Your editor has asked me to give you some practical advice about the kind of labour involved in planning and executing a book of the kind I have just published – a work of some 80,000 words about a fellow-author whose name is D. H. Lawrence. I would not normally be willing to give such advice, since no writer's method of work can be of much value to another: a method is an emanation of a personality. But Lawrence is, in a sense, one of the patron saints of all who struggle at the damnable craft of putting words together and trying to earn a living out of it. Like every other writer, he began as an unpublished amateur. He succeeded in becoming a prolific professional. But the fight to impose himself on the reading public went on all his life. As the son of a Nottinghamshire coal miner he was not born into the literary establishment and he had to prevail against the disdain of those who were. He wrote about sex when sex was a taboo subject. His style was highly individual and not easily acceptable by a public who thought that a book should be read as easily as a daily paper. He died at forty-four of tuberculosis, far from rich, and set upon by the smut-hounds who declared that they would cut their children's throats rather than permit them to read Lady Chatterley's Lover. A hundred years after his birth he belongs to the ranks of the British classics. But he still has enemies.
I was asked by Messrs Heinemann to write a brief book honouring Lawrence, but they left the commission rather late. I had a visit from the managing editor in January 1985, and I was told that, in order to put the book on the market in time for the centenary of Lawrence's birth in September, my typescript would have to be ready by the end of April. The notion of writing a book quickly has never really appalled me. I rather enjoy the challenge of racing the clock. Writing a book about a novelist has to take rather longer, however, than writing a novel of one's own. You don't enjoy the luxury of invention. Moreover, you have to read all that novelist's novels.
Lawrence, of course, was more than a novelist. He was a very fine poet, travel-writer and playwright. He was a quirky sort of social philosopher and a master of the short story and the discursive essay. He wrote much, as all professional writers have to, and one of the tasks of a writer about him is not merely to read, or re-read, all his books, but to note in these books certain recurring themes and images. There is also the business of comparing different versions of your author's works. For instance, the Penguin edition of The Rainbow keeps in a sentence that the original Heinemann edition leaves out. It's about the bridegroom undressing before getting into bed with his bride – unacceptable to Lawrence's first readers, but not to his later ones.
And, if one reads too quickly or carelessly, it's easy to miss in that same novel a reference to a white peacock – a theme in Lawrence's very first novel, and even the title of it. It seems, once you've re-read all the work, that there's a kind of ornithological conflict in Lawrence – between the white peacock of the woman and the phoenix of the man.
So the work has to be read and re-read very thoroughly, and notes have to be taken. I'm not good at notes and never was. I try to hold ideas in my head, sometimes with disastrous results, but they have a better chance of staying there than if committed to bits of paper – which the wind tends to blow away. The importance of cultivating the memory if one is going to be a writer cannot be stressed too often.
Read Full Article »
