On the literary life
PERSONAL COLUMN JOHN ROWAN WILSON
The writing of fiction, regarded as an occupa- tion, bears certain resemblances to prostitution. It is a career open to the talents, which can be pursued at home in one's spare time. There isn't any official training or standard. And everyone you meet seems to want to ask you two questions: 'How did you get into the game?' and `Do you really manage to make a living out of it?'
Neither of these questions is very easy to answer, since so much seems to happen by sheer chance, and it is hard for the writer to convince himself that he exercises much genuine control over the progress of his career. My per- sonal feeling is that probably fiction-writing isn't really a full-time job at all, in the ordinary sense of the word. When it comes down to it, there are few writers who can actually sit down at a desk and work for more than four hours a day. Even if they can, they can't do it all the time. There are periods of work and then periods of enforced idleness, when the author would like very much to work but simply can- not find the right thing to say. As Hemingway said, either the juice is on or it isn't. And if it isn't, there's nothing much to be done about it.
Anyway, it's very questionable whether it is desirable for the writer to work too hard or too continuously. He has, after all, only so much to say. Supposing he starts at twenty-five and car- ries on throughout a normal working life. Imagination boggles at the millions of words he is likely to turn out. He can analyse his own character to its innermost depths, paint endless thinly disguised portraits of his friends, use every shred of his experience, and still one day find that the orange has been sucked dry, leav- ing nothing but the pith.
The fact alone is enough to make the full- time author apprehensive about his future. His pessimism is aggravated by another depressing discovery—that while the extension of higher education has produced an ever-increasing number of people who want to write, it doesn't seem to have produced many more who want to read. He is in an over-productive industry, operating in a buyer's market. The columns of his professional journal, The Author, reflect this anxious, hunted attitude. They are full of complaints about the laws of copyright, the iniquities of the public library system, the rapacity of the Inland Revenue, and the de- pressed state of authors generally.
Added to this is his constant confusion about money. It is his misfortune to be a man without practical business experience, operating in one of the most confusing commercial situations designed by man. What he can reasonably de- mand as his share of the money earned by a book depends on all kinds of factors of which he has no knowledge, such as printing costs, overhead expenses, prospects in regard to book clubs and film rights, and the long-term man- agement policy of W. H. Smith's. He doesn't really understand his contract, and all kinds of odd things baffle him. Why do his statements take so long to arrive? And why are they so incomprehensible when they do?
If he is published in America, he is tormented by the business of returned copies. Since Ameri- can publishers supply booksellers on a 'sale or return' basis, it is impossible for the author to know how well his book has done for about three years, when all the unsold copies have finally winged their way back to New York. As for his European translations, they are sub- jected to a whole series of obscure financial imposts and incomprehensible deductions bank charges, transfer charges, foreign com- missions. In Italy and Spain they make him pay some kind of special tax for taking his money out of the country, which he doesn't want to do anyway; from Germany he gets enormous sheets of figures including items like Verkauf 9 Ex. and Umsatz,steuer, which have the effect of reducing his royalties from a respectable 4,000 marks to a net debit of thirty pfennigs. And finally there is a cryptic figure of f 12 lOs for `contras'—what on earth can that mean? Can it be that he is subsidising the family planning arrangements of his agent?
This financial confusion is paralleled by a similar loss of control on the literary side. The softening-up process begins with the dust-jacket and the blurb. When the author first sees- these, his reaction is to accuse the publisher of down- grading the book. What will The Times Literary Supplement critic think of those two people necking in the corner? The publisher, concerned less with the us than with district librarians in Gosport and Cleckheaton, stands his ground. The author retires disgruntled. Somehow he feels it is not his book any more.
But this is only the beginning. The more suc- cessful a book is, the more the author's control is loosened. A book club in the United States would like to buy it—but they would like one or two minor changes. He feels he should re- fuse—there is a principle at stake. Then be looks at a Finnish translation he has just received. He cannot even decipher the title they have given it, never mind any of the book. If the Finns are to be allowed carte blanche, surely the Americans; for all that money, should be given a little latitude? From that moment his attitude changes. Digests, abridgements, potted serials—let them all come, and he is grateful. Just so long as somewhere, in his own language, the book he once wrote is on record, that's all he asks.
Over and above all these other harassments, he has the reviewers. Most writers start off with a wrong idea about book critics. With the natural vanity of all creative artists, they think that others take them as seriously as they do them- selves. They picture an earnest editorial con- ference. 'Now for the fiction reviews,' says the editor-in-chief. 'It is by their depth and quality that this paper will be judged. We must have a commanding and universally respected authority on modern British literature. Money must be no object in our search for such a man.' Actu- ally, what is more likely to happen is that the literary editor meets an old friend in the bar at the Savile Club. 'Hello, George—haven't seen you for years. Are you terribly busy just now? I was hoping you might do some fiction for us. You can? Fine. I'll send you a dozen of the latest batch. Pretty measly, I'm afraid, but chuck away the most nauseating and give us a couple of columns on the rest ...'
In these circumstances, it will be apparent, a writer who gets more than 200 words without being actually insulted is well ahead of the game and should be satisfied. He isn't, of course. Writers are never really satisfied. The obscure envy the eminent, the eminent live in a state of constant uneasy fear that -they have passed their peak. The young sneer at the traditional- ists, and the traditionalists thunder at the avant- garde. Some complain that they are unappreci- ated by the critics, others curse the philistine indifference of the public.
A few make a decent living. These are mostly the natural story-tellers, who profit from the fact that English is a very widely spoken lan- guage. They are consequently in a position to take advantage of the market in subsidiary rights and paperbacks, book clubs and movie rights, throughout the United States and the Commonwealth. Other special groups do very well, notably the commercial spy thriller writers and the pornographers. However, these two forms of fiction are only marginally creative and require talents of a different kind from ordinary fiction.. But even supposing the author can manage to knock up a living, is full- time writing a desirable way of life?_ I doubt it. While authorship is superficially attractive as an occupation, in practice it bristles with snags. Authors on the whole don't give the impres- sion of being particularly happy men—they tend to be querulous and irascible and to drink too much. Cut off from the normal aggressive outlets of the working male, they indulge their power impulses at home and have terrible trouble with their wives and mistresses, Looked at from any angle you like, it is an unhealthy, sedentary life.
To do some other work outside writing is surely desirable, if one can get it and if it doesn't interfere too much with one's primary interest. If it does nothing else it gets the author out of the home and into contact with other people. And it gives him something to say when people ask him, 'What do you do for a living?' If he answers that he is a novelist, a shifty, apolo- getic look comes on to their faces. He waits painfully for a number of possible responses. `I'm afraid I don't read novels much.' When did your last book come out?' My wife's very fond of books—she's probably heard of you'— or, perhaps worst of all, `Do you write under your own name?' It is worth while going to a good deal of trouble to avoid this kind of con- versation. And in case you think it happens only to nonentities, I can quote you an account by Mr Evelyn Waugh of his encounter with a jour- nalist in Georgetown, British Guiana. Mr Waugh was rash enough to admit that he was a writer. lust a writer?' asked the journalist. `Or one who has published books?'
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