A wintry tale
Francis King
Like Yeats's Byzantium, Britain is no country for old men (or women). Nowhere is this more obvious than in the sphere of the novel. Writers of non-fiction — poets, biographers, historians — are usually allowed to continue to swagger down the centre of the literary highway when they are septuagenarians or even octogenarians. Writers of fiction are all too often elbowed aside into the gutter.
There is not, of course, anything new in the media preferring to lavish attention on the glamorous, young and untested, rather than on the musty, old and tried. Henry Green declared that he would write no more novels after his 1952 Doting had been so often reviewed briefly at the bottom of the page, whereas in the past he had always been certain of a lead. But over the years this infatuation with youth has become more and more extreme.
The most common criticism of the elderly novelist — either openly voiced or snidely conveyed by such epithets as `senior', 'veteran', 'old-fashioned' — is of being out of touch. Many years ago I was talking to Victor Gollancz about his most distinguished, if not his most lucrative, author, Ivy Compton-Burnett. 'Dear old Ivy,' he sighed. 'I'm afraid she's rather out of touch. Her world is the world of Henry James.' But who is now more out of touch with all that is relevant to our lives at the deepest level: Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henry James, or the authors of those now forgotten or half-forgotten Gollancz novels indicting the social and political ills of the time? Compton-Burnett and James also refute the commonly held belief that, like the abilities of athletes, singers and dancers, the creative powers of novelists must inevitably deteriorate once they are past their physical prime.
Two other constant criticisms of well- established novelists are either that they have failed to continue to produce books exactly like those with which they first achieved fame or that they have gone on doing so ad infinitum. This was demonstrat- ed to me, only a few days ago, at a dinner- party. A young woman writer complained of Doris Lessing that she had been `idiotic' in abandoning realistic narrative for science fiction. Not long after, this same woman was complaining of Anita Brookner that 'she just goes on rewriting the same dreary book over and over again'. She seemed totally unaware of any inconsisten- cy.
But underpinning all these criticisms is the flinty rock of the fact that, like the last government, the elderly novelist is all too often thought to have, quite simply, been around too long. Near the end of his life, I left a literary party at the same time as Charles Morgan, whom I hardly knew. As we walked across Hyde Park together, he suddenly said to me, 'You belong to the younger generation. Perhaps you can answer a question for me. Once, as a writer, I could do nothing wrong. Now I seem unable to do anything right. What has happened?' With the knowledge that I have now, I should have answered, 'All that has happened is that you've grown old.' As it was, I floundered in embarrassment.
In the last six months I have heard of no fewer than seven well-established novelists who have either had difficulty in placing their most recent books or been totally unable to do so. Since to draw attention to the decline in the value of a stock is to make it decline even faster, they would not, I feel sure, wish me to name them. At almost every meeting of the committee of the Royal Literary Fund, I am astounded by the plea of some such well-established writer for help. Shall I, I ask myself, even- tually find myself in the same predicament? The proceedings of the Royal Literary Fund are, of course, confidential; but since Margaret Drabble has revealed in her biog- raphy of Angus Wilson that, near the close of his life, the Fund came to his aid, I can cite him as a tragic instance. Unlike Penelope Fitzgerald, Sybille Bedford and Brian Moore — writers who have been writing as well as they ever did in their eighth decades — there is no doubt that Wilson showed a decline in his later work. But in indicating this decline review- ers were markedly cruel. Many reviewers showed a similar cruelty to L. P. Hartley, taking (like T. C. Worsley in a review which drove Hartley to threaten an action for libel) a sadistic pleasure in flaying a man near the end both of his life and of his tether. When I suggested to Worsley that he might have been more merciful, his uncompromising reply was that-The review- er's prime obligation was not to mercy but to the truth. I forbore to point out that, despite this declaration, his novel reviews often showed more mercy than truth when dealing with young writers of far less accomplishment and achievement. The situation is no different today: all too often the obstreperousness of the newly acquired puppy elicits a smile and a pat, the settled habits of the decrepit family pet a kick.
When ageing writers become discour- aged, they should think of Barbara Pym. They should also think of Robert Liddell, Jocelyn Brooke and C. H. B. Kitchin. Liddell was, like Barbara Pym, summarily ejected from the Cape list; Jocelyn Brooke, once so popular, died without having placed his last two books; Kitchin was abandoned by Secker and Warburg and had difficulty in finding another publisher for what proved to be one of his finest novels, The Book of Lift. None of these three writers has yet achieved the populari- ty of Pym, but each has a small, devoted band of admirers, of the kind far more important to the survival of a writer than his transitory appearance on school syllabuses or among the Books of the Year.
Liddell, Kitchin and Brooke, though sometimes depressed, all struck me as being essentially confident of the value of their work and therefore of the certainty that it would go on finding readers, even if not in large numbers, into the future. That seemed to satisfy them. But it did not satisfy Olivia Manning. Renamed by me `Olivia Moaning', she would constantly complain to me that her books had come to receive much less notice than those of younger writers far inferior to her. 'But, Olivia,' I told her, 'your books are going to be even more successful after you're dead.' `Yes, I know that,' she replied angrily, 'but I want it now!'
Most elderly novelists want it now. But in the present climate of increasingly perfunc- tory reviews, marked by oblique disdain or patronisingly lukewarm approbation, of exclusion from BBC arts programmes, British Council lecture tours, literary festi- vals, newspaper interviews and bookshop displays, and of a general feeling that it is time for them to pull down the shutters on a less and less frequented shop, it is highly unlikely that they will get it.
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