Free Loose Living by Frank Moorhouse

quotations which happened to have got the quotation wrong.
    I gave evidence against them at the European Court of Artistic Disgrace, which won me no friends at the school. But too many fiction writers are implying greater learning than they in fact have.
    Some become skilful at throwing the shadow of scholarship without having the prerequisite scholarly qualifications. I have dedicated myself to uncovering these rogues.
    For my efforts, I am seen as a sneak. People leave the staff lounge when I enter. Conversations are hastily concluded.
    I have also campaigned to have painters who use quotations in their paintings from works they have not studied dragged before the European Court of Artistic Disgrace.
    The most abject of all of those at the school are the disgraced Marxist writers and former Marxist academicswho have been thrown out of universities in Europe and Eastern Europe.
    If you want to know what happened to the Marxist scholars of the world, they came to teach creative writing at the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus of Rouen.
    Not one voluntarily resigned from their posts for being catastrophically wrong.
    I believe we are to receive another wave from the UK where they are being weeded out in their hundreds.
    Another colleague, a reviewer, has been put on trial for implying a confident background knowledge of the subject of the book under review when, in fact, all her knowledge came from the single book she was reviewing.
    I gave evidence against her. I established the case after insinuating myself as a friend and confidant and then using a series of trick questions together with a study of her personal library, and of her library borrowings over fifteen years.
    Another case in which I am gathering evidence is against a novelist whose so-called imaginary characters in his latest book are simply thinly disguised facets of the author’s self.
    I am also laying traps for those novelists who have tried to jump on the post-modern bandwagon by writing novels about writing novels while, in their hearts, being secret modernists. They will receive heavy sentences.
    At the school the staff are opinionated beyond belief. We all have affectations—men wear capes, carry caneswith silver tops, wear strange hats and sport elaborately waxed moustaches. One prays each morning before a statue of Edgar Allan Poe, and so on.
    Women staff wear jodhpurs and carry riding crops or wear men’s tuxedos.
    We are all hypersensitive, we name-drop endlessly, we talk of contracts, of advances, of film deals, all of which never eventuate.
    We exaggerate our sales figures. We talk of our titles as if they were published recently when in fact they were published thirty years ago.
    We treat support staff abominably.
    We abuse publishers’ editors for having introduced errors and for having emasculated what would have otherwise been gutsy masterpieces.
    We all court the admiration and approval of the callow student body. We praise their rotten poems and give inordinate time and intellectually dressed-up analysis to their stupid short stories.
    We are forever disparaging other writers, we search their work for plagiarisms, we gossip about poor sales and ‘burnout’.
    We denigrate commercialism in the successful writers and lack of sales among the literary writers. We resent all interviews and public attention given to other writers.
    We talk of ‘closed circles’ and elites. We rush to attack others for elitism, for the one thing we are not, is an elite. Of that, the staff at the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus will never be accused.
    I have never been among such poseurs, yet it is strangely comforting.
    Because the pay is so bad (no one in their right mind would ever work at the school), I live in a miserable attic room in the Quartier Maroc and cook on a smelly oil stove, washing out my linen and hosiery in dishes from which I and the cat also eat.
    I hang out my clothing to dry above my miserable single bed and I barely have the