Literary life is horrible – from bitter writers to stingy publishers
Growing up in industrial South Wales, where the men were men and the women by some margin worse, I hankered for somewhere more refined, more seemingly civilised and openly genteel. Would I find such a climate by cranking myself up several social classes and going to university, perhaps? My innocent assumption was that the humanities would be humane and the arts filled with nice people saying hello to clouds and flowers. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Maybe people are better behaved in proper subjects such as medicine or quantum physics – subjects requiring rigour and application – but, in my (long) experience, those involved with English Literature, in particular, are on the whole disloyal, mendacious, grasping and thoroughly vile. The problem is that, unless one stays hidden away in a university, receiving a pension after delivering lacklustre lectures on Keats as a teaching hack, writers have no professional structure...
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