6
It is settled that you are going to write a novel. You have examined your motive and found it pure and worthy of you. Comes now the great question of how to set about the business.
At this point let no one rise up and “point out” that Arnold Bennett has told how. Arnold Bennett has told how to do everything—how to live on twenty-four hours a day (but not how to enjoy it), how to write books, how to acquire culture, how to be yourself and manage yourself (in the unfortunate event that you cannot be someone else or have no one, like a wife, to manage you), how to do everything, indeed, except rise up and call Arnold Bennett blessed.
The trouble with Mr. Bennett’s directions is—they won’t work.
Mr. Bennett tells you to write like everything and get as much of your novel done as possible before the Era of Discouragement sets in. Then, no matter how great your Moment of Depression, you will be able to stand beside the table, fondly stroking a pile of pages a foot high, and reassure yourself, saying: “Well, but here, at least, is so much done. No! I cannot take my hand from the plough now! No! I must Go On. I must complete my destiny.” (One’s novel is always one’s Destiny of the moment.)
It sounds well, but the truth is that when you strike the Writer’s Doldrums the sight of all that completed manuscript only enrages you to the last degree. You are embittered by the spectacle of so much effort wasted. You feel like tearing it up or flinging it in the wastebasket. If you are a Rudyard Kipling or an Edna Ferber, you do that thing. And your wife or your mother carefully retrieves your Recessional or your Dawn O’Hara and sends it to the publisher who brings it out, regardless of expense, and sells a large number of copies—to the booksellers, anyway.
Mr. Bennett also tells you how to plan the long, slow culminant movement of your novel; how to walk in the park and compose those neat little climaxes which should so desirably terminate each chapter; how to—— But what’s the use? Let us illustrate with a fable.
Once an American, meeting Mr. Bennett in London, saluted him, jocularly (he meant it jocularly) with the American Indian word of greeting: “How?”
Mr. Bennett immediately began to tell him how and the American never got away until George H. Doran, the publisher, who was standing near by, exclaimed:
“That’s enough, Enoch, for a dollar volume!”
(Mr. Doran, knowing Bennett well, calls him by his first name, a circumstance that should be pointed out to G. K. Chesterton, who would evolve a touching paradox about the familiarity of the unfamiliar.)
That will do for Arnold. If we mention Arnold again it must distinctly be understood that we have reference to some other Arnold—Benedict Arnold or Matthew Arnold or Dorothy Arnold or Arnold Daly.
Well, to get back (in order to get forward), you are about beginning your novel (nice locution, “about beginning”) and are naturally taking all the advice you can get, if it doesn’t cost prohibitively, and this we are about to give doesn’t.
The first thing for you to do is not, necessarily, to decide on the subject of your novel.
It is not absolutely indispensable to select the subject of a novel before beginning to write it. Many authors prefer to write a third or a half of the novel before definitely committing themselves to a particular theme. For example, take The Roll Call, by Arnold—it must have been Arnold Constable, or perhaps it was Matthew. The Roll Call is a very striking illustration of the point we would make. Somewhere along toward the end of The Roll Call the author decided that the subject of the novel should be the war and its effect on the son of Hilda Lessways by her bigamous first husband—or, he wasn’t exactly her husband, being a bigamist, but we will let it go at that. Now Hilda Lessways was, or became, the wife of Edwin Clayhanger; and George Cannon, Clayhanger’s—would you say, stepson? Hilda’s son, anyway—George Cannon, the son of a gun—oh, pardon, the son of Bigamist Cannon—the stepson of, or son of the wife of, Edwin Clayhanger of the Five Towns—George Cannon.... Where were we?... Hilda Lessways Clayhanger, the—well, wife—of Bigamist Cannon....
The relationships in this novel are very confusing, like the novel and the subject of it, but if you can read the book you will see that it illustrates our point perfectly.