The Constant Listener. Susan Herron Sibbet

his reasoning:

      “. . . life has no direct sense whatever for the subject and is capable, luckily for us, of nothing but splendid waste.”

      I admired the balance of his phrases. Yes, this was how a great writer told of his method of drawing from life, I thought, as I bent again to my machine, thinking how in the evening I was slaving over my diary pages, their steady pace, the even slant of letters, the nearly identical length of every entry—how it was all calculated, all controlled, no sudden scribble on some evening after too much brandy. No, even then, I knew I was writing those pages—my “private diary”—for public consumption.

      As that first winter passed and as I heard and concentrated my mind and fingers on more and more of the prefaces, I was also listening carefully for my own benefit to Mr. James’ well-thought-out theories of composition. It was in my diary notes that I first endeavoured to make use of his rules and suggestions as I understood them while taking them down.

      As he described the germ for “The Spoils of Poynton,” I was caught in his spell when he told me of the story’s inspiration on that Christmas Eve, that brown London night. It seemed as if I were also there at that dinner table, eavesdropping. I was caught. It had all begun with his friend, another guest at the table, telling him of someone she knew, a good lady of the north, freshly widowed, who was engaged in a fierce family battle with her son over her dead husband’s will. Naturally, under entailed British law, the son was to receive everything the mother and father had owned together, even his mother’s precious house and her priceless collections. Everything was left, entailed away, exclusively to the son. Mr. James had thought that this one hint from his dinner companion was enough and dropped out of her conversation to let his mind begin to work out the rest of the story for himself.

      As he dictated, describing his curiously (to me) ghoulish practise of picking over the bones of a tragedy, building his art on the ruins of other people’s broken lives, I found myself becoming more and more alarmed.

      Again, here was foolish Life, who was notably female—

      “I saw clumsy Life again at her stupid work.”

      He continued, recalling that he had been forced that Christmas Eve to listen to more of the woman’s story. At some point, I must have made some sort of unconscious, protesting creak with my chair. I could not type it out as he dictated. Mr. James then came closer and, in the most deliberate, even diabolical, of tones, went ahead dictating, forcing me to face the bloody work necessary to reach a story.

      He had been caught by the guest’s anecdote, but her first few words—“but ten words”—were all he needed to know, as he thought to himself:

      “One had been so perfectly qualified to say in advance: It’s the perfect little workable thing, but she’ll strangle it in the cradle, even while she pretends, all so cheeringly, to rock it;”

      His own murderous cheerfulness flowed on as he described to me how he stopped his friend from finishing her tale so that he might extract only the tiniest germ, the one viable cell, and throw out the rest. I was dumbfounded to think he’d had no desire even to attempt to tell the whole story, even to try to deal with the “fatal futility of Fact,” as he alliteratively called it. Instead, he went on blithely to describe how he played with his characters, choosing which ones to throw together, which to send their separate ways, with his main concern apparently over the scenic construction of the story, as if it were a play on a stage.