But the opening paragraph made me bristle slightly: "He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960..."
I'm assuming that's Canadian dollars. So he was living abroad doing what he loved, and presumably not breaking much of a sweat.
No less than ten years later, in the same country, my parents were struggling to bring up two children on my father's wage which was half that amount - and for a 40-hour week of very dangerous, manual work.
Now obviously people aspire to successful, creative careers, and most people don't begrudge them that, especially if they bring a great deal of joy to others. But I notice there is a phenomenon quite common in journalism, esp. regarding artistic figures, a great many of whom were actually born into relatively privileged circumstances, and a number of whom, especially during the sixties, wanted to display their bohemian credentials by living in somewhat spartan conditions. Strangely, however, they can always afford an air fare (decades before budgets airlines), and often inherit a house here or there, and always able to afford recreational drugs.
The image of the impoverished poet has long had journalistic appeal, but it is often a lie. They were actually in a very privileged position compared to 99% of people.
I don't see the need to bristle when the rest of that paragraph dispells any notion of an "impoverished poet": "Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry."
In the liner notes to 1975's The Best of Leonard Cohen, which includes the song, he mentions that the famous blue raincoat to which he refers actually belonged to him, and not someone else:
I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn't go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne's loft in New York City sometime during the early seventies. I wasn't wearing it very much toward the end.
Burberry still is in a lot of ways. Chav culture riffs on it have degraded the public image a bit but a Burberry coat probably won't go for less than a couple grand.
The grant would have been a one-time grant, presumably for the year (or possibly 6 months).
Are you talking about your 1970 father's wage being $1500 per year, or per month, or per pay period?
The bristling at the journalist is fine (after all, $3000/year in 1960 is approximately equivalent to $24,000/year in today's dollars, with which a single man could live quite well in Greece). But let's make sure we're comparing apples to apples.
Canadian minimum wage in 1970 was 1.75/hr, which comes out to well over $3000/year assuming 40/hr weeks. So I'm guessing you're talking per month or other pay period.
I'm talking per year. A historical exchange rate calculator tells me 3000 CAD was approx 1000 GBP in 1960. According to my father, in 1970 he earned 600 GBP per annum. That was before overtime, which employers pretty much made mandatory by paying such a low basic wage.
He was certainly paid way below the average wage at the time, and as the decade progressed he moved on to better paid work. There was no minimum wage in the UK until 1999, so unscrupulous employers would pay what they could get away with. I think it was something of a low point, and unsurprisingly, the 1970s is remembered as a decade of workers' strikes as they demanded better pay. People often moan about it, but I think it improved our circumstances at the time.
Ah ok, that makes sense now. When you wrote "in the same country", I thought you meant in Canada, since that's where Cohen and the grant in question were from. You meant the same country where Cohen stayed for part of the grant, before he went to Greece.
In any case, I sympathize with your complaints about the coverage, since $3000 CAD wasn't a bad deal at all for a single person in 1960, particularly for doing what he loved. Certainly not "scraping by" or having to make sacrifices like your father would have been doing in 1970, with a family to feed. Glad he secured better paying work.
I didn't realize UK only got minimum wage in 1999, wow. It's surprising to me that the US had minimum wage for decades when the UK did not.
But the opening paragraph made me bristle slightly: "He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960..."
I'm assuming that's Canadian dollars. So he was living abroad doing what he loved, and presumably not breaking much of a sweat.
No less than ten years later, in the same country, my parents were struggling to bring up two children on my father's wage which was half that amount - and for a 40-hour week of very dangerous, manual work.
Now obviously people aspire to successful, creative careers, and most people don't begrudge them that, especially if they bring a great deal of joy to others. But I notice there is a phenomenon quite common in journalism, esp. regarding artistic figures, a great many of whom were actually born into relatively privileged circumstances, and a number of whom, especially during the sixties, wanted to display their bohemian credentials by living in somewhat spartan conditions. Strangely, however, they can always afford an air fare (decades before budgets airlines), and often inherit a house here or there, and always able to afford recreational drugs.
The image of the impoverished poet has long had journalistic appeal, but it is often a lie. They were actually in a very privileged position compared to 99% of people.