The Artist's Wages

 At one point in his Past and Present, the great British belletrist Thomas Carlyle takes up the Chartists' rallying cry, "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work." Ultimately—he endorses the sentiment. But not before allowing himself a bit of sarcasm. 

He admits, after all, that fair wages for work is desirable—but when in all the history of human creation, he asks, were they so apportioned? For the great artists and thinkers of the past—what wage did they ever receive for their toil, but scorn, poverty, prison, and the scaffold? 

In other words—he says to the Chartists—"not getting a fair wage for your work? Well, join the club." 

If there is one person who has never earned a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, after all, it is the artist—the poet—the belletrist. As Basil Bunting once imagined Apollo admonishing those foolhardy enough to enter this profession: "Well sung singer, but in this trade we pay no wages." 

Ezra Pound makes a similar point in one of his earlier "economic works"—mercifully free of the fascism and antisemitism that later became his crude obsession—namely, the ABC of Economics. As one might perhaps have suspected—the book is not really much about economics. 

What it is really is an impressionistic rant by a poet, a person of eclectic and idiosyncratic learning, and a crank. (Pound was a crank about many things, but most especially was he that sub-variant of the species that abounds in every era of economic distress: the money crank.)

One point he makes in the book, though, that will strike people as relevant today (in spite of his overall crankishness) is to suggest that—in an era of mass unemployment—the solution might be simply to limit the number of hours any given person can work going forward. 

If demand will not suffice to sustain a full week's work for every person—that is—perhaps we should ration work so that everyone gets a diminished but equal share. 

The idea has not vanished from the stage of history. One still hears some of the "Abundance" people talk about the same proposal today. If AI really does limit the amount of human cognitive labor that's needed in the future, they say—perhaps we could solve it by having a three-day work week. 

Now, many people might rebel against this. They will say—"I want to work more; and earn more. What would I do with my time if I were forced to stay home four days a week?" Pound replies: get a hobby; learn to garden; take up painting or horseback-riding. 

And people might retort in turn—but I wouldn't get paid for that!

To which Pound replies, in so many words—much as did Thomas Carlyle: "Join the club." He says: you're merely about to experience the fate that every creative artist has known for centuries—namely, that of never ever getting paid adequately for what they do. 

The artists all had to learn how to enjoy work and effort for its own sake. They could never hope to be remunerated by any other means. So, in the three-day-work-week world of the "Abundant" future—everyone will just have to figure out how to live as the artists do. 

(It's a vision of a uniformly-symphony-writing human future that John Maynard Keynes also hinted at in his "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.")

I suppose some writers get paid for what they do. I suppose even that, in a sense of the words, I get paid to write. But I never get paid to write what I am most motivated to write. I've never earned one red cent—for instance—off of this blog. 

I take solace from the fact that this has long been recognized as the fate of genius. And if you think this is arrogant of me—to compare myself to genius—let me remind you that since, like the other geniuses, I will never be paid for writing this—I have to take my compensation where I can find it. 

I was reading Henry Miller's book about Rimbaud this week, The Time of the Assassins. And Miller was very good for this type of compensatory fantasy. 

He did not hesitate to declare himself an artist-hero and a genius—on the strength of books that were made of little else but this repeated self-assertion of his status as an artist-hero and a genius. 

And it worked! Henry Miller still seems to us today like the artist-hero-genius he declared himself to be. I'm reminded of some advice W.S. Merwin once gave in a poem: "Deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it." Miller certainly did, and so can you. Artist-hero-geniuses are not forged through humility. 

And Miller reassures me that my lack of wages for this blog is merely another mark of my genius—a confirmation of my status as a poète maudit—the poet's mark of Cain that is also a crown of thorns, as Shelley once wrote—an outward sign of my inward disgace (to steal a phrase from the great Quentin Crisp). 

"The place for the genius is in the gutter, digging ditches, or in the mines or quarries, somewhere where his talents will not be employed," writes Miller. "A genius looking for employment is one of the saddest sights in the world. He fits in nowhere, nobody wants him." 

To quote Bunting's line again: "in this trade"—that of the poet, that is—"we pay no wages." 

Artists are probably drawn more than any other class of society to the idea of the welfare state—not out of any inherent idleness in their nature (they are the least idle people in the world)—but because they are completely unable to conceive of how anyone is supposed to translate their talents into money. 

I've never understood the first thing about it, myself. My entire life, any employment that comes my way I have taken as an inexplicable miracle. Because it never seemed remotely possible to me to earn a living. And I don't know to this day how so many others manage to do it. 

When I went to law school, it was in part with the idea that I would finally learn something "useful." I would learn a trade at last—something I could hawk for cash. Something that people didn't immediately despise as useless and unmonetizable, like everything else I'd ever done. 

I suffered from what Miller calls the "fear which every creative artist knows: that he is unwanted, that he is of no use in this world." 

It has never occurred to me that someone might pay for what I'm offering on this blog. Because I've only ever been able to offer the unwanted. 

But if I went to law school—then maybe, somehow, I would finally learn how to make something that people want. 

And law school turned out to be the worst I've done at anything I ever attempted. Liberal arts I could do. Religion. Poetry. History. Literature. 

I even aced Constitutional Law—the one subject they teach in law school that correlates to no known branch of remunerative practice, and for which no firms hire. 

What I couldn't do, in turned out—even when I tried—was to learn something that other people pay for. Every subject that even approached the domain of the remunerated was not only distasteful to me—but intellectually and practically incomprehensible to me too. 

Wills, trusts, estates, property—it is like they are all written in a kind of mystic and indecipherable runes. 

It's the same tragedy Rimbaud suffered—the tragedy Miller describes in his book on the subject: Rimbaud's flight from his calling; his decision to reject poetry; the long, miserable, sterile second half of his life he spent in the desert, trying to strike it rich at last in the world of practical business. 

He had about as much success at it as I did. 

Time and again, in law school, I have been impressed by how much better everyone else is at finding their way in life and earning a living—and understanding the material needed to get there. If nothing else, it has helped to break me of my pride. It has taught me not to underestimate others. 

So you will perhaps forgive me if I indulge in my off-hours from studying for the bar—each day of which is a similar humiliation along these lines; a similar reminder that I'm not good at this—by comforting myself with a Romantic interpretation of events. 

Perhaps I am eternally unpaid because—I tell myself—such is simply the fate of the creative author. Perhaps it is not my block-headedness, but my genius that is to blame. 

In his poem "The Albatross," Baudelaire compares the poet to the great sea bird—so majestic and beautiful in flight; but so clumsy and ungainly when forced to come down to the world of men and things. 

Let me say for a moment it is like that—let me admit that, in my inmost heart, it feels like that—i.e., that I can soar in ideal intellectual realms; that I can seemingly do anything there—and yet every time I try to descend to concrete reality—to be of use, for pay—it is a humiliating farce. 

"Well said, blogger," I hear some god of the pensmiths say—

"But in this trade—we pay no wages."