WRITERS AND REWARDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 325, 14 September 1945, Page 18

WRITERS AND REWARDS

Sir,-I have read A. R. D. Fairburn’s article "Pass the Jam Please." The chief merit of free-lance work, I have always thought, lay in its being written by people who earned their living in other ways. Mr, Fairburn thinks that at £2 an article a writer of articles could have jam as well as bread and butter. I suspect that his idea of a living wage is nearer £12 than £6, but being unable to face the idea of six articles a week by one writer I shall suppose three articles at £6. . At times I have read most New Zealand periodicals. I have frequently read an article that interested me and have perhaps mentioned it to a dozen people who have read the periodical and have found that they had not read that contribution. Now if we limit the argument

to, say, one periodical, a fairly literary or intellectual one-Mr. Fairburn will probably say there isn’t any such-probably fewer than half the population see the publication at all, and one out of 12 will read any one article. It seems to me that if every free-lance writer turns out three articles a week, readers are going to have an awful strain thrown on them. I consider myself a tough reader, but I quail at the thought. My reaction would be to restrict the output by paying seven guineas an article,, but my racial conscience rebels against reduction and the stifling of production. I am afraid the free-lance writer will have to be satisfied with bread and butter without jam, because in a land full of frustrated statesmen and hand-tied reformers who would work for a crust if they could get their ideas and messages into print and to the public, and willingly forgo recompense, I see no hope that free-lancers will be paid more.

SATURATION

POINT

(Dunedin).

Sir,-With regard to A. R. D, Fairburn’s article "Pass the Jam Please" the free-lance journalist or artist is paid according to the demand for the fruit of his labour, If he prefers to wield a pen or brush in place of a pick, or scalpel, or whatever other instrument would adorn a doctor’s coat of arms (if he had one) he does so with his eyes wids open. If he cannot see the limited horizon clearly defined by popular taste he is a fool. If he says he must write or draw, what is there to stop him? Must the results be foisted on a public which is expected to pay exorbitant rates for some.thing it doesn’t want? If a man flatters himself he is a creative artist must someone part out his hard-earned cash to foster that illusion? After all what happens to this stuff that is written? It is printed. Nobody but a few egocentrics read it, and then it is confined to the waste-paper basket. Place for it no doubt! If these people must write why not do so and keep it to themselves? After all, you do sing in your bath, but you don’t expect to be paid Bing Crosby rates for it. It seems to me that some free-lance journalists are grossly overpaid, whatever brief is held for the others. Witness the appalling drivel that disgraces some of our _ periodicalsespecially women’s. The writers ought to be fined, not paid! Then perhaps they might be induced to turn the brain-power expended on these vaporous nothings to a more profitable and certainly more useful occupation.

M.

MOODY

(Auckland),