ROYAL LITERARY FUND: NOT BY BREAD ALONE

LONDON —  In these days of state aid, bureaucratically administered and painfully obtained, there is an English group that for nearly 200 years has discreetly helped out writers in their hours (years) of need. “Our purpose,” says Arthur Crook, president of the Royal Literary Fund, “is to alleviate hardship.”

The point of the Fund is not to give someone a grant for a year off to write a novel; other funds do that. “We are a relieving charity for authors who have fallen on very bad times,” Crook says.

The Fund helped Coleridge in 1796 and the exiled Chateaubriand in 1799. Thomas Love Peacock and James Boswell’s daughter were tided over; Henry James wrote to the Fund on behalf of Mrs. Charles Dickens (Dickens had sat on the Fund’s committee). James Joyce, who described his occupation as schoolteacher and his income as none; Joseph Conrad; D. H. Lawrence; “Ouida,” Dylan Thomas and Jean Rhys were also beneficiaries.

Privacy is guaranteed. “The whole operation is carried out in as friendly a way as possible,” writes Janet Adam Smith, Arthur Crook’s predecessor as president, in a magazine article.

“I can say so for I have been on both sides of the transaction,” she adds. When her husband, writer and anthologist Michael Roberts, died in 1948, a dependent’s grant from the Fund got her through resettling the family and finding a job. “It got me over the hump. And I was told that if in the future I were in distress, I was to apply again on my own account as an author. Happily I didn’t need to--but this assurance was as good for the morale as the grant itself.”

As a former editor of the Times of London Literary Supplement, Crook has had close experience with needy writers. So have the authors and publishers on the Fund’s committee, which meets monthly to discuss grants and which prudently includes as members a judge, a banker and an accountant.

Cases may include an aging and out-of-fashion author facing dwindling royalties and diminished output, a writer whose publisher has gone broke, or pensioners facing the cold (heating grants were boosted during last year’s fearsome winter). The Fund was founded in 1790 in reaction to the death of a distinguished scholar in debtors’ prison. While writers no longer face prison, there are many who are in need.

According to a survey made in 1981 by the Society of Authors, the average annual income of more than 100 British novelists sampled was $2,400, which was less than one-third of the average national wage. Of 6,086 writers who signed up for Public Lending Rights (a royalty based on the number of times books are borrowed from public libraries), more than half received less than $150 in 1984. The number of full-time authors in Britain has dropped by half in the last decade and by two-thirds since 1966.

The income of the Royal Literary Fund, $273,000 according to its 1984-85 annual report, is derived from donations, subscriptions (the Queen gives an annual subscription), investments and royalties. The most important source of royalty income is Winnie the Pooh.

Pooh Properties Trust has assigned royalties from A. A. Milne’s work, which brought in $121,500 in 1984-85. An equal or perhaps greater sum will soon be coming in from Somerset Maugham. The money will come from copyrights Maugham left to Alan Searle, Maugham’s companion and secretary, with the proviso that they pass to the Royal Literary Fund on Searle’s death; he died in August, 1985.

Another, but relatively minor, source of income is from sales of the Fund’s archives, which are now available on microfilm and have been bought by several universities, including Yale. The microfilming had enabled the Fund’s small staff to discourage scholars’ visits to their cramped offices off Fleet Street, which are decorated by a statue of the founder and two soapy busts of unidentified literary figures.

“If scholars write to us we can in fact refer them to the microfilm now,” Arthur Cross says. The published archive, compiled by Nigel Cross, starts with the Fund’s incorporation in 1790 and ends, for reasons of confidentiality, in 1918 with case No. 3060. It includes letters from Thackeray and Trollope asking for help for other writers. “You will find no mass of records superior in interest and importance to the archives of the Royal Literary Fund,” Benjamin Disraeli said at the organization’s annual dinner in 1853.

The founder of the Fund was a clergyman named David Williams. In 1787 the respected classicist Floyer Sydenham died in debtors’ prison for having neglected to pay a food bill, and Williams quickly took out an advertisement to announce the opening of a fund in Sydenham’s memory. Subscriptions trickled in and the Fund held its first meeting on May 18, 1790, in the Prince of Wales coffee house on Conduit street.

Many of the writers whom the Royal Literary Fund has helped get over the hump make donations when they are back on their feet; Chateaubriand was among the first to do so.

Still, a number of writers do not make it back, and these the Fund takes care of for life. The advice given by Anthony Trollope, for many years the Fund’s treasurer, in his autobiography still holds. Speaking of his affection for the Fund, he added, “The experience I have acquired by being active in its cause forbids me to advise any young man or woman to enter boldly on a literary career in search of bread.”