Michelangelo, old boy, do you think you might...
My attitude to money is simple. I want to think about it as little as possible. So I have arranged my life with this end in view. I work hard and spend less than I earn. I put aside sums for tax and VAT and do the returns promptly. I pay bills by return of post. I have never borrowed or had an overdraft, and paid off the only mortgage I ever had at the earliest possible date. I always say to the people who look after my savings: I am not greedy and don’t want a high return, just security and peace of mind. None of this did me the slightest good during the present crisis. I discovered my bankers had put the bulk of my money into a company (‘probably the safest investment in the world, Mr Johnson’) which had to be ‘rescued’, and for a fortnight I thought I had lost all. So I worried about money as never before. Now I believe I am safe again, and I despise and hate myself for giving way to money-fear, the lowest of all emotions. By way of penance I am praying hard for the poor wretches who have more reason to worry than I had, especially the growing numbers in danger of losing their houses or jobs.
Writers often get themselves into financial messes. Sir Walter Scott, poor fellow, did nothing actually wrong but invested, for altruistic reasons mostly, in a publishing firm which failed in the terrible crisis of December 1825. This was in the days before limited liability, and he had to spend the rest of his life working frenetically to pay off his debts. The last were settled from royalties shortly after his death. Thus the soul of this honourable man, who his biographer, Lockhart, said was ‘a gentleman even to his dogs’, could rest in peace. Wordsworth gave Scott no credit for paying off debts by industry, but looked down his nose at him for ‘engaging in trade’ in the first place.
Dickens worried about money all his life, making his fortune but spending it as it came in, chiefly on his reckless and improvident family and his hopeless male children. His readings drew in vast sums but shortened his life. He compared himself to Marley’s ghost, dragging along behind him a heavy chain of obligations, constantly increasing. Of course he had no need to acquire a pseudo-mistress, in the shape of Ellen Ternan, who added to his outgoings. He was also a soft touch for importunate writers and artists of all kinds, down on their luck and anxious for a ‘loan’ to ‘tide them over’. He gave away at least 10 per cent of his gross income. Thackeray was another big earner-big spender who found it hard to keep ahead of his obligations. As a young man he dissipated his inherited patrimony, and felt guilty about it. He determined to ensure that his two daughters had decent provisions, and so went lecturing in America and all over Britain, something he hated doing. But he also built himself a magnificent new house in Kensington Palace Green, though he did not live to enjoy it long: the wining and dining of High Victorian London was too much for him, and he popped off at 52 (Dickens only got to 58).
Thackeray, too, was besieged in his prosperity by literary scroungers and drop-outs. The 19th century was the great age of begging letters and genteel mendicancy. Leigh Hunt, whom Dickens portrayed as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, was the archetype. Macaulay wrote: ‘He believes he has a right to relieve you of a five pound note every time he meets you in the street.’ A generation before, Charles Lamb wrote a fine essay on the subject: ‘The Two Races of Men’. They were of course the borrowers and the lenders. He was a lender, for though he never earned more than £800 a year, he was careful of his cash and contrived to leave £2,000 when he died, a hefty sum for the 1830s.
There were strong reasons for helping the needy in those days, for men might be arrested for paltry debts and be flung into the Marshalsea gaol, as Dickens’s father was. Some never reemerged. At least two of Lamb’s friends died in debtors’ prison. If you turned down a request for a ‘loan’, you might precipitate a chain of events which would haunt you later. It was not just the borrower himself you had to think about. There was a wan, lined, defeated wife and strings of pale children, doomed to lives of want and scrimping. Carlyle, a generous man despite all his bellowing, gave away his silver, like Dr Johnson before him. When Leigh Hunt called, obviously to ‘make a touch’, Carlyle would simply leave a sovereign or two on the mantelpiece, and leave the room (‘He prefers it that way’). Lamb tried to avoid lending to people he knew, remembering Polonius’s warning to Laertes (‘Loan oft loses both itself and friend’). He gave it outright. That is my method too. I learned this at Oxford. I did not have much money, existing on an exiguous exhibition and a government ‘grant’, but (on the principle of Lamb’s two races) I always had cash in my pockets while others of ampler means were skint. In my college, Ken Tynan, an ostentatious fellow, was always asking me for trivial sums, a half-crown or a ten-bob note. If I handed over, I always said: ‘Keep it. I’m not a moneylender.’ When Ken died, 30 years later, I was not sur prised he left tremendous debts. So, of course, did Cyril Connolly, also a stalwart of the other race of men.
The theme runs through history, as far back as you care to look. Among artists, too, there were and are two races. Thus Guido Reni, the highest-paid painter of the 17th century, who at one time had 70 people in his studio, died in debt (gambling), whereas Luca Giordano, an inferior artist by far, left 300,000 gold ducats (about £100 million by today’s standards). I own a Reni, that is, one of the 100 or so versions he turned out of his ‘St Michael Expelling Satan from Paradise’, which hangs in my London studio, and whenever I look at it, I thank God I have always had a positive horror of gambling.
Another interesting contrast is between Balzac and Victor Hugo. Balzac was a compulsive writer (and sometimes a superb one) and a compulsive spender and borrower-oncredit. He earned huge sums and was deeply in debt and financial crisis all his life. Hugo was also a compulsive writer — there was not a day when he did not produce a poem or two or a chunk of excellent prose — but one who liked to tuck the proceeds away. Not mean, exactly, but careful, provident, serious about money. In the later decades of his life he was colossally rich and died a financial emperor. You could compile a long list of contrasting couples who are instances of the two races — the two Irish playwrights Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, for instance, the first ‘dying beyond my means’, as he put it, the second leaving an immense fortune for such footling causes as Spelling Reform. Or Dylan Thomas, the most prolific writer of begging letters of the 20th century, one of which went to T.S. Eliot in 1951, and elicited a favourable response — a splendid example of the two races as fellow poets.
It is hard, perhaps, on poets like Leigh Hunt and Dylan Thomas to be driven to perpetual soliciting of cash just to keep going. But creative people who earn vast sums and contrive to hang on to them do not necessarily fare better. Hugo’s wealth led to much unhappiness in his family, before and after his death. The family rows which sprang out of Somerset Maugham’s riches are notorious. Picasso was the richest artist who ever lived, and the family bitterness and lawsuits over his booty were correspondingly unprecedented. We are told that J.K. Rowling and Damien Hirst are each worth over £100 million. Will it do them any good? We shall see: it is early days. If you want to be spared worry over money, being very rich is almost as bad as being very poor.
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