Posh Totty

There is no Wikipedia entry for my school. I could be the most famous pupil; my little blog its only star in the Internet universe. But this school…ah yes; this one is here, shining large and bright on my intergalactic screen. What is…oh, a selective grammar. And…ah yes…the alumni?

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Dame Margaret Anstee – UN Under-Secretary General 1987–93

Karen Buck – MP for Regent's Park and Kensington North

Anne Cullen – actress, played Carol Grey in The Archers

Rachel Elnaugh – entrepreneur and panellist on Dragons' Den

Sarah Perry (née Butler) – writer

Catharni Stern – sculptor

Sarah Tyacke (née Jeacock) – former Keeper of Public Records and Chief executive of The National Archives, and cartographic historian

Rosemary Vercoe (1917–2013), British costume designer

Not quite Ipswich School, where a few of my friends had the good fortune to polish its seats with their backsides. Nevertheless, Chelmsford County High School for Girls has an impressive record. This is not a typical comprehensive, let alone an underperforming academy beyond the inner ring road of respectability. 

Chelmsford County just the kind of place you’d expect to produce copywriters, civil servants, legal administrators and nannies. Plus the occasional MP or Under-Secretary General. There some people, of course, who want more than an office job. The insane or the super rich. We know to which category this person belongs.

I was poor, and getting poorer: what was I thinking, staring at the wall making things up, when I could do something both more useful and more remunerative? Ought I to have been a barrister? Should I perhaps teach? Writing felt, obscurely, like a moral failing.

Her history confirms it. 

Essex accent that makes itself known unless I concentrate, my lack of connections through family and friends, my polytechnic degree.

We are enjoying, as always, this Dick Whittington story, a panto for modern times, when something in Wiki catches the eye: Royal Holloway University. Chelmsford County High School for Girls snuggles next to it. We look for the polytechnic; but it has been elided. Not surprising given that apart from Anglia Poly they ceased to exist in Britain since 1992. We read the article again. Copywriter. Legal Administrator. This woman is not, it seems, so mad after all. Sniff! Sniff! Sniff!…hey, that’s not Wilko’s own brand…Chanel N°5? Or something more expensive: Dior's Belle de Jour?

Chelmsford County is a selected grammar not an independent school. This represents the distinction within the middle to upper bourgeoisie between the rich and those who share their education but not their bank accounts. Here is a class within a class - or a world within a world, if you wish - whose fine gradations of wealth and privilege are invisible to the outsider. To those inside the differences feel enormous. A would-be writer - such schools encourage such hopes - often resenting those at the very highest level for whom work is an optional pleasure. Educated to be cultured these affluent volunteers can spend all their time writing; though, as Will Self writes, this can be counter-productive - there is never the urgency to finish things. Below this elite there are the majority of the middle-classes, who must work for their comfortable lifestyles. A few are lunatics, who chase the mad hare of literature.

Anyone embarking upon a literary career must expect years of poverty and hardship before establishing a reputation and earning a decent living. West Indians share with all writers from oversea the further difficulty that they have no relatives at hand on whom they can fall back when times are hard. In the West Indies no one, however poor, is faced with starvation. It is always possible to cadge a meal; and rum, which is food and drink in a single bottle, is comparatively cheap. Housing conditions may appear to the comfortable tourist drab and on occasion noisome. But in a climate so bland shelter is not as important nor so expensive as in the chill smog of the Metropolis. At least one West Indian writer of talent has contracted tuberculosis in London, largely as a result of the appalling living conditions to which he and his family were subjected by poverty. (Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Land They Have Left)

Literature is a privilege; the hard demands of office life, its boredom and inertia, given up for the intoxicating spirit of art. Do you read me, sir? Have you got it, madam? These characters choose poverty, they want to enjoy the benefits of the dole. Now of course, as Sarah Perry says, there is usually an inner compulsion to write (or paint or play the big horn). To a large extent the artist is compelled to perform. Nevertheless, it is a choice, and one expects and then suffers its consequences. John Zorn:

Yeah, well, that’s what it takes - courage. It takes more courage than most people have. There’s less than one percent of people like that, but the world could not exist without them. The world would not move forward without them, and I really believe that. I think the outsiders, the individualists, the people who have a messianic belief in themselves and are able to stick with their vision despite all odds - and believe me, Bill, every day of my life I’m haunted and tormented by the voices of people that are saying in my ear, “Maybe you’re wrong.” But the people that can stick with that, they’re the ones that are really going to make a difference in the world. And they will always be a small number and I’ve always aspired to be one of that number. I think about the people that I admire, people like Jack Smith, who lived in a small apartment right over here on First Avenue and died of AIDS 10 years ago. I worked with him for about eight years in the late ’70s helping him with his theater performances that never more than 10 people attended. And, I mean, this was some of the greatest shit I ever experienced. Here was a guy my age performing for 10 people. And I think about John Cage not getting an orchestra commission until he was over 50 years old. When he was my age he was still working as a dishwasher, you know? I think about that and I say, “Those are the models. I’ve gotta live up to that.” And if I can in any way inspire someone else, then the line gets passed on and that’s beautiful. That’s great. I really hope that it’s happening. (John Zorn: One Future Two Views)

The purpose of Sarah Perry’s article is a laudable one: to advertise prizes that support writers to continue their careers. Yet her piece is framed in an odd way. These prizes, and the associated Arts Council grants, exist, she argues, to redress the iniquities of privilege, which prevent (especially young) people from writing - they just don’t have the time. There are no universities. No long holidays (think of Stanley Middleton: a novel each summer term). No courses in creative writing. She is young - are they too close to see? The contemporary book trade is also ignored. Its shift from an older publishing culture, that married profit with a literary career, to a multi-national media operation that seeks for a quick divorce from an impoverished spouse, is completely absent from this piece.1 If we are to believe Sarah Perry the problem is class not the mechanics of an industry.

But writing is difficult for everyone, and more difficult for some than for others. And in a society in which some communities are significantly more likely to lack financial privilege those difficulties can stultify and narrow the culture.

The big issue is financial privilege. What this overlooks is that there are other kinds of privileges, many of which she herself has enjoyed. A first class education is one. A religion obsessed family is another. In my own The Working Class Highbrow I note the role of the chapel in creating a literary sensibility; that pre-requisite for a writing life, amongst people who lack Ms Perry’s social and educational advantages. There is the privilege of a fashionable creative writing course, whose contacts with the publishing industry reap obvious rewards. Life was harder in the old days. Think of such characters as Roland Camberton - Scamp - or Julian MacLaren-Ross, his memoirs describing a bleak literary landscape. That life is too rough, too far-out, for the respectable matrons of today’s fiction scene. First-time novelists have it easy, nowadays.

The age of the bottom-drawer novel is long gone: the time, ending in the 1980s, when a first novel that received a handful of good reviews could sell two thousand copies in hardback to public libraries alone, and it was worthwhile for its author to resurrect an old manuscript that had been sitting in a bottom drawer and present it to the world as new. Nowadays it’s relatively easy to get a first novel published, hard to take the next step with any confidence. Sally Rooney is well on her way, propelled by unusual quantities of acclaim and assurance. And yet, Normal People seems a less mature project than Conversations with Friends, even if it isn’t a resurrected earlier project. (Adam Mars-Jones, The First Time)

Debut novels themselves enjoy a privilege. It is the enormous amount of institutional support that goes into their making. However, once collect the certificate, you’re on your own. Thus the need for more support - the nanny reference is apt - for the ‘poor’ novelist, who can now win prizes to keep them going.

As I write elsewhere, the culture industry has been taken over by the bourgeoisie, who want to turn it into a career, with life insurance and pension plan. The old insecurities and the risks that went with them - that West Indian contracting TB - are not for these characters, brought up in comfort and ease. It mustn’t be admitted of course. Thus we have this Guardian article pretending to be about the poor and the outcast. The poor: a copywriter. Give me a break! John Zorn calms me down….

…do you really think these large corporations are going to let that happen? Because these are some greedy motherfuckers and they’re gonna find some way to fuck everybody. People who know how to manipulate other people are always going to be around and they’re always going to be working for those companies and they’re gonna know how to twirl some shiny object in front of some artist and get their fucking publishing away, and get them off their independent dot com and get them onto Warner Bros. Everybody could have their own little record company, it doesn’t cost that much to put shit out. But I get phone calls all the time, I get tapes all the time and I talk to them and say, “Man, you should put this shit out yourself. I’ll run it all down to you on how to do it.” And you know what? They don’t wanna do it! “Man, all I wanna do is make music, I don’t want to think about the business.” And they are ripe for getting ripped off. And most people are really like that. They’re honest musicians with integrity that just don’t want to deal with the business. They don’t want to have their own dot com. And as long as people are like that, they’re victims. That’s been going on since day one.

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1.  See Diana Athill’s classic Stet.  A more jaundiced view can be found in Donald Sassoon’s The Culture of the Europeans.