More importantly, after being rejected by 8 publishers, the Wallet of Kai Lung was published in 1900, and to date, remains in print. At some point, he appears to have married Mattie. Jerome, rising to a position as editor of one of Jerome's magazines. Bramah's father was a wealthy man who rose from factory hand to a very wealthy man in a short time, and who supported his son in his various career attempts.īramah went to Fleet Street after the farming failure and became a secretary to Jerome K. It is known that he dropped out of Manchester Grammar School at the age of 16, after displaying poor aptitude as a student and thereafter went into farming, and began writing vignettes for the local newspaper. It is now many years,I forget how many it may be twenty or more, or it may be a little less since The Wallet of Kai Lung was sent me by a friend, The effect produced upon my mind at the first opening of its pages was in the same category as the effect produced by the discovery of that hidden statue in Burgundy, or the coming upon an unexpected house in the turn of a high Pyrenean gorge.īramah was a reclusive soul, who shared few details of his private life with his reading public. It is like coming round the corner of some wholly desolate upper valley in the mountains and seeing before one a well cultivated close and a strong house in the midst. Therefore in such a time as that of our decline,to come across work which is planned, executed and achieved has something of the effect produced by the finding of a wrought human thing in a wild, It is like finding, as I once found, deep hidden in the tangled rank grass of autumn in Burgundy, on the edge of a wood not far from Dijon, a neglected statue of the eighteenth century. You do not, opening a book at random, say at once This is the voice of such and such an one. Yet,I say,the great mass of men today do not attempt it in the English tongue, and the proof is that you can discover in their slipshod pages nothing of a seal or stamp. No writer can be judged by the entirety of his writings, for these would include every note he ever sent round the corner every memorandum he ever made upon his shirt cuff, But when a man sets out to write as a serious business, proclaiming by the nature of his publication and presentment that he is doing something he thinks worthy of the time and place in which he lives and of the people to whom he belongs, then if he does not construct he is negligible. We write to establish a record for a few days or to send a thousand unimportant messages or to express for others or for ourselves something very vague and perhaps very weak in the way of emotion, which does not demand construction and at any rate cannot command it. It may be objected that the mass of writing must in any age neglect construction. But in either character, the character of survival or the character of intrinsic excellence, construction deliberate and successful is the fundamental condition. The essential is the matter of excellence that a piece of work should achieve its end. Yet this much is certain, that unconstructed writing is at once worthless and ephemeral and nearly the whole of our modern English writing is unconstructed, The matter of survival is perhaps not the most important, though it is a test of a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feels most intimately. That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve this end and in which it is far easier to neglect it than in any other is the art of writing. His business is to construct to plan to carry out the plan: to fit together, and to produce a finished thing. Kai Lung's Golden Hours By Ernest Bramah.
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