For a very long time, maybe two years, my husband worked away in the scaled-down version of a house at the end of our garden, on a book about SCALE. I never really understood what scale was, though the word seemed to rouse interest in architect friends and, much against my wishes, R had accepted a commission to write the wretched thing.
The idea for the book had been his. But a momentary enthusiasm, once a delivery date has been set and money has changed hands, cannot be easily discarded. As it ought to be. No wonder that all the books I value most from my years in publishing emerged from that heap of manuscripts known as the slush pile: books written because they demanded to be written, often by authors with very little knowledge of the publishing world.
Of course, great works, especially works of non-fiction, can be written to order, but being locked in to any schedule or expectations other than one’s own still seems like a straitjacket to me: not unlike being in debt, something of which I have a particular horror.
And so it was that R was toiling away at a project in which he had really lost interest while I, whenever I had the time, was writing short pieces, to no one’s order but my own, which my friend Nicky was posting every month on the website she had given me as an 80th birthday present, at a time when I did not even know what a blog was.
THERAPY FOR US OLD PEOPLE is what Effie had said when she gave me this splendid pig who became our household god.
She had made the pig (I can still see the streaks of glue where she had slightly misfired as she stuck on the teats; it is a lady pig) at the nearby Charlie Ratchford Centre (see link below for how the Centre looks following its recent transformation by Camden Council) when she lived across the road from us in a pretty little house that had been provided for her by her ex-employer. She had been his housekeeper.
Of course Effie, still irresistible in advanced old age, must have been more irresistible still in her youth and, now that I am as old as she was, I appreciate even more her liveliness and the kick that creating that felt pig had given her.
And so it was that while Mrs Pig looked on from her post at the top of the stairs and I was enjoying writing about anything that came into my head, R was wrestling each day with a subject that had gone dead on him.
The answer was obvious. He should give up on books and turn to shorter forms.
What about the Essay?
Had he not implored me to read Montaigne, a pocket-sized edition of whose essays I carry around as a kind of mascot, but have yet to read?
Had he not loved Emerson and Thoreau? Did he perhaps prefer to forget that many readers found his thinking and his prose impenetrable and, thus, best taken in small doses? We could both remember his Aunt Eunice — a Methodist preacher’s daughter, as he was a Methodist preacher’s grandson — saying she was going to finish his first book if it killed her.
Why not make it easier for his loyal readers as well as for himself and, above all, why limit himself to one subject?
And so, after a long and difficult birth, his blog was born (link below) and the wasted years forgotten as this healthy child, which had been waiting impatiently in the wings, took flight . . . Rembrandt, Soutine, Cy Twombly, Shakespeare, Artaud, Ruskin, of course . . .
How right Effie was: making IS the best therapy of all.
The Charlie Ratchford Centre as it is now.