The title was good by itself. The context put it in perspective. And it seemed to fit the book he intended to write. Of course the book might take its own shape, as all of his did to a greater or lesser extent. His present title could lose its significance, or a more appropriate title might occur as the book grew.
On a third page he typed “(dedication).” He had not yet decided to whom the book would be dedicated so he left the page otherwise blank and added it to the stack.
There were now three sheets to the left of the typewriter, and none of them represented any work on his part, but he had discovered that he was uncomfortable working on a book unless he had already prepared the front matter. He might discard or change all of it later on, but he could not write the first page of the novel until he had these other pages written.
He lit a cigarette, set it in the ashtray. By the day’s end the ashtray would be overflowing with butts, yet he would have smoked relatively little. When his work engrossed him, he would let cigarettes burn up unnoticed in the ashtray.
He typed “1.” in the top left corner of a fresh page. Halfway down he typed “Chapter One” and skipped a dozen lines. Page one, chapter one. Now what?
He lit a cigarette, having already forgotten the one burning a few inches from his elbow. He took a few drags from the new one and set it alongside the other. His fingers positioned themselves on the keyboard. The opening scene was clear enough in his mind. It was just a matter of deciding which of several ways to structure it.
For fifteen minutes he did nothing but sit with his eyes on the blank paper before him. Then he began typing, and for the next twenty minutes the typewriter was never silent for more than five or ten seconds at a time. After twenty minutes he lit a cigarette. By that time he was at the top of page four, and when he left his desk at three fifteen that afternoon there were a dozen more finished pages to the left of the typewriter and a dozen fewer blank sheets to the right.
Sometimes at night he would stay in the large stone house, reading and listening to records. His reading consisted of magazine pieces and nonfiction. He had discovered that he could not read novels while he was himself writing one. He knew writers who consciously avoided fiction while they were at work, fearing that another author’s style would adversely influence their own. This had never bothered Hugh. Instead, he found that he simply could not concentrate on another man’s book when his own was in progress. He was too conscious of style and technique. Characters seemed to lack depth, dialogue had no flavor, plot lines were impossible to remember. Between books he read voraciously, swallowing novels in huge gulps, but he could not do this while he was at work.
Other nights he went out. He needed people around him at such times, yet was too locked into his work to be of much use in conversation. He would go to Sully’s or the Logan Inn or one of several other bars. He would never drink heavily, but always had enough scotch in him so that sleep came easily by the time he returned home.
On such nights there would almost always be questions about his work. When was his next book coming out? That was easily answered but led to questions about its title and theme, and he disliked discussing one book while involved with another. He even more disliked discussing current work and simply refused to do so, explaining that if he talked about it it would go stale for him. How was the new book coming, then?
It was coming along, he would say.
Which was as much of an answer as existed, because he could not have said whether the book was going well or poorly. All he knew for certain was that it was continuing to get written, that the pile to the typewriter’s left was increasing while the pile to the right grew smaller.
Some days were good ones, when the pages seemed to write themselves. On those days he would have to force himself to stop when he had written twenty pages, the maximum he allowed himself in a single day. On other days he would enter his study at nine in the morning and it would be dark before he had finished his minimum of five pages. Some days every page that went into the typewriter wound up on the stack of finished copy. Other days there were three sheets in the wastebasket for every sheet he kept.
And later, when the book was done, no one including Hugh would be able to tell the easy work from the hard, the smooth pages that hurried their way to completion from the ones over which he sweated blood. The work itself was all of a piece. It made no sense to him, seemed as though it should not be that way, but it was so.
The summer after the divorce he lectured at a writers’ conference in New Hampshire. He had received similar invitations frequently in the past and had always regretted them, considering such conferences a waste of time for all concerned, the students at least as much as the instructors. He accepted this invitation because it was something to do and some place to go at a time when he was doing nothing and going nowhere. They paid his expenses and a fee of five hundred dollars, which they called an honorarium and which he alternately regarded as too much or too little.
The conference was about what he had expected. The other instructors included a lesbian poetess of whom he had never heard, a screenwriter who arrived drunk, gave one disastrous lecture and fled to the Coast, and a painfully earnest woman from Washington who wrote articles for general magazines. Hugh avoided them all. The students included some who, like Hugh, seemed to find the idea of a week in New Hampshire agreeable. Others really thought the conference would help their work, and they were as agonizingly sincere about it as the magazine writer. Finally there was a sprinkling of women who wanted to sleep with a successful author. Hugh could not imagine their reasons, but he obliged one a night for seven nights and spent the rest of his time drinking.
His lectures went over well enough. Idiotically enough, his audience sat there taking meaningless notes while he told them how to write novels. Afterward he couldn’t remember what he had told them, and hoped their memories were equally selective.
Because he had no idea how to write a novel.
There was a time when he thought there was a way. After the success of One If by Land he had had considerable second-novel trouble. He threw away one effort after another, ten pages of this and thirty pages of that and once a hundred pages that simply died on him. In desperation he began reading books purporting to tell how to write a novel.
Most of them were too vague to do any harm. But one had reduced the entire process to a systematic method which anyone with a typewriter could follow. First you drew a chart with all your characters and the relationship of each to the others. Then for each character you filled out a series of index cards with all their quirks and foibles and the details of their lives from cradle to grave. Then you did an outline of the entire book, indicating every scene and conversation. Then, with your chart and your index cards and your outline to guide you, you filled in the blanks and wrote the book.
He had proceeded as far as the index cards and had filled out a series about his lead character before he came to his senses and burned cards and chart in the fireplace. He also burned the book that had involved him in this idiocy, and other books of its ilk, and all the false starts he had thus far made on his second novel. Then he wrote the book as he had written One If by Land, by the simple method of putting the chair in front of the typewriter and his ass on the chair and going ahead and doing it.
He still didn’t know how he did it. From time to time he tried outlines, only to discard them as overly rigid once the book took on life of its own. All he knew now was that there was a magic that had to happen. The characters had to become real, had to speak their own lines to him so that he could put those lines on the paper.