Another voice

Here we are again

Auberon Waugh

How nice to be back on the Spectator. This is the third time I have joined it to write a weekly Column, the third editor I have served, and each time, although the circulation may be smaller, the welcome seems warmer. It was a particularly happy accident that my first piece, in praise of General Pinochet last week, should have coincided with a burst of publicity over that much misunderstood man's treatment of an English lady surgeon whom he had apparently been torturing with electric shocks. But When Mr Callaghan has got over his very Proper revulsion about this atrocious behaviour, he should realize that for anyone living in such a dim country as Chile, all publicity must be good publicity. Before parading his indignation further, Mr Callaghan might reflect on the advice given to the old man of (I think) Crewe Who had found a dead mouse in his stew: Said the waiter, 'Don't shout Or wave it about, Or the rest will be wanting one too.' Such brilliant topicality cannot be achieved very often, but the risk that it might recur may have influenced the editor in his choice of a name for the column. Something was needed that would dissociate the other distinguished Contributors from whatever deplorable lapses of taste or judgment that might come limping through the post from West Somerset. After a studious half-hour with the Oxford Book of Quotations, I had various suggestions to offer, from 'Solitary Song' (that whistles in the wind — Wordsworth), to 'A Solitary Shriek' (the bubbling cry of some swimmer — Byron), but neither seemed quite right. 'Was not too happy with the self-deprecating whimsy of a weekly whistle in the wind, and While the bubbling cry of some strong swimmer in his agony is undoubtedly fine, strong stuff, I was not sure that it was exactly me. The final choice comes, as most readers will undoubtedly have recognised, from T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding": For last year's words belong to last`year's language And next year's words await another voice. I am not sure what it means or even that it is Particularly appropriate, since the voice

concerned is exactly the same one that was Warbling away in this paper eight and a half Years 'ago as political correspondent, but it see. ms to strike exactly the right boastful, slightly mysterious note for those who are in

the know while carrying an embarrassed, Slightly apologetic message to those who aren't.

Journalism is much more fun than writing novels and I hope the new arrangement ,lasts. When I discovered that my fifth and last novel, Published in 1971, had earned a grand total of f600 (the fee for a shortish article in many American magazines) I publicly vowed that I Would never write another until Public Lending Right was granted. When the government, with tYPical pusillanimity, looked like giving way before this dire threat, I upped my demand and insisted that it should be introduced on a leans-based scheme in all public libraries, Which then seemed technically impossible.

NOW even this demand will soon be met and it begins to look as if my bluff has been called.

Although there may be a certain perverse satisfaction in store when I turn to the cringing Minister of the Arts later this year, after his Public Lending Right has been enacted, and say "Aha, fooled you!" it seems to me that the innovation brings more serious possibilities. The first and most obvious is for a demand that the Literature Department of the Arts Council should be closed down.

Although literature accounts for only slightly more than one per cent of the Arts Council Budget, this still amounts to a fairly substantial sum (last year it was £186,548 in grants and guarantees, £20,097 in salaries and wages) and it is my submission that by far the greater part of this sum has been spent on projects and in a manner which are actually harmful to English letters. Quite apart from the list of specific abuses which follows, the very existence of a literary body handing out money which is not its own adds an inevitable element of cliquishness and back-scratching to the favouritism which is inherent in any form of artistic patronage; and although the hand-outs will plainly be missed by the tiny number of people who receive them the government can surely not afford to ignore a cut in expenditure which will be welcomed by the discriminating few as much as it will be by the philistine

majority. •

The most glaring and scandalous example of Arts Council favouritism is too well known to discuss at length. Last year, Ian Hamilton's New Review received £19,000 subsidy, over £1,500 per issue, while continuing to pay its contributors abysmally. It claims a circulation of 5,000 copies (representing a subsidy of 30p per copy from the Arts Council) but one must treat even this derisory figure with a certain amount of caution, since it does not specify how many of those 5,000 copies were disposed of by remainder or how many were given away. In any case, I simply do not believe there are 5,000 people in Great Britain who are both rich enough and foolish enough to pay 90p for this mediocre, pretentious drivel. It may look curmudgeonly to begrudge the £5,000 given to London Magazine (apparently at the rate of £1,000 per issue) but this is another blatant case of favouritism. Anybody can see that London Magazine prints very little of value in the way of original work and its reviews are well below the standard of the Spectator, New Statesmen, or Country Life, none of which receives a penny from the Arts Council. They do not even compare favourably with occasional pieces in The Times, the TLS, the Daily Mail or the Sunday Telegraph. This sort of payment can only encourage the cliquish, the precious and the esoteric in literature. I do not grudge the £21,000 paid to the Poetry Society since I know nothing of how it is spent; but few people who study the work of the National Book League can honestly suppose it is worth £11,850 of direct subsidy. The greatest single disaster backed by the Literature Department is undoubtedly Martyn Goff's New Fiction Society. Goff was the promoter of the appalling Book Bang in Bedford Square some years ago. His idea for the New Fiction Society was a Book Club whose choice would be made for it by yet another of those panels of disinterested literati. Whether from the traditional hazards of cliquishness and back scratching or from general ineptitude I don't know, but it has invariably chosen the second or third best novels of every batch and last year managed to lose £34,500 which the Arts Council had to make good.

Which gives us over £70,000 of misapplied money for a kick-off, before we begin to scrutinise the smaller items or even look at the main one, grants to individual writers. I have never applied for an Arts Council grant and have no intention of doing so, although I have a pretty shrewd idea of what the answer would be if I did. This is because all such applications have to go through the Panel's Literature Director, an Australian called Charles Osborne, whom I do not think I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. Last year, after I had held a creative writing course at the Arvon Foundation's centre in Lumb Bank, Yorkshire, I discovered that Mr Osborne had taken the unusual step of refusing to reimburse the Foundation for tutor's fees in my particular case, on the apparent ground that he disapproved of an article I had written in Private Eye.

The place where Mr Osborne's likes and dislikes are most readily available is in a curious book published in 1968 by a firm called Rapp and Carroll. It is called Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, and Mr Osborne contributes sixteen essays to. it, pointing out why we could do without such varied works as the York Mystery Plays, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Alice in Wonderland, and the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Quotation must necessarily be selective, but here are a few examples which give, by their tone, some idea of how his mind works. To be fair, I suppose they should be read with an Australian accent: On Walt Whitman: "His principal interest . . . is sex. . . In a post-Freudian age he would probably not have written at all: one hopes he would: at any rate, have spent less time being fascinated and repelled by his own homosexuality, and more time enjoying himself in the practice of it."

On Alice in Wonderland: "[Dodgson] was kinky about little girls and he was an extremely dull, humourless man . . . His mind is dn something else, something impure no doubt . . . The imagination that contrived Alice is a tired imagination . . . the Mad Hatter is not mad enough, the White Rabbit is too frantically dull."

On G. M. Hopkins: "His muscle-bound, determinedly 'difficult' verse is really abhorrent . . . No wonder his poetry is so cringingly irrelevant."

On A. E. Housman: "Of course, compared with Kipling or Henley or Francis Thompson, Housman is almost bearable."

On Maugham: "The best that can be said of Maugham is that at least he professed no moral standards."

So there we are. This is the man who has been chosen as supreme arbiter of official patronage in the field of English literature. But even as we gasp and rub our eyes, we may be sure that dozens of young men with equally bizarre and brash views are waiting to take his place. The best and fairest thing would be to abolish the job, and with it the whole misguided attempt to dictate what sort of writing is worthy of government patronage and what sort isn't.