I was walking once with Father Payne in the fields, and he was talking
about the difficulties of the writer's life. He said that the great problem
for all industrious writers was how to work in such a way as not to be a
nuisance to the people they lived with. "Of course men vary very much in
their habits," he said; "but if you look at the lives of authors, they
often seem tiresome people to get on with. The difficulty is mostly this,"
he went on, "that a writer can't write to any purpose for more than about
three hours a day--if he works really hard, even that is quite enough to
tire him out. Think what the brain is doing--it is concentrated on some
idea, some scene, some situation. Take a novelist: he has to have a picture
in his mind all the time--a clear visualisation of a place--a room, a
garden, a wood; then he must know how his people move and look and speak,
and he has to fly backwards and forwards from one to another; then he has
the talk to create, and he has to be always rejecting thoughts and
impressions and words, good enough in themselves, but not characteristic.
It is a fearful strain on imagination and emotion, on phrase-making and
word-finding. The real wonder is not that a few people can do it better
than others, but that anyone can do it at all. The difference between the
worst novelist and the best is much less than the difference between the
worst novelist and the person who can't write at all.
"Well, then, there is such a thing as inspiration; most creative writers
get a book in their minds, and can think of nothing else, day and night,
while it is on. The difficulty is to know what a writer is to do in the
intervals between his books, and in the hours in which he is not writing.
He has got to take it easy somehow, and the question is what is he to do.
He can't, as a rule, do much in the way of hard exercise. Violent exercise
in the open air is pleasant enough, but it leaves the brain torpid and
stagnant. A man who really makes a business of writing has got to live
through ten or twelve hours of a day when he isn't writing. He can't afford
to read very much--at least he can't afford to read authors whom he
admires, because they affect his style. There is something horribly
contagious about style, because it is often much easier to do a thing in
someone else's way than to do it in one's own. Pater was asked once if he
had read Stevenson or Kipling, I forget which--'Oh no, I daren't!' he said,
'I have peeped into him occasionally, but I can't afford to read him. I
have learnt exactly how I can approach and develop a subject, and if I
looked to see how he does it, I should soon lose my power. The man with a
style is debarred from reading fine books unless they are on lines entirely
apart from his own.' That is perfectly true, I expect. There is nothing so
dreadful as reading a writer whom one likes, and seeing that he has got
deflected from his manner by reading some other craftsman. The effect is a
very subtle one. If you really want to see that sort of sympathy at work,
you should look at Ruskin's letters--his letters are deeply affected by the
correspondent to whom he is writing. If he wrote to Carlyle or to Browning,
he wrote like Carlyle and Browning, because, as he wrote, they were
strongly in his mind.
"With a painter or a musician it is different--a lot of hand-work comes in
which relieves the brain, so that they can work longer hours. But a writer,
as a rule, while he is writing, can't even afford to talk very much to
interesting people, because talking is hard work too.
"Well, then, a writer, as an artistic person, is rather easily bored. He
likes vivid sensations and emphatic preferences--and it is not really good
for him to be bored; a man may read the paper, write a few letters, stroll,
garden, chatter--but if he takes his writing seriously, he must somehow be
fresh for it. It isn't easy to combine writing with any other occupation,
and it leaves many hours unoccupied.
"Carlyle is a terrible instance, because he was wretched and depressed when
he was not writing; he was melancholy, peevish, physically unwell; and when
he was writing, he was wholly absorbed very impatient of his labour, and
most intolerable. Indeed, it does not look as if the home lives of writers
have generally been very happy--there is too often a patent conspiracy to
keep the great irritable babyish giant amused--and that's a bad atmosphere
for anyone to live in--an unreal, a royal sort of atmosphere, of
deferential scheming."
I said something about Walter Scott. "Ah yes," said Father Payne, "but
Scott's work was amazing--it just seemed to overflow from a gigantic
reservoir of vitality. He could do his day's work in the early hours, and
then tramp about all day, chattering, farming, planting,
entertaining--endlessly good-humoured. Of course he wore himself out at
last by perfectly ghastly work--most of it very poor stuff. Browning and
Thackeray were men of the same sort, sociable, genial, exuberant. They
overflowed too--they didn't batter things out.
"But, as a rule, most men who want to do good work, must be content to
potter about, and seem lazy and even self-indulgent. And one of the reasons
why many men who start as promising writers come to nothing is because they
can't be inert, acquiescent, easy-going. I have often thought that a good
novel might be written about the wife of a great writer, who marries him,
dazzled by his brilliance and then finds him to be a petty, suspicious,
wayward sort of child, with all his force lying in one supreme faculty of
vision and expression. It must be a fiery trial to see deep, wise,
beautiful things produced by a man who can't _live_ his thoughts--can
only write them."
"But what should a man _do_?" I said.
"Well," said Father Payne, "I think, as a practical matter, it would be a
good thing to cultivate a hobby of a manual kind--and also, above all, the
power of genial loafing. Of course, the real pity is that we are not all
taught to do some house-work as a matter of course--we depend too much on
servants, and house-work is the natural and amusing outlet of our physical
energies; as it is, we specialise too much, and half of our maladies and
discomforts and miseries are due to that--that we work a part of ourselves
too hard, and the other parts not hard enough. The thing to aim at is
equanimity, and the existence of unsatisfied instincts in us is what
poisons life for many people."
He was silent for a little, and then he said, "And then, too, there is the
great danger of all writers--the feeling that he has the power of giving
people what they want, when he ought to remember that he has only the good
fortune of expressing what people feel. Art oughtn't to be a thing
sprinkled on life, as you shake sugar out on to a pudding--it is just a
power of disentangling things; we suffer most of us from finding life too
complicated--we don't understand it--it's a mass of confused impressions.
Well, the artist puts it all in order, isolates the important things, makes
the values distinct--he helps people to feel clearly--that's his only use.
And then, if he succeeds, there come silly flatteries and adorations--until
he gets to feel as if he were handing down pots of jam and bottles of wine
from a high shelf out of reach--until he grows to believe that he put them
there, when he only found them there. It's a dreadful thing for an artist
never to succeed at all, because then his life appears the most useless
business conceivable; but it is almost a worse thing to get to depend upon
success--and it is undeniably pleasant to be a personage, to cause a little
stir when you enter a room, to find that people know all about you and like
meeting you, and saying they have met you. I never had any of that: and I
have sometimes found myself with successful writers who made me thank God I
couldn't write--such complacency, such lolling among praise, such vexation
at not being deferred to! The best fate for a man is to be fairly
successful, and to be at the same time pretty severely criticised. That
keeps him modest, while it gives him a degree of confidence that he is
doing something useful. The danger is of drifting right out of life into
unreal civilities and compliments, which you don't wholly like and yet
can't do without. The fact is that writing doesn't generally end in very
much happiness, except perhaps the happiness of work. That's the solid part
of it really, and no one can deprive you of that, whatever happens."