ART AND MONEY: CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, November 23, 1997

Page: E4

Section: Books

Thus, I take a gruesome interest in the details of writers' poverty. Even thinking of George Gissing's ``New Grub Street'' puts me in a cold sweat. So there was no question of not reading Paul Auster's recently published memoir, ``Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure'' (Holt, $25). Because I admire Auster's novels, it distressed me to find the present book rife with a self-congratulatory, call-me-crazy attitude toward work and money. It is his impression that: ``Most writers lead double lives. They earn good money at legitimate professions and carve out time for their writing as best they can.'' He summons the usual elite cast to prove this point: T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, et al. But Auster -- call him reckless; he does -- wasn't cut out for that life: ``It's not that I wasn't willing to work,'' he confides, ``but the idea of punching a clock at some nine-to-five job left me cold, utterly devoid of enthusiasm.'' Hard to believe, I know, but apparently true.

Although he has sometimes been strapped for cash, particularly after the birth of his son, Auster's appreciation for money, for its absence, and for what it means in material rather than symbolic terms is, throughout the book, remarkably cool. ``Money, of course, is never just money,'' he explains in the beginning, in the grand psychoanalytic manner that traditionally assumes a comfortable income. ``It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.''

Money was the great subject of 19th-century Western literature, as sex is patently the subject of our own. It dominates the work of Dickens and Trollope, the two novelists who have robbed me of prosperity by absorbing, between them, hundreds of man-hours, crucial periods during which I might otherwise have been out in the world making my mark. Still, all is not wasted, for I am able to tell you what perhaps you had not suspected: that Dickens and Trollope take very different views of money. The former (like those other admirable bluster bags, Thomas Carlyle and William Cobbett) saw it as embodying all that is evil. Money represents cruel and soulless domination; it is abstract and antithetical to human relationships and to a virtuous, humane society. Because he is a great artist, Dickens is able to convey this unnuanced opinion as a terrible vision.

Trollope wouldn't think of such a thing. Money pervades his novels, but he is a good deal more subtle on the subject than Dickens -- as he is in everything: too subtle by half, his detractors would say. I have just succumbed to rereading ``The Small House at Allington'' in a splendid new edition published by Everyman's Library, which completes that press's six-volume republication of the Barchester series. (A mere $23 gets you 740 acid-free, cream-wove pages in a sewn, full-cloth binding complete with ribbon marker. The genuine article.) In these pages Trollope goes about what he always goes about, setting up a masterfully complex moral calculus. Money and honor, prosperity and virtue, passion and sense: All are variables, in flux, subject to mutation; all exert influence, but none is antithetical to the others. Trollope enters them into his ever more elaborate equation and works it out to the smallest tittle and jot. In the end we have -- life! But it is life dissected by a master of casuistry whose object is to show us the ineffable difference between self-interest properly and improperly understood. In all this he is a friend to money -- of which a reasonable amount, adjusted to station in life, he sees, frankly, to be virtue's reward.

And so do I -- sometimes. But then, of course, sometimes not. After reading ``The Book Shop'' (Mariner, $10), I think this measured view is one that is shared by its author, Penelope Fitzgerald. This is a brilliant little book -- no, it is perfect. Its 123 pages concern Florence Green, a widow who decides to open a bookshop in a village in England in 1959. She finds herself confronted with an array of hostile forces, including nature and the supernatural, the will to power of a grande dame of village culture, and the deadly pincers of traditional business practices and new business realities -- two incommensurate theologies of the market.

Underlying it all, of course, are the antagonistic requirements of art and money. There are, on one hand, the books Florence hopes to sell and there are, on the other, the ``Books of the Books -- the Ledger, Repeat Orders, Purchases, Sales Returns, Petty Cash. Still blank, with untouched double columns, these unloved books menaced the silent commonwealth on the shelves.'' One could sum the novel up as being an illustration of England's post-World War II decline into incivility, but its greatness lies in the concreteness of the little story it tells and its resonance with larger themes.

When I am groping about for something good to read, I scarcely ever reach for a treatise on money. Still, in my hand I hold ``Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money'' by James Buchan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25). This is a history and literary appraisal of the subject, lucid, arresting, and witty from start to finish. Buchan, who was once a correspondent for the Financial Times, is preeminently a novelist, and writes about money with a novelist's brio and sensitivity to moral odor. His approach is historical, biographical, and anecdotal. Marx and Milken have their place, but so also does his great-great-grandfather John Buchan, who was ruined in the historic crash of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878. The disaster, movingly described here, is perfectly Dickensian. It was brought about by the malfeasance of its directors, outwardly ``sound men, of a certain age, severe and whiskery of face and sober of dress, pillars of their kirks and Masonic Lodges.'' From this calamity, he argues, came the vision of his grandfather, John Buchan the novelist (1875-1940), that civilization is `` `a line, a thread, a sheet of glass'; beyond it was the primordial bedlam.'' Buchan wrote that in 1902; which is to say, before its truth became as obvious as it was by 1918, or 1932, or 1945, or now. So, it seems, do the tribulations of money produce the insights of art.