In 1988 we made a short trip to Europe--Vienna, Budapest, Shruns (so I could pontificate on Hemingway). Returning, alone in Strasbourg on a train and a plane I planned out the short book I had promised to write on the composition of BILLY BUDD. I made my notes on both sides of a 9 x 12 manila envelope. Top of third column on back: "When can I write this? . . . Not till after the New Orleans trip, and maybe California Trip? Probably. Maybe August. . . I want to do it at a stretch. I want to do it in 21 days. . . . 6 pages a day average. There's your goal." The reason I wanted to do it fast was that I wanted to know if I would block the whole experience out. Had Melville remembered any details of writing REDBURN in 2 months then going right on and writing WHITE-JACKET in the next 2 months? Then on plane: "Passenger in previous row lighted a cigarette." "Mass Action."
Then New Orleans, salt water pushing upstream. At Tulane on July 7 I Discovered letters from an intimate of the Duyckinck circle to the N O Commercial Bulletin. (I learned that it was Oakey Hall, then young, later DA and Mayor.) Word around the friends was that Melville "wrote WJ in a score of sittings." That could be true. 60 days. Remembering and researching sources and planning and walking then on the third day writing like hell. 20 days. It was possible. At home I took up the manila envelope where I had planned out the BB book and wrote, pointing to the plan to write in 21 days: "13 July 1988 I take an oath that this was all written on the plane, a week before I discovered 'a score of sittings.'" So in an upstairs room without air conditioning, when it was over 90 fourteen days in a row, I wrote it between 13 July and 24 August 1988 and Xeroxed and mailed it on 25 August 1988. After a few months Bobbs-Merrill rejected it because it was too long. Someone said fiercely, "Don't cut a word." I didn't. Eventually, Northwestern published it. My copy of READING BILLY BUDD came 29 January 1991.
I thought that writing a book very fast could help me as a biographer of Melville, who had written 2 books in one summer. Would he even remember what he had written? Years later I realized that the important thing that happened that summer of 1849 was Tom's sailing for China--that Melville's writing REDBURN was a direct consequence of seeing Tom off, just a decade after Gansevoort had seen him, Herman himself, off on his first voyage. Of course finding that Tom had sailed for China that year meant re-dating a bit of a diary from 1860 to 1849, but it was easily done, once I focused on the document--as important as almost anything in the NYPL's trove of AUGUSTA PAPERS. Melville naively thought he could write an easy book about his childhood and youth but he was reckless of the consequence when he dropped his angle into the well of childhood. REDBURN led to PIERRE.
So I was reading Frederick Forsyth's THE OUTSIDER this week. Not a great writer like Melville, but a man with a remarkable life. Not a great prose stylist, but a very great storyteller. Broke, smeared for telling the truth about Biafra, Forsyth thought he might succeed in writing a novel, not about Biafra but about plots to assassinate de Gaulle, his old idea being that only a hired outsider could succeed. He wrote: "On January 2, 1970, I sat down at the kitchen table in my borrowed flat with my trusty old portable typewriter, with its bullet scar across the tin cover, rolled in the first sheet of paper, and began to type. . . .I wrote for thirty-five days, from when my friend went off to work until her return after dark; that is to say, all through January, seven days a week, and the first two weeks of February. Then I typed the last line of the last page. . . . I rolled the first page back into the machine and stared at it. I had called it THE JACKAL. That seemed a bit bare and might be taken for a nature documentary set in Africa. So in front of the title, I typed THE DAY OF. If I say so myself, not a single word has been changed since."
Forsyth's next chapter begins: "For the whole of the spring and summer of 1970, I hawked the manuscript of The Day of the Jackal around the publishing houses of London." Oh, someone had humiliated Melville by spreading word in New York City that in the Fall of 1849 Melville in his attempt to sell the "right" of WHITE-JACKET had "wearily hawked this book from Piccadilly to Whitechapel, calling upon every publisher in his way, and could find no one rash enough to buy his 'protected right.'"
Two great adventurers, two great storytellers, wearily hawking manuscripts around London! One book written in a score of sittings, and the other book written in 35 days. Well, I had written one in 43 days, and had been proud of that speed. I don't recall wearily hawking mine though. After Bobbs-Merrill turned it down it worked its slow way through Northwestern. I think a reader held it up a very long time.
Now I am going to make up for lost years by reading THE DAY OF THE JACKAL and THE ODESSA FILE. The experiences promise to be almost as good as reading an new novel by John Buchan, who was so like Forsyth in getting his story all in mind and sitting down and just putting it on paper. Admirable men!
No comments:
Post a Comment