PART IV POOR FELLOW MY COUNTRY
Chapter 9 The Rule of Old Zave
After the failures and disappointments of the fifties, it must have been hard for Herbert to nerve himself for another attempt, but in 1965 he was ready. On Tuesday 23 August his writing log contains the entry, ‘Yesterday marked the beginning of the book properly’.498 The great work had begun. On 25 September he calculates, ‘say I average 500 words a day, I have a book [of 150,000 words in] 300 days. It’s thus about a year’s work to do the first draft. So we can say this will take 18 months’. 499 How wrong he was. It was to take nine years and 850,000 words before ‘the opus’ was finally completed. Considering the trouble he got into in the fifties, one might have expected Herbert to have sought advice early and often during the writing of Poor Fellow My Country. But no. He was, if anything, more determined than ever to take advice from no-one. No more would he submit work in progress to an editor. He would do his own thing without interference, and if critics and publishers did not like it at the end, so be it. He simply wrote on, year after year, with no-one but himself ever seeing what he had written. And as the years went by, and the book got longer and longer, he must sometimes have wondered whether he had got it right this time. He was horribly vulnerable. He knew now how fallible his taste was. It had betrayed him in the fifties and could do so again. How could he be sure Poor Fellow