Notes on My Books | Page 2

consistency was badly
shaken. I was a victim of contrary stresses which produced a state of
immobility. I gave myself up to indolence. Since it was impossible for
me to face both ways I had elected to face nothing. The discovery of
new values in life is a very chaotic experience; there is a tremendous
amount of jostling and confusion and a momentary feeling of darkness.
I let my spirit float supine over that chaos.
A phrase of Edward Garnett's is, as a matter of fact, responsible for this
book. The first of the friends I made for myself by my pen it was but
natural that he should be the recipient, at that time, of my confidences.
One evening when we had dined together and he had listened to the
account of my perplexities (I fear he must have been growing a little
tired of them) he pointed out that there was no need to determine my
future absolutely. Then he added: "You have the style, you have the
temperament; why not write another?" I believe that as far as one man
may wish to influence another man's life Edward Garnett had a great
desire that I should go on writing. At that time, and I may say, ever
afterwards, he was always very patient and gentle with me. What
strikes me most, however, in the phrase quoted above which was
offered to me in a tone of detachment is not its gentleness but its
effective wisdom. Had he said, "Why not go on writing," it is very
probable he would have scared me away from pen and ink for ever; but
there was nothing either to frighten one or arouse one's antagonism in
the mere suggestion to "write another." And thus a dead point in the
revolution of my affairs was insidiously got over. The word "another"
did it. At about eleven o'clock of a nice London night, Edward and I

walked along interminable streets talking of many things, and I
remember that on getting home I sat down and wrote about half a page
of "An Outcast of the Islands" before I slept. This was committing
myself definitely, I won't say to another life, but to another book. There
is apparently something in my character which will not allow me to
abandon for good any piece of work I have begun. I have laid aside
many beginnings. I have laid them aside with sorrow, with disgust,
with rage, with melancholy and even with self-contempt; but even at
the worst I had an uneasy consciousness that I would have to go back to
them.
"An Outcast of the Islands" belongs to those novels of mine that were
never laid aside; and though it brought me the qualification of "exotic
writer" I don't think the charge was at all justified. For the life of me I
don't see that there is the slightest exotic spirit in the conception or
style of that novel. It is certainly the most tropical of my eastern tales.
The mere scenery got a great hold on me as I went on, perhaps because
(I may just as well confess that) the story itself was never very near my
heart. It engaged my imagination much more than my affection. As to
my feeling for Willems it was but the regard one cannot help having for
one's own creation. Obviously I could not be indifferent to a man on
whose head I had brought so much evil simply by imagining him such
as he appears in the novel--and that, too, on a very slight foundation.
The man who suggested Willems to me was not particularly interesting
in himself. My interest was aroused by his dependent position, his
strange, dubious status of a mistrusted, disliked, worn-out European
living on the reluctant toleration of that Settlement hidden in the heart
of the forest-land, up that sombre stream which our ship was the only
white men's ship to visit. With his hollow, clean-shaved cheeks, a
heavy grey moustache and eyes without any expression whatever, clad
always in a spotless sleeping suit much befrogged in front, which left
his lean neck wholly uncovered, and with his bare feet in a pair of straw
slippers, he wandered silently amongst the houses in daylight, almost as
dumb as an animal and apparently much more homeless. I don't know
what he did with himself at night. He must have had a place, a hut, a
palm-leaf shed, some sort of hovel where he kept his razor and his

change of sleeping suits. An air of futile mystery hung over him,
something not exactly dark but obviously ugly. The only definite
statement I could extract from anybody was that it was he who had
"brought the Arabs into the river." That must have happened many
years