When suffering leads to great art, apologies can be misplaced
They’ll be busting out the Hippocrene in the first circle of hell this week, as the Virtuous Pagans gather to congratulate Ovid on the lifting of his sentence of exile. Dante’s Divine Comedy lists Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Homer and Ovid’s friend and fellow poet, Horace, among the denizens of Limbo, so it should be quite a party, even if the remission of his punishment comes two millennia too late to console the author of the Metamorphoses, the Ars Amatoria and the Tristia.
Ovid, you recall, was banished by the Emperor Augustus in AD8 to Tomis on the Black Sea, at the far reaches of the Roman Empire. There, he devoted his last years to writing elegiac poetry and letters bemoaning his fate and pleading to be allowed to return home. He died in exile in AD17, and to mark the 2,000th anniversary of his demise Rome city council has decided to “repair the serious wrong suffered by Ovid by revoking the order with which the emperor sent him into exile in Tomis”.
This is not the first time that Italy’s city fathers have attempted to make amends for an ancient wrong. In 2008, a motion by the city council of Florence to “rehabilitate” Dante Alighieri, exiled after becoming embroiled in Guelph infighting, turned sour when some councillors opposed the measure, arguing that Dante’s “sublime poetic dimension” was “intimately linked” to his suffering in exile.
The relationship between suffering and creativity is an intriguing one, and this week it gained official recognition in the form of a report commissioned by Arts Council England, snappily titled Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction. Here, it is revealed that “all but the bestselling authors are unable to make a living from their writing”. For every JK Rowling, Hilary Mantel or Ian Mcewan, there are hundreds of poor drudges with average annual earnings of £11,000. The only people who can afford to write literary fiction these days, it concludes, are those who don’t have to live by the pen.
In the Arts Council’s list of recommendations, it acknowledges that “the requirement to demonstrate public engagement has proven difficult for some writers to negotiate”, apparently noticing for the first time that writing is a solitary occupation. Organisations such as the Royal Literary Fund, of which I am a beneficiary, are well aware of the problem and have been quietly supporting writers for centuries.
Still, there remains the troubling relationship between inspiration and misery. For an established writer suddenly to fall into disfavour is shattering. Like Ovid and Dante, the 20th-century novelists Molly Keane and Barbara Pym found themselves exiled after successful careers by the vagaries of fashion, until rehabilitated by careful readers who noticed the excellence of their writing.
These days, the burgeoning creative-writing industry encourages new writers to feel that every narrative has its own validity. Which is good – sort of. But the only advice I’ve ever found useful as a writer was on the gloomy side of bleak. The artist Sarah Raphael, who died young in 2001, once told her father, the novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael, that she found it hard to work because of a difficult love affair. “Sarah, in the mornings we work and in the afternoons we are in love,” said her father.
Love, money, exile – in the end, the only answer is to keep on working.