Joking apart

Just to show the sort of thing one has to put up with in life, take the writing of this book as an instance. It was getting along splendidly. Chapter after chapter was piled up; the commonplaces of everyday life lay delicately unclothed upon the pages. All the neighbours—everybody’s neighbours—were there, pinned down like butterflies; their beauties and their bulgy eyes and their great number of legs ready for the inspection of the public. It is not every one who is quick enough to get a good look at butterflies and moths when they are flitting about, so it is best to keep them somewhere where we can get at them any time we like.

But there was no difficulty in all this. The trouble was with that section of the public which wants a magnifying glass and a dissecting implement before it can enjoy a pinned-out butterfly. Aunt Mary, who takes a view altogether different from mine on almost every subject, but who is really a very sound woman and a good judge of what people think, read through my manuscript and said:

“But, my dear Martha, it is by no means clear what it is all about.”

This put me in a fever. If there is one thing I dislike more than another it is to be told that something I am interested in is “not clear.”

“Well, it is certainly not thick,” I replied, my poor mind harking back, as it nearly always does, to some such homely matter as the soup.

“Now that is an excellent example of what I mean!” Aunt Mary complained. “I say that many things in your book are not clear, and your mind at once flies off on the word ‘clear,’ and you imagine yourself at table, with a greasy waiter leaning over your shoulder holding a plate of kidney purée in one hand and bouillon in the other. You forget that you don’t carry your audience with you.”

“You are not clear now, yourself,” I said with a certain pleasure. “Would you please strain your criticism once more and add a little bit more beef.”

“Well, for instance, you never explain where Millport is,” she began. “You don’t say how you came there, nor what sort of place it is.”

“But everybody understands that,” I argued. “We all come to live in a place in the same way; by train, with furniture and linen, and a list of things to be done when we get there. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred we come because our husbands have got a job in the place. Very few people go to live anywhere for pleasure.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” my aunt admitted, “except that it is usual to give some explanation. Writers generally begin by describing the sun setting behind the suburbs, or rising over the heart of the city. They give the general lie of the streets and the surrounding country. And if they are talking about the provinces they usually create an atmosphere of depression, and domestic smells, and balked desires, just to start off with.”

“Will you write a description of my home?” I suggested. “Tell them that it is a solid enough house, stucco in front and bricks at the back; a cat-run and some laurel bushes facing the road, and a gardener and another cat-run behind the house. In the middle of the back cat-run there is a tennis net and three seedy deck-chairs, one of which supports a blonde authoress with ill-defined features, the other an aunt with a high forehead and ideals about literature; the third will shortly contain a husband who will come home in about half an hour with a pink evening paper. What is there in all that to cheer a reader who is in the same unfortunate position herself?”

“Still, they like to know,” said Aunt Mary. The gentle persistence of these mild women is what wrecks many homes, and was, I suppose, at the bottom of a good deal of martyrdom in the times of the Inquisition. We were silent. I was a little ruffled and bored, and Aunt Mary was planning a new attack in nearly the same place.

“You don’t describe your people, either,” she began again presently, boring away. It was like that bad moment when the dentist, having fitted a new spike on to his steam gimlet, says, “Now please, shall we go on? A little wider——”

“You don’t describe your people,” averred Aunt Mary. “You talk of Mrs. Beehive, and Reginald, and Polly, and the Henrys, and the Spicers, but you don’t give their heights or their features or circumstances, nor even tell us what rooms they are in when the conversations take place.”

“But don’t you see, dear,” I explained, “that if I did that the Henrys would probably get a job in Edinburgh or Sheffield. Or Reginald and Polly might die, and their places be filled by a similar couple whose names were Tom and Katie. Then Reginald instead of having a fair moustache would have a dark beard, and so on, and make all the description wrong. It is much better to leave them quite free to look different in different towns. I believe if you think of all the great names you know in literature you will find that the make-up of most of them has been left to the imagination of the public. Take Noah—we all know the look of him, but there is no description of him anywhere. And there are many more of the same kind whom I could mention.”

“Well, well,” said Aunt Mary, “have it your own way, though I think you are wrong. But there is another thing. I don’t like your putting in Miss Brown’s letters. They are not in the spirit of the book, and they are a little vulgar in places, I think, if you will excuse my saying so. Those absurd names she gives to people do not deceive anybody, and the letters are calculated to do a great deal of harm. Louise made a great mistake in letting you have them.”

“Anyhow I asked Miss Brown,” I replied, “and she said I might do as I liked. She will never come back here, and the reason I wanted them is that my own view of Millport is one-sided. I have a filial sentiment for it, and I couldn’t describe it with the kind of photographic falsity which is sometimes a help when such an unstable person as myself is trying to set down emotional truths.”

“Still, I think it is a mistake,” said Aunt Mary. “I don’t like descriptions which, as you say, are like photographs. I never thought that Miss Brown showed much insight or tried to enter into the spirit of Millport society. But—joking apart—couldn’t you, Martha dear, write a nice little chapter, just giving a bird’s-eye view of the town, and explaining who all the people are who come into the book?”

I made several beginnings to please her, but it was no good. If I ever write a novel it will have no scenery, and no furniture, and very little gesture in it. People will speak as they do in nightmares, crowding round and peering into the sufferer’s face, and the reader will gasp as he turns over to the other page, “Oh! There’s Fred! stop him! He’s going over the cliff!” But every reader must bring his own cliff. All that I supply is the dream people who have every one of them got faces which we have seen at one time or another.