Friends

I was asked to write an article on the novelist Gwyn Thomas for The Anglo Welsh Review about thirty years ago; the editor wanted a piece on Gwyn Thomas's plays. I did quite a lot of research, read the plays, about five of them for the stage though he wrote others for TV and radio, and wrote about ten pages. Well, you don't get paid much for articles in literary journals - the reward, you see, is in contributing to such prestigious magazines not the filthy lucre they pay you. So I was pleased to get £5 for the piece, better than nothing I thought, and it might lead to bigger things, invitaions to contribute to other even more prestigious journals.
Not so however. And one day when I was in a bookshop in Cardiff there it was, the edition with my article in it.... in the remaindered section!
Clive James wrote a poem on a book being remaindered: "The Book of my Enemy has been Remaindered".

"The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs."

Not bad. But I feel he should have said the book of my friend not my enemy.
Why? Because artists are a bitchy, back-stabbing lot who like nothing better to see their fellow artists skewered, crucified, sacked, remaindered. As a famous Broadway saying goes: "It's not important that I succeed but that my best friend fails."