Prev
| Next
| Contents
CHAPTER V - MY FIRST BOOK: 'TREASURE ISLAND' (17)
IT was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a
novelist alone. But I am well aware that my paymaster, the
Great Public, regards what else I have written with
indifference, if not aversion; if it call upon me at all, it
calls on me in the familiar and indelible character; and when
I am asked to talk of my first book, no question in the world
but what is meant is my first novel.
Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a
novel. It seems vain to ask why. Men are born with various
manias: from my earliest childhood, it was mine to make a
plaything of imaginary series of events; and as soon as I was
able to write, I became a good friend to the paper-makers.
Reams upon reams must have gone to the making of 'Rathillet,'
'The Pentland Rising,' (18) 'The King's Pardon' (otherwise
'Park Whitehead'), 'Edward Daven,' 'A Country Dance,' and 'A
Vendetta in the West'; and it is consolatory to remember that
these reams are now all ashes, and have been received again
into the soil. I have named but a few of my ill-fated
efforts, only such indeed as came to a fair bulk ere they
were desisted from; and even so they cover a long vista of
years. 'Rathillet' was attempted before fifteen, 'The
Vendetta' at twenty-nine, and the succession of defeats
lasted unbroken till I was thirty-one. By that time, I had
written little books and little essays and short stories; and
had got patted on the back and paid for them - though not
enough to live upon. I had quite a reputation, I was the
successful man; I passed my days in toil, the futility of
which would sometimes make my cheek to burn - that I should
spend a man's energy upon this business, and yet could not
earn a livelihood: and still there shone ahead of me an
unattained ideal: although I had attempted the thing with
vigour not less than ten or twelve times, I had not yet
written a novel. All - all my pretty ones - had gone for a
little, and then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy's watch.
I might be compared to a cricketer of many years' standing
who should never have made a run. Anybody can write a short
story - a bad one, I mean - who has industry and paper and
time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad
novel. It is the length that kills.
The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down,
spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he
makes haste to blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature has
certain rights; instinct - the instinct of self-preservation
- forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the
consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the
miseries of unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be
measured in weeks. There must be something for hope to feed
upon. The beginner must have a slant of wind, a lucky vein
must be running, he must be in one of those hours when the
words come and the phrases balance of themselves - EVEN TO
BEGIN. And having begun, what a dread looking forward is
that until the book shall be accomplished! For so long a
time, the slant is to continue unchanged, the vein to keep
running, for so long a time you must keep at command the same
quality of style: for so long a time your puppets are to be
always vital, always consistent, always vigorous! I remember
I used to look, in those days, upon every three-volume novel
with a sort of veneration, as a feat - not possibly of
literature - but at least of physical and moral endurance and
the courage of Ajax.
In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at
Kinnaird, above Pitlochry. Then I walked on the red moors
and by the side of the golden burn; the rude, pure air of our
mountains inspirited, if it did not inspire us, and my wife
and I projected a joint volume of logic stories, for which
she wrote 'The Shadow on the Bed,' and I turned out 'Thrawn
Janet,' and a first draft of 'The Merry Men.' I love my
native air, but it does not love me; and the end of this
delightful period was a cold, a fly-blister, and a migration
by Strathairdle and Glenshee to the Castleton of Braemar.
There it blew a good deal and rained in a proportion; my
native air was more unkind than man's ingratitude, and I must
consent to pass a good deal of my time between four walls in
a house lugubriously known as the Late Miss McGregor's
Cottage. And now admire the finger of predestination. There
was a schoolboy in the Late Miss McGregor's Cottage, home
from the holidays, and much in want of 'something craggy to
break his mind upon.' He had no thought of literature; it
was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting suffrages;
and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of water
colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture
gallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to
be showman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the
artist (so to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon
with him in a generous emulation, making coloured drawings.
On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it
was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the
shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained
harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the
unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance
'Treasure Island.' I am told there are people who do not
care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the
shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers,
the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable
up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and
the ferries, perhaps the STANDING STONE or the DRUIDIC CIRCLE
on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for
any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to
understand with! No child but must remember laying his head
in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and
seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.
Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of 'Treasure
Island,' the future character of the book began to appear
there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces
and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected
quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting
treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.
The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was
writing out a list of chapters. How often have I done so,
and the thing gone no further! But there seemed elements of
success about this enterprise. It was to be a story for
boys; no need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy
at hand to be a touchstone. Women were excluded. I was
unable to handle a brig (which the HISPANIOLA should have
been), but I thought I could make shift to sail her as a
schooner without public shame. And then I had an idea for
John Silver from which I promised myself funds of
entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the
reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to
deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of
temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his
courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to
try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw
tarpaulin. Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way
of 'making character'; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.
We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words
with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? Our
friend, with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know -
but can we put him in? Upon the first, we must engraft
secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from
the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the
needless arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the
few branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure of.
On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk fire,
and the rain drumming on the window, I began THE SEA COOK,
for that was the original title. I have begun (and finished)
a number of other books, but I cannot remember to have sat
down to one of them with more complacency. It is not to be
wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet. I am
now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once
belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is
conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles
and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of
skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I
am told, is from MASTERMAN READY. It may be, I care not a
jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet's saying:
departing, they had left behind them Footprints on the sands
of time, Footprints which perhaps another - and I was the
other! It is my debt to Washington Irving that exercises my
conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was
rarely carried farther. I chanced to pick up the TALES OF A
TRAVELLER some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose
narrative, and the book flew up and struck me: Billy Bones,
his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner
spirit, and a good deal of the material detail of my first
chapters - all were there, all were the property of
Washington Irving. But I had no guess of it then as I sat
writing by the fireside, in what seemed the spring-tides of a
somewhat pedestrian inspiration; nor yet day by day, after
lunch, as I read aloud my morning's work to the family. It
seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like
my right eye. I had counted on one boy, I found I had two in
my audience. My father caught fire at once with all the
romance and childishness of his original nature. His own
stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep
with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers,
old sailors, and commercial travellers before the era of
steam. He never finished one of these romances; the lucky
man did not require to! But in TREASURE ISLAND he recognised
something kindred to his own imagination; it was HIS kind of
picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily
chapter, but set himself acting to collaborate. When the
time came for Billy Bones's chest to be ransacked, he must
have passed the better part of a day preparing, on the back
of a legal envelope, an inventory of its contents, which I
exactly followed; and the name of 'Flint's old ship' - the
WALRUS - was given at his particular request. And now who
should come dropping in, EX MACHINA, but Dr. Japp, like the
disguised prince who is to bring down the curtain upon peace
and happiness in the last act; for he carried in his pocket,
not a horn or a talisman, but a publisher - had, in fact,
been charged by my old friend, Mr. Henderson, to unearth new
writers for YOUNG FOLKS. Even the ruthlessness of a united
family recoiled before the extreme measure of inflicting on
our guest the mutilated members of THE SEA COOK; at the same
time, we would by no means stop our readings; and accordingly
the tale was begun again at the beginning, and solemnly re-
delivered for the benefit of Dr. Japp. From that moment on,
I have thought highly of his critical faculty; for when he
left us, he carried away the manuscript in his portmanteau.
Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help, and
now a positive engagement. I had chosen besides a very easy
style. Compare it with the almost contemporary 'Merry Men',
one reader may prefer the one style, one the other - 'tis an
affair of character, perhaps of mood; but no expert can fail
to see that the one is much more difficult, and the other
much easier to maintain. It seems as though a full-grown
experienced man of letters might engage to turn out TREASURE
ISLAND at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight. But
alas! this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to it, and
turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early
paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My
mouth was empty; there was not one word of TREASURE ISLAND in
my bosom; and here were the proofs of the beginning already
waiting me at the 'Hand and Spear'! Then I corrected them,
living for the most part alone, walking on the heath at
Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a good deal pleased with
what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict to you
in words at what remained for me to do. I was thirty-one; I
was the head of a family; I had lost my health; I had never
yet paid my way, never yet made 200 pounds a year; my father
had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book that was
judged a failure: was this to be another and last fiasco? I
was indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard,
and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the
winter, had the resolution to think of other things and bury
myself in the novels of M. de Boisgobey. Arrived at my
destination, down I sat one morning to the unfinished tale;
and behold! it flowed from me like small talk; and in a
second tide of delighted industry, and again at a rate of a
chapter a day, I finished TREASURE ISLAND. It had to be
transcribed almost exactly; my wife was ill; the schoolboy
remained alone of the faithful; and John Addington Symonds
(to whom I timidly mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on
me askance. He was at that time very eager I should write on
the characters of Theophrastus: so far out may be the
judgments of the wisest men. But Symonds (to be sure) was
scarce the confidant to go to for sympathy on a boy's story.
He was large-minded; 'a full man,' if there was one; but the
very name of my enterprise would suggest to him only
capitulations of sincerity and solecisms of style. Well! he
was not far wrong.
TREASURE ISLAND - it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the first
title, THE SEA COOK - appeared duly in the story paper, where
it figured in the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and
attracted not the least attention. I did not care. I liked
the tale myself, for much the same reason as my father liked
the beginning: it was my kind of picturesque. I was not a
little proud of John Silver, also; and to this day rather
admire that smooth and formidable adventurer. What was
infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark; I had
finished a tale, and written 'The End' upon my manuscript, as
I had not done since 'The Pentland Rising,' when I was a boy
of sixteen not yet at college. In truth it was so by a set
of lucky accidents; had not Dr. Japp come on his visit, had
not the tale flowed from me with singular case, it must have
been laid aside like its predecessors, and found a circuitous
and unlamented way to the fire. Purists may suggest it would
have been better so. I am not of that mind. The tale seems
to have given much pleasure, and it brought (or, was the
means of bringing) fire and food and wine to a deserving
family in which I took an interest. I need scarcely say I
mean my own.
But the adventures of TREASURE ISLAND are not yet quite at an
end. I had written it up to the map. The map was the chief
part of my plot. For instance, I had called an islet
'Skeleton Island,' not knowing what I meant, seeking only for
the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify this name
that I broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe and stole Flint's
pointer. And in the same way, it was because I had made two
harbours that the HISPANIOLA was sent on her wanderings with
Israel Hands. The time came when it was decided to
republish, and I sent in my manuscript, and the map along
with it, to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they were
corrected, but I heard nothing of the map. I wrote and
asked; was told it had never been received, and sat aghast.
It is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one
corner of it at a venture, and write up a story to the
measurements. It is quite another to have to examine a whole
book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it,
and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit
the data. I did it; and the map was drawn again in my
father's office, with embellishments of blowing whales and
sailing ships, and my father himself brought into service a
knack he had of various writing, and elaborately FORGED the
signature of Captain Flint, and the sailing directions of
Billy Bones. But somehow it was never TREASURE ISLAND to me.
I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost
say it was the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and
Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson's BUCCANEERS, the name
of the Dead Man's Chest from Kingsley's AT LAST, some
recollections of canoeing on the high seas, and the map
itself, with its infinite, eloquent suggestion, made up the
whole of my materials. It is, perhaps, not often that a map
figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important.
The author must know his countryside, whether real or
imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the
compass, the place of the sun's rising, the behaviour of the
moon, should all be beyond cavil. And how troublesome the
moon is! I have come to grief over the moon in PRINCE OTTO,
and so soon as that was pointed out to me, adopted a
precaution which I recommend to other men - I never write now
without an almanack. With an almanack, and the map of the
country, and the plan of every house, either actually plotted
on paper or already and immediately apprehended in the mind,
a man may hope to avoid some of the grossest possible
blunders. With the map before him, he will scarce allow the
sun to set in the east, as it does in THE ANTIQUARY. With
the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow two horsemen,
journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days,
from three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday
night, upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and
before the week is out, and still on the same nags, to cover
fifty in one day, as may be read at length in the inimitable
novel of ROB ROY. And it is certainly well, though far from
necessary, to avoid such 'croppers.' But it is my contention
- my superstition, if you like - that who is faithful to his
map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration,
daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere
negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there;
it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the
words. Better if the country be real, and he has walked
every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with
imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide
a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had
not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though
unsuspected, short-cuts and footprints for his messengers;
and even when a map is not all the plot, as it was in
TREASURE ISLAND, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|