by Joan Taylor
“What sort of books do you personally prefer?” I asked. “Not thrillers and chillers, I presume.” And clearly not “chick lit.”
“Indeed not.” He thought for a moment, a little distracted by cream.
My typescripts?
“I’m fond of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Trollope, Thackeray, Maupassant. I prefer the writers of the past to those of the present, but that’s simply my taste. I certainly don’t believe one should endeavour to write like Dostoyevsky in this day and age.”
I looked about the room full of furniture and pieces of rooms from other times, avoiding the ogreish gaze from the misericord. There was little from the twentieth century apart from the light fittings, let alone the twenty-first. He mentioned no women writers in his list. The room in which we sat was also devoid of any feminine touches except for the embroidered linen cloth on the tea table and the cream cakes. Perhaps the floral china also reflected a woman’s choice: Monique’s, I guessed.
“Dostoyevsky!” I exclaimed inwardly, remembering my labours with reading The Brothers Karamazov, and remembering Dostoyevsky’s labours. I had once been much affected by a collection of his letters, and in one of them he told how for three years he had been working so hard on this book that he had become physically ill. Looking at Mr. Prain from the perspective of this image of the writer, he seemed irritatingly smug. I knew instinctively that pointing out the trials authors endure to produce their products would fall on cynical ears. An artist might suffer, he would say, but this does not prove that the artist is a good one. And he would be right.
I had asked him for his preference in books, and he had given me his favourite authors. Though “past fiction” was not a genre, he had indicated he enjoyed stories from times in which he perhaps would have felt more at home. I wanted him to tell me if there was a book which had moved him, or changed his life, or given him strength, or made him doubt himself, anything. I thought this might provide a way into a less formal discussion. It might tell me something that would allow me to understand him better, to establish some basis for easier conversation. I felt, here in his domain, I did not know him at all. He was different.
“Which of Dostoyevsky’s works do you … do you like most?” I asked. “Like” was not the right word. I could not find it.
By this time he had finished his cake, and was sitting back in the chair in his former position, fingertips touching. He seemed to be sorting through the files of his memory, like a computer scanning a disk, an occasional ripple on the screen indicating a significant byte. Presently, he replied, “Karamazov, of course.”
“Of course” implied that I had asked yet another silly question, and banned me from further intrusion. If I dared ask why this was his favourite, he would again use the third person, and pepper the reply with expressions like “obviously” or “it goes without saying.” I wished I could gain the upper hand. Combatively, I eyed my cream cake. I had copied out tracts from Dostoyevsky’s letters into my journal. I wanted now to refer to some of these passages, but I knew my memory was fuzzy. Even still, would he be impressed?
“From the little I’ve read of his letters,” I said, employing a modest approach, “it seems to me that Dostoyevsky’s one driving motivation throughout his life was to express all that was in his imagination, and he was frustrated that he had managed to express only a fraction of what he felt was true and heartfelt. Should Dostoyevsky have tailored his work to fit the market-place and thought not so much about truth but more about whether his product was going to be a hit?”
“Not at all,” he said. “A writer must always write according to his conviction.”
“But the requirements of the market may mean that this writer might never be published.”
Mr. Prain almost sighed. “Perhaps. But I would not advise a novelist to be guided by market forces. That would be a form of censorship. I am simply asking for an awareness of the problem on the part of those who write: that the artistic worth of literature must be weighed against its commercial appeal, to some degree. The novelist must nevertheless write in accordance with his own inspiration and purposes.” He was now fixing me with a stare. I found this uncomfortable, and had to avoid it. I glanced down at my folded arms.
“Isn’t there a palate for particular ideas and forms at particular times? You might be saying something people don’t want to hear, but really need to. If I made the best spirulina smoothie in the world but tried to sell it in China, where no one drinks spirulina smoothies, that doesn’t mean it’s bad.”
Mr. Prain looked at me with a certain bafflement. He had undoubtedly never heard of a spirulina smoothie, but he did not admit it. “Timing is important. A good writer should be able to pick up on current issues and address contemporary local concerns.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” I said. “It isn’t a question of current issues. It’s a question of vision, and the way this is expressed. One can be ahead of one’s time, or culturally alien, or too radical, and therefore not commercial.”
Mr. Prain’s voice grew a fraction louder. “And this is where we hope our editors have sufficient skill to recognise the valuable new talents who will gain a market niche, albeit a small one. I’m not saying it’s easy, or that geniuses are never overlooked, but some effort is made to sort the sheep from the goats, and sometimes we will try to sell the tastiest ‘spirulina smoothie’ to China, to use your image, simply because we think a novel ought to be published. In this instance, any sales are a veritable bonus.”
“But meanwhile,” I continued, “the writer who isn’t noticed, whose vision is just not very tasty, starves to death in a garret, or abandons writing.”
Idiot, I thought. You’re exaggerating. Don’t get so vexed. Don’t take it personally.
Mr. Prain gave me an almost compassionate look. I was, after all, a woman. A woman’s innate leanings toward hyperbole would scramble any discussion, and create a muddle in which she would quickly entrap herself. I saw him decide afresh that he was my intellectual superior. “I should hope that a truly committed writer, who is truly inspired and has a true sense of vocation, would never abandon writing.”
Well, what else would he say? Starve in a garret! Where did I drag up that phrase from? Victorian melodrama? And wasn’t he right? How could anyone driven to write creatively give up writing?
My eyes fell on a portrait of a woman clad in a morning dress of the 1840s. It was severely narrow-waisted, made of printed alpaca, with a large white lace pelerine and voluminous Victoria sleeves. She had a lace bonnet on her head and her hair hung around her face in two sets of perfect ringlets. Her hands were held in front of her belly. On the third finger of her left hand was a ring. Immediately, I felt a strangling sense of constriction. I knew that the bodice of her dress was long-waisted and tight, boned in the front, the three bones spreading up in a fan from the point, pressing down the diaphragm and hampering breathing. Under this was a stay extending over her breasts, abdomen and hips, with a whalebone busk vertical along the front. The cuffs around her wrists would have pinched. Under her armpits were bulky dress protectors of india rubber. Under the skirt: a crinoline bustle, and layers and layers of petticoats, flannel and white. On her feet, I imagined a pair of tight kid slippers. Her pallid face was that of a long-term prisoner: hopeless, frustrated and resigned. She would daintily negotiate life, forever in danger of fainting for lack of oxygen as she completed the simple tasks her role required: needlework, reading, writing letters, taking a brougham to town, attending church, arranging a society party for her husband. There was a title underneath the painting which gave the woman’s name as Mrs. Oliver Marshall.
The portrait screeched with frustration. It seemed like a portrait of a howl, as raw as Ginsberg’s, or Munch’s Scream, wrapped up inside an ornate package from an age in which Mr. Prain would appropriately belong.
In the next instant I imagined something of her life. I saw her in a hallway, carefully taking off her gloves after an outing, sighing deeply. She looked s
ideways to me, sadly, as if she was about to tell me her story. “Listen,” she said. “There’s something you need to know.” There was a drama here. What could it be?
Imagination is a frightening thing, but it is the sine qua non of being a writer. It’s not exactly a gift; it is more a weird mental condition. It overcomes you, and you have to get the images out of your system by transferring them into words. You have to tell. Before there were publishers and printing presses we would tell them to a crowd gathered at an inn, and now there is a kind of new inn on the world wide web. I have seen it written somewhere as the “global inn-ternet,” a virtual crowd ready to listen to your dreams, or throw cabbages at them. We are part of the human condition: writers, story-tellers, bards.
“At any rate,” said Mr. Prain, checking his nails. “I feel you are confusing two quite different things: getting published and earning a living by writing.”
I stared at him somewhat blankly for a moment, too affected by Mrs. Marshall. That is how a tale begins, by weaving fantasies around a face one sees in the street, on a train, in a portrait. It runs you over in the middle of tea.
“True,” I managed to say, “but the first is an initial step toward the second.”
“Sometimes a very small one,” he said, letting his hands drop.
“Agreed,” I said, admitting defeat, with a last glance at Mrs. Oliver Marshall. Starving in a garret, giving up writing: I had overstated the case. Perhaps I was getting used to doing that in the Green broadsheet I wrote for every month. You overstate the case to try to highlight the folly of your opponent. You draw a strident conclusion to make a point. How else can you motivate people to consider the ozone layer or global warming? But there is a time and a place for everything, and overstatement was inappropriate here. I recognised that a touch of humility would not hurt and said, “You don’t have to starve in a garret when there’s the dole.”
I smiled at the thought of heated debates with my friends about the ethics of exploiting the current system if one was committed to Green concerns. And we were. We were all actively campaigning for awareness of environmental issues in one way or another. My flatmates—musicians—persisted in calling unemployment benefit “the Government Arts Subsidy” and made sure that their songs carried a message about the planet. This gave them a growing fringe following and they were increasingly sought after for performances at fund-raising affairs for organisations like Greenpeace. On rare occasions they would sometimes earn enough payment from a gig to cover their expenses and a considerable amount extra, but that was unusual, and such money was usually ploughed back into the band. It was expensive to hire studios for recording demo tapes and CD’s. They had yet to get a recording contract with a company, though they believed this eventuality to be just around the corner. In the meantime, earnings were undeclared, and the state paid for the basics, except when, on occasions, ends were not met and I forked out for the electricity bill, because I had a job. The theory was that I should keep tabs on how much I was spending, and that after they signed a contract and sold some albums, I would be reimbursed. No one really believed this. We wanted our flat to be a little island in which “deep Green” policies would be sacrosanct. We tried pooling all our resources, but I withdrew when I wanted to attend a women’s writing festival and there was no money in the jar for the registration fee. We kept our heads up with the idea that we were working things through. Only myself and one other out of five adults and a child had steady employment. Times had not been easy.
“Authors often forget,” continued Mr. Prain, “that no one earnt a living writing novels in England before the eighteenth century.”
“Others forget,” I added, “that no one wrote novels in England before the eighteenth century.” Victory! He should not have added the genre specification. It gave away what was foremost in his mind. I tried not to sound too triumphant. He, too, could make mistakes.
Mr. Prain gave a conceding movement of his hands, and eyed me with considerably less compassion. “Of course,” he said. “But you know what I mean. You must take my point.”
“I know that it’s foolish to think that a first published work could provide any income to speak of, unless you are aiming to write a blockbuster. Thomas Hardy was an architect, wasn’t he? Kafka was a clerk in an insurance office.”
“Indeed. Writers of the past had to ply a trade too,” he said, trying to recover lost ground. “Chaucer worked as a sort of fourteenth-century civil servant. François Villon lived by organised crime. Rabelais was a scholar. John Bunyan was a tinker and then a preacher. Blake earned his keep as an engraver. Shakespeare was probably a schoolmaster until he attached himself to a series of London theatrical companies as a playwright, which was a job in itself, and of course he was an actor too. Samuel Johnson was a teacher and then a journalist and a bookseller’s hack before his success, though he was never very wealthy. Writing literature cannot be seen as a day job.”
“Oh but it isn’t really money I’d want,” I objected.
“What then?” he enquired, hardly controlling a smile of anticipation.
“It’s time,” I emphasised.
The smile broke. “Does time make a good writer?” he tested.
“No, but it helps. I mean, how can anyone write anything good when there’s little time to write anything at all? While you work at some job or other you can plan, imagine, feel inspired … but at the end of the day, after getting home and eating dinner, there’s only a few hours before you’re so exhausted you just have to crash. There are only so many writers’ fellowships, and they’re very hard to get.”
“But for most writers, publication doesn’t help, because it provides nothing to speak of in earnings. You could not forego all other employment.”
“Yes but publication gives a writer the impetus to keep on going. You always write for someone else ‘out there.’ There’s nothing rewarding about writing for your desk drawer.”
“It’s not just mere self-expression then, for you, Stella?”
“No … ah, no.” Mere self-expression? “You mean like a therapy?”
“Writing can be therapeutic. Most of the poetry written in this country is done as a kind of self-expressive therapy. I think certain members of the mental health establishment even encourage it. Publishers of poetry are usually overwhelmed with volumes of this kind of material.”
“You mean if it’s done for this purpose it isn’t very good?”
“It’s generally complete drivel, though as with everything there are occasional exceptions.”
Did he think my work was complete drivel? I should have asked the question, but my stomach went into a somersault and something painful shot across my chest, so that I was mute. Is that what he thought when he saw me writing at the Market?
“So you do feel you write for someone ‘out there,’ not just to express your feelings regardless, but you feel you have little time to write because you work hard for your bookstall at Camden Market.” He summed up my position like he was ordering his papers. “Do you never consider other more remunerative options in terms of employment?”
Remunerative options?
He continued, “You could do something less time-consuming, for better pay. You have a degree.”
I smiled at that. “Yes, and I even won a prize in my final year. But I majored in New Zealand literature. A fat lot of good that is as the basis for a future career, especially in the United Kingdom.”
“Nevertheless, you could work elsewhere. Publishers take graduates, even those with degrees in New Zealand literature.”
I squirmed a little. God help me if he offers me a job, I thought. Please don’t ask me to think about a position as an Assistant Editor! I felt all at once self-conscious and pulled my dress vainly towards my knees, aware at that moment that I wanted to obscure myself from him, not understanding precisely why. I sensed he wanted to ruffle me. I wanted to justify myself, to explain why I was doing what I was doing, to stick up for myself with head held high. And
yet I felt there was little to defend. I had been in England now for almost six years, earning a living with one job or another. I had come in search of some sort of culture I felt lacking in New Zealand, or at least in Wellington, our beautiful little capital city. I grew up in Brooklyn, a suburb high on top of a hill, from which you can look down on the city lights below curving around the harbour like a diamond smile. The trouble is that—despite its fledgling film industry and raving night-life—Wellington gets to feel small after a while, and you know absolutely everybody doing anything of any cultural value. You feel like you live on the edge of a bowl—Wellington Harbour—and outside that bowl there is a great expanse of hills, farmland, satellite towns, rivers, beaches and ocean. Nothing else.
When still a teenager I had been published in New Zealand literary journals. But already at the age of 21 I had felt stale, continually working out my relationships through stories and poems that twisted around rough New Zealand towns and countryside. After university I worked in a library long enough to get the money to leave the country with a one way ticket. Half a dozen years in London later, without a single visit back to my native land, I had had adventures, known extraordinary people, done things, consumed art, literature, dance, theatre, music, history, anything cultural. I had become Green and a true radical. But now I was getting comfortable in my lifestyle, alternative as it was, and possibly a little bored. I felt very much part of a certain London scene, which had a fair crop of expatriates from various lands, who had come to London for similar reasons. Among this enclave I was the only Kiwi, and had the reputation of being strong-willed, open and easy-going, which I knew also to be something of a European caricature of Antipodeans.
Now it seemed that Mr. Prain was seeking to find out precisely why I was the way I was, as if he wanted me to explain myself. Why did I work where I did? Wasn’t this a rather curious question?