THE DENTIST (or stomatologist, as he would perhaps now prefer to be called) knows exactly where he stands – on his surgery floor, looking into mouths. The writer knows all too haemorrhoidally where he sits, but where he stands hardly at all. The blessed delimitation that applies to writers in the Navy – the narrowing-down of the medieval ‘clerk’ – is something all dry-land writers long for: they want, be it ever so humble, the pride of the specialist. For no man can call himself a novelist or a poet any more: he is a writer who writes, among other things, novels or poems. The response to the public-bar disclosure (‘And what do you do for a living?’ – ‘I’m a writer’) always follows the same pattern: ‘What sort of things do you write?’ – ‘Books.’ – ‘Have you published a book yet?’ – ‘I’ve published twenty.’ – ‘What kind of books? Dirty books?’ – ‘No, not those either’ (The man in the street can accept the pornographic or the didactic, but never the stasis of art). And then comes, in this society full of writers, the odd dropping of a name: ‘So-and-so lives just round the corner – he writes for television’, or, if one’s interlocutor is a woman, ‘he writes for Queen’.
The true writer nowadays is, unless he is a pornographer or didact or both, not the book-writer but the journalist. This is altogether appropriate in a society that regards itself as dynamic and puts a great value on the new, meaning usually the ephemeral. No writer of books will despise the quick returns of journalism, and the lure of reviewing or the odd thousand words of topical comment is not solely that of the sure small cheque at the end of the month. His audience is immediate and often very large; he is not cut off, facing a long architectonic agony alone; there is none of the neurosis of wondering about sales or the depression of not finding his work on the bookstalls; stylistic sloppiness and factual errors are not much noticed and, anyway, soon forgotten; if he is Cyril Connolly he is amassing a book as well as earning his bread and butter.
But the temptation to write nothing but journalism is one to which too many brilliant writers have yielded – especially those round about thirty. It would be possible to reel off a long list of names of young men who should be writing books but who, having tasted the pleasure of being known – and by a much bigger audience than the mere book-writer can expect – are likely to push on till cancer of the lung gets them, doing television criticism in this paper, literary reviewing in that, the occasional longish sociological-aesthetic study in Encounter. It is a living, it is writing; more, it is what is known as being a writer.
But there is a new field of a para-literary endeavour which is more tempting, and much more corrupting, than journalism. There was a time when television promised to be to young contemporary writers what the stage had been to the university wits of the first Elizabethan age. Television drama was to be the great popular fictional medium, and its analogue was to be found less in the stage-play than in the novel. Clever young men tend to write novels rather than stage-plays; many novels appear every week; there are few professional playwrights; television drama borrows its fluidity from the novel. It was, then, to the novelist that television applied in the days – not so long ago – when it aspired to a new art of drama. It seemed to offer a deuxième métier to the writer of books.
Some novelists will remember well an evening early in 1962 when, after a conducted tour round the BBC Television Centre, they were harangued over a fork-supper and told that it was their duty to write for television. Great names in BBC television – some now heard no more, a few exalted to further greatness – lent the occasion not merely lustre but a quality of top-level urgency. The response of the novelists to the harangues was predictable: ‘If I write a novel and have it rejected by my publisher, there are other publishers to try, scores of others. If I write for a television play there are only two possible organisations to send it to. If I succeed in placing it, I receive an outright sum – no royalties, no subsidiary rights. I fear cuts, emendations, tamperings, last-minute bannings.’ And so on. The assumption was that the novelist would be approaching his television play seriously, expending on it the care appropriate to a novel; more than that, his play would probably use material that – with free development and more elbow-room – could be made into a full-length novel. The air is not crammed with themes and plots and characters; every novel – however inferior – has the seed of something precious in it. One performance of your television play: a Tyburn glory, a dramatic occasion which ends in an execution. What would the fee be? Something in the region of £500.
No novelist can predict what his new novel will earn. It will often be much less than £500, but even the unsuccessful can go on to the end of their careers sustained by the hope of global bestsellers and cables from Hollywood. Fees are in order for casual journalism, but not for works of literature. The payment of a fee, however generous, for a work of literary art seems to blaspheme against it to the status of a mere thing to be used. If a thing can be bought for use, it can also be bought for non-use. The fee paid for a portrait or piece of sculpture seems to justify a sort of consignment to oblivion – withdrawal from a public gallery to a private place. Pay for a piece of literature and your private place may as well be an attic or a locked drawer.
This has happened far too often with commissioned television plays, as most authors know. The procedure is something like this: the telephone call from the producer with an idea; the lunch; the formal briefing; the composition of the work; the submission of the work; the wait; the acceptance, with payment of half the total fee; the conference, with requests for cuts and emendations; the retyping; the further changes; the receipt of an official typed copy, with further requests for cuts; the silence of apparent satisfaction; the balance of the fee; the vain wait; the author’s resignation as an interim silence is protracted beyond hope. He has received his fee – generous enough for a few weeks’ work – but he is not content. Money is not everything.
It is evident to anyone who makes a habit of watching television drama that the literary artist has been deemed incapable of bringing much to it. There are a few exceptions, but it is safe to assume that the art, such as it is, has settled contentedly at a level of mere craft, and that its most acceptable practitioners are journalists. In a form which takes so much of its style and colour from the director, perhaps it was inevitable that the strongly individual voice of the literary artist should jar. The great expectations of 1962 will now never be fulfilled. What is required for television drama is a hackable block of material for the director to work on. Even the name of the television dramatist has ceased to have much importance in trailer or credit list. It is not style or individual vision that is wanted (those qualities which proclaim the artist) but rather the solidity of topical, surprising or controversial content – the sort of thing the journalist is most concerned with. And not only the journalist but also the sort of man whom the journalist interviews – the philosophical taxi-driver, convicted homosexual, retired glasshouse NCO.
What applies to television drama applies also to the television documentary, except that the writing of the para-literature of a spoken commentary is more patently the kind of journalism the writer of books is used to. There will be no heart-burning over cutting, emending to fit the kind of film the director likes best, over-simplifying or even falsifying. The commentary is often in the service of the visual material. It is assumed, however, that the literary man is only to be called upon for a literary documentary (the old heresy of the hegemony of content), and there are not many of those.
From the point of view of television it would seem that the professional writer of books has little to bring except his own personality in the context of his own or other men’s work. Both channels do shamefully little for literature – that is to say Independent Television and BBC One; BBC Two feeds so small a minority that it cannot yet be taken very seriously – but what has been done – in programmes like Writer’s World and Bookstand – has been what the writer himself would want, and that is to give him a chance to address an audience that has the facelessness of a readership and to say those things which used to be said in prefaces. Addressing a camera represents an immediacy of contact which does not call for the histrionics of the stage or the lecture platform: many writers have a gift for this kind of communication, and it is a kind of communication which they hunger for and which the austerity of their art will not permit. Nevertheless, one would not call such rare television appearances anything more than the luxury of self-advertisement.
The author can do something for the publicising of literature in general, as BBC Two’s programme Take It or Leave It has shown. There is a lucid element here – giving a name to an anonymous passage read by an actor – but there is criticism, too. And yet the true value of such a programme lies on the fringes that the audience never sees – the fact that authors meet and talk and have the sense (almost lost since Dr Johnson’s time) of belonging to a club. The average reader will hardly believe how lonely the contemporary writer is becoming. Latent in all these television activities however, is – as has been said above – the danger of a subtle corruption. The writer’s personality may become divorced from his function as a writer; he may be used to deliver opinions on non-literary subjects, even set up as a guest in a satirical show. Soon nothing will seem sweeter than the hot lights and the red eye. To be a television personality is easier than writing, even reviewing.
What then can the dedicated writer of books do, other than reviewing, to augment his income and to satisfy needs which are not met by the daily damnation of the typewriter? One answer is to stick to his secondary vocation (whether teaching or writing advertisement copy), but the danger is that the occupation that earns the more money can never be regarded as anything other than primary: this turns serious writing into a mere hobby. The alternative may be regarded as hackwork, but it was good enough for Dr Johnson. The writer of books should call himself that and get on with the job. The novelist cannot be writing novels all the time, but he has a great gift of being able to organise words into chunky battalions of 80,000 or so: he knows, which the journalist rarely does, how to write at length. There are many books to be written – ‘small histories’, language primers, travel guides, anthologies, volumes of comprehension exercises for schools. The important thing is to write books: Johnson saw that.
One may conclude that the position of the serious writer has not been greatly changed by the development of the new mass media: he is wanted rather less, if anything, than he used to be. The chameleon journalist, who is interested in everything so long as he is not called upon to write more than two or three thousand words about it, the script-writer, the television personality – these make money out of half-sincere verbalising. The dedicated author, who is concerned about words and the reality behind them, may take some of the crumbs, but the bulk of the cake is theirs. Still, one must not repine, as Mr Waugh would say, entrenched among the bestsellers. Write four books a year, and you will survive. And if authors survive they have done something for civilisation.
Times Literary Supplement, 29 July 1965