The Timaru Herald SATURDAY, JUNE 2, 1923. HOW MUCH A WORD?

Timaru Herald, Volume XCVIII, Issue 18084, 2 June 1923, Page 8

The Timaru Herald SATURDAY, JUNE 2, 1923. HOW MUCH A WORD?

Dons modern literature pay its writers well ? And it Unit question is rather a sweeping one, does fiction, which is the popular literature, pay its writers ? Because A. S. M. Hutchinson, with his Mark Sabre and his Mabel; or W. JA Locke with his Berzelius Hibbedard Paragot, and his Blanchette; or tho voluble McKenna with his Sonia and his utterly unnecessary sequels has “arrived,” because their incomes enable them to live the lives of country squires, does story writing pay? Does exercising 1 the brain in the creation of articles and stories pay? Because literary America is bounded on all quarters by the Almighty dollar, does literature pay in Britain? The answer appears to be that literature in Britain and in the Empire does not pay, and that in America it does; ergo, the- cleverest British writers, by virtue of a common tongue, prefer to. sell their writing to American journals from which they receive rates identical with those paid to American writers. And the dire result of such a state- of affairs has been the creation of a literary Tammany. It has been the substitution of “How much a ivord?” instead of “Hullo!” when American writers meet; it has established a state of pervasive commercialism. On that point, Robert Haven Schauffler, an American, endeavouring to explain to American writers how literature exists in England as literature, art, love of self expression, only among those who do not sell the-ii “stuff” to the- rapacious maws of the American periodicals, is emphatic; but he also condemns the existing* liahit among publishers in Britain of _ keeping royalties as low as possible, and declining to pay equitable- prices for talent until ,by some- means or other, a writer has obtruded himself lief ore the public gaze. Withal, bewailing* the low rates of pay, the American writer mourns the- loss, to the world of those Bohemians— Strindberg, Baudelaire, Poe —who wrote against adversity, while admittino- that Hergesheimer, a moclern, starved for a few days and never grew tired of talking about it; he contends that the present “how much a word” system could .never produce a Bronte, a Jane Austen, a Dickens, a Thackeray, a Meredith.

A Eugene Sue, who loved thousands of pages could never be paid by publishers at present rates ..... Yet Lloyd George,

who is no writer of . stories, receives fabulous sums.

Schaeffler _ says : “It lias been my great privilege to meet scores of British writers ancl to know many of them iutimately. _ In none of their frequent gatherings have I ever heard the familiar phrase: ‘How-much-a-word?’. In shop-talks between American writers I have seldom heard anything else. We would do well to catch by contagion, or at least infection, the British _ author’s passionate interest in his profession. He is a serious craftsman, devoted as utterly to literature for its own sake as the baseball fan is devoted to baseball for its own sake. How many of us are that? The obvious retort is, there is no sense in John Bull’s inquiring ‘How-much-a-word F ’ because his own periodicals invaluably answer ‘Nothing!’ But that would be losing sight of the fact that our periodicals admire John and pay him quite as much as they pay us. The British writer usually feels that writing is valuable only in so far as it is creative and that the most powerful antitode for creativeness _is commercialism. He agrees with the composer Brahms that any artist whose chief interest is money has been bound hand ■ and foot by the devil. He therefore postpones consideration of that burning American issue, How-much-a-word ?’ until liis work is quite done. And that is never. Literary America is bounded on the east by the Book Makers Tammany." In discussing this unfortunate phenomenon I would not seem to imply that British letters have no Bosses. They also have their bully critics, their Whitechapel thugs, and _ their Tammany tyrants. But theirs are slightly broader,' more sportsmanlike than ours—more amenable to the appeal of good writing. And British authors are a bit less afraid of them than we are of ours.” British waiters may be. less money grubbing. But art is so long and prices of living are result*? Co-operative action in the Halls of Tnk? Wailing and gnashing of typewriters?