The Book of Months

by E. F. Benson

I wonder how the writing and the subsequent publication of any book, the meanest, affects the average author? No doubt the great powers in authorship, so to speak, care as little when another volume is launched as does the Empire at large when another battleship leaves the slips to join its mighty brothers. But for the majority—those of us, in fact, who hope some day (however vainglorious the hope, we all cling to it) to produce a book which may rouse laughter or tears or interest twenty years hence—I imagine that there is scarcely any excitement, depression, exaltation or misgiving that we have ever felt which is comparable to those attendant on the writing and launching of our little paper fleets. And as I have just launched another little paper boat to go and look after its drowned brothers, and the memory of all the emotions attendant on it is consequently keen, it may be of interest, in however small a degree, to others to read what even so uneminent an author as myself experiences in these times.

Birds, perhaps, give one the only simile possible for the first period. For the idea of the book, its scope, its aim, its plot, and, to a certain degree, its characters, all exist, in my case, before I put a word down on paper. When these are complete, we may say that the egg is there. The writing it, to my mind, is equivalent to the hatching only; but the definite production of the egg—of that which contains potential vitality—is over and complete at the moment the writing begins. If there is no potential vitality in it then, there never will be. When I begin to write, I am sitting on my egg.

Now, this first period—here we dismiss the simile of the egg, and take that of disease—lasts for a very ill-defined period. During it the patient is continually conscious of an abnormality of condition. His spirits are very variable: sometimes for days together the appetite will be good (mine always is), and the only symptom of the malady is a slightly increased vividness. Speech is coherent, but rather more fluent than usual; he tends to talk nonsense (this must not be confused with the subsequent wandering). Then, without apparent cause, stages of depression, irritability, and general peevishness ensue: he will decry his favourite pursuits, particularly authorship, and express audibly a desire for a large and settled income in Consols. Shortly before the crisis approaches (i.e., the first dip of the pen in ink) a period of febrile excitement ensues; he will put sudden problems to his nurses as to how A would act given B, C, and D did so-and-so, and, whatever the answers given him, he will certainly take exception to them. This is the period of wandering alluded to above. Both the period of excitement previous to this and the period of depression are marked by a certain listlessness with regard to other pursuits; the patient takes nothing, except his malady, quite seriously, and though he performs the ordinary routine of life with correctness, he performs it somehow subaqueously. Indeed, he is never quite himself from the time the seeds of the malady first attack him.

All these symptoms are temporarily ameliorated when, to go back to our first simile, the egg is laid. For a time the nurses are encouraged to hope that the worst is over. Large quantities of what is known as ‘sermon-paper’ should be given without stint, and special care taken that there should be in every room, where the patient can possibly desire to sit, plenty of black ink and suitable pens. For a day or two he may refuse to go out altogether, or play any game, and here it is a mistake on the part of the nurses to urge him to do so. He may, in fact, be entirely left to himself. Probably these favourable symptoms will last for a week or two (during which the supply of sermon-paper should be renewed), and then a change for the worse comes over the patient. The irritability returns, and with it an attack, more or less severe, of complete idleness and indescribable misgivings. He again expresses a wish for a settled income in Consols, and often goes suddenly to stay with his friends, or, if the disease is not so acute, merely lunches and dines out every day, and seems to fear being left alone. Then the malady becomes spasmodic, the periods of inaction alternate with periods of feverish industry, to which succeeds an attack of apparent coma with regard to everything except the disease itself, which is now confluent and completely encompasses him. A series of absolutely happy days ensue, accompanied by great mental activity and enormous consumption of sermon-paper. As soon as this definitely sets in, the nurses may make themselves quite happy for the time being. All fears of suicide may be considered over, and there is no allusion to Consols. And thus the egg is hatched in a blaze of hypertrophied glory.

It is hatched. That is to say, the MS.—such as it is—is complete, and personally one is completely happy for about a week. Then ensues a very tedious period, which is at times brightened by finding that something is better than one thought, but oftener darkened by finding that something is worse than one thought. In other words, after a week of idleness, I sit laboriously down, and copy out the whole thing from beginning to end. Other patients at this point, I believe, use a typewriter, but personally, on the one occasion when I did so, I found that the corrections were not compassable even in triple-spaced type. So now, when the first MS. is complete, I begin from the beginning, and write the whole story out again. Chapters are often excised, and chapters (more rarely) inserted, since in my first MS. I find that I much more commonly say too much than too little. (Here is an opening for critics to point out how extraordinarily superfluous the first MS. must have been.) This period is the tiresome part of the hatching of the egg. The writing of the first MS., astounding though it may appear, was attended by a certain excitement: whereas the writing of the second is due to the desire, shall we call it? to catch one’s self tripping, to detect, by the painful process of copying, one, perhaps, of the hundred absurdities that one has committed. Yet there is a certain delight even in this, for since one would not set pen to paper at all unless one thought that one had an idea of some kind, it is mildly pleasant even now, when the first excitement is over, to see in cool blood what the idea was, to emphasize what appear to be its decent points, to suppress its bad ones. After that the second MS. goes to the typewriter, and peace again reigns.

Now, during the first writing of the MS. a curious thing has more than once happened to me; that is to say, a character, or a situation, or even the story itself, takes the bit between its teeth, and, as far as I know, bolts. One had meant to do and to say something different, but whether it is that even in the meanest-imagined character one, so to speak, raises the devil, and cannot be held responsible for his subsequent action, or whatever the cause, this phenomenon occurs. In the terms of our first simile, this is the cuckoo’s egg in the hedge-sparrow’s nest. One sits on the thing—writes it, that is—but it is not going to be a hedge-sparrow at all, but something quite different. This has happened to me more than once, in —— and —— (my egotism does not go quite so far as to write the names of these obscure tales), I had definitely meant to give a different outcome. I had meant a character to be different in character, and thus to play another part. But writing I found it was not so. That character would go another way. And did. I followed faint but pursuing.

To resume. The MS. comes back from the typewriter’s, and the sickening part of the work begins. In print, somehow, the degrading stuff looks even more degraded; for print, as Hazlitt said, in more senses than one, had he known it, ‘print settles it.’ What one suspected was rather sketchy and amateur becomes indubitably so. What one thought was somewhat workmanlike appears merely slip-shod carpentering, unplaned, out of line, with screws and nails not driven home. One taps here, one whacks there; one planes down, and finds one has planed too much; one planes down, and finds one has to plane more. One thinks—and this is, perhaps, the worst of all—that A rather resembles one’s dear friend, John Smith, and ruthlessly takes all the stuff out of him, leaving an enfeebled marionette. Then, like a pin-prick to a man on fire, come the inevitable typewriter’s errors, necessitating reference to the MS. Some typewriters omit whole sentences, because they are not certain (no wonder); others rush in where angels fear to tread, with brilliant repartees of a sort undreamed of; others spell a name wrong throughout; others—and they are worse—spell it wrong occasionally. When I have time I will write an article on typewriters. They will not, after that, hold their heads so high.

Then comes the last step. When the typoscript (an awful word) has been corrected, and if necessary another made, and also corrected, the whole thing goes to the publisher, and in course of time come proofs. Proofs are of two kinds—galley proofs and page proofs. Galley proofs are interminable strips of paper which slide off one’s desk, get mixed, and are altogether impossible. Page proofs, though depressing, are manageable, because they come in folded sheets of sixteen pages. Then once again are all weak points glaringly emphasized, the indescribable misgivings return with redoubled vigour, and invariably I long to live the last year, or whatever it may be, over again, in order to have profited by my previous experience and do better. Usually at this stage—perhaps because I am used to it—the ‘idea’ does not seem to me so bad. It is only everything else that is wrong. Yet even then come sanguine moments. Quite suddenly I find myself thinking it is extremely good. How delicate, for instance, is the way in which Y behaves, how subtle and correct is Z’s induction. Back swings the pendulum: over go these unstable ninepins.

There is probably a revise—there may be two—and the bread is cast upon the waters. As the date for publication approaches I feel ill. If I could, I would recall it all. One has felt a certain situation, or a certain character, keenly; was it not enough to have felt it, without throwing it, like early Christians, to the public? They will tear it into shreds, and probably refuse to swallow it.

But just then—when, in my experience, the darkest hour is on one, when one distrusts utterly all one has done, when one is afraid that that which is to one’s self a chiefest joy of life is to everyone else just a mud-pie made by a child in a populous roadway, to be carefully stepped over by three-quarters of the passers-by, to be stepped into by the remaining quarter, who, with a careless cuff to the maker of it, will pass on, remembering it only as they would remember some tiny untowardness in the menu at dinner—then comes quite suddenly the remembrance of an exceeding unexpected joy. A man or a woman, otherwise quite unknown to one, has on the last occasion of this kind thought it worth while to send a line, it may be a postcard only, to say ‘thank you.’ Once this ‘thank you’ arrived to me from New Zealand, and was accompanied by two frozen sheep bred on the reader’s farm. The letter said, ‘Please do not answer this, or you will think I am wanting an autograph.’ Or, again, it may be just a press-cutting from a provincial paper, that shows me that someone whom I have never seen, and probably will never see, has understood something of what made me so happy when I thought of it. And that—unreasonably, perhaps—more than counterbalances the vituperation or the scorn of those who either do not or will not see. For a friend concerns me very much: an enemy, or, if that is too big a word, an acquaintance to whom I am antipathetic, concerns me not at all. He is a negative quantity, and in this life of ours the negative quantities do not matter, for the man who has one friend is infinitely better off than the man who has no enemies and a million acquaintances.