R. C. Sherriff on writing Journey's End

[too_much_in_the_sun]

One thing that R. C. Sherriff discusses in his autobiography, No Leading Lady, is the process of writing Journey's End. I found this passage fascinating, but it's relatively long, so it took me a good deal of time to transcribe. That transcription follows the LJ-cut, and is itself followed by my commentary.

imgur album of the scanned pages.



transcript:

With history out and plays out, but with the itch to write still there, I began to think about a novel I had begun a few years back. It hadn’t got very far because the time for the annual play came round and the few chapters I had written were put away in a drawer and forgotten. It was easier, I had been told, to get a novel published than a play produced. In any case I had the time to spare, and it wouldn’t be any loss if it didn’t come to anything. I got out the chapters I had written and had another look at them.

The theme was hero worship, and the story began with two boys at school. The elder boy, Dennis Stanhope, was the hero; and Jimmy Raleigh worshipped him from afar. Dennis had everything a boy desired: good looks and charm, supreme ability for games and a gift for leadership that carried the school from strength to strength. Jimmy was an ordinary, plodding boy: he did nothing brilliant in games or work, but his character was modelled and strengthened in the light of his hero.

When schooldays ended, the position of the two boys gradually reversed. The younger boy achieved success and became head of a flourishing business, while Dennis, spoilt by adoration at school, without proper qualifications, drifted aimlessly from job to job.

The story was then to show how desperately Jimmy Raleigh strove to save his fallen hero. So much of his own success had stemmed from the inspiration that Dennis had given him at school, and he felt a debt that he must repay. He entered upon a thankless battle to help his bitter, disillusioned friend, who secretly despised the man who as a boy had been a mug at games, and only accepted his help through bleak necessity.

It seemed a promising idea, and I set to work with an enthusiasm I hadn’t felt since writing the plays for the Adventurers. But I soon began to find that a novel was a very different project from a play. A play came easily because you simply had to use the words that people spoke in everyday life, words and expressions that I would employ myself without any conscious need to search for them. But a novel called for a wider vocabulary, a mastery of words and an easy flow that either came naturally or didn’t come at all. The first chapters flowed smoothly enough. I could describe the lives of the two schoolboys, but when I left the safe surroundings of the school and had to set down on paper, not what they did and said, but what was in their minds, I found myself in deep waters.

I had read plays, and they had helped me to write my own, but the more novels I read the more frustrated and despondent I became. The writers seemed to do it so easily: words poured from their pens without apparent effort, words, often, that I had never written on paper myself. The novel dragged more and more slowly, and finally ground to a stop. The tortured pages went into the fire, and I had another go at the insurance exams.

But my thoughts would always go wandering off into ideas for something of my own to write, and I began to wonder whether the story of Dennis Stanhope and Jimmy Raleigh, which had fizzled out as a novel, might be made into a play. The novel was to have covered a long span of years. I tried to work out some way of telling the story in a few compact scenes that would fit the stage, but it was a fruitless effort. Possibly the war might serve some purpose. I had avoided the war in the novel because I couldn’t see anything happening to Stanhope and Raleigh that would have any relevance to the story as a whole. But the more I thought about it in terms of a play the deeper it began to bite. I had had a year as an infantry soldier in France. I had written long letters home: my father and mother had kept them all, and when I got back I had collected them together and written them up as a continuous narrative. With all this material on hand it wouldn’t be difficult to hammer it into the shape of a play, and the story of Stanhope and Raleigh began to take shape within it. It would have been in the younger boy’s character to move heaven and earth to get into Stanhope’s regiment when he was old enough to leave school and join the army. I should have to distil the essence of the novel into a few days in a front-line dugout. It meant throwing away the whole original idea to span the greater part of their lives, but at least it had the makings of a play: above all a play that never left the confines of a dugout.

With the plan worked out I was on safe ground. Dialogue came easily: I merely had to write down what people said. I didn’t have to turn up the dictionary for flowery words and hunt through my book of synonyms. The other characters walked in without invitation. I had known them all so well in the trenches that the play was an open house for them. Raleigh would not have been old enough to arrive at the front before the last year of the war, so the story fell naturally into the most dramatic episode on the Western front: the days before the final, desperate attack of the Germans in March 1918.

A Company Headquarters dugout in the front line made a perfect natural setting for the theatre. It was usually one of a chain of dugouts linked together by short tunnels, each with its own way up to the trench by a steep flight of steps. The tunnel to one side would lead into the dugout where some of the officers slept, the opposite one to the quarters of the signallers and runners, and the place where the cook-batman prepared the meals. This made it easy to move the characters in and out as needed. An officer would go up the steps to take his turn of duty in the trenches: the one he relieved would come in for a meal, then go off stage to the adjoining dugout for some sleep when he was no longer required. With a little simple planning you could bring the characters together and disperse them easily, and I had lived in those murky underground caverns for so many months that I knew them as intimately as the room I was working in.

It was ideal for the playwright, but a more unappetising set-up for a commercial manager would have been difficult to find. In those days the theatre worked in colourful, romantic surroundings. The producer staked a lot on the attractive design of his scenes, making them as eye-catching and alluring as possible. A dirty, gloomy dugout lit with candles; no furniture beyond a rickety wooden table and a few upturned boxes for seats; no love interest; no plot; and no women in the cast: you could scarcely have done better if you had set out deliberately to make the thing as repulsive to a manager as possible.

But I wasn’t thinking in terms of box office. The prospect of writing about men in the trenches, with all the drawn-out wretchedness and longing for home, held moments of exultation that never came to the daily routine of work for an insurance office. The play was to fill the empty evenings with a nostalgic journey into the past, and the first act was so absorbing that it carried me every night into the small hours of the morning. All the previous plays had been about imaginary people in imaginary situations, and now for the first time I was writing about something real, about men I had lived with and knew so well that every line they spoke came straight from them and not from me. I had lived through it all, and poured into it such a wealth of detail that more than fifty pages were written before the curtain came down on the first act.
It had been an exhilarating experience. I fretted every day for the time when I could go to my room after supper, draw the curtains on the lamplit street and live again with old comrades in the trenches. But unhappily that first surge of enthusiasm had swallowed up everything I had to say. I had brought in the young officer Raleigh, burning with ardour to serve under his schoolday hero, and dramatised the shock of his discovery of Stanhope’s deterioration through years of strain. All this had come so easily that I took it for granted that the rest of the play would write itself. The impetus behind those opening scenes had been so strong that I had no doubt of its carrying the play through to a triumphant end. But unfortunately it didn’t, and when the curtain went down on the first act there was nothing to bring it up again.

It was frustrating to have a good story at your finger tips and feel it slipping out of reach no matter how you tried to write it; and to sit every night in front of a blank sheet of paper did nothing beyond keeping you awake when you went to bed. No effort of mine would bring the curtain up on the second act, and after a long and fruitless struggle I gave it up and went back to the history books.

History served well to fill the evenings when there was nothing else in mind, but reading in an atmosphere of frustration and defeat brought little in return. It was hard to concentrate upon the Norman Conquest with a play still nagging in the background, itching to be written if only I could find the key.

The play had fizzled out, but the characters remained alive: so insistently and urgently alive that they obsessed me. I thought about them day and night: they seemed to be accusing me for bringing them to life and giving them lungs to breathe, only to throw them aside when they were strong enough to do my bidding if I would tell them what to do.

It was a case of getting so entangled in a story that you can’t see the wood for trees. It began to be apparent that the first act was so clogged up with detail that the characters hadn’t got the space to move. When I had unravelled it the play began to breathe again, and it was the characters more than the story who finally got the curtain up on the second act. Their relationships with each other began to weave a pattern. New scenes developed out of earlier scenes, and when this happened there would be a furious and exciting period of writing until the newly found material had spent itself and a dead end came again. For a time it would seem as if that sudden spurt had been another flash in the pan. The play went back into its drawer, and then another episode would bring it out again, and every time the period of writing lasted longer as the play took firmer shape and form. Finally it came out of the drawer for the last time, and the three scenes of the final act wrote themselves; or it might be truer to say that the characters by that time had so taken command that I merely had to write down what they called for.

It had taken a year, and had been put aside so often as an unfinished endeavour that when one evening I wrote at the bottom of a page “The Play Ends” there was an unreality about it. I never thought the time would come to write them. Now that it had I wrote them grudgingly. I had lived with the play so long, and shared so many hopes and disappointments with it, that things would never be the same without it.

Nothing new had emerged to make it any the more palatable for the theatre: no light beyond the flickering candles on the dugout table and the rise and fall of the flares over No Man’s Land that lit the sky beyond the dugout steps; no sudden dramatic developments or surprise twists in the story. Such things couldn’t happen with men caught in a trap with no hope of escape. The end was inevitable from the moment it was revealed that Stanhope’s company had moved into the front line on the eve of the great German offensive that overwhelmed every regiment in its way.

My text-book on playwriting laid down that a play of suspense must never allow the audience to guess its ending until the last moments of the final scene. If they knew too soon, then the play was bound to drift into an anti-climax and fizzle out before the curtain fell. I didn’t question this: it was plain commonsense. I didn’t pretend that I could rise above it. Maybe the fate of the play was sealed from the moment its ending became obvious before the first act was over. I hadn’t thrown the rules aside for nothing. I had done it because I couldn’t have written the play in any other way. It had been a labour of love, and if nothing ever came of it I shouldn’t be much cast down. It had carried me through a long winter of discontent, and had served its purpose.

All that remained was to find a name for it. I never had a flair for titles. With the plays for the Adventurers it used to wait until somebody came up with a good one at rehearsal. I was on my own now, and it didn’t come easily. I thought of calling it Suspense, but this didn’t ring true because I couldn’t honestly claim that it had any. Waiting was a possibility, but it had the flavour of a restaurant or a railway station. The play didn’t lend itself readily to an interesting title. One night I was reading a book in bed. I got to a chapter that closed with the words: “It was late in the evening when we came at last to our Journey’s End”. The last two words sprang out as the ones I was looking for. Next night I typed them on a front page for the play, and the thing was done.

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I first singled out this specific excerpt because it’s such a relatable writing experience, especially the experience of putting a great deal of work into making a story come alive, only to find yourself getting carried away.

Probably the most interesting thing about this excerpt, when it comes to using this play as an example of Writing As She Is Spoke, is something that Sherriff doesn’t call out, and which is arguably up to interpretation: the changes that occurred to his two principal characters in between having the idea for a story about them and finishing that story. The general experience of “started with a specific plan and ended up just going off-road entirely” is pretty relatable - but the sketch Sherriff gives of his original idea has something else interesting going on.

Namely: in his original concept, Stanhope hated Raleigh. Which is not where the characters ended up in the play at all, though it’s arguable that the text plays a neat trick in this regard – it is possible to read Stanhope as coldly tolerating, or outright disliking, Raleigh, until the last scene. Then, in that scene, it becomes inarguably obvious that Stanhope really does care for Raleigh, which is more satisfying than what it sounds like would’ve happened in the novel as Sherriff first imagined it.

This is also a matter of opinion, but a version of the story where there’s no emotional conflict over whether Stanhope does actually care for Raleigh… would be a whole lot more boring. Stanhope is a difficult character to make sympathetic, and having him flatly loathe Raleigh from the get-go would make the task even more difficult.

The same general thing goes for another change that Sherriff doesn't dwell on too much: his original idea was to cover years' worth of time in the characters' lives, and he ended up covering just three days. That tightening of focus ultimately worked to his benefit, I think. And it ended up making much better theater / film.

All this, and the legitimately funny fact that Sherriff didn’t think the war would matter all that much in the storyline, point to a potential writing lesson you could see here: stories change as they are written, and that can be a good thing. Another possible lesson here, if there is one, is that if your plot turns around an important past event... you’re going to have to write something about that event.

I can’t imagine how on earth a version of this storyline written around the war rather than set during it would even read. The question of if, and how, the war effected Stanhope and Raleigh, would loom over every scene set after it. You’d be reading and thinking “God, I wish this were about whatever must’ve happened then!”