Did you know that a hundred-gram Jar of Nescafé filled with 1p coins buys two packets of Benson and Hedges? Did youknow that a two-litre nagon of Paul Masson burgundy filled with 2p coins buys three regular-size bottIes of Safeway's claret? Didyou know that a Steradent tube fiIIed with 10p coins buys just over one-and-a-haIf bottIes of Night Nurse?
Perhaps you didn't. Why should you? Why shouId I? And yetI dote on such statistics; rarely do they fail to cheer me up. I can be twenty grand down at the bank, the tax on my heels and aheap of nasties on the mat, but for some reason the spectacle of my three-quarters-full-and-rising coffee jar gives me a sense ofhigh accomplishment, a feeIing that I've licked, have nearIy licked,will 1ick the system. As Iong as those bronze chip lets continue topile up, I tell myself, I'm not out of the game. I am a saver.
There are, of corse, other ways of saving. For these, though,you need to be 'in funds'. For example, you can hide a river in acoat you never wear, or tuck a tenner in a sock that's had its day.The idea is that you'll forget about these minor-league deposits.After all, what's rifteen pounds when you are packing a new wad?And then, when things turn rough again and you just happen tobe trying on old coats and socks-you know, the way one doeswhen things turn rough-there they will be: salvation, a new start!The loopholes in this strategem are self-evident, and it's not onethat I recommend for workaday survival. But it does have somepoetic substance. It makes money seem Iike magic. As with thecoffee jars, aIthough more chancily, it tells you that you're still inwith a chance.
Childish stuff, you may weII think and you'd prubably beright. But For some of us, it has become the stuff of life_thestuff, that is, of literary Iife. Knowing how many days passbetween a rinal notice and a cut-off, knowing how muc'h time yougain with a carefu1ly-phrased 'WAFDA pdc' (post-dated chequeon which the 'words and figures don't agree'), knowing the phonecodes for Yorthampton, Worthing and Southend ('A friendly-sounding fellow called. Cou1d you pIease ring him back?'): suchinformation is the small change of a 1ife that's sometimesfinanced by small change. And you can easily get hooked on yourown expertise.
Back in the early sixties, when I first started out, insolvency spelt glamour. It was OK to be broke-more than OK, since money was well-known to be the super-foe of books. It was Mammon v. the Muses: take your pick. In those days, if a writer owned up to caring about money, he was instant1y branded a dud. 'He's got a what? A mortgage? Well, I have to say I always had my doubts. I mean, his 1ine-breaks did seem a bit arbitrary. The avowed aim was to treat money rather as money seemed likely to treat us: with altitudinous contempt.
There was, of course, an easy fraudulence in this, since none of us was poor-well, not poor poor-but we weren't ready then to spot it. We intended to set up as 'sons of 1iterature' (in Dr Johnson's nob1e phrase). Had not literature itself decreed that we shou1d not make friends with Mammon? The modern texts we had learned to decipher for our school exams were all to do whith tensions between money and non-money. For A-level English I studied The Waste Land and Howards End and I still have t he actual books I worked from. The margins of each resemble a roster of sports fixtures: 'inner life v. outer ', 'money values v. culture values', 'Wilcoxes (money) v. Schlegels (sensibility)', 'Mr Eugenides (merchant) v. hyacinth girl (spiritual illumination)'. With the Forster, I am glad to see, there is the odd underlining or question mark, as if I might now and then have been trying to work out something for myse1f: 'To trust peop1e is a luxury only the wealthy can indulge' is marked with a combative Trust you! The overall impression, though, is of tame capitulation to the belief that works of art are like messages in bottles from some dire cultura1 shipwreck-a wreck caused, of course, by money. As students, it was our clear duty to man life-rafts and set sail.
Theкe was, then, a near-priestly kind of romance in the idea that a high-purposed literary career wou1d be proаitless, at 1east in terms of cash. Here was the Thorny Way, the way of deprivation. And for a period, I went along with this, nose in the air. At the same time, though, I knew I could handle only so much deprivation. That painting of the dead Chatterton sprawled on his pallet never made me want to be like him. Nor, come to that, did I want to be like Keats and Shelley. And the then-recent cult of Dylan Thomas left me cold. Thomas's whipped-dog act when he was cadging the price of his next drink seemed horribly demeaning. And Iook at the way he carried on when he had swallowed his next drink: all that intoning-from-above, that bardic blethering. He too was like a priest, He seemed to think the world owed him a living.
With attitudes like these, I was clearly in something of a fix. On the one hand, it was contemptible to have a mortgage; on the other, a fellow ought to be able to pay for the next round. What did that leave? It Ieft the CobbIed Way, the way of compromise. And my compromise was to start up a small poetry magazine. How better to reconcile the importunittites of art and commerce?
In those days-this was 1962-I was much fired by the early letters of Ezra Pound, the ones that deal with his efforts on hehalf of magazines like the Litlle Reviiew and Poetry (Chicago). Pound was a superb backs-to-the-wall businessman, it seemed to me. An enemy of money, or of 'money-value', he recognized yet did not flinch from money's power. He was brilliant at locating and tapping likely sources of largesse. With him, though, there was none of Thomas's spare-a-penny-guv self-humbling. His benefactors were usually left Feeling grateful: such was the high vehemence of his belief in the world-altering potential of his cause. And they were even more grateful when Pound from time to time slipped them a Joyce worksheet or a drawing by Gaudier- Brzeska. Pound never made the mistake of despising his money- men. He treated them like converts. I remember being mightiIy impressed by his retort to his two arty-crafty co-editors on the Little Review, when they spoke scornfully of the millionaire John Quinn. It was Quinn's money that guaranteed the magazine's survivaI. Pound wrote to them:
Perhaps you didn't. Why should you? Why shouId I? And yetI dote on such statistics; rarely do they fail to cheer me up. I can be twenty grand down at the bank, the tax on my heels and aheap of nasties on the mat, but for some reason the spectacle of my three-quarters-full-and-rising coffee jar gives me a sense ofhigh accomplishment, a feeIing that I've licked, have nearIy licked,will 1ick the system. As Iong as those bronze chip lets continue topile up, I tell myself, I'm not out of the game. I am a saver.
There are, of corse, other ways of saving. For these, though,you need to be 'in funds'. For example, you can hide a river in acoat you never wear, or tuck a tenner in a sock that's had its day.The idea is that you'll forget about these minor-league deposits.After all, what's rifteen pounds when you are packing a new wad?And then, when things turn rough again and you just happen tobe trying on old coats and socks-you know, the way one doeswhen things turn rough-there they will be: salvation, a new start!The loopholes in this strategem are self-evident, and it's not onethat I recommend for workaday survival. But it does have somepoetic substance. It makes money seem Iike magic. As with thecoffee jars, aIthough more chancily, it tells you that you're still inwith a chance.
Childish stuff, you may weII think and you'd prubably beright. But For some of us, it has become the stuff of life_thestuff, that is, of literary Iife. Knowing how many days passbetween a rinal notice and a cut-off, knowing how muc'h time yougain with a carefu1ly-phrased 'WAFDA pdc' (post-dated chequeon which the 'words and figures don't agree'), knowing the phonecodes for Yorthampton, Worthing and Southend ('A friendly-sounding fellow called. Cou1d you pIease ring him back?'): suchinformation is the small change of a 1ife that's sometimesfinanced by small change. And you can easily get hooked on yourown expertise.
Back in the early sixties, when I first started out, insolvency spelt glamour. It was OK to be broke-more than OK, since money was well-known to be the super-foe of books. It was Mammon v. the Muses: take your pick. In those days, if a writer owned up to caring about money, he was instant1y branded a dud. 'He's got a what? A mortgage? Well, I have to say I always had my doubts. I mean, his 1ine-breaks did seem a bit arbitrary. The avowed aim was to treat money rather as money seemed likely to treat us: with altitudinous contempt.
There was, of course, an easy fraudulence in this, since none of us was poor-well, not poor poor-but we weren't ready then to spot it. We intended to set up as 'sons of 1iterature' (in Dr Johnson's nob1e phrase). Had not literature itself decreed that we shou1d not make friends with Mammon? The modern texts we had learned to decipher for our school exams were all to do whith tensions between money and non-money. For A-level English I studied The Waste Land and Howards End and I still have t he actual books I worked from. The margins of each resemble a roster of sports fixtures: 'inner life v. outer ', 'money values v. culture values', 'Wilcoxes (money) v. Schlegels (sensibility)', 'Mr Eugenides (merchant) v. hyacinth girl (spiritual illumination)'. With the Forster, I am glad to see, there is the odd underlining or question mark, as if I might now and then have been trying to work out something for myse1f: 'To trust peop1e is a luxury only the wealthy can indulge' is marked with a combative Trust you! The overall impression, though, is of tame capitulation to the belief that works of art are like messages in bottles from some dire cultura1 shipwreck-a wreck caused, of course, by money. As students, it was our clear duty to man life-rafts and set sail.
Theкe was, then, a near-priestly kind of romance in the idea that a high-purposed literary career wou1d be proаitless, at 1east in terms of cash. Here was the Thorny Way, the way of deprivation. And for a period, I went along with this, nose in the air. At the same time, though, I knew I could handle only so much deprivation. That painting of the dead Chatterton sprawled on his pallet never made me want to be like him. Nor, come to that, did I want to be like Keats and Shelley. And the then-recent cult of Dylan Thomas left me cold. Thomas's whipped-dog act when he was cadging the price of his next drink seemed horribly demeaning. And Iook at the way he carried on when he had swallowed his next drink: all that intoning-from-above, that bardic blethering. He too was like a priest, He seemed to think the world owed him a living.
With attitudes like these, I was clearly in something of a fix. On the one hand, it was contemptible to have a mortgage; on the other, a fellow ought to be able to pay for the next round. What did that leave? It Ieft the CobbIed Way, the way of compromise. And my compromise was to start up a small poetry magazine. How better to reconcile the importunittites of art and commerce?
In those days-this was 1962-I was much fired by the early letters of Ezra Pound, the ones that deal with his efforts on hehalf of magazines like the Litlle Reviiew and Poetry (Chicago). Pound was a superb backs-to-the-wall businessman, it seemed to me. An enemy of money, or of 'money-value', he recognized yet did not flinch from money's power. He was brilliant at locating and tapping likely sources of largesse. With him, though, there was none of Thomas's spare-a-penny-guv self-humbling. His benefactors were usually left Feeling grateful: such was the high vehemence of his belief in the world-altering potential of his cause. And they were even more grateful when Pound from time to time slipped them a Joyce worksheet or a drawing by Gaudier- Brzeska. Pound never made the mistake of despising his money- men. He treated them like converts. I remember being mightiIy impressed by his retort to his two arty-crafty co-editors on the Little Review, when they spoke scornfully of the millionaire John Quinn. It was Quinn's money that guaranteed the magazine's survivaI. Pound wrote to them:
Re: Quinn, remember. Tis he who hath bought the pictures: tis he who both getteth me an American ub1isher and smacketh the same with rods; tis he who sendeth me the Spondos Oligos, which is by interpretation the small tribute or spondoo1icks wherewith I do pay my contributors, wherefore is my heart so ftene d toward the said J.Q. and he in mine eyes can commit nothing heinous.
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