Business is the lone God of our Congress. Let a man open a pie factory or begin to mold cement blocks and he becomes Privileged. His property is taxed as a sacred, eternal entity. His costs are deductible. Only the profit he pockets is thought of by our Congress as income; his every barrel of flour or bag of cement is capital. But let a man create books or serials in his head and Congress sees him as a social inferior, a mere wage earner.
The accumulation of intellectual property for a book may require three-quarters of a life. Its sale, for a year or two, may be considerable. After that one book—or after two or three—an author may return to pittances. What he has written may become the mental and emotional capital of his countrymen, or of the world, for generations. Yet Congress does not deem it equal to pies or bricks and sometimes skims away in a year the whole capital of an author—as if it were but annual income. America bounteously provides for the makers of bricks and pies; it short-changes book-makers and the winners of Nobel Prizes. Indeed, such is the unconscious hostility of the mob toward the fruits of intelligence that, not long ago, a group of representatives, commercial he-whores and contumelious morons, endeavored to do away with copyright altogether on the grounds that what a man thought and wrote down, or what he felt and painted, belonged free of charge to the whole people: noneconomic, since it was Art. To such men as these, only junk fabricators, gadgeteers, tram operators, pop bottlers and the like are entitled to the best profit for their contribution to life. History will note the fact when history writes how American avarice held in open contempt all culture and all thought, decerebrated itself and so died headless.
As a man about to perish I could not but think bitterly of this. Had my labors, my work, my business, my investment of skill and thought and sweat been deemed equivalent, by my government, to the activities of a manufacturer of flea powder, I could have left the people I loved far better off.
A relative complaint, under the circumstances and in my case. But when I thought of the "successful" writers I knew who had been taxed into poverty for their genius, and when I thought of the potbellied yuts I'd met who turned up fortunes in sewer pipes, cemetery lots and toilet paper, my sentiments toward the people and their politicians were rude....
They would get along—Karen and Ricky and Ricky's mother and those who would now depend on them. My death might even accelerate the sale of my books for a while. There might be movie sales. Plays. Posthumous editions. Anthologies. If I had led Ricky to be careless and extravagant, she would nonetheless be capable, under necessity, of good management. The hundred-year-old house in the country would continue to fend off the winters and to doze through the summers in its great lawns. Karen would attend Swarthmore. If Ricky wished, she could work again; she was well enough now. Marry again.
The thought jarred and I considered that sensation. Marry? Of course she would. She should. What is wickeder than inhibiting sentiment, than memory turned prison?
I am not a jealous man and even my envies are of an obscure sort. The momentary shock came from the fact that, never before, had I thought of Ricky as married to another man. Romantic about another man—perhaps. (Hadn't I said, in fun and also meaning it, that if, in our seventies, she were to swear she had been faithful, I would regard it as sad? No man desires a wanton for a wife. But a great many men love their wives in such a fashion as to consider them people—human, curious, imaginative, subject to sensations of staleness, capable of discretion, and not intended to be—through every hour of all that is a life—belled, balled and chained, hobbled and kept like cattle. An academic point—now. We might never see those seventies—note the envisaged smiles—or hear the candlelit confidence.) She would marry again. Karen would marry. The bonds I'd bought, the real estate, the insurance I'd purchased down the years—flush or borrowing—would provide a measure of security.
Come war? Come vast inflation? Costly sickness?
There is no security on our planet. There is no way, by money, wills, investments, legal instruments, or other means, to carry even the smallest wish or the most minimal responsibility beyond crematory and urn. Such is the aching truth—the irony we try to avoid. No one understands it better than I—but I had done what I could to avoid it, too. Done it—in spite of a national tax philosophy that evaluates authorship as a meaner trade than pawnbroking.
In all America are only five thousand of us who make our whole livelihood by writing, anyway. To Congress—a scattered, inconsequential number—vote-voiceless and therefore impotent. It is a figure—five thousand in one hundred and fifty millions—which the aspiring writer should bear in mind. And some are communists, or leftists, besides—which, in the miserable eyes of Congress these days, no doubt makes our whole profession suspect. Freedom is sick. Freedom is dying.