Back in the early sixties, when I first started out, insolvency spelt glamour. It was OK to be broke – more than OK, since money was well-known to be the super-foe of books. It was Mammon v. the Muses: take your pick. In those days, if a writer owned up to caring about money, he was instantly branded a dud. ‘He’s got a what? A mortgage? Well, I have to say I always had my doubts. I mean, his line-breaks did seem a bit arbitrary.‘ The avowed aim was to treat money rather as money seemed likely to treat us: with altitudinous contempt.

There was, then, a near-priestly kind of romance in the idea that a high-purposed literary career would be profitless, at least in terms of cash. Here was the Thorny Way, the way of deprivation. And for a period, I went along with this, nose in the air. At the same time, though, I knew I could handle only so much deprivation. That painting of the dead Chatterton sprawled on his pallet never made me want to be like him. Nor, come to that, did I want to be like Keats and Shelley. And the then-recent cult of Dylan Thomas left me cold. Thomas’s whipped-dog act when he was cadging the price of his next drink seemed horribly demeaning. And look at the way he carried on when he had swallowed his next drink: all that intoning-from-above, that bardic blethering. He too was like a priest. He seemed to think the world owed him a living.

With attitudes like these, I was clearly in something of a fix. On the one hand, it was contemptible to have a mortgage; on the other, a fellow ought to be able to pay for the next round. What did that leave? It left the Cobbled Way, the way of compromise. And my compromise was to start up a small poetry magazine. How better to reconcile the importunities of art and commerce?