For years, a collection of boxes confined first to the offices of the Royal Literary Fund and then to less traveled areas of the British Library remained locked without anyone stopping to think that mutable documents could be kept inside. … A deep understanding of the lives of authors who today are considered pillars of contemporary literature. It was a cataloging mission that paved the way for the discovery, as The Guardian exclusively revealed, of shopping lists, private letters, medical notes and requests for financial assistance that show the extent to which figures such as Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing developed work in conditions characterized by instability, exhaustion, insecurity and a constant need for outside support to keep their creative work going.
The case of Dylan Thomas, whose documentary traces occupy a large part of the archive, is particularly revealing, because among the papers appears an invoice from 1951 listing tobacco, a Swiss cake, Irish whisky, Guinness and peanuts, a household record consistent with the usual diet of a poet who, despite the reputation he had already acquired, relied on the assistance of the Royal Literary Fund from 1938 until the end of his life in 1953.
In an application dated August 1938, Thomas explained that he had been trying to make a living from his writing for five years, and that he had been in constant poverty throughout that period; He stated that he was “lucky to always have enough food and room to work and sleep”, until his wife’s pregnancy made his situation impossible. “My wife is now going to give birth to a child, and our situation is desperate,” he wrote in the original text. The Royal Literary Fund referred his case to the Royal Remuneration Fund, which responded harshly, asking whether a 23-year-old, “unable to support himself,” should marry and expand his family.
Economic fragility is also evident in the application submitted by James Joyce in 1915, in which he stated that he received “no royalties” because the sales of his books were “less than necessary.” At the time, Joyce had just fled Trieste, was living in Zurich and was already working on Ulysses, although he had not yet enjoyed recognition or stability. His cause included a letter of support from Ezra Pound, who claimed that Joyce had lived for ten years “in obscurity and poverty”, aiming to perfect his writing without succumbing to commercial demands.
Pound, one of the most influential poets and editors of the twentieth century, a central figure of Anglo-Saxon literary modernism and, at the same time, one of the most controversial figures of his time for his adherence to Italian fascism during the 1930s and 1940s, added that “the image of the artist as a young man” had “undoubted value and permanence”, although he considered the manuscript of “Ulysses” to be “uneven”, an expression that can be translated as “irregular”.
Edward Kemp, current director of the Royal Literary Fund and former president of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, told the British newspaper that if a catalog of works whose existence depended on the fund were to be drawn up, said catalog should begin with “Ulysses.”
The archive also contains a letter from Edith Nesbitt, author of The Railway Children, dated August 1914, in which the author explained that the emotional impact of her husband’s death had been “so completely overwhelming” that her mind was unable to produce “the poetry, romances, and fairy tales by which I earned most of my living.” The despair conveyed by these lines reaffirms the emotional and material fragility that went through the lives of authors who today are interpreted from the distance of uniform prestige.
The fragility of James Joyce was evident in 1915, because he had not reached the minimum number of sales to receive income from copyright.
Another important piece is the handwritten note from Sylvia Plath’s doctor reporting her admission to hospital for an appendectomy, a document included in an application administered by Ted Hughes, the author’s husband and an important British poet. Although the document does not change what is already known about Plath’s autobiography, it does include a first-hand account of the physical interruptions that damaged the continuity of her work.
Equally revealing is a letter sent by Doris Lessing in 1955, in which she stated that she had arrived in the United Kingdom in 1949 from what was then known as Southern Rhodesia with barely twenty pounds, and that, after publishing her first novel the following year, she had given up her job as a secretary to devote herself exclusively to writing, always “in a very risky way,” in her own words.
He noted in the same document that he had been offered to write scripts for commercial television, but he turned that route down because “although he could make a lot of money, he would never do serious work.” The tension between economic survival and literary obligation emerges here with a clarity that is particularly significant because it comes from an author who will be the only British woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Professional writers in the UK currently earn an average income of £7,000 a year, according to the Author Licensing and Aggregation Association.
The unearthed documents, the cataloging of which has not yet been completed and for which final figures have not been published, reveal a historical pattern that maintains full continuity with the present, because, according to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, professional writers in the UK currently earn an average income of £7,000 a year, a fact that reinforces Kemp’s warning of the gradual decline in publishing agreements for medium-sized fiction authors, which have fallen “more and more and more.” And more,” while the big developments are concentrated in an increasing number of names.
Thus, these forgotten archives, sometimes consisting of small but crucial fragments of life, allow us to reconstruct the human, often vulnerable, side that accompanied the writers whose works today are part of the canon, and show that the history of literature, despite its roots in inspiration or individual genius, has often been underpinned by instability, uncertainty and a constant struggle for survival while trying to create.