.
| Hearsay: |
Robert McCrum has some harsh words for the Depends and liver spot set: you may not know it, but you’re done. Good art, says he, like short term memory and genital engorgement, is difficult to sustain into one’s 70s and 80s.
Ageing great writers recognise the inevitable no more than the over-optimistic late starter. Leo Tolstoy wrote “I Cannot Be Silent” at the age of 79. Resurrection, his last novel of any consequence, appeared in 1900 when he was 72. Three score years and 10 still seems to retain its biblical magic, though not, strangely, in art: Picasso, and Matisse painted memorably deep into their 80s.
But now that 80 is the new 70, you might think that literary endeavour would flourish among octogenarians. The evidence is not encouraging. Yes, Goethe completed Faust at 81, but here in Britain, both Graham Greene and William Golding published new, and inferior, books in their 80s.
Doris Lessing won the Nobel prize for literature in 2007, aged 87, and published The Cleft in 2008. But even her most ardent fans would agree that she’ll be remembered for The Grass Is Singing, and The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, when she was 43.
It’s a measure of the desperate condition of the British book trade that no publisher is going to tell a big-name writer that he or she would be better off leaving their latest typescript in the bottom drawer.
January 2006
December
2005
November
2005
October
2005
September
2005
August
2005
July
2005
June
2005
May
2005
April
2005
March
2005
February
2005
January
2005
December
2004
November
2004
October
2004
September
2004
August
2004
July
2004
June
2004
May
2004
April
2004
March
2004
February
2004
January
2004
December
2003
November
2003
October
2003
September
2003
August
2003
Bookninja © Copyright
The opinions expressed on this site are those of individual participants
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the site owners,
organizers, or other participants.
[powered by WordPress.]
November 10th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
This goes together with the bit about the new/old Nabakov not being up to snuff, right? Why don’t you take all those old guys out and shoot them, while burying their unfinished work with them?
But remember the New Yorker cartoon last year of the gamblng bikini-clad babes who were saying: “So 80’s the new 60.” We gray panthers will keep fighting.
Mary (who celebrated another birthday on Sunday.)
November 10th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
And what of the benefits of historical and human perspective, the fruits of long experience? Surely all older writers are incapable of discerning what needs (and needs not) be said, or of carrying a thought elegantly to its conclusion. Pshaw! Curses on the arrogance of the not yet old.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Oops! Insert “not” before incapable. I must be entering my dotage.
November 10th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Reminds me of a brochure I saw in Huntsville once, advertising the region as a paradise “unmatched by few.”
November 10th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
I guess I’d agree with McCrum, but I point to Saramago. If I’m not mistaken, he didn’t even publish until he was 60.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
How does this say anything about the “desperate condition of the British book trade?” Has there ever been an era, in any trade, when distributors refused to sell a sub-par product that was guaranteed to make money and which could not be refunded?
Another counter-example to add to Saramago: whether or not you agree with his views on history, you have to admit that Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence” is a mighty impressive book for a 95 year-old.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Oops, according to the all-mighty wikipedia, Saramago published his first book when he was 25, and he was in his mid-fifties when he started to attract attention outside of Portugal.