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Balancing the Books:
Scotsman, Spring 2000
Some people think hardship, like medicine or maybe Guinness, is good for you. And specially good for writers. Consumption, cold beans, the breaking of hearts - it's all material, they say, good for the writing soul. I'd sooner vouch that what's good for writers and the country in which they live is writing, and that my own experience as a woman trying to write in Scotland is that finding material is easy. It's everywhere. The struggle is to find time, peace and space to write anything at all.
I want to live in Scotland. I want to rear my son here and attach to Alasdair Gray's "better nation" as far as I can. I also want to continue to write. One hears a great deal about a Scottish Cultural Renaissance, but Culture isn't just the mere existence of poems or novels. It's about the climate in which they are produced, and the value placed their production. In short, a country's culture can only be called healthy if Art is perceived as a significant part of the national consciousness, and by those criteria, Scotland's present Renaissance is less to banner about.
Nitty-gritty. I may be counted one of Scotland's more "successful" writers in that I have a modest visibility and my writing provides my sole means of income - something that was the privilege of very, very few in this country only fifteen years ago. Even so, my earnings are temperate enough for my reliance on bit-and-piece grants and my own inherited capacity for thrift to be alarming. Two years running, I have not earned enough to be eligible to pay income tax and have turned down trips abroad because the financial help of the inviting body has not been adequate. I've also missed an award ceremony at which I was a nominee. If I had two paid flights for international work every year, as is normal for Irish writers, I'd have been there helping making Scottish work visible instead of not there, not.
The Republic of Ireland is not an example to us in every respect, but its better artistic initiatives are worth a look. There, the government exempts writers from paying tax, and also provides hundreds of stipends a year, (about £10,000 each) to people who have talent worth developing. This is seen as "in the national interest" and so it is. Does it need saying that money makes a serious difference to a writer's ability to work? It makes adequate child-care, decent heating and the "time-out" to think and work possible. The literary marketplace will not often address these needs, and certainly won't address the particular need of women writers.
More nitty-gritty and no surprise. Women writers are in the worst position. They do less well with publishers' advances. They are shortlisted for an win fewer prizes - not because they're less talented, but because of entrenched patterns of how to see and read literature, what subjects may be considered "serious". Women drop from the canons of literary history faster and have few memorial prizes or awards in their memory that may benefit other women. Women do less well in the so-called marketplace as a whole, and those with families tend to have more responsibility at home. Much more. Read Tillie Olsen's superb book Silences to understand more fully why housework is a serious literary issue. Understand too why women who rank as world-class writers are mostly childless. Katherine Anne Porter, writing in the fifties, wrote a terrible truth when she wrote:
I have no patience with his idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted and completely crippled...In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not masters of that fate.
Virginia Woolf, at the end of the twenties, argued it cleaner. What one needs as a writer, she said, is 200 guineas a year, and a room of one's own. What price our parliament, in bright shiny new-Renaissance Scotland, assessing the possibility of that?