I turn 84 today. Maybe that’s why I find myself thinking of the decision made by Maurice Gee, who published no adult fiction for his last 16 years. He stopped, as deliberately and absolutely as that.
I also think of Harry Orsman, lexicographer, authority on English as spoken in New Zild, and one of my university tutors at what was then Victoria University of Wellington. Harry was talking to us one afternoon about Chaucer’s language and sources. He mentioned his own tutor, from the late 1940s it would have been. I can’t recall the guy’s name. But I do remember Harry pausing, smiling affectionately, and saying ”There’s not much left of him now, except a pair of bright blue eyes. But he’s still writing.” I knew instantly that I wouldn’t – couldn’t – forget that tribute.
So there you are. One author who stopped; one who couldn’t. Pause here, to contemplate which category each of us may slip into. I know authors who stopped because they couldn’t face another rejection; others whose health or other outside-world circumstances meant they couldn’t keep going. I sympathise with them all.
Me? I hope to do the same as Harry Orsman’s tutor. But I’ve built a fair chunk of my life around writing for over 40 years now. If I had to stop, I reckon I’d feel empty, purposeless, fearful even.
Oh and also there’s the not very small matter of the cost of living. (Has anyone else’s house contents and car insurances just gone up by 30 percent?) Like a lot of other elderly New Zealanders now, I’m having to keep working well past retirement age.
But obviously I’ll keep writing also because of the pleasure, the sense of satisfaction and achievement it brings. There’s a Roger Hall line to the effect that when you measure your personal contentment, it won’t be based on the acreage of shagpile carpet in your holiday home; it’ll centre on what you’ve made in your life. Writing is making par excellence.
And I want to keep writing to keep sane. Literally sane. Many good people turn to crosswords, Code-Cracker, Wordle etc to hold dementia at bay. All of us in these 2020s cringe at the spectre of dementia; it’s a flip side of lengthening lifespans. Yes, I know ”flip” probably isn’t the most apposite word.
My forward defensive line against such disintegration is writing: the brain connections it demands; the mental discipline; the coherence and framework that shaping a novel or an essay involves. Plus you can’t pay the house contents insurance by filling in crosswords.
I’ll try to keep writing for companionship as well. Not only the companionship of other writers and readers, which matters so much in what’s essentially a solitary occupation, but the sort your characters and subjects bring. I always make friends with the people I assemble for my fiction. I become personally committed to the issues and concepts I may be trying to discuss in non-fiction. I talk to them, at them in the case of the less attractive ones. I get up at the end of a session, feeling I’ve been at a social occasion. I’ve heard myself chatting aloud to one of my protagonists as I walk downtown and other pedestrians cross to the opposite side. We’re told that socialising is a great way to ward off dementia. I socialise all the time with my characters as I write, and as I think about what I’m writing.
I’ve also got physical reasons for wanting to keep going. Writing, like any other pleasure or satisfaction, gets the endorphins skipping. Your body feels good when the lines or sentences are coming. The best moments can bring all the physical benefits of meditation.
And yes, I’m aware of the physical downsides of the trade. These days I make sure to get up every ten minutes, turn the torso, flex the fibres. Too late: my cervical radiculopathy with arthropathy and foraminal narrowing (it sounds better than the plain English of a crook neck) is a job-related problem, even if ACC doesn’t see it that way.
I know there’ll always be unfinished business. I’ll never get some plots, problems, people down in words, no matter how much I want to. When I went full time, too many decades back, I vaguely imagined there would come a time – for some reason I felt it would be a Tuesday afternoon in mid-winter – when I’d have nothing left to write. I’ll tempt fate and say it hasn’t happened yet. Each thing I work on seems to give me still more possible topics for the future.
Yet another bonus of writing is that it’s an activity, a focus that you can take with you well into old age, right up to the end, maybe. I hope that’s the case for me, but I know how presumptuous such a hope can be. A piece of plaque in an artery may come adrift at any moment, somersaulting along till it jams and stops blood flow to heart or brain. I may go face-down, halfway through the best sentence I’ve written that year.
Maybe. But until then I think of Richard Gere in the 1983 film An Officer and a Gentleman. Gere plays an Air Force trainee pilot on an induction course. Partway through, he’s told by the drill sergeant that he’s going to be kicked off. “I got nothing else,” Gere weeps. “I got nothing else.”
I hope I’m not that dependent on my writing. But it remains one of the great joys of my life. I have things to do, things to write before I turn 85.
Mr Hill accepts birthday congratulations emailed to clivedavid.hill@gmail.com
