Where are all the working class writers? Radio 4, BBCiPlayer.

Where are all the working class writers?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09fzmjt

That’s the question Kit de Waal asked. She published her first novel, My Name is Leon, at the age of 55. I’ve placed an order to read this book. Well, you know what happened next. International acclaim and all the happy-ending stuff. If you read very carefully between the lines you’ll see the lie that works so well in politics and book publishing and in real life. The exception to the rule, in statistics they are called the outliers, are used to justify a particular ideology and support the status-quo.   Thirty thousand shipyard workers become unemployed but one of them gets a job shelf-stacking in ASDA, 29 999 immediately become lazy bastards that don’t want to work. We don’t think, we feel the answer.  You might think that story an exaggeration. One of the stories that stuck with me was all those matchers from Jarrow trekking to London in the 1930s and they stop off and get a sandwich. It’s ham. One of the workers takes the ham from his sandwich and posts it home to his wife. His children haven’t seen meat for over a week. Ah, you might say, but that’s the 1930s. But the Grenfell fire did not take place in the 1930s. Listen to what Emma Dent Coad the Labour MP for Kensington tells us about a cost-cutting ideology marked only by those with money and powers contempt for the working class that, ironically, Lord it above them. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/19/emma-dent-coad-grenfell-interview-shaun-bailey

 The same pre-war contempt of the poor and working class exists today. We lost by a very big margin the propaganda war. The moron’s moron in the Whitehouse is evidence if you are looking for it of a new world order. Well, not actually new. Read your Great Gatsby. Read your Grapes of Wrath. Your Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur Scargil. Well, Mark Twain did coin the term ‘a gilded age’, but his timing was all wrong.

Kit de Wall proved that to be black, to be an older woman and above all to be working class was no barrier to becoming a writer. Good on her I say. But she asked a very salient question. Where are all the other working class writers?

She has a quick dekko in Waterstones.  Nothing but middle-class crap. Well, not crap, somebody buys it. Sixty percent of university graduates are readers, some talking head tells us (middle-class talking-head presumably). But, hey, fifty percent of the working class are readers. That’s me. My hand waves in the air, I’m a reader. But fifty percent of the working class spend the same proportion of their money on restaurants and food. That’s not me, unless by restaurants you mean pubs that sell cheese-and-onion crisps.

It depends what you mean by working class. Here’s where there’s wriggle room for those defending the indefensible. My mum was working class so I’m working class. Donald Trump, the moron’s moron is by that definition working class and Brigadoon is in Scotland. If you start the day in debt and end your day in more debt then there’s a very good chance your working class. If you use the bus or public transport (outside London) there’s a very good chance your working class. If you live in a high rise that burns down then there’s a very good chance your working class. Rich people don’t burn. They just start the fires that incinerate common humanity.

Part two of wriggle room is by definition a writer is no longer working class because he or she has worked his way up to middle-class sanctuary. Here we go again. The old embourgeoisement thesis that the Luton car workers on the assembly line were no working class because they were coining it in. An old idea given a new jacket and fitted onto writers. One of Alan Bisset’s characters in Pack Man,  a would-be writer, jokes that he work in Potterstones, because all they sell is Harry Potter books. She’s no longer working class is she? She no longer needs to sit scrawling in some dismal café, does she? Remember the story of the outliers that applies here. The perception writers make a fortune is laughable, but I’m not laughing. Some talking head (middle-class) tells us the average writer makes on average eleven-thousand pound a year in 2015. I wish I could make ten-bob a year writing. But I don’t. Therefore I’m not middle-class and I’m not average. Thank god for that. I was worried there.

We all like a tear-jerker. They bring in the guy from Penguin, who’s not a penguin but is upper class, because the upper classes are far more representative –sixty percent or more – of being the right kind of bloke to give us working class advice.   Think Winston Churchill turning up in Dundee canvassing and telling its mill workers to keep smiling and work harder and they’ll become all Vera Lynn.  

So what do working class writers lack apart from life chances, education any chance of a career path in writing and role models you may ask? Well, money would be a good start. It would be good if working class people, and not just writers and artists, get paid for their work. Weren’t stigmatised, treated as scum and talked down to. Weren’t treated as something other and a threat that needs to be dealt with.

Hi, I admit it. I want to be a writer when I grow up. Like Kit de Wall I’m 55 and past it. But, hey, I believe wholeheartedly in the exception to every rule model. I’ve taken time off from writing that big glorious novel to write this for nowt. Maybe it’ll pay off in the future. Doubt it very much somehow. I write realist novels. Get real.  

Comments

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists - I'm one, ah yes g-d knows. Giving my precious time away to part-time cleaning for minimum wage. Then the organised administrative shambles of my sessional work teaching creative writing, yes I'm on a good rate, in theory, but when I count in the hours of faffy paperwork and meetings and whether my course prosposals make it past the committee and then on to next semesters  prospectus where we are now 'working in partnership' it's all pure random, well  I make more dosh rate-wise working with the hoover and the mop.

Moan over - I love The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, it's brilliant. Wide-canvas, deadly serious and often laugh out loud funny. Tressall takes no prisoners, he often lampoons the lot.

Will try Kit de Waal. She's got a point. Loads of Waterstones is given up to drivelly lifestyle rubbish. I'm more middle than working class. I'm off to Waitrose for my free coffee and a poinsettia.

 

if you start your day in debt and end your day in more debt, then you're working class elsie. Hoovering for a living is the servant class of the 1900s the disgruntled aristocracy moaned didn't want to work. Ironically, as you say, you don't get paid for your work wirh writers. You get an allowance. Need to google what poinsetta is. 

 

Oh, it's a plant. I thought you could eat it, but it's a poisonous plant for animals. Wonder who'll I feed it to? 

 

Feed it to the Southwest Arts Council, CM.

I  got a BA in English Studies in the days when the government paid for almost all of it. My parents paid 'parental contribution' unlike the boy in the room next door whose dad wanted him to qualify as an  accountant and join the family firm. Ewan chose to study sociology. He paid his living expenses by working as a dock labourer in Jersey in the summer, he was Scottish but palled up with a mature student from tax-haven Jersey, and glass collecting in the disco bar during term time. He didn't have any student debt and looked well and happy which surprised me in a good way as he was also a vegetarian and I wasn't sure if this was healthy. I graduated in 1981. It's all much harder now.

I still think of Arts Council grants and Writer in Residence jobs as being for people 'above me' There seems to be a food chain where a bright young thing gets one grant and then it's easy to get more and climb some almost invisible ladder.

And if I think like that when I'm from the sodding suburbs and have a BA and do sessional teaching work and run Open Mic at my library what the hell does it feel like for someone who is economically and educationally well and truly down at the bottom?

Interesting listening to the Kit de Waal radio 4 link. So quite a few writers who have 'made it' are living in a house where they do not feel at home, metaphorically speaking. Easy to see how the punters shopping in Waterstones then turn their back on the 'literary/artsy/studenty' stuff and buy books on Wellbeing and Make Your Business Dream Real and Bake Toothwatering Mince Pies. Job done, Christmas prezzie-wise, they squeeze into the upstairs Costa for a Gingerbread Latte and Pain au Chocolat.

Yeh it's a bad old world we live in but, hey, people in a lot of other countries have it worsesmiley

 

I've got a roof over my head. food on the table. I'm not complaining, though I am. Patchett and Grealy talk about the gravy train. When you step on it doors open. You get grants, you get fellowships, you get invited to...lower down the food chain. 

 

'I'm not complaining though I am'. Me too!