Hunger

 In Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger one reads the narrative of a starving writer. There is no glamour, just hunger, the attempts to get by with a little money from the pawnbroker or the publisher. The unfortunates of Gissing's New Grub Street are materially better off, pinched for money, getting nowhere, but never uncertain of the next meal. The picture is nearly that which Macaulay gives of life for struggling writers in London when Samuel Johnson was young:

The patronage of the public did not yet furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices paid by booksellers to authors were so low that a man of considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little more than provide for the day which was passing over him. The lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich harvests was over, and the period of famine had begun. All that is squalid and miserable might now be summed up in the word Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow, familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly qualified to decide on the comparative merits of the Common Side in the King's Bench prison and of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him; and they well might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject, their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pairs of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's church, to sleep on a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December, to die in an hospital and to be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been entrusted with embassies to the High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or in Paternoster Row.

Hamsun's narrator has no bailiffs after him, and is imprisoned only has himself admitted to jail for a night on the pretense of having lost his key, to have a lodging for a night. He has occasional luck with publishers. But Macaulay's passage captures the tone.

The edition I read is translated by Sverre Lingstad.  It  is curious as giving twenty pages of preface to the failings of the previous translations into English, and eleven to an appendix giving examples of the lapses of Robert Bly's translation. I have a dim recollection of Nabokov's hard words for translators of Gogol and Tolstoy; but I don't remember his going into such detail.