“Memoirs of a Private Man” by Winston Graham, author of forty novels, including “Marnie” and the “Poldark” series: Writing process and writers

Marnie

“…in the writing of Marnie…I was halfway through the book; it was the first time I had written in the person of a woman; and I found myself gagging at the love scenes in which the narrator was made love to by a man. So I stopped and began again at page one, writing it entirely afresh in the third person and from an omniscient point of view…So I persevered in this revision, and having rewritten (in longhand, as I do everything) about 45,000 words of Marnie, I stopped and left it alone for a month, and then went back to read it through. And quite clearly the new version was losing enormously in the change…

“So back I went to the original version, reading it, rewriting it here and there until I came again to the troublesome love scenes. But this time I had somehow sunk deeper into the character of the girl, and they went through without let or hindrance. When the book was finished I was convinced — and still am — that the first person narrative was a tremendous gain upon any other possible way of presenting that novel” (1, pp. 153-154).

Poldark

“In a canvas as wide as the twelve Poldark novels, the number of characters is enormous and their variation, one from another, is enormous; but, looking back, there are relatively few cases in which I have drawn from a living original. It’s as if, in the course of my life, I have encountered thousands of people and they have descended into a sort of cauldron of the subconscious, and some part of one or another has been selected or has surfaced to the conscious at the suitable time to be made into fictional flesh. I don’t ever remember looking around in search of new personalities; they have always been available…you don’t just feel with, you have to feel in…” (1, p. 187).

Split Consciousness

“It could be said that an author is the most harmless form of schizophrenic. He lives for a substantial part of his time in a world of his own creation, even fantasy, but never — one hopes — loses track with reality. When he is the participator he is also, willy-nilly, the observer. While being attached, he is also detached. In one of his diaries Arnold Bennett confesses that when he went to see his mother when she was dying, parallel with his absolutely genuine grief some part of him was taking in the texture of the blankets, the smell of the oil lamp, the drip of liquid on the edge of the medicine bottle, the fly buzzing against the windowpane. In different mood Goethe admits that in the middle of one of his numerous love affairs he found himself tapping out the hexameters of his latest poem on the backbone of his new girlfriend” (1, p. 188).

1. Winston Graham. Memoirs of a Private Man. London, Macmillan, 2003.