Long Before Forty

C. S. Forester

Description

Before C.S. Forester achieved literary success with his famous saga of Captain Horatio Hornblower and the great romantic novels such as “The Africa Queen”, he had a difficult time making his start as an author. Long Before Forty is the account of his lonely struggle to learn how to write. The concluding section, “Some Personal Notes,” is a memoir of his creation of the famous Captain Hornblower!

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Biography
• Lettres et linguistique
• Literary Figures

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774643174
• Langue: English

Extrait

Long Before Forty
by C. S. Forester

First published in 1964
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
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Long Before Forty
by C. S. Forester

On C. S. Forester’s death, the archives of his bank revealed theautobiography of his first thirty-one years. It ends when he wasestablished as a professional novelist but long before TheGeneral and the Hornblower novels had propelled him to theheights of recognition and success. To readers of his novels,and to would-be writers and those fascinated by the career ofwriting, it is an absorbing work.
The early years were spent in Camberwell. Cecil was theyoungest of three brothers, all clever and precocious and clearlyheaded for scholarships. Together they shared an enthusiasmfor lead soldiers and paper campaigns involving armies andfleets in serious tactical exercises. As a small boy, Cecilexploded an almost fatally successful mine, handmade in a backgarden with three-pennyworth of gunpowder.
A weak heart set him apart from the war experiences of hiscontemporaries, and the ensuing restless and lonely periodbegan his breaking away from the professional pattern of hisfamily. Following unwillingly in the footsteps of a brilliantbrother, he became a medical student, but persistently failedthe School Examination in Bones. He compensated himself withpleasures he could ill afford and once sang in the street for themoney for an evening out with a première danseuse. Soonafterwards the decision was made to earn his living by writing.The last part of the book recounts Forester’s chastening earlyexperiences with publishers and the desperate application toboth serious literary effort and hack work which for the timebeing became his life.
Also reprinted in this volume are the autobiographical notesfrom The Hornblower Companion , written thirty years laterwhen his success had reached its height. Possibly no novelistsince Anthony Trollope has written so frankly about hisworking life and talents.
Chapter One
The earliest recollection, perhaps, is of being on board a shipat sea in a fog. There was a good deal of bustle and excitement,bells ringing and sirens blaring and folk running about—verymuch to the taste of a small boy aged two and a half, but notto his mind indicative of anything really untoward. I wassomewhere at the ship’s side, peering through an openingwhich the first officer had had closed with string network formy especial benefit; before that precaution had been taken Ihad been in the habit apparently of hanging most of my smallself out over the Mediterranean. Exactly whereabouts in theship this entrancing opening was is more than I can say now. IfI were to trust to my memory I should call it a porthole, butthat only goes to show that my memory is distorted by laterrecollections. Presumably it was some sort of opening in thebulwarks.
Anyway, as I knelt there and fiddled with the network the fogsuddenly lifted, almost as dramatically as the curtain rising ata theatre. That, too, was not specially marvellous to me; themost ordinary and the most extraordinary things are on muchthe same plane of the marvellous to the two and a half year oldmind. We were at the entrance to Malaga harbour—there wasa glimpse of hills and houses to be seen. Plenty of small boatswere manoeuvring round us; a couple of hundred yards awayor so a big steamer was aground on a sandbank: we wereaground on the same sandbank, which sufficiently accounts forthe bustle on board, but that meant nothing to me. Presumablyit meant something to my mother, who was on board with aconsiderable number of her children—three at least andpossibly five, all under thirteen years old; I do not know howmany of my brothers and sisters were with us.
In fact I do not remember anything else to do with thatvoyage—I cannot say what on earth a passenger steamer fromEgypt was doing at Malaga, nor how we got off the sandbank,nor what the rest of the journey was like. But that one recollectionis vividly clear. Moreover, if ever nowadays I smell thepeculiar sharp scent of tea made with condensed milk the wholepicture of the hills and the houses and the wrecked steamer isconjured vividly up before my eyes in an instant. I suppose acanny steward was allaying panic among the women passengersby serving out cups of tea, and in those days—1901 or so—freshmilk was unobtainable in small Mediterranean steamers.
Presumably the next recollection is of a time a month or twolater. It shows a very small boy who could walk upstairs but notdownstairs, standing outside a small house in Camberwell andfinding the world a very strange place. I was all bundled up inwoollen clothes and mufflers and things—very odd after thetussores and linens to which I was accustomed—and yet I wasconscious of a new and most unpleasant sensation. What wasthe matter with me was cold, the raw cold of an EnglishFebruary, which was something quite out of the run of myprevious experience, for the only two winters I had ever knownhad been passed in the benign sunshine of Egypt.
Moreover, the house decorators to whom I was talking wereto my mind being extremely rude in not understanding what Iwas saying to them. That is easily explainable to me now, forI was persisting in addressing them in Arabic. I could speakEnglish as well, of course—probably better—but to my mindthen people of the social order of house decorators could not beexpected to understand anything except Arabic. I told thosehouse decorators over and over again that they were doing theirwork all wrong, that brick houses were not nearly as nice aswhite stone ones with walls two feet thick, that the smell of sizeand varnish was objectionable to me, and that I did not likeEngland and was going straightaway with my mother to find asteamer back to Egypt; but they only laughed.
They laughed until more house decorators arrived, andamong the newcomers was a man who had served in the Englisharmy and who had fought at Tel-el-Kebir under Wolseley. Heactually managed to remember a few words of Arabic—that isanother instance of unexpected memory, because Tel-el-Kebirwas fought twenty years before—and when he used them mysorrowing heart was comforted. What he said I cannot rememberand cannot possibly imagine—what Arabic words which anEnglish Tommy would pick up in the Cairo bazaars couldpossibly be of use in a conversation with a two and a half yearold?—but whatever it was it reassured me until at last he wasable to get me out of the men’s way and indoors to where thewarm-hearted Irish maid could take charge of me, and offer methe warmth of a kitchen fire and a wooden horse on wheels inexchange for the charcoal braziers and camels of Cairo.
The last I heard of that maid she had risen to the surprisingposition of cook to His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop ofWestminster, and I suppose no other raw Irish girl has made asimilar success of life in the last thirty years. And she deservesevery bit of it too. My regret is that His Eminence, ex officio ,cannot possibly have any children or grandchildren to wanderdown into his kitchen and say ‘I’ll block up the pathway,Maggie’ as I used to do, and ask infantile questions aboutboiling kettles and roasting joints. It would be nice for HisEminence, and I strongly suspect that Maggie would still likeit, and I am quite sure that the grandchildren would.
That winter in Camberwell must have been a depressingperiod, all the same. I can remember my mother weeping overthe cracked chilblains with which her poor hands were covered;and I have heard—although I did not observe it at the time—thatour Camberwell neighbours refused to notice my mother’sexistence. It was far too suspicious, to their minds, that a strangewoman should turn up from foreign parts with five children andno apparent husband. They turned up their noses and passedher on the other side of the street—whether my mother wouldhave been glad if they had done otherwise is more than I cansay. It must have been a dreadful time for my mother, spendingher first winter in England after fifteen years of Egypt—fifteenyears of warmth and sunshine, of willing servants and pleasantsocial life. Khedivial balls and Nile trips—arriving in a smallsuburban house with one maid; embarrassed with five children,and tormented by the cold and by the chilblains.
However, my memory is not burdened with recollections ofthat period, for practically the next picture I can recall is ofbeing helped up into my high chair at the breakfast table andsaying ‘I’m three today, I’m three today’ and feeling verysatisfied with myself in consequence; that must have beenseveral months after our arrival in England. A week after mythird birthday I went to school.
Chapter Two
It may be that those early years in a hot climate conduced toprecocity; or it may be that as the youngest of five I tended tocopy my seniors, but however it was at three years old I couldread with ease and could make some sort of show at writing. Iwas never taught either—I learnt to read by studying the bigbound volumes of Chums which my brothers read. Theycontained, among other things, most thrilling serials by S.Walkey, about pirates and Spaniards and shiploads of treasure.It was only later (probably under the influence of The ScarletPimpernel ) that Mr Walkey turned his attention to the FrenchRevolution. At that time he dealt with a period indefinitelypost-Elizabethan; there are bits of his stories which I canremember now. In one story the villain was called Peref