PERSONAL COLUMN

Words per minute

BENNY GREEN

As your eyes race along this line of print, you are embarking on an essay of approxi- mately fourteen hundred words. Nobody has actually counted them, and they may well amount to fifteen hundred, or, if I decide to use a great many polysyllables, no more than thirteen. But when the editor asked for fourteen hundred, we both knew what he meant, and I am writing the required word- age to fill a given space. The time is ten thirty in the morning and I have no idea how long it will take me. if things go exception- ally well I could have the whole thing wrapped up before lunch and spend the rest of the day enjoying myself. If, on the other hand, I become bored by my theme, or con- fused by my thoughts, or if I suddenly de- cide there are cosmic implications in the piece which at first escaped my notice, or if my typewriter ribbon starts acting up, it might stretch over into tomorrow, or even, terrible thought, the day after. Fourteen hundred words. A few columns, a dozen paragraphs, five minutes casual reading. Absolute child's play. Why, already I have written a hundred and seventy and I have hardly begun. But how easy is it? And how arduous? Nobody can say, not Tolstoy, not Dickens, not Dumas Ore, who is said have written over four hundred novels, not even Proust, who only wrote one. A writer's daily output of words, and the way he achieves it, is per- haps the one aspect of his life that can be fully understood by the layman. But there is no norm, no possible way of fixing a ratio of words to time, or words to money, or even of time to merit. Sometimes the most hurried writing is the best—but only sonii- times. My own platonic ideal is a thousand words a day, a perilous notion I picked up many years ago from Arnold Bennett's journals. All his life Bennett computed his output like a miser, keeping himself up to the mark with what was almost certainly a neurotic terror of idleness, and ending each year with the kind of grand summary which made him appear less like a man than a corn-

puter—`Dec 31, 1908. I wrote Buried Alive, of Old Wives' Tale, What the Public Wants, The Human Machine, Literary Taste, How to Form It, half a dozen short stories,

over 60 newspaper articles. Total 423,500 words' Bennett knew perfectly well that in practis- ing this meticulous arithmetic he was flying in the face of the romantic misconception of the artist as an impractical dreamer await- ing inspiration. There had been the salutary lesson of Anthony Trollope, who, twenty years before Bennett started compiling his sums, had published an autobiography so candid about his working methods as to cost him his reputation among aesthetes for the next fifty years. Trollope took especial de- light in describing how he worked from 5.30 am until breakfast.,each morning, with his watch on the table before him, so that he could maintain his pace of 250 words per quarter hour and justify his theory that 'three hours a day will produce as much as a man

ought to write'. Today Trollope is respect- able once more, but the romantic ideal dies hard. Not so very long ago, when Bennett's Imperial Palace was republished, a review by

Michael Foot implied that nobody who troubled to compute his own wordage could be a really fine writer.

One aspect of the problem which seems never to occur to anybody but writers them- selves is the sheer physical hardship. Some writers are tougher than others, and when I hear of their feats of endurance I stagger back with the same incredulous horror that Michael Frayn once showed to me when I mentioned to him my daily stint of a thousand words. Frayn explained that for him, anything over 300 would reduce him to a jelly. What then, would he have made of a character like Balzac, who could stick at it for fifteen or sixteen hours a day, especi- ally when the broker's men were in the vicinity? In the preface to Sinister Street, Compton Mackenzie describes his haste in completing certain sections of that marathon work. 'All that July I worked twelve hours a day on the second volume.' Or in terms of wordage, an average of very nearly 5,000 a day. In another context Mackenzie claims to have written Figure of Eight in a month, which works out at rather more than 3,000 a day, the same working rate that Conan Doyle achieved while compiling The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

The point about both-. Mackenzie and Doyle is that sheer physical energy becomes a major factor. Quite apart from what they had to say, each was in excellent physical condition to say it. Doyle was a formidable heavyweight boxer who scored centuries for the MCC; Mackenzie's physical resilience has been legendary for many years now. Both men were like born marathon runners, whereas for my own part, not only could I not write for twelve hours a day, but I could not do anything for twelve hours a day. Long before then mental boredom would induce physical fatigue. Indeed, I know myself far too well even to attempt such a feat, After three hours my back starts to ache. After four I am producing pure gib- berish. After five—frankly I have never tried, but it might be interesting to see what came out.

An interesting variation on the theme of the marathon writer is Simenon, who, to gather from reports, is more the weight- lifter type, contemplating the load for some time before working up the mental concen-

tration to attempt a lift. Then, at the psycho- logical moment, having sharpened all his pencils and checked all his railway time- table he snatches, and voila, a fifty thousand word novel in eleven days. It is said that as a young man Simenon sat in a shop window writing a novel in full view of the pedes- trians, and handing over each completed sheet to a typesetter, also sitting in the window. The significance of this anecdote is that it suggests how little Simenon needs to rewrite, which makes his eleven-day sprints a shade more feasible to normal, everyday writers.

On the other hand there is always Flaubert, trudging doggedly down the twilit corridors of his own ideal, searching for les mots jusies, and finding only 200 a day, which is why it took him seven years to write Madame Bovary, and perhaps also why, after the end of it he expressed a loathing for the book and a desire to buy in all existing copies and burn them. Edmond de Goncourt writes in his journal, 'Flaubert told me that for two months he worked fifteen hours a day on Un Coeur Simple; he went to bed at four in the morning and was sometimes surprised to find himself back at his writing table at nine. Nine hundred hours' work for a story thirty pages long.' Flaubert might claim his painstaking methods were justified by the result, but was he any better a writer than, say, Stendhal, who completed The Charter- house of Parma in the totally ridiculous time of fifty days?

Different writers in differing crises have evolved all sorts of methods to facilitate work-rate. Carlyle could write only in com- plete silence, and not very well even then, if contemporary taste is anything to go by; the gentle Chekhov, on the other hand, must have been as tough as old boots, writing, as he sometimes did, in a crowded family living room. Mark Twain, a writer unusually prone to the mental block, had a beautifully simple way of coping with the problem, which was to throw the work aside and forget all about it, which is why Huckleberry Finn was six

years in the writing. Lawrence Durrell would never have done such a thing. His advice to

the writer faced by a block is to change the colour of the typing paper: Not much use to Ronald Firbank, who could compose only on large blue rectangular postcards. Edmond

de Goncourt, who took himself so seriously

that his journals are one of the unintentional comic masterpieces of the nineteenth century, wrote, 'When I want to write a stylistic pass- age, I have to wash my hands beforehand. I cannot write with my hands dirty.' The all-time champion must be the pseu- donymous Frank Richards, creator of Billy

Bunter, who, at the age of seventy, was averaging 60,000 words a week, or fifty modern-length novels a year. If there is a heaven, which seems unlikely, and writers are allowed into it. which seems even more unlikely, it might he interesting to see what

Flaubert and Richards made of each other.

They might enjoy comparing notes while Goncourt was washing his hands, with the

old fox Dumas pere laughing his head off at

such goings-on. When Dumas fits arrived at a literary impasse, 'the old man would come in, write the scenario, eat a cutlet, bring in

a whore, borrow some money and go off again'. But I see I have filled my allotted

space. it is just after three o'clock. Not at all

a had day, considering. I could go on, but what would he the point? Anything over

fourteen hundred and the editor would be sure to cut me off in mid-sentence, with not the slightest regard for my