Full swing

Thursday, January 18th., Hotel Californie, Cannes.

Yesterday I finished the fifth article of the Harper's series. And today I turned towards the construction of the sequel to "The Card" for the American Magazine. It is only between two spells of work that I can find time for unimportant correspondence, notes etc. My days are always absolutely full; without counting that I have had three abscesses, two together, as a result of a chill in December. The last one is not yet gone, quite.

I am now in the full swing of my ordinary day; writing, reading a lot of newspapers and several books at once. I bought Whymper's "Scrambles among the Alps", and Stendhal's "Vie de Napoleon", and began reading them together, and immediately felt that I had got hold of two rattling good things. These, with a daily instalment of Sorel's "L'Europe et la Revolution Francais", keep me busy.

Marguerite seems continually surprised that I have more than one book on the go at any one time. Claims that she would be confused and mix them up. Well I don't. I have a sort of system whereby I have a serious book which I read after my nap, when I am rested, a general daytime book of the pick up - put down sort, and a book for reading in bed which is usually a novel, but not necessarily. Of course I don't read non-fiction books word for word. No point. The idea is to get a general impression which stays in the mind. So I do get through more books than the average reader.

I have received an invitation to be Guest of Honour at a dinner of the Writers' Club. Very flattering, but I have declined. That sort of thing is entirely out of my line. I told them that I am merely a writer, not at all a speaker. When I was in America I refused nearly a hundred invitations to lecture or read at a minimum of £100 a time. That shows how serious is my objection to exposing myself. 

I must say that Marguerite has blossomed here. Very stylish and desirable at present. I have noticed that she is attracting admiring looks when we walk out, which is gratifying I find. In consequence I have found my own ardour to be greater than it has been of late. Very pleasurable! I intend to buy her some new clothes, especially flimsy undergarments!

Distressed

Wednesday, January 21st., Cadogan Square, London.

We were at Lady Russell's dinner party last evening and Anthony Hope told me a lot about Henry Irving. For example that on every first night Irving gave an immense champagne supper to about 300 people - journalists and friends. Also that all sorts of people had free entry to the theatre on any night, amnd if there were no seats they stood. You only had to know Irving, or Loveday or Bram Stoker to be let in. All this at the Lyceum of course. Hope reckons that Irving, notwithstanding his fame and success, was in a chronic state of hard-up-ness. Surprised that he left £10,000 when he died, expecting only a schedule of debts. Wouldn't be surprised if people think something similar about me.


Ian Hamilton was there as well and he is a very nice and artistic sort of old man. I like him much. I praised his writing highly (which it deserves, what I've read of it) whereat he was clearly much pleased. "I feel several inches taller" he said on leaving. He said he couldn't work much because he had so much to do in connection with ex-servicemen's organisations.

Last night I had more distressing instances of my failure to recognise peole whom I know. Three in fact. I hadn't the least idea who any of them were, and each of them had to make the first move, while I groped after the identity. Coming home from Pisa last week I met, at different parts of the country, four people whom I knew and hadn't, again, the slightest notion who they were. I make a joke of it of course; speak of my 'advancing years', but no point not admitting that it worries me. I am not sixty yet. God knows how things will be later on. If it is softening of the brain then I am determined to put an end to myself before I cease to be myself. Can't bear the thought of degenerating into a second infancy.

i am still reading Stendhal's "Memoires d'un Touriste", slowly. Second time. Why? I suppose because of the fellow's mind. I at last bought "A Passage to India" and am looking forward to getting started on that. And there's another thing - just now I could not have said, if my prosperity depended on it, who wrote that damned book; just couldn't bring it to mind. This is happening more frequently as well.

On edge

Saturday, March 6th., Winter Palace, Menton.

I have returned to reading Stendhal's "Promenades dans Rome". Then I sat in garden and thought out next chapter of my novel. We just got back to the hotel at 1 p.m. for lunch. Neuralgia. I slept 15 minutes and woke acutely nervous and still neuralgic. I went in to Dorothy and said: "I can't sleep and I can't work either." She said: "Perhaps you can begin packing my valise." She was sewing. As only sarcastic responses occured to me I made no reply but returned to my room and began to write. I wrote 1,100 words, a complete chapter, in 75 minutes, and then felt better. Writing as therapy.

We set off back to England tomorrow, in time for Dorothy's confinement. I have a lot of things on my mind, apart from impending fatherhood I mean. Particularly the situation with Septimus who is dying of consumption in North Wales. I must go to see him of course, but how to handle the situation I know not. Also I have heard from Ida Godebski, who has seen Marguerite and tells me that she would not on any account agree to a divorce. 

We are returning in short stages, for Dorothy's benefit, to Paris and then via Calais to London. I intend to stay at Claridges for a week or so when we get back and have written to Miss Nerney to that effect. I don't want to go back to Cadogan Square until after the child is born. Then my life really will change. I am nearly 60 - can I adapt to the new circumstances? Only time will tell.

Extremities

Wednesday, January 26th., Royal York Hotel, Brighton.

I have done 2,000 words each day this week of "Clayhanger". I think the stuff is getting better each day.

Last night Orage sent me the first novel (I think) censured by the Libraries under their new scheme. I read 100 pages of it. I won't be reading any more.

Perfect weather today. Hard frost. Chilblains on all my extremities.

Still reading Stendhal's "Le Rouge et le Noir" with humility.

Rattling good things

Thursday, January 18th., Hotel Californie, Cannes.

Yesterday I finished the fifth article of the Harper's series. And today I turned towards the construction of the sequel to "The Card" (I haven't decided what to title it yet) for the American Magazine. It is only between two spells of work that I can find time for unimportant correspondence, notes etc. For example I wrote declining an invitation to speak at a dinner of the Writers' Club. The invitation, from a Miss Simpson, was most flattering but that sort of thing is entirely out of my line; I consistently refuse speaking engagements though I could make money from them.

I had a letter from my cousin in the Isle of Man, and must reply to that before I get immersed in the novel. Also, she mentioned a couple of things which perplexed me and I must ask about them. She seems well and was extolling the virtues of the mild Isle of Man climate - no extremes of weather apparently. No doubt she has a point, but I would rather be in Cannes! 

My days are always full at the moment, without counting that I have hadthree abcesses, two together, as a result of a chill in December. The last one is not yet gone, quite. 

I am now in the full swing of my ordinary day: writing, reading a lot of newspapers, and several books at once. I bought Whymper's "Scrambles among the Alps", and Stendhal's "Vie de Napoleon", and began reading them together, and immediately felt that I had got hold of two rattling good things. These, with a more or les daily instalment of Sorel's "l'Europe et la Revolution Francais", keep me busy.

A rich vein

Wednesday, October 23rd., Villa des Nefliers.

In reading Stendhal's unpublished journal in the Mercure de France, it seemed to me that in my journal I waste a great deal of time in the proper construction of sentences. Quite unnecessary to do this in the recording of impressions. On the other hand, suppose my journals were to be published at some time in the future? Am I content, with this possibility (though slight) in mind that my writing should be merely impressionistic? It depends on the purpose of the journal, and that is something I have not, as yet, grappled with effectively. Certainly impressions were my original idea but as my reputation grows why not think that even these writings may be of interest? Better impressions than nothing at all, but well-constructed sentences are a pleasure to the writer as well as the reader; so if I have the time why do a thing less well than is in my power?

Still much rain here. A perfect baptism of damp this morning in the forest, though not actually raining. The forest all yellow and brown. Good fungus weather. A lot of those large toadstools with a bright red cap which I believe are poisonous. No idea what they are called. Leaves falling continuously. Horse chestnuts quite yellow. Sound of water occasionally dislodged from trees by the wind. I feel like an intruder when walking alone in the forest in this weather.

I have written over 2000 words of the third chapter of "The Old Wives' Tale" yesterday and today. I planned the chapter perfectly yesterday morning in the forest. There is no doubt that I am established in a routine of excellent work at present. If I continue in this vein the book will be my best yet, and my journal may start to seem more significant!

Feeling poorly

Thursday, June 2nd., Villa des Nefliers, Fontainebleau.

I was in bed all day on Tuesday with a migraine; it sounds nicer than bilious attack. All due to eating a fricot on Monday night. This almost made me resolve to take nothing but bread and milk in the evenings. I should mind these disturbances less if the resulting headache did not make it practically impossible for me to read. I awoke at 2 a.m. and after then scarcely dozed. I just passed my time in disgust waiting for the posts in the hope that something interesting might arrive by one of them. Nothing did. 6.30, 9.15, and 2.30. But I got up at 5.30 and made some tea.

Up till noon I still hoped, in spite of millions of experiences, that I might be able to work in the afternoon. I glanced through all the newspapers, and made my head worse just as it was easing. I took nothing but milkless tea until the evening, and then a morsel of arrowroot. To starve and to lie flat - this is my only treatment. By 7 p.m. I could read a little without making myself worse, and I began my new Stendhal "L'Abbesse de Castro". It opens slowly and finely. The intrigue is exactly the same, in essence, as that of the "Chartreuse" and of "Le Rouge et le Noir". Did he ever think of anything else except capturing the affection of women under the most difficult conceivable circumstances?
See also, 'Living for today?' - April 3rd. http://earnoldbennett.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/living-for-today.html

I began to work after tea yesterday, and wrote 1,400 words of the first chapter of the last book of the eternal "Clayhanger". This morning (after supper of bread and milk) I arose in fine health at 5.30. I made tea and read a lot of my manual of tree-drawing that I bought a year ago and have scarcely looked at. And then I finished the first chapter of "Clayhanger" at 8.45, having written about 1,600 words in two and three quarter hours. My day's work was thus done before breakfast.

Living for today?

Friday, April 3rd., Les Sablons, Fontainebleau.

Easily influenced! In reading Leautaud's preface to the "Plus Belles" pages of Stendhal, I found him defending Stendhal's hastiness of style; never going back etc., 'getting the stuff down' (as I say) without affectations or pose; reading a few pages of the Code to get himself into the 'tone' of plain straightforward writing. Now I could see the weakness of the argument, and I knew the clumsiness of Paul Leautaud's own style.

Paul Léautaud (1872 – 1956) was a French writer and theatre critic. He would not stand for any form of grandiloquence where writing was concerned, and words such as "inspiration" were shot down rapidly: "When I see my father dying and write about his death I am not inspired, I am describing." Asked why he had been at his dreadful father's deathbed at all, he said, "It was only curiosity - 

Cu-ri-o-si-té." He wanted to say before he died, "I regret everything," words, he said, "that will sum up my life." The last thing he did say before dying in his sleep was, "Foutez-moi la paix," ["Leave me the hell alone."] which was more typical.

Yet so influenced by what he says that I at once began to do my novel more currente calamo! Sentences without verbs, etc. See chapters in Part II, birth of baby and kids' party, etc. Yesterday I wrote 1,700 words in two and a half hours. Stendhal attracts me more and more.

Marie-Henri Beyle (1783 – 1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism, as is evident in the novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).

Today received Tauchnitz' "Swinburne". I came across "England: an Ode." I would not write a thing called "England: an Ode."
Here is a short extract:

Music made of change and conquest, glory born of evil slain,

Stilled the discord, slew the darkness, bade the lights of tempest wane,

Where the deathless dawn of England rose in sign that right should reign.

Mercy, where the tiger wallowed mad and blind with blood and lust,

Justice, where the jackal yelped and fed, and slaves allowed it just,

Rose as England's light on Asia rose, and smote them down to dust.

This patriotism seems so cheap and conceited. I would as soon write "Burslem: an Ode" or "The Bennetts: an Ode." I would treat such a theme ironically, or realistically. But loud, sounding praise, ecstasy - No. See also - 'An excess of patriotism', March 4th. <http://earnoldbennett.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/an-excess-of-patriotism.html>

Every morning just now I say to myself: Today, not tomorrow, is the day you have to live, to be happy in. Just as complete materials for being happy today as you will ever have. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself. No one can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive. Live as though this day is your last of joy. "How obvious, if thought about" - yet it is just what we forget. Sheer M. Aurelius, of course.

Each day, thrice, I expect romantically interesting, fate-making letters. Always disappointed. Astonishing how I have kept this up for years.

Eyesight going wrong again. Ought to go to an optician at once. But can't put myself out to go to Paris, hate the idea of explaining to an optician, etc. Yet I know I run risks. Yesterday I decided to go, and felt easier, today my eyes are better and I put it off.