Myself when Young / Confessions (PDF)

Excerpt from Book:

ABOUT a year ago my American publishers asked me to send them some personal material for press publicity, and I spent a hot summer afternoon describing my parentage, my tastes, my aversions, and what use I made of days and hours. I am now receiving by every second mail syndicated cuttings of my confessions. I am learning quite a lot about myself. I am, I have discovered, a methodical and industrious person. Every Monday and Friday I go to a publisher’s office in Henrietta Street where I read manuscripts, draft advertisements, and generally entertain myself and my employers. During the three middle days of the week I write.

I follow a regular routine on my writing days. I have breakfast at half-past eight. From nine to ten I walk over Hampstead Heath. From ten to one o’clock I write. In the afternoon I go to a cinema. From five to seven I write again. I work at the rate of 3500 words a day. During the week-end I enjoy myself. I dance, I play football or cricket as the time of year ordains. I see my friends. It is, in fact, a picture of the sort of young man who wins prizes at a Sunday school and makes good in the business novel.

I suppose that I must have in some such way spent the week previous to my confession. Or perhaps I felt that I needed organising, that it was on such lines my time should be arranged, and that by the mere fact of writing down a time-table I should “Coué” myself into an observance of it; at any rate it is not, I need perhaps hardly say, very much like that. I do not confine my entertainment entirely to the weekends. Usually three days a week in summer-time are spent lazily on a cricket field. Were I to maintain an average rate of ten thousand words a week, I should produce some half a million words a year, and heaven knows what I should do with them. Nor am I very often down to breakfast by half-past eight.

A mendacious chronicle that confession. But then are we not always drawing up schemes and time-tables. At the beginning of the year we estimate the extent of our income. We make two columns. We put down the items of general expenditure: rent, insurance, income-tax, club subscriptions, clothes, and washing. And we decide how much remains over for personal indulgence. “I may allow myself,” we say, “three or four or five or six pounds a week in pocket money, and I will not,” we continue, “spend one penny more than that.” Nor do we for a week or so till we become so inflamed with a sense of merit that we adjudge our economy entitled to some worthy tribute, and we arrange a dinner party and twelve pounds go in a single night. It is the same with time-tables. They always get upset somewhere, and the people who stick to them are an infernal nuisance.