The Making Of A Novelist Part 1

The Making Of A Novelist.

by David Christie Murray.

PREFACE

Every man who writes about himself is, on the face of the matter, obnoxious to the suspicion which haunts the daily pathway of the Bore.

To talk of self and not be offensive demands an art which is not always given to man. And yet we are always longing to get near each other and to understand each other; and in default of a closer communion with our living fellows we take to our bosoms the shadows of fiction and the stage. If the real man could be presented to us by any writer of his own history we should all hail him with enthusiasm.

Pepys, of course, came nearer than anybody else; but this is only because he wrote for his own reading and meant to keep himself a secret.

d.i.c.kens exquisitely veils and unveils his own personality and career in _Copperfield_, and scores of smaller writers have done the same thing in fiction to our great pleasure. But to set down boldly, openly, and as a fact for general publication the things of one's own doing, saying, and thinking is an impertinence whose only justification can be found in the public approval. If Pepys had written his Diary for publication he would have been left to oblivion as a driveller. But we surprise the man's secret, we see what he never meant to show us, the peering jackdaw instinct is satisfied; and we feel, besides, a certain sense of humorous pity and affectionate disdain which the man himself, had we known him in life as we know him in his book, could never have excited. Rousseau, to me, is flatly intolerable, because he meant to tell the world what every man should have the decency to hide.

The perfect autobiography is yet to seek, and will probably never be written. A partial solution of a difficulty is offered in this experimental booklet. It is offered without diffidence, because it is offered in perfect modesty. I have tried to show how one particular novelist was made; where he got some of his experiences, and in what varying fashions the World and Fate have tried to teach him his business. It has been my effort to do this in the least egotistical and the most straightforward fashion. The narrative is quite informal and wanders where it will; but in its serial publication it received marked favour from an indulgent public, and I like to give it an equal chance of permanence with the rest of my writings, which I trust will not convey the notion that I covet a too-exaggerated longevity. Should the public favour continue, the field of experience is wide; and I may repeat d.i.c.k Swiveller's saying to Mr. Quilp--'There is plenty more in the shop this comes from.'

THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST

I

Only a day or two ago I found myself arrested on my eastward way along the Strand by the hand of a friend upon my shoulder. We chatted for a minute or two, and I found that I was in front of Lips...o...b..'s window.

A ball of cork, which has had a restless time of it for many years, was dodging up and down the limits of a gla.s.s shade, tossed by a jet of water. The sight of it carried me back twenty years in a flash. 'In the year 1872 I came to London, as many young men had done before me, without funds, without friends, and without employment, trusting, with the happy-go-lucky disposition of youth, to the chapter of accidents.

For some time the accidents were all unfavourable, and there came a morning when I owned nothing in the world but the clothes I stood in.

I found myself that morning very tired, very hungry, very down in the mouth, staring at the cork ball on the jet of water under the gla.s.s shade, and drearily likening it to my own mental condition, flung hither and thither, drenched, rolled over, lifted and dropped by a caprice beyond the power of resistance. It was at this mournful moment that I found my first friend in London. The story of that event shall be told hereafter. What I want to say now is that the sight of that permanent show in Lips...o...b..'s window made me younger for a minute by a score of years, and opened my mind to such a rush of recollections that I determined then and there to put my memories on paper.

I am not such an egotist as to suppose my experiences to be altogether unique; but I know them to be curious and in places surprising.

Adventures, as Mr. Disraeli said a good many years ago, are to the adventurous, and in a smallish kind of way I have sought and found enough to stock the lives of a thousand stay-at-homes. At the first blush it would not appear to the outside observer that the literary life is likely to be fruitful in adventure; but in the circle of my own acquaintance there are a good many men who have found it so.

In the city of Prague the most astonishing encounters pa.s.s for every-day incidents. In these days of universal enlightenment n.o.body needs to be told that Prague is the capital of Bohemia. There is a note that rings false in the very name of that happy country now. Its traditions have been vulgarised by people who have never pa.s.sed its borders. All sorts of charlatans have soiled its history with ign.o.ble use, and the very centre and citadel of its capital has an air of being built of gingerbread. In point of fact, though its inhabitants are spa.r.s.er than they once were, and its occasional guests of distinction fewer, the place itself is as real as ever it was. I have lived in it for a quarter of a century, and, without vanity, may claim to know it as well as any man alive.

Eight or ten years ago I was sitting in the Savage Club in the company of four distinguished men of letters. One was the editor of a London daily, and he was talking rather too humbly, as I thought, about his own career.

'I do not suppose,' he said, 'that any man in my present position has experienced in London the privations I knew when I first came here. I went hungry for three days, twenty years back, and for three nights I slept in the Park.'

One of the party turned to me. 'You cap that, Christie?'

I answered, 'Four nights on the Embankment. Four days hungry.'

My left-hand neighbour was a poet, and he chimed in laconically, 'Five.'

In effect, it proved that there was not one of us who had not slept in that Hotel of the Beautiful Star which is always open to everybody. We had all been frequent guests there, and now we were all prosperous, and had found other and more comfortable lodgings. There is a gentler brotherhood to be found among men who have put up in that great caravanserai than can be looked for elsewhere. He jests at scars that never felt a wound, and a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.

There are many people still alive who remember the name of George Dawson. There used to be thousands who recognized it with veneration and affection. He was my first chief, editor of the _Birmingham Morning News_, and had been my idol for years. My red-letter nights were when he came over to my native town of West Bromwich to lecture for the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation there on Tennyson, 'Vanity Fair,' Oliver Goldsmith, and kindred themes.

Every Sunday night it was my habit to tramp with a friend of mine, dead long ago, into Birmingham to hear Dawson preach in the Church of the Saviour. The trains ran awkwardly for us, and many scores of times poor Ned and myself walked the five miles out and five miles home in rain and snow and summer weather to listen to the helpful and inspiriting words of the strongest and most helpful man I have ever known.

I am not sure at this time of day what I should think of George Dawson if he still survived; but nothing can now diminish the affection and reverence with which I bless his memory. I had been writing prose and verse for the local journals for a year or two. I was proud and pleased beyond expression to be allowed to write the political leaders for the _Wednesday Advertiser_. I got no pay, and I dare say the editor was as pleased to find an enthusiast who did his work for nothing as I was to be allowed to do it. In practical journalism I had had no experience whatever; but when Dawson was announced as the editor of the forthcoming _Birmingham Morning News_ I wrote to him, asking to be allowed to join the staff. I had already secured a single meeting with him a year before, and he had spoken not unkindly of some juvenile verses which I had dared to submit to his judgment

He proved to be as well acquainted with practical journalism as myself, for in answer to my application he at once offered me the post of sub-editor. Dr. Langford, who held actual command, set his veto on this rather absurd appointment, and told me that if I wished to join the journalistic guild at all I must begin at the beginning. I asked what the beginning might be, and learned that the lowest grade in journalism in the provinces is filled by the police-court reporter. The salary offered was 25s. a week. The work began at eleven o'clock in the morning and finished at about eleven o'clock at night. I have known many sleepless nights since then; but the first entirely wakeful time I had pa.s.sed between the sheets was spent in the mental discussion of that offer. There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth at home when I decided to accept it. The journal was very loosely conducted--a leader in the Birmingham Daily Post spoke of us once as the people across the street who were playing at journalism--and the junior reporter was permitted to write leaders, theatrical criticisms, and a series of articles on the works of Thomas Carlyle, then first appearing in popular form in a monthly issue.

I have always maintained, and must always continue to believe, that there is no school for a novelist which can equal that of journalism.

In the police court, at inquests in the little upper rooms of tenth-rate public-houses, and in the hospitals which it was my business to visit nightly, I began to learn and understand the poor. I began on my own account to investigate their condition, and as a result of one or two articles about the Birmingham slums, was promoted at a bound from the post of police-court reporter to that of Special Correspondent. Six guineas a week, with a guinea a day for expenses, looked like an entry into Eldorado. There was a good deal of heartburning and jealousy amongst the members of the staff; but I dare say all that is forgotten long ago.

The first real chance I got was afforded me by the first election by ballot which took place in England. This was at Pontefract, where the Hon. Hugh Childers was elected in a contest against Lord Pollington.

Some barrister-at-law had published a synopsis of the Ballot Act, which I bought for a shilling at New Street Station and studied all the way to Pontefract I sent off five columns of copy by rail in time to catch the morning issue of the paper, and received the first open sign of editorial favour on my return in the form of a cheque for ten pounds over and above my charges. The money was welcome enough; but that it should come from the hands of my hero and man of men, and should be accompanied by words of unqualified approval, was, I think, more inspiriting than anything could possibly be to me now. A very little while later Dawson came to me with a new commission.

'I hate this kind of business,' he said, 'but it has to be done, and we will do it once for all.'

There was an execution to take place at Worcester. One Edward Hughes, a plasterer, I think, had murdered his wife under circ.u.mstances of extraordinary provocation. The woman had left him once with a paramour, and when she was deserted he had taken her back again. She left him a second time and was again deserted, and again he condoned her offence.

She left him a third time, and he went to look for her. She was living in clover, and she jeered when he begged her to return. It was set forth in evidence that he had told her that he would see her once more.

He walked home--a distance of three or four miles--borrowed a razor, returned to the house in which the woman was living, asked for an interview outside in the darkness, and there almost severed her head from her body. He surrendered himself immediately to the police, was tried for his life, and sentenced to be hanged.

Rightly or wrongly, the man's story inspired me with a dreadful sympathy. I cannot help thinking to this day that the tragedy of that man's life went unappreciated, and that his long-suffering devotion and the pa.s.sion of jealousy which at length overcame him might have furnished Shakspeare himself with a theme as terrible as he found in 'Oth.e.l.lo.' Anyway, the man was to be hanged and I was deputed to attend the execution.

At that time I had never been a witness at a death scene. I have seen thousands hurried out of life since then; and though even now I should find an execution ugly and repellant, I recall with some astonishment the agony of horror which this commission cost me. I had an introduction to the sub-sheriff and another to the governor of the gaol; and I presented these at the gaol itself on a night of rainy misery which was in complete accord with my own feelings. I went hoping with all my heart that the permission to attend the awful ceremony of the next morning would be refused. It was accorded, and I left the gaol in a sick whirl of pity and horror.

I shall remember whilst I remember anything my last look at the gloomy building from the fields which lie between it and the town. The flying afterguard of the late storm was hurrying across the sky, the fields were sodden, and rainpools lay here and there reflecting the dull steely hue of the heavens. A single light burned red and baleful in one window, and right over the black bulk of the gaol one star beamed. It seemed to me like a promise of mercy beyond, and I went back to my hotel filled with thoughts which will hardly bear translation.

Next day I had a first lesson in one or two things. I saw death for the first time; for the first time in my life I saw a human creature in the extremity of fear, and I had my first lesson in human stupidity. I have told the story of this execution in another place and have no mind to repeat it here. But I shall never forget the spidery black-painted galleries and staircases and the whitewashed walls of the corridor.

I shall never forget the living man who stood trembling and almost unconscious in the very gulf of cowardice and horror. I shall never forget the face of the wretched young chaplain who, like myself, found himself face to face with his first encounter with sudden death, and who, poor soul, had over-primed himself with stimulant. I shall never forget, either, that ghoul of a Calcraft, with his disreputable grey hair, his disreputable undertaker's suit of black, and a million dirty pin-p.r.i.c.ks which marked every pore of the skin of his face. Calcraft took the business business-like, and pinioned his man in the cell (with a terror-stricken half-dozen of us looking on) as calmly to all appearance as if he had been a tailor fitting on a coat.

The chaplain read the Burial Service, or such portion of it as is reserved for these occasions, in a thick and indistinct voice. A bell clanged every half-minute or thereabouts, and it seemed to me as if it had always been ringing and would always ring. I have the dimmest notion--indeed, to speak the truth, I have no idea at all--as to how the procession formed and how we found ourselves at the foot of the gallows.

The doomed man gabbled a prayer under his breath at galloping speed, the words tumbling one over the other. 'Lord Jesus have mercy upon me and receive my spirit.' The hapless chaplain read the service. Calcraft bustled ahead. The bell boomed. Hughes came to the foot of the gallows, and I counted mechanically nineteen black steps, fresh-tarred and sticky. 'I can't get up,' said the murderer. A genial warder clapped him on the shoulder, for all the world as if there had been no mischief in the business. Judging by look and accent, the one man might have invited the other to mount the stairs of a restaurant. 'You'll get up right enough,' said the warder. He got up, and they hanged him.

Where everything was strange and dreamlike, the oddest thing of all was to see Calcraft take the pinioned fin-like hand of the prisoner and shake it when he had drawn the white cap over the face and arranged the rope. He came creaking in new boots down the sticky steps of the gallows, pulled a rope to free a support which ran on a single wheel in an iron groove, and the man was dead in a second. The white cap fitted close to his face, and the thin white linen took a momentary stain of purple, as if a bag of blackberries had been bruised and had suddenly exuded the juice of the fruit. It sagged away a moment later and a.s.sumed its natural hue.

I learned from the evening paper and from the journals of next morning that the prisoner met his fate with equanimity. I think that in that report I bottomed the depths of human stupidity, if such a thing is possible. I had never seen a man afraid before; and, when I found time to think about it, I prayed that I might never see that shameful and awful sight again.

II

I wrote three small-type columns--three columns of leaded minion--about that execution, describing everything I had seen with a studied minuteness. Dawson was nervous about the whole affair, and, whilst the copy was yet in the hands of the printer, asked two or three times what had been done with the theme. He was kept at bay by the subeditor, who scented a sensation, and was afraid that the editor-in-chief might cut the copy to pieces. Dawson was purposely kept waiting for proofs so long that at last he went home without seeing them; and he often spoke to me afterwards of the rage and anguish he felt when he opened the paper at his breakfast-table and found that great ma.s.s of s.p.a.ce devoted to the report of an execution. He began, so he told me, by reading the last paragraph first; then he read the paragraph preceding it; and next, beginning resolutely at the beginning, found himself compelled to read the whole ghastly narrative clean through. The machine was at work all day to supply the local demand for this particular horror, and Mr.

George Augustus Sala wrote specially to ask who was the author of the narrative. I began to think my fortune made.

The journalist is like the doctor, his services are in requisition mainly in times of trouble. The Black Country which lies north of Birmingham is full of disaster, and the special correspondent has a big field there. Quite early in my career I was sent out to Pelsall Hall, near Walsall, where a mine had been flooded and two-and-thirty men were known to be in the workings. I was born and bred in the mining district, and was familiar with the heroism of the miners. They are not all heroes, and even those who are are not always heroic. But use breeds a curious indifference to danger.

I remember once paying a visit to the Tump Pit at or near Rowley Regis at a time when the men were taking their midday meal. There was a sort of Hall of Eblis there, a roof thirty feet high or thereabouts, and the men sat in a darkness dimly revealed by the light of one or two tallow candles. Down in the midst of them fell a portion of the rocky roof--enough to have filled a wheelbarrow, and enough certainly to have put out the vital spark of any man on whom it might have fallen. One coal-grimed man, at whose feet the ma.s.s had fallen, looked up placidly and said, 'That stuck up till it couldn't stick no longer;' and that was all that was said about the matter. I suppose there was a tacit recognition of the fact that the same thing might happen in any part of the mine at any moment, and that it was useless to attempt to run away from it. A pa.s.sive scorn of danger is an essential element in the miner's life, and when need arises he shows an active scorn of it which is finer than anything I have ever seen in battle.

The Pelsall Hall Colliery disaster was the hinge on which the door of my fate was hung. I wrote an unspeakably bad novel which had that disaster for its central incident, and it was published from Sat.u.r.day to Sat.u.r.day in the _Morning News_, to the great detriment of that journal; and so long as the story ran, angry subscribers wrote to the editor to vilify it and its author. There was some very good work in it none the less; and an eminent critic told me that, though it was capital flesh and blood, it had no bones. It resulted years afterwards in 'Joseph's Coat,'

which is, if I may say so, less inchoate and formless than its dead and buried original.

But it was not that exasperating novel which made the Pelsall Hall disaster memorable in my personal history. I made an acquaintance there--an acquaintance curiously begun--which did much for me. I met there the king of all special correspondents, and had an immediate shindy with him. There was only one decent room to be found by way of lodging in the village, and this was in the cottage of one Bailey, a working engineer. Mr. Bailey, without his wife's knowledge, had let that room to me for a week at a rent of one sovereign, and Mrs. Bailey, without her husband's knowledge, had let the room at a similar rent to the great Special. Box and c.o.x encountered, each determined on his rights and each resolute to oust the other.

I was leaving the cottage at about seven in the morning, when I met a man in a flannel shirt with no collar attached to it, a three days'

beard, a suit of homespun, and heavy ankle jack-boots much bemired with the clay of the rain-sodden fields. He smoked a short clay pipe and looked like anything but what he was--the comet of the newspaper firmament.