This week I want to provide a quick hark back to the question of what some bright spark called “the cost of letters.” The said b s was Alain de Bottom. I’d quite forgotten he wrote a book with the intriguing title How much do you think a writer needs to live on? It was published twenty years ago by Waterstones (who had a dog in that fight) and takes the form of responses to questions posed to forty or so famous authors. Obviously, it meant famous in 1998 – fame, like youth, being stuff will not endure. I should stress the book came out when self-publishing (apart from the vanity press) was barely a gleam in Amazon’s eye.
The book is interesting because it also includes the responses to the same questions posed in 1946, so you can, if so inclined, compare views on what a writer thought you needed to live on then. Converted to 1998 money, of the ancient crop, George Orwell thought £20,000 per annum was more than adequate, whereas Elizabeth Bowen suggested she could scrape by on £70,000. Oddly enough the same disparity persists in the modern crop: Alasdair Gray says £20,000 will do; Michael Holroyd suggests £70,000. Make of that what you will. Class distinctions do seem to infect everything, don’t they?
Class being the sine qua non of English letters, the book contains a splendid offering of the inverted kind, from Beryl Bainbridge: “I had my first book published in 1967 by the ‘New Authors’ Hutchinson imprint. I received £25.”
There was another question posed, of interest in the present context. Having asked whether a “serious writer” can earn these sums from their writing alone, de Bottom goes on: “If not, what do you think is the most suitable second occupation …”
Among the replies, Lucy Ellman goes for “Inheritance”, which has rather sinister overtones; Sebastian Faulks commends “An earning spouse ... and no children”, equally grim; Alasdair Gray says, “Prostitution should be avoided when possible”, and one cannot but agree; Hilary Mantel (less famous in those days), quotes Stevenson saying journalism is always possible, but one risks acquiring a “cheap finish,” I couldn’t possibly comment; Will Self recommends “Night watchman” adding “or Buddhist Monk”, which makes you wonder whether he took the exercise all that seriously. Of the 1940s authors, Herbert Read suggests, “Farming and small-holding”, which is lovely; Dylan Thomas, in a surprisingly serious entry, suggests, ”Writing BBC and film scripts … so long as it is not depriving the world of a great poem.”
There are, of course, authors who take themselves a tad too seriously on the question of earning a living. What is the novice writer supposed to make of Julian Barnes’s injunction, “Don’t do it unless you believe, utterly, that making art is the most important thing there is.” Seriously, does he imagine anyone is going to respond, “Well, if that’s how it is, I’ll jack it all in and take to writing detective stories.”
Beryl Bainbridge brings us back to earth: “In the old days – Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters – women got on with the dusting. The chaps either drank themselves to death, or relied on their wives, which seems reasonable.” Solemnly asked, “If literature suffered from the diversion of a writer’s energy from other employment or is enriched by it?” her wonderfully laconic response was, “I think there should have been a comma after employment …”
One parting thought. In 1998, the teaching of creative writing as a possible second string occupation cropped up quite a lot, almost always in extremely negative terms (it is, as one of them puts it, “A ghastly option”). Make of that what you will: we shall be coming back to it.
The curse of precocious talent is the topic for next week. If you turn up I’ll expect you to have read Lucy. So you know what I’m going on about.