The alternative career fantasies of writers would make an interesting study: James Joyce dreaming of becoming the agent for Irish tweeds in Trieste, Thomas Mann musing that he would have made a good banker, Samuel Beckett contemplating a career as a pilot. 'I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot,' Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy at the age of 29, having just published More Pricks than Kicks. 'I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It was not as though I wanted to write them.' The spurs to fantasy in his case were failure and rejection, which he suffered on a grand scale - one of the reasons his biography makes such consoling reading for struggling writers.

LRB 9 February 2006 | PDF Download