The Making of a Novelist

Making Of A Novelist, by David
Christie Murray

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Title: The Making Of A Novelist An Experiment In Autobiography
Author: David Christie Murray
Release Date: August 1, 2007 [EBook #22204]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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MAKING OF A NOVELIST ***

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THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST
An Experiment In Autobiography
By David Christie Murray

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1894
[Portrait] From a Photograph by Thomas Fall
TO J. M. BARRIE

PREFACE
Every man who writes about himself is, on the face of the matter,
obnoxious to the suspicion which haunts the daily pathway of the Bore.
To talk of self and not be offensive demands an art which is not always
given to man. And yet we are always longing to get near each other and
to understand each other; and in default of a closer communion with
our living fellows we take to our bosoms the shadows of fiction and the
stage. If the real man could be presented to us by any writer of his own
history we should all hail him with enthusiasm.
Pepys, of course, came nearer than anybody else; but this is only
because he wrote for his own reading and meant to keep himself a
secret. Dickens exquisitely veils and unveils his own personality and
career in Copperfield, and scores of smaller writers have done the same
thing in fiction to our great pleasure. But to set down boldly, openly,
and as a fact for general publication the things of one's own doing,
saying, and thinking is an impertinence whose only justification can be
found in the public approval. If Pepys had written his Diary for
publication he would have been left to oblivion as a driveller. But we
surprise the man's secret, we see what he never meant to show us, the
peering jackdaw instinct is satisfied; and we feel, besides, a certain
sense of humorous pity and affectionate disdain which the man himself,
had we known him in life as we know him in his book, could never
have excited. Rousseau, to me, is flatly intolerable, because he meant to
tell the world what every man should have the decency to hide.
The perfect autobiography is yet to seek, and will probably never be
written. A partial solution of a difficulty is offered in this experimental

booklet. It is offered without diffidence, because it is offered in perfect
modesty. I have tried to show how one particular novelist was made;
where he got some of his experiences, and in what varying fashions the
World and Fate have tried to teach him his business. It has been my
effort to do this in the least egotistical and the most straightforward
fashion. The narrative is quite informal and wanders where it will; but
in its serial publication it received marked favour from an indulgent
public, and I like to give it an equal chance of permanence with the rest
of my writings, which I trust will not convey the notion that I covet a
too-exaggerated longevity. Should the public favour continue, the field
of experience is wide; and I may repeat Dick Swiveller's saying to Mr.
Quilp--'There is plenty more in the shop this comes from.'

THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST

I
Only a day or two ago I found myself arrested on my eastward way
along the Strand by the hand of a friend upon my shoulder. We chatted
for a minute or two, and I found that I was in front of Lipscombe's
window. A ball of cork, which has had a restless time of it for many
years, was dodging up and down the limits of a glass shade, tossed by a
jet of water. The sight of it carried me back twenty years in a flash. 'In
the year 1872 I came to London, as many young men had done before
me, without funds, without friends, and without employment, trusting,
with the happy-go-lucky disposition of youth, to the chapter of
accidents. For some time the accidents were all unfavourable, and there
came a morning when I owned nothing in the world but the clothes I
stood in. I found myself that morning very tired, very hungry, very
down in the mouth, staring at the cork ball on the jet of water under the
glass shade, and drearily likening it to my own mental condition, flung
hither and thither, drenched, rolled