Another voice
Arts Council's proudest hour
Auberon Waugh
One never thought one would applaud any decision of the Arts Council on its policy towards literature, and closer investigation reveals that it is too early to start cheering yet, but if Sir Roy Shaw and his merry arts persons find, as I sincerely hope they will find, that their funds are frozen (if not reduced) this year, and if they adopt the 'unthinkable' option of closing down the Literature Department and ending its patronage of the literary arts (thereby saving slightly less than one per cent of the Council's revenue) they will have earned the undying gratitude of all who care for the health of English letters.
All, that is to say, apart from 400-odd 'writers' and would-be writers who have received awards or bursaries in the past years, and those still hoping for them. It is one of the advantages of having a government which chooses to use the rhetoric of monetarism in place of an economic policy that just occasionally it can be persuaded to make small cuts in public expenditure in those areas which are actually harmful to the recipients. If, as I half suspect, the motive of the Arts Council in suggesting that it will put an end to literary subsidies is to provoke as noisy an opposition as possible to the whole idea of cuts in government expenditure on the arts, then this should suit the government's purpose very well. The sum involved is, as I say, tiny — about £611,000. The publicity excited is commensurate with the closing down of five major teaching hospitals, two steelworks and a shipyard. The real money spenders (and money wasters) are the four great national companies — National Opera, National Theatre, Covent Garden and Royal Shakespeare Company — but economies demanded there, and vindictively applied, would undoubtedly result in the cultural impoverishment of the nation.
Nor, I am convinced, is it the government's real purpose to save money. Spending other people's money is too much fun for that, and in fact this government, for all its monetarist avowals, is over-spending at a greater rate than any previous government in the history of the nation. But it has to convince itself, and us, and the rest of the world, that it is serious in its intentions to cut public expenditure. To this end the howls of anger excited by a cut of £611,000 — a sum so tiny as to be completely invisible in the budget deficit of £10,500 million — represent a triumph for government policy, or at any rate for the presentation of it.
But it is not my purpose to argue that the Arts Council's ending of subsidies to literature would be helpful to the government, so much as that it would be a good thing for literature and a good thing in itself — a positive contribution to the intellectual vitality of the country such as the Arts Council has not yet made, to the best of my knowledge, in its 36 years of existence.
In urging this course of action I am fully aware that there are contrary arguments to be put. Mr Channon, the Minister for the Arts, and Sir Roy Shaw can accept my pleading or they can choose to listen to the Writers' Guild of Great Britain whose chairman, Ms Eva Figes, has received no fewer than three grants from the Arts Council for work which Robert Nye (no doubt himself a beneficiary) has described as 'creating the moment from inside, vividly, patiently, admitting every ounce of its current ambiguity, so that [her] sentences read like heart beats'.
I do not propose to enter into a discussion of the Figes heart-beat technique at this stage; the Writers' Guild argument is well put in ordinary English by Mr Ian Rowland Hill, its general secretary, in a letter to The Times: 'with libraries and education authorities spending less money on purchasing books and with prices being forced up, now is the time for increased funding, not a total abdication.'
To this Sir Roy Shaw replied a few days later that 'whereas dance, drama and music must rely mainly on the Arts Council for support, literature is very heavily supported by libraries, which are separately funded.'
Although on this occasion Sir Roy appears to be on the side of the angels, I feel he misses the point. The libraries, far from helping writers, have destroyed any hope of earning a livelihood from writing books for all but a handful of authors. No first novelist today can hope to earn a living from the practice of his craft. Librarians talk as if they are doing a favour to the author when they buy his novel and lend it to 40 or 50 readers for nothing, pointing out that few of the borrowers would ever think of buying a novel for themselves, but the sad truth is that free libraries have nearly destroyed the market, as they were bound to do. The Government has at last acknowledged this by its proposal to pay 1/2p per borrowing up to a limit of £500 (or 100,000 borrowings) on each title but this should not be seen as 'support for literature' so much as a belated and inadequate recompense for an act of piracy. It is the posture of a highwayman who kindly offers his victim a few pence back in the hope that he will continue to cross Haywards Heath every night to be robbed.
I write these words with some pain, as a man who has published 11 books in the last 20 years, five of them novels, but who gave up novel writing ten ,years ago when it became apparent that no literary novel was ever again going to earn more than £2,000 (or its equivalent) for any but a tiny handful of old favourites. For myself, I will not be tempted to write another novel by the offer of 1/2p a borrowing on a maximum borrowing, I should judge in my case, of 20,000 — that is to say £100 on top of a library royalty of some £600 for the purchase of 1,000 copies. Nor, when would-be novelists look into the economics of the matter, will many of them be tempted to start, even if publishers are still prepared to look at the work of unknown fiction writers. I should judge that a payment of 5p a borrowing, with an upper limit of £5,000 a title (or 150,000 borrowings) would be the least needed to get things started again. Even this would cost only £20 million, or less than a fifth of one per cent of our budget deficit, for a service which, in times of mass unemployment, may prove only slightly less important or useful than the National Health.
But direct government patronage is not the answer. It is as a reviewer, rather than as a writer of books — and general student of the literary scene — that I would urge Sir Roy to consider that the influence of Arts Council patronage in literature has been detrimental, and that it should be stopped for this reason if no other. My qualifications for this are that for the last 11 years I have reviewed at least one, sometimes many more books every week. In that time I have been searching publishers' lists in the endless quest for any books worth noticing. The Arts Council's Annual Reports for the last ten years trace not only its support of such disastrous ventures as the New Review and New Fiction Society but also list authors who have received awards. Many names are repeated, but 90 per cent of them are still completely unknown to me — if they ever published anything, it sank without trace.
The remaining 10 per cent include five or six respectable writers, but the bias apparent in the choice — towards anyone prepared to keep blowing on the dead embers of the Modern Movement which could be seen to have lost all heat 40 years ago — has been a disastrous one for the vitality of English letters. One could blame the Literary Director for this, a mysterious and uncouth Australian called `Osborne' but I suspect that any other Director would have been as bad. The very fact of discretionary awards creates its own aura of 'expertise' or pseudism which must prove at best obfuscatory, at worst cliquish) and corrupt.
My last argument is addressed through Mr Channon to the Chancellor. Writers both represent and create a large part of the intellectual climate of the nation. If they are encouraged to look upon the nanny-state as their proper source of sustenance, so eventually will everyone else. It is my observation that those ineligible for government largesse are as a result more, not less, critical in their attitudes towards those whom the authorities judge eligible.
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