Conversations With Mr. Prain Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 reallybelieved 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 anengraver. 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