Low life
Grants and groans
Jeffrey Bernard
There seems to be a crazy idea going around that journalism is actually im- portant. What nonsense. How awful that Harry Evans, ex-editor of the Times and Sunday Times, should be making a fortune about squabbles at desk level. So what? Of course, the trouble with editors is that they're simply jumped-up office boys. William Deedes of the Daily Telegraph, so I'm told, earns £22,000 per year while 72
typesetters at the same newspaper earn £36,000 each per year. Now this grates. It's extraordinary, to my way of thinking, that the likes of Shiva Naipaul and Richard West, two of the best non-fiction writers in the country, whatever that means, have to be skint because of the whims of hideously unprepossessing, liberal creeps like Claire Tomalin and Charles Osborne of the Arts Council, who bung the rich Salman Rush- die more pounds than he's already got or needs.
A few months ago I applied for an Arts Council grant to have a drink in every single pub in the British Isles — the idea being that I could and would write a sociological study of the severest importance on the sub- ject of British piss-artistry. It was con- sidered and then refused. Boo, hoo. I now want very much a grant to write a book call- ed 'Hallo Sailor — a Sensitive Study of the Kiwi Homosexual Sailor in Tasmania'. I know for a fact that Richard West would like to eschew the malaria- and Beaujolais Nouveau-infested swamps of the Far East and Central America and settle down to writing his epic, 'The Revival of the Austro- Hungarian Empire — how Europe can only be happy under the rule of the Hapsburgs'. His wife, Mary Kenny, surely deserves a few quid for her 'Evils of the Abortion Industry in Hungary'. And Shiva
Naipaul of all people deserves some Aussie dollars for his forthcoming 'Australian Wankers'.
But another tiny insight into the malaise of pen, pencil and Fleet Street was the amazing episode this morning of my
delivering a column to the Sporting Life. I do it once a week in a taxi which goes on to
the Coach and Horses for 75p more than the total bus fares. Anyway, I gave my copy to the commissionaire who said, 'I'm not
allowed to accept copy. What's more I don't telephone upstairs to tell them I've got some copy. Just leave it in a tray and they may pick it up.' This bloke is presumably a member of Natsopa, on about £300 a week and not too keen on his job. I'm on about £70, not all that keen either, and I'm beginning to wonder, since the Arts Council has money left over and no use for it, couldn't they instead give tax relief to writers?
While it is highly likely that Charles Osborne will write a biography claiming Beethoven to have been a blind Australian sheep-shearer who learnt to play 'Chop- sticks' at the age of two and to be called 'Bruce Beethoven', it is unlikely that anyone at your old Spectator will get the money or wherewithal! to write 'The Arts Council — a Sensitive Study'.
But nil desperandum, as they used to mutter in the £25 ringside seats at Wembley Stadium when the British boy was being thrashed. The Government and their minions stink a little. But take cheer; some of us have still got some guts. Richard West, without any financial assistance from the Arts Council, is about to lodge in a boarding house called the Familia Lesbia, the only Central American hotel ever patronised by Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. The likes of Tomalin and Osborne would have forked out for that out of their own pockets.
Incidentally, our literary editor has asked me for my Christmas banalities and I'm seriously considering a book on how badly men treat women as book of the year. It must surely have been written with the aid of an Arts Council grant.
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