Living By Wit: Some Thoughts on the Profession of Hack

No one can feel more acutely than I do the unsatisfactoriness of my financial position. -- Dorothy L. Sayers

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that good writing is disinterested writing -- that is to say writing committed for reasons other than economic ambition or desperation. While it is impossible to entirely eliminate a profit motive, we are pretty well agreed that Literature most often consents to descend when courted by the holy mysteries of Vocation rather than rousted by the brusque routines of Livelihood. The person seeking a living by her pen must try to please too many people for that pen to function honestly and openly. She must always be under anxiety to produce, produce, produce; she cannot have her whole heart upon the refining of her art but be continually darting glances to her receipts, her reviews, her contracts and her competitors. She will write according to formula, for while an idiosyncratic work may find some buyers, it will startle and displease more. The battle for shelf space, review column and entertainment dollar wages fiercely, and pressure will be constantly applied for her work to conform from everyone who cares for the stability of her lifestyle or who can profit by her. If she has any desire to produce more enduring work, she will live in a torture of impotent regret as each facile volume slides off the presses. She will not challenge anyone to think new thoughts or discard old prejudices because she cannot afford to offend a soul. After all, there are thousands of other hopefuls clamoring for every printed page she manages to fill.

So to live by wit must mean to live as a hack, harried, sour and sterile. But what is so terrible about wanting to live by the labor of one's mind that it should condemn one to the purgatory of producing second-rate work? All one wants is a living -- shelter, food, warmth, transportation, health care, an occasional posy. And why shouldn't one use one's wit, if one possesses such, to gain it?

Wit may be defined for our purposes as the ability to create sufficient amusement for others with one's own brain for which they are willing to give something back -- praise, power, money, love or some blessed combination thereof. Wit does pay well when it pays: think of a theater ticket, an astronomical sum for a bare two hours of entertainment. And you're not even paying for the kind of command performance you get in, say, a lawyer's consultation, albeit for a higher fee. Hundreds of people are handing in their hard-earned cash and filing into the auditorium to witness the single spectacle. Granted there are an endless variety of costs involved in staging, but union scale is still a toothsome sum. When you work. If you work.

And there's the crux of the problem: there are so many good -- or at least enthusiastic and hardworking -- people competing for that wit-payment that both consumers and the wit-middlemen of publishers, agents, theater and gallery owners, recording companies and so on, can afford to be extraordinarily finicky about which dainties they choose to filch from the canape tray of Art. Writing students are exhorted to make that first paragraph snappy, ostensibly to set the story going quickly, but perhaps more actually in acknowledgement of the fact that with thousands of submissions arriving at a major magazine each month to compete for one or two acceptances at most, no one is going to bother reading any farther unless something within the first few sentences leaps out and sinks its fangs into the sensibilities. (Literary and small press magazines are another kettle of fish, of course. However, if a writer manages to recover her postage costs here, she may pat herself on the back.)

With these cutthroat conditions being operative from time immemorable, what sort of feather-pated fool would set out to earn her daily bread by writing? A fool named Aphra Behn did, in 1670. She had tried being a wife first, and then a spy, but her unsuitability for these professions brought her to debtor's prison. Once she extracted herself and picked up a pen, that fate never darkened her door again. Perhaps our fears to tread this ground are not so angelic.

In considering the work and lives of women who traded the labor of their nimble minds for the common necessities of living, we won't include those who may have felt short often enough, such as Virginia Woolf or Mary Shelley, but who were not solely dependent on their literary output.

We know that the Bronte girls had a scheme for getting money by writing novels. And what novels! One can hardly imagine a more unsalable trio of manuscripts in the uplifting and bowdlerizing 1840's. To start with, there is Agnes Grey, in which a timid governess finds her charges to be brats -- not misguided little poppets whom she gently persuades back to goodness, nor ignorant urchins thirsting for truth under their grimy savagery -- but genuine, unadulterated brats who bully, intimidate and casually enslave her well into their young adulthood. The book provides us with one of the finest portraits of bratdom in literature, but did Mrs. Grundy desire such a portrait? Then we have Jane Eyre, another governess story, this time with a heroine plain and proud and priggish who still snags the fairy tale ending of marriage with her wealthy (though somewhat disfigured and possessing perhaps not the best track record in the arena of domestic harmony) employer. Finally comes that unwomanly, unrealistic, uncontrolled, unpleasant tome Wuthering Heights -- but could you expect anything better from a girl who went flouncing around the moors instead of attending her own father's church? Whatever their declared intentions, the Bronte girls did not have a get-rich-quick scam on their hands. They managed to publish all right, but the receipts couldn't have kept Branwell in gin for a fortnight.

Perhaps it may be said that it is not fair to use the sisters Bronte as a model for the dilemma of the modern young woman with an itch to scribble. The scope of their choices are considerably narrower than our own when we wish to live and write and are not independently wealthy. There were no grants or writer-in-residence programs open to our nineteenth century forebearers -- at least not grants that a respectable lady would accept. Today we are not economically dependent on our families, and a variety of professions less onerous than governess, milliner or maid-of-all-work are open to us. A woman with sufficient brains and bowels to stand a fighting chance in the literary milieu can certainly hold down an entry level clerical position that will pay her rent, even if the job is little less repugnant than costermongering or picking hops. So why even concern oneself with earning money by writing? Why not simply write, and let the wit-peddlers go hang themselves?

Because ranged against the traditional disadvantages of living by wit are the even more hallowed disadvantages of living by labor while trying to exercise wit, namely perpetual exhaustion and lack of concentration. Holding down an eight-to-five underling position and then coming home to wrestle with the Muse dooms one to the haunting certainty that there's never world enough and time, and never will be. An endless, almost hallucinatory list of things undone swells up, edema-like, in the brain as one faces the blank page. One never faces the beloved idea clean and rested. God help us if we have, or want, children, or if the people we live with are not inclined to be supportive of our madness.

All of this agony of spirit and mortification of flesh goes under the glib rubric of "paying dues," as if creative life were a country club. Once in, it seems to go, one may put up one's feet beside a cool mint julep and enjoy the huddled faces of the less fortunate pressed up against the gates. In a certain respect the literary world does resemble a country club: the appraising judgment of its current members will be applied to us as we petition for entrance, a cool scrutiny to see if we lower the tone. Many of us will undergo a painful trial by genre if we choose not to write straightforward, "serious" fiction. (I once had a teacher, a moderately successful novelist and screenwriter, put aside the manuscript of what was to be my first professionally published piece of fiction and refuse to talk with me about it on the grounds that "fairy tales are not of our time," and I thereby had no right to write one.) In the best of all possible worlds, we would simply produce writing as fountains produce water, without regard to what sells or what doesn't sell, to what will please the mentors that may sponsor us or what will blackball us as surely as we were Jewish mulattas. So, we must say with rising exasperation as we confront these obstacles mortared onto the top of the wall that already rises so steep, the wall whose bricks are the inherent difficulties in producing any kind of meaningful creative work, what are we to do with this less good but more probable world that we inhabit?

The first creative act is the imagination of our ability to create at all. The first act was Aphra's.

Racy, loudmouthed, meddlesome Aphra Behn, on whose tomb Virginia Woolf tells us we should let fall flowers "for earning us the right to speak our minds." More importantly, she earned us the right to get paid for speaking our minds.

Virtually nothing is known of her origins. Angeline Goreau in her excellent biography Reconstructing Aphra theorizes that Aphra may have been someone's "natural" (i.e. bastard) daughter. I incline towards this theory myself, for it explains the lack of ladylike restraints placed on Aphra's wanderings in the Indies as a young woman. If she was already outside the pale due to illegitimacy, it didn't matter much if she conversed with slaves, or went on long raft journeys to remote native villages or formed transient attachments to gentlemen with shadowy connections to the King's service -- if, in short, she gathered enough experience of the world that no subsequent difficulty ever seemed to surprise her much. After marrying the short-lived and almost anonymous Mr. Behn, she took a turn undercover gathering information in Holland for the Crown. His Majesty's servants quibbled over the expenses she incurred so long that she found herself clapped in prison by her creditors. Upon release, Behn found cheap lodgings, shook the lice of Newgate out of her garments and wrote a play. It was the start of a career both unprecedented and unparalleled. In the next seventeen years, seventeen of her plays were produced -- in a city that housed only two theatrical companies and certainly did not lack for aspiring playwrights.

Why was Behn's work so popular? She was not the first woman to attempt an assault on the exclusive men's club of London's dramatists. Why was she the one who took the fortress? It may be partly explained as the product of fortuitous timing. Ribaldry being as much a political as a social stance in the late seventeenth century, the fashionable Royalist roué clamored for the particular piquance, the frisson of anti-Puritan libertinage that defines the Restoration more clearly than any positive attribute of its own, that a woman acting on the public stage could invoke. We all know what a public woman is. And how much more devilishly lubricous if the actress in her trim tights is speaking the words of another woman -- another public woman with neck immodestly unbent. Behn's personality certainly did not hinder her; the energy of a plowhorse, boldness in forming and stating opinions, openness to experience and indifference to conventional morality can carry a woman to success behind the stage as surely as it can upon it. However on second thought, is piquance really sufficient reason to sit through five acts of a play, pelted with smells, puns and blood oranges if So-and-so over at the Duke's Company could do it better? The answer must lie in the nature of the plays themselves.

Behn's most prominent theme was the economics of marriage. Conventional wisdom viewed marriage not as an emotional or even domestic partnership, but rather one based on property. Impecunious persons of both genders jockeyed or were jockeyed around by their families for a firmer financial foothold via the rites of Hymen. Heirs were exhorted from every stronghold of authority, from the head of the family dining table to the pulpit, to maintain the status quo by allying with fiscally comparable families, even if their own incomes were adequate to every conceivable need. Lawyers were an indispensable part of every prenuptial preparation where the parties involved possessed anything more than four bare legs and a bed. Once contracted and sealed, the marriage bond was unbreakable, even if both partners, thrown into sudden intimacy on such concupiscent grounds, could ultimately agree only on hating one another.

Hence we find the social emphasis on "gallantry," virtually the only way a person might choose a partner freely under conditions privately and mutually consented to (though this was certainly no guarantee of performance). Whoring, attended by profanity, complicated foppery in dress and diction, gambling, duelling and overindulgence in liquor, could also be viewed as a patriotic stance against the erstwhile Puritan protectorate.

Women of all classes trod a taut line between sexual freedom and social peril. On the one hand, one might be told that "virtue" was outmoded and useless, that it was a fine thing to give one's love freely without regard to the mewling of the preacher. On the other hand, a discarded mistress might find herself apostrophized in verse as a flaccid, spewing hole.

The cavalier hardly invented this type of opportunistic misogyny; the novel element he introduced was the public nature of the discourse surrounding it. No longer was lip service paid to chastity as an ideal while individual women were cajoled to abandon it. The dialogue between swain and lady-fair took place on the boards, in the coffee houses and in the smartest drawing rooms with as much openness as the subject had ever been canvassed in the bedroom.

Behn embraced this publicity wholeheartedly. Though figures in her verse were cloaked in pastoral Ardelias and Philanders, it was no secret who Ardelia and Philander were. This created the savor of licentiousness that has surrounded Aphra's name well into the twentieth century, though by Restoration standards the notches in her bedpost were modest in number. The voice of "lewd" Mrs. Behn, who had sex and liked sex and called for some mutuality from her partners (however much she got from them in practice) filled an essential gap in the boisterous dialogue of desire. Economically independent of both the marriage system and the mistress system, she could speak her mind on both with freedom that was to remain rare for centuries yet to come. No one's daughter and under no necessity to either preserve her reputation as a wife or to shore up a tenuous trade as a courtesan, she had no motive to mince her words. Enough men and women found an echo of their own feelings to buy enough theater tickets and volumes of verse and prose to keep her in bread, thereby maintaining her in her capacity as independent voice.

In human relations it cannot be said that anyone is ever entirely passive or entirely dominant. However forces of authority weight relationship and assign roles, individual personalities must fill out and frequently produce friction with their ordained positions. According to taste and opportunity, the women of the seventeenth century fought against the situations of oppression and repression, naked and subtle, which they found themselves entwined in. The ferment of the time, however it may be measured in concrete victories won, meant that the right of a woman to desire, both sexually and otherwise, could be declared, debated and defended. Behn's voice is the clearest and most uncompromising that has survived. While insisting her creative and intellectual powers were the equal of any man's, she could still comfortably acknowledge her own flesh, and assert the equality of other, less ethereal drives. Her heroines were singularly bold in stating their wants and aims. Here is a young woman, "designed for the convent" by her family, planning to "spoil her devotion" by capturing some sexual experience:

Prithee tell me, what dost thou see about me that is unfit for love? Have I not a world of youth? A humor gay? A beauty passable? A vigor desirable? Well shaped? Clean limbed? Sweet breathed? And sense enough to know how all these ought to be employed to the best advantage? (The Rover, act I, scene i)

Such ingenues, who were lions rather than kittens, scandalized half London while quickening pulses in the other half. Her intrepid stance established her as a literary force that could neither be ignored nor hooted away, and enabled her to give a leg up to younger contemporaries such as Otway and Dryden. The best minds of the day were her friends, her confidants and not infrequently, her debtors. For not only did she take her place as an intellectual equal, she was an equal at the box office as well. While actresses were paid considerably less than their male counterparts on the ouroboros grounds that they were likely to augment their wages by prostitution, Behn's third-night playwright's receipts could not be docked with any such convenient sophistry. She wrote quickly and tirelessly, in every available form: plays, poems, essays, translations, political commentary and the new mongrel form, prose fiction.

For in Aphra's later days, as she began to be troubled by the painful sciatic complaint that was to kill her in her late forties, her "cash cow" of stagewriting went dry. The two theaters of London became one theater, and that one theater's manager intent on reviving old plays whose dead authors could demand no fees. Too old and certainly too canny to whore, too used to halloing in the thick of things to cringe for a patron, too scornful of the values of the market to set up shop in another line, she began writing novels "with a lame hand scarce able to hold a pen." Thirteen volumes, including the groundbreaking abolitionist tale Oroonoko, were the product of that lame hand -- thirty years before Defoe wrote the book that is generally awarded the palm in freshman literature survey courses as the First English Novel, Robinson Crusoe. When she died, the indefatigable hack was buried in Westminster Cathedral under two snotty lines from an ex-lover:

Here lies a proof that wit can never be
Defense enough against mortality.

Putting them on a stone across her chest was probably the only way he could have hoped to have the last words with a woman so verbal and contentious.

Aphra Behn was in the right place at the right time. A lover of pleasure, she landed smack dab in an amorous age. An articulate and passionate being, she held her own in the most tempestuous of literary milieus. With the love of justice built into her bones, she placed her stamp on the tradition of women's solidarity with other classes of victims by writing the first major exposition on the evils of slavery and the slave trade. Oh, who wouldn't be Aphra, calumny and penury and perfidity of lovers even included?

For my part I can only say, & solicit, & urge my Fanny to print, print, print! Here is a resource -- a certainty of removing present difficulties. -- Susan Phillips, letter to her sister Fanny Burney (June 9, 1793)

Shifting forward one hundred years to examine another noted hack must feel abrupt. We find society under George III to be considerably better behaved and involved in more sober pursuits than speculating as to the masculine attributes of the monarch. Madame Frances d'Arblay (née Burney) was nearly paralyzed with embarrassment when her authorship was first discovered outside her family and would probably have been forbidden to view any of the indelicate Mrs. Behn's plays.

Fanny Burney's novels are most interesting to consider in light of the very clear-cut motivations behind the writing of each one. Evelina (1778) was written privately and printed anonymously for pure fun, and shows its origins as entertainment on every page. Cecilia, the novel that followed in 1782, was written under the watchful eyes of the greater portion of England's literati, including Dr. Johnson, Mrs. Thrale and her adored father, as a useful and improving work. This book always dissatisfied its author, who complained vociferously (or at least as vociferously as a young lady might) about being unable to revise it properly under deadlines imposed by publishers who had no concern for the manual labor involved in making fair copies and how her writing time was broken into pieces by her duties as a daughter and sister. It must be confessed that Cecilia utterly defeated this reader's attempts at its scaly slopes (although a certain Miss Austen liked it well enough to lift the phrase "pride and prejudice" from the mouth of one of its characters).

From this turgid mess we arrive at Camilla (1796), which may not be any more remarkable for brevity, but here we may feel that Miss Burney knows whereof she speaks. For the theme is money -- more specifically, debt and the ways it could compromise and imperil a young woman. This is a theme that Burney, who spent a miserable five years at the post of Second Keeper of the Queen's Robes (a glorified species of dressing maid) in hopes of not being a financial burden to her family, could develop with confidence and vigor. In the course of five rambling, character-laden volumes, Burney has her eponymous heroine dig herself a trench of debts so deep that even the most hardened plastic-juggler of our own day might blench. It starts with a mere half-crown borrowed for admission to an exhibition of ourang-outangs which she doesn't even want to see, and ends with the poor girl alone in a filthy inn racked with the delirium tremens of her financial imprudence. Her honorable and well-propertied lover arrives to rescue her, and the reader cannot doubt that the "happily ever after" extending beyond the novel's close will be a thrifty one.

Burney's motive in writing Camilla was a simple one: to make money for herself and the presumably adorable but regrettably insolvent (not to mention deplorably Roman Catholic) Alexandre d'Arblay, her new emigrè husband. Pregnant with what was to be their only child as she worked on the draft, she looked with satisfaction on her ability to provide for her burgeoning family instead of merely creating expense, and had no compunction about throwing in some Gothic visions-and-specters tricks at the end, for that's what she heard was the fashion. No ladylike blushes were in evidence as she roped in friends, families and miscellaneous well-wishers to help secure the best possible terms for the book's sale. Her business dealings were brisker and sharper than in her maiden days (knowing, no doubt, that faint heart ne'er won fair contract). Instead of feeling violated by mixed-to-poor reviews when the novel actually appeared, she observed with workmanlike pride that receipts doubled and tripled the figures for her previous efforts, no slouches for sales themselves. The capital engendered bought a little housed dubbed Camilla Cottage and provided the d'Arblay family with at least a temporary refuge from the hurlyburly of fortune.

The cautionary note of Camilla is that no one has the right to be financially passive, even if she possesses the best ideals and intentions. While in law a woman may not have had rights to administer her own income, she could find herself in deep water very quickly if she remained modestly and decoratively ignorant.

When we push on to the Victorian age, must we again be subjected to the humiliation of a mere hack, a constructor of potboilers, tackle issues vital to the health and growth of her fellow women, blazon forth new ways of seeing, warn of pitfalls awaiting the less observant, and generally call into question our own satisfaction with paid-in-copies purity? What a relief it is to open the autobiography of Mrs. Margaret Oliphant and find her explicitly declaring herself a literary nonentity because she'd written too often and too copiously. (After all, she'd only had six children to provide for.) Being such a nobody, it didn't matter if she put down all her real feelings, such as anger at her husband for putting the family to the expense of a "therapeutic" trip to Italy when he knew (she discovered later from his doctor) that his tuberculosis would be fatal regardless, leaving her stranded in Florence with three children under ten. This humble openness of expression results in a document heartrending in the clarity with which it depicts the welter of conflicting and debilitating emotions an active woman in the Victorian age must have suffered under.

Mrs. Oliphant found herself saddled with the roles of both Breadwinner and Angel in the House, her responsibilities further augmented by the addition of her alcoholic brother and his children to keep. She thought that the resulting literary production, stemming from "an intellect so alert that one wondered she ever fell asleep" in J.M. Barrie's words, ruined her as a creative being. "No one will ever mention me in the same breath with George Eliot," she tells us in her autobiography. "And that is just." I intend to make a liar out of Mrs. Oliphant by declaring that her novel Hester does stand alongside The Mill on the Floss -- and that Hester does not come off the loser by comparison. Both books document the struggle of a young woman to cope with a society that wishes her to keep quiet and ornamental. But while Maggie Tolliver's ambitions are pretty much confined to thwarting various blonde and well-bonneted relations, Hester Vernon's rebellion is focused on the desire to work, to create independence for herself and her feckless mother rather than accept the dollops of charity that her cousin, Miss Catherine Vernon the spinster CEO of the Vernon Bank (quite an ambitious and autonomous old body herself) measures carefully out. Hester's subsequent instability of purpose and miscarriage of judgment stem from the early thwarting of her desire to work and the attempt of all around her to keep her in the role of porcelain figurine. Catherine and Hester are brought together after long, fruitless antagonism by a financial crisis and the need to preserve the fair name of the Vernon Bank against the malfeasance of Catherine's cossetted heir Harry. The realities of a newly industrialized and brutalizingly harsh economy are at the core of Oliphant's work, both in this book and elsewhere.

They could hardly be absent, for they inhabited the shabby parlor where she wrote: the helpless brother, the boy-children to be educated to compete in the new economy, the girl-children to be fortified and taught self-sufficiency to withstand adversity. In the wake of tragedy after tragedy, her pen never failed her. It was the only resource she could count on to protect herself and the people that she loved, the only constant source of strength in an unrelentingly cruel world. It seems almost criminal that this staff of life should come to be viewed by its possessor as second-rate, or that self-reproaches should have been uttered on account of lack of care in editing and hastiness in accepting terms of publication. Her husband wrote to an editor in 1855 on the occasion of a child's death, "Our poor little darling left us as we feared... Mrs. Oliphant would beg as a favour that her article on Charles Dickens which was to have appeared in the magazine for March might now be arranged for April." One may feel ashamed for not having written one night because a PBS special on Flannery O'Connor was on, and it broke up the evening too much.

By this point, perhaps we are feeling a little bruised with the evidence of the horsepower, iconoclasm, generosity and loyalty displayed by our mercenary foremothers. If we move into our own century, herculean in its tawdriness, perhaps we will be lucky enough to meet with something more sordid and commercial. Here we see a woman who actually worked in that soul-destroying brothel, the advertising industry, and who made her name writing cheap mysteries before bolting back to the safety of academia after she'd made her pile. We can look forward to some dirt, here in the life of that energetic and frowsy hack Dorothy Leigh Sayers.

With a vicarage childhood and an Oxford education , Miss Sayers certainly does not have the excuse that she did not know what she was doing or could do no better when she took up residence in Grub Street. Before she set out to conquer the genre of detective fiction, her poetry and essays had been published in a number of Oxford-related journals and had been well received by the select souls who saw them. Her parents might have supported her in the comfortable, albeit solidly bourgeois and aunt-ridden, vicarage while she continued to patter down her scholarly path. However, the young woman was impatient of restraint and did not feel comfortable as a dependent. So she fled to the wide open spaces of London, took a copy writing job and formulated a scandalously successful gentleman-detective, Lord Peter Wimsey.

James Brabazon, author of the official Sayers biography authorized by her son (conceived out of wedlock and never publicly avowed during her lifetime), skims rather lightly over her position at the agency, assuring us that she found office life congenial and entered into the word play involved in writing advertising copy easily. Nothing is said of the difficulties of "playing" upon compulsion, under deadline, and against one's own standards of taste. He goes so far as to state that when she was able to abandon the job for full-time writing, the change might have caused difficulties for her:

She may not have realized, in releasing herself from the slavery of an office job, that in some ways the slavery of the freelance is worse. When there are no office hours, there is no time off. Office-goers may hate Mondays, but only because they have had a free Saturday and Sunday.

When, pray tell, was Sayers supposed to have written her novels if not during that supposed "time off?"

Sayers was not only a working woman writer, but the creator of one of the finest portraits of a working woman writer, that of Harriet Vane, the long-besought object of Lord Peter's desire. It was with a tremendous lift of heart that I first encountered this practioner of my own profession after having dealt with such fictional literatæ as Meredith's Diana of the Crossways and Madame de Staël's Corinne, noble and excruciatingly exemplary ladies both. Miss Vane feels cranky when people offer her story ideas at cocktail parties, "you know, the sort of thing people bring out and say, 'I've often thought of doing it myself, if I could only find time to sit down and write it.' I gather that sitting down is all that is necessary for producing masterpieces," as Lord Peter observes in Strong Poison with a perception whose source is not far to seek.

Harriet is one of us. Sayers tells us that Harriet set out to earn her living by fiction and succeeded. Her success, mirroring that of her creator, grows in the course of the novels and compasses the means to travel, employ a secretary, keep her own little car. The romantic elements of the Wimsey-Vane courtship-cum-fencing match cannot obscure Harriet's independent victories in both the marketplace and the city of the mind. Sayers later said that she invented Harriet as a means to marry Peter off and thereby "dispose" of him, but found at the end of the novel that she could invent no way for her character to accept him that would not compromise Harriet's self-respect. When was the last time you heard an author trouble herself about a fictional person's amour-propre? Consciously or unconsciously, Sayers had discovered that Harriet had a use. From the frightened, bitter and defiant accused of Strong Poison to the observant and passionate scholar of Gaudy Night, Harriet pulls herself up inch by tenacious inch, despite Wimsey's persistent attempts to place her in harness. The conclusion of Gaudy Night in all its glory can then arrive as a triumphant meeting of equals.

I think that Carolyn Heilbrun, in her otherwise splendid Writing A Woman's Life has got the wrong end of the stick on Harriet Vane's married life. Heilbrun characterizes Harriet as being "killed off," reduced to a mere domestic entity while Peter potters around unchanged. I believe that Sayers did not write about Harriet more because Harriet simply continued to write herself, and it is notoriously difficult to turn literary production into passably realistic and engaging story lines. Harriet was not the detective in the family. She was the detective story writer, disclaiming ability and insisting on her amateur status throughout the investigations she undertook.

Moreover, at that point Sayers had purchased herself space and leisure to do other things, scholarly things more precious for the waiting, and her mind was never fully focused on detective fiction again. She was tired of being plagued with Wimsey and Wimsey fans. If you have written even one novel, you may know the ghastly tea-party-of-the-damned feeling you can get towards the end, when it seems that all your characters have trapped you on a settee and immobilized you with glutinous pastries, to jabber repetitive inanities at you through the centuries. There is nothing you want to do more than hit your denouement and escape. That Sayers stuck with even the super-charming Wimsey for twelve volumes shows almost inhuman stoicism.

For Harriet, the quest for her "proper job" -- that is, the ability to carry on her work wisely and successfully after an embarrassingly ill-suited affair and a notorious trial for murder followed by a period of dreary imbalance punctuated by Peter's pro-nuptial nagging -- was accomplished at the conclusion of Gaudy Night. This was the masterwork that Sayers designed to declare her concerns and values. That achieved, there is really nothing for Harriet to do but continue on with her job. We see her in a much later story titled "Talboys," "writing for dear life in the sitting-room" while her youngest son pesters her to play. She negotiates for ten more minutes of writing time.

"What's ten minutes, Mummy?"
"Look darling, here's the clock. When this long hand gets to that, that'll be ten minutes."

Now, I cannot write in the same room with a full-grown person, whom I am pretty well sure will not yank a cat's tail or swallow small sharp objects if left unattended. To see Harriet with one eye on a book and one eye on a baby without seeming particularly tense about either, is simultaneously mindboggling and comforting to those of us who wonder if we can have children without being torn apart, creatively speaking, by them. (Although we must bear in mind that Sayers personally chose to have her child brought up outside her own home, even when she gained a husband and could do it respectably.)

Though tending towards a stodgy conservatism in matters theological and political, Sayers' commitment to feminism never wavered. When asked by a male acquaintance how she had made her male characters talk when alone together "so naturally," she replied,

I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it might likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also. ("Are Women Human?")

For having given us a book as sure and fine and full of integrity as Gaudy Night, we could forgive Dorothy Sayers even if she had "killed off" her heroine afterwards. And for giving us that heroine, not a Corinne burning with incandescent vision and destined to die young, but "noted detective authoress" Harriet Vane, with her pleasant deep voice and excellent taste in clothes, good-humored, honorable and audacious, for this we must be forever in Sayers' debt.

Between the conception of this essay and its execution, I lost my job. It was a job I liked as well as I can like anything that gets me out of bed before ten, and I performed my duties to the satisfaction of all around me. I was given notice not for incompetence or insolence, but because the large and highly successful corporation that my workgroup formed a part of decided to institute a major budget-cutting and personnel "downsizing" program, quite coincidentally a short time after a regulatory commission granted the corporation the right to keep a larger portion of its profits. Writing for a living suddenly seemed a whole lot less precarious.

For when one lives by wit, one is not dependent on the whims of such august bodies as corporations or government agencies. Agents and publishers may interfere, and the buying public may seem criminally stupid at times, but essentially you are counting on a spectrum of people with widely divergent tastes and beliefs to find enough value in your work to buy it and keep you solvent. If you are writing forcefully and honestly and widely and wisely enough, you will find your niche and make your sum.

"Self-promotion" is not a synonym for prostitution. There is nothing sullying in petitioning for the opportunities that your talents require to expand. Asking "will it be bought?" has enable me to look at my work more concretely, not more cynically. My standards could rise infinitely or hover amorphous as tulle -- fog or fabric -- when I fancied I only had myself to please.

It is a commonplace that women took to writing novels because novels were a new and "bastard" form when women first entered the field in earnest. Women have also done well in the genres, where they do not fall under the purview of what Ursula K. LeGuin calls the literary "canoneers." All of the writers examined in this essay worked in a number of forms -- poetry, plays, novels, short stories, essays, reviews, translations, portraits, memoirs, anything they could lay their hands to. They showed remarkable solidarity with and generosity towards their peers, and were to a woman known to their friends and families as charming, fun and interesting people. There does not seem to be anything shameful or disfiguring in following their example.

My zeal to hurl as many manuscripts as possible at the unsuspecting world has increased tenfold. I can imagine gaining wants and desires with specific applications of drive and luck, rather than in the cloud-cuckoo-land of When I Am A Famous Writer. I have less doubts in the wee hours. In short, looking to live off my wit hasn't made me any less hoity toity, but I hoit my toit with more energy these days.

To put it more objectively, purity of motive is no protection against poorness of work. The active seeking of tangible results in a profession famed for the few-and-far-betweenness of its rewards can spur a novice on, give her cause to hone her strengths and exploit her weaknesses more thoroughly. She can feel that there is a way out of the tangle of distractions and discouragements that interfere with getting her stories down on paper. (Never mind that the distractions and discouragements she encounters in full-time midwifery to the Muses will equal or surpass anything she ever found in the world of "gainful employment.") She need not continue drudging at tasks that she is inherently unsuited to while genuine gifts languish and dull with disuse. To employ her talents to lift her over the barriers of routine labor can almost overwhelm her with exhilaration, the sensation of space and flight being so acute.

Failure is possible but not inevitable. The world does not uniformly shun talent. If talent can feed its hungers, then it will gorge there as happily as it does at the smorgasbord of kitsch. And it must be remembered that the world does sometimes hunger for truth, beauty and justice as much as for sensation, formula and wish-fulfillment, and that the artist is better prepared than phone company advertisements to offer these things.

In looking for her living, Mrs. Aphra Behn, shady lady, widow and incorrigible intriguer, only changed forever Western drama, poetry and discourse by introducing a female sensibility unencumbered by the need to flatter the man or men who provided her bed and board. She forced open to her gender a profession that would come to be known as the most welcoming to women of all the arts. The wave of abolitionist prose she set into motion with Oroonoko would carry forth across the Atlantic to American women who, after they finished liberating "the wretched African," began to think about liberating themselves. Casting about for a way to augment a dwindling purse, she began inventing the modern novel. Nice work if you can get it.