AND ANOTHER THING
No need for Writers' Houses, they can make their own pigsties
PAUL JOHNSON
The Arts Lottery Board announces it is to give £18,000 for a 'feasibility study to create what is termed a Writers' House. I don't like the sound of that. It has a Bertold-Brecht-Writers'-Union-Congress- of-Intellectuals sound to it. I fear it would attract the kind of self-righteous, bullying people, the women even more hectoring than the men if possible, who would want to hold 'workshops'. Come to think of it, I don't like the sound of that Arts Lottery Board either. Too many busybodies are giv- ing money to the arts these days. Not long ago, at a party, that cheeky chairman of the Arts Council, Grey Gowrie, came over to me and said, `Ah, I see you are wearing a dark-blue shirt and bright-red tie. Now I know you're an artist. Care to apply for a grant?'
It is bad for writers or artists to be given money they have not earned. Even private donations from rich folk who are spending their own income are not always wise. When one of the Wedgwoods funded the young Coleridge, it did not produce more, or finer, poetry — far from it. The Earl of Lansdale had a better idea when he made Wordsworth Collector of Stamps for West- morland. That meant he had to ride up and down the dales, supervising little post offices, observing people, animals, weather, spending long hours on horseback and thinking up poems. But it is far worse when the state starts to hand out cash. It makes writers and artists feel like unmarried teenage mothers — on to a good thing for life.
They should be made to ferret around for a livelihood, insert themselves by their own efforts into the interstices of the mar- ket, turn their words and brushstrokes into pennies. Their work is all the better for being produced in anxiety and even want, by a combination of desperation, low cun- ning and impudent braggadocio. Goldsmith is the model. Without hunger, he would have written little. If Evelyn Waugh had got his wish and become a consul in the Adriat- ic in 1945, he would never have given us his marvellous Men at Arms trilogy. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who actually did get a cushy job as consul, turned out nothing while he was en poste.
Nor is it a good idea for writers to be together in an official house. Most writers want to be alone anyway when they are working. They can be gregarious too, but then they prefer to make their own arrangements, huddling together for mutu- al sympathy and bickering in insalubrious places usually associated with the sale of liquor. New York City did not pick up the tab when the Algonquin Table met, nor was there anyone to fund Oscar Wilde's gatherings at the Cafe Royal. When I lived with writers in Paris we always met at a joint called the Cafe Tournon, near the Luxembourg, an undistinguished venue picked for I know not what reason, but a nest of acrimonious singing-birds in its day. It was the same in Chelsea: we consorted at a dingy pub called the Commercial — long since tarted up and renamed — whose beer-stained tables were thumped, argued and boasted over by a raggle-taggle bunch of writers, most of whom were then hang- ing onto solvency by their fingernails.
Literary coteries form and dissolve them- selves around geographical centres, whether it be Shakespeare's Eastcheap Tavern, or Madame de Stars Coppet, or Emerson's Concord, or Strachey's Blooms- bury, or Sartre's Cafe des Deux Magots, for all kinds of mysterious and accidental rea- sons. It is usually a humdrum process which only in retrospect looks magical. The state has nothing to do with it. On rare occa- sions, a munificent individual can achieve much. Thus the Earl of Egremont, by keep- ing open house for painters like Turner at Petworth, was a real benefactor of the arts, and it's arguable that Lady Ottoline Mor- rell gave much-needed encouragement, at Garsington, to D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, though it is probable they would have got ahead without her. But who would want to share a Writers' House with the likes of Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Joe Orton, Denis Potter, Malcolm Lowry, eta!?
There is no harm at all in writers congre- gating cheek by jowl in unwholesome rook- eries chosen for cheapness and conve- nience. Such literary menageries have exist- ed in London and Paris since the 16th century. The original Grub Street was one of these manifestations, where penny-a-lin- ers lived in bare-boarded garrets not far from the printers' dens in which they whee- dled a living from the hard-faced or reck- less booksellers who published ephemeral periodicals. When I was a young man, there was a similar Grub Street area in the maze of little streets, courts and alleyways north- east of Fleet Street, all now buried beneath monstrous office blocks. Amid metal- smelling workshops turning out half-tone blocks and the like existed the editorial offices (grandly so called) of countless cheap magazines, most of them aimed at children, adolescent girls and pimply youths.
I was reminded of these warrens by the death last week, aged 101, of G.R. Sam- ways, a survivor, almost, from the Grub Street golden age. In a sense, he was a very lowly form of writer, being a stand-in for 'Frank Richards', itself a pseudonym, and other more successful authors in such papers as the Magnet and the Gem. It was nothing for Samways to turn out a 20,000- word Billy Bunter episode at short notice. For decade after decade, he provided scores of thousands of words a week for such publications as the Scout, Boys' Weekly, the Boy's Friend, Chuckles, Sports Favourites, Football, Meny and Bright and the Popular. He also wrote stories and arti- cles for adults in myriads of publications most of them now defunct — poems, comic verses, skits, jokes for Punch, adventure novels and love stories.
He came from an age where there was a continuum in the world of letters from the sublime to the merest trash, where a genius like Kipling began, as a teenager, to write verse and stories to fill in holes in a provin- cial Indian newspaper, where fertile word- smiths like Edgar Wallace and W.W. Jacobs were unclassifiable, and where even — as we learned last week — the young T.S. Eliot, who aspired to and became the greatest poet of the age, churned out third- rate rhyming smut. What writers have in common is nothing but the propensity to become intoxicated by words. They develop this gift, or curse, anyway — no need to manufacture it in a state-supported Writ- ers' House run on battery-hen principles.
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