HOW EDGAR WALLACE WORKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3993, 23 September 1930, Page 62

HOW EDGAR WALLACE WORKS.

“ How much truth is there in the legend of your having hundreds of filing cabinets and stenographers and secretaries?” I asked him.

None at all. I have just two secretaries, one for my correspondence and one for my literary work. I have an office for them to work in, and they have a private telephone line through to me here. Then there’s my dictaphone.” He raised an eyebrow in the direction of the latter, which stood by his desk neatly covered in a baize cap. “Do you ‘ dictaphone ’ all your work ? ” ’

“No, only my stories and articles. My plays I write out in pen with my own hand. No, not pencil. Pencil gives me writer’s cramp. I always use a fountain-pen.” “Do you revise your work verv much ? ”

Yes, a great deal. I write in corrections on the typewritten copy. I take the greatest pains with my work. I’m very keen, on English—good, simple, nervous English. Nobody knows how much trouble I take to see that what I write is in really good English.” “Have you regular hours for work?” “ No. I. work almost any time. Early morning is the best. Sometimes very early in the morning something excites me, and then I can go on working for hours.” “ But surely you must have some sort of system or you never could accomplish such an enormous amount of work.” “ No, I haven’t any system. I’m not conscious of having any. I have one principle, however. I never do anything that someone else can do for me. I’m very lazy physically.” Before I could ask another question, he went on, “ I’m a very good dreamer.” I wasn’t sure that I had heard aright. “ I’m a very good dreamer.” he repeated. “ I sit for days sometimes and never write a line.”

“ Are you conscious of how ideas come to you?” I asked. “ They keep coming all the time. But I get most from sitting here by my window and watching people go by. Especially people on the tops of buses, at midnight. I wonder about them, what kind of work they do for a living, what kind of houses they live in . . .” “ You get vour ideas from people then ? ”

“ I suppose so. People are what I’m most interested in. There’s nothing more interesting. I never get tired of them, of noting them, and classifying them from what I see of them. I like watching the girls who come to work past my window at 8 o’clock in the morning, and the subtle change that comes over them as the hour nears nine! I spend the week-end in a motor boat, loafing round, watching the people on the river. What a lot of love-mak-ing goes on there! The spirit of Eros seems to descend on the river. They do their love-making in public. And nobody cares.’’

“Do you work much in the country?” “ Yes, I do a good deal of my work at my country place at Bourne End. I also do a good deal here.”

I asked him whether the weather or noise or interruptions affected his writing. “ I never notice the weather when I’m writing,” he answered. And then he added, characteristically: “The little things don’t bother me.” “ What do you think is the best training school for writing?” “Journalism is the only training school for writing,” he said with emphasis.—Louise Morgan, in Everyman.

SUNSET. Half sunk in drowsy western banks of clouds The eye of day still lingers. Night usurps The Eastern dome, and now delays her horde Of sun-shy travellers through infinity. Wrapped in the twilight rose whose petals fade The gentle sun grows big, nor will offend The timorous eyes his midday glare doth blind. His huge majestic round what unknown thought Impels? What law, by whom and howdecreed, Lays down his time-appointing pathway thus Undeviating through unchartered heaven ? . We ask—and as we do, we know not how, Though still unanswered, heavenly comfort then Soothes our poor heart, and that w’ild question’s void. —Romilly John, in the Nation and Athenaeum.

it would interest nearly everyone of them far more to understand the reasons which caused an aeroplane to tail-spin? “ Tremendous scientific miracles are taking place daily in the world, whilst we remain stagnantly chewing the outworn cud of a few arbitrarily selected writers, which a few word-tasters may and can enjoy, but which should not for that reason be served out as sole diet to thousands of hungry minds who have no literary appreciation whatsoever. Literature” (says this school) “is the language of the few. It is a tiny pocket of thought with narrow and limited confines.”

I see and reluctantly bow to the logic of a great deal of this. I cannot refute it. But I must shamefacedly confess that when I think of a race of men and women whose minds have been fed from earliest youth on tail-spins and nosedives (in the widest and most embracing sense of these words) but who have never tested the rare flavour of “ The Ancient Mariner,” or “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” have never been haunted by the music of “Full fathom five thy Father lies”—or “Take, oh! take those lips away,” then I am thankful to have been born in an age whose twilight is still coloured by the afterglow of a dying tradition, the setting sun of classicism. Is it a convention and nothing deeper that opens a mental chasm between me and those who have no use for Andrew Marvell or Sir Thomas Browne, whilst a complete ignorance of the most elementary scientific facts seem quite compatible with the closest intellectual intimacy? It would be difficult to feel that a man who did not enjoy Shakespeare was quite civilised, even though he might have the most brilliant engineering record to his credit. Whereas it would give me no shock whatever to discover that the most “ cultured ” man of my acquaintance knew nothing whatever about chemistry, astronomy, the working of a motor, or the Einstein theory. I am delighted that someone does know these things, because I am grateful for the added speed, light, warmth, and safety which (up to a point) they bring to life. But confronted with scientific miracles, I never long to ask “ how ’’ or “ whv?”

For the enjoyment of great literature is, to my mind, not a merely passive and receptive process; it is in some degree action and creation as well. The music of the written words stirs, evokes and conjures up within us a vision which is all our own making, and which in the ordinary course of practical life might easily elude us. And it is perhaps for this reason that no purely scientific mind that I have come in contact with, exhales for me the subtle fragrance of the mind steeped in the classical tradition.—Lady Violet Bonham Carter, in Good House: keeping.