John Locke contributes this piece from the issue of The Writer dated September 1921. We have requested permission from the staff of The Writer to keep this article posted. You can visit the website for The Writer by clicking here.
PERSONAL GOSSIP ABOUT AUTHORS
Mundy -- Most of the many writers who were born in Maine, or who live there, make Maine a frequent theme of their work. Talbot Mundy is an exception. He has lived in Maine for many years, though a native of England, but his stories commonly have to do with things on the other side of the world.
"Why did I start writing? The price of pork and beans made it necessary. I just got hungry enough, which is always a good thing for beginners. I was in New York, and I knew Jeff Handley, a red-haired reporter on a paper there. I would pound out stuff on the typewriter, and Jeff would come home, look my stuff over, say it was rotten, which it was, and make me go ahead doing more of it. Finally, under the stint of his irony I wrote a story and sold it to Frank Munsey. It was about British soldiers. They all told me nobody wanted to read about British soldiers, but that was all I knew to write about, so I went on writing about British soldiers.
"My first book, Rung Ho, was really a sort of glorified short story. That is, it began as a short story and turned into a book. I never began really to write, though, until I got in Maine. Everybody was so dashed independent in Maine -- so friendly -- natural. Why, I never knew what life was until I sat on a curbstone in Norway -- Norway, Me. -- and swapped yarns with a banker.
"I was a citizen of Great Britain until nine years ago, when I became an American. As you hear, I now talk a jargon mixture of Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, down-east Yankee, and Shakespeare, but all the time I go on writing English. I consider America the most delightful and comfortable country in the world. The truth is, however, it really is much too comfortable. A man gets soft on his feet here and effeminate and I have to run away once in a while . . . so off to wild places where I can rough it and learn to sympathize with the other fellow.
"My ideal life? That's easy -- a yacht large enough to go around the world in with an all-American crew. I should like to make such a yacht a sort of floating headquarters, stopping off where I pleased for as long as I pleased and always drifting back to the yacht to write stories of the adventures I had along the way. I've lived in India, Africa. -- I've chopped ice off a ship's rigging in the Arctic country -- here and there wherever adventure calls me I go. I live intensely in my experiences and, before I know it, a book gets itself written."
Posted by ds at January 15, 2003 03:49 PM