PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to William Deacon, 2 August 1953. MS-2-202 39.43.
Subject HeadingsAfter giving his opinion on a writing problem being faced by his friend, William Deacon, Raddall exchanges family news, gives a full description of his writing retreat at Moose Harbor, and explains the need to get away from summer visitors. In response to a comment from Deacon about the British historical fiction writer, Nicholas Monsarrat, Raddall gives his views about Monsarrat's writing and on how Monsarrat interacts with people. Raddall goes on to compare his own instinctive writing style and ease with people to Monsarrat's carefully planned work and introverted tendencies.
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Sunday, August 2nd, 1953. My dear Bill, Your handling of the wedding notice is adroit and will eliminate any possible objections from the people concerned. As I've said before, the thing was alright as it stood, you were merely quoting a newspaper account and legally on solid ground; but it's just as well to avoid personal reper- cussions if you can do so without sacrificing the point of the joke. Your writing den in the upper story of your boathouse sounds attractive. I think I can match it, though, for I'm writing this in my hide-away at Moose Harbour, a small creek in the shore woods at the entrance to Liverpool Bay, about three miles seaward from my house in town. The creek holds two or three small fish-wharves, and the usual weatherbeaten shacks where fishermen stow their gear, and at the present moment a dozen of their motor-boats are tied up there in Sabbath idleness. Actually my hut is outside the creek, with a broad view seaward that takes in Coffin Island and the lighthouse marking the entrance to Liverpool Bay. The sea washes the rocks thirty feet away, so that literally from where I sit looking over the sea there's nothing dry this side the Bay of Biscay -- except Sable Island (a place of which you've heard a thing or two) down over the horizon about 200 miles and on exactly the same parallel of latitude. My hut is quite spacious, a single long room, built of round peeled logs sawn down through the centre, so that inside all is square, as if the interior walls were of boards. The main feature is a big plate glass window, eight feet long and six high, from which at intervals I have to erase the salt deposited by storms. Here I can stand or sit or lie on my cot and watch the sun come up out of the sea, or the moon at the proper time; and here I can write or just plain think without the interruption of the telephone or of summer visitors anxious to meet an actual author in his habitat. It's pleasant to meet people who have read one's books and instructive to hear their comment on the particular things that have impressed them; but as my notoriety grew I found it impossible to get any serious work done during the months of June, July and August when the tourists are afoot. Hence three years ago I sought this spot and built this den, secluded and yet within easy reach of my house in Liverpool. It contains a small stand for my portable, a working chair, two plain pinewood lounging chairs, a simple davenport that opens out to form a bed, a pine trestle table and two pine benches that can be put outdoors for occasional family picnics and for feeding special guests, and a small sheet-metal lumber-camp stove complete with oven. At the present time Edith and I have the place to ourselves, for our daughter (17) is a swimming instructress at a YWCA camp for several weeks, and our son Tom (19) is a deck-hand on a freighter running from Montreal and Cornerbrook, Nfld., to ports in Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. He leaves the ship in mid-September when the term begins at Acadia University. He took to the sea like a duck to water anywhere, and apparently has the same salt in his blood that my father bequeathed to me. (My dad was a soldier, but he was a Cornishman, a salty breed, and began his career in the Royal Marines on the China station 50-odd years ago.) I read with much interest your comment on the difference between Monsarrat's 1 writing methods and mine. The basic fact is of course that Monsarrat's books, including The Cruel Sea, are actually histories rather than novels, and that is why he is able to plan so exactly before he starts to write, and to keep to his plan so exactly in the whole course of the writing. They are documentaries and as such they are magnificent -- I firmly believe that The Cruel Sea will remain a classic of English literature on war at sea -- but in those brief chapters where he ventures into the province of novelist -- creative fiction, that is -- his tale turns weak and his characters are never quite credible. He was undoubtedly speaking sincerely when he remarked to us all that his next book ("about women") would be "largely guess-work". I'm curious to see it, for my impression of him is that of a man essentially introverted and shy, not really familiar with men (except those who came under his microscope when they were shut up in the same ships with him during the war), and moreover a man without much intimate contact with women. (In spite of his two wives. Did you meet his current one? I believe she was known in Johannesburg as The Cruel She.2) Monsarrat's assertive and somewhat belligerent manner (which I'm told gave many of his hearers a hostile opinion) seemed to me a sort of defence mechanism, the bold front of a man a little overwhelmed by success and still unsure of himself, in spite of the adulation he receives. I met and chatted with him two or three times in Toronto apart from our debate before the CAA3 and the bit we did together on TV,4 and on the whole I liked him. We are complete opposites of course. He's the congenital male introvert with a cynical view of the world, who nevertheless feels irresistibly drawn to the crowd by some fascination that he cannot understand. (He confessed to me that he would never be happy until he could live in London "where there are lots of people and lots of things going on".) On the other hand I am the congenital mixer, at home with men and charmed with women, who for those very reasons cannot work or even think except in solitude and has forced himself over the years to seek and like solitude as a necessity. Apart from all that I have always looked upon my writing bent, not merely from the viewpoint of the sea, but from a deep and sincere interest in the genus homo, male and female, afloat or ashore, past or present. This it seems to me is the true field of the novelist, and the tales he writes cannot be planned so exactly as Monsarrat seems to think; they have to be pulled from the back of his mind, out of various past experiences and feelings and observations, and all subject to the quirks of his own imagination -- a process which defies analysis and certainly any sort of rigid planning beforehand. That is why I detest being asked to get up and pontificate on the subject. I agree absolutely with the British painter Walter Sickert when he was asked how he got the ideas for his work. He said, "My paintings grow out of me like my toe-nails. When they have reached a certain length I cut them off, and that is all I know." |
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2. THR is referring to Phillipa Crosby, Monsarrat's second wife, divorced in 1961, died in 1979.