Heartless

[poliphilo]

There's a speech in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art- reported in his diaries (I haven't seen or read the play) where Humphrey Carpenter tells the elderly Britten and Auden that the public have had enough of their music and poetry and are waiting for them to die so that their respective oeuvres can be squared up and tidied away.

How heartless, how true.

The lives of artists can be very straggly. They produce juvenilia, then masterpieces- followed by a long period of decline. They outstay their welcome, keep on adding substandard appendices to the collected works, rendering the legacy untidy, compromising their former greatness, making final appearance after final appearance. Auden's a goodish case in point. His best years came to an end round about the mid-century- and the later verse- though never less than interesting- is no longer the work of a great poet (if Auden was ever a great poet which I sometimes doubt).

Bennett is very good at speaking out loud the thoughts most of us have and then shamefacedly censor. This has been a bumper year for celebrity deaths. Can we honestly say that some of those deaths haven't come as a bit of a relief?

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Writers, physicists, squash players...

On the other hand, Stephen Potter defined "Miltoning" as the art of not writing Paradise Lost until you are fifty.

Then there are the late starters, who perhaps fall into a different category, having spent much of their lives doing something else (either a career or bringing up a family): Lucy M. Boston, Gwen Raverat, and more lately Diana Athill. They tend to be female, I suppose, because on the whole women have less time for writing.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

But you could argue that Milton's best work is the work he did in his youth.

I keep going back to Comus and Lycidas, but Paradise Lost defeats me.

Again 50 isn't exactly old- or at least doesn't seem so from where I'm sitting.

Mary Wesley is another novelist who didn't get going until late in life. Perhaps the creative longevity of these writers has something to do with not having used up all their material as youngsters.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Well, 50 is fairly old in a 17thC context, I suppose? (Though Hobbes was in his sixties when he produced Leviathan.) I share your love of JM's early work especially the two you just mentioned, but PL is pretty damn impressive too, in my opinion (and of course I'm not alone).

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I should have another go at scaling Paradise Lost. I don't like being defeated by major works of Eng Lit.