Of Granta’s fabled list of 20 Best of Young British Novelists, 1983, six are gone, including our most princely satirist, Martin Amis. We’re all approaching birthdays where the cake is too small for the candles. Some of us are wounded: Salman Rushdie by an attacker’s knife, Julian Barnes lives with blood cancer, others with the fatal hurt of being forgotten.
But what’s the likely fate of those of us who are surviving – for now? Do readers still love us? When Barnes announced that he was signing off because of illness, was he also intuiting that the younger generations had heard enough from us old birds and geezers who were young when Sean Connery had dimples, when David Hockney first coloured his hair yellow?
The answer is probably “yes”. But here’s what I believe: contrary to what publishers hope and expect, serious writers don’t think obsessively about readers, or even about sales, royalties and prizes. What we talk to each other about, what we dream of, what we can’t live without is the work itself.
When I endured a terrifying procedure for pancreatic cancer in 2019 and contemplated the likelihood of dying in Addenbrooke’s hospital, I spent wide-awake nights mourning not only the people I love and the places that are precious to me, but the end of storytelling. Ideas for stories have peopled my life since the age of 12, when I wrote my first play at boarding school. My existence devoid of these would definitely feel what Amis once called “thin”.
From interviews Hockney gave towards the end of his 88 years, when yellow had turned to white, we gleaned a fine understanding of the elderly artist’s unflagging commitment to a day-by-day engagement with his art. The simplicity of the Hockney philosophy – “I wake up. And I go to work” – enabled him to rival Picasso with the vastness and variety of his output.
He lived and breathed painting. The idea that he would suddenly stop doing this he would surely have thought plain stupid, and I’m with him on that. Though there can be a falling-off in the work of artists and writers as they age, this is by no means inevitable; the reasons for keeping on are not too hard to find.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
