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I
read, the other day, about some famous author who had made it a habit to get up
and write for two hours every morning of his life, by which method he had
accumulated an impressive list of masterworks.
It is typical of me in my present state and age, that I cannot remember
the name of this author, but that really doesn’t matter. I have begun to ask
myself what would it be like if, lacking any particular subject, I just sat
down and began to write whatever came into my head, which I imagine must be
somewhat analogous to the experience of the aforesaid great author.
So, be warned, this is the occasion.
Come to think of it, I have done this
before. Years ago I dreamed up a strange sentence which I wrote down, imagining
it to be the beginning of a novel. As a matter of fact, I did write a novel
arising from that first, bizarre sentence. I stood up on a chair a few minutes
ago to reach up to a high shelf on which the sole remaining copy of that
unpublished novel now rests, along with dozens of other half-finished,
unregarded, scrappy manuscripts of one kind or other. Unfortunately, because of
my present state of both mind and body, I was unable to complete my search, for
instead of being able to pick out the manuscript from my disorganized files, I
suddenly realized that if I persisted I might well
topple off the chair, so that, not for the first time in my life, I
should recognize that discretion is the better part of valour.
I have forgotten the exact sentence
with which I began that novel, but I went something like this, “If Collette
Davidson had known what would happen when she visited her husband, Joe, in the local jail, she would never have taken
her son, David, aged nine, with her.”
What followed immediately was
something to this effect: the wardens in the local jail took a fancy to son
David, and agreed to undertake his care, provided she for her part would agree to
go into a neighbouring room and undertake certain acts that they might demand
of her. I remember a subsequent scene
had Collette sitting on a bus as she left the jail, complaining to the woman sitting
beside her that she should never have left her son with those men, because they
had raped her.
I also remember that I carried this fantasy on
through maybe 40,000 words, showed it to a man who was my agent at the time,
who showed it to a publisher of his acquaintance, who reacted enthusiastically
as to its quality, and urged me to carry on. At that point, finding myself trapped
in a totally unlikely plot, I began to think I should rescue this off-the-top-of-my-head
process, and impose some order on all this.
I did that, imposed on the plot some sequence that I recognized as more
or less normal, and was told after submitting the completed novel that it just
didn’t meet the standards of the same publisher who had previously been so
enthusiastic. In other words, my attempt to impose order on the plot had ruined
it.
Well, at least that novel did get to
rest under the eye of a publisher, however briefly, which is more than can be
said for most of the other half-dozen or more novels I have written in my eight
or nine decades of scribbling. Indeed I
can think of only one other that even got to be circulated among publishers: it was an effort I made to
write a real pot-boiler; an agent I had at the time in New York loyally sent it
around the publishers of cheap trash --- publishers of bestsellers, in other
words --- and although it elicited some friendly comments, none of them wanted
to stand behind it.
The rest of my novels have never seen
the light of day even in the narrowest meaning of that expression. Most I have just consigned willingly to the
scrap heap. Of only one do I wish I had been rather more determined to try it
out on publishers. It was a longish novel arising from my lifetime interest in
the dramatic life of Captain James Cook who discovered for Europeans the country
in which I was born, New Zealand. Since I was a scribbler by nature I had
always harboured a secret desire to invent my own Captain Cook. Such a thing if
it could be pulled off would have the peripheral advantage that Captain Cook is
of importance in the history of almost all the English-speaking peoples and most
of the countries they inhabit, including Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and
even Canada, where in the years before he embarked on his great voyages, he had
already made his name as a cartographer by having mapped the coasts of
Newfoundland, and, in addition, having guided the Royal Navy up the St Lawrence
river carrying General Wolfe’s army for the attack on Quebec. All this would be
good for sales of any significant book on the subject of Captain Cook.
My son Thom, who had embarked years
before like a laser beam on achieving a career as a screenwriter, worked with
me in tandem writing the first drafts. He is exceptionally strong on plot,
which I am weak on. I thought I could hold my own on the production of the
actual prose, so we made a good team. The actual plot was quite complex. It
revolved around the assumption that Captain Cook had never been assassinated by
the Hawaiians, but had, in league with a few trusted senior members of his crew,
staged a phony death to enable him to settle for life with a Polynesian maiden
of his choice. Immediately on the crew’s
return to the United Kingdom, the Royal
Navy invested the huge emotional capital of Cook’s selfless and heroic death
into creating the myth of the world-straddling adventurer and explorer. Ten
years later, when letters began arriving in London from Cook, begging to be
rescued from his self-imposed
incarceration among the savages, the Admiralty were not prepared to
disturb their hugely successful myth-making.
Instead, they hired a man, Molesworth Phillips, who had been an officer
in Cook’s crew, and was now drinking himself to death in Ireland, to embark on
a similar small ship with the instruction to seek out Cook and solve the
problem in the generally understood fashion. This action had become over the
generations the most closely guarded secret of the British Admiralty, known to
only one man at a time, handed on from the director of Intelligence to his
successor.
There were a lot of intriguing sidebars
to this overall plot, many of them involving actual personalities from Cook’s crew
who in our novel undertook purely fictionalized events, enabling us to draw in
many interesting historical figures. For example, Phillips was married to a
sister of Fanny Burney, the woman novelist and member of the Blue Stocking
Society, famous for its close relationship with Samuel Johnson (Fanny also being a sister of James
Burney, a lieutenant on Cook’s crew and later a rear-admiral). Also, a young man called Trevanan was a midshipman
on the crew, and a friend of James King, who commanded the return to London
after Cook’s death, and collaborated with King on producing the hugely
successful account of the voyages. Trevanan later went to join the Russian
navy, under the guidance of an Admiral
Greig whom the Russians employed to whip their Navy into shape. In Moscow,
before dying in action for the Russians,
he married the widow of Thomas Bowdler, whose versions of Shakespeare
texts gave the word “bowdlerize”, to the English language. We used these
historical figures shamelessly to build a plot that began with an investigative
journalist in Boston travelling to Baie St Paul on the St Lawrence river to
interview a retired British rear-admiral, a descendant of Admiral Greig, as to
whether Trevanan had ever left any journal that might confirm or deny something the journalist’s drunken father had
been told by a story-telling Polynesian vagrant who hung around Boston Common,
leading to…..I think you must have an idea of what our historical whodunit was
about, by this time.
We never got it into shape to send to
a publisher. I was fussing over plot details, and Thom had to pursue his
screenwriting obsession, and somehow, our masterly mystery fell between our two
stools. Or should I say, fell into a
file so high on my shelves that I will never be able to get it down again.
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