Lately I’ve been meeting my fellow writers in unexpected places of work. On a recent trip to New York, three writers told me how they keep a roof over their heads with parallel careers as physiotherapists and masseurs. In Europe, there are a bunch of writers driving taxis. For example, a while ago an Irish taxi driver picked me up from Galway Airport and recited a long poem in praise of Irish-American relations. Fine, that’s the Irish for you, I thought to myself, they’re all born poets. However, in London, a taxi driver recently gave me a detailed rundown on half his novel. Hurrying to a literary evening in Brussels, I took a taxi only to find a professional writer sitting at the wheel, a Portuguese, driving to somehow make ends meet. And these guys weren’t just wannabe writers like, for example, the Pakistani in Edinburgh who told me about how his girlfriend had left him, and then presented me with three possible synopses of the event. “I hate memoirs, I’d rather turn my memories into a script for a Bollywood film,” he said, while driving me to the airport.
Historically speaking, writers have always fallen into the category of “sensitive” human material, but somehow they’ve hung on, surviving hostile epochs, the reigns of kings, czars, and dictators, seasons of book burnings and censorship. Today, lo and behold, some earn fabulous money and turn up on the Forbes’ list of richest “content providers,” tour the world like royalty, surrounded by clubs of devoted subjects. Ever since a few writers made it into star-like orbit, the writerly profession has become somewhat chic. Once upon a time only the shady took up the pen; the mad, potential suicides, masochists, and unemployed aristocrats in need of something to fill the day. Today money and fame have made writing an attractive occupation. To be like J. K. Rowling is equally if not more attractive than being like Angelina Jolie. You know, literature still has a few shares in our collective spiritual capital. Some great writers have posthumously become an integral part of the tourist package, Joyce in Dublin, Proust in Paris, for example. As a consequence of this apparent promise, many writers patiently endure semi-anonymity and poverty, their hopes firmly planted on life after death — their very own statue for local pigeons to crap on.
All in all, the fact is that today roses only bloom for the few. As a specific human species, the majority of writers are facing extinction. Whether writers fall into the critically endangered group like Sumatran orangutans; the endangered group like Malaysian tigers; the vulnerable group like African elephants; the near threatened group together with the jaguar; or in the least concern group with the giraffe — let’s leave that to the experts. They say that the endangeredness of a species is determined by three factors: habitat, over-exploitation, and other risk factors such as threat of viruses. Every former literary theorist, critic, or historian (the active are as endangered as writers) will easily identify the same three threat factors at work in the literary world.
I see my writerly colleagues struggling more and more: some to hold on to their critical and popular status, others to win such status. Isabel Losada spent a few days in the window of a Paris bookstore promoting her latest book. She called the stunt writer-in-residence. Many writers take writer-in-residence jobs on tourist cruises, in hospitals, at universities and on safaris. I know of one author who has recently passed her safari guide test, and is now successfully combining two jobs, the literary and the touristic. A recent ad for a writer-in-residence program in prisons drew well over a thousand applicants. You get a two-year contract, and have to give creative writing workshops to prisoners two-and-a-half days a week. I personally know a writer who spent a year in a village famous only for its prison. The local authorities set her up with a pretty cottage and modest monthly stipend. In return, she was expected to write a book about her experience in the village.
Only some thirty years ago West European writers routinely mocked socialist realism as a genre and the Stalinist practice of placing Soviet writers in a factory, on a kolkhoz, or at a site where a motorway or dam was being built. Today these same West European writers dream of commissions from the likes of Shell or Heathrow. The most lucrative commissions circulating among a select group of Dutch writers come from the directors of big companies and banks (who might want to flavor an important meeting with a few words of wisdom, a poem or the like, and thus seek out “professional” help). Dutch writers dream of jobs as editors-in-chief at Shell or Heineken’s in-house newsletter. Of course, today they don’t call it a Stalinist socialist realist practice, but a successful business arrangement. No one has a moral crack at the lucky colleague; they envy him. What’s more, in Amsterdam there’s a literary agency that specializes in these kinds of literary gigs. Russian writers had the metal to mock Stalinist cultural practice, and did so masterfully (Ilf and Petrov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and others). It’s interesting that today few writers raise their voices against anything.
I’ve been carefully following the phenomenon of transition for the past twenty years or so, the transformation of a former communist country into a capitalist statelet. That statelet is called Croatia. Aside from the unemployed and those on a pension, the rest of the population consists of children, an extensive bureaucracy, a plethora of politicians, and a handful of local tycoons. The short story is that for the majority of the population things have gone downhill over the past twenty years, and only improved for a statistically negligible minority. On the other hand though, in the same period, the status of animals at Zagreb Zoo has improved markedly. While public services have been asset-stripped and closed down (a handful of Croats enriching themselves in the process), only the fortunes of animals at the Zagreb Zoo have been on the up. How is that? Simple: Wealthy Croats have taken protection of individual animals upon themselves. The owner of a well-reputed Zagreb restaurant has been feeding the tiger; the President the ostrich; a famous pop-starlet the flamingo; the tapir is under the protection of a well-known war criminal, while the crocodile is under the wing of a Croatian tycoon. Wealthy Croats amuse themselves to no end with conversations such as: How’s your ostrich? Good thanks, last month we nursed his sore throat back to health. And how’s your tapir? I gave him up, now I’m looking after a hippopotamus. That basketball player took the tapir on. . somehow suits him better.
In citing the example of Zagreb Zoo, I naturally don’t want to suggest that endangered writers should be put in zoos. But I don’t see the problem with luxury resorts, theme parks, and writers’ villages. I mean, in Soviet times there was such a village, romantic wooden cottages and the like. It was called Peredelkino. There, thirty years ago, in Boris Pasternak’s former dacha I met the woman who served as the inspiration for the character of Lara in Doctor Zhivago.
While we’re on the subject of Russians, let’s put it out there that the Russians have always had more respect for literature than other nations. When you tally things up, no one, out of fear of the literary word — that is, respect for the literary word — has killed more writers than the Russians. That’s why it’s somehow understandable that a Russian oligarch has bought Waterstones, another the Independent, and a third set up a foundation for the translation of Russian writers into foreign languages (the same guy who one night paid Amy Winehouse a million pounds to sing just for him). Inspired by these examples, perhaps Madonna might swoop down to offer lifelong protection to a potential African Nobel laureate, or Bill Gates spend the rest of his days dedicated to the promotion of Malaysian literature.