MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD N1COLSON
HAVING just finished a book on which I have been engaged for a considerable time, I ought, I suppose, to be experiencing some at least of the emotions recorded by Edward Gibbon when he wrote the last word of the Decline and Fall. We are told that Gibbon began his great work when he was a stout young man of twenty-seven and finished it when he was an obese and prematurely aged man of fifty. We have been assured by the author himself that it was on October 15th, 1764, "as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter," that the idea of his tremendous history first " started " to his mind. He tells us again that it was between eleven o'clock and midnight on June 27th, 1787, that he wrote the last word of the last volume, seated in the summer-house that closed the acacia terrace of his garden at Lausanne. Having laid down his pen, he "took several turns" along his terrace, gazing down at the lights of Ouchy twinkling beside the lake and across to where the mountains of Savoy glimmered distantly under "the silver orb of the moon." He analyses the thoughts and feelings that then assailed him. There were in the first place the "emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame.' These emotions were rapidly succeeded by "a sober melancholy" at the thought that he had taken" an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatever might be the future fate of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious." All this is most moving and salutary. But in fact the experience was not as neat or final as all that. For eight years after 1764 he merely contemplated his intended book "from an awful dis- tance": : it was not until 1772, in No. 7 Bentinck Street, that he really settled down to work; and even then his concentration was distracted by his service as major in the Hampshire militia and by his not infrequent, although silent, attendances in the House of Commons. .
* * * * Moreover it is not given to man to finish a book sharply and punctually, as one finishes a journey by stepping on to the platform at Victoria station at 4.46 p.m. Even Gibbon, when he laid down his pen in his Lausanne summer-house on that warm summer night, -could not really claim that he had finished the Decline and Fall. There followed eight months in England, spent staying with Lord Sheffield either in Downing Street or at Sheffield Place, when he discussed publication with his publisher Cadell, attended the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and wrote additional notes to his great history. He discovered, as all historians must discover, that certain new material, such as the Assizes of Jerusalem, had somehow to be incorporated, or at least mentioned, in the last three volumes. The Duke of Gloucester was justified in gobbling at him the words : "Always scribble, scribble, scribble ! Eh, Mr. Gibbon ? " The moment when the pen was laid sown at Lausanne was certainly a sym- bolic moment: but it was not the end. He must have feared, since his health was as he said "precarious," that he might never live to write the final notes, or to see his last volumes appear in perfect form. But there must have come one day, whether in Downing Street or Sheffield Place, when he really did correct the last proof of the last note, and when he really did feel that the Decline and Fall had parted from him for ever. That moment is not recorded in any of the variants of his autobiography. He probably never noticed it: one can never say at what second exactly an aeroplane glides out of sight.
Although Gibbon took twenty-three years, more or less, to write his wonderful history, my own little opuscule has taken me no more than three years and a half. Did I experience "emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom " ? Not in the very least. I was glad of course to have finished the book before the hem- lock of senility numbs my every faculty. I shared with Gibbon a certain sadness at taking leave of a companion that has kept me entranced for three-and-a-half years. I am, alas ! unable to participate in his fully justified hopes regarding the "establish- ment of my fame," knowing well that fame, whatever that may be, is not for me. And I knew, and know, that "freedom " will not follow this long and arduous task, that it will be "type, type, type ! Eh, Mr. Nicolson ? " until the final collapse. For me also, I suppose, there will come the moment when I really do correct the last proof of the last note and when I see the book no more until it appears bound in blue. That moment, as when an aeroplane fades into the mist and then appears again, will pass unperceived. Since the instant when I typed the last word of my manuscript was, I well knew, not the end, but only the beginning of the end. There were the galley proofs to come; there were verifications and additions; there was the "Author's Note "; there were the illustrations and then the page proofs; there was the table of contents; there were the appendices, the reference notes, and the genealogical trees; and there was the index. It is on this gruelling task that I have lately been engaged. I recommend it as a test, an endurance test, to those who are interested in the really odd movements of the human brain.
a
I am convinced that any conscientious author should write his index himself, especially when his book, as mine, is heavy to read. He alone can estimate the relative importance of those who figure in his narrative: he alone can tell what episodes are illustrative; what themes need to be stressed. No professional compiler can judge how to render the index sufficiently analyti- cal to enable the student to acquire the desired information without having to read the beastly book all through. Nobody but the author can compile the index as a guide or key to the tired reviewer, or be sufficiently sympathetic to the latter to provide him with all manner of short cuts through the dreary wastes of five hundred closely-printed pages. Moreover the writing of an index to a book that has taken several years to compose produces all manner of interesting feelings. There is the " sober melancholy" of recovering from one's own oblivion names that figured in the earlier chapters, when the heart was fresh. There is the gratification of devoting these last weeks of drudgery to the proper completion of a work that has been, in Gibbon's words, " an old and agreeable. companion "; one plants a little rosemary on the grave. There is the strange .pleasure of performing a task which is largely, but not wholly, mechanical and which we imagine (probably quite wrongly) that we do neatly and well There is the delightful jumble of opposites, when the incongruous jostle together as lists upon the typewritten page, when Lear comes next to League of Nations, or Dyspepsia to Dyprosium. And there is the satisfaction of seeing a work that has occupied so many winters and summers boiled down to tablet shape.
* * Words, curiously enough, are the bricks with which a book is constructed. We fit these bricks together one by one, taking pains to see that a certain symmetry is preserved, that the edges are not too ragged. We handle our bricks lovingly, rejecting an ugly brick now and then, or now and then a brick that seems too garish or unreal. -Chip, chip, flap, flap, we work like any mason, and gradually the bricks make walls and moms, and then a house rises; the day May come, perhaps between eleven and midnight in June, when the roof is finished. But then there -remain the windows, and the painting, and the furnishing, and the clearing of the mess. The day arrives when the builder slams the front door happily and sadly, murmuring "Work well done " : but the front door sticks, and the chisel has to be taken out of its basket, and the end is not yet. Which is all to the good.
Previous page
