A Novelist’s Needs

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 956, 26 April 1930, Page 29

A Novelist’s Needs

*yVhy Women Writers Succeed jF~ [Written for The Snn.J SOMETHING less than, a century ago, a certain lady, having written a novel, considered it necessary to adopt the masculine name of George Eliot in order to encourage the public to buy her work. To-day, there is more likelihood of the opposite being done—of a man taking the name of a woman in order to sell hig books. For, during the last 20 years, the .women have glutted the market with their novels. It is becoming increasingly difficult for a man to get a word in edgeways. What, If a mere man may ask the question, is the explanation of this appalling facility for novel-writing which the women of to-day seem to possess? Is it that women are better writers than men, and have only just found it out? Is the level of intelligence higher among them? Or is it simply that the process of grinding out a novel does not require intelligence? I have my ow n theories on the subject, which will no doubt be jreeted with hoarse laughter by the Amazons. The fact of the matter is that the Writing of a novel does not demand intelligence of a very high order. Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, was a man of considerable intelligence; yet he could no more have churned out a novel than have written a Shakespearian play, or refrained from dipping into the petty cash. Aristotle and Spinoza had more than the average amount of intelligence, yet neither of them can be imagined as the author of a best-seller. The novel is concerned with life, not with thought. Mr H. G. Wells wrote a “novel of ideas,” and you can pick up copies “as new” in all the second-hand book hops in the kingdom. But his earlier novels of life still sell in quantity. In order to be a successful novelist •me must possess certain faculties which are more commonly found in women than in men. One must be an observer, rather than a thinker. One must be interested in persons and things, rather than in ideas. The women have the advantage in these respects. They are not much given to thinking for its own sake, which is the enemy of novel-writing. Men, on the other hand, when they possess any intelligence, usually become addicted to philosophical speculation, to the formulating of barren theories about the nature of things, rather than to observing and recording the events of everyday life. Takj myself, for intance. I once tried to write a novel. At the end of two thousand words I found myself deep in a discussion as to the respective advantages of primitive and civilised life. My chief character, who for the first three paragraphs had held the stage like a musical comedy lead, was drowned in a flood of rhetoric, and completely forgotten. If I had been a woman, things would have gone differently. At the point where I stopped and threw the thing into the waste-paper basket. 1 should have had the character of my hero drawn in with sure and vivid strokes, and have had him half-way through his first love affair. But that, as I hear somebody say, proves nothing; except perhaps that I am incapable of writing a novel. Women, as a class, are observers. They notice things which escape men. And since any novel must consist largely of a mass of detail of the sevt which can come only from a close observation of ordinary life, the men, v'-ho are too polite to do much staring, and have no taste for it in any case, are as a disadvantage. Take any man you like into a roomful of people, leave him there for 10 minutes, and fetch him out again. He will be able to remember very little more-about the room and its contents than such blatantly obvious things as the position of the door and the piano and the table, and a few meagre facts to the approximate height, girth, and facial colouring of one or two of the people. Make the same test with a woman, and you will find that she remembers exactly where every article of furniture stood, can tell you the colour, material, and piece of the dress of every woman in the room, the (probable) time that has elapsed since the place was last swept, the condition of the finger-nails of every man present, and any other little details you care to astc for. Another faculty which is essential m the craft of fiction is garrulousness. At the risk of making a comic supplement joke. I must insist on the substantial truth of the legend that women are more talkative than men. A novel consists largely of talk. There is, in the first place, the dialogue; but even apart from this, the descriptions of people and places which help to fill up the covers are for the most part nothing more nor less than talk and it may be added, just the sort of gossipy talk in which women excel when herded together. Consider the novels of Virginia Woolf. They consist merely of the conversation of an unusually clever woman, who likes gossiping, and prefers to do it as publicly as possible: clever, because she has the common sense to put down her conversation on paper and sell it between covers at a nice profit, nstead of dissipating it at afternoon tea narties-

xne first step for a woman to take in writing a novel is to lock herself up alone in a room for some considerable time, without anybody tq talk to. No normal woman could do this without incurring the risk of a nervous breakdown. But in the case of an intelligent woman, all that is necessary after this first step has been taken is a pen and ink and a ream of paper. She must talk to somebody. And that somebody can’t be herself: it is not practicable in conversation with oneself to say those deeply sympathetic, or banal, or clever and epigrammatic, or merely malicious things which go to make up the chatter of intelligent women. The only thing left is to write a novel. I have no doubt whatever that most of our women novelists owe their careers to some accident of eircum stance which cuts off from the world for a time, either virtually, as in the case of loneliness in a great city, or actually, as the result of being snowed up, or marooned, or in some other way isolated from the rest of their kind. The trouble is that, having done it once, they acquire a taste for it. They begin to see the advantages of this method of talking. One can make a world of one’s own., One

can. be (vicariously, through this or vat character) as catty, as clever, as generous, as beautiful, as well-dressed and as witty as one chooses. And; above all, one can talk to the heart’s content without fear of interruption. . And so they go on piling them out. They write for the sheer love of it, these women. Most of the men who write novels, I am certain, regard the operation as a necessary evil, and a huge bore. One cannot make money out of poetry: so one writes a novel to keep the hounds at bay, and then goes back to the real business of a literary man —writing poetry, eating, drinking, and enjoying life generally. A. R. D. FAIRBURN.