Postscript
Holy relics
P. J. Kavanagh
For the first time I have been reading a novel by Barbara Pym. It is called Quartet in Autumn and is about four elder- ly people who work in an office together. Their work is pointless and undemanding and, although they know hardly anybody but each other, even in the office they 'keep themselves to themselves'. It is the kind of book which makes you wince with recogni- tion. One of the quartet passes the house of another who is going dotty from loneliness inside it, but he does not call in because he does not want to 'interfere'. It is about peo- ple sleep-walking through their lives and makes the reader wonder how awake he is. It is therefore a 'disturbing' book though I doubt whether it would be called so by a reviewer; it does not contain large horrors but private ones that are nearer home and hurt more. In fact I wondered how reviewers did describe it and found on the back an anonymous quotation that told me it was 'very funny'.
The book is about slow death, from futility; in one case with cancer thrown in. Admittedly, it does not lecture us, or shout; the tone is unpretentious, cool, the touch light. But it reaches a nerve in the reader, for these reasons. As to why the reviewer found it 'funny', I think I have an explana- tion: most writers are so broke they have to review to pay the rent, and the imminence of the gas bill leaves no time for the snot juste.
In a recent study of the earnings of pro- fessional writers in France it is estimated that 75 per cent of them earn less than 5,000 frs a year (call it £500). They can't live off their books so they have to do other things, including writing (too fast) about other people's. Barbara Pym herself had given up writing novels, because of diminishing sales which led to publishers abandoning her, un- til she was rescued by timely praise for her work from, I think, Philip Larkin, and others.
It is hard to know what can be done about this poverty of writers, though it does have the odd effect of causing more, bad, books to be written in order to make ends meet. As demand goes down, quantity goes up; as quality diminishes so does the de- mand, and so on.
It is a puzzle, though, to know where the literate public has gone. I would guess it to be about the same in size as it was in the time of Charles Dickens and his royalties for only part of the year 1866, and from on- ly one source, were £1270 15s 9d. I know this because they are selling three of his royalty cheques at Sotheby's this week. It is a sale of books and manuscripts and odd- ments and one of the sale days is devoted to the 20th century. It seems that nowadays writers not only have to write reviews for cash they also sell the hand-written drafts of the reviews.
Many of us seem to have scraped the bar- rel. Mr Dannie Abse, for example, is put- ting up for sale the manuscript and typescript of a TV 'programme 'with typescript filming schedule'. Sotheby's estimate between £200 and £250 for this. Some have emptied the barrel altogether: Brian Patten is selling his complete literary manuscripts: 'We believe this is the first time that such an archive, comprising prac- tically the entire literary manuscripts to date of an established contemporary poet, has been offered for public sale in this country.' They hope to.get £15,000 for this little load, and for Mr Patten's sake let us hope they do. For all our sakes; I myself have a modest item on offer. A part of the pro- ceeds goes to a good cause, which puts a lit- tle gloss on the occasion, but the major beneficiaries will be ourselves and it seems an odd way to make a bob.
Even odder, of course, is that there should be a market for rejected scribbled- over pieces of paper. One typescript of Robert Lowell's is illustrated in the catalogue and has been corrected so much it looks illegible. This is expected to go for about £700. Of course, he is dead and famous but most of the manuscripts in the sale come from people still alive and less well known. Why we should want to sell such things is obvious, but why people should seem willing to part with large sums of money for the scribbles, when there is lit- tle or no attention paid to the printed books, is a phenomenon for which I can think of several explanations, none of them interesting. The sale of relics was held to augur something wrong with the Church. There is nothing of Barbara Pym's on sale,
but a letter in the Times Literary Supple- ment asks for subscriptions so that a memorial to her may be set up. This might
make her smile, in view of the near- extinction, by neglect, of her quiet but un- mistakable talent.
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