THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS: PART I
MY active literary career dates from my return from America. Hitherto,
with the exception of the _Handbook to Japan_ and the potboiler for the
North German Lloyd, and a shilling shocker, published anonymously, and
the two series of articles on Japan executed for the _San Francisco
Chronicle_ and McClure’s Syndicate respectively, my literary aspirations
had all been poetical. I had published volumes of my own verse entitled:
_Frithjof and Ingebjorg_, _Australian Lyrics_, _A Poetry of Exiles_, _A
Summer Christmas_, _In Cornwall and Across the Sea_, _Edward the Black
Prince_, _The Spanish Armada_, _Lester the Loyalist_, and four
anthologies, _Australian Ballads and Rhymes_, _A Century of Australian
Song_, _Australian Poets and Younger American Poets_, one of which,
_Australian Ballads_, had a very large sale, though I only had ten
pounds for doing it.
[Illustration:
THE DINING-ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS.
(_From the Painting by Yoshio Markino._)
]
But in America I had been under the necessity of making money, because
my private income was unequal to the increased expense of living in
America. The articles for McClure and the _San Francisco Chronicle_ were
the outcome of this necessity, and having found that I could add
materially to my income by writing about travel when in America, I
conceived the idea of making my articles on Japan, a country then but
little known in England, into a book. I went to Mr. A. P. Watt, then not
many years established, and he procured me a commission from Hutchinson
& Co.—the first of a series of commissions which has gone on from that
day to this. That book was _The Japs at Home_, the most successful, in
point of sales, of all my books, for not less than a hundred and fifty
thousand copies of it have been sold by various publishers. Hutchinson &
Co. brought out editions of it at eighteen shillings (two), six
shillings, and three-and-six, and then, having got through four editions
of it, and believing the sale at an end, gave the book up to me. Another
publisher sold fifteen thousand copies of it at half-a-crown, and then
exchanged the book rights with me for the serial rights, and since then
there has been a shilling edition, an enormous sixpenny edition, and a
threepenny-halfpenny edition; the shilling and the threepenny-halfpenny
editions are selling still.
Following _The Japs at Home_ came _On the Cars and Off_, the success of
which was ruined by having illustrations which took six weeks to
produce. It was a guinea book, and a first edition of a thousand copies
was sold directly. But the second edition was not ready till nearly two
months later, and by that time the interest in the book was dead.
My next book of travel was _Brittany for Britons_, published as one of
the familiar little half-crown guides of A. and C. Black, of which a
great number of copies were sold. I cannot say how many, because I
parted with the copyright.
After this my energies were diverted from travel-books for a while,
because I wanted to try my hand at novel-writing. The result was _A
Japanese Marriage_, which, after _The Japs at Home_, has been my most
successful book in sales. About ten thousand copies of it were sold in
octavo form, and as a sixpenny various publishers have sold a hundred
and twenty thousand.
For two years after our return from America we confined ourselves to
short excursions to the milder parts of England—Hampshire, chiefly round
Norman Christchurch; Devonshire, in the nook of Dartmoor round
Drewsteignton, and on the gloriously wild coast round Salcombe; and the
woods of the Isle of Wight. During this period I finished _The Japs at
Home_, and wrote _On the Cars and Off_, which was not published till
1895, about our double journey across America from Halifax to
Vancouver’s Island.
Then a new interest came into my life—we were persuaded in 1895 to spend
a summer and autumn at St. Andrews, and there I acquired the inevitable
taste for golf, which has kept me interested and amused and healthful
and unaging. Certainly this was one of the most fortunate inspirations
we ever had for a holiday, since, after being devoted to games at school
and College and in Australia, I had left off football and cricket and
tennis, and even shooting, as soon as I settled in London.
Poor old Tom Morris never had a worse pupil, for I play everything
wrong, and owe the prizes and medals I have won at golf to the
straightness of eye which helped me to win every shooting challenge cup
at Cheltenham and every shooting challenge cup at Oxford. At St. Andrews
I not only had a glorious spell of golf, but fell deeply in love with
romantic and historical Fifeshire. There are few places which combine so
many attractions as St. Andrews. It is the capital of golf; its cliffs
capped with old houses, and its ancient port, are beautiful enough for
Sicily, and its great ruined castle and its immemorial cathedral make it
architecturally the most interesting place in Scotland after Edinburgh
and Stirling. Nor does it yield to many in historical interest. I should
live there if it had a climate like Naples.
It gave us such a hunger for old architecture and romantic scenery that
in the following summer we went to the old Breton towns on the Gulf of
St. Malo. We stayed at St. Servan in a seventeenth-century _manoir_
called La Gentillerie, which we had from the chaplain, my school-friend,
William Vassall, who stayed with us as our guest in his own house.
From a point close by we could look across the harbour to St. Malo, with
its mediæval walls and crane’s-bill steeple, and on the other side were
no further from Dinan. From St. Servan we went on for a month in
Normandy, which I much prefer to Brittany. Towns like Rouen and Caen,
Coutances and Bayeux, Evreux, Lisieux and Falaise, are citadels of
mediævalism.
During this holiday I wrote my third travel-book, published in England,
_Brittany for Britons_, issued a year later, and put the final touches
on my first acknowledged novel, _A Japanese Marriage_.
It was my two books on Japan, _The Japs at Home_ and _A Japanese
Marriage_, which helped me to gain a literary position; both went into
several editions in their first year. Between them they have sold more
than a quarter of a million copies.
But I was on the verge of a book-success of another kind, which could
hardly be called a literary success, though more people connect my name
with this than with any of my books. Messrs. A. & C. Black, who had
published _A Japanese Marriage_ and _Brittany for Britons_, approached
me to know if I would expand _Who’s Who_, of which they had just
purchased the copyright.
They showed it to me, and asked me if I could turn it into a book of
reference—a sort of cross between the old _Who’s Who_ and _Men of the
Time_ was the idea which shaped itself from our discussion.
The two visits which we paid to Salcombe in Devon, the second of them
with Reginald Cleaver, have not yet furnished me with any subject for
writing.
The year 1896, in which I compiled the new _Who’s Who_, was also a
notable year for me from the travel point of view. At last I faced the
exertion of taking my family to Sicily, which had been my ambition for
exactly ten years. It was not such a stereotyped journey as it is now. I
began to make inquiries about it when we reached Naples, and could not
find an Englishman in the place—even the Consul-General—who had ever
been to Sicily. But the Consul-General made inquiries, and said that he
did not think travelling in Sicily was very difficult or dangerous. He,
however, asked me if I had a revolver, and recommended me not to take
out a licence for it at the Consulate, because in Sicily a licence is
not available for the whole island, but only for one province, and there
are seven provinces. He also told me that he was quite sure that no
Sicilian ever took out a licence, though they all carried firearms. As
for malaria, he did not know; he never troubled about it; he always
spent the summer in or near Naples, and never felt any the worse for it.
This Consul was my great friend, Eustace Neville-Rolfe, who had lately
sold his ancestral estate of Heacham in Norfolk. Nelson students will
remember allusions in the great Admiral’s letters to his uncle Rolfe at
Heacham. But my friend hated the climate of Norfolk, and hated its
politics, and settled at Naples, where a good many years afterwards they
made him Consul-General for the unconstitutional reason that he knew
more about Naples than any living Englishman. He had the unique
distinction of joining the Consular Service as a Consul-General.
When we got to Sicily we found it perfectly easy and safe. The Whitakers
of Palermo, to whom he gave us an introduction, at once became our
friends, and told us all we ought to see and all we ought to do in the
island. On that trip we paid fairly exhaustive visits to Palermo,
Taormina, Syracuse, Girgenti, Marsala, Trapani, Selinunte, and Segesta,
and flying visits to Catania and Messina.
Sicily is an adorable country. Grass, flowers and fruit-trees grow right
down to the edge of the sea, where there is any soil, for half the
island is rock. There are no brigands on the sea-coasts, and nearly
every monument worth visiting is in sight of the sea. There is not a
place in the island from which you cannot see a mountain. It is the land
of the orange and the lemon; and possesses the rare charm of ancient
Greek and mediæval Arab architecture.
Sicily inspired me to write the largest of all my books, _In Sicily_,
and inspired a publisher to produce it in an _édition de luxe_, whose
two volumes weighed fourteen pounds, and contained four hundred
illustrations. I called it _In Sicily_ because it was not until several
years afterwards that I considered that I knew enough about the island
to write a book with the more pretentious title of _Sicily_. A great
French author paid me the compliment of appropriating my title, and a
good deal of my information, a few years afterwards. I began to write
_In Sicily_ in 1896, but it was not published till 1901.
We spent the spring of 1896 in Sicily, and the summer at Lulworth, on a
little round cove in South Dorset. We went there partly because it was
said to be the mildest place in England, partly because Thomas Hardy
told me that he had laid the scene of one of the chief episodes in _Tess
of the D’Urbervilles_ in an old farmhouse near the station which served
Lulworth; it had a hopelessly unromantic name—Wool.
In the following summer we went to Ostend for the season, because I
wanted to see the gambling and the fashions. The morals of the Ostend of
that day may be gathered from this. A friend of mine who was staying at
the principal hotel with her husband, was asked by the proprietor if
they were properly married. She was most indignant, and said that of
course they were.
“Very well,” he said coolly, “then I think you ought to go to some other
hotel, because you are the only people in mine who have been married.”
That same hotel manager considered that things were no longer what they
were, for an Indian Maharajah had that morning complained at being
charged two pounds for a chicken—that the English and Americans were no
longer fools, and, in fact, that the only fools left were the Austrians.
The late King of the Belgians was in residence at the chateau, and had
not one, but three, notorious French actresses staying with him.
Apart from its _plage_ and its gaming-tables, I should have found Ostend
a dull place if it had not been for Henry Arthur Jones, who was there,
off and on, writing a new play, and ready to discuss it. He had had a
play at the St. James’s which had not gone too well, and he asked me if
I could account for it. I suggested that allowing a hospital nurse to
frustrate an elopement was more calculated to gratify the gallery than
the stalls, and that the St. James’s was a stalls theatre.
Jones had one curious habit—whenever he felt at a standstill in writing
his play he used to say he must have a change of air, and then fly away
to Homburg or some other place which took many hours to reach. He was
much interested in gambling, though he did not gamble seriously. I
imagine that he found the gaming-tables full of “copy.”
In the winter we went to Sicily again, and in the summer to Salcombe
again.
In the following winter my connection with _Who’s Who_ ceased. My
agreement with the publishers was only for three years in case the book
was a failure, and the publishers pronounced it a failure.
Almost immediately afterwards I had an attack of jaundice, brought on,
or not brought on, by the incident, and after a short stay at Brighton,
went to recruit my health at Nice, from which I paid many visits to
Monte Carlo, though I did not gamble much.
On our way back from Nice we did what not one Englishman in a hundred,
among the thousands who winter in the Riviera, does, got off at
Tarascon, and wandered about the cities of Troubadour-land, such as
Tarascon, Arles, Nîmes, Avignon and Les Baux, the deserted capital of a
dead principality, where the houses, instead of being built, are hewn
out of the face of the rock. Provence is full of ancient Roman
buildings, and of Romanesque buildings, hardly to be distinguished from
them; and, in our day, in spite of the law against it, they used the
Roman amphitheatres for the modern equivalent of gladiatorial
games—bull-fights. Bull-fighting always began on Easter Sunday.
I registered a resolve, which I have never kept, to write a book about
Provence.
That summer we spent at Cookham on the Thames. Since we were unable to
go abroad, we went on the river, as being the most frankly “Continental”
place in England. We had perfect weather, and Ostend itself did not give
us more pleasure than the reach of the river between Cookham and
Maidenhead. I found lying in a punt outside the lock at the Cliveden end
conducive for finding incidents for fiction.
And I had not done sufficient creative work since I began _Who’s Who_.
Indeed, _The Admiral_, my novel of the love of Nelson and Lady Hamilton,
which I finished at Ostend, had been nearly my whole output, for
_Trincolox_ had been written ten years before, and published in _Temple
Bar_. I was, of course, working at the materials for _In Sicily_ all the
time, and in the spring of 1900 we paid another three months’ visit to
Sicily to see that all my facts were up to date.
We were at Syracuse during the darkest days of the Boer War. About half
the people in the house were Germans, who were openly pleased at the
succession of disasters which had befallen the British arms before they
could get proper forces out to South Africa, to fight an enemy who was
prepared in every single detail before he forced on the war. It seemed
as if the disasters never would stop, and these amiable people told us
so every day. But one fine day a British battleship, one of the largest
then afloat, steamed into the great harbour of Syracuse, and anchored in
the waters where the Athenians were annihilated in their last sea-fight
against the Syracusans. We were down on the quay, and so was nearly
every other foreigner in Syracuse, when a launch put off from H.M.S.,
and made towards us. The Captain, a typical sea-dog—it was Callaghan,
now one of our chief Admirals—was in the stern. As he stepped ashore he
said: “We have just had a wireless from Malta—Kimberley is relieved.” It
was most dramatic to have the news brought to us by the biggest
battleship in the Mediterranean, how French had introduced a new feature
into warfare by raising a siege with a dash of five thousand cavalry
riding all day as hard as they could. I shall never forget it.
We returned to Rome in time for the Papal Jubilee, the sixth centenary
of the original Jubilee established by Boniface VIII in 1300. Some of
the ceremonies were extraordinarily interesting, and the procession of
Leo XIII in St. Peter’s was one of the most impressive things I ever
saw. I think it was that which inspired me to write _The Secrets of the
Vatican_, though I did not complete it for publication till nearly seven
years afterwards.
That summer again we went to Cookham, which had serious results, for my
son was thrown into contact with some charming boys who had just passed
into the Army, and were spending their vacation from Woolwich at Bourne
End, a mile up the river from Cookham. Nothing would do for him after
this but to go into the Army. I did not oppose it, because he was an
absolutely idle boy at school, and it seemed such a good thing that he
should want to pass any exam., and further, I was almost as much under
the glamour of those dear boys—poor St. John Spackman, who was
afterwards killed in the polo-field, was one of them—as he was.
That inspired me to write _My Son Richard_, which is a story of river
life and boys who want to serve their country. I took him to Captain
James, the leading Army crammer, and said that he wanted to get into the
Army. In a few home questions, James discovered that he had never done
any work at school, and said he had better go into the Artillery—he
could not get into the Line. I looked incredulous, and he explained that
in the Artillery exams. there are papers in more subjects which boys do
not learn at school, so that a boy who has not done any work has not
lost time over this—such things, for instance, as “fortification” and
“military topography.”
My son amply fulfilled his prognostications by securing ninety per cent.
of the marks in the military subjects, and only sixteen marks out of two
thousand in Latin. Still, he passed, but, to his great disappointment,
was not allowed to go out to the war which had just begun, because he
was too young.
In this year, 1901, in which both my big book _In Sicily_ and my novel
_My Son Richard_, first saw the light, I had plenty to do, for I was
finishing and attending to the publication of _Queer Things about
Japan_, which was the best received of all my books of travel. It owed
its success largely to the timely moment at which I wrote it. Knowing
Japan well, I was convinced that there was going to be a Russo-Japanese
war, and Sidney Dark, the brilliant literary editor of the _Daily
Express_, as alive a journalist and critic as there is in London, was at
that time manager of the firm of publishers to whom I offered the book,
because they had recently taken over the publication of the sixpenny
edition of _A Japanese Marriage_. It was not hard to convince him that
there was war in the air for Japan, and he commissioned the book with
the happiest results. Much of it appeared serially in the papers
connected with the Tillotson Syndicate, which at that time had Philip
Gibbs for its editor. He accepted my offer to write him eight long
instalments about Japan for the Syndicate. Just as I had finished and
dispatched them, he wrote to tell me that he did not think that Japan
was a sufficiently live subject, and asked me not to write the articles.
No sooner had he written the letter than he received the articles. He
read them and thought them so good that he sent me a telegram cancelling
his letter, and used them. They form the backbone of the book. He had
asked me to be as humorous as possible. Other editors thought them very
amusing, and when the approach of war made Japan the topic of the day,
showered commissions on me.
Norma Lorimer, who was all through Japan with us, was of great
assistance to me in recalling our life there, and I got her a good many
commissions for articles, which were afterwards collected with some of
the articles that I wrote during the war into _More Queer Things about
Japan_.
In this same year, 1901, Hutchinson & Co. published _My Son Richard_,
which, as I have said above, was a novel about boys who had just passed
into the Army, and girls of the same age, spending the summer on the
river at Cookham. As an instance of rapid printing, I may mention that
Hutchinson got me all the proofs of this book in seven days, but he
recently, in 1913, eclipsed this by making the printer give me all the
proofs of _Weeds_ in six days.
_My Son Richard_ was very popular. A Duchess wrote to a newspaper which
was collecting statistics about the popularity of books, that this was
the nicest book she had ever read, and when it came out as a sixpenny,
the village grocer at Cookham ordered hundreds and told me that every
maidservant for miles round was buying it. I wish they would buy all my
other sixpennies. To reach the servant class is a most difficult
achievement.
As Miss Lorimer had broken her leg that year and still could not move
about much, we went for August to Baveno on Lago Maggiore, to an hotel
with a garden on the lake, where she had a room looking right over the
exquisite Borromean Islands, Isola Bella and Isola dei Pescatori. Italy
has always been her favourite subject for writing. She corrected the
proofs of her _By the Waters of Sicily_ here, which is as popular as
ever, though it has been out for twelve years.
Baveno had the happiest effect on her. The air is lovely, and her window
looked right over the finest sweep of Lago Maggiore, with the islands in
front and the snow-tipped Alps behind. Heavy square-prowed barges with
junk sails used to glide slowly across the eye-line, and light
high-prowed fishing-boats with hoods like Japanese sampans darted about
near the shore, which had long pergolas overhanging the lake and
Passion-vines sweeping over every shed.
A month’s rest at Baveno made her leg quite well, and then we were able
to spend a fascinating September in the mountain city of Bergamo;
Brescia, with its history and monuments of a thousand years; and Venice,
which is always most adorable in summer. The Feast of the Redentore in
July is the crown of the year at Venice. We had learnt, and we have
often made use of our knowledge since, that Italy is at her best in
summer.
I do not seem to have published any books in 1902 or 1903, though I was
writing steadily all the time, and had a couple of serials running in a
magazine, but I was collecting materials hard for the biggest piece of
work I have ever accomplished. Those who take up _Sicily, the New Winter
Resort_, a small octavo, and _In Sicily_, two immense quartos, will be
surprised to hear that the smaller book contains a far greater amount of
reading matter than the larger—half as much again, I should say—though
the one costs five shillings net and the other three guineas. The
Directors of the Rete Sicula, for whom I compiled the smaller book,
stipulated that it was to be cheap in price and handy in form. This book
is an encyclopædia of Sicily. It itemises every monument of any
importance, every custom, every piece of scenery noted for its beauty,
every railway station, and gives information about every name which
comes prominently into the history or the mythology of the island. It
also gives directions how every monument and beautiful piece of scenery
is to be reached.
Nineteen hundred and two was the last summer which we spent at Cookham.
My son was then at Woolwich, and we stayed at Cookham so that he could
have his week-ends on the river. That winter and spring we again spent
in Sicily and Italy. But that summer we spent at Tenby for the first
time, because my son had now been gazetted to a Company of Artillery
which was stationed at Pembroke Dock. Tenby I consider one of the most
beautiful coast-places in the United Kingdom. It stands on a rock over
the sea, and still retains a considerable portion of walls and towers
built in the reign of the third Edward, and restored during the Spanish
Armada scare in 1588. It has also a magnificent Gothic church, and one
Gothic house. Its position is hard to beat, for its rock stands between
two splendid stretches of sand, and when the wind blows on one side you
are out of the wind on the other. On the north sands is a green bluff.
If you walk inland it is easy to find deep woods, and if you walk across
the golf-links (there is very good natural golf) you come on to noble
downs with gorgeous precipices sheering down to the sea, and rich in the
ruins of historic and prehistoric men—literally historic, for there is
Geoffry of Monmouth’s castle of Manorbier, and far beyond, my ancestor
Aylmer de Valence’s castle of Pembroke, which, like the castle of the
Carews, rises out of the windings of the great haven of the West.
Such is Tenby, round which, under the name of Flanders, I built a
romance in my novel, _The Unholy Estate_.
The golf-links served both Tenby and the naval and military officers at
Pembroke Dock. Nearly every day I used to meet the Gunner and Infantry
subalterns and captains disporting themselves on the links, and I was
often over at Pembroke in the barracks. It was there that I picked up my
knowledge of young soldiers, which I put into use in _The Unholy
Estate_, _The Tragedy of the Pyramids_ and _The Curse of the Nile_.
The winter we generally spent in Italy, except the winter and spring of
1906, when we were once more in Sicily, and went across from Sicily to
visit Tunis and Carthage.
In 1904 I was busy putting the finishing touches on two books about
Japan, _More Queer Things about Japan_, the book in which I collaborated
with Norma Lorimer, and _Playing the Game_, which in the cheap editions
has had its name changed to _When We Were Lovers in Japan_. This book
has been running serially in _Cassell’s Magazine_. It never had half the
popularity or circulation of _A Japanese Marriage_, though it had much
more value as a study of Japan and the Japanese, for it deals with the
transition of Japan from a weak Oriental nation to one of the great
powers of the world, and gives an acid picture of the futility of the
diplomats to whom Great Britain entrusts her interests.
In this same year, 1904, Methuen brought out _Sicily, the New Winter
Resort_. In 1905 I turned my attention to Sicily once more, working up
the serial which had appeared in _Cassell’s Magazine_ into the volume
which the publishers insisted on christening _A Sicilian Marriage_, to
try and lend it some of the popularity of _A Japanese Marriage_, which
it never acquired, and the world never discovered that it was an
excellent popular guide-book to Palermo, Girgenti, Syracuse and
Taormina.
In the same year I brought out _Queer Things about Sicily_, a companion
volume to _Queer Things about Japan_, with Norma Lorimer.
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