Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

is the investment indeed? A brief against this view has been made searingly well in the lives of writers, poets, and composers, from Samuel Johnson through Melville and Dos Passos; from Blake through Emily Dickinson and Randall Jarrell; from Mozart through Schumann and Erik Satie. Anyone who has read a biography of such a person knows the categories of investment by heart, but rather than approach them historically, consider the hypothetical example of what these days would be considered a wildly successful writer, who has just sold his book for a million dollars. Just imagine; for making up a story and tossing a ream of typing paper in a box at an editor in a cubicle in a skyscraper, you get a check for a million dollars. Why would such a creature need sympathy from, for example, his college classmate, a lawyer for the EPA, who pulls in a hundred thousand dollars a year?

But look closely. It took the creature ten years to write the book. That means they’re even. But not quite, because, if they live in, let us say, New York, the creature is going to pay the top federal, state, and city tax rates on his earnings (income averaging having vanished long ago), in addition to the unincorporated business tax and both his and the employer’s share of the Social Security tax. Without a steady income the creature (who writes as a profession, not a hobby) cannot possibly get or keep a mortgage, so in addition to forgoing a long-term escalator ride on equity, he forgoes a mortgage deduction as well. Nor can he build equity in claiming more than one year’s maximum retirement plan deductions—if he is able, absent an income stream, to have a retirement plan at all. All things considered, he will be left with an average, over a comparable decade (during which he completely depleted his savings), of about forty-five thousand a year, whereas his friend the lawyer, including what he may earn from money invested over the same period, will be left with an average of approximately seventy-five thousand (a lower adjusted gross income as a result of his deductions, a much lower tax rate from all jurisdictions, and no unincorporated business tax or employer’s share of Social Security).

When it comes time for the creature to send his children to college (if he can afford to have children) the college will look at the assets off of which he attempts to live—at 5 percent, the $450,000 he has put away, for example, will yield $22,500 before taxes annually—and declare that the family is too wealthy for a scholarship. By the same token, unless he is a screenwriter or holds another job, he will never be eligible for unemployment, and the assets that are his life preserver will bar him from welfare until he depletes them entirely. And this not exactly glorious profile is that of someone who has been able to collect a million dollars for his book, something that has always been rare and is even much less likely these days after the economic rationalization (relatively speaking) of publishing. The writers who make up the vast majority of those devoted to the profession will have no such luck with advances, and all the figures above are in their regard, I am afraid, almost purely hypothetical.

The investment is real. It often consists of years of work without compensation, living in or near poverty, ineligibility for aid, an unstable family life, and then going public with one’s deepest beliefs and fragile emotions only to have them savaged by critics who practice a blood sport for the entertainment of commuters on the 5:06 or someone relaxing on a beach. The investment is in sacrificing the ability to get a mortgage or sometimes even an apartment: try telling a renting agent that you’re a writer. A half a lifetime ago, my oldest friend, even then a leading photographer, went with me to a comida on the Upper West Side, where, at the end of a meal I was able to pay my share and retain two dollars for my wallet. “How much money do you carry?” he asked, amazed. I told him—this was in the late seventies—that I usually had five to seven dollars on me, which I thought was plenty. (Really, five was the goal, and the extra two dollars made me feel like John Paul Getty.) “How much do you carry?” I asked in return. His answer was, “A couple of hundred.” He had an American Express card, too, something that I looked upon like the chimps in 2001 gazing upon their mysterious plinth. And for a thirty-year-old writer, I was doing quite well.

Add to these elemental conditions the fervor of those who would abolish copyright, and the effect would be to reduce drastically what a publisher would pay an author because the publisher would be subject to immediate competing editions or downloads of any even vaguely successful book. (The truncation of copyright term, rather than pure abolition, would have commensurate effects, as would—in reverse—its extension.) Thus, the result of copyright abolition (or, by degrees, further limitation) would be to emphasize secrecy and speed in bringing out an edition, the power of marketing and promotion, and the means of distribution—the emphasis upon which, except for the first, has been a growing problem in publishing if only for its detrimental influence on the quality and integrity of manuscripts and their preparation, the corrosion of subject matter into the rust of nonsense or gossip, and the elevation of topicality and marketing. Even now in publishing, “celebrity” trumps everything.

But these problems would go nuclear in the absence of copyright. The world of letters would be vastly diminished, and what remained would become fairly unrecognizable. One of the many consequences would be the virtual disappearance of the profession of writing other than its migration into the academy, think tanks, or various other corporate bodies, where the cadre of writers would find themselves beholden to various types of