That is an easy question to answer. The most difficult question is: Will you give me a copy of your book and inscribe it to me?
The reason the question is difficult is that you want to say yes, but you must discipline yourself to say no. Buy it. Then I'll inscribe it.
This insight came to me as I finished inscribing a copy of David Sunshine to my dentist. Good fellow. Well read. Proud to have a novelist as a patient. I handed him the book and both of us, all smiles, went out to the reception room where the friendly lady behind the desk removed $400 from my plastic vault.
It was then and there I realized that next time my friend the dentist asked for a free book, I was bound to reply, "Sure, if you don't charge me for this appointment."
It would be a fair trade, after all. He spent years in dental school and subsequent practice which allowed him to unblushingly charge a fast four hundred for a filling. I spent a very long time in school and longer writing and getting my novel published. He has expenses of course, but then so do I. Having expenses is really nothing more than a vital sign.
George Bernard Shaw, in his incarnation as a music critic, pointed out that the Arts are like no other profession. An audience, pleased with a performer, thinks nothing of shouting "Encore!" And expecting more. If they were pleased by their butcher's most recent sirloin would they expect a free pot roast next time they visited his shop?
I once sat at table with a well-known and popular visual artist who did quick sketches of everyone there to our delight and never did any of us even think of paying him (though we have all saved and still treasure our little napkin art as we would a small jewel.
Some years ago, in my incarnation as a producer, a colleague and I did all the pre-production work on a Broadway show, built around a particularly beloved entertainer who backed out at the last minute. My right hand man and I huddled together over a cognac bottle and asked ourselves if there is any other business, this side of swindling, where so much money is laid out, so much work done, so much time spent to no avail? If we had chosen to open a bakery, say, we would have gone out on a limb all right, but surely neither of us would have strayed quite so far out.
(Certainly, there is legal recourse to be had in certain cases -- very few-- but every work of creative and/or performing art requires a commitment so heavy and work so long and hard that only the disappointment when it goes wrong can have the same weight and heft.)
A musical arranger friend of mine (a Grammy-winner) has exactly the same problem when he is asked to give and sign his latest CD. He thinks people just think that players play. After all, what fun it is to dance. And sing. And tell stories. And draw. And sculpt. And paint. And recite. And to pretend to be someone else.
Some years ago the actor Laurence Luckinbill scandalized the Sunday Times Arts Section readership by suggesting that the American Theatre is subsidized, all right. By actors. His audacity in suggesting that artists were entitled to houses and cars and children was more than the New York brunch bunch could bear. And the outrage they expressed in their letters to the editor was white hot.
And here's where liberals get mighty Tea Partyish. People in the arts have to paddle their own canoes, damn them. Hell, Robert Redford gets 21 million a picture. Peter Max and Stephen King are rich, aren't they? If you want to gamble, you had better be prepared to lose. After all, many are called, but few are chosen.
Do these erstwhile liberals have a point?
How many rich poets do you know?
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