HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL

And the Varying Methods of Work of Celebrated Novelists

Arthur Bartlett Maurice

SOME one, at some time or other, is said to have estimated that the number of possible stories in the world is seven. Some one else is believed to have placed the number at twenty-one. Just what these stories are no one seems definitely to know. Some of them, of course, are perfectly obvious. One of the oldest of all is the tale of Cinderella and the Silver Slipper. Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy, to illustrate, is one of the several hundred variations of that theme. Then there is the Bréton story of Barbe Bleu, which, in the course of an endless evolution, produced, in one year Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and in another Augusta Evans Wilson's St. Elmo. But whatever the exact number of plots is, seven or twentyone, to some one of them the person who sits down to write a book must turn. They constitute the foundation of the projected structure. Individuality of talent may express itself in the rising stories.

The finished work may look startlingly new, but underneath it is the same as a thousand others.

Reading Dickens, every one must at times have been puzzled by some cryptic episode, character, or utterance. On the scene, apparently from nowhere in particular, will appear, for a brief moment, a young woman with a strange, wild stare of the eyes, or an elderly man whose ill-fitting wig becomes at once an object of suspicion. One or the other is made to say something or to do something that suggests a mystery, then to step out of the narrative for all time. They are the Dickens reserves, the supports that are essential, that never happening to be needed, are never called into action. But they are just as much parts of the Dickens novel as the Marshalsea Prison of Little Dorrit, or Dotheboys Hall of Nicholas Nickleby. Without them he never could have proceeded. Beginning with a general idea, but no very definite knowledge of what the working out of that idea would develop, he safeguarded himself by throwing out these leads which might mean nothing, and again might mean anything. There was always in his mind the possible moment when the centre at which he was beating would hold him back for a time. Inaction would be out of the question, so once again into the narrative for a flank movement could be called these supports, until he found the way in which the main attack could be resumed.

THERE was more of that haphazard method in the old days. Whether or not the novel has become a finer art is open to question, but certainly the old timers were readier to take a chance. The method of Dickens was to a considerable extent the method of Thackeray. Vanity Fair was begun as a series of pictures of English social life under the Regency. The whole tenor of the novel changed at the precise moment when, after Waterloo, "the pursuit rolled miles and miles away, and Amelia, on her knees, was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart." The original scheme of the last chapters of Pendennis, calling for situations in which Thackeray had planned to rival Eugene Sue, was discarded at the last moment. Sue himself was even more daring. When The Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew were appearing serially in Paris newspapers there were times when the narrative would be interrupted for days. The explanation was offered that M. Sue was suffering from a slight illness, but that on his recovery he would take up the threads again, and invent fresh adventures for the heroic Rodolphe or the infamous Rodin.

If the novel had no other mission than to amuse all nations might not be absolutely in accord, but popular vote would almost certainly award the supreme crown to the elder Dumas. "I think of the prodigal banquets to which this Lucullus of a man has invited me with thanks and wonder," wrote the fastidious Thackeray. "To what a series of splendid entertainments he has treated me! Where does he find the money for these prodigious feasts?" That was the question. Where did he find the money? There are something like two thousand volumes to which his name is attached, and though his aides are known to have been many, so had Rubens pupils paint on his canvasses. Dumas has described himself, when inventing the plan of a work, as lying silent on his back for two whole days on the deck of a yacht in a Mediterranean port. At the end of the two days he arose and called for dinner. In those two days he had builded his plot. He had moulded a mighty clay, to be cast presently in perennial brass. The chapters, the characters, the incidents, the combinations were all arranged in the artist's brain ere he set a pen to paper. With this in mind, reread the most colossal of all his romances, The Count of Monte Cristo. First of all there was the basic idea upon which the vast edifice was constructed. In every human heart there is implanted a longing for the possession of the power to right wrongs, to inflict retributive justice, to deal out deserved rewards, to be, in a word, " Caliph for a day," as humanly, if not as humbly, as the Persian porter. Also he had at hand the general outline of his scheme in a curious document that had then just come to light in the archives of the French Secret Police. The original of Edmond Dantes was Francois Picaud a journeyman cobbler, who, in 1807, was betrothed to one Marguerite Vigoureux. Picaud, on the eve of his marriage, was denounced as a spy by jealous rivals, and thrown into prison, where he remained seven years. During his incarceration he acted as servant for a rich Milanese ecclesiastic. Of course the Abbe Faria. The churchman . treated Picaud like a son, and dying in prison, he bequeathed to him seven million francs on deposit in the Bank of Amsterdam, and told him of a hiding place in Italy where diamonds to the value of twelve hundred thousand francs, and three millions of specie consisting of English guineas French Louis d'or, Spanish quadruples, Venetian florins, and ducats of Milan were concealed. With this fortune Picaud started out to reek vengeance; in his case a pitiful and sordid vengeance, but the suggestion of the retribution which in The Count of Monte Cristo assumed epic proportions because Dantes, with impassive logic, allowed his enemies to work out their own doom.

BOTH essentially French, in their ideas of how to write a novel, Dumas and de Maupassant were as far apart as the poles. To the first, ideas, situations, words, came with tropical profusion. Before beginning to write Maupassant served years of arduous apprenticeship to Flaubert, who himself had produced Madame Bovary after six years unflagging effort, during which at times weeks were given over to the search of the right word. To Maupassant Flaubert would say: "Look. Across the street is a cab horse. There is in the French language just one word to express the attitude of that horse. Find it." Thus, laboriously, Maupassant worked out that perfection of narrative, that amazing power of condensation, that enabled him to present a slice of life in a paragraph. Everyone knows "The Necklace." Eleven hundred words in its original length, it takes a clever writer to epitomize the tale, omitting no incident, to twenty-five hundred. In the preface to Pierre et Jean, Maupassant gave his ideas of how a novel should be written. Unfortunately the public is made up of groups governed by different predominating tastes. One group asks of the novelist "Console me," another, " Amuse me." Others, " Sadden me," "Soften me," "Make me dream," "Make me laugh," "Make me shudder," "Make me weep," "Make me think." There was the obstacle. What the public should say to the artist is " Create for me something fine, in the form that suits you best, according to your temperament." That was his own creed, the creed to which he rigidly held from the publication of Boule de Suif till the day when the shadow of madness fell upon him.

CHARMINGLY and simply, another Frenchman, Alphonse Daudet, has told of his own experiences, his own ideas of how to write a novel. In the little papers, "The Story of My Books," the reader will find the account of genesis and development of plot, selection of character, and actual work of composition. If there is imitation he confesses it; if a change in a story has been made to avoid the appearance of imitation, he tells of it. For instance, in the account of how he wrote Fromont et Risler he relates that the little Desiree was originally a doll's dressmaker. But someone told him that in one of Dickens's* novels there was precisely the same conception of a young cripple who was a doll's dressmaker. So for long months he searched dark houses and climbed cold staircases until he chanced on the faded gold sign "Birds and Insects for Ornament," and Desiree Dellobelle's occupation was found.

Many novels are builded backwards. A conspicuous and an illuminating example is Daudet's Kings in Exile. The very words with which the story ends were its inspiration and birth. The ashes of the Tuileries in the sunset glow like some ancient monument of Egypt or Assyria, the witness of manners and morals and of peoples vanished; a grand old oead past -gone, brought to his mind the vision of Queen Frederica and the little Prince Zara. From that vision he worked backwards, ransacking expense accounts, finding a model here and a model there, until the whole splendid picture of dethroned royalty, gradually disintegrating and becoming demoralized under the democratic spell of Paris, was complete.

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GEORGE DU MAURIER, after a long and brilliant career, depicting the foibles of English society in the columns of London Punch, sat down in the evening of his life and produced in quick succession Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian. How was it, asked the critics, that a novice, a man absolutely unpracticed in the art of fiction, could achieve a construction and a finish so flawless? To which Du Maurier explained that far from being a novice, few men of his time had undergone so arduous a training. Those bits of dialogue that told the story of the weekly Punch picture had all been little novels in themselves. Over and over again he had had to work for a finer concision, ever trying for the greater effect, ever searching for the mot juste.

Given the basic foundation of plot, what are the chief ingredients needed in the work of writing a novel? Briefly, the answer might be in the words, reminiscence and research. There are few novels that are not in some sense autobiographic. Dickens, himself David Copperfield, drew constantly on his early impressions. Thackeray, many of whose traits were those of Arthur Pcndennis, builded on his memories of the Charterhouse, Cambridge, and the young years of rumblings in Paris and Weimar. Du Maurier, in Trilby, idealized the enthusiasms of his rapin days. Barrie, with his apparent wealth of imagination, is really always limited by the four walls of personal association. Stevenson absorbed into himself any place that he pitched his tent. Marion Crawford was the Paul Griggs of his stories. Van Bibber was an early mood of Mr. Davis; Royal Macklin a later mood. This novel or that of Mr. Howells is the expression of what Boston meant to him at one time or New York at another.

WHEN the word research is used what is really meant is the power of transmutation, the gift that enables a man to go through many volumes of history and many documents, sift out the ore and find the material that is needed to his hand. Nothing that the mind of man can invent can ever be so dramatic, as what the example of men will show him. A really great transmutor will be a great novelist. Scott was a great transmutor, Dumas was a great transmutor, Thackeray did not disdain transmutation in Esmond and The Virginians. In our own day a transmutor of really high order is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He read enormously of the Chronicles of the Hundred Years War and there found four-fifths of The White Company and Sir Nigel. He absorbed everything he could find dealing with the Napoleonic legend. Hence the stories dealing with the Brigadier Gerard, Uncle Bernac, and The Great Shadow, Analyze Rodney Slone, to the mind of the present writer the best story ever written about Corinthian England. One-tenth original narrative, nine-tenths lives of Brummel, sketches of Nelson and of the Prince Regent and his circle, Toni and jerry in London, and various crude volumes dealing with the early prize ring. But in that nine-tenths a master workman has taken the raw material and illumined it with the fire of his own talent.

THE ingredients of O. Henry's best story "A Municipal Report," were the dry data of an atlas and Frank Norris's challenge that the only story cities in the United States were San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York. The starting point of Owen Johnson's The Sixty-first Second was an incident of a disappearing ring at a dinner party. At the beginning the author had nothing but that, but he had the seven or eight men and women who sat round the table, and working out their various destinies carried the novel through its course. Anna Katherine Green's The Leavenworth Case grew out of the idea that the nucleus for a story might be hinged upon the fact of a person passing the open door of a room, overhearing an accusation and attributing it to the wrong one of two occupants. These stories told themselves. Most stories do. The novelist who does not find strong inspiration in the carrying on of the narrative, in the narrative itself, very often has no real tale to tell. There is the technique of building to be more or less learned. On that point there is no short cut. To few genius is given, to few the patience, the infinite capacity for taking pains that sent Balzac through every street in Paris studying signs until he found the name Z. Marcas, few catch even a glimpse of the far face of "the True Romance." There is only one way for the novelist. He must " Draw the Thing as he sees it. For the God of Things as They Are."