Silences (36 page)

—Poets & Writers Newsletter,
1976

In 1971–72, P.E.N. surveyed its membership. These were writers of professional status (biographers, poets, essayists,
journalists, as well as fiction writers) of sufficient reputation to have been invited into P.E.N.

In a year when $7,300 was the
minimum
adequate standard of living for a family of four, a third of these established writers had not earned $3,000; more than half earned less than $6,000. A third were able to earn $10,000 or over.

An earlier survey (1969) of writers-in-residence at The MacDowell
Colony (some demonstration of achievement is required for admission) showed half of the writers earned $1,000 a year or less from their writing; a quarter earned from $1,000
to $5,000, and only a fourth were able to bring in more than $5,000.
*

“The remarkable fact of the economics of the artist’s life is not how little he [she] earns, but how much he [she] manages to create in spite of the niggardly
earnings,” the article comments. “ ‘Art,’ as one of the colonists [me!] accurately said, ‘is subsidized by artists’ ”—with their lives.

As for foundation help, fewer than one in ten of the MacDowell writers had ever received grants of any sort, and half of the grants were for less than $2,500. One and a half percent got grants of $5,000 or more.

Nearly all had, or answered that most of their
artist friends had, been “habitually forced by pressure for adequate income to put aside their creative work.”

Remember that the above figures are for writers accorded some recognition. What would a similar survey of the 800 writers listed in CODA’s
Directory of American Fiction Writers
(which requires only some kind of publication for listing), or of a cross-section of
all
writers reveal?

            
It is the same with Individuals as Nations; works of Art can only be produc’d in Perfection where the Man is either in Affluence or is Above the Care of it. Poverty is the Fool’s Rod, which at last is turn’d on his own back; this is A Last Judgment—when Men of Real Art Govern & Pretenders Fall. Some People & not a few Artists have asserted that the Painter of this Picture would not
have done so well if he had been properly Encourag’d. Let those who think so, reflect on the State of Nations under Poverty & their incapability of Art; tho’ Art is Above Either, the Argument is better for Affluence than Poverty; & tho’ he would not have been a greater Artist, yet he would have produc’d Greater works of Art in proportion to his means. A Last Judgment is not for the purpose of making
Bad Men better, but for the Purpose of hindering them from oppressing the Good with Poverty & Pain by means of such Vile Arguments & Insinuations. . . .

                  
Who will Dare to Say that Polite Art is Encouraged or Either Wished or Tolerated in a Nation where The Society for the Encouragement of Art Suffer’d Barry to Give them his Labour for Nothing, A society composed of the Flower
of the English Nobility & Gentry Suffering an Artist to Starve while he Supported Really what They, under Pretence of Encouraging, were suppressing. . . .

                  
Liberality! we want not Liberality. We want a Fair Price & proportionate Value & a General Demand for Art.

                  
Let not that Nation where Less than Nobility is the Reward, Pretend that Art is Encouraged by that
Nation. Art is First in Intellectuals & Ought to be First in Nations.

—William Blake, 175 years ago

What follows is the blues. Writer, don’t read it. You know it anyway, you live it; and have probably read it in one way or place or another before and said better. This is for readers to whom it may be news. An unrevised draft is all I can bring myself to.

When Van Gogh, quoted earlier, said:

            
The dissatisfaction about bad work, the failure of things, the difficulties of technique . . . and then to swallow that despair and that melancholy . . . to struggle on notwithstanding thousands of shortcomings and faults and the uncertainty of conquering them. . . . All this complicated by material difficulties. . . . One works hard, but still one cannot make ends meet

he was speaking
for most dedicated writers. Ah, if that were all.

“Who will read me, who will care?” It does not help the work to be done, that work already completed is surrounded by silence and indifference—if it is published at all. Few books ever have the attention of a review—good or bad. Fewer stay longer than a few weeks on bookstore shelves, if they get there at all. New books are always coming in. Quality
or ephemera—if the three- or four-week-old one hasn’t yet made best-sellerdom or the book clubs (usually synonymous)—Out! Room must be made. It is always fall in the commercial literary world, and books are its seasonal leaves. Even fewer books (again, regardless of merit) are kept alive by critics or academics who could be doing so. “Works of art” (or at least books,
stories, poems, meriting
life) “disappear before our very eyes because of the absence of responsible attention,” Chekhov wrote nearly ninety years ago. Are they even seen? Out of the moveable feast, critics and academics tend to invoke the same dozen or so writers as if none else exist worthy of mention, or as if they’ve never troubled to read anyone else. Anthologies, textbooks, courses concerned with contemporary literature,
tend to be made up of living writers whose names will immediately be recognized (usually coincident with writers whom publishers have promoted). A prize or good-foundation-fellowship seal of approval helps. Public libraries, starved for funds, buy less and less books. Published writers of good books, if their books haven’t been respectable money-makers, more and more find themselves without
a publisher for their latest one. Younger writers (that is, new ones of any age) find that fewer and fewer first books are being published. The magazine market for fiction has shrunk—what? 75 percent?—in the last two decades.

I see there is a lot of “fewer and fewer” and “less and less.”

At a time when there is more reading and
writing
of imaginative literature than any time in the human past
(and an indiscriminate glut of books on the market), and a greater potential audience than ever before, it is harder and harder for the serious writer to get published or get to readers once published.

Another way of saying it:

Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled. That happier schizophrenic time
when publishers managed profit necessities in combination with some commitment to literature of quality and content, is less and less possible. Almost
all
publishing houses are now owned by conglomerates who bought them for investment purposes (oh, they knew about the high costs of printing, paper, mailing, etc.) and whose only concern (necessarily) is high profit return. Why diversify, take risks,
settle for modest returns, take trouble—and literature
is
trouble. Salability—as
maximum
-profit defined—leads to, well too much of what has been said here already, and other ramifications there is no room or spirit to discuss here.

The pressure to publish, “to keep before the public”

            
Nowadays if you don’t want to be forgotten, you must produce a masterpiece a year.

—Jules and Edmond
Goncourt

            
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

—Jules Renard

The literary atmosphere

            
This miserable bartering of fame, this coveting of it, fighting for it, tearing it from mouth to mouth . . . this continual talking about literature in ignorance as if it were some sort of commerce; this constant criticizing,
denigrating, envying, self-praising, exalting people and writings that deserve contempt—all this depresses me to such a degree that if I had not got the refuge of posterity, and the certainty that in the course of time, everything does fall into its right place, I would send all literature to the devil a thousand times over.

—Giacomo Leopardi, 1835

The literary atmosphere that sets writers against
one another, breeds the feeling that writers are in competition with each other. (In its extremest sense, Hemingway’s feeling that the measure of success would be “to knock Tolstoy out of the prize ring”: literature as prize ring!) The prize-givings that are barterings and tradings-off more often than true honorings. The foundation grants, starvingly few in number, for the astonishingly many
demonstrably worthy
^*
—grants now so associated with honor, status, credentials, that those who do not need them to get their work done, seek (and sometimes receive) them at the expense of those who do need them; the harm of the applyings, the trying not to feel the being passed over as condemnation of capacity. The “major/minor” pigeonholing.
The judgings having nought to do with true criticism;
the unjustified malignity and ignorance of much “reviewing,” its superior tone, its tendency to follow the leader:
New York Times Book Review
and the
New York Review of Books.

            
Disappointment and humiliations embitter the heart and make an aching in the very bones. . . .

                  
. . . There is a point with me in matters of any size when I must absolutely have encouragement
as much as crops rain; afterwards I am independent. . . .

                  
. . . When I spoke of fame I was not thinking of the harm it does to men as artists: it may do them harm . . . but so, I think, may the want of it, if “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise To shun delights and live laborious days”—a spur very hard to find a substitute for or to do without.

—Gerard Manley
Hopkins

Writer’s isolation, loneliness.

The attitude: nobody owes you (the writer) anything; the world never asked you to write.

My long ago and still instinctive response: What’s wrong with the world then, that it doesn’t ask—and make it possible—for people to raise and contribute the best that is in them.

I can’t go on.

I can’t leave it there either. I sound like certain established
writers at forums and conferences (and sometimes even in classes) eagerly bringing the news to unestablished ones of how frightful and hard and impossible it is—not in an emboldening spirit of solidarity and resistance either—or even balancing it with the rest, the joys and rewards which keep writers going.

(Writers, you can start reading again here.)

              
O ye dead poets who
are living still

              
Immortal in your verse though life be fled,

              
And ye, O living poets who are dead

              
Though ye are living, for neglect can kill,

              
Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill

              
With drops of anguish falling fast and red

              
From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head

              
Ye were not glad your
errand to fulfil?

              
Yes, for the gift and ministry of Song

              
Have something in them so divinely sweet