First Aid for Writers

Abstract

This chapter reflects on the aesthetic commitments of the welfare state through the lens of the Arts Council Literature Department, which emerged belatedly in the mid-1960s. Focusing on the influential scheme of literary ‘first aid’ grants introduced by the poet Cecil Day-Lewis in 1966, it discusses the relatively idealist terms in which the Arts Council envisioned the obligations of writers to a wider public. The third section centres on three emblematic beneficiaries of state funding between 1966 and 1981, the avant-gardists B.S. Johnson and Dambudzo Marechera, who both tended to strain against the ideals of invested institutions, and the Caribbean Artists Movement, which encompassed a more socially inclusive, though no less contested, idea of literature as a collective enterprise.