15 - My First Book by Various

Have you ever been curious about how your favorite authors embarked on their writing journeys? Did they dive headfirst into the world of literature, or did they pour their hearts into their stories after long days at the office? Some faced countless rejections, while others tasted success almost immediately. In this captivating collection, we hear directly from the authors themselves—like Bret Harte, Arthur Conan Doyle, R.M. Ballantyne, and H. Rider Haggard—as they share the pivotal moments that launched their literary careers. Join us as we explore the diverse experiences that shaped some of the most beloved writers in history. - Summary by Lynne Thompson

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter fourteen of my first book. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
by Jennifer Painter, my first book by various Chapter fourteen,

(00:23):
The Western Avernus by Morley Roberts. Certainly no one was
more surprised than myself when I discovered that I could
write decent prose and even make money out of it.
For during many years, my youthful aspirations had been to
rival Rossetti or get on a level with Browning, rather

(00:44):
than to make a living out of literature as a profession.
But when I did start a book, I went through
three years of American experience like fire through flax, and
wrote The Western Averness, a volume containing ninety three thousand words,
in less than a lunar month. I had been in
Australia years before, coming home before the Mast as an

(01:08):
a b in a blackwall liner, but my occasional efforts
to turn that experience into form always failed. Once or
twice I read some of my prose to friends who
told me that it was worse even than my poetry.
Such criticism naturally confirmed me in the belief that I
must be a poet or nothing, and I soon got

(01:30):
into a fair way to become nothing. For my health
broke down at last. Finding my choice lay between two
kinds of tragedies, I chose the least and went off
to Texas. On February twenty seventh, eighteen eighty four, I
was working in a government office as a writer. On

(01:51):
March twenty seventh, I was sheep herding in Scurry County,
northwest Texas, in the south of the Panhandle. This experience
was the opening of the western of everness. But I
should never have written the book if it had not
been for two friends of mine. One was George Gissing
and the other W. H. Hudson, the Argentine naturalist. When

(02:16):
I returned from the West and yarned to them of
starvation and toil and strife in that new world, they
urged me to put it down instead of talking it.
I suppose they looked on it as good material running
to verbal conversational waste. Being both writers of many years
standing now, I understand their point of view, and carry

(02:40):
a notebook or an odd piece of paper to jot
down motives that crop up in occasional talk. But then
I was ignorant and astonished at the wild notion of
writing anything saleable. However, in desperation, for I had no money,
I began to write and went ahead in the same
way that I have so far kept to. I wrote

(03:03):
it without notes, without care, without thought, save that each
night the past was resurgent and alive before and within me,
just as it was when I worked and starved between
Texas and the Great Northwest. Each Sunday I read what
I had done to George Issing, at first with terror,

(03:25):
but afterwards with more confidence when he nodded approval, and
as the end approached, I began to believe in it myself.
It is only six years since the book was finished
and sent to Messrs Smith, Elder and Co. But it
seems half a century ago. So much has happened since then.

(03:45):
And when it was accepted and published and paid for
and actually reviewed favorably, I almost determined to take to
literature as a profession. I remembered that when I was
a boy of eleven, I wrote a romance with twenty people,
men and women in it. I married them all off
at the end being then in the childish mind of

(04:07):
the most usual novelist who believes or pretends to believe,
or at any rate, by implication, teaches that the interesting
part of life finishes. Then, instead of beginning, I recall
the fact that I wrote Doggerel verse at the age
of thirteen when I was at Bedford Grammar School, and
that an ardent, ignorant conservatism drove me when I was

(04:30):
at Owens College, Manchester, to lumpoon the liberal candidates in
rhymes and placed them up in the big laboratory. And
under the influence of these memories, I began to think
that perhaps scribbling was my natural trade. I had tried
some forty different callings, including salorizing, saw mill work, bullock driving, tramping,

(04:56):
and the selling of books in San Francisco, with in
different financial success. So perhaps my metiere was the making
of books instead. So I went on trying and had
a very bad time for two years. Having written The
Western of Earnest in a kind of intuitive, instructive way,

(05:17):
it came easily enough to me, but very soon I
began to think of the technique of writing and wrote badly.
I had to look back at the best part of
that book to be assured I could write at all
for a long time. It was a consolation and a
distress to me, for I had to find out that
knowledge must get into one's fingers before it can be used.

(05:42):
Only those who know nothing, or who know a great
deal very well, can write decently, and the intermediate state
is exceedingly painful. Both the public and private laudation of
my American book made me unhappy. Then I thought I
had only that one book in me. Some of the
letters I received from America, and more particularly British Columbia,

(06:06):
were anything but cheerful reading. One man of whom I
have spoken rather freely, said I should be hanged on
a cottonwood tree if I ever set foot in the
colony again. I do not believe there are any cottonwoods there,
but he used a phrase common in American literature. Another
well home friend of mine, who had read some favorable criticisms,

(06:30):
wrote me to say he was sure Messrs Smith and
Elder had paid for them. He had understood it was
always done, and now he knew the truth of it.
Because the book was so bad, I almost feared to
return to British Columbia. The critics there might use worse
weapons than a sneering paragraph. In England, the worst one

(06:52):
need fear is an action for criminal libel, or a
rough and tumble fight. There it might end in an inquest.
I wrote back to my critics that if I ever
came out again, I would come armed and endeavor to
reply effectually. For that wildlife, far away from the ancient

(07:13):
set and hardened bonds of social law, which crush a
man and make him just like his fellows, or so
nearly like that only intimacy can distinguish individual differences, had
allowed me to grow in another way and become more myself,
more independent, more like a savage, better able to fight

(07:33):
and endure. That is the use of going abroad, and
going abroad to places that are not civilized. They allow
a man to revert and be himself. It may make
his return hard, his endurance of social bonds bitterer, but
it may help him to refuse to endure. He may

(07:54):
attain to some natural sight. Not many weeks ago, I
was talking to a well known American publisher, and our
conversation ran on the Transopsianic view of Europe. He was
amused and delighted to come across an Englishman who was
so Americanized in one way as to look on our
standing camps and armed kingdoms, as citizens of the states do,

(08:19):
especially those who live in the west. To the American
Europe seems like a small collection of walled yards, each
with a crowing fighting clock defying the universe on the
top of his own dunghill, with an occasional scream from
the wall. The whole of our international politics gets to
look small and petty, and a bitter waste of power.

(08:42):
Perhaps the American view is right. At any rate, it
seems so. When I sat far aloof upon the lofty
mountains to the west of the Great Plains, the isolation
from the politics of the moment allowed me to see
nature and natural law. And as it was with nations,

(09:02):
so it was with men out yonder in the west.
Most of us were brutal at times, and ready to
kill or be killed. But my American bred acquaintances looked
like men, strikingly, like men independent, free, equal to the
need of the ensuing day or the call of some

(09:23):
sudden hour. It is a liberal education to the law
abiding Englishmen to see a good specimen of a Texan
cowboy walk down a Western Street, for he looks like
a law unto himself, calm and greatly assured of the
validity of his own enactments. We live in a crowd here,

(09:44):
and it takes a rebel to be himself, and in
the struggle for freedom, he is likely to go under.
While I was gaining the experience that went solid and
crystallized into the western of earness, I was discovering much
but had never been discovered before, not in a geographical sense,

(10:05):
for I have been in few places where men have
not been, But in myself. Each new task teaches us
something new and something more than the mere way to
do it. To drive horses, or milk a cow, or
make bread or kill a sheep sets us level with
facts and face to face with some reality. We are

(10:28):
called on to be real and not the shadow of others.
This is the worth that is in all real workers,
whatever they do, under whatever conditions. Every truth so learnt
strips away ancient falsehood from us. It is real education,
not the taught instruction, which makes us alike and thus

(10:50):
shams merely arming us with weapons to fight our fellows
in the crowded, unwholesome life of falsely civilized cities, and
in America there is the sharp contrast between the city
life and the life of the mountain and the plain.
It is seen more clearly than in England, which is

(11:11):
all more or less city. There are no clear stellar
interspaces in our life here, but out yonder. A long
day's train ride across the high barren cactus plateaus of
Arizona teaches us as much as a clear and open
depth in the sky, For all of a sudden we

(11:31):
run into the very midst of a big town, and
shams are made gods for our worship. It is difficult
to be oneself when all others refuse to be themselves.
This was for me the lesson of the West and
the life there. When I wrote this book, I did
not know it. I wrote almost unconsciously, without taking thought,

(11:53):
without weighing words, without conscious knowledge. But I see now
what I learned in a hard and bitter school. For
I acknowledged that the experience was at times bitterly painful.
It is not pleasant to toil sixteen hours a day.
It is not good to starve over much. It is

(12:14):
not well to feel bitter for long months. And yet
it is well and good and pleasant in the end
to learn realities and live without lies. It is better
to be a truthful animal than a civilized man. As
things go, I learned much from horses and cattle and sheep.

(12:35):
The very prairie dogs taught me. The ospreys and the
salmon they preyed on expressed truths. They didn't attempt to
live on words or the dust and ashes of dead things.
They were themselves and no one else, and were not
diseased with theories or a morbid altruism that is based
on dependence. This, I think, is the lesson I learned

(12:59):
from my own book. I did not know it when
I wrote it. I never thought of writing it. I
never meant to write anything. I only went to America
because England and the life of London made me ill.
If I could have lived my own life here, I
would have stayed. But the crushing combination of social forces

(13:20):
drove me out. For fear of cutting my own throat,
I left and took my chance with natural forces. To
fight with nature makes men. To fight with society makes
devils or criminals or martyrs, and sometimes a man may
be all three. I preferred to revert to mere natural

(13:41):
conditions for a time, to lead such a life for
a long time is to give up creeds and to
go to the universal storehouse. Whence all creeds come. It
is giving up dogmas and becoming religious. In true opposition
to instructive nature, we find our own natural religion, which

(14:03):
cannot be wholly like any other. So a life of
this kind does not make men good in the common
sense of the word, but it makes a man good
for something. It may make him an ethical outcast, as
facts faced always will. He prefers induction to deduction, especially

(14:23):
the sanctioned, unverified deductions of social order, for nature affords
the only verification for the logical process of deduction. We
fear nature too much, to say the least, for most
of us hold on to other men's theories instead of
making our own. When Mill said solitude in the sense

(14:45):
of being frequently alone is necessary to the formation of
any depth of character, he spoke almost absolute truth. But
here we can be alone. The very air is full
of the dead breath others. I learned more in a
four days walk over the California coast range, living on

(15:06):
parched Indian corn, than I could have done in a
lifetime of the solitude of a lonely house. The Selkirks
and the rocky mountains are books of ancient learning. The
long plains of gray grass, the burnt plateaus of the
hot South speak eternal truths to all who listen. They
need not listen, for their men do not learn by

(15:29):
the ear. They breathe the knowledge in. In speaking as
I have done about America, I do not mean to
praise it as a state or a society. In that respect,
it is perhaps worse than our own, more diseased, more
under the heel of the money fiend, more recklessly and
brutally acquisitive. But there are parts of it still more

(15:52):
or less free. Nature reigns still over vast tracts in
the West. As a democracy is so far a failure,
as democracies must be organized on a plutocratic basis. But
it at any rate allows a man to think himself
a man aught Whitman is the big expression of that thought.

(16:13):
But his fervent belief in America was really but deep
trust in man himself, in man's power of revolt, in
his ultimate recognition of the beauty of the truth. The
power of America to teach lies in the fact that
a great part of her fertile and barren soil has
not yet been taught, not yet cultivated for the bread

(16:35):
which of itself can feed no man wholly. Perhaps, among
the few who have read The Western of earnest for
it was not a financial success, fewer still have seen
what I think I myself see in it now. But
it has taken me six years to understand it, six
years to know how I came to write it and

(16:56):
what it meant. That is the way in life. We
do not learn at once what we are taught. We
do not always understand all we say. Even when speaking earnestly.
There is often one aspect of a book that the
writer himself can learn from, and that is not always
the technical part of it. All sayings may have an

(17:18):
esoteric meaning. In those hard days, by the camp fire
on the trail on the prairie with sheep and cattle,
I did not understand that they called up in me
the ancient underlying experience of the race, and like a
deep plow brought to the surface the lowest soil, which

(17:39):
should hereafter be a little fertile. When I starved, I
thought not of our far ancestors, who had suffered too,
as I watched the sheep or the sharp horned Texas steers.
I could not reflect upon our pastoral forefathers. As I
climbed with bleeding feet the steep slopes of the western hills.

(17:59):
My thoughts were set in a narrow circle of dark misery.
I could not think of those who had striven like
me in distant ages. But the songs of the campfire,
and the leap of the flame, and the crackling wood,
and the lofty, snow clad hills and the long dim plains,
the wild beast and the venomous serpents, and the need

(18:22):
of food brought me back to nature, the nature that
had created those who were the fathers of us all,
and bringing me back, They'd taught me, as they strive
to teach all, that the real and deeper life is everywhere,
even in a city, if we will but look for
it with unsealed eyes and minds set free from the

(18:44):
tedious trivialities of this debauched modern life. End of chapter fourteen.