‘This may seem slow going but I had decided my book was to be a short one and it is always what a writer leaves out of his book, not what he puts in, that takes the time.’ He wrote in this semi-operatic self-exile with such meticulous care that just one chapter was completed before his winter was over. In 1926, when he was 26, he retired for the winter ‘to the little Adriatic island town of Capodistria, where the exchange was then so favourable that I could live on next to nothing – which is all I had – and where the only language spoken was Italian, of which (at first at any rate) I knew not a word, so that I could work all day in the Café della Loggia undisturbed by the chatter’. When Richard Hughes looked back at how he wrote his first and most successful novel, he described the process rather beguilingly.
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