The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [113]
“I have been writing for over eight years,” I said, “and am nearing a climacteric.”
“I don’t quite follow,” said Mr. Benwell anxiously.
“I mean a turning point in my career.”
“Oh, dear, I hope you’re not thinking of making a contract elsewhere?”
“No, no, I mean that I feel in danger of turning into a stock bestseller.”
“If I may say so in very imminent danger,” said Benwell, and he made me a kind of little bow from the seat of his swivel chair and smirked in the wry fashion people sometimes assume when they feel they have said something elaborately polite; a smile normally kept for his women writers; the word “climacteric” had clearly upset him.
“I mean, I am in danger of becoming purely a technical expert. Take my father —” Mr. Benwell gave a deferential grunt and quickly changed his expression to one of gravity suitable to the mention of someone recently dead. “He spent his whole life perfecting his technique. It seems to me I am in danger of becoming mechanical, turning out year after year the kind of book I know I can write well. I feel I have got as good as I ever can be at this particular sort of writing. I need new worlds to conquer.” I added this last remark in compassion for Mr. Benwell, whose gravity had deepened to genuine concern. I believed he would feel the easier for a little facetiousness—erroneously, for Mr. Benwell had suffered similar, too serious conversations with other writers than me.
“You’ve not been writing poetry in Morocco?”
“No, no.”
“Sooner or later almost all my novelists come to me and say they have written poetry. I can’t think why. It does them infinite harm. Only last week Roger Simmonds was here with a kind of a play. You never saw such a thing. All the characters were parts of a motor-car—not in the least funny.”
“Oh, it won’t be anything like that,” I said. “Just some new technical experiments. I don’t suppose the average reader will notice them at all.”
“I hope not,” said Mr. Benwell. “I mean, now you’ve found your public . . . well, look at Simmonds—magneto and sparking plugs and camshaft all talking in verse about communism. I don’t know what to do about it at all. . . . But I can count on your new novel for the autumn?”
“Yes.”
“And we can list it as ‘crime’?”
“Certainly.”
Mr. Benwell saw me to the top of the stairs. “Interesting place, Morocco,” he said. “The French are doing it very well.”
I knew what he was thinking: “The trouble about Plant is, he’s come in for money.”
In a way he was right. The money my father had left me and the proceeds which I expected from the sale of the house, relieved me of the need to work for two or three years; once the necessity was removed there was little motive for writing. It was a matter of pure athletics to go on doing something merely because one did it well. This tedium was the price I must pay for my privacy, for the choice, which until lately had been a matter of special pride with me, of a trade which had nothing of myself in it. The heap of foolscap began to disgust me. Twice I hid it under my shirts, twice the club valet unearthed it and laid it in the open. I had nowhere to keep things, except in this little hired room above the traffic.
As I returned from seeing Mr. Benwell, the club secretary waylaid me. Under Rule XLV, he reminded me, members might not occupy bedrooms for more than five consecutive nights. He did not mind stretching a point, he said, but if a member from out of town applied