Holiday Writing
BY MOTH.
" THE holidays," they said, " are coming round again. You must write something suitable for Holiday Reading. You can call it Thoughts In Idleness, or something like that."
It sounded too good to be true. Thoughts In Idleness ! The title, as it seemed to me, carried a passport for every platitude, a free pardon for all irrelevance. With all possible speed I bought a pencil nine inches long.
It is always a good thing, on these occasions, to buy a pencil, even a comparatively short one. The necessity— for it is a necessity (see Professor J. K. L. Nonny's mono- graph, How To Get The Best Out Of a Pencil (Jagforth and Bline. 35. 6d.), page 303)—of sharpening it, and, even before you can do that, of deciding which end you are going to sharpen, at once clears and stimulates the mind. Behind every literary or journalistic controversy, behind every libel action, you will find sonic hothead with a smoking fountain-pen. The pencil-user rarely gets into trouble ; he has time to look before he leaps, and lands on the right side of the fence.
Thus it was that I, as I whittled at my fine new pencil, pondered more deeply on this title, Thoughts in Idleness, and began, as I pondered, to have my doubts and to lose some of my elation. I remembered, first, that countless other essayists had committed themselves to paper under titles only slightly different. I recalled a facetious Lazy Musings, a provocative Spare-Time Speculations, a weighty Meditations at Leisure, a rather daring Day- Dreams of a Fainéant, and a host of others. But it was not their quantity, nor even their quality, that gave me pause. If that sort of thing had to be done, I felt that I could do it as well as another. No ; I was not worried about how, or what, or even why, to write. It was a question of where.
Cast back your minds to anything you have ever read under what we will for the moment regard as the generic title of Thoughts in Idleness, and try to recollect the opening paragraph. Does it not begin by describing how the author is prone (whether. on his back or his stomach is immaterial and not always specified) in the heather, or the edelweiss, or the sand; or the snow, or on. - some other equally desirable integument of the earth's crust ? Does it not go on to say that there are corning, ever so faintly, to his ears the noises made by not less than one, and not more than two, of the following : cow- bells, surf, bees, old peasant women (quaint ones), guitars, chamois, curlews (or whaups), punkahs, larks, or the mizzen stays'l spinnaker, whether fore or aft? Is it not then noted that he is gazing either upwards at the . in- credible blue of the sky, downwards at the unbelievable emerald of the sea, or sideways at the astonishing green of the grass, the scarcely-to-be-credited white of the snow, or the frankly improbable beige of the plage ? Does it not begin like that ? Of course it does. And I will tell you why.
You must know that the Thoughts in Idlenesi of a literary man are really a kind of base revenge taken on his readers ; for, being written during his 'exiguous vacation, and stated to be so written, they are designed to set up a strong yearning and a feeling of envy for *hat is still, I believe, called the Literary Life in Kensington and certain of the suburbs ; the people in those parts little imagining that the reality which they romanticize is, in truth, the most grim, arduous, and degrading of all the existences, not excepting even that of the wretched fellow who crawls along under trains, tapping at, the -wheels with a tiny hammer for -no good reason. " How fortunate is this chap," says the reader of a pukka Thoughts in Idleness, " who is for ever lying in the sun, surrounded by delightful sights and sounds, and distended by a-wine which he claims to have been of the very first cpiklity " (for I had forgotten to say that this matter of the Wine or, with the more established authors, beer-7is invariably touched on)," how fortunate he is to be able to capitalize his siesta by jotting down the amusing, though perhaps rather inconsequent, reflections to which (so he says).* prompted him ! How I wish I could earn my own living in circumstances one half so attractive! " And so the seeds of discontent are planted in the breast Of many a chartered accountant—aye, and many a 'girl-typist, too—and an ever-greater proportion of Britain's youth stays at home in the evenings in temperamental isolation, writing stark short stories on their dressing-tables, instead of tasting the joys of social intercourse and manly recrea- tion by waiting in the pavilion of the Tennis Club for the rain to stop.
So perhaps, on the whole, it is just as well that I. am not the right man to do them an article called ThoughiS In Idleness : or, if I am the right man, I am in,the -wrong . place. So far from being prone in the sun, I- am sitting on a hard, wizened chair, within a bowshot of the crowds in the Tottenham Court Road (but what good is that to me, who have no bow ?). Outside, a light, but wetting, rain is falling. The sky is not incredibly blue, but a yellowish grey, the very Colotir of plausibility. The sea, as every schoolboy knows, is out of sight. If —as is most improbable—there are in fact coming, every so faintly, to my ears the sounds of cow-bells, or old peasant women, or any of the rest of it, they will have to come a lcit less faintly before I hear them, for there is a filthy noise going on in the next room, and under my window what I take to be an eXhumation is being conducted in the middle of the street by seven huge ghouls.
So you see there is a fundamental incompatibility between my whereabouts and the task I have to perform. I could, I suppose—even situated as I am concoct one of those random, whimsical, engaging pat-poitrris of slightly sentimental paradOx, the sweepings of a year's table-talk, Which are the only compositiOns proper, to the title Thoughts in idleness. But now you..know where I am, you would not read it ; or, at least, you would be fools if you did. No ; it is evident that I must start again.
" Supine in the bog-myrtle, I listen with a- dreamy contentment to the keening of the goose-,gir1S- which comes, ever so faintly, to my ears as they lead their gaggles down. the winding path to the village of St. Fitiiaa. Bouillabaisse-de-Fou-Rire. The old peasant iwoMen; toil; in their quaint chapeaux, are making a certain. amount of noise. Gazing- upwards into the unbelievable blue-Of the sky, I ask myself whether perhaps, after all, in spite of what is sometimes asserted by people of one sort and another, Life, taking it in the round, is, in the common but not to be despised phrase, worth it. But it may be that the excellent Duhamel et Minssen, 1901, which I drank for lunch would affect my judgement on what is, look at.it how you will, a very big question."
"Talking of salted almonds, now 71 That, I fancy,. is what you had a right to expect. Well, give me .a week-end ticket to the Cornish Riviera and I will see what can be done about finishing it.
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