by Alex Palmer
The writer and his patron had an intricate relationship, with the writer’s work influenced by his employer’s tastes. The classical relationship between Virgil and his patron, Maecenas, was held as the ideal, based on an ancient epigram that translates, “Let there be Maecenases ... and Virgils will not be lacking.” Some notable “Maecenases” include:
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—A close friend of Queen Elizabeth’s, Dudley was patron to poets including Philip Sidney (his nephew) and Edmund Spenser.
Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton—Shakespeare’s patron, to whom the poet dedicated Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). He is thought to be the “Mr. W. H.” to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed, disguised through a reversal of his initials.
Elizabeth Sidney—Daughter of Philip and a patron to Ben Jonson, who wrote “To Penhurst” in honor of her family.
Francis Walsingham—Patron to both Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe. He was also Queen Elizabeth’s “spymaster,” who likely employed Marlowe as an agent (and some believe ordered the poet’s assassination).
As patronage faded with the Renaissance, a publishing industry aimed at a broader readership began to grow. The copyright act of 1709 was the first to recognize the legal right of authorship, although it would be decades before the notion of copyright was seen as originating with the author. The act did free the publisher from the monopoly of the printer, allowing the industry to expand in both Britain and the United States.
Paradise Sold
Milton signed an agreement with Samuel Simmons in April 1667, giving the bookseller copyright of Paradise Lost for five pounds (plus five pounds for three subsequent editions) earning him a whopping ten pounds for the greatest epic in English. Adding insult to injury, his widow sold all remaining rights to Simmons for eight pounds.
Daniel Defoe is considered the first person to actually make a living as a working writer. The success of Robinson Crusoe (1719) came at a time when the technology of printing and rising rate of literacy among the English meant that enough books were being produced and sold to afford a reasonable payment to the author (though they remained prohibitively expensive for the average Brit). It was only the occasional mega-selling author who could afford to live on writing alone.
As publishing houses established themselves by the late eighteenth century, a system of royalties allowed authors to compose works more freely, targeted to the demands of the expanding market. The establishment of circulation libraries and strengthening copyright laws helped publishing to become profitable enough that by 1776, Samuel Johnson could proclaim “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, authors could make a living writing articles and books, but piracy remained rampant, particularly in America, and a writer could easily be ripped off if he wasn’t careful. Edgar Allan Poe received nine dollars to publish “The Raven” in the Evening Mirror in 1845. Readers loved it, but when many other publishers printed their own version of the poem, few bought Poe’s official collection when he published it months later.
Other writers knew their business better. Charles Dickens is credited with pioneering the serialized novel, as well as republishing popular works into “special editions.” Going on lecture tours also provided moneymaking opportunities to nineteenth-century writers.
Merchandising Mark
Mark Twain may have said, “a banker is a person who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it rains,” but he knew a thing or two about finding sources for cash. Besides his books, which sold quite well, Twain put his trademark to all types of products, and a few misguided inventions. These include:
Mark Twain’s Memory Builder board game (one critic described it as “a cross between an income tax form and a table of logarithms”)
Mark Twain Cigars, featuring the slogan “Known to Everyone and Liked by All,” as well as Mark Twain Tobacco
Twain printing machine
Self-pasting scrapbook (one of his bestsellers, eventually selling some 25,000 units)
Whiskey
The Twain Bed Clamp (designed to keep babies from getting caught under the covers).
As writing became more profitable, some authors even embraced the craft as just another job. Jack London, the first writer to make a million dollars from writing, generally saw his work as a business more than an artistic enterprise. He said, “I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.”
The evolution of publishing and book marketing through the twentieth century allowed successful authors to bring in good money in royalties, as well as through optioning their works for film or television adaptations. Before they gained literary prestige, authors worked a number of fascinating day jobs.
Kurt Vonnegut managed America’s first Saab dealership in Cape Cod during the late 1950s. He joked in a 2004 essay, “I now believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery: Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for Literature.” Richard Wright worked as a letter sorter in a post office on the South Side of Chicago from 1927 to 1930, while he wrote a number of short stories and poems that were published in literary journals.
William Faulkner also worked in the postal service, as postmaster at the University of Mississippi, before his writing career took off. He neatly summarized the balance of art and commerce faced by many authors in his resignation note from that gig: “As long as I live under the capitalist system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.”
In some cases, a writer’s day job could help jump-start his or her writing career. Toni Morrison was a successful editor at Random House for several years before publishing her first novel. Even after her writing took off, she continued working there, discovering such writers as Chinua Achebe, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gayl Jones.
A more fortuitous example of a writer working the right job at the right time came as a busboy interrupted the poet Vachel Lindsay as he dined at a hotel restaurant in Washington, D.C. At first irritated by the young man, who handed him some sheets of his poetry, Lindsay was quickly impressed by the writing and asked the busboy, “Who wrote this?” The busboy replied, “I did,” and so Langston Hughes got his first big break.
At Least It Made Top 100
On CareerCast.com’s 2010 survey of the 100 best and worst jobs, book author placed number 74. Not bad, although it ranked below forklift operator (#67) and musical instrument repairer (#62).
This list of some other day jobs of the greats gives one a sense of what these authors might have done if they hadn’t made it as writers:
T. S. Eliot worked as a banker—specifically serving as a clerk for Lloyds Bank of London for eight years, during which time he found inspiration for The Waste Land while walking to work.
J. D. Salinger served as entertainment director on the MS Kungsholm, a Swedish luxury liner. These experiences informed his short story “Teddy,” which takes place on a liner.
William S. Burroughs worked as an exterminator.
Douglas Adams worked as a hotel security guard in London.
Franz Kafka worked as chief legal secretary of the workmen’s accident insurance institute and is believed by at least one professor to have invented the hard hat during this time.
More recently, financial fortune has ironically become something of an embarrassment to successful authors. In The Fight (1975), Norman Mailer describes receiving a million-dollar advance for his novel. In his signature third-person style, Mailer writes how, “He knew that his much publicized novel (still nine-tenths to be written) would now have to be twice as good as before to overcome such financial news. Good literary men were not supposed to pick up sums.”
The £500,000
Martin Amis received for his 1995 book The Information earned such publicity and criticism that his publisher HarperCollins released the book two months ahead of schedule to take advantage of the attention. Novelist A. S. Byatt described the episode as “extremely bad for the industry,” saying that it “makes life hard for young authors.” Even in success, writing can be thankless work.
Money Quotes
“Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.”
—D. H. Lawrence
“Money often costs too much.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?”
—Ayn Rand
IS COFFEE OR OPIUM BETTER FOR CREATIVITY?
Writers and their rotten habits
In Canto II of The Inferno, Dante Alighieri calls out, “O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!” While this practice of invoking a muse for inspiration fell out of popularity with epic poetry, writers have continued to reach for plenty of other, less divine, “aids” to help them tap their creative energies. Whether it is Jack Kerouac slipping Benzedrine into his coffee to help him power through a marathon writing session, or Edgar Allan Poe hitting the bottle to take him to the dark place of his tales, drugs have been not-sotrusty sidekicks to many authors seeking all manner of inspiration.
While Homer and Shakespeare made occasional references to various potions, it was Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) that really lit up literature’s experimentation with drugs. De Quincey’s autobiographical account of the pleasures and pains of opium use aroused the interest of the Romantics, especially considering the drug’s tendency to produce vivid dreams and help artists access places that the sober mind would not go. Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley were all regular users (virtually all of the Romantics dabbled in it, excluding William Wordsworth).
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” credits its surreal images to an opium-induced “Vision in a Dream” that was cruelly interrupted by a visitor waking the poet up and seriously bumming his high. Coleridge’s opium addiction caused him plenty of trouble later in life, as he separated from his wife, became estranged from his lifelong friend Wordsworth, and had himself put under the care of a doctor until his death.
Did You Know?
Byron had less trouble with opium than he did with laxatives. Historians believe he suffered from severe anorexia nervosa, including starvation diets during which he would survive only on biscuits and water, as well as the regular use of strong laxatives that kept him far below a healthy weight.
Opium’s popularity in the nineteenth century, often mixed with alcohol in the form of laudanum, related to the fact that it was prescribed as a painkiller for everything from headaches to tuberculosis. Louisa May Alcott got hooked after taking it for typhoid fever. Coleridge first took it for rheumatism. Elizabeth Barrett Browning began using it at fifteen years old for spinal tuberculosis and soon argued that it greatly enhanced her imagistic poetry, writing to her brother in 1843 that, “I am in a fit of writing—could write all day & night—& long to live by myself for 3 months in a forest of chestnuts and cedars, in an hourly succession of poetical paragraphs and morphine draughts.”
Did You Know?
A combination of laudanum and alcohol prevented the Brontës from having an additional literary star in the family. Branwell Brontë, brother of the famous Brontë sisters, was a talented painter and poet, but his addictions led him to irrational and sometimes dangerous behavior. He eventually developed delirium tremens before dying of tuberculosis, leaving the world to wonder if he could have been more.
While opium was all the rage among the British literati, their French contemporaries preferred hashish. Charles Baudelaire put a stoner’s twist on de Quincey with Artificial Paradises (1860). “The Poem of Hashish” includes the following description of the drug’s effects:
First a certain absurd and irresistible hilarity comes over you. The most ordinary words, the most simple ideas take on a strange new aspect. This gaiety becomes insupportable to you, but it is useless to revolt. The demon has invaded you, all the efforts you make to resist only accelerate his progress.
Baudelaire met with Parisian writers like Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, and Théophile Gautier for regular gatherings of “The Hashish Club” in the early 1840s at the Hôtel Pimodan. By all accounts, Baudelaire and Balzac didn’t inhale, only attending for the conversation. As Baudelaire would later explain, for Balzac, “there is no deeper shame nor worse suffering for a man than to renounce control over his own will.”
Did You Know?
Walt Whitman was also a famous abstainer. He rarely drank alcohol throughout his youth and claimed not to have touched strong liquor until he was thirty. One of his earliest works of fiction was the novel Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate (1842), which promotes temperance—though years later he would denounce the book as “damned rot.”
Balzac had a strong affinity for one substance: coffee. He is said to have thrown back fifty cups of black Turkish mud on a typical day, and wrote that, “Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale.” Considering Balzac’s prolific output, this level of caffeine consumption explains quite a bit. Dumas was no lightweight when it came to java, either, drinking dozens of cups a day and occasionally chewing on the raw grounds.
During the late nineteenth century, absinthe rose in popularity among writers like Oscar Wilde, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guy de Maupassant for its supposed hallucinogenic properties. The ritual of preparing it, from pouring the contents into a special reservoir glass to pouring water over a sugar cube set on a slotted spoon, offered the dramatic flair these writers sought in their substances. Wilde wrote of it: After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.
Though only a handful of writers loved absinthe, many authors enjoyed, and suffered because of, alcohol over the years. Some of literature’s most notorious drinkers include:
Edgar Allan Poe—Though he managed to remain temperate for much of his life, the death of his wife in 1847 led to a downward spiral of whiskey and port, as he missed deadlines and embarrassed himself at public readings over his remaining years.
Jack London—His autobiographical novel John Barleycorn (1913) describes in blunt detail how his alcoholism developed (beginning with a drunken episode at five years old) and how it came to define who he was.
F. Scott Fitzgerald—Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were serious drinkers and more serious partiers. They posted a list of house rules during one rager: “Visitors are requested not to break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by the host and hostess. Weekend guests are respectfully notified that invitations to stay over Monday, issued by the host and hostess during the small hours of Sunday morning, must not be taken seriously.”
Dylan Thomas—After claiming that he’d had eighteen straight whiskies at his favorite New York City watering hole, the White Horse Tavern, Thomas passed out and never woke up for the hangover.
The Beats fully embraced drugs as their modern muse. Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac experimented with alcohol, marijuana, Benzedrine, and morphine before adding LSD, peyote, amphetamines, and mescaline to their writing regimens.
Burroughs was a master of addiction literature, with most of his work, including Naked Lunch (1959) and Junky (1953), about getting high. His drug use was legendary: spending months touring South America in search of yage, selling heroin in Greenwich Village, and pawning his own typewriter to pay for his habit, requiring the author to handwrite his work. At one of his low points of morphine addiction, Burroughs wrote, “I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction.”
Pretty nasty stuff.
As the Beats became beatniks and then hippies, a major influence in this period was Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), which followed in the tradition of de Quincey and Baudelaire, this time examining his experiences of an afternoon on mescaline.
Smoke ’Em if You Got ’Em
Though tamer than LSD and laudanum, tobacco has made some interesting appearances in the history of literature:
Renaissance poet and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh helped popularize tobacco in Europe. He brought it back with a tour of the New World and introduced it to the English court—supposedly even convincing Queen Elizabeth to have a smoke.
Mark Twain loved cheap cigars and smoked between twenty and forty a day, a habit started at eight years old. As he famously said, “To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I’ve done it a thousand times.”
Though an ardent advocate for the widespread use of LSD and marijuana, Allen Ginsberg warned his readers against smoking in “Put Down Your Cigarette Rag (Don’t Smoke)” as follows: “Don’t Smoke Don’t Smoke Nicotine Nicotine No / No don’t smoke the official Dope Smoke Dope Dope.”
With Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), Hunter S. Thompson broke from the high sense of cultural purpose offered by much of this drug literature. The semiautobiographical descriptions of excessive drug use and crazed antics make Huxley and de Quincey look conservative. But rather than encouraging drug use, it offered a satire of the “dope decade,” with the protagonist reflecting that the hippie ethos was already on the wane and “the wave finally broke and rolled back.”