The Making Of A Novelist / An Experiment In Autobiography

by David Christie Murray

With this lifelong habit of swift workmanship upon me, I thought that all I needed was to see my theme before me, and to go at it with my whole heart as I would have done at a new novel. In writing a novel you want a live place and live people; and these being provided, your book is as good as finished when you are half-way through with it. But I shall never forget in what a quagmire I landed myself when I began to write 'Chums' upon this principle. I have always, since I can remember, been a student of the acted drama. I acted for some years as dramatic critic in the provinces and in London. I knew as much about the exigencies of stage construction as the average man, and found that that meant a little less than nothing. The very method of work looked curiously bare and bald. My study for years has been to me a theatre in which I have acted many scores of different parts, often enough before a mirror to assure myself of nature. Yet I no sooner began to write consciously for the stage than this useful faculty abandoned me entirely. I no longer saw my living people; but in their stead the members of the travelling company obtruded themselves upon me.

My leading lady was before me in the place of Lucy Draycott. She was and is a most excellent and charming actress; but she was only playing at being Lucy Draycott, and she stood in between me and my own conception in a way which filled me with a cold embarrassment. Then, again, Square Jack Furlong, a rustic rascal, who, as I boldly hoped, was to make quite a new type of stage villain, was to be impersonated by a heavy man of quite the conventional sort—a man who (small blame to him) would have no idea of the accent my scoundrel was to speak in (a vital point to me) and not a conception of the inner workings of his mind. In this way all the real people who supposed they were to interpret my shadows into flesh and blood converted my flesh and blood into shadow. Understand that I am not apologizing for a bad play or a failure. It was not counted either one or the other, though I must do something different to touch the mark I am in quest of. I am only trying to show in what fashion I was embarrassed by new conditions. My travelling manager nearly broke his heart because I would not at first consent to allow my villain to shoot little Harold, and at last in desperation I took his advice and killed an idyll with a single grain of melodrama.

The piece was somehow written in the time prescribed, and was produced 'under the direct supervision of the author,' by which fact it gained perhaps as much as might have been expected. It was produced at Auckland, and achieved a success which it was not destined to repeat in its fulness. It was admirably, and in one respect originally, staged. The second act was laid in the New Zealand bush: and since at Auckland folks know what a New Zealand bush-scene is like, it was needful to be a little truer to nature than we found it easily possible to be when the play was produced for a single experimental night at the Globe, or when it ran its twelvemonth course in the English and Scotch provinces later on.

Sir George Grey was interested in the production; and in Auckland Sir George Grey does pretty much as he likes, as he has a right to do when one remembers what the city, and indeed the whole colony, owes to his patriotism, his statesmanship, and his personal generosity. Without his aid the stage-manager's proposal could not possibly have been carried out; but, armed with his authority, I presented myself to the curator of the park, and from him obtained leafage enough to dress the whole scene without the help of the scene-painter's art. We had a backcloth, to be sure, and an artificial waterfall (which flooded the cellars, by-the-by), but for everything else we were indebted to Sir George Grey and pure nature. The live bush, the wounds of the woodman's axe concealed by heaps of vari-coloured mosses, bloomed and rustled under the limelight as I suppose it never bloomed and rustled elsewhere in the history of the theatre, and the stage was ankle-deep in withered leaves; the scent of the forest actually getting beyond the footlights for once in a way.

I have never in my life seen any theatrical spectacle one-half as lovely; and this one scene had a great deal to do with the success of the piece. It was frantically applauded, and the scene-painter walked in front and bowed as if he had been responsible for its beauties. I overheard from a sun-tanned gentleman in the dress circle near whom I sat one useful trifle in the way of criticism. When Mr. Stuart Willoughby entered with his swag on his shoulder my neighbour whispered to his neighbour that that fellow had never learned to hump his bluey in Otago. 'I'll bet my head,' he added, 'that chap's an Australian.' And so he was. The future Stuart Willoughbys were instructed in this particular, and the most critical New Zealander could have found no fault with the style in which Mr. David James, junior, carried his belongings in the Otago bushland of the Globe Theatre, London.

'Chums' hit the New Zealand fancy, and the little play was kindly received in many places. I had begun to write another drama of a much more serious sort, and was working pretty busily as well at a revised edition of my first effort, when a serious accident befell us. My manager and I were travelling together to Dunedin (for we had formed a definite scheme of partnership, and had arranged to spend a year or two in the preparation of a repertoire of pieces which might be fit to face the lights of London by the time we got there), when a telegram found us at a railway station en route. It told us that an important member of the company had seceded. I know now the story of his secession; but I have some slight acquaintance with the law of libel, and the history is of no particular interest to anybody.

We were announced to open in Dunedin in 'Jim the Penman,' and our missing man was to have played the part of Baron Hardfeldt The town was billed, seats were booked; there was no going back from the engagement without disaster. Then I had a goodly number of friends in Dunedin who were coming to see my own play, and there was a financial loss to be encountered into the bargain. Personally I experienced a keen sense of disappointment; but the manager was in despair. There was no filling the place of the recalcitrant for love or money—there was very little capital behind the concern; and, in short, it looked as if we had found a finish for our enterprise. Then it was that I bethought me, 'Why the dickens shouldn't I play Baron Hardfeldt?'

I communicated my idea to my companion, who grasped at it as a drowning man grips a straw. We consulted together. We found it possible to begin to study at midnight, and we arranged for a rehearsal on the morrow. I had seen the piece once, and recalled its general tenor, and began to construct a Hardfeldt. One of my dearest friends is a Zliricher, and I felt certain of his accent. That was a point gained, for the rascally Baron might as well have come from Zurich as from anywhere else in the world. I recalled, with no twinge of inward apology, every tone of my old friend's voice, every trick of facial expression, and every little touch of Swiss gesture which helps his breezy and warm-hearted talk. I determined to dower Sir Charles Young's admirable scoundrel with all my dear old J—— G——'s tricks and manners; and I was the less remorseful in copying his cheerful and childlike bonhomie because our recalcitrant had been in the habit of giving the Baron away at his very entrance, and had stamped him from the first as a ruffian of the deepest dye, whereas I was disposed to think that a really successful adventurer would be likely to have an honest and engaging manner.

At midnight I began to study; and at three o'clock in the morning I went away to bed, carrying with me the words and business of the part and a pretty bad headache. We rehearsed at eleven; and I was 'letter-perfect,' as actors say, and was always to be found on the very nail of the stage on which I was wanted. I have always boasted a verbal memory like a steel rat-trap. It never lets anything go upon which it once seizes. So far excellent. 'But Linden saw another sight' at night-time. I knew platform fright as well as anybody. I have thrice been physically sick before addressing a strange audience, though I have been hardened by nearly a quarter of a century of practice. John Bright once said in my hearing that he never arose to speak in public without a feeling of insecurity at the knees and 'the sense of a scientific vacuum behind the waistcoat.' But this first appearance on the boards took me beyond anything I had hitherto experienced. I recalled the phrase about the 'scientific vacuum' which had fallen from the lips of England's greatest orator, and tried to console myself with the hope that I might not play so very vilely in spite of the fact that I had forgotten every line and word. I was bathed in a coward sweat whilst I stood near the central doors of the stage-chamber into which I was shortly to walk like a sheep to the slaughter. The cue came, and I entered mechanically crushing an opera-hat against my shirt-front. I know that if the audience could have seen the face below the grease-paint and the powder, they would have seen something very like the face of a corpse.

Luckily I am very short-sighted, and the space beyond the yellow glare of the footlights was no more than a black and empty gulf to me. The Penman, my miserable sin-steeped confederate, took me by the hand and introduced me cordially to Mrs. Ralston. Until he had ceased to speak I had no remotest idea of what I had to say; but the words came somehow, and I half fancied that my old friend J—— G—— had spoken them.