V
One unpleasant wintera€?s day, I was lying in bed recovering from influenza. I was bored. I had read lots of books, had attempted to do The Demon thirteen times, brought out Miss Milligan successfully, and was now reduced to dealing myself bridge hands. My mother looked in.
a€?Why dona€?t you write a story?a€she suggested.
a€?Write a story?a€I said, rather startled.
a€?Yes,a€said mother. a€?Like Madge.a€?
a€?Oh, I dona€?t think I could.a€?
a€?Why not?a€she asked.
There didna€?t seem any reason why not, except thata€|.
a€?You dona€?t know that you cana€?t,a€mother pointed out, a€?because youa€?ve never tried.a€?
That was fair enough. She disappeared with her usual suddenness and reappeared five minutes later with an exercise book in her hand. a€?There are only some laundry entries at one end,a€she said. a€?The rest of it is quite all right. You can begin your story now.a€?
When my mother suggested doing anything one practically always did it. I sat up in bed and began thinking about writing a story. At any rate it was better than doing Miss Milligan again.
I cana€?t remember now how long it took mea€“not long, I think, in fact, I believe it was finished by the evening of the following day. I began hesitantly on various different themes, then abandoned them, and finally found myself thoroughly interested and going along at a great rate. It was exhausting, and did not assist my convalescence, but it was exciting too.
a€?Ia€?ll rout out Madgea€?s old typewriter,a€said mother, a€?then you can type it.
This first story of mine was called The House of Beauty. It is no masterpiece but I think on the whole that it is good; the first thing I ever wrote that showed any sign of promise. Amateurishly written, of course, and showing the influence of all that I had read the week before. This is something you can hardly avoid when you first begin to write. Just then I had obviously been reading D. H. Lawrence. I remember that The Plumed Serpent, Sons and Lovers, The White Peacock etc. were great favourites of mine about then. I had also read some books by someone called Mrs Everard Cotes, whose style I much admired. This first story was rather precious, and written so that it was difficult to know exactly what the author meant, but though the style was derivative the story itself shows at least imagination.
After that I wrote other storiesa€“The Call of Wings (not bad), The Lonely God (result of reading The City of Beautiful Nonsense: regrettably sentimental), a short dialogue between a deaf lady and a nervous man at a party, and a grisly story about a seance (which I re-wrote many years later). I typed all these stories on Madgea€?s machinea€“an Empire typewriter, I remembera€“and hopefully sent them off to various magazines, choosing different pseudonyms from time to time as the fancy took me.
Madge had called herself Mostyn Miller; I called myself Mack Miller, then changed to Nathaniel Miller (my grandfathera€?s name). I had not much hope of success, and I did not get it. The stories all returned promptly with the usual slip: a€?The Editor regretsa€|a€Then I would parcel them up again and send them off to some other magazine.
I also decided that I would try my hand at a novel. I embarked light-heartedly. It was to be set in Cairo. I thought of two separate plots, and at first could not choose between them. In the end, I hesitatingly made a decision and started on one. It had been suggested to my mind by three people we used to look at in the dining-room of the hotel in Cairo. There was an attractive girla€“hardly a girl in my eyes, because she must have been close on thirtya€“and every evening after the dance she would come and have supper there with two men. One was a heavy-set, broad man, with dark haira€“a Captain in the Sixtieth Riflesa€“the other a tall, fair young man in the Coldstream Guards, possibly a year or two younger than she was. They sat one on either side of her; she kept them in play. We learnt their names but we never discovered much more about them, though somebody did make the remark once: a€?She will have to make up her mind between them, some time.a€That was enough for my imagination: If I had known any more about them I dona€?t think I should have wanted to write about them. As it was, I was able to make up an excellent story, probably far different from their characters, their actions, or anything else. Having gone a certain distance with it I became dissatisfied, and turned to my other plot. This was more light-hearted, dealing with amusing characters. I made, however, the fatal mistake of encumbering myself with a deaf heroinea€“really I cana€?t think why: anyone can deal in an interesting manner with a blind heroine, but a deaf heroine is not so easy, because, as I soon found out, once you have described what she is thinking, and what people are thinking and saying of her, she is left with no possibility of conversation, and the whole business comes to a stop. Poor Melancy became ever more insipid and boring.
I went back to my first attempta€“and I realised that it was not going to be nearly long enough for a novel. Finally, I decided to incorporate the two. Since the setting was the same, why not have two plots in oneProceeding on these lines I finally brought my novel to the requisite length. Heavily encumbered by too much plot, I dashed madly from one set of characters to the other, occasionally forcing them to mix with each other in a way which they did not seem to wish to do. I called ita€“I cana€?t think whya€“Snow Upon the Desert.
My mother then suggested, rather hesitantly, that I might ask Eden Philpotts if he could give me help or advice. Eden Philpotts was then at the height of his fame. His novels of Dartmoor were celebrated. As it happened, he was a neighbour of ours, and a personal friend of the family. I was shy about it, but in the end agreed. Eden Philpotts was an odd-looking man, with a face more like a fauna€?s than an ordinary human beinga€?s: an interesting face, with its long eyes turned up at the corners. He suffered terribly from gout, and often when we went to see him was sitting with his leg bound up with masses of bandages on a stool. He hated social functions and hardly ever went out; in fact he disliked seeing people. His wife, on the other hand, was extremely sociablea€“a handsome and charming woman, who had many friends. Eden Philpotts had been very fond of my father, and was also fond of my mother, who seldom bothered him with social invitations but used to admire his garden and his many rare plants and shrubs. He said that of course he would read Agathaa€?s literary attempt.
I can hardly express the gratitude I feel to him. He could so easily have uttered a few careless words of well-justified criticism, and possibly discouraged me for life. As it was, he set out to help. He realised perfectly how shy I was and how difficult it was for me to speak of things. The letter he wrote contained very good advice.
a€?Some of these things that you have written,a€he said, a€?are capital. You have a great feeling for dialogue. You should stick to gay natural dialogue. Try and cut all moralisations out of your novels; you are much too fond of them, and nothing is more boring to read. Try and leave your characters alone, so that they can speak for themselves, instead of always rushing in to tell them what they ought to say, or to explain to the reader what they mean by what they are saying. That is for the reader to judge for himself. You have two plots here, rather than one, but that is a beginnera€?s fault; you soon wona€?t want to waste plots in such a spendfree way. I am sending you a letter to my own literary agent, Hughes Massie. He will criticise this for you and tell you what chances it has of being accepted. I am afraid it is not easy to get a first novel accepted, so you mustna€?t be disappointed. I should like to recommend you a course of reading which I think you will find helpful. Read De Quinceya€?s Confessions of an Opium Eatera€“this will increase your vocabulary enormouslya€“he used some very interesting words. Read The Story of my Life by Jefferys, for descriptions and a feeling for nature.a€?
I forget now what the other books were: a collection of short stories, I remember, one of which was called The Pirrie Pride, and was written round a teapot. There was also a volume of Ruskin, to which I took a violent dislike, and one or two others. Whether they did me good or not, I dona€?t know. I certainly enjoyed De Quincey and also the short stories.
I then went and had an interview in London with Hughes Massie. The original Hughes Massie was alive at that time, and it was he whom I saw. He was a large, swarthy man, and he terrified me. a€?Ah,a€he said, looking at the cover of the manuscript, a€?Snow Upon the Desert. Mm, a very suggestive title, suggestive of banked fires.a€?
I looked even more nervous, feeling that was far from descriptive of what I had written. I dona€?t know quite why I had chosen that title, beyond the fact that I had presumably been reading Omar Khayyam. I think I meant it to be that, like snow upon the deserta€?s dusty face, all the events that happen in life are in themselves superficial and pass without leaving any memory. Actually I dona€?t think the book was at all like that when finished, but that had been my idea of what it was going to be.
Hughes Massie kept the manuscript to read, but returned it some months later, saying that he felt it unlikely that he could place it. The best thing for me to do, he said, was to stop thinking about it any more, and to start to write another book.
I have never been an ambitious person by nature, and I resigned myself to making no further struggle. I still wrote a few poems, and enjoyed them, and I think I wrote one or two more short stories. I sent them to magazines, but expected them to come back, and come back they usually did.
I was no longer studying music seriously. I practised the piano a few hours a day, and kept it up as well as I could to my former standard, but I took no more lessons. I still studied singing when we were in London for any length of time. Francis Korbay, the Hungarian composer, gave me singing lessons, and taught me some charming Hungarian songs of his own composition. He was a good teacher and an interesting man. I also studied English ballad singing with another teacher, a woman who lived near that part of the Regent Canal which they call Little Venice and which always fascinates me. I sang quite often at local concerts and, as was the fashion of the time, a€?took my musica€when I was asked out to dinner. There was, of course, no a€?tinneda€music in those days: no broadcasting, no tape-recorders, no stereophonic gramophones. For music you relied on the private performer, who might be good, moderately good, bloody awful. I was quite a good accompanist, and could read by sight, so I often had to play accompaniments for other singers.
I had one wonderful experience when there were performances of Wagnera€?s Ring in London with Richter conducting. My sister Madge had suddenly become very interested in Wagnerian music. She arranged for a party of four to go to The Ring, and paid for me. I shall always be grateful to her and remember that experience. Van Rooy sang Wotan. Gertrude Kappel sang the principal Wagnerian soprano roles. She was a big, heavy woman with a turned-up nosea€“no actress, but she had a powerful, golden voice. An American called Saltzman Stevens sang Sieglinde, Isolde, and Elizabeth. Saltzman Stevens I shall always find it hard to forget. She was a most beautiful actress in her motions and gestures, and had long graceful arms that came out of the shapeless white draperies Wagnerian heroines always wore. She made a glorious Isolde. I suppose her voice could not have been equal to that of Gertrude Kappel, but her acting was so superb that it carried one away. Her fury and despair in the first act of Tristan, the lyrical beauty of her voice in the second, and thena€“most unforgettable, to my minda€“that great moment in the third act: that long music of Kurwenal, the anguish and the waiting, with Tristan and Kurwenal together, the looking for the ship on the sea. Finally that great soprano cry that comes from off-stage: a€?Tristan!a€?
Saltzman Stevens was Isolde. Rushinga€“yes, rushing one could feela€“up the cliff and up on to the stage, running with those white arms outstretched to catch Tristan within their grasp. And then, a sad, almost bird-like stricken cry.
She sang the Liebestod entirely as a woman, not a goddess; sang it kneeling by Tristana€?s body, looking down at his face, seeing him with the force of her will and imagination come alive; and finally, bending, bending lower and lower, the last three words of the opera, a€?with a kissa€?, came as she bent to touch his lips with hers, and then to fall suddenly across his body.
Being me, every night before I dropped off to sleep I used to turn over and over in my mind the dream that one day I might be singing Isolde on a real stage. It did no harm, I told myselfa€“at any rate to go through it in fantasy. Could I, would it ever be possible for me to sing in operaThe answer of course was no. An American friend of May Sturgesa€who was over in London, and connected with the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, very kindly came to hear me sing one day. I sang various arias for her, and she took me through a series of scales, arpeggios and exercises. Then she said to me: a€?The songs you sang told me nothing, but the exercises do. You will make a good concert singer, and should be able to do well and make your name at that. Your voice is not strong enough for opera, and never will be.a€?
So let us take it from there. My cherished secret fantasy to do something in music was ended. I had no ambition to be a concert singer, which was not an easy thing to do anyway. Musical careers for girls did not meet with encouragement. If there had been any chance of singing in opera I would have fought for it, but that was for the privileged few, who had the right vocal cords. I am sure there can be nothing more soul-destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing that you want desperately to do well, and to know you are at the best second-rate. So I put wishful thinking aside. I pointed out to mother that she could now save the expense of music lessons. I could sing as much as I liked, but there was no point in going on studying singing. I had never really believed that my dream could come truea€“but it is a good thing to have had a dream and to have enjoyed it, so long as you do not clutch too hard.
It must have been about this time that I began reading the novels of May Sinclair, by which I was much impresseda€“and, indeed, when I read them now I am still much impressed. I think she was one of our finest and most original novelists, and I cannot help feeling that there will be a revival of interest in her some day, and that her works will be republished. A Combined Maze, that classic story of a little clerk and his girl, I still think one of the best novels ever written. I also liked The Divine Fire; and Tasker fevons I think a masterpiece. A short story of hers, The Flaw in the Crystal, impressed me so much, probably because I was addicted to writing psychic stories at the time, that it inspired me to write a story of my own somewhat in the same vein. I called it Vision (It was published with some other stories of mine in a volume much later), and I still like it when I come across it again.
I had formed a habit of writing stories by this time. It took the place, shall we say, of embroidering cushion-covers or pictures taken from Dresden china flower-painting. If anyone thinks this is putting creative writing too low in the scale, I cannot agree. The creative urge can come out in any form: in embroidery, in the cooking of interesting dishes, in painting, drawing and sculpture, in composing music, as well as in writing books and stories. The only difference is that you can be a great deal more grand about some of these things than others. I would agree that the embroidering of Victorian cushion-covers is not equal to participating in the Bayeux tapestry, but the urge is the same in both cases. The ladies of the early Williamsa€?s court were producing a piece of original work requiring thought, inspiration and tireless application; some parts of it no doubt were dull to do, and some parts highly exciting. Though you may say that a square of brocade with two clematis and a butterfly on it is a ridiculous comparison, the artista€?s inner satisfaction was probably much the same.
The waltz I composed was nothing to be proud of; one or two of my embroideries, however, were good of their kind, and I was pleased with them. I dona€?t think I went as far as being pleased with my storiesa€“but then there always has to be a lapse of time after the accomplishment of a piece of creative work before you can in any way evaluate it.
You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence (about the only times in my life when I have been full of confidence). If you are properly modest, you will never write at all, so there had to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start in an exercise book buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, dona€?t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know that it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later you wonder whether it may not be all right after all.