Low life
Prize folly
Jeffrey Bernard
Wa load of old nonsense this 130°1‘,,, V er Prize business is. And what a 119111.' cow the novel is. But few will agree me, I know. Especially the likes of iv" Philip Howard of the Times. Last TueselaY he wrote, 'Only a curmudgeon would ble about commerce giving moo to r creative writer.' It's the first time I've eV% been called a curmudgeon and I feel it wall, pity that Mr Howard didn't devote his c°, umn to the more important fact that Ttlesd day was the anniversary of the birth and death of Sir Thomas Browne, in 1605,%a 1682 respectively. Does a best- or novelist really need £10,000 to keep
her going? Not bloody likely. There are I", too few people starving in garrets these dart
ts and the mollycoddling of `creative' actl'he by the soft-cored, precious people at t Arts Council has a lot to do with an awful form of snobbery and an excess of bad art. Good art will be produced and survive, whatever. By the way, Alice Thomas Ellis should have got the loot. But how the hell we have Figaro today without Russell Harty having given Mozart a cheque will, I must admit, always remain a mystery to me.
Now, were I an industrial tycoon I'd set up annual cash awards for people unable to create, for the worst books of the year, the Most remaindered authors and the shortest tun play. You don't give a man a prize of £10,000 for discovering an oil field.
Anyway, there are far too many novels and books of all kinds published every year. You should have a look inside a literary editor's office if you haven't already. But what do you think a 'creative' (the word's beginning to make me feel almost sick) writer does when he collects a cash prize? I'm afraid he writes even more. The £10,000 should act as a form of aversion therapy. It ought to discourage him. Now, if you hap- Pen to think I've got sour grape juice com- ing out of my ears you're quite wrong. The fact that I earn less than the national average weekly wage, the fact that I haven't eaten for three days or had a drink since last night, have holes in my typewriter ribbon, owe my bookmaker £68 and have run out of Kleenex is of total irrelevance. 1 mean what would I do with £10,000? I'd only spend it. It's just as well I'm not creative, although I do like making paella.
I suppose younger readers wouldn't know of the artist John Minton but he was a lovely man and extremely charitable. Among his many handouts there was an Olivetti typewriter for me when as an 18-Year-old bum I announced that I wanted to be a `writer'. I sold it a week later. Why I kit such a shit for doing so at the time, !leaven only knows. I bitterly regret not flaying sold unmediately every typewriter that's ever come into my possession and this is where the envy comes in — 'creative' writers actually enjoy their work. That to Me is incredible and, as I say, enviable. What I'd like to do, if I could like doing It, would be to write a Booker Prize- winning novel about a bloke who wakes up one morning determined to pull himself together and who actually does manage to d0 so. He then gets an advance from a Publisher and writes a novel — very creatively — about a bloke who manages to Pull himself together. This would go on and °_,n for about 800 pages and would be °seribed by the reviewers as sensitive, touching, moving, uproariously funny, Cl laughed till my ribs ached and was moved to tears') gripping, and £8.95.
Portland As it is, I sit here in my eyrie in Great °nIand Street fermenting with envy, bitterness, waiting for opening time,
aan overdue cheque from the Sunday elegraPh, a telephone call from almost nYthing on two legs, and a creative flash. A0, °, in the end the Booker Prize and the `',.tts Council are all right. Giving money way is not a bad thing. Even to those most awful people writers.
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