Perseverance A Writer’s Best Friend

How I learnt a humble lesson in the grace of perseverance

When I was 33 and a doctor in the West End of London, I developed a gastric ulcer and was exiled for six months to a small farmhouse in the Scottish Highlands. A week there drove me crazy. Debarred from all physical pursuits, I was reduced to feeding the chickens and learning to greet the disapproving cattle by their Christian names. Casting round desperately for something to do, I had a sudden idea. For years I had nursed the vague illusion that I might write.

Now, at the desolate Highland farm I raised my voice in a surge of justification: “By heavens! This is my opportunity. Gastric ulcer or no gastric ulcer, I will write a novel.” Before I could change my mind, I walked to the village and bought two dozen penny exercise books.

Upstairs in my cold, clean bedroom was a scrubbed pine table and a very hard chair. Next morning I found myself in this chair, facing a new exercise book open upon the table, slowly becoming aware that, short of dog-Latin prescriptions, I had never composed a significant phrase in all my life. It was a discouraging thought as I picked up my pen and gazed out of the window. Never mind. I would begin ... Three hours later Mrs Angus, the farmer’s wife, called me to dinner. The page was still blank.

A SPIDER’S WEB

Perhaps the tribulations of the next three months are best omitted. I had in my head, clearly enough, the

theme I wished to treat – the tragic record of a man’s egoism and bitter pride. I even had the title of the book. But beyond these naïve fundamentals I was lamentably unprepared. I had no pretensions to technique, no knowledge of style or form. The difficulty of simple statement staggered me. I corrected and recorrected until the page looked like a spider’s web, then I tore it up and started all over again.

Yet, the thing haunted me. My characters took shape, spoke to me, laughed, wept, excited me. When an idea struck me in the middle of the night, I would get up and sprawl on the floor until I had translated it to paper. I was possessed by the very novelty of what I did. At first my rate of progress was some 800 laboured words a day. By the end of the second month I was accomplishing 2000.

Then when I was halfway through, the inevitable happened. A sudden desolation struck me like an avalanche. I asked myself, “Why am

I wearing myself out with this toil for which I am so preposterously ill equipped? I ought to be resting ... conserving my energies, not squandering them on this fantastic task.” Feverishly, I read over the first chapters, which had just arrived in typescript from my secretary in London. I was appalled. Never, never had I seen such nonsense in all my life. I saw, finally, that I was a presumptuous lunatic, that all I had writ ten, all I could ever write, was wasted effort, sheer futility. I decided to abandon the whole thing. Abruptly, furiously, I bundled up the manuscript, went out and threw it in the dustbin.

Drawing a sullen satisfaction from my surrender or, as I preferred to phrase it, my return to sanity, I went for a walk in the drizzling rain. Halfway down the loch shore I came upon old Angus, the farmer, patiently and laboriously ditching a patch of the bogged and peaty heath which made up the bulk of his hard-won little croft (farm). As I drew near, he gazed up at me in some surprise: he knew of my intention and, with that inborn Scottish reverence for ‘letters’, had tacitly approved it. When I told him what I had just done, and why, his weathered face slowly changed, his keen blue eyes, beneath misted sand brows, scanned me with disappointment and a queer contempt. He was a silent man and it was long before he spoke. Even then his words were cryptic.

“No doubt you’re the one that’s right, Doctor, and I’m the one that’s wrong ... ” He seemed to look right to the bottom of me. “My father ditched this bog all his days and never made a pasture. I’ve dug it all my days and I’ve never made a pasture. But pasture or no pasture,” he placed his foot directly on the spade, “I canna help but dig. For my father knew and I know that if you only dig enough, a pasture can be made here.” I understood. I watched this dogged working figure with rising anger and resentment. I was resentful because he had what I had not – a terrible stubbornness to see the job through at all costs, an unquenchable flame of resolution brought to the simplest, the most arid duties of life. And suddenly my trivial dilemma became magnified, transmuted, until it stood as a touchstone of all human conduct. It became the timeless problem of mortality – the comfortable retreat, or the arduous advance without prospect of reward.

I WAS APPALLED. NEVER, NEVER HAD I SEEN SUCH NONSENSE IN ALL MY LIFE

I t ramped back to the farm, drenched, shamed, furious and picked the soggy bundle from the dustbin. I dried it in the kitchen oven. Then I flung it on the table and set to work again with a kind of frantic desperation. I lost myself in the ferociousness of my purpose.

Towards the end of the third month, I wrote finis. The relief, the sense of emancipation, was unbelievable. I dispatched the completed manuscript to a publisher and forgot all about it.

TIMELY LESSON

In the remaining days at the farm I gradually regained my health, and at last one day I went around the village saying goodbye to the simple folk who had become my friends. As I entered the post office, the post master presented me with a telegram – an urgent invitation to meet the publisher. I took it straightaway and showed it, without a word, to John Angus.

The novel I had thrown away was chosen by the Book Society, dramatised and serialised, translated into a score of languages, bought by Hollywood. It sold millions of copies. It altered my life radically, beyond my wildest dreams ... and all because of a timely lesson in the grace of perseverance.

Ignatius of Loyola was once playing a game of ball with his fellow students when someone demanded, suddenly and with due solemnity, what each of them would do if he knew he had to die in 20 minutes. All agreed they would rush frantically to church and pray ... all but Ignatius, who answered, “I should finish my game.”

The virtue of all achievement, as known to Ignatius and my old Scots farmer, is victory over oneself. Those who know this victory can never know defeat.