Neopatronage is not for everybody

In a Substack post, Brian Niemeier accurately describes the way the publishing industry has changed in recent decades. He argues that the way forward now for the writer (and other artists, if one may so term writers) is to seek what he calls ‘Neopatronage’ – neo in the sense that it differs from the sort of patronage bestowed on artists all the way from antiquity until the emergence of commercial publishing.

Neopatronage seeks financial support directly from the audience rather than through the medium of intermediaries such as publishers, bookshops, record labels, etc., all of which tend to extract more money from the audience than the artists themselves. That is all very fine until you consider the fact that most people are unwilling to pay anything at all because they regard what is on the internet as free. Writers in English must also take into account the steep and accelerating decline in literacy in Britain and north America, our two principal markets.

I am not arguing for a return to the humiliating grind of (a) trying to find an agent who will even look at your book and then (b) hoping some august being will actually stoop to publish it. What’s more, in London and probably New York too, publishers now employ ‘sensitivity readers’, typically young women fresh from indoctrination in a university, whose job it is to comb through the text searching for anything liable to offend anyone, anywhere, particularly the pets of the central banks and, below them, the giant corporations who these days run the largest and most powerful publishing companies.

So even if an author gets to first base in the legacy publishing process, he, or these days, more likely, she, will immediately come up against one of these censorettes and her felt-tip pen. This is after, of course, the text has been deemed generally acceptable by the publishing director.

In my case I would last no more than fifteen minutes of sensitivity reading and the business relationship would be over before it had barely started.

Censorship of what is published online is in its infancy but is due to get worse. Much worse. Amazon already bans political books it considers us too delicate to see. It and most other online marketplaces (e.g. Apple Books, Kobo, Smashwords) have strict rules about publishing the worst filth, which I quite understand and indeed approve of. The world is knee-deep in that as it is.

I am afraid the prospects for authors grow grimmer by the year. I foresee a time when new work is distributed as samizdat and the author receives nothing except social invitations – with luck.

In my own circumstances, this does not bother me. There are far more efficient ways to make money than writing; the vast majority of published writers have waged or salaried employment anyway. They write in the evenings or at weekends or whenever they can. The more enterprising ones get hold of a sinecure in the public sector where nobody much cares what they are doing, and write at ‘work’.

My own exposure to mainstream publishing ended in the early nineties, the last book being first published in 1987; my further dealings with HarperCollins related only to subsidiary rights. In fact, after what Hollywood did to that story I gave up writing altogether in disgust and co-founded a business.

But writing is a disease and I could not keep away. By 2000 I had finished another novel. My agent received generally favourable reports from publishers’ readers but nobody was buying. I hadn’t realised that in the years I had been away the landscape had changed.

Like its predecessor, that novel is a thriller: a commercial decision on my part. I hadn’t much enjoyed some sections of the narrative but felt that I needed to capitalise on the success of the previous book. Indeed, I would rather have written something else. When my agent, expressing puzzlement and regret, eventually abandoned her search, I decided to write what I wanted to write.

That book couldn’t find a publisher either. I continued writing anyway, and as I did so it dawned on me that things had changed. I gradually gave up thinking about legacy publishing and was writing merely as a hobby. This gave me complete artistic freedom, which I love.

Then in 2010 or so, Smashwords, Amazon’s KDP and whatnot started up and I found I could make some pocket-money from my efforts. That is where I am today. I can write whatever I want. Writing, for me, has become largely an exercise in self-realisation. It helps with exploring who I am and my place among my fellows. If other people like reading what I turn out, I am of course very pleased, because part of my motive remains to entertain and perhaps inform others. But it is only a part, and if nobody likes my books that is OK too.

I will not seek Neopatronage. It takes too much effort for too little reward.

Besides, I have inherited the unbecoming and groundless pride of the Irish, overcoming which is proving intractably difficult, even with the help of my keyboard.

AI generated novels

An interesting take. I hope he’s right.

My handwriting

One’s handwriting varies through life, notably in childhood when one is still finding one’s way in this, as in so many other areas of existence. Because I have specimens of my own handwriting dating back to 1958 (mostly in the form of a nature journal I have kept since 1963), I am able to see how it has changed over the years. You might like to compare those changes with your own.

At my primary school (ages 5-11) we were given dip-pens; each of our little desks was equipped with an inset, white porcelain inkwell. We also used pencils, but writing with ‘biros’ was strongly discouraged. My earliest memory of writing is of working from a copy-book used to teach cursive script. Here is part of a letter I never posted.

Summer 1958, aged 8; pencil. Click any image to enlarge

The next sample I have is from March 1963, when I started my nature journal. You can see that I have left the textbook cursive far behind and have begun abandoning certain ligatures, such as on terminal e or initial p. The writing also now slopes to the right.

March 1963, fountain pen, probably an Osmiroid 65; Quink Royal Blue washable

That year, it seems, I was experimenting with letter-shapes: notice below the three different es, or the gs in ‘edges’. Some of the abandoned ligatures are creeping back, for the sake of speed.

May 1963, same pen and ink

Four months later my handwriting had become somewhat more regular, though it shows also an increase in speed; we had to write a great deal at school.

September 1963, same pen, Quink Permanent Black

During that autumn term my handwriting became influenced by that of my friend J. G. G. Steedman, particularly with respect to his distinctive es that were, I believe, copied from his elder brother’s hand. These are formed by making a c, then inscribing a loop from its centre to the upper tip and joining this, if necessary, to the next letter. This silly affectation remained with me for quite some time. Notice also that the slope is reducing.

October 1963, ditto

By November, no doubt under Steedman’s influence, the slope had disappeared altogether. However, I was now restoring some cursive ligatures, perhaps to make up for the loss of speed my es were incurring.

November 1963, ditto

The following month my writing even started leaning backwards. The s in ‘also’ is another Steedmanesque touch. However, yet more ligatures are being restored. My early inculcation in cursive writing was probably responsible.

December 1963, ditto

A year later my es owed more to italic script than to Steedman: notice that now the loop proceeds from the top of the c to its middle before being joined to the next letter. But notice also how many more conventional es there are in this sample. The backward slope is still present.

December 1964, unknown fountain pen and ink

The sort of radical change in appearance another pen can make is illustrated in the next sample from only a month later. Yet the writing is essentially the same.

January 1965, Osmiroid 65 with worn nib used upside-down, ? Stephens’s Blue-black

A couple of months later the backward slope had disappeared. Otherwise the handwriting is unchanged.

March 1965, same pen, Quink Royal Blue washable

A hint of a forward slope is detectable by September. By now I was using the deprecated ballpoints; and by now, having opted for sciences rather than the arts, my handwriting was becoming distinctly crabbed and introspective.

September 1965

A year later it had become even more crabbed, and the majority of the gs were formed figure-of-eight style. First, a specimen written with an unknown fountain pen:

And then an extract from a chemistry account book:

August/September 1966

By January 1967 the introspection had grown even worse. Why my masters at school didn’t complain I cannot say. At least the forward slope had become more pronounced.

January 1967

It is more pronounced still, and less crabbed, in this sample from the following March.

March 1967

On my 17th birthday in April I was given a Parker 45 fountain pen with a medium nib. Its fluidity and the need to form larger letters had an immediate effect. The influence of my late birding friend I. G. Johnson, some fifteen or twenty years my senior, is also visible: he had a particularly elegant hand.

April 1967, Parker 45; Quink Royal Blue washable

The academic work involved in science A-levels is pretty gruelling, and involved me in much writing from September 1966 to June 1968; we were issued with filepaper by the ream, and I kept thick lever-arch files crammed with my notes (all lost now). By the end of the first academic year my writing had become more functional than anything else.

July 1967, ditto

An October specimen, written with a Parker Flighter ballpen:

October 1967

Little had changed by April 1968.

April 1968

Three months later the germ of my adult handwriting became visible.

July 1968; Parker 45, home-mixed ink

Annoyingly, I have nothing left from my time at university, September 1968 – June 1971, though by 1973 my handwriting had scarcely changed at all.

September 1973; same pen, Quink Permanent Black

By 1975 it had become more adult and free-flowing.

October 1975; ditto

By 1977, aged 26, it had almost matured.

March 1977; ditto

The following three samples illustrate the way my handwriting has finally shed all trace of anything but my own personality.

February 1982; ditto

January 2000; ditto

November 2011; Parker Jotter, generic ink

This is the way my writing looked until about 2020. Recently however, my handwriting has become less legible: I have acquired the dreaded ‘deathgrip’, in which one inadvertently grips one’s pen or pencil too tightly. I was taught the standard tripod grip (holding the pen with the thumb and first two fingers), and now when I take up a pen I want to exert so much pressure that my forefinger curves inward. Of course this makes writing uncomfortable and quickly causes cramping.

Writing by hand is achieved by a fusion of conscious thought and muscle memory. Conscious thought determines what is to be written and the unconscious informs the muscles how it should be written. Lack of practice in writing by hand – such as is commonplace these days, the use of keyboards being so prevalent – erodes this fusion. The result is that the conscious mind tries to make good the loss of muscle memory by exerting the control that ought to be unconscious.

I find that the only effective cure for this is to retrain oneself with exercises. Making a conscious effort to maintain a relaxed grip, one simply practises making loops, zigzags, or any other pattern; as soon as one feels one’s grip tightening, the thing to do is to relax it. Once a degree of relaxation has been achieved, one can form words, repeating the same phrases over and over again, all the while being aware of the grip.

It helps to use a fountain pen, since almost no pressure is required to make the line: that is why my teachers abominated ballpoints. A wet-running rollerball will do as well. To help in my practice I bought a Lamy Safari fountain pen here, which has a chamfered section (i.e. the part you hold), and after only a week or two I am pleased to say that my writing has already improved.

I rather regret my early adoption of typing; there was an Olivetti portable in the family and by the age of 15 I was using it quite a bit, having been schooled even earlier on a full-sized, long-carriage Imperial. In 1972 I bought an Adler Gabriele and used it until I got my first computer in 1984.

Writing on a computer is very different from writing with a typewriter, which in turn is even more different from writing by hand. When you write by hand you are much more involved and thoughtful, partly because you do not want to make a mistake, but also because there is something intrinsically personal and intimate about the process of making marks on paper. In modern jargon, writing by hand is ‘mindful’.

A typewriter is less intimate, but still there is a reluctance to make an error – especially when nearing the end of a page. Consequently one thinks hard about what is to be typed; I developed a habit, continued to this day, of rehearsing sentences on a scratchpad before committing them to the typed page.

The advantages of word-processing are so manifest that nearly every writer has succumbed to them, but in so doing one loses altogether the intimacy and particularly the care that are part of writing by hand. It is so easy to correct a mistake or transpose text that one becomes almost negligent. This is especially disastrous for writers like me who begin at the beginning and try to get one chapter right before tackling the next.

Whether I shall ever write a book by hand I cannot say, though it is unlikely. But it is something I’d like to try, and I may even dig out that Osmiroid 65 (whose rubber ink-sac is miraculously intact and for which I long ago bought a new nib) and give it a go. But before that I may have to acquire the Palmer Method, which is another skill altogether: though arm-writing explains how Trollope or Proust were able to sit at a desk and write all day.

Maureen Duffy and Caroline Sanderson in conversation

I have been a member of ALCS for very many years and am grateful to them for their efforts for writers everywhere and of course for myself. Here the redoubtable Maureen Duffy, one of its founders, discusses some of the attitudes towards writers, not least the idea that writing is not a ‘proper job’.

Lionel Shriver on the death of fiction

It comes to something when a writer as liberal – in the classical, original meaning of that word – as Lionel Shriver is characterised as right-wing; or, to use the version of that term habitually applied to anyone who does not fully subscribe to every aspect of today's shape-shifting orthodoxy, 'far-right'. She makes the point in this interview that brainwashed children are now setting forth from their campuses and taking influential positions in society. Her run-in with Penguin shows just how pernicious this will become.

She also says that she feels like a lone voice; that other writers who may be of a like mind seem to keep their heads down, no doubt in fear. Well, even though I am far less successful than Ms Shriver, I nonetheless may be classified as a 'writer', and I completely endorse her views.

I am coming to the end of drafting a new novel and have been toying with the idea of submitting it to a traditional publisher rather than, as I have with my last few books, self-publishing the thing. The novel makes no concessions to political correctness whatever. I have even set it in the early 1960s before the rot set in. It will be very interesting to me to see what reception it meets, and I shall leave this post in place for any prospective publisher to read.

We must fight back against this creeping tyranny. Unless we do, it will morph into something far, far worse than being hounded on and deplatformed by Twitter and Facebook, far worse even than being doxxed and having your employers blackmailed into firing you from your job.

The most relevant part of this interview starts at 8'31, though the whole of it is well worth your time; Part One is here.

An offline electronic thesaurus

In 1975 I bought a copy of the Longman edition of Roget’s Thesaurus to replace an abridged Penguin edition, and the Longman’s has been by my desk ever since. As it is a printed book rather than an electronic file it is comparatively unwieldy and time-consuming to consult, especially because it runs to over 1,300 pages and is so exhaustive.

Since 2004 I have been using Apple Macs, and these come with an Oxford dictionary and thesaurus that is more than adequate for an author seeking the best word. But I also use a Linux machine and plan to transition entirely to Linux when my present Mac reaches the end of its days.

Thus I have been looking around for a Linux-friendly thesaurus. Those I have found are too sketchy and/or need an internet connection, and when I’m working I like to be offline.

Roget’s Thesaurus was first published in 1852 and has been revised many times since. The penny has now dropped: I realised that at least one of the better revisions would be out of copyright, and where more obvious to begin looking than Project Gutenberg? The more popular version there dates from 1911 and is available in various formats. The body of the work and the index are held in two different files, both of which I downloaded in Microsoft Word format, speedily converted to Open Document Text (.odt), which is more compact.

The body file, as it is called, is the more useful to me. I use FocusWriter for drafting: the draft goes in the first buffer and the thesaurus body file in the next. To switch between these two all I need to do is press Ctrl-1 or Ctrl-2. Then, with FocusWriter’s search facility, it is easy to find the keyword and see its context.

The Gutenberg edition isn’t as detailed as the Longman’s, which I would not be without, but nine times out of ten it does the job.

Writer’s block

Image: Rosser1954 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Fiction is linear when read, and often written that way as well, though a writer don’t necessarily begin at the beginning. At every stage, however, whether that be chapter, scene, paragraph, sentence or even word, he must choose what to write next. The sum of all his choices is the finished work.

A schema of his project will look something like a fern frond. The finished work is the midrib, or rachis, to use the botanical term. From it, fractal-like, diverge smaller ribs, or rachillae, and these in turn can have further branches, and so on. Each of these ribs diverging from the rachis is an avenue he hasn’t followed.

When the story starts to have a life of its own the author develops a sense of the path he needs to follow. He is happy if this feels to him like a rachis; all the elements of the story are in harmony. If he branches off it he may not at first be aware of the fact. The further he gets along the rachilla the worse and more uncertain he feels. He might turn along another branch in the hope of regaining his original direction, and even another, but it’s hopeless: every route from here ends in vacant space. It’s akin to getting physically lost and coming to the end of a cul-de-sac. He realises at last that he has gone wrong but doesn’t understand how. The story grinds to a halt.

For writers who begin at the beginning, this fern analogy holds up in another way. The rachillae are larger at the start and look tempting. These are the unfinished stories in his desk drawer or, nowadays, lurking year after year on his hard disk. Along the rachis the rachillae become progressively smaller, so that by the time the end gets near there is less and less chance of going wrong.

This ‘going wrong’ is the cause of writer’s block. The symptoms build slowly. First there is a nagging feeling that something isn’t right. This is followed by a general depression about the piece as a whole. Next it all seems misconceived. Finally the writer questions the very idea of authorship. He examines the meagre returns on his labours and wishes he’d taken up another line of work. Depending on his vanity and the emotional investment he has made in presenting himself to the world as a Writer, this can even lead to permanent depression.

His solution, of course, besides learning plumbing, is to retrace his steps and find out where he left the rachis. It’s often difficult to do and involves throwing away everything on the wrongly taken rachilla. In the worst case, this can amount to many thousands of words, but there’s nothing else for it if he wants to finish what he set out to do. It may be that he cannot regain the rachis at all because he was never on it: everything he has written so far is a rachilla, in which case he should recognise the fact and consign it to his real or virtual desk drawer.

The feeling of going wrong has to be learned, which is what prentice pieces are for. So too the acceptance that a rachilla must be sacrificed, even though the odd phrase or paragraph from it might be put to use in the proper place.

A frequent cause of going wrong is a character being made to do something he wouldn’t do if he existed in real life. The writer errs for various reasons: inexperience, ineptitude, a desire to take a short-cut or force the story in a certain direction. The light-bulb moment on that particular sort of rachilla comes when the writer says to himself, ‘X wouldn’t do that!’

That is one of the reasons it’s easier to follow the rachis nearer its end – by then the writer knows his characters better.

One nostrum for overcoming writer’s block is to sit down and scribble whatever comes into your head. That is, you delegate the writing to your subconscious. Although I agree that the subconscious plays a central part in writing fiction, this is not the answer. It does not develop your craft, because you do not understand how you became blocked and you have missed an opportunity to analyse your mistake, and these are functions of the conscious mind.

The pesky pluperfect

In many foreign languages, the endings of verbs are changed – ‘inflected’ – to tell the reader what tense is being used. In English, inflection is relatively sparse and we rely on auxiliary verbs to do much of the work. This is an extract from the dictionary on my computer under ‘have’:

used with a past participle to form the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect tenses, and the conditional mood: I have finished | he had asked her | she will have left by now | I could have helped, had I known | ‘Have you seen him?’ ‘Yes, I have.’. 

 ‘Had’ is of course also an inflection of the verb ‘to have’ in various senses, like ‘possess’ or ‘receive’.

When writing fiction I try to make the words on the page become ‘transparent’, so that the reader will respond only to the meaning and hence visualise the story. Disruption of the visualised can be caused by many things, such as a misspelling, an error in research, a word wrongly used or unfamiliar to the reader, etc. Repetition of the same word in close proximity can also disrupt, because it momentarily jars, reminding the reader that he is, in fact, reading a story and not watching a film.

Style guides deprecate what Fowler calls ‘elegant variation’, the obvious use of synonyms to avoid this repetition, and they are usually right: it is usually better to be straightforward and to repeat, provided the repeated word carries exactly the meaning you intend.

However, these auxiliary verbs can be a pest, especially in the pluperfect tense (e.g. ‘I had caught the bus’). Consider this fragment from the book I am writing now:

What she had described was truly vile. He could not conceive of a more systematic and comprehensive betrayal: a little girl of eight uprooted and taken overseas to be left at the mercy of a self-centred mother. For the next seven or eight long, child’s years, that mercy had been abused and abused until finally things got so bad that the roles had inverted. And how had Phoebe reacted? With filial duty, unreciprocated and profaned.

[The reader already knows that her mother has become an irascible and foul-mouthed invalid.]

The original draft is this:

What she had described was truly vile. He could not conceive of a more systematic and comprehensive betrayal. A little girl of eight had been uprooted and taken overseas to be left at the mercy of a self-centred mother. For the next seven or eight long, child’s years, that mercy had been abused and abused until finally things had got so bad that the roles had inverted. And how had Phoebe reacted? With filial duty, unreciprocated and profaned.

Recasting and combining sentences 2 and 3 got rid of one ‘had’. The rest of the original is grammatically correct but lumpy at ‘things had got so bad’, especially considering the echoic ‘bad’. It is so lumpy that the flow is interrupted. I removed the ‘had’ from ‘things had got so bad’ in the hope that the reader won’t notice. The unusual construction of ‘long, child’s years’ (implying that time seems to pass more slowly when one is very young) creates a brief hiatus before we plunge ahead. Having plunged, we encounter the unorthodox and actually nonsensical repetition of ‘mercy’. The repetition serves as an intensive, accelerated, by the second intensive repetition in ‘abused and abused’, to a speed where the missing ‘had’ is overlooked. At least that was my thinking when I took it out. The character thinking about the child’s betrayal is becoming increasingly angry, and that too adds to the speed.

This may all seem pettifogging, but it is the sort of decision that writers must make if their work is to be enjoyed.

A commoner problem with the pluperfect comes when one needs to insert a substantial amount of historical information in a passage that otherwise uses the imperfect, perfect, or continuous past (the common convention when writing fiction). Thus ‘X remembered [imperfect] that as a boy he had [pluperfect] done Y and his father had tried help him, while his uncle had done everything to make his life difficult’, etc. The pluperfect hads soon add up and clog the passage. The trick is to begin with one or two hads, then slip back into the earlier tense, continue with that for as long as necessary, and finally resume the pluperfect before returning. So, to begin:

X remembered that as a boy he had done Y and his father had tried help him, while his uncle, who disliked him, did everything he could to make his life difficult.

The subordinate phrase (‘who disliked him’) is correctly cast in the imperfect, but the sneaky ‘did’ is not. But it has got us into the imperfect again and we can continue unencumbered. Some sentences later we begin to conclude our account of poor X’s travails:

Finally he decided [imperfect] to have it out with him. And that, really, had been [pluperfect] the start of their lifelong feud. He regretted [imperfect] that, but it was too late now.

The ‘really’ is sleight of grammar, bridging the gap. Such are the underhand tricks of the trade. Writing is a technical process as well as a creative one: no wonder it is so difficult.

Not quite there yet

Alerted by Nate Hoffelder’s blog to the ingenious Text Clock by Ross Goodwin, I next had a peek at Mr Goodwin’s blog and noticed that he has devised and made public a fiction generator.

Of course I tried it out, feeding in some character-names and adjusting the “depravity” slider leftwards (I’m a prude like that). Then I hit “Generate”. The machine did its thing, drank some coffee, smoked a cigarette, did its thing some more, guzzled a bit of whiskey (or so it claimed), and came up with a shiny new novel, all 209,687 words of it.

Here is the opening paragraph:

Chapter 1

Other Scrapovitch?”

, a comprehensible ship, no more than a manageable handful could be sur- veyed in two glances; Iona looked, and was where Iona was and what to do. But in this liner Seara for an able master. In that ship Anaia could see at once way to take unless Kamil had a good memory. No understood could not see where Iona was, and would never know which designed with a cunning informed by ages of sea-lore to move came to Jett in that hall of a measured and shapely body, non-irritant skin permitted to stand there to afford man an New York’s skyscrapers, which this planet’s occasionally daring. But with the knowledge that this wall must be apparent reason to be gratified with Iona’s own capacity and that little opened in Anaia’s altitude, Iona found Iona in afloat there came no sense of security when, went through, for Iona was puzzled as to direction. Iona’s last ship a spacious decorated interior which hinted nothing of a ship.

(I did not input any of these character-names, though the ones I did suggest occur later.)

While this may not make the New York Times bestsellers lists, one can see clear evidence of phrasing and sentence-structure. There is only one spelling mistake and (with a few trivial exceptions) there is no problem with the punctuation. It is an impressive feat, several steps on from the poetry generators (like this one) that take advantage of the free form and, frankly, pretentiousness of much modern poetry. Prose is less elastic than poetry and demands less effort on the reader’s part.

As a means of understanding language and our response to it, trying to write a fiction generator is an interesting and useful project. It also reminds us how advanced and amazing – in the true sense of that word – are the abilities of the human brain, for Nature and education have gifted us not only countless thousands of quirky and unique fiction-generators but millions upon millions of equally complicated fiction-interpreters.

Leave it out

Part of the story-teller’s craft is knowing what not to describe. Omitting an inessential scene has two benefits: the flow of the narrative is improved and the reader is drawn in deeper. Besides inviting him to create images from the words before him, you make him fill in the gap. This is done by providing him beforehand with the building-blocks to construct – in any way he sees fit – the missing material for himself. His vision can be modified later with references to what happened during, or arose from, the absent scene. Correctly handled, this technique may cause the reader to believe, once he has finished the story, that he has actually read what isn’t there.

(Omitting whole scenes is analogous to the excision of unnecessary words, particularly descriptors. Parsimony with descriptors leads the author to search for the right noun or verb, improving the flow still further.)

A writer can get into trouble if he doesn’t understand that some of what he has imagined should not be exposed. Sooner or later his ploughshare will hit a rock.

I got stuck like this with The Tide Mill, which is set in the 13th century. The story opens with the arrival of the economic-refugee protagonist, aged nine. I was satisfied with the first chapter and in the next continued with an account of the nine-year-old’s new life, but after a thousand words of that I came to a halt and didn’t know why. I assumed the problem was in the first chapter and rewrote it several times, even changing from third-person to first-person narrative. In the end I gave up.

Months later I was listening to a radio adaptation of a novel and noticed that the author had, without ado, jumped his narrative forward by a number of years. I finally realized that the next significant event in my hero’s life required him to be older and more independent, so I junked what I had written of Chapter 2 and started it again, three years along from the end of Chapter 1. That second chapter is one of the easiest I have ever written.

Eliding those three years indicates that they are of little interest and brings the spotlight to bear on the central event of Chapter 2, which determines everything that follows. Moreover, the reader’s perception of the missing years is enriched as the story unfolds and he learns more about the setting and the local way of life.

I believe that writer’s block is usually caused by an instinctive or subconscious awareness of a technical fault. Sometimes the fault is huge – the whole idea of the story is unbelievable – while at other times it can be trivial. In this case I got blocked because the first version of Chapter 2 lacked momentum. Like a shark, a story must keep moving forward. If there is excess baggage the narrative will be slowed down and made less readable. If the baggage proves too cumbersome, the story may even be impossible to write.

This phenomenon helps illustrate the mysterious and wonderful collaboration between reader and writer. The reader finds unnecessary prose tiresome; if there is too much of it for his taste he will lay the book aside – as will the author himself, temporarily or not.

The wellsprings of fiction

In 1946 George Orwell published an essay entitled “Why I Write”.

Quote:

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. – Using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

He also says:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art”. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

In my view an overt political agenda can be toxic to the relationship between the reader and the story, particularly if the reader’s beliefs are at odds with the author’s. Samuel Goldwyn is said to have declared, “If you have a message, call Western Union”. That Orwell succeeds so well with Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four is down to his gifts as a storyteller.

Vladimir Nabokov had no time for political fiction. He is scathing about Dostoevsky:

My position in regard to Dostoevsky is a curious and difficult one. In all my courses I approach literature from the only point of view that literature interests me – namely the point of view of enduring art and individual genius. From this point of view Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one – with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.

This is belied by evidence that Nabokov had read, closely, most if not all of Dostoevsky’s work. Dostoevsky was a polemicist, for sure, but he was a greater artist than Orwell, with a deep interest in and sympathy with the human condition. He also had a better sense of humour than Nabokov gives him credit for. Some Dostoevsky is laugh-out-loud funny (e.g. when Nikolai seizes Pyotr Pavlovitch Gaganov by the nose in Demons; that whole book can be taken as a monstrous joke). Nabokov’s jokes are just as good, though quite different (e.g. the entire character of Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire, the portrait of Lolita’s all-American mother, and of course entertaining felicities and plays on words throughout).

So Nabokov put poetry above polemic. Yet he adored Dickens:

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

If Dickens’s novels aren’t polemical then I don’t know whose are.

Towards the end of his essay, Orwell informs us that:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Unfortunately he goes on to say:

For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Trying to define “good prose” (for fiction, at any rate) is a waste of time. Orwell’s writing is so transparent that it is dead to the subtlety and music found on every page of Nabokov. Then again, Nabokov is perhaps too much the stylist. When reading him we are never far from a suspicion that he is showing off: that the subject-matter interests him less than the language with which it is expressed. In Nabokov the second of Orwell’s “great motives” (aesthetic enthusiasm) predominates.

Orwell says he wanted “to reconcile [his] ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us”. If he was a public writer, Nabokov was essentially a private one; and it is in the territory between the public and the private that we find the fifth and most interesting motive for writing fiction.

Apparently without fully realizing what he is saying, Orwell mentions the “desire to see things as they are”. He goes on to say that “at the very bottom of [authors’] motives there lies a mystery. … [One is] driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand”.

That demon is surely the quest for self-knowledge. It is the religious need to find evidence that our lives are not meaningless.

The tyro writer is usually unaware of any such demon – or angel. His motives are those listed by Orwell. His personality is such that he likes embroidering personal anecdotes: my Irish grandfather, when accused of exaggeration or outright untruth, would reply that he was merely an author whose books had never been published. Our tyro progresses from these petty lies to more elaborate ones, on paper, and is likely to tap into the primeval need to tell and to hear stories. The storyteller’s vanity looms large, together with unrealistic expectations, but he has withal a poetic impulse and this needs to be satisfied. Depending on the quality of that impulse, his early work will be more or less readable. As his career advances and his technique improves, he will begin (assuming he is not a complete dolt) to be gripped by the possibilities of language and the opportunities that fictioneering gives him for exploring the grand puzzle of his existence.

Pablo Picasso is credited with saying “Art is the lie that tells the truth”. A novel can be inherently more truthful than any history or biography, but a novel written with an agenda, whether commercial or political, cannot be a faithful reflection of the unique experiences and inner world of its author.

One measure of the truthfulness of a book is its longevity. Most if not all of the books we regard as classics are truthful, which is why we still read them. They may also be admirable in some other way, but it is to their truth that we chiefly respond.

If writing a novel is an exercise in self-exploration, why should its author – besides hoping for payment – want to see it published? Sometimes, in fact, he doesn’t, but usually he does, because he wants validation, praise, and possibly fame. These will all feed his vanity, especially in the early stages of his career, but unless he offers his work to the world and gets some feedback he will never know whether he has struck a chord with anyone else. He will not “connect”, to use E M Forster’s word: recognition that others feel as you do is the prime motor of both the storyteller and his listener, and I contend that the urge to find it is the deepest source of literary art.

To Orwell’s four motives, then, I’d like to add this fifth. In conclusion I would also like to say that for all his superficial insouciance, Nabokov was a serious artist. I feel I know the Russia of his childhood, the nostalgia of the émigré, what it is like to be a foreigner living in America. He has risked sharing these and a multitude of other confidences; he opens our eyes to the beauty of his synaesthetic world; and in a profoundly polemical fashion he upholds whatever is courageous, noble and virtuous. That is my little tribute to a great writer at the furthest end of the spectrum. His fiction deserves to endure.

What's an author to do?

Here are sixteen quotes (verbatim, typos and all) from recent Amazon reviews of The Penal Colony.

1. Unfortunately upon reaching the end I felt unsatisfied due to the author leaving numerous loose ends. This ruined the enjoyment for me.

2. (And with a satisfying ending, too)

3. the ending left a lot to be desired, very open ended and a bit of a disappointment.

4. I always like a happy ending.

5. Not a bad story, would've been quite a bit better if it had been edited better. Also the ending, abruptly one page. C'mon...

6. Great read and loved the ending.

7. The only downside I could find was that the ending of the book was a little too quick for me and I had to read the last chapter a couple of times to see if I had missed something hence I only scored it 4 stars.

8. Well done from beginning to end.

9. I wanted more information about the end the the trip. Without giving spoilers I wanted more of the end . How the trip went. What happened ? The author could have given more there and didn't . It was an ending without a real ending if you like that sort of thing

10. It had a good ending, it was smart, and it spoke to redemption.

11. I felt short changed at the end, but enjoyed it overall.

12. A wonderful story allowing for great character development throughout and the inkling of "I wonder how he fared" at the end.

13. This was an interesting read and the first half is great but by the end it was like, enough already.

14. it is a good story though and has a pretty good ending.

15. I was glad I stuck with it, but have to say that the ending was a bit of a let down!

16. I also want to go on the record and say can you teach other authors to write endings? Yours was damn near perfect and there were no silly cliffhangers or any such nonsense, just a beautiful ending. I just don't get to read but one a year.

See also here.

Building the mosaic

The human retina has two sorts of photoreceptors. Rods (so called for their shape) respond only to dim, monochromatic light, while cones are adapted to the perception of colour and detail. The middle of the retina is formed into a small pit, the fovea. Here the cones are densest; and in the middle of the fovea is an area about a third of a millimetre in diameter, called the foveola, where the concentration of cones is greatest of all.

Rather than perceiving something in detail all at once, we scan it. The musculature of the eyes makes a series of tiny jerks, termed saccades, shifting the foveola from one point to another. In this way the brain builds up a mosaic which the imagination and memory try to make sense of.

Hearing operates in an analogous manner, using a granular series of pressure waves. In fact the whole of our perception works like this.

What we do with the mosaic depends on who we are. Our genetics, prejudices and past experiences are all brought to bear when integrating and interpreting information.

Yesterday I walked the path fringing the harbour. The tidal surge that recently wreaked havoc on this coast has left behind huge quantities of brash – the brown and decaying remnants of marsh plants, mixed here and there with branches of seablite or gorse, driftwood, plastic debris, gates, fencing, boats large and small, even an errant, crazily-angled footbridge. The path is still muddy, but under a mild south-westerly breeze and an even milder February sun it was beginning to dry out. Spring is returning to this hemisphere. The birds know it; but the season is still winter.

The sky was azure, the clouds white, the sea ultramarine. Far away across the estuary, on the sands at the end of the shingle spit, many seals were basking. The profile of the bottom there forms a trap for fish. Those mobile specks, too distant to identify, were fish-eating birds: mergansers, goldeneyes, Slavonian grebes, red-throated divers, perhaps black-throated and great northern divers as well (all were reported later). The scene was alive with birds, a thousand or more brent geese, innumerable gulls, cormorants, swirling clouds of waders – knot and dunlin, mainly, no doubt. For me, with my history and interests, an arc of excitement was building.

At length the path brought me to the fen, a wide, quiet, reed-fringed lagoon behind the sea wall, with inlets and spits where birds can hide, rest and preen. On my preceding visit a single avocet, an early harbinger of spring, had been swimming there and upending like a duck. Now there were forty. The lapwing flock had dwindled; the golden plover had gone altogether, and in their place were black-tailed godwits.

Because I had left my telescope at home, I spent a long time scrutinizing the fen with binoculars only. It is surprising how much information the foveolas can glean, even at low magnification. I sorted through the geese on the far side, admired the pintails (surely there is no more elegant creature than a drake pintail), examined the many black-headed gulls for something rare, counted the godwits and avocets, jotted notes. Just when I thought I had covered everything I picked up a single drake pochard, feeding where the water is deepest.

Descending the wooden steps, I gained the footpath that skirts the western side: I had decided to walk even further, to check the freshwater meres near the coast road. The footpath is thickly lined with scrub and small trees, but here and there affords views of the fen.

My afternoon was assembling grain by grain, like the pixels on this computer screen or the frames of a cinema film, like the words of a story or even the letters of a sentence. I was content, more than content, with my reward for the long walk. This landscape has always suited me very well, and if the day had offered nothing more I should have gone home happy.

I stopped once more to raise my binoculars to the fen. They were filled with leafless willows, a tawny wall of dead reeds, gunmetal water, all sunlit from the right, the colours perfect. Then, low above the reeds, I saw the thuggish bulk of a female sparrowhawk coming slantwise in my direction. Her brown plumage co-ordinated exactly with the waxen twigs and branches of the willows. In an instant she was lost to view behind the foreground hawthorns.

A bird of prey is a solitary assassin, living fast, much of its time yielded to the imperative to feed. An evolutionary arms race joins predator and prey: most attacks end in failure. As the winter afternoon wanes a hungry hawk can become desperate and even reckless.

Sparrowhawks hunt in various ways. A common ploy is to cruise the length of a hedge and flip over it to surprise whatever is on the other side – a blackbird or even a wood pigeon, for a really strong female hawk. This one was using the reedbed like that.

For an odd, floating moment I was the only one who knew she had arrived. Then most of the birds on the fen took flight, many more lapwings than I had been able to count, avocets, gulls, even some of the teal and wigeon; the rasping cries of a fleeing snipe came from high above the willows.

I could not tell whether the hawk had struck, and didn’t see her again, but my glimpse of her had unified what had gone before. It was the final piece of mosaic. The naturalist longs to blend with nature, to learn its secrets, a hopeless quest but one that always draws him on. Just for those two or three seconds before the fen erupted, I was as much hawk as human.

It bears saying that each of has unique experiences, all the time. Each of us is building a unique vision of the world. If I had no interest in birds, or had simply been looking the other way, my afternoon would have felt quite different. And your past few minutes would have felt different too, because you would not have been reading this, but assembling some other mosaic, in keeping with the larger mosaic that conforms to the unique combination made by your genetics, history, and system of beliefs.

Interview with Tom Wolfe

In this new interview, Tom Wolfe unfolds his thoughts on a wide range of topics, from decadence and the eerie predictions of Nietzsche to the future of America and the Enlightenment – about which I fear he is irrationally optimistic, given the ground covered in the first part of the interview.

Yet another bear-trap

As George Bernard Shaw famously suggested, “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.” In Clive James’s typically amusing and erudite review of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, there is this paragraph:

Langdon, though an American, still favours English tailoring. It must be easier to run in. Running beside him is Dr Sienna Brown, described as a “pretty, young woman”, in keeping with Dan Brown’s gift for inserting the fatal extra comma that he or one of his editors believes to be a sign of literacy. And indeed I should perhaps have written “the fatal, extra comma”, but something stopped me: an ear for prose, I hope.

 Some of the commenters take exception. alex masterley says:

 I think Brown got his comma right in “pretty, young woman.” Like that, it means a woman who is both young and pretty. No comma (a “pretty young woman”) and it would have been a woman who was only approximately young.

voxer retorts:

As opposed to precisely young? What does “approximately young” mean? I can’t see your point.

Ian agrees with alex:

The point is that ‘pretty young’ without the comma is a description of how young she is (distinct from ‘very young’, for example), whereas adding the comma makes it clear that pretty is an adjective describing the woman, not grading the extent of her youth.

James Kabala doesn’t:

No, the point here is that traditional grammar treats “young woman” as a single syntactical unit. It’s one of those “I know it when I see it” things rather than a precisely defined rule, but the underlying idea is that precisely that one CANNOT SAY “young pretty woman” – “young woman” is a unit and cannot be separated – “pretty” must come first and there should be no comma. Phrases of this type often involve ages or colors – good old boy, fine young lad, mean old man, old gray mare, old brown shoe, big yellow taxi – reversing the adjectives would create an impossible phrase (in English – other languages might have different instincts). Maybe someone who knows more grammatical terminology than I do can say if this rule has a name. 

 Frederick nails it:

In colloquial American english not having a comma after “pretty” turns it into an adverb meaning “more or less” ( in this case to modify the adjective “young” ). When a comma is placed after “pretty” it remains an adjective meaning “beautiful.” In Great Britain “pretty” is rarely as an adverb and remains an adjective in most contexts: thus for British speakers, such as James, the comma would be unnecessary.

[Mr James is Australian, BTW.]

Tejaswini says:

I concur. ‘pretty young’ could sound as if ‘pretty’ is an adjective of ‘young’, not of ‘woman’. Switching the order to young pretty goes against this adjective-ordering rule:
http://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/elc/studyzone/410/grammar/adjord.htm
Pretty neat site, that.

The growing divergence of American and British usage can have subtle ramifications. The interposed comma is taken by a British reader as evidence of a tin ear; an American regards it as clarifying (though James Kabala uses the spelling “color”). Who knows what other misunderstandings arise when we read each others’ prose?

Myself, I’d have side-stepped the bear-trap and called her an “attractive young woman” or a “pretty girl”, but then I’m not Dan Brown. Or his editor. Thank heavens.

Sequence in storytelling

Image: canonsnapper

The structure of a satisfying story is well known: it has a beginning, a middle and an end. That is the broad pattern, but the whole narrative is like a fractal. The beginning itself has a beginning, middle and end; likewise the middle and likewise the end. And if you increase the magnification you will see that everything conforms to a sequence. If this is broken at any point, the story becomes less satisfying.

Let us turn the magnification up to maximum and examine the smallest element of a story, the word. A word must be spelled or pronounced a certain way or it will not be drenustdoo … er, understood. Once the first letter of the first word has been laid down, the subsequent letters must obey the law of sequence or the story will go awry.

The second word is in thrall to the first; the third is even more constrained, because it must follow both the first and the second.

The first sentence has a beginning, middle and end. So do the first paragraph and the first chapter.

As element succeeds element each becomes more constrained, until, in a well constructed story, the final element is inevitable. It will hit the emotional sweet-spot and the reader or listener will be completely satisfied.

Although a born storyteller has an intuitive grasp of this idea, when he is building a complicated story his intuition can be inadequate. Elements of the tale vie with one another for precedence. If one element takes his fancy, he may introduce it too soon and thereby cause a structural problem that leads to writer’s block. Or it may not even belong in the narrative at all, causing an even more severe blockage, especially if he is enamoured of the way he has already presented it.

The law of sequence is ruthless. Any diversion causes reader dissatisfaction. It may appear to the storyteller that he is free to take the narrative in whatever direction he chooses, but this is a fallacy. I have said elsewhere on this blog that, in writing fiction, the subconscious is king, and it is the subconscious that is the final arbiter of sequence. The notion that certain characters take on a life of their own is also fallacious: what really happens is that the conscious mind is surprised by the manifestation of a form that was already present in the subconscious. Equally wrong is the illusion of freedom. The only freedom a storyteller enjoys is to disrupt the sequence and subject himself to the torture of writer’s block.

We can see now why the first line of a novel is so important, and why writers spend so long agonizing over and polishing it. Have a look at these. You will see that its first line contains the very germ of a book, however subtle and compressed it may be.

Correctly used, flashbacks have their proper place in the sequence, which is to provide information needed for subsequent development of the story. When incorrectly used, they annoy and may even exasperate the reader. One of the worst offenders in my reading experience is Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, of which a reviewer says: “Very enjoyable to read, but when I finished I was temped to rip out each chapter and arrange them in chronological order. Written in epistolary and non-sequential style, this novel can be as confusing at times as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.” I felt just the same, but wrote the chapter-numbers down in chronological order, then re-read the book that way, whereupon I understood and appreciated it better.

If, as a writer, you find yourself blocked, go back to the start of your story and check that the sequence flows freely. And if, as a reader, you like the style of a book but become dissatisfied with the story, ask yourself whether the sequence is correct. A poor sequence may reveal further weaknesses in the author’s technique, such as an over-reliance on the conscious mind and/or a lack of sincerity. By such means you refine your critical faculties and earn your place in the ranks of the good and great readers, and if this little post helps you in that it will have been well worth its composition.

Herley's golden rule for writers

I am a sucker for those interviews featuring writers who lay down the law about their craft. To be asked one’s opinions on such things is flattering, and writers above all love a bit of flattery, especially if it is disguised in this way

Alas, some writers seem to have such an inflated view of their own significance that their advice transcends the helpful (e.g. “work at it every day”) and enters the realm of the patronizing or the downright surreal. Here, Margaret Atwood tells us: “Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.”

I sincerely hope she was being ironic, but the rest of her pearls of wisdom suggest otherwise.

The one to blame for this recent plethora of advice may be Elmore Leonard, who has issued his Ten Rules for Writers.



Now I greatly admire Mr Leonard’s spare and very funny prose, and if Leonardesque prose is what you want to write you would do well to heed his advice. But not all of us do, and not all of us want to read that to the exclusion of other sorts of literature.

As you can see, I have been giving this matter deep thought, and have condensed his Ten, and all the others’, Rules into a single maxim, which I urge all writers to inscribe in copperplate (cursive, not uncial) script, using only black ink and on yellow paper, size exactly 200 x 100 mm. The motto must be pinned (not glued) to the wall above their desk no more than 500 mm above its surface, and ideally on an exact level with their line of sight while working. It reads thus:

There are no rules. 

If you follow anyone’s ideas but your own, you are not speaking with an authentic voice. You are cramping yourself, condemning yourself to be an also-ran. What works for you and your readers will evolve only with time and faithful adherence to your craft. Everything else is bollocks, and it is a measure of writers’ lack of self-knowledge that they suppose their conscious mind capable of understanding what the hell is happening when they commit their words to paper or screen.

On second thoughts, scrap the bit about the copperplate motto. That’s bollocks too. Obviously.

The Secret Joy of Reading

Just in time for the holidays I have released a collection of ten non-fiction pieces, all but one from this blog:

My First Fountain Pen
Kathleen
The Subconscious in Fiction
Nausea
The Good and Great Reader
Feminism
Politics and Fiction
The Super Panther
Fuzzy Computing
The Secret Joy of Reading

Please help yourself to a free copy from Smashwords. It is also available from Amazon in a specially formatted Kindle edition, currently priced at the minimum (99 cents), and should soon appear for nothing at Apple, Barnes & Noble, Diesel and Sony.

Isabel, meet Lydia

In this extract from early on in The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James ignores one of the rules laid down for authors. He makes no concession to the mediocre; he doesn’t care whether the semi-literate can keep up with the flow. Instead his nib is allowed to describe a magical course, an act of levitation which brings the scene and his heroine alive – if he’d broken these paragraphs into bite-sized pieces the effect would have been destroyed.

James is sometimes accused of being stuffy. His prose may now be deemed old fashioned, but for all that he is still in the first rank and well worth a modern aficionado’s time. You can find his work at Project Gutenberg. If you’ve never read him till now, start with Daisy Miller or Washington Square – the latter as beautiful, subtle and brutal as fiction ever gets.

—

She had taken up her niece – there was little doubt of that. One wet afternoon, some four months earlier than the occurrence lately narrated, this young lady had been seated alone with a book. To say she was so occupied is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilising quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of fresh taste in her situation which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to correct. The visitor had not been announced; the girl heard her at last walking about the adjoining room. It was in an old house at Albany, a large, square, double house, with a notice of sale in the windows of one of the lower apartments. There were two entrances, one of which had long been out of use but had never been removed. They were exactly alike – large white doors, with an arched frame and wide side-lights, perched upon little “stoops” of red stone, which descended sidewise to the brick pavement of the street. The two houses together formed a single dwelling, the party-wall having been removed and the rooms placed in communication. These rooms, above-stairs, were extremely numerous, and were painted all over exactly alike, in a yellowish white which had grown sallow with time. On the third floor there was a sort of arched passage, connecting the two sides of the house, which Isabel and her sisters used in their childhood to call the tunnel and which, though it was short and well lighted, always seemed to the girl to be strange and lonely, especially on winter afternoons. She had been in the house, at different periods, as a child; in those days her grandmother lived there. Then there had been an absence of ten years, followed by a return to Albany before her father’s death. Her grandmother, old Mrs Archer, had exercised, chiefly within the limits of the family, a large hospitality in the early period, and the little girls often spent weeks under her roof – weeks of which Isabel had the happiest memory. The manner of life was different from that of her own home – larger, more plentiful, practically more festal; the discipline of the nursery was delightfully vague and the opportunity of listening to the conversation of one’s elders (which with Isabel was a highly-valued pleasure) almost unbounded. There was a constant coming and going; her grandmother’s sons and daughters and their children appeared to be in the enjoyment of standing invitations to arrive and remain, so that the house offered to a certain extent the appearance of a bustling provincial inn kept by a gentle old landlady who sighed a great deal and never presented a bill. Isabel of course knew nothing about bills; but even as a child she thought her grandmother’s home romantic. There was a covered piazza behind it, furnished with a swing which was a source of tremulous interest; and beyond this was a long garden, sloping down to the stable and containing peach-trees of barely credible familiarity. Isabel had stayed with her grandmother at various seasons, but somehow all her visits had a flavour of peaches. On the other side, across the street, was an old house that was called the Dutch House – a peculiar structure dating from the earliest colonial time, composed of bricks that had been painted yellow, crowned with a gable that was pointed out to strangers, defended by a rickety wooden paling and standing sidewise to the street. It was occupied by a primary school for children of both sexes, kept or rather let go, by a demonstrative lady of whom Isabel’s chief recollection was that her hair was fastened with strange bedroomy combs at the temples and that she was the widow of some one of consequence. The little girl had been offered the opportunity of laying a foundation of knowledge in this establishment; but having spent a single day in it, she had protested against its laws and had been allowed to stay at home, where, in the September days, when the windows of the Dutch House were open, she used to hear the hum of childish voices repeating the multiplication table – an incident in which the elation of liberty and the pain of exclusion were indistinguishably mingled. The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste – she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece – she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender little girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side – a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or of terror.

    It was in the “office” still that Isabel was sitting on that melancholy afternoon of early spring which I have just mentioned. At this time she might have had the whole house to choose from, and the room she had selected was the most depressed of its scenes. She had never opened the bolted door nor removed the green paper (renewed by other hands) from its sidelights; she had never assured herself that the vulgar street lay beyond. A crude, cold rain fell heavily; the spring-time was indeed an appeal – and it seemed a cynical, insincere appeal – to patience. Isabel, however, gave as little heed as possible to cosmic treacheries; she kept her eyes on her book and tried to fix her mind. It had lately occurred to her that her mind was a good deal of a vagabond, and she had spent much ingenuity in training it to a military step and teaching it to advance, to halt, to retreat, to perform even more complicated manoeuvres, at the word of command. Just now she had given it marching orders and it had been trudging over the sandy plains of a history of German Thought. Suddenly she became aware of a step very different from her own intellectual pace; she listened a little and perceived that some one was moving in the library, which communicated with the office. It struck her first as the step of a person from whom she was looking for a visit, then almost immediately announced itself as the tread of a woman and a stranger – her possible visitor being neither. It had an inquisitive, experimental quality which suggested that it would not stop short of the threshold of the office; and in fact the doorway of this apartment was presently occupied by a lady who paused there and looked very hard at our heroine. She was a plain, elderly woman, dressed in a comprehensive waterproof mantle; she had a face with a good deal of rather violent point.

    “Oh,” she began, “is that where you usually sit?” She looked about at the heterogeneous chairs and tables.

    “Not when I have visitors,” said Isabel, getting up to receive the intruder.

    She directed their course back to the library while the visitor continued to look about her. “You seem to have plenty of other rooms; they’re in rather better condition. But everything’s immensely worn.”

    “Have you come to look at the house?” Isabel asked. “The servant will show it to you.”

    “Send her away; I don’t want to buy it. She has probably gone to look for you and is wandering about upstairs; she didn’t seem at all intelligent. You had better tell her it’s no matter.” And then, since the girl stood there hesitating and wondering, this unexpected critic said to her abruptly: “I suppose you’re one of the daughters?”

    Isabel thought she had very strange manners. “It depends upon whose daughters you mean.”

    “The late Mr Archer’s – and my poor sister’s.”

    “Ah,” said Isabel slowly, “you must be our crazy Aunt Lydia!”

    “Is that what your father told you to call me? I’m your Aunt Lydia, but I’m not at all crazy: I haven’t a delusion! And which of the daughters are you?”

    “I’m the youngest of the three, and my name’s Isabel.”

    “Yes; the others are Lilian and Edith. And are you the prettiest?”

    “I haven’t the least idea,” said the girl.

    “I think you must be.” And in this way the aunt and the niece made friends.