Writers Are Overpaid

by NICCOLO TUCCI

WRITERS are overpaid. Strange thing for a writer to say, who expects to be paid for telling others that he is overpaid and who, if underpaid, will not fail to protest.

And yet I feel we are all overpaid. Take my own case. It is typical of a majority of free-lance writers who are the victims of their freedom. Confronted with the choice between selling and sulking, we much prefer to sulk, because we hate to part with anything that has not been rewritten seventeen times; and if it has, that was too much —the thing has lost its freshness. A manuscript is like a child: it is never quite grown enough. And if we must relinquish it, because the deadline is long past and the rent overdue, it is to us as if we had sold our own flesh. We hate the very sight of money, which is never enough, so we feel hurt and underpaid. If we divide that money by the time it took us to do nothing in preparation for the time we did something, plus the time we did something (the last fifteen minutes), plus the time we did neither nothing nor something (and that is probably the worst part of the task), we realize that we have earned less than one tenth of one cent per hour.

Of course, writers must live. That is exactly what I always say to those who want to publish me but hate to pay me. “What do you want that money for?" they ask. “You have no problems, you are a gentleman of leisure. You never have to prostitute yourself, you get up when you want, you don’t have to keep office hours or take orders from anybody or claim to think what you don’t think and write what you can neither think nor understand; so don’t be greedy now. Be glad you get publicity.”

To which my answer is: “If a writer is honest, should he be punished for his honesty? Or does only crime pay?”

“Nonsense,” they say. “You don’t live as you live because you are more honest but only lazier than we are. If you must live, then work, as the ant said to the cicada. And if you must sing in the summer, then dance when the winter comes.”

“If sitting in an office for eight hours a day is real torture,”I reply, “then also sitting in your bedroom and dozing for eight hours a day in front of a blank sheet of paper is real torture. It is in order not to feel that horror that many officegoers stick to their jobs even if they don’t have to. It makes them bearers of the burden of boredom, pillars of modern society, workers — to use that noble word — while in reality they pulverize their time in telephone calls, trips to neighboring offices, fuss over useless papers, lunch, interoffice conferences of jokes and gossip, a cup of coffee, trips to the bathroom, a cigarette, more conferences, more telephone calls, until the moment comes to go home; and then they feel perfectly justified in asking for a stiff drink and a great deal of sympathy for having stayed out of the universe a whole day. If the cicada is useless to society because it sings, the ant is much more useless because it cannot sing. Let the ant try to sing; then tell me whether you would not support your local cicadas, as you support, your city orchestra, out of your tax money. So, if you want my leisure black on white, you must pay for it.”

These arguments, however, do not invalidate my theory. Writers are overpaid. Of course, writers must live. That does not mean that non-writers must write. And yet this is what happens. Because writers must live, others begin to write who never wrote before and who should never have been allowed or encouraged to write.

The dying salesman, the unsuccessful broker, the tired violinist, the dissatisfied housewife, and even worse than these, the, happy housewife, the living and pestiferous salesman, the tireless violinist, the filthy-rich broker, all write and make “that extra money" at our expense. They see the ads of the different writing schools, they learn the recipe, they mix the emotional ingredients, make the hot cakes and sell every damn one of them. The writing trade can hardly cope with their material. Of course editors speak with sadness of the days when the writing was nourished and the writers were starving. But Gresham’s law applies to writing too, since writing has become a commodity like money, and it is always the bad money that chases the good money out of the market. Why put your soul or your blood into your characters if you can fill them with hot water and wind? What are the writers complaining about? Are they not given recognition as valid money-makers? Are they not overpaid like everybody else? If it is perfectly absurd for the head of General Motors to get the salary he gets, or for the unionized electrician to make seven dollars per hour for turning off the stage lights, why should it seem normal for a writer to get two thousand dollars for a story? We are all overpaid because no one today has anything to do on earth; no one knows why he lives, but everyone thinks of himself as useful. To what, they never say. Usefulness is a passport to existence, and we forget that usefulness is useless. But the writer is more ridiculous than all the others; he wants to be both the classic of the library shelf and also, at the same time, the classic of the checkbook, like any J. D. Rockefeller. He knows that inspiration has no price and that today he can name his own price because the market needs him. That his writings are stubs he does not care to know. It might give him a block and cost him three years of analysis to de-block him again. So he must tell himself that his writing remains art even when sold over the counter — like the old prostitute who thought herself immaculate because she was so the first day.

Editors are corruptible, too. Used as they are to editing the “extra-money" authors, whose writing has no shape, they will think nothing of clipping some real writing into paper dolls that will fit nicely with the ads in the magazine. They will “correct” the style, flatten out all poetic experiments, restore the rules that were knowingly broken, add a spice of sex here and a coating of tearful sentiment there, and say: “Don’t forget, the Commuter is tired, the Commuter is busy, he must be entertained but not disturbed, you titillate his senses from Grand Central to Greenwich. You are read in the bathtub. If parts of you get wet, the dry parts must repeat what was lost. Don’t overtax his mind, don’t make him frown, or he may leap but of his office window instead of yawning in front of the radiator.”

Now, what real writer does not want the Commuter to commit suicide? That is the whole point of our trade: break the old patterns of stupidity and bring awareness to our life, as we break the old patterns of grammar and replace them with new ones. And that is quite a job.

As for our grudges against editors, we should remember that no good man can be harmed by a bad one, or claim he was corrupted. Nothing is bought that was not sold. Except for very rare and special cases that are not habit-forming, rape is a contract. It is preceded by a certain play in which one of the parties plays the rapee and the other the rapist, but the rapee never opens the door or lifts the telephone to scream for help. He lets himself be raped hundreds of times, then complains he was paid thousands of dollars, “to add insult to injury.” And to console himself he says: “My true reward comes from within.”In other words, he eats his cake, is paid ten times the price, and then even pretends to be praised for his gift of that cake to a suffering humanity.

If that is not a businessman, what is a businessman?

As for the magazines, they really harm the writer by paying him too well. Magazines are in business; they are not and cannot become patrons of the arts. They tax themselves, if they try that, with a difficult choice between a lower product that invariably helps the circulation and a good product that invariably kills the Commuter and gives the magazine a bad case of thrombosis. As for us writers, our dilemma is forever the same: either we starve a person we respect (ourselves) or feed a person we despise (ourselves again). Our money may be stolen, inherited, or married (theft is unpleasant, inheritance forbidden, marriage forbidding when the wife is rich), but never earned. We can’t be paid by the gods and by the humans, too.

Our only hope is not to be led into temptation by a flourishing trade. There is something ascetic about writing. None of the great medieval saints prayed in a brothel. They felt safer in church. And churches, after all, are for that purpose.