Spectators watching David Beckham at Wembley — or Andrew Flintoff in the West Indies — are starkly aware that a clock is ticking down on their careers. In a decade, these sportsmen will have become memories and/or commentators. Fans of literary titans, though, have no such nagging sense of perishability. Writing is a career that can continue as long as brain-life survives. Having seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, we know that if necessary a book can be dictated with an eyelid.
So reports from Colombia that Gabriel García Márquez has signalled there will be no more books come as a disappointment to admirers. Even at 82, the Nobel prize winner might, by the actuarial standards of publishing, have been good for a few more stories; Diana Athill has just been shortlisted for a prize in her 91st year. We simply don’t expect writers to retire, although Márquez is not alone in pensioning himself off; Gore Vidal has told interviewers that his most recent book will be the last, and Philip Roth hints that the next novel may book-end his shelf.
The reason that great writers contemplate stopping, when they could carry on, is a matter of quality control. Literary biographers almost routinely acknowledge a dropping off in the last part of the catalogue, and the longevity made possible by modern medicine has merely made this dip in the graph potentially steeper. An ageing author is haunted by the admonitory examples of those who set down their pens long before they laid down their lives — EM Forster, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin — and others who were perhaps unwise to keep feeding the libraries: the later publications of Graham Greene, abandoned novels anaemically completed, jottings of his dreams, rants about French municipal politics, will rightly perish in posterity’s shredder.
And yet, as a red-hot Greenian, I read each of these senescent weaklings and was pleased to. Because all writers are to some extent reporting on their lives and times, we inevitably want these dispatches to continue as close as possible to the final human experience.
When John Updike died in January, readers were saddened by reports that he had been too weak during the final months to complete a 24th novel, but gladdened by the news that a collection of short stories is due in June. And then came word of an extraordinary bonus book, published in the United States this week.
Endpoint — the title deliberately echoing Midpoint, a 1969 book of verse about middle age — contains a sequence of poems written in the final weeks of Updike’s life, reporting on the diagnosis and futile treatment of his final illness. In this book lies the greatest argument against a writer calling it a day before the night calls him — the unflinching honesty and detail he had applied to chronicling his life here record his last sensations. An exemplary literary career ended with a last great example for Updike, the writer was a captain who stayed on the bridge as the ship went down.
Endpoint will be the 65th of his books to go on my shelves and the short stories, My Father’s Tears, the 66th. But I haven’t given up hope yet of the collection reaching 70 because recent literary history has shown that the death of an author is less a full stop than a semicolon. For example, more printed pages of poetry and fiction by Philip Larkin have appeared since his death than appeared during his lifetime.
This pressure for completism is driven by two different lobbies. Many academics believe that even abandoned projects have some biographical or critical value, and readers will tend to share this feeling: I would love to have Updike’s unfinished novel, almost regardless of its readiness for publication, because reading it would feel like a final letter from a friend. But a less sentimental pressure for the appearance of incomplete texts comes from publishers, who find it increasingly hard to accept that death should remove a commercial asset from the balance sheet.
The adventure novelist Wilbur Smith, perhaps more likely to attract commercial than academic interest posthumously, told me recently that he has destroyed the manuscript of his unpublished first novel to avoid the possibility of it being released after his death. But even death with an empty desk drawer may bring no guarantee of a writer being left in eternal silence. A number of literary estates — most notably, those of Ian Fleming and VC Andrews — have brought in ghosts to keep the shelf lengthening.
So, even if Márquez has written his last book, he will need to be thorough with his instructions to executors to ensure that no new work by him is ever published. Knowing that writing is a profession with no retirement date, publishers and readers are reluctant to let go. —