Recollections of a Varied Life Part 39

In truth, the author of a story has very little control over its course after he has once laid its foundations. The novel is not made--it grows, and the novelist does little more than plant the seed and keep the growth unchoked by weeds. He is as powerless to make it other than what it tends to be as the gardener is to grow tomatoes on corn-stalks or cuc.u.mbers on pea-vines. He may create for the story what manner of people he pleases, just as the gardener may choose the seed he will plant; but once created these fict.i.tious people will behave according to their individual natures without heed to the wishes of the author of their being.

In other words, the novelist is under bond to his conscience to represent his personages as talking and acting precisely as such personages would talk and act under the circ.u.mstances in which he has placed them. It often happens that their sentiments, their utterances, and their conduct do not fit into the author's preconceived arrangement of happenings, so that he must alter his entire story or important parts of it to make it true.

I have borrowed the last few paragraphs from a playful paper I wrote for an obscure magazine thirty-odd years ago, because they suggest a trouble that must come to every conscientious novelist many times during the writing of every story. There come times when the novelist doesn't know what happened, and must toilsomely explore his consciousness by way of finding out.

[Sidenote: Working Hours and Working Ways]

My working hours are determined by circ.u.mstances--morning, afternoon, evening, or late at night. When there is a "must" involved, I work when I must; when I am free I work when I choose or when I feel that I can.

I never carry my work to bed with me, and I never let it rob me of a moment's sleep. To avoid that I usually play a game or two of solitaire --perhaps the least intellectual of all possible occupations--between work and bedtime; and I usually take a walk in the open air just before going to bed, whatever the weather may be. But whatever else happens, I long ago acquired the art of absolutely dismissing the subject of my work from my mind, whenever I please, and the more difficult art of refusing to let any other subject of interest take its place. I do that when I go to bed, and when I do that nothing less than positive physical pain can keep me from going to sleep.

I have always been fond of fishing and boating. In summer, at my Lake George cottage, I have a little fleet of small boats moored within twenty paces of my porch-placed writing table. If my mind flags at my work I step into my fishing boat and give an hour or two to a sport that occupies the attention without fatiguing it. If I am seriously perplexed by any work-problem, I take a rowboat, with a pair of eight-foot oars, and go for a ten-mile spin. On my return I find that my problem has completely wrought itself out in my mind without conscious effort on my part.

I am fond of flower gardening and, without the least technical skill in it, I usually secure astonishingly good results. The plants seem to respond generously to my uninstructed but kindly attention.

In my infancy my mother taught me to begin every day with a plunge into water as cold as I could get, and I have kept up the habit with the greatest benefit. I find it a perfect tonic as well as a luxurious delight.

I have always enforced upon myself two rules with respect to literary style: First, to utter my thought simply and with entire sincerity, and, second, never consciously to write or leave a sentence in such form that even a blundering reader might mistake its meaning.

Here let me bring to an end these random recollections of a life which has involved hard work, distressing responsibility, and much of disappointment, but which has been filled from the beginning with that joy of success which is the chief reward of endeavor to every man who loves his work and puts conscience into it.

THE END