AN AUTHOR’S EARLY DAYS

Southland Times, Issue 23664, 12 November 1938, Page 14

AN AUTHOR’S EARLY DAYS

WALTER DE LA MARE

[sy

WALTER DE LA MARE

in The Listener']

Autobiography appears to prove that the majority of well-known writers, both great and small, have been apt to delight, in early childhood, in the use of words. There is still extant, for example, a minute poem entitled “Night”—a poem certainly not less rich in poetry than any of Charles Kingsley’s later verse—which he wrote at the age of five; there is an even more astonishing play by Tennyson, of his fourteenth or fifteenth year. Quite young children, if they happen to be Southeys or Elizabeth Barretts,, will embark on epics without the faintest misgiving; and an American inquirer has shown, with painstaking, percentages, that all innate faculties . (and what faculty has ever been acquired?) tend to declare themselves early, in life: especially music; and even an inclination towards science. If the craft and art of writing—the use, that is, of words—is a child’s devastating destiny, and particularly if his hope is set on “the best words in the best order,” then I think it is the sounds of them and the . making of those sounds that will be his chief decoy and enticement. Sound and meaning soon become inseparable; and thus words themselves become the means of make-believe —one of the richest of human consolations; of silently talking to oneself—one of the closest of all human communions; of sharing that self with others; and, last, of making things up—fashioning secret lairs, havens, windows, to rejoice and pacify the fancy, the spirit and the imagination. This inclination may be fostered and incited by folk-tales and nursery rhymes, many of them of an unexcelled verbal music and of so astonishingly similar a genius that as with the Scottish Ballads, it seems almost impossible they can have been the flowering of more than one mind. But can it be grafted, instilled? That seems improbable. One might as . well try to persuade a child in his third or fourth year to chatter at bedtime to himself about the events of the day. in a scarcely intelligible English, intermingled with a lingo or gibberish of his own—a habit by no means uncommon in the young. AN EARLY THEME My family annals are silent on this little matter. But I am none the less certain that when I was a child I listened to the sounds of words—that secret language—no more consciously perhaps, but with no less delight than, say, to the babbling of water over its pebbles, or to the quacking of ducks, to the piping of birds at twilight, to the wind in the willows, or to such a voice as Lena’s in Conrad’s “Victory.” Mr first recallable original scrap of verse was on the theme of the rout of Pharaoh’s horsemen in the Red Sea—in anapaests, I fancy! I confided the MS. to a bosom friend, Canon Henry Scott-Holland—a friend to whom a boy could confide all but anything either in his head or in his heart. That mercurial, that most original countenance! He read it, and remarked with an amiable twinkle in the alertest of human eyes that the subject was a familiar one; although he failed to mention the marvellously vivid AngloSaxon version of it. I was a little daunted by this tepidity, but quickly recovered. That particular virus is not so easily sterilized. Soon afterwards, jilting authorship, I turned editor. As I was singing away on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels in St. Paul’s Cathedral one autumn afternoon, there descended on me a shaft of inspiration from a window in its dome. I would found a school mazagine. Its staff bickered, quarrelled, resigned, made it up, and continued for some weeks to dye themselves purple as woad in the manipulation of a reproducing jelly-compound whose mephitic odour haunts me still. This periodical was entitled The Chorister’s Journal. It actually appeared (for a time) every week, then every month, at last twice a year: and it still flourishes. An ideal editor—and I have it on excellent authority—never “writes.” On the other hand, I know at least one ideal editor who did! CONTRIBUTIONS OF ALL KINDS Still, editing, unlike authorship, appears to have little concern with that commodious vacuum, the Unconscious. We offered handsome rewards for the recovery of objects that had never been lost—Horatio Bottomleys in embryo; we trafficked in postage stamps; and since no more than one meagre epistle rewarded an appeal for correspondence by the other sex on the subject of Boy, I fell at once into Satan’s trap and wrote three replies myself—blissfully ignorant at the time that in his young days Oliver Goldsmith used to write infatuating loveletters for his friends who were unable to manage the art unaided. Incited possibly by Poe, one of my serial contributions to the Journal included a cryptogram, the deviser of which still fondly supposes that any message conveyed by it is beyond human solution —without the key. He recalls, too, having been just enlightened enough to notice that in a contributon to its pages from Dean Church, the word “among” occurred where he himself would have expected “amongst”! Or was it vice versa? That way lies Flaubert. A household magazine, remotely after the model of Lewis Carroll’s Rectory Umbrella, and another of later years gave further practice—the practice, needless to say, that does not make perfect! At length, in the later ’nineties, my first real story was sent to The Sketch; and I can vividly recall the narrow staircase which I ascended angelwinged, flaunting my three-guinea cheque, to announce this triumph. Later yet, I remember sitting on a green-cushioned sofa, resembling (apart from its occupant) Madame Recamier’s, and toying, like Danae, with a

shower of gold—the product of a fantastic story sent to The Cornhill. If authorship makes money as easily as this, thought Ito myself, then ... L It was a childish ignorance.” Indeed, a second contribution inspired a few of its pusillanimous readers to cancel their subscriptions. Many years were to pass by before, abandoning the city, the city by a miracle having not yet ■ abandoned me, I finally embarked upon a sea of ink. By that time, with the elegant billets-doux which accompany ■ rejected manuscripts, I could have, papered a boudoir. THE WRITER’S IMPULSE Such were the first chrysalis symptoms—alas, for the butterfly!—of what has proved a life-long craving, past explanation and even yet unexhausted. The bee secretes honey, the spider spins a web, the wren weaves a nest, mulier sapiens prepares a cradle. So, every artist, would-be or otherwise, is the victim of innate desires and motives beyond direct scrutiny. But what is his honey or honeydew for? What is he trying, to catch? What is this impulse that pines to make, to bestow phantasmal life, and to share his own? It would be closer to the facts, perhaps, to compare him to the ichneumon fly; except that he himself lays his eggs not in an alien and living victim but in his own mind. It is a peculiar lust and passion (however frail its outcome), yet it may survive, and in so doing, may surpass nearly every other desire, in life. It seldom even dilutes itself into a mere wish or affection. And yet, as soon as the labour is over and, the work is done, the conceiver of it is apt to have as little further interest in it as a tom cat has for his own kittens. The Enchantress has forsaken him—until with her irresistible illusions, she consents to return to him again. Writing, too, may perhaps be in the nature of a “compensation”—and, at that, as strange a reward as the fatted calf. It is certainly an escape from self—but into another self. Hence, perhaps, the common inclination to keep, for a while at least, one’s writings secret, to adopt a pseudonym. It may be a sort of unpremeditated exploration of an experience antecedent to one’s present earthly life: or even the outcome of a thirst for a reality distinct from the actual.

But what conceivable lesson or counsel is derivable from these m j reminiscences? “Begin very early? Even if this were anything better than advice that could only be offered far too late, its wisdom would be dubious. “Composition strictly forbidden”?—! am uncertain if this is not a better eleventh commandment for the nursery,wall, since unrighteous commandments have no celestial status. for compulsion—poets cannot be “made.” Given, however, the impulse, the incitement, the egg in the vitals, the ridiculous aspiration, “Work on, and work secretly” is, I think, good sense. Also, leave “the others” completely out as long as you can; and be prepared not only for the bitterest disappointments, but never to find within furthest sight of the easy what, until the end of your days, will prove to be grotesquely difficult. READING AND WRITING Hints as to actual practice are not always easily come by. Read the best there is in search of your own company—also a good dictionary: so write that, so far as lucidity is concerned, all punctuation, however useful it may be, is unnecessary: avoid “moreovers” and “howevers”: beware of the rich deposits in English of the adjective—all these are valuable fragments of advice received, counsels of perfection, which are now, having been sorely neglected, most gratefully passed on. The sheer toil of writing, as authorities so diverse as Rousseau, Flaubert, Johnson and Newman have agreed, is exhausting, and indispensable. There is no discharge in that war. Ambition may, a little acidly, spice the cup. But Christina Rossetti’s: “May I deserve remembrance when my day comes, and then remembered or forgotten, it will be well with me,” seems to me to be the most acceptable allusion to what is called fame or reputation that I have ever encountered. Why one should wish to publish what one’s heart pined to keep secret is a most curious problem; but perhaps the novice had better let too acute a hankering after this eventuality remain, as much in the background of his mind as possible. Last, there is money—the “necessity” of a living. As with all “vocations," it is more prudent, to look elsewhere to provide the staff .of that. Besides, self B——the ratepayer, the man of the world, paterfamilias, even the “distinguished author”—may have the most admirable motives for acquiring money; but if he is too insistent, self A, and all that that means, is apt to fall silent. Not indeed that one need agree with Stevenson that-pay for anything that has been done involving one’s very self is prostitution. If this is so, literature is a brothel; and where then, in what Hesperides, shall we look for the Muses That, I think, is a kind of inverted cant—if “art for art’s sake” is also in the nature of cant. The conscience part of this matter, indeed, is too personal and private a thing to put easily on paper. Nevertheless, the imagination is no slave of any lamp, however thickly gilded it may be. Write because you must, cannot help yourself, pine for this queer metheglin, even though the honey may not have come from anywhere near Hymettus, nor the water from Helicon —localities less frequently visited nowadays than in the past. Any range is strictly limited—that is an early discovery; Pegasus often goes lame; and “of making many books there is no end." The all-wise author of that particular phrase said also tliat “all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”

In that case, authorship, being human, is only a kind of vanity; but one how rich in much. And so long as it continues to prove a vexation of spirit, then let Pegasus, surely, enjoy as many carrots as are available.