Writing to be read

Press, 2 May 1981, Page 17

Writing to be read

Britain’s Literature Panel, the British equivalent of the Literary Fund Advisory Committee in New Zealand, is cutting off virtually all literary grants to writers and poets. The money will be used instead to stimulate public interest in books and writing. The decision comes after a long campaign by a number of leading British authors, including Kingsley Amis. The writers have argued that a change is needed in the manner in whch money from taxpayers is used to patronise the arts in Britain. The system of grants to authors has been described as a waste of scarce arts money and a conspicuous failure as far as' being a method of encouraging the reading and writing of literature. The new chairman of the Literature Panel, Marghanita Laski, has described the change as ’“a shift of emphasis from, producer to consumer.” Now she faces the question of how does the Literature Panel persuade people to read more books or, indeed, to read more writing of any kind? She has yet to find an answer, but she said in a recent interview she thought the function of literature was to “console, delight, stimulate and generally increase people’s health and creativity.”

Those who have argued for the, grants to writers and poets to be stopped have said that the grants did nothing to make literature more accessible- if anything; literature tended to become more.-elitist< and in-bred as indifferent writers were paid to write, with little= object in view except to impress other writers similar' to themselves. Now British writers are being told that they will have to write books and poems; that people actually want to read. The experiment deserves to be watched closely in New Zealand and Australia where a similar tendency exists for taxpayers’ money to be used to subsidise writers who are close to being unreadable,

at least in the eyes of the community which is forced to provide the money. • New Zealand is, perhaps, a special case where the very small size of the home market makes it. difficult for any writer to be a commercial success unless she or he has the good fortune to be taken up quickly by a publisher in a much larger country. Even so, a note that a book or magazine is being produced with the help of a grant from the. Literary Fund is, too often, a warning that the contents will be dull, or barely intelligible, or insufferably self-centred, or even all three. — Literary Editor.