I’m going to assume it was Brad’s review of Pen To Paper by Pamela Frankau that put it on my radar. I’ve only read a handful of her prodigious output, but I think she can be a brilliant, and brilliantly unusual, writer. She can also be a pretty poor, melodramatic one. And so I was intrigued about how she’d write about the craft of writing – for that is exactly what Pen To Paper is. (Incidentally, Brad’s review dates it to 1962, but I assume that was an American publication date or something – my copy was published in 1961, so fear not re: it’s eligibility for the 1961 Club.)
Well, I say that. It’s nothing like the sort of ‘how to write’ book that might be published nowadays. Doubtless that was the sort of topic suggested to her by a publisher, but Frankau has really written an autobiography through the lens of her writing. We don’t discover much that is personal (except in relationship with her father, more of which later) but we do get to take an entertaining journey through her career, alongside a rather subjective dose of writing advice.
Frankau’s first novel was published when she was still a teenager, and she wrote about one a year after that. She does seem to assume a little knowledge of her oeuvre, but I think you could enjoy Pen To Paper even if it were your first Frankau book. Certainly, most of what she says about writing tends towards the broad rather than the specific – for instance, her habit of the Rough and the Smooth. The ‘Rough’ is her rough draft, written on the right-hand side of notebooks, getting down the ideas and the characters and seeing what happens. The left-hand side is reserved for all sorts of edits and notes and self-recriminations – and the Smooth is the next draft, in which any manner of things may have changed. The idea of redrafting isn’t particularly unusual, but I enjoyed the way Frankau wrote about it, and the leap that is somehow made between a rough smashing-out of possibilities into (say) something as complex and brilliant as A Wreath for the Enemy.
When it comes to details of writing, she discusses such things as first vs third person, how to craft dialogue, when to use adjectives, how to vary sentence length etc etc. These are the bread-and-butter of ‘how to’ guides, but so much engaging in Frankau’s voice than in other people’s. That isn’t because her advice is particularly novel, but because of the tone it is given in: that of an author who has won her spurs, and has the right to a little didacticism, but can also be self-deprecating when need be.
What I found most interesting, though, was when advice turns into memoir. Here she is, writing about sex in books(!):
A scene that I saw with peculiar vividness and intensity before I wrote it once fooled me completely. It was concerned with lust. My character, over whose shoulder events were observed, was a strenuous, priggish fellow who had lived an asectic life. Lust took him unawares. After staring, in an unseemly way and with the crudest thoughts, at a woman whom he was meeting for the first time, he finally picked up a prostitute on his way home. I have made it sound rather silly; but it was an honest scene, a true and necessary stage in the life of the man. I wasn’t writing about sexual desire for my own fun, nor for the fun of excitable readers. Even so, when it was written, I was a little leery of it. Wasn’t it too frank, too violent for its context?
When I chanced to look at it again, about two years later, I was shocked. Not, as yuou might imagine, by discovering that I indeed gone too far. I hadn’t gone anywhere. The exposition of lust simply wasn’t there. What disturbed me in the writing of it had been thought and not said. The words were missing, the scene almost meaningless. Not as much as an overtone… The vivid apprehension in my own mind had deluded me and it was must have been a powerful delusion to last right through the reading of galleys and page-proof.
I suspect this happens far more often than one knows. I may be easy with the words and the words may even, on occasion, be easy with me, but this is not to say that they have passed my message accurately to you.
These sorts of stories from her own experience aren’t functionally illuminating, but they are interesting and do provide some sort of general rule. Though I can’t really imagine anybody picking this up with the intention of using it to write their own novel – this is much more about spending time with Frankau, and better understanding what motivates and informs her writing. Which is, indeed, incredibly idiosyncratic. I work as a writer for a charity, which involves plenty of proofreading, and I felt a pang of sympathy for her proofreader here:
There is the word ‘grey’. To my mind ‘grey’ and ‘gray’ are two different shades of colour. ‘Grey’ has a blue tint and ‘gray’ a brown. So I spell the word according to the colour I want and the printer’s proof-reader changes it back to uniformity throughout. Then I change it again.
On the other hand, I did cheer her on here:
But American spelling will always be a minor trial to the English writer. I have expressed my feelings about ‘airplane’. There’s a clause in my American contract forbidding its use and likewise that of ‘mustache’.
Speaking of Americans, quite a bit of Pen To Paper is Frankau’s prolonged culture-shock at the US. Let’s gloss over her list of comparisons of Brits and Americans (e.g. Americans: slow / Brits: quicker) to an amusing moment that apparently scuppered her reputation across the Atlantic for a good number of years. She was writing her impressions of America for the Evening Standard, back in the days when British people were routinely paid to do such things.
I wrote, among other things: ‘Life in California is very beautiful, very hygienic, very tiring and very expensive.’ The editor, or somebody, left out ‘beautiful’.
Oops! Along the way, Frankau does have plenty to say about publishers, editors etc, including the editors of magazines. While she wrote an extraordinary number of novels, it seems that she didn’t have the same success in the periodicals and journals that were the mainstay of many authors’ earnings during Frankau’s career. While Pen To Paper is not very open about many aspects of Frankau’s personal life, she does go into a lot of detail about finances – and how little she has managed to retain from her profession. She rather self-generously ascribes this to a heart for helping other people out, and to the reluctance of editors to pay her well, but I did also wonder if our definitions of being without money would coincide. Still, she is a lot more open about the earnings of mid-century writing than I’ve seen anywhere except Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and that was illuminating.
And, ah yes, her father. Gilbert Frankau, who was once a big name author. She describes some fraught periods between them, and their apparently very different approaches to writing, and it does sound rather like they didn’t see eye-to-eye on many things. And yet she allots the final 50 pages or so to a memoir of Gilbert, which does feel rather awkwardly tacked onto the end. I imagine she would not have been published as a 19-year-old without his fame, so he is relevant to her literary career – and I would have loved to delve more into the tensions in their relationship, which were rather compelling when they came up – but I could have done without this sudden turn in tone and theme at the end.
But that aside, Pen To Paper is an enjoyable, very idiosyncratic book. It’s definitely more about Frankau than about the craft of writing, but I preferred it that way. She may not have set out to write it as an autobiography, and some of her cards are kept close to her chest, but I definitely ended it feeling much better informed about who she is as a person and as a writer.
