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- Books<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
23 February, 2016<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_books_freeman_1.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\nThe Distressed Poet of William Hogarth\u2019s popular print is a sorry figure. The bill for the milk is unpaid, the baby grizzles for want of a fire, the dog is about to make off with the joint, and his wife is mending already much-mended trousers. He should be industriously scribbling \u2014 a penny ballad, a pamphlet \u2014 and earning enough to see off the milkmaid brandishing her bill at the garret door. But here he is scratching his head and frowning out of the window, while scrap paper piles up under the table. The engraving appeared with verses from Alexander Pope:<\/p>\n
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Studious he sate, with all his books around,
Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profund!
Plung\u2019d for his sense but found no bottom there,
Then writ, and flounder\u2019d on, in mere despair.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe Distressed Poet made his appearance in print in 1736. He was still there, in the same attitude and in want of money and inspiration, in 1836. By 1936 his quill pen had become a typewriter. In 2016, it is a MacBook.<\/p>\n
The precarious business of making a living from one\u2019s pen is the subject of D.J. Taylor\u2019s The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England since 1918<\/em>. Taylor sets out to answer a series of questions: \u201cWhat is \u2018literary culture\u2019?\u201d; \u201cWhat is taste?\u201d; \u201cWhy in the English 20th century did certain kinds of writing prosper only for others to fall by the wayside?\u201d; \u201cWhy did certain critics succeed in forming or altering the opinions of the literary public and others fail?\u201d The most engaging question \u2014 though Taylor doesn\u2019t put it in quite such vulgar terms \u2014 is: \u201cHow much?\u201d<\/p>\n
How much for a book review? How much for a first novel? How much for the film rights? How much for a man of letters to sacrifice his dignity \u2014 as Kingsley Amis did \u2014 to advertise wallpapers and home furnishings?<\/p>\n
The question \u201cHow much?\u201d is of particular interest to me a year after leaving a well-paid newspaper job with prospects, pension and private medical insurance, for freelance writing. As I sat down to write this review, an email arrived from an editor on a woman\u2019s glossy magazine apologising for the \u201cgenuinely pathetic amount of money\u201d they were able to pay.<\/p>\n
The question posed by Taylor after \u201cHow much?\u201d is \u201cFor how much longer?\u201d With rates for journalism so low (\u00a3100 for a 700- word review in the Independent<\/em>, according to Taylor \u2014 and the print edition of that newspaper has folded since The Prose Factory <\/em>was published) and getting lower (one broadsheet has cut its rate from 45p a word to 35p in the last six months, according to my payment slips) and with the average professional author earning \u00a311,000 a year, according to the Author\u2019s Licensing and Collecting Society, how sustainable is it to flounder on with a career in writing?<\/p>\n
Certainly, Taylor has managed it so far, writing prolifically, unstoppably: reviews for the Guardian<\/em>, Independent<\/em>, TLS<\/em>, Literary Review<\/em>, Spectator<\/em>, Wall Street Journal<\/em> and Private Eye<\/em>; collections of short stories; biographies of Thackeray and Orwell; and a half dozen books of criticism and literary and sporting history.
The Prose Factory<\/em> is a spirited dash through British literary culture since the end of the First World War. It rarely lags, except perhaps when discussing Cambridge\u2019s impenetrable F.R. Leavis, and that is Leavis\u2019s fault, not Taylor\u2019s. (\u201cHe has no ear, no taste, no judgment. How can a man who writes as he does teach anyone English?\u201d was the verdict of publisher Rupert Hart-Davis.)<\/p>\nEach generation is ousted by the next: complacent Bloomsbury by Proles and Pinks; Bright Young Things by Angry Young Men (Iris Murdoch included by virtue of her political fury and, one assumes, her cropped hair); Booker Prize Big Beasts by the experimenters Zadie Smith, David Mitchell and Ali Smith.<\/p>\n
In every age the question endures: can I pay the milkmaid\/school fees\/mortgage\/bailiff?<\/p>\n
When politeness dictates that we do not ask how much a man earns, there is a prurient pleasure to be had rifling through writers\u2019 account books \u2014 and reading of the disobliging jobs they had to do to make ends meet. Julian Maclaren-Ross, for example, selling vacuum cleaners before the war. J.L. Carr, in a fallow period during the 1970s, reckoned he earned just 17 pence an hour. He paid the butcher\u2019s bill in remaindered copies of his novel The Harpole Report<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Evelyn Waugh, mindful of the taxman, negotiated to have half of the $4,000 promised him by the American Good Housekeeping <\/em>magazine, paid in the form of a new car, to be delivered to his house in Ireland.<\/p>\n
His brother Alec Waugh, in a pinch for cash and commissions, took on commercial work: a life of Thomas Lipton, the tea importer, and a history of Gilbey\u2019s, the wine merchants. Deliverance came when Twentieth Century Fox bought the film rights to his novel The Sugar Barons<\/em> for $140,000.<\/p>\n
Others had a less lucrative time of it. Cyril Connolly died with an overdraft of \u00a327,000 in 1974 \u2014 a fate he had feared in his 1927 diary, when a young man of 24. \u201cDamn life, damn love, damn literature! In other words, damn journalism! Live out of London, drop journalism \u2014 yet to quit one made impossible by loneliness, the other by finance. Make \u00a31,000 a year, make pots of money out of a novel! Too soft for journalism, too rough for literature. I should be wretched abroad, bored in the country \u2014 what can one do?\u201d<\/p>\n
Kingsley Amis, despite earning \u00a3822,000 in the last five years of life, died with a relatively modest estate. What he earned, he spent: \u00a3315 on taxis, \u00a3432 at the Garrick Club, \u00a31,038 on drink \u2014 and that just in one month in February 1993.<\/p>\n
Amis had a bulldog agent. Others weren\u2019t so lucky. Penelope Fitzgerald\u2019s first novel The Golden Child<\/em> (1977) was taken on by Duckworth for \u00a3200. Was this acceptable?, asked the managing director. \u201cNo,\u201d wrote Fitzgerald, \u201cbut I haven\u2019t the courage to say no.\u201d<\/p>\n
George Gissing, who had painted the hack trade in rough colours in New Grub Street<\/em> (1891), used to ask of young writers talked up as the next big thing: \u201cBut has he starved?\u201d<\/p>\n
Better, many writers have concluded, to take on lucrative work for the lowbrow mags despised by literary London, than to starve in the TLS and LRB. Martin Amis and Ian McEwan picked up cheques for short stories in the adult magazines Penthouse<\/em> and Club International<\/em>.<\/p>\n
Taylor\u2019s admiration for the men and women who have scraped \u2014 or raked \u2014 a living by their pens springs from every page of this energetic, affectionate, galvanising book. It sends you hurrying to order all the novels, memoirs and collected letters you haven\u2019t read and to re-read the ones you have. May editors commission a sequel, may Hollywood buy the film rights, and may he never flounder in garret despair.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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<\/h3>\n
\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/Volgograd_and_the_Motherland_statue.jpg\"\/)
Monuments and men<\/a>
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\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/stoppard-120x120.jpg\"\/)
The invention of Stoppard<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
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\nMonuments and men<\/a>
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\nThe invention of Stoppard<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Prose Factory is a spirited dash through British literary history \u2014 and the many ways writers have struggled to pay their bills<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6924,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}