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V.
Writing under Difficulties
It is an exceptional mind that enables an author to write at his ease amid interruptions and distractions, lets and hindrances, of a domestic kind. Héloise gave this singular reason for her constant refusal to become Abelard's wife – that no mind devoted to the meditations of philosophy could endure the cries of children, the chatter of nurses, and the babble and coming and going in and out of serving men and women. Of Abelard himself, however, we are told that he had a rare power of abstracting himself from all outward concerns; that no one knew better how to be alone, though surrounded by others; and that, in fact, his senses took no note of outward things. When Cumberland was composing any work, he never shut himself up in his study, but always wrote in the room where his family sat, and did not feel in the least disturbed by the noise of his children at play beside him. The literary habits of Lord Hailes, as Mr. Robert Chambers remarks, were hardly such as would have been expected from his extreme nicety of diction: it was in no secluded sanctum, or "den," that he composed, but by the "parlour fireside," with wife and bairns within very present sight and sound.
Cowper describes himself at Weston (1791) as working in a study exposed to all manner of inroads, and in no way disconcerted by the coming and going of servants, or other incidental and inevitable impediments. A year or two later he writes from the same spot, "amidst a chaos of interruptions," including Hayley spouting Greek, and Mrs. Unwin talking sometimes to them, sometimes to herself. Francis Horner relates a visit he and a friend paid to Jeremy Bentham at Ford Abbey, one spacious room in which, a tapestried chamber, the utilitarian philosopher had utilized for what he called his "scribbling shop" – two or three tables being set out, covered with white napkins, on which were placed music desks with manuscripts; and here the visitors were allowed to be "present at the mysteries, for he went on as if we had not been with him."
The fourth of Dr. Chalmers' Astronomical Discourses was penned in a small pocket-book, in a strange apartment, where he was liable every moment to interruption; for it was at the manse of Balmerino, disappointed in not finding the minister at home, and having a couple of hours to spare, – and in a drawing-room at the manse of Kilmany, with all the excitement of meeting for the first time, after a year's absence, many of his former friends and parishioners, – that he penned paragraph after paragraph of a composition which, as his son-in-law and biographer, Dr. Hanna, says, bears upon it so much the aspect of high and continuous elaboration.
His friend, – and sometimes associate in pastoral work, – Edward Irving, on the other hand, could not write a sermon if any one was in the room with him. Chalmers appears to have been specially endowed with that faculty of concentrated attention which is commonly regarded as one of the surest marks of the highest intellect, and which Alison so much admired in Wellington – as, for instance, on the day when he lay at San Christoval, in front of the French army, hourly expecting a battle, and wrote out, in the field, a long and minute memorial on the establishment of a bank at Lisbon on the principles of the English ones.
We read of Ercilla, whose epic poem, the Arancana, has admirers out of Spain, that he wrote it amidst the incessant toils and dangers of a campaign against barbarians, without shelter, and with nothing to write on but small scraps of waste paper, and often only leather; struggling at once against enemies and surrounding circumstances.
Louis de Cormantaigne, the distinguished French engineer, composed his treatise on fortification from notes written in the trenches and on the breaches, even under the fire of the enemy.
Delambré was in Paris when it was taken by the allies in 1814, and is said to have worked at his problems with perfect tranquility from eight in the morning till midnight, in the continued hearing of the cannonade. "Such self-possession for study under that tremendous attack, and such absence of interest in the result of the great struggle, to say nothing of indifference to personal danger," is what one of his biographers confesses himself unable to understand. Small sympathy would the philosopher have had with the temperament of such a man, say, as Thomas Hood, who always wrote most at night, when all was quiet and the children were asleep. "I have a room to myself," exclaims Hood, triumphantly, in a letter describing a change of lodgings, "which will be worth £20 a year to me, – for a little disconcerts my nerves." Mrs. Hood brought up the children, we learn from one of them, in a sort of Spartan style of education, on her husband's account, teaching them the virtues of silence and low voices.
Washington Irving was of a less morbid temperament, and his genial nature could put up with obstacles and obstructions neither few nor small; but even in his Diary we meet with such entries as this at Bordeaux, in 1825: "Harassed by noises in the house, till I had to go out in despair, and write in Mr. Guestier's library." It was upon the Essay on American Scenery that he was then engaged.
Unlike Maturin, who used to compose with a wafer pasted on his forehead, which was the signal that if any of his family entered the sanctum they must not speak to him, Scott allowed his children (like their mute playmates, Camp and the greyhounds) free access to his study, never considered their talk as any disturbance, let them come and go as pleased their fancy, was always ready to answer their questions, and when they, unconscious how he was engaged (writes the husband of one of them), entreated him to lay down his pen and tell them a story, he would take them on his knee, repeat a ballad or a legend, kiss them, and set them down again to their marbles or ninepins, and resume his labor as if refreshed by the interruption. There was nothing in that manly, sound, robust constitution akin to the morbid irritability of Philip in the poem: —
"When Philip wrote, he never seemed so well —
Was startled even if a cinder fell,
And quickly worried."
Biographers of Mistress Aphra Behn make it noteworthy of that too facile penwoman that she could write away in company and maintain the while her share in the talk. Madame Roland managed to get through her memoirs with a semblance at least of unbroken serenity, though so often interrupted in the composition of them by the cries of victims in the adjoining cells, whom the executioners were dragging thence to the guillotine.
Madame de Staël, "even in her most inspired compositions," according to Madame Necker de Saussure, "had pleasure in being interrupted by those she loved." She was not, observed Lord Lytton, of the tribe of those who labor to be inspired; who darken the room and lock the door, and entreat you not to disturb them. Rather, she came of the same stock as George Sand's Olympe, who "se mit à écrire sur un coin de la table, entre le bouteille de bière et le sucrier, au bruit des verres et de la conversation aussi tranquillement que si elle eût été dans la solitude. Cette puissance de concentration était une de ses facultés les plus remarquables."
That Lord Castlereagh was able to write his despatches at the common table in the common room of a country house is not unjustly among the admiring reminiscences of a Septuagenarian (Countess Brownlow): "Once only we found the talking and laughter were too much for his power of abstraction, and then he went off into his own room, saying next morning at breakfast, 'You fairly beat me last night; I was writing what I may call the metaphysics of politics.'"
Celebrated in the "Noctes Ambrosianæ" is the Glasgow poet, Sandy Rogers, not less for his lyrics, one at least of which is pronounced by Christopher North to be "equal to anything of the kind in Burns," than for the fact that his verses – some of them, too, of a serious character – were thought out amidst the bustle and turmoil of factory labor, the din of the clanking steam-engine, and the deafening rattle of machinery, while the work of committing them to paper was generally performed amidst the squalling and clamor of children around the hearth, now in the noise of fractious contention, and anon exuberant with fun and frolic.
Tannahill, too, composed while plying the shuttle, – humming over the airs to which he meant to adapt new words; and, as the words occurred to him, jotting them down at a rude desk which he had attached to his loom, and which he could use without rising from his seat. But no more noteworthy example of the pursuit of authorship under difficulties – the difficulties of a narrow home —res augusta domi– is probably on record, in its simple, homely way, than that of Jean Paul, as Döring pictures him, sitting in a corner of the room in which the household work was being carried on – he at his plain writing-desk, with few or no books about him, but merely with a drawer or two containing excerpts and manuscripts; the jingle and clatter that arose from the simultaneous operations at stove and dresser no more seeming to disturb him than did the cooing of the pigeons which fluttered to and fro in the chamber, at their own sweet will.
Dr. Johnson delved at his dictionary in a poor lodging-house in London, with a cat purring near, and orange peel and tea at hand.
Molière tested the comic power of his plays by reading them to an old servant.
Dr. William E. Channing used to perambulate the room while composing; his printers report that he made many revisions of the proof of his writings, so that before the words met the eyes of the public on the printed page the sentences were finished with the most elaborate minuteness.
Bloomfield, the poet, relates of himself that nearly one-half of his poem, "The Farmer's Boy," was composed without writing a word of it, while he was at work, with other shoemakers, in a garret.
Sharon Turner, author of the valuable "History of the Anglo-Saxons," who received a pension of $1,500 from the British government for his services to literature, wrote the third volume of "The Sacred History of the World" upon paper that did not cost him a farthing. The copy consisted of torn and angular fragments of letters and notes, of covers of periodicals and shreds of curling papers, unctuous with pomatum and bear's grease.
Mrs. Lizzie W. Champney writes absolutely without method. Her stories, she admits, have been penned in her nursery, with her baby in her lap, and a sturdy little boy standing on the rails of her chair and strangling her with his loving little arms. She works whenever and wherever she can find the opportunity; but the children are always put first.
George Ticknor, the Bostonian, found William Hazlitt living in the very house in which Milton dictated "Paradise Lost," and occupying the room where the poet kept the organ on which he loved to play. It was an enormous room, but furnished only with a table, three chairs, and an old picture. The most interesting thing that the visitor from Boston saw, except the occupant himself, was the white-washed walls. Hazlitt had used them as a commonplace book, writing on them in pencil scraps of brilliant thoughts, half-lines of poetry, and references. Hazlitt usually wrote with the breakfast things on the table, and there they remained until he went out, at four or five o'clock, to dinner. His pen was more to him than a mechanical instrument; it was also the intellectual wand by which he called up thoughts and opinions, and clothed them in appropriate language.
It was in a bookseller's back-shop, M. Nisard tells us, on a desk to which was fastened a great Newfoundland dog (who, by-the-bye, one day banged through the window of an upper room, desk and all, to join his master in the street below), that Armand Carrel, one moment absorbed in English memoirs and papers, another moment in caressing his four-footed friend, conceived and wrote his "History of the Counter Revolution in England." Mr. Walker, in this as in other respects "The Original," adopted a mode of composition which, says he, "I apprehend to be very different from what could be supposed, and from the usual mode. I write in a bedroom at a hotel, sitting upon a cane chair, in the same dress I go out in, and with no books to refer to but the New Testament, Shakespeare, and a pocket dictionary." Now and then, when much pressed for time, and without premeditation, and with his eye on the clock, he wrote some of his shorter essays at the Athenæum Club, at the same table where other members were writing notes and letters.
VI.
Aids to Inspiration
Washington Irving's literary work was generally performed before noon. He said the happiest hours of his life were those passed in the composition of his different books. He wrote most of "The Stout Gentleman" while mounted on a stile, or seated on a stone, in his excursions with Leslie, the painter, 'round about Stratford-on-Avon, – the latter making sketches in the mean time. The artist says that his companion wrote with the greatest rapidity, often laughing to himself, and from time to time reading the manuscript aloud.
Dr. Darwin wrote most of his works on scraps of paper with a pencil as he travelled. But how did he travel? In a worn and battered "sulky," which had a skylight at the top, with an awning to be drawn over it at pleasure; the front of the carriage being occupied by a receptacle for writing-paper and pencils, a knife, fork, and spoon; while on one side was a pile of books reaching from the floor nearly to the front window of the carriage; on the other, by Mrs. Schimmel-penninck's account, a hamper containing fruit and sweetmeats, cream and sugar, – to which the big, burly, keen-eyed, stammering doctor paid attentions as devoted as he ever bestowed on the pile of books.
Alexander Kisfaludy, foremost Hungarian poet of his time, wrote most of his "Himfy" on horseback or in solitary walks; a poem, or collection of poems, that made an unprecedented sensation in Hungary, where, by the same token, Sandor Kisfaludy of that ilk became at once the Great Unknown.
Cujas, the object of Chateaubriand's special admiration, used to write lying flat on his breast, with his books spread about him.
Sir Henry Wotton is our authority for recording of Father Paul Sarpi that, when engaged in writing, his manner was to sit fenced with a castle of paper about his chair, and overhead; "for he was of our Lord of St. Albans' opinion, that 'all air is predatory' and especially hurtful when the spirits are most employed."
Rousseau tells us that he never could compose pen in hand, seated at a table, and duly supplied with paper and ink; it was in his promenades, – the promenades d'un solitaire, – amid rocks and woods, and at night, in bed, when he was lying awake, that he wrote in his brain; to use his own phrase, "J'écris dans mon cerveau." Some of his periods he turned and re-turned half a dozen nights in bed before he deemed them fit to be put down on paper. On moving to the Hermitage of Montmorency, he adopted the same plan as in Paris, – devoting, as always, his mornings to the pen-work de la copie, and his afternoons to la promenade, blank paper, book, and pencil in hand; for, says he, "having never been able to write and think at my ease except in the open air, sule dio, I was not tempted to change my method, and I reckoned not a little on the forest of Montmorency becoming – for it was close to my door – my cabinet de travail." In another place he affirms his sheer incapacity for meditation by day, except in the act of walking; the moment he stopped walking, he stopped thinking, too, for his head worked with, and only with, his feet. "De jour je ne puis méditer qu'en marchant; sitôt que je m'arrête je ne pense plus, et ma tête ne va qu'avec mes pieds." Salvitur ambulando, whatever intellectual problem is solved by Jean Jacques. His strength was not to sit still. His Réveries, by the way, were written on scraps of paper of all sorts and sizes, on covers of old letters, and on playing cards – all covered with a small, neat handwriting. He was as economical of material as was "Paper-sparing Pope" himself.
In some points Chateaubriand was intellectually, or, rather, sentimentally, related to Rousseau, but not in his way of using ink and paper.
Chateaubriand sat at a table well supplied with methodically arranged heaps of paper cut in sizes; and as soon as a page was blotted over in the biggest of his big handwriting, – according to M. de Marcullus, with almost as many drops of ink as words, – he tossed it aside, without using pounce or blotting-paper, to blot and be blotted by its accumulating fellows. Now and then he got up from this work, to look out of the window, or to pace the room, as if in quest of new ideas. The chapter finished, he collected all the scattered leaves, and revised them in due form – more frequently adding to than curtailing their fair proportions, and paying very special attention to the punctuation of his sentences.
Lessing's inherent nobility of intellect is said to have been typified in his manner of study. When in the act of composition he walked up and down till his eye was caught by the title of some book. He would open it, his brother tells us, and, if struck by some sentence which pleased him, he would copy it out; in so doing, a train of thought would be suggested, and this would be immediately followed up – provided his mood was just right.
The early morning would lure Jean Paul Richter to take out his ink-flask and write as he walked in the fragrant air. Such compositions as his "Dream of a Madman" he would set about by first seating himself at the harpsichord, and "fantasying" for a while on it, till the ideas, or "imaginings," came – which presently they would do with a rush.
Tradition, as we get it through the historian of the Clapham Sect, informs us that Wilberforce wrote his "Practical View" under the roof of two of his best friends, in so fragmentary and irregular a manner, that one of them, when at length the volume lay complete on the table, professed, on the strength of this experience, to have become a convert to the opinion that a fortuitous concourse of atoms might, by some felicitous chance, combine themselves into the most perfect of forms – a moss-rose or a bird of paradise.
Coleridge told Hazlitt that he liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood.
Sheridan composed at night, with a profusion of lights around him, and a bottle of wine by his side. He used to say: "If a thought is slow to come, a glass of good wine encourages it; and when it does come, a glass of good wine rewards it."
Lamartine, in the days of his prosperity, composed in a studio with tropical plants, birds, and every luxury around him to cheer the senses.
Berkeley composed his "Minute Philosopher" under the shade of a rock on Newport Beach.
Burns wove a stanza as he ploughed the field.
Charlotte Brontë had to choose her favorable days for writing, – sometimes weeks, or even months, elapsing before she felt that she had anything to add to that portion of her story which was already written; then some morning she would wake up, and the progress of her tale lay clear and bright before her, says Mrs. Gaskell, in distinct vision; and she set to work to write out what was more present to her mind at such times than her actual life was. She wrote on little scraps of paper, in a minute hand, holding each against a piece of board, such as is used in binding books, for a desk, – a plan found to be necessary for one so short-sighted, – and this sometimes as she sat near the fire by twilight.
While writing "Jane Eyre" she became intensely concerned in the fortunes of her heroine, whose smallness and plainness corresponded with her own. When she had brought the little Jane to Thornfield, her enthusiasm had grown so great that she could not stop. She went on incessantly for weeks. At the end of this time she had made the minute woman conquer temptation, and in the dawn of the summer morning leave Thornfield. "After Jane left Thornfield, the rest of the book," says Miss Martineau, "was written with less vehemence and with more anxious care" – the world adds, "with less vigor and interest."
"Ouida" (Louise de la Ramée) writes in the early morning. She gets up at five o'clock, and, before she begins, works herself up into a sort of literary trance.
Professor Wilson, the Christopher North of Blackwood's Magazine, jotted down in a large ledger "skeletons," from which, when he desired an article, he would select one and clothe it with muscle and nerve. He was a very rapid writer and composer, but worked only when he liked and how he liked. He maintained that any man in good health might write an entire number of Blackwood's. He described himself as writing "by screeds" – the fit coming on about ten in the morning, which he encouraged by a caulker ("a mere nut-shell, which my dear friend the English opium-eater would toss off in laudanum"); and as soon as he felt that there was no danger of a relapse, that his demon would be with him the whole day, he ordered dinner at nine, shut himself up within triple doors, and set manfully to work. "No desk! An inclined plane – except in bed – is my abhorrence. All glorious articles must be written on a dead flat." His friend, the Ettrick Shepherd, used a slate.
Dr. Georg Ebers, professor at the University of Leipzig, Saxony, who is known all over the world as the author of novels treating of ancient Egyptian life, and as the writer of learned treatises on the country of the Khedives, prefers to work in the late evening hours until midnight when composing poetry, but favors daylight for labor on scientific topics. He makes a rough draft of his work, has this copied by an amanuensis, and then polishes and files it until it is satisfactory to him, that is, as perfect as he possibly can make it. He finds that tobacco stimulates him to work, and, therefore, he uses it when engaged in literary production. When he writes poetry, he is in the habit of sitting in an arm-chair, supporting a lap-board on his knee, which holds the paper; in this position he pens his lyrics. He imagines that he is more at liberty in this posture than when behind a writing desk. Ordinarily he writes with great ease, but sometimes the composition of a stirring chapter so mercilessly excites him that great beads of sweat appear upon his forehead, and he is compelled to lay down his pen, unable to write another line. He never writes unless he is in a suitable frame of mind, except it be on business matters. Sometimes, when laboring on topics of science, he works from ten to twelve hours at a stretch; he never spends more than three or four hours in succession on poetry.
Charles Reade's habit of working was unique. When he had decided on a new work he plotted out the scheme, situations, facts, and characters on three large sheets of pasteboard. Then he set to work, using very large foolscap to write on, working rapidly, but with frequent references to his storehouse of facts, in the scrap-books, which were ready at his hand. The genial novelist was a great reader of newspapers. Anything that struck him as interesting, or any fact which tended to support one of his humanitarian theories, was cut out, pasted in a large folio scrap-book, and carefully indexed. Facts of any sort were his hobby. From the scrap-books thus collected with great care he used to elaborate the "questions" treated of in his novels.
Like Charles Reade, Miss Anna Katherine Green is a believer in scrap-books, and culls from newspapers accounts of strange events. Out of such material she weaves her stories of crime and its detection.
Emile Zola, the graphic author of realistic fiction, carefully makes studies from life for his sensational works. He writes rapidly, smoking cigarettes the while. He is an inveterate smoker, and, if there is anything he likes better than tobacco, it is his beautiful country-house near Paris, where he receives daily a large circle of admiring friends.
Edward P. Roe, who, if we may rate success by the wide circulation of an author's books, was our most successful novelist, preferred the daytime for literary work, and rarely accomplished much in the evening beyond writing letters, reading, etc. When pressed with work he put in long hours at night. In the preface to "Without a Home," Rev. Mr. Roe presents some extremely interesting matter in regard to the causes which led to his authorship, and the methods of work by which he turned out so many well-constructed stories in so short a time. "Ten years ago," he says, "I had never written a line of a story, and had scarcely entertained the thought of constructing one. The burning of Chicago impressed me powerfully, and, obedient to an impulse, I spent several days among its smoking ruins. As a result, my first novel, 'Barriers Burned Away,' gradually took possession of my mind. I did not manufacture the story at all, for it grew as naturally as do the plants – weeds, some may suggest – on my farm. In the intervals of a busy and practical life, and also when I ought to have been sleeping, my imagination, unspurred and almost undirected, spun the warp and woof of the tale and wove them together… I merely let the characters do as they pleased, and work out their own destiny. I had no preparation for the work beyond a careful study of the topography of Chicago and the incidents of the fire. For nearly a year my chief recreation was to dwell apart among the shadows created by my fancy, and I wrote when and where I could – on steamboats and railroad cars, as well as in my study… When the book appeared I suppose I looked upon it much as a young father looks upon his first child. His interest in it is intense, but he knows well that its future is very doubtful." Mr. Roe always wrote from a feeling that he had something to say; and never "manufactured" a novel in his life. While writing he was absorbed in his work; and made elaborate studies for his novels. "I have visited," said he, in reference to "Without a Home," "scores of typical tenements. I have sat day after day on the bench with the police judges, and have visited the station-houses repeatedly. There are few large retail shops that I have not entered many times, and I have conversed with both employers and employees."
Mr. Roe did not make "outlines" or "skeletons" to any great extent, and when he did so, he did not follow them closely. Indeed, he often reversed his plan, satisfied that following an arbitrary outline makes both story and characters wooden. He held that the characters should control the author, not he them. He usually received the suggestion of a story unexpectedly, and let it take form in his mind and grow naturally, like a plant, for months, more often for years, before he began to write. He averred that after his characters were introduced he became merely the reporter of what they do, say, and think. He imagined that it was this spontaneity which, chiefly, made his books popular, and said that to reach intelligent people through fiction, the life portrayed must seem to them real and natural, and that this can scarcely be true of his characters if the author is forever imposing his arbitrary will upon them. Mr. Roe wrote in bound blank-books, using but one side of a sheet. This allowed ample space for changes and corrections, and the manuscript was kept in place and order. The novelist used tea, and especially coffee, to some extent as a stimulant, and smoked very mild cigars. But he rarely took coffee at his dinner, at six P.M., as it tended to insomnia. The author of "Barriers Burned Away" worked three or four hours before and two or three hours after lunch. On this point, however, he varied. When wrought up and interested in a scene, he usually completed it. In the after part of the day, when he began to feel weary, he stopped, and, if hard pressed, began work again in the evening. Once, many years ago, he wrote twenty-four hours at a stretch, with the aid of coffee. He did not force himself to work against inclination beyond a certain point. At the same time he fought against a tendency to "moods and tenses."
The German lyric poet, Martin Greif, writes only in the daytime, because he can conceive poetry only when walking in the woods, meadows, and lanes that form the environs of the Bavarian capital – Munich. During his excursions into the surrounding country, he notes down his thoughts, which he elaborates when he reaches his quiet study. He is not a ready versifier, and is compelled to alter a poem repeatedly before it receives his approbation. At work in the afternoon, he loves to smoke moderately; but he never uses stimulants. Generally work is hard to him, but sometimes – that is, rarely – he writes with unusual rapidity. As a professional writer, he must sometimes force himself to work and must mount the Pegasus in spite of disinclination, as when, for instance, a product of his pen has to be delivered on a certain date.
Emile Mario Vacano composed his writings at all times that gave him the impulse for doing so: at daybreak or in the night. With him it was the "whereabouts," not the hour, that made the essence. There was a mill belonging to a good friend of his, where he found his best inspirations amidst all the hubbub of horses, peasants, poultry, cows, pigeons, and country life. And he asserted that the name of his friend, Harry Salzer, of Stattersdorf, near St. Poelten, Lower Austria, ought to be joined to his. He said that his friend merited a great share of his "glories" by his hospitality as well as on account of his bright ideas. Vacano never made a plan in advance, but penned his novels, stories, essays, etc., as one writes a letter, —prima vista, – never perusing again what he had written, be it good or bad. When writing he imbibed a good deal of beer, and was in the habit of using snuff. He did not regard writing as work. For him it was like a chat in pen and ink with friends. As for an inclination to work; as for a feeling that he had something to say, and must say it, come what will, – there was nothing of the sort in him. He said he hated romances, tales, and all the like, and wrote only to gain his "pain quotidien" and that he detested the humbug with all his heart and despised the mob that would read it. He declared that if he were a millionaire or simply wealthy, "he'd never take a pen in hand for bullying a stupid public with his nonsense."
