WELLSPRING OF A NOVEL.(Alan Gould discusses his novel The Schoonermaster's Dance)

I TAKE OUR TOPIC to require from us an account as to how the imagining of a work of literary art begins, and whether the body's five antennae--of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell--contribute anything sufficient towards animating an imagined place and time.

Therefore let me try and reconstruct for you how my most recent novel, The Schoonermaster's Dance, first presented itself to my mind's eye. This moment was not--and never has been in my writing--a vision or scheme that loomed suddenly before me in its entirety. The completion of the novel was, as usual in my practice, slow, accretive, sometimes baffling, sometimes dispiriting, and in the end, hard-won.

But it did begin with a gift, or rather a glimpse, and the glimpse was of a schoonermaster who was dancing. This I identify as the initiating impulse, the scrap of reverie that divides a before when there was no reason why my novel should exist from an after where it began a progress towards the full being I hope it has now. My glimpse was, if you like, a view through that "gateway" in this session's title.

Why was this figment in my mind's eye a schoonermaster and not an ordinary seaman or a bank manager or a cassowary? I don't know. Certainly I was not in the physical presence of a sailing man at the time, nor was I anywhere near the sea. But as my fingers moved across the cobbled surface of my keyboard I saw my dancing schoonermaster as clearly as one sees any scrap of daydream.

Indeed, within only a matter of seconds, faster than my fingers could move, it was a glimpse that became most particular in its visual, aural and tactile details. My seafarer was short in stature. He had a great deal of fuzz on his face. He was wearing a collarless white shirt, a dark dungaree jacket smoothed by use, and a squashy cap. I think I noted that he had on his seaboots. But further to this appearance, I knew a little of his non-material quality, how his character was hived with practical nautical experience, how his person communicated a powerful benevolence. In other words my insight was already more searching, more secondary, than would be a picture supplied solely by my sensory perception.

As for his dance, it was an indistinct hornpipe, and he shuffled its movements in a cleared space on a floor where, only moments before, I knew other people to have been dancing the formal dances of an earlier time. These people now watched him. Or rather they watched the special collusion between him and the fiddler, and listened to the haunting, repetitive tune that appeared to lock the dancer to the fiddler and the fiddler to the dancer in a way that was hypnotic and without prospect of coming to an end.

But most arresting in this inner spectacle of mine was the fact that my schoonermaster had a remote smile on his face at the same time as tears were coursing down his cheeks and becoming lost in his facial hair.