The fire had begun to burn merrily in the grate; the warm light fell caressingly in a glowing haze on books and chairs and pictures; and I turned towards it from the book-shelves that had become to me inhospitable, wondering why one’s interests should be kept separate in literature if they are not so kept in life; why one book should be devoted exclusively to fiction, another to criticism, another to reminiscence, and another to sport. Would it not be for a change amusing to find unity of theme and subject abandoned for a unity of tone. And suddenly I knew in what words I should reply to Grant Richards in the morning.
“My dear Richards,” I should write, “I am afraid that I have no news for you about my novel. But I shall be sending you quite soon, I think, a book that you will, I hope, like a very great deal better. It will not be fiction, though there will be short stories in it, nor a sporting book, though there will be there both football and cricket: there will be much talk of books, but it will not be literary criticism. Indeed, I do not know to what shelf the librarian at the Times Book Club will consign it.”
It would be a sort of cousin to my dream paper; one feature only would be omitted. There would be no malicious personalities. There are some things that one may like to read, but does not care to write. For the sake of a few pennies and a few paragraphs, I would not run the risk of injuring a friendship.
And, lying back in the depths of my arm-chair, watching the dusky shadows of the firelight move over the ceiling as waves do on a calm day in mid-channel, I thought how pleasant would be the writing of such a book that would pass as conversation does from books to life, and from life to cricket, and so back to books again. How pleasant to let the pen follow the fancy of the anecdote, to let impression flow into impression, to snatch away the blinkers of the technique of formal narrative and criticism. Tired and well content and drowsy I let my thoughts wander out of my control on their lazy, haphazard journey.
II
ABOUT a year ago my American publishers asked me to send them some personal material for press publicity, and I spent a hot summer afternoon describing my parentage, my tastes, my aversions, and what use I made of days and hours. I am now receiving by every second mail syndicated cuttings of my confessions. I am learning quite a lot about myself. I am, I have discovered, a methodical and industrious person. Every Monday and Friday I go to a publisher’s office in Henrietta Street where I read manuscripts, draft advertisements, and generally entertain myself and my employers. During the three middle days of the week I write.
I follow a regular routine on my writing days. I have breakfast at half-past eight. From nine to ten I walk over Hampstead Heath. From ten to one o’clock I write. In the afternoon I go to a cinema. From five to seven I write again. I work at the rate of 3500 words a day. During the week-end I enjoy myself. I dance, I play football or cricket as the time of year ordains. I see my friends. It is, in fact, a picture of the sort of young man who wins prizes at a Sunday school and makes good in the business novel.
I suppose that I must have in some such way spent the week previous to my confession. Or perhaps I felt that I needed organising, that it was on such lines my time should be arranged, and that by the mere fact of writing down a time-table I should “Coué” myself into an observance of it; at any rate it is not, I need perhaps hardly say, very much like that. I do not confine my entertainment entirely to the weekends. Usually three days a week in summer-time are spent lazily on a cricket field. Were I to maintain an average rate of ten thousand words a week, I should produce some half a million words a year, and heaven knows what I should do with them. Nor am I very often down to breakfast by half-past eight.
A mendacious chronicle that confession. But then are we not always drawing up schemes and time-tables. At the beginning of the year we estimate the extent of our income. We make two columns. We put down the items of general expenditure: rent, insurance, income-tax, club subscriptions, clothes, and washing. And we decide how much remains over for personal indulgence. “I may allow myself,” we say, “three or four or five or six pounds a week in pocket money, and I will not,” we continue, “spend one penny more than that.” Nor do we for a week or so till we become so inflamed with a sense of merit that we adjudge our economy entitled to some worthy tribute, and we arrange a dinner party and twelve pounds go in a single night. It is the same with time-tables. They always get upset somewhere, and the people who stick to them are an infernal nuisance.
I recall a certain fellow-prisoner of war with a day curiously and exhaustively pigeon-holed. “Come and make a fourth at bridge,” you would say. “Sorry,” he would answer; “but in five minutes I shall be starting on my second pipe.” And when you wanted him to walk round the square his next drink was due. And when you wanted him to split a bottle, it was his time for exercise. Even his romantic nature marched in fetters. He was ordered by the irrefrangible mandate of his time-table to devote the hour between half-past three and tea to a “siesta of sensual reverie.”