Since Colin Davis, Lord Snowdon and Lord Olivier are prepared to be members respectively of the Musicians Union, ACTT and Equity, I fail to see why any writer should be toffeenosed about joining a union. Furthermore (to nail that old one about writers being impossible to organise) there is a union for writers in film and television: the Writers’ Guild,43 which despite being only a quarter of the membership size of the Society of Authors is very effective in seeing that screenwriters are adequately paid.
The Society of Authors by all logic should turn itself into a trade union. The first benefit would be that publishers would start to take the Society as seriously as the television companies do the Writers’ Guild. Another immediate benefit would be that it would be able to go to other trade unions in the publishing industry for help; think of the difference it would make to the Society’s position if it could suggest to a publisher with whom it was in dispute that he would have difficulty finding anyone to print his books in future because of our friendliness with the very important printing unions. Such co-operation is happening all the time within the trade union movement; the Society as it is at present constituted and run has no right to ask for or expect any such help.
It might then have some strength to apply in solving the basic cause of writers’ financial problems: that they do not receive a fair proportion of the money available from the sale of books. Everyone else in the industry (publishers, printers, booksellers) earns a living from the same source, the bookbuyers’ money, but not writers. This is because the writer receives on average only ten percent of the price of his book compared to (for instance) the bookseller’s thirty-five percent. Does any bookseller think that his part in society is more than twice as important as Graham Greene’s? Put like that, it seems absurd: but financially that is exactly how he does think of himself in relation to Graham Greene; and in relation to less distinguished authors he thinks he’s worth three times as much!
Publishers would object, of course, that any increase for writers would put up the price of books; but in the last eight years the price of books has doubled, and yet still more copies are sold every year. That argument must be exposed as the falsity it is. The Society should propose to the Publishers Association that some increase in royalty rates be agreed: say by stages of one or two percent a year for the next ten or five years. Such an increase might go some way towards seeing that writers make the living from the publishing industry that others expect and take.
And yet is the royalty scheme the best one for authors? No one would advocate a return to the old outright, lump-sum system that existed in Victorian times, but it should be possible to arrange for a guaranteed minimum advance which would cover what it cost the writer to stay alive to write the book, with a later royalty if the book sold well. It is worth asking, too, in connection with royalties (the very word itself derives from the divine right of kings) why it is that publishers choose to apply it only to writers: they do not ask their editors, warehousemen, or even less their printers to accept remuneration only according to how many copies are sold of the books on which they work.
Yet let us not be naïve. Publishers do these things because they can get away with them; and they can get away with them because the Society of Authors historically has never stood up to them and fought them. All right, so authors could never go on strike (though important authors withholding manuscripts at key moments could cause much the same effect) but there are other forms of action which are possible and practical. And the very least the Society could do would be to draw up its own standard form of contract for the publication of a book, containing the minimum terms it recommended its members to accept. You are surprised it has not even done this? So was I; but it was just one of many surprises about that curious organisation.
The main argument so far advanced for not turning the Society into a trade union is that authors still living who have intimated that they are leaving a bequest to it would not do so if it became anything so common. The amount of such bequests is not generally known, nor how many people would agree to change their wills if asked. The Society says it is able to keep its fee down to ten guineas a year largely because of bequests made to it in the past, notably by the George Bernard Shaw estate. And really money, this money, plays a big part in the doings and outlook of the Society, which is ironic considering that the members themselves see so little of it from their writing. But the Society is, to repeat, a limited company, and tends to behave as such. And how ironic, too, Shaw might have found it to see his money being used to support the reactionary policies the Society now follows!
It has been fighting, it says, the battle for Public Lending Right (shouldn’t it in any case be Authors’ Lending Right?) for twenty years now; there is every prospect it will continue to do so for another twenty the way it is going about it. It should see that authors should take direct action like any other pressure group; the lesson of such campaigns, from the Suffragettes on, is that only in this way does the government take notice of you, do changes come about. And the scheme it currently backs is both unjust, expensive, and takes no account of books already published. Furthermore, the Society has had the incredible insolence to propose 25 per cent of its members’ due from PLR to publishers! Never once has the membership been given a chance to vote on whether it wants this scheme or another; never once has it been consulted over any other of the issues involved, either. Such arrogant autocracy must be challenged, even if it does react with its usual weapons of innuendo, slander and the machinations of the old boy network; even if it does meet reasoned argument with evasion and misrepresentation.
Given its nature, the Society of Authors is not likely to give way to the pressures now making themselves felt from certain writers and groups of writers. But if it does not, it will probably atrophy and die; for there is already the nucleus of another organisation formed in the two hundred odd members of the Writers’ Action Group.44 The Society made a serious mistake in the early fifties when it allowed television writers to go off and form the WGGB; if another organisation begins to represent book writers, then it will be difficult to see any function left at all for the Old Lady of Drayton Gardens.
The Happiest Days?
Published (abridged) in Education and Training, March 1973
Usually one can find a pattern in an experience as long as an education, draw the threads together to shape an article like this. I have thought for a long time about my own, but it has not been possible: how can you impose a pattern on chaos?
I started early. It seems that there was some distinction in being sent to Flora Gardens Primary, in Hammersmith, at the age of four, and that I was proud of it; most others went at five. That must have been 1937, presumably September. We had to lie down in the afternoons on canvas campbeds, I competed at whopeeshighestupthewall in the Boys’, and was disappointingly too well-built to qualify for free codliveroil and malt. Of the learning process I remember nothing.
On the outbreak of war I was six, and was privately evacuated with my mother and the son of a Westminster publican to a farm that was really only a smallholding near Chobham, in Surrey. I went to the village school, St. Lawrence’s I think it was called. Again I can remember very little of it, though my life on the farm has left me with very many sharply-felt memories. But I did learn to read during that time. I can date it no more closely than somewhere between my sixth and eighth birthdays, but it was at the end of some days in bed and I was feeling quite recovered from an illness but still not allowed to get up. The story was in one of the kind of comics which contain both picture strips with speech-balloons as well as stories in words with only a heading illustration, and I read it out of boredom, in desperation almost, after exhausting all the picture strips had to give me. It was a spy story with a boy hero who sent messages across the Channel by means of a petroldriven and radiocontrolled model aircraft; a highly improbable tale, I see now, but that afternoon I read it over and over again, with infinite pleasure, glorying in the fact that I could now read s
tories.
It would be dishonest not to give the school some credit for that; though, as I say, I can remember no one teaching me there, nothing learnt there. I am reduced to circumstantial evidence.
In 1941, after a brief period spent in London during the bombing, I was officially evacuated on my own to High Wycombe. At some point and at no cost my ‘name had been put down’ for Latymer school, then in Hammersmith Road; I think going to Flora Gardens was a preliminary to this, and I would normally have gone to Latymer at perhaps seven. Latymer had earlier been evacuated as a school to a small village outside High Wycombe called Sands, and some administrative logic sent me there now I was of age. To accommodate the overflow, the village school had taken over a Presbyterian Church Hall opposite; the Latymer boys still wore their uniforms, were not assimilated. I wept at my first billet, was given another the London side of High Wycombe; and for the rest of the next three years I made the long bus journey there and back to Sands every schoolday.
At some point, perhaps after a year or so, Latymer returned as a school to London; for some reason two of us were left behind at Sands. Virtually the last link with London was gone; from then on my isolation grew, my whole life was dominated by the fact that I was away from everything I had known. I was wretchedly miserable, weepy at the slightest cause (or for no cause), bad company, a thoroughly unrewarding pupil for any teacher, even for the odd saint, I suspect.
In 1944 I sat what I now know to be the eleven-plus. At the time I did not understand what it was about. By post came a promise from my parents (my father an RAOC45 private in Germany, my mother working as a shop assistant in London) of my first twowheeled bicycle if I passed; so I knew it was important. Two of us took it, in the Headmaster’s room; from this I presume it must have been a London paper, for the other candidate was the only other Latymer boy left. Afterwards the Headmaster called me back, pointed with his pipestem at my attempt at one of the questions:
‘Couldn’t you do even that one?’ he said.
I had on a previous occasion been caught thieving fruit from an orchard in a mill; and humiliated when up before him by an offer of fruit from his own garden if that was what I needed. That was not what I needed, at all.
I do not remember being told I had failed; and they still gave me the bicycle, anyway.
The secondary modern they sent me to for the last year of the war and my evacuation was called Highfields, I think, but certainly the Headmaster was called Perfect. Here my form-master was the teacher who meant most to me throughout the whole of my education; and his name, remarkably, was Proffitt. He took us eleven-plus rejects and shook us, restored our confidence, showed us we certainly mattered to someone, to him. He really worked us, worked himself: all my memories have him on his feet, usually marching about, delivering, cajoling, enlightening; a balding, greyhaired, springy little figure of about fifty-five. He really brought something out of me; but he could also be cruel, both physically and verbally. Principally, he made us compete: there were exams from the first week, placings, encouragements to do better, to go up the scale of Mr. Proffitt’s esteem.
At the end of the first term I ranked third in the class, which position was physically recognised by his placing me in the back row three from the window; the nearer you were to him, the less well you had done, the more you felt he had his eye on you. It all seems rather oldfashioned now, but it worked with me; I was now being stretched, for the first time in my life I think; no one had ever made me work before, had shown me what I could do, what I had in me.
Before the end of my first year at Highfields the war was over; I suspect they sent us home within weeks, whereas they could have waited till the end of term, July instead of June. But no. I remember saying to Mrs. Bailey, my fostermother, that I would not have minded staying on in High Wycombe to finish my schooling. Whether this was an expression of dismay at the prospect of yet another change I do not know; but I cannot think I meant it.
During the war my parents had moved over the river from Hammersmith and London to Barnes and Surrey. Hence I could not go back to Latymer for administrative reasons, and I was sent to Barnes County Secondary Modern School. All my previous Proffitt brightness was now displayed outside the classroom, in cleverness, in putting people down. This I am sure was because there was no teacher in the school to bring it out, to give me a reason to compete; the other kids seemed to accept they were bound to go on to dead-end jobs (I met one of them again recently: as a conductor on the number nine bus to Barnes). Thirteen years later I was to do four or five months there as a supply teacher; a bizarre and unenlightening full turn of the wheel.
At fourteen after passing some sort of simple examination I went to Kingston Day Commercial School, which was then at Hinchley Wood, near Esher, and a long busride round the Kingston Bypass from Barnes. Doug White was the other of my contemporaries at Barnes CSMS to go with me, and we felt ourselves privileged; for by the standards of Surbiton and environs Barnes was then largely rough and workingclass. At KDCS they taught shorthand (Pitmans for the girls, Gregg for the boys) typing, commerce and book-keeping; besides the usual things. Ted Britton46 was teaching maths there then. It was a two-year course designed to turn out shorthand-typists and clerks; those able and whose parents were willing could stay on an extra year and take the School Certificate.47 I did; the Korean War broke out as we sat the papers; in the summer holidays I had a note from Ted Britton saying that he was pleased that White and I had gained Matric Exemption. I knew that this meant I had qualified for university, but no one had ever suggested that I stood any chance of actually going; no one had ever gone to university from Kingston Day Commercial School.
There followed five years of various accountancy jobs. I already knew I was a writer, though I had not actually written anything. I was lazy, cocky, distracted by (in particular) sex, soccer and motorbikes. Gradually I saw that further education, perhaps even a degree in English, were there for the having, but the initiative had to come from me; no one was going to bring anything out. A friend at work showed me the Birkbeck prospectus, explaining the college was part of London University but held its lectures in the evenings for students with fulltime jobs. From it I saw that my Matric Exemption was nothing of the kind; I had, in particular, to pass O-level Latin. The same West Indian friend told me about Davies’s, the crammers in Addison Road. I did O-level Latin from scratch in eight months with them, sitting three different Boards in the hope of passing one and actually getting all three. My tutor was an old man of seventy-odd who was gross, ugly, fat, slobbery; and he overindulged in Dr. Rumney’s Pure Mentholyptus Snuff. I loved him; he was a real master/teacher.
He died not long after I started at Birkbeck. I worked for an oil company in Kingsway during the day, and at six most evenings went to Birkbeck for two or three hours. The course was an internal equivalent of A-level called Intermediate BA; I did English, Latin and History. I became secretary of the Literary Society, arranged a visit to and a discussion on the first production of Waiting For Godot, made friends I still have. Of the staff, Barbara Hardy ravished me with her intellect, Geoffrey Tillotson bored me with his pompousness, and Arthur Johnson made sense of Chaucer by reading the Prologue in the original pronunciation.
In the summer term I applied to go as a fulltime student to two London colleges, King’s and University. Both required applicants to declare which they preferred; I was honest and put King’s on both simply (and now it seems so asinine, so grossly irresponsible) because I liked the sound of the name better. I made no attempt to determine the respective qualities of the English departments, or to ask for any other help or guidance. I still wince at the naïveté of that choice. Of course I was not even interviewed by University College; but I was promised a place at King’s for September 1956, at the age of twenty-three. When I told the Birkbeck Registrar he tried to dissuade me:
‘You’ll be surrounded by eighteen-year-old girls,’ he warned me.
The fact that they were girls worried me not at all, b
ut what did make me apprehensive was that they were all bright enough to have come straight from grammar school, glowing with high achievement, and the roundabout way I had joined them after my failure at eleven led me to believe I should have to work very hard indeed merely to stay in their company, let alone compete with them. Not so. After only a few weeks I found very few to whom I might feel myself inferior; no doubt my five years’ greater maturity made a big difference. I edited five issues of the college literary magazine Lucifer, I wrote, directed, and acted with the Drama Society in London and on two tours of German and Danish universities. I had a disastrously important love-affair. I read Tristram Shandy and Gawain.
But the three years were unhappy and painful for me. I think (though there were other personal and emotional factors involved) it was because the course I was following unexpectedly seemed insufficiently related to the reasons for which I was following it. That is, much of what I was obliged to read seemed, by any standards I had and was taught, bad, boring and irrelevant; and the London English degree is notorious for falling between the stools of language and literature. Perhaps it is too much to ask that English departments at least take into account the possibility that they may have young writers amongst their undergraduates. It has always seemed to me strange that teachers in art schools are presumed to know how to paint in order to be able to teach it; but that English teachers are not required actually to be able to write a sonnet in order to teach other people’s.
At the end of my second year I was interviewed and told how much they admired my efforts with Lucifer and the Drama Society, but when was I actually going to do any work?
I came down with a 2:2. I thought it was very fair. I would have been pleased with any sort of degree at all, in fact. According to their rules, I was a lower-second-class of person; I accepted that, as long as it was clearly understood that it was according to their rules. For the next five years, until I could support myself wholly by writing, it counted (somewhat ironically) as a Good Honours Degree to increase my salary as a supply teacher through dozens of schools in west and north London. I will not say I necessarily knew which ones they were, but I think I saw many of my earlier selves going to waste, waste, in those five years.
Well Done God! Page 40