The Tomb of the Unknown Artist

Looking over the history of literature I am conscious that what I am looking over is a history of what was commissioned, completed, presented, acclaimed, copied, preserved in substance and in memory.

That foundation for literary history is not wrong when we think of literature as what people read.

However, it is more questionable when we think of it as what was written, or what writers tried to write, or of such writing as a record or reflection of the times, for which purpose that basis is a lot less complete and satisfying. Many tried to create, but due to lack of opportunity never finished what they began, or due to censorship in one form or another created and saw their works suppressed before they could make such a mark--and we can only wonder at what might have been created had the circumstances in which they worked been just a little more supportive or free.

Few acknowledge this, or the politics behind it, but to his credit Upton Sinclair does so in Mammonart. As he remarks, "our recognized and successful artists" were generally those who "served their masters gladly and freely." Those who did not "paid the penalty by a life of conflict and exile," while if those writers had the misfortune of being "poor and friendless" they did not even reach the point at which they were persecuted and exiled--or find compensation in "the gratitude of posterity." Rather "their dream-children died unborn, and were buried, along with their parents, in graves unknown," one of which may have had for an epitaph "'Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest.'"

Today some of those poor and friendless are submitting their work to the slush piles, and pieces running in places like the Guardian, to their discredit, gloat over how their dream-children will be buried in unknown graves.