A Communication to My Friends, Chapter 7

London: Nonesuch Press, 13 June 1933, pages 58-63, 1,383 words

VII

The days went by, leaving me almost daily exhausted in an attempt to disentangle some knot that had come into the skein unexpectedly. I went out to walk distracted by the thought that I would have to abandon A Mummer's Wife, saying to myself, It cannot be written, it cannot be written; but next morning the knot disentangles itself and I proceeded without difficulty into three or four pages of narrative. In these monotonous days, in which every hour reminded me of my growing desire of truancy from my desk, not truancy, but a holiday that my health needed, there was a distraction, but it was one I could willingly have done without, for when wearied even to the point of feeling that I could not continue writing another day about mummers and their monetary difficulties, I was reminded of my own. I owed forty pounds, the sum which I had agreed to pay to Tinsley if Mudie and Smith did not subscribe enough to defray the cost of publication of A Modern Lover.

Months went by, and Tinsley did not send in his bill of costs. He must have published some novel of great success, a novel of popular appeal, and did not want money — the only explanation I could find for his reticence in sending in his account, but one day the letter arrived. Forty pounds due to Tinsley, and the pen dropped from my hand. How the money was to be paid I did not know without breaking my promise to Tom Ruttledge, and the whole afternoon went by in vacancy until my brother Augustus came in. I showed him the letter, and he said in his airy way, "Oh, this is nothing. You haven't noticed perhaps that he does not send in his account. I know a genial Jew who will just write to him for his accounts and if they are not right he will make it the temperature of a red-hot poker for Mr. Tinsley." This was Augustus's fanciful way of speaking and I left the matter in his hands. I acted with judgment, for I was prompted by my instinct. A few days afterwards he told me that Jimmy Davis had written to Tinsley, who had replied, "Let Mr. Moore pay the money he owes me and then we will go into accounts." A very innocent letter this appeared to Augustus for a publisher to write to an author, almost childish. Tinsley must be drifting into his second childhood. "But I have signed for the money," I said. "Tinsley's stock was stored in a warehouse fully insured, and the warehouse has been burnt with the stock, therefore Tinsley was paid through the insurance and you owe him nothing." A great weight was lifted from me, my depression vanished like a fog. A breeze had come and lifted it above the housetops and I was myself again. "You will hear no more from Tinsley," Augustus called back from the door, and I continued my manuscript, thinking from time to time that I could now afford a holiday, for two-thirds of A Mummer's Wife was finished, and I fell to wondering whether forty pounds would pay my expenses to Ireland and back. Luck when it comes does not abandon a man quickly, and not long after this Byron Webber came knocking at my door to ask me if I would write a few articles on painting for his paper, for which he would pay three pounds apiece. I answered, "These articles will take my mind away from my book, but I want a holiday and I will write them," and I wrote them and received about twelve pounds in return, and on these proceeds and the forty pounds from which my brother had redeemed me I started on my holiday.

In Moore Hall I could take a holiday writing at my ease, and being a late riser I never was at my writing-table till eleven o'clock, but I did not eat luncheon and after two or three o'clock I was on the back of a large brown horse seventeen or eighteen hands high, difficult to mount on account of his height, riding about fields that I had known in my early life, or shooting ducks with a Scotch farmer who lived near us, an excellent shot. We were nearly drowned swimming out to an island where we hoped to meet the ducks coming in to preen themselves, but that is another story. There was some more shooting and some more writing and at last my stay prolonged itself to three months, during which I finished A Mummer's Wife and sent it to Vizetelly.

At last the proofs came in, and what was more important than the proofs, cuttings from the papers saying that a new voice had come into literature, that nothing had been written with the same force as A Mummer's Wife for many a day. These inflamed me, and I resisted my mother's invitation to remain on. "You have seen Moore Hall under its most unfavourable aspect. The beauty of Moore Hall is in its trees and the pink buds of the beech are unclosing. Stay another month and you will see my garden in bloom." "But Mother, I want to see the Press in bloom recording my name as an English writer," and regardless of her lamentations I said, "I must go, Mother, I am called," and I crossed to London and with my scanty luggage arrived at Vizetelly's office.

"Thank·you, Mr. Vizetelly," I said, for sending me the notices of the Athenaeum and the London News"­ — and there were half a dozen other notices he had sent me, all praising A Mummer's Wife. "You are now," he said, "accepted as the coming novelist with a new manner of writing. Your future is assured if you use it properly," he added. "Use it properly?" said I. "I have got a new book in my head called Muslin." "A prettier title it would be in French than in English," he replied, and I proceeded to interrupt the old man in his endless correspondence with authors with a detailed account of Muslin, to which he gave a somewhat dry reply. "I think your forte is rather among the lower classes than the upper.” But I am gentry, said I to myself, and I shall be able to write about gentry, and Vizetelly, guessing my thoughts, said, "It is the gentry who write best about the lower classes.” "But how about the sales?" I asked, "the sales are not on a par with the reviews." "I have one hundred pounds to give you, and I will give it you now."

One hundred pounds in my poverty seemed like manna falling from heaven, and feeling that I could not return to my brother I took two rooms in Dane's Inn. Detestable rooms they were, but I was used to hardship, and determined not to run into debt I undertook with my brother to write the lyrics of the Cloches de Corneville and I did some journalism, and to save money I went down to Sussex to live — not with friends who had a pretty Italian house built under ilex trees and who would have been glad to receive me, for with the father and the mother and the two young ladies and the young man I was on friendly terms — but on a green in rooms let by a woman above her shop, and there I wrote some articles on Ireland for the Figaro and began Confessions of a Young Man, which to-day finds readers. And it is rare, I prided myself as I wrote this line, that a book finds readers after six months.

Muslin was a moderate success and the Confessions of a Young Man was a real success. Everybody liked it. "I hope your next book will be written with the same gaiety and in the same style as Confessions," Vizetelly said. "You will not return to the manner of A Mummer's Wife, I hope." Hating advice, I replied, "I shall return to whatever instinct prompts."

From this point the text was not revised by the author.