by Paul Theroux
It sometimes works the other way. There are instances where patron and recipient disappoint each other. In 1932, Diego Rivera was hired, for $21,000, to paint a mural on the RCA building in Rockefeller Center. His patrons were of course the Rockefellers, who assigned him the theme, "Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a Néw and Better Future." Assisted by Ben Shahn, Diego set to work, but before the mural was finished, Nelson Rockefeller walked by and saw that one of the faces in the mural was that of the first premier of the USSR, V. I. Lenin. Nelson Rockefeller had the painful task of informing Diego that this would not do. He complimented the painter on his work, but added, "As much as I dislike to do so I am afraid we must ask you to substitute the face of some unknown man where Lenin's now appears." Diego refused; work stopped; the mural was destroyed by the Rockefellers, in spite of their prior assurances to the contrary; and Diego painted a similar mural in Mexico City, enhancing it with a portrait of John D. Rockefeller.
On the whole such failures in patronage as this are not widely publicized, and it is the "intellectual knighthood" conferred on recipients that is stressed, or as the current (1981) report of the Guggenheim Foundation has it, "The Fellowships are awarded to men and women of high intellectual and personal qualifications who have already demonstrated unusual creative ability in the arts." It makes it seem like an award for achievement, rather than a sum of money intended to help start or complete a project. It signals arrival and is, for many, the beginning of self-esteem. And where once appeared in books sycophantic expressions of gratitude to patrons, phrased as fulsome dedications, we have "Thanks to my intrepid editors ... And thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant which helped" (Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong) or "Thanks are due to the J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation." These are not always boasts, but it is difficult not to read in them a smug satisfaction, and even a suggestion of Imprimatur in their formula.
And there are more candid assessments. Consider these three:
1. "Receipt of the fellowship gave me new confidence in my work and in my choice of writing as a profession."
2. "This was the first time my work had been given credibility by an outstanding outside source. The results were that my family, my colleagues within the local community, the region and the state accepted that I was a serious writer—and that it was all right to be that."
3. "Often the result of such a grant is intangible—it has more to do with your own psychological attitude, toward your work and toward the society in which you're living."
These comments are from the report circulated by the National Endowment for the Arts, their "Literature Program Follow-Up on Creative Writing Fellowships," 1972–1976. The report states, "A large number of writers specifically commented on the added 'prestige' and 'recognition' brought to them and their work by the award." These fellowships were not given on the basis of need; the only considerations were "the talent of the writer and the quality of the manuscript submitted." The greatest boast in this report is that, after having received a National Endowment fellowship, nearly half of them (129 out of 293 surveyed) went on to secure other fellowships or grants—twenty-two Guggenheims, four Rockefellers, four Fulbrights, and so forth. It is almost as if the National Endowment for the Arts is a means by which a writer may attract further patrons, the first rung on the ladder of patronage. Critics may say that this smacks of the kind of acceptance accorded to approved writers in the Soviet Union. It is true that Soviet authors who toe the line are elected to the Writers Union, but this carries no stipend. On the other hand, if you are in the Writers Union you get published; and if you're not, you don't. How could you? You're not a writer.
So, what about those American writers whose applications were turned down by the National Endowment for the Arts? We have no way of telling, because the report did not cover unsuccessful applicants. But wouldn't it be interesting to know if the refusal of a grant was such a blow to an aspiring writer's self-esteem and so damaging to his prestige that he abandoned writing? And what if it made no difference at all? To say that half your respondents have become patronage-pensioners after receiving their first grant does not impress me, but only confirms my view that grantsmanship is often a game that is played at the peripheries of art. There is a Grantsmanship Center in Los Angeles, which conducts "grantsmanship classes" and publishes, among other titles, The Guide to Corporate Giving and Ten Steps to a Million-Dollar Fund Raiser. Unsuccessful applicants for the National Endowment might well consider one of these classes or gold-digging textbooks.
The British equivalent of The National Endowment for the Arts is the Arts Council of Great Britain. Until 1980, the Literature Panel felt it was (in the words of one director) "ungentlemanly" to ask how the money had been spent by the writers who received Arts Council patronage. For about fifteen years, no one knew; and then in 1980 a report was commissioned. But for this, unsuccessful applicants were questioned. The Chairman of the Literature Panel, as a result of the report's findings, concluded that it made little difference whether a writer received a grant or not. That is, patronage was not crucial to any of the writers—unsuccessful and successful applicants for patronage seemed indistinguishable in their final results; though having read the report I must confess that the unpatronized ones sounded very aggrieved. The Arts Council decided to abandon grants to writers, except for (I quote) "Two or three writers of outstanding ability in exceptional circumstances."
"The books we were subsidizing seemed very dull," the Chairman told me. "And we have come close to producing a breed of poets who can't write poetry without a grant." The Arts Council is happier subsidizing magazines and small publishers, and the Chairman of the Literature Panel confided that what he would like to see is a very large state publishing house, something like the National Theatre or the Royal Opera House. In any case, individual patronage to writers is more or less at an end in Britain, and this is largely due to a report which asked unsuccessful applicants whether patronage mattered to them.
"We couldn't point to a Ulysses having been written," the Chairman of the Literature Panel said glumly, suggesting that a masterpiece might have vindicated his bursaries. It is a wonderful example, because the writing of Ulysses—in fact, the life of James Joyce—superbly shows how patronage can work, providing the patron is very rich and the recipient is a genius. But Joyce was also a great spender. His biographer, Richard Ellmann, wrote that Harriet Weaver's "benefaction did not make Joyce rich; no amount of money could have done that; but it made it possible for him to be poor only through determined extravagance." Miss Weaver provided Joyce with a stipend in 1918. This continued for the next twenty-three years. He had dozens of other patrons, and a Civil List grant, and a sort of bloodhound in Ezra Pound frantically sniffing out new patrons. Joyce's biography (written with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship) is filled with anecdotes of handouts, grants and stipends, and with sorely-pressed patrons and patronesses. Joyce was not only a master of English fictional prose—he could also write an effective letter beseeching a potential patron for funds.
Mrs. Harold McCormick, née Edith Rockefeller, was his patroness for a time. She was also Jung's patron, and what seems to have ended her relationship with Joyce was her insistence that the Irish novelist be psychoanalyzed by Jung—at her expense. Joyce refused, and got no more money from Mrs. McCormick. It might have happened anyway, since Jung's treatment of another of Mrs. McCormick's artists (the composer, Wolf-Ferrari) was in advising the patroness to withdraw her subsidy. Cut off without a penny, the composer "pulled himself out of dissipation and inertia" and began again to compose music. Even after Mrs. McCormick stopped paying Joyce's bills, Joyce wrote her asking if she would reconsider and take him aboard—she was reputedly the richest woman in Zurich. But silence was her stern reply. Joyce secured other patrons, and his revenge on Mrs. McCormick was in putting her in the brothel scene in the "Circe" episode of Ulysses; she is The Honourable Mrs. Mervyn Talboys who appears as a rich sadistic h
orsewoman, "In amazon costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes her welt constantly"—she threatens to bestride the cringing Leopold Bloom and flay him alive.
Joyce did well out of his patrons; and his patrons had the satisfaction of knowing their man was a genius, even though they hardly understood what he wrote. And yet in the world of patronage there are few real success stories. The writer doesn't want a patron half so badly as he wants a paying public. In his lifetime, Joyce's public was not large—his royalties were lamentably thin, and like Stephen Dedalus he owed money to everyone.
Here is Joyce on publication day, 1939. Finnegans Wake has just appeared. He has published his poems, Dubliners, Exiles, Portait of the Artist, Ulysses and his essays. He is fifty-seven. His life's work is done. At his publication party today, his wife says, "Well, Jim, I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to some day because they must be good, considering how well they sell." Joyce is not consoled. His financial situation is terrible. He considers returning to teaching, and his secretary Samuel Beckett reveals that there is a job open as lecturer in Italian at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
For a few days, Joyce toyed with the idea. But he gave it up. He heard there were often thunderstorms in Cape Town. He was afraid of thunder. He died two years later and his funeral was paid for by his patroness, Harriet Weaver.
Would James Joyce have secured a Guggenheim Fellowship ? It is idle to speculate, but it is certain that a one-year fellowship would have done him little good: his talent was too vast, his working method too slow, his tastes too extravagant for a one-year fellowship. He did not require prestige, and it is fair to say that literary patronage is always limited—a garbage collector earns more than any recipient of a literary grant; and there is the limitation of time—what is a year to someone writing Ulysses? It seems almost as if latter-day patrons are determined to encourage the small book, the small talent, the slight ambition. Nationality aside, Joyce would probably not have applied for any grant. It was his inheritors—his biographers and critics and masters of the footnote—who made a living from foundations, in his name, and put one in mind of barnacles on the Titanic.
Nathanael West applied for a Guggenheim, and was turned down. Henry Miller had the same experience and was so embittered by it that in a note to what would have been his Guggenheim project, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, he listed in that book the loony-sounding projects of the successful applicants. And notice: he wrote his book all the same. So did West. So would Joyce have done. It is possible to feel, when reading a mediocre novel by an author who has received patronage, that instead of a check through the door, the cause of literature would have been better served by a visit from The Person from Porlock.*
Even so, we are dealing with very small sums. For the period 1977–1978, ten per cent of the money awarded by major foundations was earmarked for the humanities, and of this only two per cent was used in activities classified as language and literature. Of the 272. Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 19 81, only eight were given to writers of fiction. The National Endowment of the Arts fellowships are currently $12,500 for "creative writers," and state art agencies' grants are much less.
But this is not the whole story. It is impossible to calculate the numbers, but I would venture to guess that the greatest amount of patronage extended to writers is that of colleges and universities; that is, the Creative Writing Program of the English Department in whose precincts we find the writer-in-residence, the visiting writer, the professor who writes when the spirit moves him, and the scribbling students. The post-war phenomenon of Creative Writing as a subject, which allowed a graduate student not to study the Bildungsroman, but to write one of his own, gave rise to a system of continuous patronage that will be with us for some time. It is, in fact, self-perpetuating. It began in Iowa and Stanford, and it worked this way. A person who wished to write a novel, registered for a post-graduate degree. He had a teaching fellowship or a scholarship to help him along. Like other MA and PhD candidates, he had a supervisor—probably a novelist. He wrote his novel. The novel was submitted to the usual committee and if it was approved, the candidate earned his degree. In time, a blurb-like plot-summary of the novel appeared in the leaden pages of the publication, Dissertation Abstracts. And the successful candidate, now a Doctor of Fiction Writing with a dissertation/novel under his belt, developed that schizophrenia that afflicts anyone who is heavily patronized: half-academic, half-novelist—Doctor Jekyll in the classroom, Mr. Hyde at the typewriter. Yes, I do believe the potion of patronage is that strong.
Although many such graduates have gone on to become professional writers, many more have joined universities and done all the things that academics do—taught classes, graded papers and demanded tenure. Their novels may never have been published, but academically at least they have passed muster by earning the person a post-graduate degree. George Gissing's novel, New Grub Street, was never like this; moreover, the very situation of the Creative Writing Program caused a particular kind of novel to be written, something quite different from what had been written before—that is, the university novel. The 1930's and '40's had given us the "Hollywood novel" for precisely the same reasons—Hollywood offered a kind of patronage to practically every major American novelist of those decades, except Hemingway, and William Faulkner continued to write movie-scripts into the 'fifties. In fact, Faulkner wrote the script for Land of the Pharaohs (1953) after he had received the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature. The main distinction between the teacher-novelist and the script-writer-novelist is the nature of the patron. The university is Maecenas; Hollywood is Magwitch.
The effect of this creative writing on the profession of letters in the United States has been profound. It has changed the profession out of all recognition. It has made it narrower, more rarified, more neurotic; it has altered the way literature is taught and it has diminished our pleasure in reading—books must be worthy (goodbye Treasure Island), books must be seminar-fodder (have a nice day, Kim), books must be symbolic (farewell, Diary of a Nobody); and hello to every pompous piece of fiction that makes literature-like noises.
Most of all, university patronage has spelled the decline of book-reviewing in the United States. After the foundations delivered novelists into the arms of universities, there was no need for anyone to engage in the habitual tasks associated with the profession of letters. A campus of creative writers does not mean that the local newspaper will be lively with literary journalism; it means its opposite. Book-reviewing, the literary essay, the feuilleton —all of these went out the window when university patronage came in the door; and a sharp, and I think unfair, distinction came to be drawn between the literary man and the literary journalist. We have a handful of reliable book reviewers in America, which is a pity; but it is a far greater pity that reviewing is seen to be so despicable a labor that it is done—when it is done at all—by nonentities on the Entertainment Page. Most newspapers get by on syndicated reviews, "notices", and mentions cobbled together from the plot-summary on the book jacket. The writer-in-residence is perhaps right in refusing to review a book; why should he bother, on his salary? And yet, when such a person's own book appears, he may object to its thin treatment, and with some justification. Patronage is odd that way; it prevents a person from doing the very thing that may free him from patronage; it is nearly always at odds with the kind of commercial considerations that make patronage unnecessary. In a world of patrons, who needs large advances? Who needs literary journalism? Who needs to be professional? When patronage is extensive, who indeed needs readers?
There is a sort of Malthusian effect in literary patronage; it has altered the nature of readership, the way books get written, and has changed the notion of the literary profession—in fact, taken away so many of the writer's duties, that writing has almost ceased to be a profession. In my reading around this subject, the strongest feeli
ng I have had is that anyone in America who aspires to authorship finds it very hard to admit this except on an application. It has less to do with prevailing philistinism than the plain truth that in our society you are measured by how much money you make. Writers do not make very much, on the whole, and have to look to patronage for justification and the respectability that is money's equivalent. I should add that it is possible to be so respectable as a novelist in America that the act of writing a book review or anything else begins to appear somewhat distasteful, and literary journalism is regarded as a blow to one's prestige.
I have moved from the general to the particular. I cannot speak about theaters, opera companies, or orchestras. I think there are arts that can only survive with a great deal of patronage. The sculptor, the painter, the composer will always need patrons of one sort or another; but one can often see the patron's taste reflected in their work. The performing arts prosper under patronage, but there is a Malthusian dimension to this as well. In the ten years prior to 1978, with the assistance of the National Endowment for the Arts, opera companies grew from twenty-seven to forty-five; professional symphony orchestras from fifty-eight to one hundred and ten; professional dance companies from ten to seventy, and legitimate theater companies from twelve to fifty. The patronage that makes them multiply, has to keep them alive, which makes the patron a bit like a rabbit breeder.