I mentioned Dorothy Whipple in passing the other day and I've since read her out-of-print Random commentary (it's obtainable at a price, or if you're lucky, as I was, from the library).It is a compilation of notes and diary entries written from the 1920s to the end of the war, but there are scarcely any dates and no breaks in the narrative at all, so one paragraph just leads on to the next though the events they decribe may have been months apart.
Once you've got the rhythm, it's a fascinating insight into a writer's life. Yesterday I was talking about Jennie Rooney's book Inside the Whale and I read that she wrote many of its short chapters during her lunchbreaks while she was working as a lawyer. Dorothy Whipple didn't have a job outwith her writing but she had a husband and a house to run and what is very noticeable about her life - she complains about it frequently - is how difficult she found it to get the time to write. She was constantly interrupted, expected to break off from what she was doing for casual callers, to entertain people who happened to be in the area, to minister to family and friends, cook endless meals for visitors and no-one seemed to think anything of intruding on her. Given that she was a bestselling author of her day, that is astonishing. However, the other striking feature of the book is just how little confidence she had in her abilities, and perhaps that explains why she wasn't firmer in setting 'work/life boundaries'. Despite the kudos of enormous sales and critical acclaim she didn't really believe in her talent.
She comes across as unpretentious, caring, modest and serious in a good way. She took pleasure from simple things, had a great love of nature, and was a keen observer of people and places - she far preferred creating character to devising plot, for instance. Her domestic life and her writing constantly overlap so for example she says "The house is full of the smell of boiling marmalade which I am making while thinking of They Were Sisters
There is a great deal in the book worth quoting, but here is a passage Dorothy Whipple herself noted particularly and describes as the best advice to any writer that she has come across:
".....the study of other men's works, except by the way, is the surest manner of killing the power to do things for oneself....doing is the sole parent of doing, and creating a little the only way of learning how to create more".
