MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
N Sloane Square the other day I met a friend who had just been I demobilised. I asked him what he meant to do now. "Well," he answered, " as a matter of fact, I was thinking of writing a book. Tell me, since you know about these things, how does one write a book? " I gazed across that ungainly Square towards the bright facade of Peter Jones. " Many years ago," I said—a trifle senten- tiously perhaps—" I asked Somerset Maugham how one wrote a play. He gave me excellent advice." "And what was that advice? " my friend asked me. " He said, ' Well, you get an idea ; and then you write a p-p-p-play about it.' " " Yes, I see," my friend murmured, and thereat we went our different ways across pavements glistening in September rain. I realised, as I walked, that I had not been helpful. I realised that having written books myself, I should have asked the man to luncheon and explained at length to him how the thing is done. I realised that on that afternoon of all afternoons I should have been in a mood of philanthropic helpfulness, since on that very morning I had typed the last words of the final chapter of a book on which I had been engaged for two years. I should have been filled with a mood of achievement and lassitude, of melancholy and delight, such as assailed Gibbon on the night of June 27th, 1787, when he paced his acacia walk having just blotted the last words of the Decline and Fall. I should have been more communicative and less selfish. I should have told him that the first essential is to know what one wishes to say ; that the second essential is to decide to whom one wishes to say it. Once one has chosen the theme and selected the audience, then the book more or less should write itself. But would that have been helpful to a young officer recently demobilised? And how, after all, does one really write a book?
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