One always finds it a bit refreshing when they observe some of their own failings in one they admire or consider accomplished. It makes our hero’s seem more human and also stirs in us the thought that maybe we could do something great and noteworthy too someday, despite our failings. That was my feelings when reading this passage about Charles Williams, prolific author and lose friend of C.S. Lewis:
He [Williams] was writing fast now, partly in office hours at the Press. War in Heaven [his first published novel] actually brought him some modest royalties, and the prospect of making money by writing encouraged him to continue in the same vein. Not that he had any absurd dream of riches, but there was a constant stream of household bills to be settled. His salary at the Press was not unreasobably low, but he was bat at managing money – he was always buying cups of coffee and glasses of sherry and meals for his friends – and in any case his memories of financial anxiety in his childhood left him in a contant state of worry about his bank-balance. So he went on writing novels specifically for the purpose of making money, and indeed he believed strongly that this was an excellent motive. He declared that it was the stimulus of potential poverty that had produced so many great writers from the ranks of the financially unstable lower middle classes. “I saw Shakespeare”, he wrote in a poem,
In a Tube station on the Central London:
He was smoking a pipe:
He had Sax Rohmer’s best novel under his arm
(In a cheap edition)
And the Evening News.
He was reading in the half-detached way one does.
He had just come away from an office
And the notes for The Merchant
Were in his pocket,
Beginning (it was the first line he thought of)
“Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins”,
But his chief wish was to be earning more money.-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.95