Getting the Idea

I wonder what the business was that the person from Porlock wanted to discuss when he (or possibly she) knocked on the door of the isolated farmhouse in Nether Stowey on that day in the summer of 1797? Maybe he (or she) said something like: ‘Sorry to bother you, Mr Coleridge, but I am honorary secretary of the Porlock Young Writers’ Circle, for my sins, and we were just wondering whether you might be good enough to judge this year’s poetry competition.’

It could have been someone seeking sponsorship for a fun run in support of the Exmoor conservation society, or wanting the poet to sign a petition against the building of the Porlock bypass, or having raffle tickets to sell. My guess is that it was probably an eager fellow asking if Coleridge had ever thought of changing his energy supplier, and offering very good terms if he could provide him with all his fuel needs, including logs, coal and oil for lamps, plus a deal to service his appliances. We know that this person stayed for more than an hour and when Coleridge was finally left in peace he had completely forgotten the rest of the dream that had inspired the poem ‘Kubla Khan’. Three cheers for that person from Porlock! Any writer who has ever been stuck for an idea should applaud that knock on the farmhouse door. If it had not happened, Samuel Taylor Coleridge would have got away with an even greater liberty. Dreaming a poem? It’s preposterous. It’s not playing the game. How many of us have woken up convinced we have just composed the perfect plot, the wittiest epigram or the neatest rhyme in our sleep only to discover, in the cruel light of day, that it is hopeless, meaningless or utterly banal? How many of us have woken up in the middle of the night and written ourselves a note about the meaning of life only to realize next morning that it is a nonsensical scribble? I know only one other person who has had a creative dream and that was my father, the author and critic V. S. Pritchett. One breakfast he informed the family that, in his sleep, he had composed the opening two lines of a song:

I came downstairs in my stockinged feet, But my heart was in my boots.

It’s a very good effort, but I have to admit it’s not ‘Kubla Khan’. So where is the Muse to be found, if not in our dreams? Lord Byron claimed the source of all his inspiration was gin-and-water, others have found a long hot bath helps, or that reading the OED is the answer. Many people have relied on their own peculiar rituals – arranging their desk in a certain way, lining up pencils, choosing a special pen, reaching for the packet of cigarettes or the pipe. I am not sure how you can conduct such a ritual in the age of the computer, except perhaps to fiddle with the fonts or to polish the screen. In my experience, a PC is likely to provide distraction rather than inspiration. My father always smoked his pipe and sat in the same dilapidated armchair, surrounded by spent matches, writing in longhand with a fountain pen on sheets of A4 paper which were fastened to an old pastry board with a bulldog clip. He used that same pastry board almost all his long writing career; it became blackened, ink-spattered and bedoodled. He depended not on inspiration, but on routine. Every day (even on Christmas day) he would head for his study at the top of the house immediately after breakfast. He called it ‘clocking on’ and we often referred to our house as the word factory. Many writers depend on a routine. Trollope, while also employed as a civil servant at the General Post Office, would make a point of being at his desk at home at 5.30 every morning to write for three hours. He would even get his watch out and aim to produce 250 words every quarter of an hour. Balzac would get up at 1 a.m. and, sustained by black coffee, work flat out for seven hours, take a 90-minute break, then carry on till 4 p.m. It was estimated that he got through 50 cups of black coffee a day. I love the account of how Graham Greene was inspired to write The Third Man. In a letter to his mistress Catherine Walston in September 1947, he wrote: ‘I believe I have a book coming . . . I walked up Piccadilly and back and went into a Gent’s in Brick Street, and suddenly in the Gent’s I saw the three chunks, the beginning, the middle and the end.’ It is just so charming to imagine a chance encounter with the Muse in a Gent’s lavatory behind Piccadilly. You will notice that the first part of this discovery of a beginning, middle and end was a walk up and down Piccadilly. So often, walking turns out to be an essential part of the search for inspiration. Charles Dickens took a brisk three-hour walk at two o’clock every day. When I lived in a village in Kent and had to provide a column every Tuesday for the Daily Telegraph I relied on a routine and a walk in order to get an idea of what to write. It had to be a solitary walk. Even the dog had to be left behind. I had a set route round the village, along the road past the old people’s bungalows (remembering to wave to Ivy, always standing by her kitchen sink at her front window), turn right at the manor house, carry on up School Lane, left through the church car park, past the farmhouse, left again down the church path, left down the main street, past the pub and back home. It took only about fifteen minutes, but I would repeat this walk four or five times in a morning. (It was a big waving day for Ivy.) Sometimes I would return home with a first paragraph in my head, sometimes I would get an idea for the ending as I was on the church path. On other occasions I would arrive back home having only come up with a rather pleasing adverb. My slightly odd behaviour soon got noticed in the village. Word got about that my circuit was part of my search for an Idea. It was decided that I must not be disturbed, that this was no time for passing the time of day. People would come out of their cottages to shush their barking dogs, old friends would duck behind their hedges to avoid me. I certainly wouldn’t claim that this was due to any reverence about the creative process; it was more out of a sense that I was suffering from some strange illness. One neighbour would slow down in his car as he passed me in the main street, wind down the window, put on a funereal face and whisper ‘Got your idea yet?’ I would pull a face and say, ‘Nearly.’ Sometimes I had the impression that the whole village was in a state of suspense – not true, of course. Round about lunchtime I would go to the pub with the first draft of the piece I had written and I would sit in the corner with a beer and revise it. When anybody came into the bar and looked as if they might speak to me, the landlord would give them a warning look and they would back away. ‘Oh, sorry, I forgot it’s Tuesday,’ they’d say. I don’t believe anybody in the village actually read the piece when it appeared in the paper. That was not the point. They were, after all, only interested in the process, in witnessing the minor agony of its creation. I was merely a little distraction, a small piece of village street theatre. Coleridge was a walker, too. He and Wordsworth used to go for long night-time tramps in the hills around Nether Stowey, causing locals to spread the rumour that they were spying for the French. Today there is a designated walk from Nether Stowey to Porlock which is named Coleridge Way, in honour of the poet. Maybe writers, even now, are striding along it, in search of inspiration. Let us hope they are not buttonholed on their journey by some official from the Porlock Tourist Board. P.S. I have just got back from a stroll round the block and I’ve had a revelation. I believe I now know the truth about what happened on that summer day in 1797. The person from Porlock burst into the farmhouse in a state of high excitement, saying: ‘Mr Coleridge, I was just taking my usual walk round the village today when I got this brilliant idea for an epic poem! I just had to come straight here to tell you all about it . . .’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 49 © Oliver Pritchett 2016