Are writers undervalued?

Michael Barber bemoans literature’s slim pickings

In 1962, an international writers’ conference, attended by a pride of literary lions and lionesses, was held at the Edinburgh Festival. One of the last to speak was Simon Raven, who caused a mild sensation by saying he wrote primarily for money. He felt the other speakers, who included Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy and Stephen Spender, had been too coy on the subject.

Raven had a point. I once asked Eric Ambler what he and Ian Fleming used to talk about when they lunched together. ‘Royalties,’ he relied. Dr Johnson would have applauded.

‘No one but a blockhead wrote, except for money’, he famously declared (though even he sometimes wrote on spec).

So does that mean the literary world is full of blockheads? – because it now seems that only a small percentage of British writers earn more than the basic wage from their work, and some take home as little as £7K per annum.

Greedy, risk-averse publishers have been blamed for this, and so has Amazon. But writing has always been a precarious trade. ‘You put your book to sea in a sieve,’ said Muriel Spark. Addressing the problem in his manifesto, Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly said that writers needed a private income (his came from his wealthy American wife). Otherwise they would waste their time making ends meet in jobs like journalism or copywriting.

A few years before, Virginia Woolf had declared that ‘intellectual freedom depends upon material things.’ As well as ‘a room of her own’, a woman needed money in order to write.

She thought at least £500 a year, a large sum then, from whatever source, was the bottom line.

Recalling the early 1970s, before he hit the jackpot with The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux wrote recently that no writers he then knew had any money and publishing was still ‘the cottage industry it had always been’, run by ‘tweedy, literature-loving, mostly older men.’

Instead of being paid decent advances, writers were kept onside with long boozy lunches and, if they did some reviewing, invitations to lavish book launches.

Reviewing was, as Theroux said,

‘appallingly paid’, but you could flog your review copies for half the published price in cash, at Gastons, the public library suppliers in Chancery Lane. There was no shame in this. I recall queueing up there behind A.J.P. Taylor and Anthony Burgess, who said he would traipse up from deepest Sussex every week with two suitcases full of books.

Gastons closed years ago. But for a lucky few things looked up in the 1980s, when literary agents began to throw their weight around. Writing suddenly became ‘sexy’, the adjective used by Julian Barnes to describe the publicity wave he and coevals of his like Ian McEwan rode, thanks to the excitement generated by prizes like the Booker and promotions like Granta magazine’s inaugural Best of British Young Novelists.

But as Martin Amis, another of Granta’s Young Novelists, later cautioned, ‘Writing is a sedentary, carpet-slippers, self-inspecting, nose-picking, arse-scratching kind of job, just you in your study and there is absolutely no way round that.’ Little wonder that it did not appear sexy for long.

Meanwhile much of the ‘cottage industry’ invoked by Theroux had been taken over by conglomerates and the accountants to whom they were in thrall.

It became inconceivable that a publisher would keep faith with a loss-making author for twenty years, as happened with Heinemann and Graham Greene.

Or that a publisher would pay a spendthrift author a weekly retainer on condition that he live at least 50 miles from London, as Anthony Blond did with Simon Raven.

But, for some writers, fame, rather than money, is the spur. George Orwell might insist that every word he wrote was to further the cause of democratic socialism.

But in his essay, Why I Write, he was also honest enough to admit that ‘Sheer egotism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death …’ was also a very strong motive. This, I believe, is one of the reasons why, despite the meagre rewards so many of them can expect, writers will continue to write.

Another reason was put to me many years ago by John Fowles, who described himself as ‘a compulsive storyteller – a kind of victim almost, in that I cannot not write.’

After coming down from Oxford, he spent years accumulating masses of ‘unpublishable material’ before The Collector was accepted.

Flaubert put it more succinctly. Writing, he said, ‘is an itch that I scratch.’ This doesn’t mean that in time you’ll produce another Madame Bovary or The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but if the urge is there, surrender to it.

But as I write another cloud has appeared on the literary horizon in the shape of AI. Given that machines don’t have emotions, could they really produce Art? Probably not.

But who’s to say what is Art and what isn’t? There is no way of proving that one bwook is better than another. And what algorithms can do very well is imitate. Writers should watch their backs.

All The Beauty In The World Patrick Bringley

Bodley Head, 240pp, £20)

Patrick Bringley was working in the events department of the New Yorker when his brother died. Bringley found he ‘badly wanted to stand still a while.’ He gave up his job and went to join New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as a guard. He spent a decade wearing the Met’s regulation blue suit and clip-on tie, developing calves of iron from standing still amid the bustle of a busy museum. In the Telegraph, Alex Diggins loved his ‘gentle mix of memoir and criticism.’

The Met, according to Waldemar Januszczak reviewing the book in the Sunday Times, is a weird place to work. ‘When it comes to separations, Upstairs, Downstairs has nothing on the Met. Upstairs live the curators, who rarely make an appearance in the galleries, never work on Saturdays and pop down only occasionally to admire the captions they have written for the exhibits.’

Diggins found Bringley ‘a marvellous guide to this strange hermetic universe. There’s a wonderful section where he takes readers through a typical start to his day, beetling between the Museum’s restricted areas and its public galleries: a paseo with all the bustle and snap of a Wes Anderson skit.’

The Kirkus reviewer found some of Bringley’s responses to artworks ‘border on the saccharine’ and thought him insufficiently reverent to the institution of the Met. But Januszczak was pretty impressed. ‘All this is told with real literary gusto and an impressive command of pace and shape.’