Catherine Czerkawska
The new literary elite

I've taken a bit of time out from my own writing to read the new report from the Scottish Literature Working Panel (you can find it as a download on the Scottish Government website) in some detail and found my name at the end of it as 'contributor and advisor'. I must have responded to a request for input at some time, but what that was completely escapes me – and I haven't been consulted since. The online community of writers has been much exercised by this report. The debate still rages fast and furious and with good reason. You can't publish something like this in the very small pond which is literary Scotland without making large waves.
     On a personal level, I find a good deal in the report to make me uneasy and I'm still trying to analyse why. Partly it's because the whole thing smacks of the kind of exclusivity that – in a small country where many writers (and publishers) know each other very well – is likely to promote far more discord than harmony. Predictably, it already has. The report proposes, for example, a National Academy, with a limited membership of the literary cream, 'no more than around 70 members, if it is to retain prestige and influence'. These would 'be invited on the basis of national and international reputation'. The government seems intent on pushing ahead with this but it will certainly be open to accusations of elitism. Who, we wonder, will be doing the inviting? Yet another 'working panel'? And who chooses the choosers? Will the Academy turn out to be – as so many of us fear – a gathering of the usual suspects, or, as the report prefers to call them, 'our best writers'?
     The report, incidentally, bandies about that woolly word 'best' as though there is an absolute consensus. There isn’t, even among academics, critics and writers. We all have our favourites, the writers we worship. On the other hand, for most of us, there will be writers who, although lauded to the skies, we privately believe are wearing a version of the king's new clothes and have been for years.
     From the panel's own list of 'best writers' who had been funded by the Arts Council in the past, several of my own favourites, living and dead, are missing. And I note the late great Ian Hamilton Finlay's inclusion with a very wry smile, having a good idea what his response to any invitation to join an 'Academy' might have been, Children's writers, too, are a significant omission as are playwrights, however literary their output. And that, of course, is another major problem with the report. It is content to retain the old narrow demarcations that are no longer fit for purpose. Perhaps it was set up within parameters that made these constraints inevitable. Of course my perceived phony may well be your hero. And that is one of the strengths – the joys even – of literature of all kinds.
     
But there is something else profoundly disturbing about the report. It seems to me to be deeply fogeyish: elderly and conservative in tone. The more I read, the more depressed I became. (And let’s face it, I am no longer a young writer). Two aspects of the report in particular reflect this. One is the recommendation to limit the numbers of writers' bursaries, so that – once more – those 'best' and presumably older writers can be given more money while young writers are mostly excluded. The other is the curious recommendation that Live Literature Scotland is paying an event fee (£150) which is 'unnecessarily high' for new writers but 'too low to attract successful writers'.
     Again, there is a curious imprecision in vocabulary here. Successful? I know many quite successful writers, myself included, for whom £150 + travel seems like a reasonable reward for a short visit, even though it can take up a whole day, depending on how far you have to travel. But I'm damned if I can see why a new writer who is deemed to be good enough to be invited to speak, should be expected to work for less, while the scant handful of financially successful writers out there should be subsidised to the tune of £300-£400.
     There is more, much more, and I think it has to do with the overall tone of the report, which seems firmly fixed in a past that has already gone, never to return. Those on the working party seem unaware of the sweeping changes that have come upon us or, if aware of them, vaguely resistant to them, and I don’t just mean the use of the word 'digital' which crops up now and again in the report. They shy away from it all the time. It is as if they have taken a collective decision that the elephant in the corner is so frightening that they would be better to ignore it altogether.
     The more I reread the report, the more it seems to me that it has almost nothing of value to say to our younger writers – often working across and experimenting with many different media. In fact the report makes a point of stating that 'cross arts or interdisciplinary work has no intrinsic claim to be any more innovatory, risk taking or exciting than one within a traditional form or format'. Which may well be true. But given the propensity of our younger writers to wish to explore exactly these options, to single out interdisciplinary work in this way seems like a retrograde step.
     What would the pronouncements of an 'Academy' of the great and the good have to say to them? And might it not be the case that many of those who would do most good would not be invited to join, while at least some of those who would be invited to join might well decline the offer on principle? I suspect that younger writers, interesting, iconoclastic, exciting – along with the more cutting edge and experimental publishers – will, quite simply, refuse to submit themselves to the kind of constraints proposed and will remove themselves from the equation.
     Instead, the truly creative young will do what young musicians do, tap into the wonderful potential of digital media, and the 'long tail' of niche marketing to get their work out there, and leave the oldies to get on with wrangling among themselves about elites and outsiders, about cliques and political pressures. It seems to me that the whole report is tinkering around the edges of a system, of a set of elitist and narrow perceptions about what constitutes 'literature' that is already changing and evolving with dazzling speed.
     On balance, I find those changes exhilarating. I also find, these days, that the more I can manage to work with talented and committed young people, the more exciting all these prospects and possibilities become. But with a few notable exceptions, the established Scottish literary scene – certainly as it seems to be represented on this committee – is peculiarly resistant to these changes. I think we are well on the way to a chasm between two sets of creative people so wide and deep that no well-meaning government intervention will ever manage to bridge it.

Catherine Czerkawska is a playwright, novelist and poet