Changing Winds / A Novel

by St. John G. Ervine

He had a shrinking will; his instinct in an emergency was to back away from things. He had not got the capacity to compel men to do his bidding by the simple force of his personality. If he succeeded in persuading people to do things which he suggested to them he was only able to do so after prolonged discussion, sometimes only after everything else had failed. At Rumpell's, Gilbert had made suggestions as if they were commands that must instantly be obeyed ... and they had been instantly obeyed; but when Henry made suggestions, either people did not listen to them or, having listened to them, they acted on some other suggestion, until at last, Henry, disheartened, seldom proposed anything until the last moment, and then he made his proposal in a way which seemed to indicate that he thought little of it; and when some of his suggestions were accepted and had proved, in practice, to be good, his attitude had been, not that of the man who is absolutely sure of himself, but rather of the man who gasps with relief because something that he thought was very likely to be a failure, had proved to be a success.

Depression settled on him so heavily that he began to believe that he was bound to fail in everything that he undertook to do, and when he thought of the bundle of manuscript in his portmanteau, he had a sudden inclination to take it out and fling it through the window of the carriage. He had not spoken of his writing to any one except John Marsh, and to him, he had only said that he intended to write a novel some day. Once, indeed, he had said, "I've written quite a lot of that novel I told you about!" but Marsh, intent on something else, had answered vaguely, "Oh, yes!" and had changed the conversation, leaving Henry to imagine that he had little faith in his power to write. He had been so despondent after that, that he had gone back to College and, having re-read what he had written, had torn the manuscript in pieces and thrown it into the grate because it seemed so dull and tasteless. He had not written a word after that for more than a month, and he might not have written anything for a longer period had he not heard from Gilbert Farlow that he had finished a comedy in three acts and had sent it to Mr. Alexander. The news stimulated him, and in a little while he was itching to write again. In the evening, he began to re-write the story and thereafter it went on, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, until it was finished. His feelings about it changed with remarkable rapidity. He read it over, in its unfinished state, many times, feeling at one time it was excellent, and at another time that it was poor, flatulent stuff, without colour or vivacity.

Writing did not give pleasure to him: it gave him pain. He felt none of that exultation in creating characters which he had been told was part of the pleasures of an author. There were times, indeed, when he felt a mitigated joy in writing because his ideas were fluent and words fell easily off his pen, but even on those occasions, the labour of writing hurt him and exhausted him. The times of pleasurable writing were short interludes between the long stretches of painful writing, little oases that made the journey across the desert just possible. And then there were those periods of appalling misery when, having ended a chapter, he wondered what he should make his people do next. He would leave them, landed neatly at the end of some adventure or emotional crisis, feeling that the story was going on splendidly and that his power to write was full and strong, and then, having written the number of the next chapter, he would reach forward to write the first word ... and suddenly there was devastation in his mind, and "My God! I don't know what to make them do now!" he would say.

He had read in a literary journal that some authors planned their stories before they began to write them. They prepared a summary of the tale, and then enlarged the summary. They knew exactly what was to happen in each chapter. A character could not move or rise or sit down or turn pale or look pleased without the author having known about it long before the act was performed. It was as if the author could count the very hairs on the heads of his people. "Just like God!" Henry had said to himself when he had finished reading the article.... He had tried to make a plan, and, after much labour, had completed one; but it was useless to him, for when he came to write out the story, his characters kicked it aside and insisted on behaving in some other way than he had planned that they should behave. It was as if they had taken their destinies into their own hands and insisted on living their lives in accordance with their own wishes instead of living them in accordance with his.... It was fortunate then that he began to read "Tristram Shandy," for when he saw how Sterne's pen, refusing to obey him, had filled some of his pages with curly lines and dots and confusions, had even declined to fill a chapter at all, impudently skipping it, he realised that authors are but creatures in the hands of some force that wills them to create things which they cannot control and sometimes cannot understand.

Writing his book had given him one pleasure. On the day on which he wrote the last word of it, he felt joy. Before he began to write, he had read in Forster's "Life of Dickens" that the great novelist had parted from his characters with pain. Henry parted from his characters with pleasure. "Thank God," he said, as he put down his pen, "I've finished with the brutes!"

He had enjoyed reading the story in its finished state, and when he had packed the manuscript into his portmanteau, he had felt that the story was good, and had sat in a chair dreaming of the success it would make and the praise he would receive for it. He tried to calculate the number of copies that would be sold, basing his calculations on the total population of the British Isles. "There are over forty millions of people in England and Wales alone," he said to himself, "and another ten millions, say, in Scotland and Ireland ... about fifty millions in all. I ought to sell a good many copies ... and then there's America!" He thought that ten per cent. of the population might buy the story, and believed that his estimate was modest until he remembered that ten per cent. of fifty millions is five millions!...

And that made him laugh. Even he, in his wildest imaginings, did not dream of selling five million copies of his novel.

5

He wished now that he had asked John Marsh and Patrick Galway to read the story and tell him what they thought of it. They were honest men, and would criticise his work frankly. At that moment, he had an insatiable longing to know the truth, mingled with a strange fear of knowing it. What he wished to know was whether or not he had the potentialities of a great author in him. He knew that his story was not commonplace stuff, but he was afraid that it might only be middling writing, and he did not wish to be a middling writer. If he could not be a great writer, he did not wish to be a writer at all. There were thousands and thousands of novels in the world which did no more for men than enable them to put their minds to sleep. Henry did not wish to add a book to their number. There were other books, fewer in number than those, which showed that their authors had some feeling for life, but not enough, and these authors went on, year after year, producing one or more novels, each of which "showed promise," but never showed achievement. The life these men pursued always eluded them. It was impossible for Henry to join the crowd of people who produced books which perished with the generation that they pleased. That much he knew. But he was eager that he should not fall into the ranks of the semi-great, the half-clever; and his fear was that his place was in their midst.

While he was ruminating in this manner, he remembered that Gilbert Farlow had written to him a few days before he left Dublin, and he ceased to think of his career as a writer and began to search his pockets for Gilbert's letter.