Another voice
Open letter to Melvyn Bragg
Auberon Waugh
Dear Melye, First, may I congratulate you on your appointment to the Arts Council as chairman of the Literature Panel in succession to Mr Roy Fuller? We all agree it couldn't happen to a nicer person, and I'm sure that the folks back home in Cumberland are prouder of you now than they have ever been.
On the face of it, I should say that the job carries with it a fairly heavy social responsibility. Our government may choose to spend only £50 million or rather less on whatever it is in an irreligious age that distinguishes human beings from animals, as against the thousands of millions spent on producing human specimens who will wreck football arenas throughout Europe, but this entire sum, such as it is, has been entrusted to you (with the Marchioness of Anglesey, the Lord Balfour of Burghley, the Viscount Esher, Lord Richard Hoggart, Professor Raymond Williams, Ann Clwyd, Annette Page . . . treat the women gently, Melvyn). Of this mighty sum, about £450,000 has been set aside to support English letters, the only art-form at which the English have ever excelled. And it's all yours, Melvyn.
This may seem an unwarrantably solemn approach to what is essentially a fun appointment, like the Anglican Bishopric of Birmingham, but you and Dr Hugh Montefiore have in common that you are both highly intelligent, cultivated people with a benign concern for your fellow men — a species which may be expected to disappear rather rapidly now that the NelsonThomlinson Grammar School of Wigton has gone comprehensive and the National Union of Public Employees has taken over the responsibility of deciding which subjects may be studied at our universities and which may not. While I would not presume to intrude on the meditations of Dr Montefiore — this week, anyway — I feel I have a particular focus on your responsibilities, partly in my capacity as the author of five novels who has given up novel-writing in response to market pressures, partly in my role as student of the English novel and weekly novel reviewer.
In about five hundred novels which I have reviewed, and a couple of hundred others which I have read without reviewing, I think there were five or six from the Arts Council which I judged worthy of notice, and only two of any discernible merit. During some of that time you were serving on the Literature panel, eventually as deputy chairman, so plainly our views differ. My only claim, if you are prepared to allow me the smallest benevolence of feeling towards the English novel and those (or most of those) who sail in her, is to an alternative view, and a view shared by the great majority of novel-readers who have tended to treat Arts Council acknowledgements as a trademark for stinking fish.
Which is why I beg you to interpret your new dignity in terms of social responsibility rather than seeing the Arts Council as an artists' benevolent fund, or benevolent fund for those who choose to project themselves, as artists and are lucky enough to catch your eye. I estimate that there are about half a million people in England who might find enjoyment and profit in a good contemporary novel like, for instance, Beryl Bainbridge's Injury Time, if they could be persuaded to attach enough importance to the form. A good contemporary novel offers an alternative perception of contemporary society, a second pair of eyes, as well as whatever emotional or intellectual stimulation the writer's artifice can contrive. Instead, the Arts Council has created a little corner of the market for itself in drivelling explorations of the author's inner creative process, often incomprehensible to any but himself. It may or may not be the case, as Roy Fuller began to perceive, that public patronage lends itself, by its very nature, to partisan entryism, favouritism, log-rolling, empire-building and all the other scandals which arise wherever public money is distributed without a sufficient degree of public accountability. The only point on which I have no doubt is that the total effect of the Arts Council's interventions has been to harm English letters and discredit the novel.
Resignations from public office on a point of principle are by no means a common event nowadays, although there has never been any shortage of volunteers to fill posts which become available in this way. But in choosing to play Cromwell to Roy Fuller's Thomas More, you surely owe us an explanation either of the extent to which you accept Mr Fuller's criticisms and propose to remedy them, or of your reasons for rejecting them.
For myself, as you know, I more or less accept Mr Fuller's tentative and hedged conclusion that it would be better if all public patronage of the living arts (as opposed to revival and support of the classics) were abolished. Of the literature panel's budget, I would end all awards to living writers, all subsidy to the New Fiction Society, all subsidy to literary magazines (except Index on Censorship for nonliterary reasons), all grants to publishers as at present constituted, all subsidy to little presses and both creative writing fellowships. I would be prepared to accept that literary festivals provide a certain amount of harmless fun and even, despite initial misgivings, that creative writing courses provided by the Avon Foundation may be of assistance to people from non-literary or otherwise deprived backgrounds. But on the 1975-6 figures (the latest available) my cuts would achieve a saving of £152,890, or 67 per cent of the literature panel's £226,800 budget, and inevitably result in the demise of the literature panel.
Which is unthinkable, of course. The juggernaut of public expenditure can't be halted in this way by a little red flag and a whistle. There is a case for public subsidy of literature while market forces are disrupted by the free library system — I would be happier, myself, if I felt I had been bowled out on a straight wicket — just as there is a case for saying that if public money is to be lavished on literature (in consideration of the vast tax revenues received from Georgette Heyer, Jean Plaidy and Barbara Cartland) some of it should go to literary magazines. However, if one is to avoid the suspicion of log-rolling and favouritism, as with the running scandals of the New Review and London Magazine, it must be done more openly. Here are my suggestions: To avoid charges of favouritism, no money shall be paid to authors, publishers or literary magazines. If, after publication, the literature panel decides that a particular book deserves encouragement, it will acknowledge the fact with an award of Arts Council rosettes on the Michelin principle. It will then promote the book with advertisements in all the literary magazines and newspapers which have reviewed it, the size of its advertisement being inextricably determined by the number of rosettes awarded and the length of the review.
If the literature panel continues to prefer the drivelling rubbish it has favoured up to now, the scheme will founder in a tidal wave of public derision, as will any literary editor who tries pandering to it; and public patronage of literature will receive its richly deserved come-uppance. If the literature panel mends its ways and acknowledges its accountability to the intelligent, educated, non-pseudish public, the scheme will bring enormous benefit to authors, publishers, literary magazines and to its own prestige. It might even be of benefit to the educated public and, through time, to society at large if, through the gambling and critical instincts, the scheme awakens an interest in alternative perceptions of our contemporary life which, I am convinced, only the novelist can supply.
Above all, you must avoid the illusion of personal generosity in giving away other people's money, the illusion of meanness in denying it. I don't suppose you will, or you wouldn't have taken the job. Anyway, chew on it, old man.
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