Block it out
I’m having to come to a decision about the novelist Edith Wharton for a Radio 4 play I’m currently writing (to accompany a dramatisation of ‘Ethan Frome’). Was she a virgin aged 47 when she began a passionate affair with a journalist called Morton Fullerton? Or was her marriage simply a sexual disappointment? They’re the kind of decisions you have to make towards the end of writing these biographical plays. You put them off. I don’t enjoy playing God, but I – and the audience and actors – need to know. You hope the play will decide for you and that your ‘decision’ will be inevitable. But I came across this today in one of Wharton’s letters I hadn’t previously read: ‘I have always obscurely felt that I didn’t know how to write a novel.’ I know the feeling. When I sold up the flat fifteen years ago, it was with the aim of writing novels. I didn’t – or so far, haven’t - succeeded. There are two half finished novels (years of work) with accompanying plans and drafts and general bright ideas in cheerfully coloured boxes in my spare room. Nothing to stop me finishing either or both of them in a few months or so. And I don’t. Why? Maybe the impetus has gone – certainly the impetus that led me towards more than a few years of fiction writing. I am confident about the Wharton play. I am looking forward to the next play, just commissioned. They are not without their problems, of course. But novels make me nervous. Wharton thought she was better in her short stories. I know I am better with these hour (or so) long radio plays. Someone who has known my stuff over the years called me a ‘miniaturist,’ yet lately I have written a number of longer plays – and with a feeling that they could have been even longer, maybe to their advantage. But plays are fun for me, and novel writing isn’t…. I started out trying to be a novelist. I was 21. It seems laughable. The novel turned into a television play largely because I realised I could write dialogue. I sent the play off (it was written in pencil) to the only writer I had some contact with: Ted Willis (of ‘Dixon of Dock Green’). I’d known his son at University. A letter came back on House of Lords notepaper – Ted was Lord Ted Willis - to my address at 10, New Houses, Piccadilly Road, Chesterfield. It began: ‘You would expect me to be frank…’ I still have the letter. It didn’t mess about. The play was no good, though he noticed ‘some ability with dialogue.’ He implied that buying a typewriter might help my prospects and that I should study television drama, see what I liked, see what worked. I did. I took up teaching and wrote during the holidays. Three years later I had a television play accepted. I got to know Ted when I was an established writer. I was a having a terrific run in television and at one of our lunches he said to me: ‘You’re taking the bread out of my mouth.’ When a year or two later things had slipped back from this peak and I was ‘contemplating my future..’ and thinking of the escape route of writing a novel, Ted offered me five thousand pounds – not as a loan. A gift. I’m still glad I didn’t take it. I just wasn’t confident enough of my fictional abilities – and that still applies. My years of attempted novel writing weren’t wasted. I spotted (I like to think) a distinctive tone of voice – not comic, quite, but light, ironic. I developed a love for - what shall I call it? - construction, the architecture of a piece. I realised I was spending far too much of my time polishing paragraphs when I should have been powering on with the damn novel. Now, with plays, I get the architecture into place before beginning writing. What we might call local realism, and even dialogue, takes second place. Block it out…