Starving Artists by Dave Jaffe Part One

                    Starving Artists Part One


    "Oh, you're a starving artist are you?" a sarcastic woman once said when I told her what I did. "How interesting." This woman aimed to hurt me and she did. Yet her comment wasn't far off-base. Most Canadian artists don't starve to death. Yet they don't make much money either.
     In 2014, 136,000 Canadians called themselves 'artists'. Their median income totalled as little less than $22,000 a year. The median income for all Canadians came in far higher at a little less than $38,000 annually.
     So most artists are or were poor. And when they are poor they're travelling a well-worn path. Take David Herbert Richard Lawrence for example. Known in the history books as D.H. Lawrence, he wrote some of the great English novels of the early 20th century. 'The Rainbow', 'Women In Love' and 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' are or used to be part of many English literature courses.
    Yet Lawrence never saw much money from these novels or from his poetry, criticism or travelogues. This son of a coal miner and a middle class mother, became a teacher in the English midlands. He wrote his first novel 'The White Peacock' before the First World War. In 1912 he eloped with the German wife of one of his former teachers. Lawrence then left teaching but never made much money after this.
    "'The Rainbow' and 'Women In Love'," says a biographical sketch of Lawrence, "were completed in 1915 and 1916." Yet "The Rainbow''s sexual frankness enraged the British government and no publisher would handle 'Women In Love'. Lawrence and his wife, the former Frieda von Richtoffen faced persecution in wartime England. The authorities had a particular disike to Frieda von Richtoffen because her brother was the famous German flying ace Baron von Richtoffen, who was shooting down English pilots in the skies above France during the First World War.
    The First World War ended in 1918. Four years later Lawrence and Frieda left their country England and travelled through large parts of the world. They had little money and Lawrence's last novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', was banned because of its frank language and its love making scenes. Lawrence died in 1929 from tubercolosis at the age of 44.
     "In his writing," wrote Frieda von Richtoffen," Lawrence gave us the splendour of living. It was a heroic and immeasurable gift." Yet from his mid-twenties on, Lawrence lived in poverty and exile. While he lived below the poverty level so did many other gifted, creative artists. But it's also fair to say that before 1945 most people in the world were also poor.