As far as I remember Jean-Jacques wanted to make a living by being a musician and "copying piano sheets" and didn't want to depend on how well his books were selling. The reason being that had he started living off his books he would have felt compelled to write what his readers wanted to read, not what he really thought. At least that's what I remember from reading his Confessions.
It was the same with Czeslaw Milosz (poet Nobel laureate) - he wrote that, if he tried to live off his writing, he'd had to resort to writing commercial novels, which for him was dreadful. He chose to be a Slavic literature professor at Berkeley instead, and wrote poetry in spare time.
As far as I remember Jean-Jacques wanted to make a living by being a musician and "copying piano sheets" and didn't want to depend on how well his books were selling. The reason being that had he started living off his books he would have felt compelled to write what his readers wanted to read, not what he really thought. At least that's what I remember from reading his Confessions.
reply