Five First Attempts

I once tried to write a novel and I tell you, it's not as easy as it seems.  Mine was terrible.  I gave it to a couple of trusted friends to read, they kindly damned it with faint praise, and that was that.

In the meantime of course I do enjoy good novels that other people write, and I often find myself drawn to where they began.  Perhaps its my parents' fault.  One of my favourites among my dad's science fiction books was an anthology called First Flight: Maiden Voyages in Space and Time which contained the impressive first published short stories of some of the luminaries of post-war science fiction, including such names as Robert Heinlein, Brian Aldiss, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C Clarke and AE Van Vogt.  I know this because I still have it on my shelf.

Later on my mother gave me a lovely coffee-table book (which I also still have) called First Glance: Childhood Creations of the Famous. This drew its net far wider, including such curiosities as some short pieces composed by Mozart at age 6, a letter written by Helen Keller at 7, some sketches made by Pablo Picasso at 8 and a poem written by a 14-year-old Winston Churchill.  My most enduring memory from the book is a series of angry letters written by an 18-year-old Edgar Allan Poe to his foster-father John Allan in which he alternately berates him and asks him for money.

With a start like this, my fate was sealed.  So here are five rather hesitant beginnings by the writers of great novels.

1. Go Set a Watchman 

Back in 2015 there was a lot of controversy about the publication of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman.  Lee is, of course, famous as the author of that classic novel of race relations in the American South, To Kill a Mockingbird.  Arriving as it did in the midst of the civil rights movement it was instantly hailed as a perceptive comment on racial injustice.  It was Lee's first foray into publishing and all but her last.  She hated the fame that came with this novel, hated being caught in the midst of a political storm.  It's possible she was uncomfortable to be hailed as champion of views she may not actually have held.  She withdrew from public life, steadfastly refused interviews for the next sixty years and never wrote another novel.

To Kill and Mockingbird was not, however, her first novel.  Before she wrote it she had written another book set in the same town, among the same characters, which her publishers had rejected.  Once she became famous there was great demand for this lost tale but she would never agree to its publication.

Then in 2015, when Lee was 89, it was announced that she had changed her mind and Go Set a Watchman was published in July of that year.  The announcement was controversial.  Lee was frail and living in an aged care facility, and had recently acquired a new legal guardian.  Had she really consented, or was she being manipulated?

Nonetheless the book came out, and I even read it.  It sees Jean Louise Finch, the child Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, as a young woman returning home to Alabama for a holiday from her new home in New York.  Here she stays with her father Atticus, now becoming frail and troubled by arthritis, hangs out with her boyfriend, Atticus's young associate, and visits other acquaintances including their former maid Calpurnia who no longer works for them and is an angry, bitter woman as a result of her experience of racial injustice.  The drama of the story, such as it is, centres around the rising racial tensions generated by the civil rights movement and Jean stumbling on a meeting of the town council, on which her father is a prominent member, playing host to a rabid racist in a way that shows her father in a none too flattering light.

Frankly, it's abundantly clear why the publisher rejected it.  It's awful.  The characters are wooden, the plot contrived, the emotions histrionic and unconvincing.  Could this possibly be written by the same author who brought us To Kill a Mockingbird?

Apparently her publisher agreed, but he saw some glimmers of something better - some short flashbacks to Jean's childhood which he thought were the beginnings of a much better story.  He was clearly a perceptive reader and we can thank him both for sparing the world from Harper Lee's practice novel and for cheering on the birth of the real thing.

2. The Professor

It seems likely that for a genuinely talented or inspired novelist, one practice is enough for them to get the hang of it.  In 1847 Smith, Elder and Co published the first edition of Jane Eyre by Acton Bell, the novelist now known to the world by her real name, Charlotte Bronte.  Jane Eyre is one of the seminal works of English fiction, a fusion of gothic and romantic which poses crucial questions about love, morality and social convention.  Bronte had previously published poems and even a novella, but this was her first novel and an instant success.  

She went on to publish two further novels in her lifetime, Shirley and Villette, which are interesting enough but seem trivial beside her masterpiece.  However, her first novel, The Professor, was only published in 1857, just over a year after her death, by her bereaved husband.  Like Harper Lee she had sent this novel to her publishers only to have it rejected, with the rejection softened  by encouragement to send any further writings.

As with Lee, once you read Charlotte Bronte's first attempt you understand clearly why it was rejected.  It tells the story of William Crimsworth, a man without money, friends or influence but with a good education, who travels to Belgium (where Charlotte also taught for a time) and gets a job as a school teacher.  The school at which he teaches is a hotbed of intrigue and espionage and its owner seeks to control William, perhaps in order to make a husband of him but more likely to gratify her own somewhat obscure designs.  Instead, he falls in love with a young fellow-teacher who also sits in on his classes to learn English, and their love follows the normal ups and downs of the romantic novel before ending in their marriage and joint founding of their own school.

The Professor is clearly a practice novel - its characters are uninteresting, its intrigues transparent, its ending predictable.  Reading it, you wonder how its author went on within a year to produce Jane Eyre but it shows that even the greatest of geniuses need practice.  

Unlike Harper Lee, Bronte never accepted that The Professor was a dud, and tried to publish it many times over her lifetime.  No-one would have it, but parts of it were repurposed for her final novel, Villette.  The young teacher (now changed to a woman), the poverty and isolation from family, the journey to Belgium (thinly disguised as the fictional kingdom of Labassecour), the school with its scheming headmistress, the love affair with a fellow teacher, are all given new form.  It is much better in this form but still no great shakes.  Bronte, it seemed, had only one real shot and she fired it early.

3. Scenes of Clerical Life

If you want to watch a great novelist developing, as it were, before your eyes, it would be hard to go past George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life.  It is the first published fiction of the woman (real name Marian Evans) who went on to write a number of great novels including that masterpiece of English fiction, Middlemarch.  It consists of three novellas, each published separately in one of John Blackwood's magazines in 1857 before Blackwood collected them in a book in 1858.  

They are conveniently collected in the order in which she wrote them and form a kind of primer, a set of exercises in fiction writing which show Ms Evans gradually mastering the skills of the craft.  The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton hesitantly tells the tale of a well intentioned but bumbling country parson, and  the tale itself bumbles along like its hero trying hard to do the right thing but ultimately failing through lack of any decent story.  The second, Mr Gilfil's Love Story, is a huge improvement but remains a diamond in the rough, a striking and original tale of the conflict between patronage and love marred by plenty of moments of kitschy melodrama.  By the third, Janet's Repentance, the author has the hang of the game, telling a challenging story of domestic violence and religious faith with the skill and assurance of a writer destined for greater things.  

4. Maurice Guest

Well into the 20th Century, women authors were still hiding behind male pseudonyms.  Even in 1960 Nelle Harper Lee dropped her obviously feminine first name in favour of her more gender-neutral middle name.  The Australian expatriate Ethel Richardson published six novels and a number of other works between 1908 and 1939 under the name Henry Handel Richardson.  They include two classics of Australian literature, The Getting of Wisdom and the trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony which are celebrated for their psychological depth and vivid portrayal of what in her lifetime were acutely uncomfortable subjects, including lesbianism and mental illness.  Both stories were based on (but not necessarily true representations of) her own life - The Getting of Wisdom based on her time as a boarder at the Presbyterian Ladies College and Richard Mahony based on the lives of her parents.

Richardson was also a gifted musician who studied piano at the School of Music in Liepzig, and she set her first novel there.  Maurice Guest, published in 1908, is the story of a young English pianist who studies at, or at least is enrolled in, this same school.  He arrives full of intent to settle down to his studies and become a great musician, but he is soon derailed by his love for the beautiful Louise Dufrayer.  At least Richardson uses the word 'love' but in fact he stalks her obsessively, spending long hours watching her window and trying to be in places where he can see her, but hardly daring to approach her or speak to her until a long way into the tale.  When he does finally establish himself as her lover the relationship rapidly becomes abusive and when she finally succeeds in extricating herself from his clutches he commits suicide.

In a way this is like an extended counterpart to Mr Gilfil's Love Story, a brilliant tale told badly.  Its portrayal of Maurice's decline is reprised much more skillfully in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony but even here it is a powerful central story.  Richardson provides her readers with a fully rounded human being who you alternately empathise with and are frustrated by.  She also presents a story which could plausibly have ended differently - the eminently sensible Madeleine Wade would have made a much better partner for Maurice, and seems keen for the role, but although he likes her and relies on her judgement it is not enough to draw him away from his obsession.  

These strengths saved it from the fate of The Professor or Go Set a Watchman, but at least it would have benefited from the attentions of a decent editor.  It drags on interminably - almost 500 pages in the edition I have - and probably half of these pages could fall to the red pen without being missed.  By the time Maurice ends his life not only do none of his acquaintances mourn him, but the reader feels his death is a mercy.  

Yet just two years later Richardson published The Getting of Wisdom, which takes half the number of pages to pack in twice the emotional impact, riding its adolescent mood swings from hilarity to devastation, popularity to pariah, loneliness to love, in a way that has been popular with Australian readers and filmgoers ever since.  How did she learn so quickly?

5. Catch-22

And now for something completely different...

Joseph Heller was actually a man in real life.  He did many things before he published Catch-22 in 1961.  He served as a bombardier in the US Army Air Corps in World War II.  He earned a masters in literature and taught English composition at Pennsylvania State University.  He worked as an advertising copywriter.  He even wrote the odd short story.  Yet he never attempted a novel before he began to write Catch-22 in 1953.  Even when he started writing it he intended it to be a short novella.  He was learning on the job, slowly and carefully, and seven years on it had stretched past 450 pages.

Unlike the other novels on this list Catch-22 is one of those Novels You Must Read.  Even those who have never picked up a copy have heard its title as a byword for bureaucratic obfuscation.  In its most basic formula Catch 22 is a rule in Heller's imaginary military handbook that says 'in order to get out of the army you have to be crazy, and anyone who wants to get out of the army obviously isn't crazy.'  This formulation serves as a kind of motif for the entire bizarre, anarchic comedy that Heller builds around his imagined air corps and its central character, the bombardier Captain John Yossarian.  

The story is hilarious and at times even side-splitting, bursting at the seams with absurd comedy, outrageous behaviour and blinding stupidity.  Yet what makes it a great novel is the way this comedy serves as a smokescreen for the horror of war.  In a scene to which Heller returns over and over again, Yossarian attempts to help his injured crew-mate Snowden.  Each time a little more of this scene is revealed until you finally learn the full horror of Snowden's injuries.  It is this trauma which drives the frenetic mayhem of the story, the reason Yossarian uses every means possible to avoid flying missions, to get out of the army, to blot out this memory in any way possible.  

After this stunning first essay in the art of novel-writing, Heller published a number of other novels, including a sequel, but none of them came close to the brilliance of this first offering.  Like Charlotte Bronte, he really only had one shot.  He just fired it a little earlier.

***

Interestingly, there is one thing that all of these novels have in common apart from being first attempts.  They all draw something from the lives of their authors.  Nelle Lee grew up in Alabama where her father was a lawyer and a member of the State legislature.  Charlotte Bronte worked as a school teacher in Belgium and later started her own school.  Marian Evans grew up in a country parsonage.  Ethel Turner studied as a foreign music student in Liepzig.  Joseph Heller flew over 60 bombing missions in a B-25.  Each of them used these formative experiences as a jumping off point for stories that tried to be something more than autobiography even if in practice they sometimes turned out to be something less.

You might want to read some of these novels.  All of them are still in print, some of them are here on my bookshelves and most of them are likely to be in your local library.  They are all in the Brisbane City Council library system, although you won't be able to borrow them for a while.  

Then again you might not.  You might prefer to spend your time on the great works their authors produced after they had learned their craft.  It's up to you.  We all have to start somewhere.