Chapter Thirty Nine.
Henty and his Books.
For the benefit of his many boy readers with whom Henty’s stories were most popular, a writer on the staff of Chums paid Henty a visit one day. He described him as a tall man, massive in build, with a fine head and a commanding presence, the lower part of his face adorned with a great flowing beard, and though his hair was almost white, the dark beard was only slightly flecked with silver threads. He had the appearance of a man who had knocked about the world and rubbed shoulders with strange bed-fellows, and looked as though he would be a capital companion and just the sort of person with whom one would like to share the solitude of a desert island. There is no doubt that the writer said this in the full belief that Henty would have been an ideal comrade—a brave man, amiable, happy in temper, straightforward, and ready at a pinch to dare danger to the very death.
The visit paid to him was, primarily, to ask him how he wrote his books. “How does a man write his books?” is a question that calls for a little thought before answering. One man will write them mentally from end to end before putting pen to paper; another will jot down sketchy notes which, after months of thought and labour, represent so many scraps that have to be picked out, set in something like order, and then fitted into shape as if they were pieces of a dissected puzzle; and only then, after much work, do they take form as a comprehensive whole. Again, another will spend years over the construction of a book, sparing no pains, in the full knowledge that he will never be able to write another; and after all it may prove to be not worth the reading, or, if worth the trouble, it may be utterly wanting in that indescribable element which enchains the reader at once and keeps his attention riveted to the very end. Yes, that indescribable something which is given to so few by nature—the few who, somehow, find themselves writing as no man to their knowledge ever wrote before; and so say their readers. For there is a peculiarity in some men’s thoughts when placed on paper in print—a something which attracts, through the soul that is in it, people of all ranks and classes—the highly-cultivated classical scholar, the student of other men’s works, the great criminal or civil judge whose life has been spent in examining the ways, thoughts, and acts of every form of human nature, the best as well as the vilest and worst.
And yet this book which affords such intense delight to its reader, often by its pathos, less often by its mirth—for, strangely enough, one finds that the gift of being humorous is extremely rare—will give as much pleasure to the half-educated child as it does to the man whom poor old Captain Cuttle, Dickens’s simple-hearted child-like creation, described as “chock full of science.” Now, how is this? I, the writer of these lines, have been a reader for seventy years, and I must frankly confess that I don’t know, and my honest belief is that I never shall. But this I do know, that I found all this attraction ready for my reading thirst in a story entitled Rip Van Winkle, in the pages of an old, old magazine called the Queen Bee. This story somehow painted a picture in my young brain of the Catskill Mountains and the Dutchmen playing ninepins, while the roll of the balls resounded and re-echoed like thunder, and the voice that rang out, crying, “Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!” sounds, at any time when I think upon it, loud and clear. There is the picture still, like a dream of the photography that I was to live to see in all its present beauty, only clear and bright and better still; for there are the colours of nature which some of us yet may see photographed in the continuation of these wondrous days in which science has given us so much.
There is no saying how a man contrives to write a book; but this is the question that George Henty’s visitor asked, as he sat near a table where closely-written sheets lay in a heap, apparently just as they had been laid together by the writer. There was a half laugh, followed by the rather disconcerting reply: “I do not write any of my books myself. I get a man to do them for me—an amanuensis, of course; it all comes out of my head, but he does all the actual writing. I never see any of my work until it comes to me from the printers in the shape of proof-sheets. My amanuensis sits at the table, and I sit near him, or lie on the sofa, and dictate the stories which I publish.”
So said Henty to his visitor, and he might have added, “and smoke the while,” for nature must have needed something in the way of sedative for the brain so constantly upon the strain.
Then questions were asked by the eager enquirer as to how long this writing went on for so great an output, as a manufacturer would call it, to result. In the words that followed the real secret was explained—and it lay in the quiet, steady, regular application which is seen in the man who is discovered one day, trowel in hand, by a small pile of bricks which he goes on laying in position; he gives each a tap or two and a scrape, and in course of time, lo and behold! as the old writers say, there stands a magnificent house.
“What do I call a good day’s work?” said Henty. “Well, say my man comes at half-past nine in the morning and stays for four hours, till half-past one; we can get through a good deal of work in that space of time. Then perhaps he comes round in the evening for a couple of hours; so in the course of a day I finish a chapter, that is, about six thousand five hundred words. I call that a good day’s work.”
And so would anyone. Six thousand five hundred words of consistent description and conversation, all forming a portion of an interesting tale which will hold a boy’s attention—often a man’s! Think of it! At half-past nine that morning there was nothing; when work was knocked off in the evening there was a chapter that would some day be read with satisfaction—a something made out of nothing save a few flying thoughts. With George Henty that was how a story was written.