Over the years I have made it my hobby to learn the day jobs of important authors. Many are unsurprising: teachers, professors, lawyers, public men. (David Bentley Hart writes in praise of Goethe, who supported his early endeavors by practicing law, on page 47. Meanwhile, Joseph Epstein looks at our Bull Moose author–president on page 58.) But some important men of letters or literary genius—and it is usually men, as women did not typically hold careers outside the home at the time these men lived—spent years of their lives doing something tedious and yet familiar to many of us: corporate work.
It is widely known that Dickens was made to work in a boot polish factory as a boy, which doubtless influenced his writing on the condition of the poor. Perhaps an echo of Raymond Chandler’s decade as a rollicking oil executive might be heard in the gunslinger life of his most famous creation, the private detective Philip Marlowe. But one must adopt a wider interpretative lens if one is to guess what influence a long career in property and casualty insurance had on the work of Wallace Stevens.
Insurance, in fact, has produced more than one great literary genius—setting aside Tom Clancy, who spent a decade selling insurance before writing The Hunt for Red October. (For Peter Hitchens on the atomic age, see page 19.) Franz Kafka famously spent his days in the office of a Prague worker’s compensation insurance firm. Readers are typically less surprised to learn that he hated it. The most widely read translator of Thucydides, an Englishman named Richard Crawley, published his complete edition of that work in 1874; the next year, in 1875, he took a position as a director of a life insurance company and spent the next twenty years there until he died.
But my personal favorite profession for litterateurs is banking. Again, it is no secret that T. S. Eliot was employed for years as a clerk at Lloyds Bank (he was thought by his superiors to have the stuff of a future branch manager) before resigning his position as the bank’s Head of Intelligence to become Faber’s poetry editor. P. G. Wodehouse’s time in the service of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank’s London office was perhaps too short and ignominious (two years, replete with comic errors) to count in the bankers’ favor. Likewise, Herman Melville’s two adolescent years at the New York State Bank may or may not have had a formative impact on his literary work (For Terry Eagleton on Joseph Conrad, another seafaring writer, see page 61), nor were the six months James Joyce toiled in the Italian correspondence department of a private bank in Rome fondly remembered by that author (for Peter Howarth on Joyce’s biographer, see page 42; for Joyce and confession, see Peter George Flynn on page 16). Banks also produced the nineteenth-century American philosopher Alexander Bryan Johnson; Thomas Bulfinch, the author of Bulfinch’s Mythology; and, most amusing of all, Kenneth Grahame, the third-most powerful man at the Bank of England upon his retirement in 1908, four months before he published The Wind in the Willows.
Working stiffs, take heart.
