My Virtual Reading Room

Hi all,

I would like to share one of my favourite stories--this is by Dr. A.J. Cronin from
his autobiography "Adventures in Two Worlds."  He was forced to take leave from his
medical practice at the age of thirty-three, for health reasons, and decided to pursue 
his lifelong ambition of being a writer during that time.  This is what he writes 
about his experience; enjoy!    *** 

I had no pretensions to technique, no knowledge of style or form. 
The difficulty of simple statement staggered me. I spent hours look- 
ing for an adjective. I corrected and recorrected until the page looked 
like a spider's web; then I tore it up and started all over again. 

Yet once I had begun, the thing haunted me. My characters took 
shape, spoke to me, excited me. When an idea struck me in the mid- 
dle of the night I would get up, light a candle we had, of course, 
no electricity in this remote spot and sprawl on the floor until I had 
translated it to paper. I was possessed by the very novelty of what I 
did. At first my rate of progress was some eight hundred laboured 
words a day. By the end of the second month I was readily accom- 
plishing two thousand. 

For the next three months, through all that lovely summer, while 
the others enjoyed themselves, I remained chained to my desk. De- 
spite their pleadings that I should take a day off, I kept myself on the 
rack relentlessly, all day and part of the night, coming down late for 
my peptonised meals, answering the children absently, seemingly 
anxious only to get back to my private treadmill. 

Although at the time I maintained a stoic, a sphinxlike silence, I 
will now confess to the miseries I went through. There were redeem- 
ing moments when, carried away by what I had written, living with 
my characters in the drama they were enacting, I dared to hope that 
I was doing something fine; but for the most part I felt that all my 
drudgery was quite useless, that I was wasting my time in sheer 
futility. 

The worst moment came when I was halfway through the book, 
and the typescript of the first chapters arrived from a secretarial 
bureau in London. As I read the opening pages, a wave of horror 
swept over me. I thought, Have I written this awful stuff? No one 
will ever read it. No one will ever publish it. I simply can't go 
on! 

I had the impulse there and then to throw up the whole project, 
destroy everything I had written. It was irresistible. I got up with a 
set face, took the manuscript to the back door, and flung it in the 
ash heap. 

When the news was known, a dire silence fell upon the house. At 
lunch, the very children were silent. I remember so well it started 
to rain, a dank Scots afternoon, and, scared by my scowl, my wife and 
the two boys left me without a word. 

Drawing a sullen satisfaction from my surrender, or, as I pre- 
ferred to phrase it, my return to sanity, I went for a walk in the 
drizzling rain. Halfway down the loch shore I came upon old Angus, 
the farmer, patiently and laboriously ditching a patch of the bogged 
and peaty heath which made up the bulk of his hard-won little croft. 
As I drew near, he gazed up at me in some surprise; he knew of my 
intention and, with that inborn Scottish reverence for "letters", had 
tacitly approved it. When I told him what I had just done, and why, 
his weathered face slowly changed, his keen blue eyes, beneath 
misted sandy brows, scanned me with disappointment and a queer 
contempt. He was a silent man, and it was long before he spoke. Even 
then, his words were cryptic. 

"No doubt you're the one that's right, Doctor, and I'm the one 
that's wrong. . . ." He seemed to look right through me. "My fa- 
ther ditched this bog all his days and never made a pasture, I've dug 
it all my days and I've never made a pasture. But, pasture or no 
pasture" he placed his foot on the spade "I canna help but dig. 
For my father knew and I know that if you only dig enough, a pas- 
ture can be made here." 

I understood. I watched his dogged figure, working away, deter- 
mined to see the job through at all costs. In silence I tramped back 
to the house, drenched, shamed, furious, and picked the soggy bundle 
from the ash heap. I dried it in the kitchen oven. Then I flung it on 
the table and set to work again with a kind of frantic desperation. I 
would not be beaten, I would not give in. Night after night, keeping 
myself awake by sheer will power, I wrote harder than ever. At last, 
toward the end of September, I wrote "Finis." The relief was  unbelievable--  I had kept my word. I had created a book. Whether it was 
good, bad, or indifferent I did not know. 

With a sigh of incredible relief, I packed the manuscript in an 
old cardboard box, tied it with farmyard twine. Then, having found 
a publisher's address in a two-year-old almanac, I dispatched the 
untidy parcel and promptly forgot about it. Like a man who has lost 
a heavy burden, I began to bathe and fish and row with the boys, 
to roam the hills and the moors with them, to behave once again 
like a normal human being. 

The days succeeded one another, and nothing happened. That 
nondescript package might well have disappeared forever into the 
void. By stern parental edict the subject was taboo in the family, and 
when the younger son inadvertently made innocent reference to 
"Daddy's book," he received the blackest of looks. 

In point of fact, I had no illusions. I was fully aware that aspir- 
ing authors acquire rejection slips more readily than cheques, and 
that first manuscripts usually come back a score of times before 
being accepted, if indeed they are ever accepted at all. My surprise 
and delight may therefore be imagined when, one morning in Octo- 
ber, I received a wire from the head of the publishing firm which I 
had selected, informing me that the novel had been accepted for 
publication, offering an advance of fifty pounds, and asking me to 
come to London immediately. 

As we read the telegram, a stunned awe fell upon the farm living 
room. Fifty pounds, cash down, seemed a lot of money, and per- 
haps later there might even be a little more, on account of royalties. 
Pale and rather shaky, I muttered: 

"Maybe, with luck and economy, I can make a living as a writer. 
Get the timetable and find out when the next train leaves for London." 

Looking back upon the events which followed, it seems incredible, 
even now, how swiftly, how amazingly, from that uncertain moment, 
the flood tide of success was loosed. This first novel, Hatter's Castle, 
written despairingly on twopenny exercise books, thrown out and 
rescued from the rubbish heap at the eleventh hour, was published in 
the spring of 1930. It was acclaimed by critics, chosen by the Book 
Society, translated into twenty-one languages, serialised, dramatised, 
and filmed. It went into endless editions, has sold, to date, approxi- 
mately three million copies, and goes on selling still. It launched me 
upon a literary career with such an impetus that, once and for all, 
I hung up my stethoscope and put away that little black bag. My 
medical days were over.