He flung his books noisily on the table and then proceeded to array himself for the ardours of composition. He first of all divested himself of his collar and tie, and wrapped round his throat the green velvet scarf, that would have lain more appropriately as a stole on the shoulders of an ecclesiastic than it did as a muffler on those of a Gefangener, engaged on a psychological study of seduction. Tarrant then removed his tunic, disclosing a woollen waistcoat, over which he proceeded to draw the second woollen coat that he had brought with him. He explained that they brought him physical ease.
“You see, old man,” he said, “it’s not much use my mind being free, if my limbs are encased in even the loosest of military tunics.”
He then proceeded to work.
Every writer, of course, has his own particular foible, and Tarrant’s was an appalling accuracy in gauging the exact number of words that he had written. Most writers are quite content to add up the number of lines in a page, then find the average number of words in a line and multiply. But Tarrant would have none of these slipshod methods.
“On that principle,” he said, “I suppose you’d call a line a line whether it goes right across the page or not?”
He gave a grunt of contempt.
“And then you say The Loom of Youth is 110,000 words long; why, half the lines you call ten words long only consist of two words—‘Bloody Hell.’ That’s not the way to do things.”
And so Tarrant laboriously added up every word. It became quite a mania with him. So much so, in fact, that he used to embark on long discussions as to the derivation of amalgamated words, and whether “lunch-time” should count as two or one. For his rough draft he kept beside him a small slip of paper, on which at the end of each sentence he used to make mathematical calculations, that reminded me of school cricket, the scoring box, and the attempt to keep level with the tens.
Correction involved much labour. At the end of the sentence he might have noted down 277 words. Then he would revise; half a clause consisting of eight words would be omitted, and on the slip of paper down went 269. Then a celibate noun called for an adjectival mate, and 270 was hoisted amid applause. It was an amusing game, but it took up a great deal of time. Very rarely did Tarrant produce more than 400 words as the result of three hours’ work, and his absolute maximum for a day was 1100.