Too Old or Too Young?

Zoe Williams has a witty crack on the Guardian books blog at both the cult of youth and the supremacy of memoir over fiction in present-day publishing.

Cult of Youth? Pff!

An unnamed editor and Arrow publishing director Kate Elton are to be congratulated for flying in the face of the cult of youth and, respectively, rescuing from the slush pile and publishing the memoir of 96-year-old Harry Bernstein. And hooray for Bernstein, I say.

Here's what Bernstein has to say:

If I had not lived until I was 90, I would not have been able to write this book. It just could not have been done even when I was 10 years younger. I wasn't ready. God knows what other potentials lurk in other people, if we could only keep them alive well into their 90s.

Interestingly, the International Herald Tribune reports: Because Bernstein's book arrived without a cover letter from an agent, Elton said, "it had none of the overhyped pitch that you sometimes get with these things, and I read it without knowing what I was getting at all" which makes one wonder if agent hype sometimes gets in the way of a book's chances with jaded or cynical publishers.

Mind you, this book is a memoir, the current golden egg laying goose of publishers. Bernstein, a lifelong writer who has only now achieved his breakthrough, tells us:

I realized ... why I had failed in writing novels. Because I turned away from personal experience and depended on imagination.

I know what he means: that had he confronted his personal experience via fiction, then his fiction might have been more successful, but the statement is unfortunately in danger of feeding into the current prejudice against fiction or 'imagination' in favour of memoir and 'fact'.

Thanks to Grumpy Old Bookman for the link.

Too much experience?

Others have seen the prevalence of new writers on this year's Booker shortlist as evidence of the judges flying in the face of fashion and hype, and concentrating for once on talent alone. But here's John Ezard, reporting on Kiran Desai's win in today's Guardian:

...the publishing market treats novelists as promotable contenders with their first and second books, mature talents by their third, and burned out with their fourth and subsequent titles. This year's passed-over favourite, The Night Watch, was a fourth novel [and from the only established author on the list].

Novelists and wealth

Nice to see that a generous new prize, the EDS Dylan Thomas Award, has been established for new novelists, and only a Bitch would complain that a maximum age requirement of 30 is pandering to the Cult of Youth: presumably older new novelists are assumed to be less poor. Nick Laird, husband of the confessedly well-off Zadie Smith gives us a giggle, though. One of the six finalists interviewed last week in The Independent (the editor-in-chief of which was one of the judges), Laird tells us that the award would enable him to give up reviewing and concentrate on writing full time. He makes a living out of reviewing? Good god!

Loss of Marbles

Last week The Telegraph, no less, treated us to a juicy instance of literary ageism.

Reporting on the Booker long list, Arts correspondent Nigel Reynolds tells us: ...the most remarkable is Nadine Gordimer.

And why is she so remarkable? Is it because, as he says, her long life has been devoted to writing about the moral and psychological traumas of her native South Africa? Apparently not. The most remarkable thing, it seems, is the fact that, at 82, she is almost certainly the oldest writer ever to make it into the count-off for the prize.

Perhaps, one thinks, he means merely that this is remarkable in view of the ageism rife in the contemporary literary world. But no: it would seem he is parroting the sentiment he quotes later, expressed by 'a Booker insider': Obviously it's remarkable that Nadine Gordimer is on the list at 82, and that he's absorbing without question the implication that writers at such an age should have lost their marbles, rather than have accumulated the kind of wisdom we ought to envy.

Sophistry and Youth

Lionel Shriver gave us a laugh in last Friday's Guardian, and I'm still laughing.

She's fed up of looking so young for her age, she says (alongside a pic of herself I'd already seen in a women's mag makeover), and before we all start getting resentful, she says, well, there's a big disadvantage: people think you're less experienced and stupider than you are.

That'll be the people her own age (49), then - or even younger, but looking their age and still old enough to feel contempt for youth.

Hang on a sec, though. Aren't they the people who've all been pensioned off (or rather shrugged off without pensions) in this Blairite world of 'modernisation' and The Next New Thing, and a contempt for the past or its lessons and an outright horror of anyone associated with it, ie anyone over 40?

Well, she's not actually that fed up about it, she admits: she's rather dreading starting to crumble like everyone else, she's vain really, and, look, dead honest about it.

Yeah, right.

Is It Cos I Is An Old Git (ie Over 25)?

Adrian at The Art of Fiction draws our scathing attention to UEA's New Writing Ventures. It's mis-named, as so many of these schemes are, because, as he points out, it's not primarily about writing itself. The focus, as usual nowadays, is the status and real-life identity of the author. As opposed to the National Short Story contest, this time it's 'emerging authors' being courted, those who have not had a 'dedicated publication of their work, ie a novel or a collection'. You must give a short account of your 'writing life' (!), and strictly no pen names or c/o addresses allowed. (Don't these people know that good fiction writers are constitutionally incapable of sticking to facts and are the world's experts in creating alter egos?) And it's a development project: does this mean your work can be too good to qualify, ie you wouldn't benefit from the nice little year-long mentoring scheme set up with the funding, and which of course is the real focus of it all? This scheme makes a point of avoiding the current trend for ageism - for once there's no upper age limit - but as always the stress is on the wearying, drearying obsession with new faces and new names. What about those increasingly numerous writers who've published one or two novels and then been dropped because publishers are hooked on the marketing notion of The Next New Thing - who ever sets out to help them? It's now accepted publishing wisdom that a novel by a new author is easier to sell to bookshops than one by a second- or third-time author, so every exciting new writer given a leg-up by these schemes is a mid-list has-been in the making - it's only a matter of time.

In my last post I commented on the trend towards the familiar, and so this might seem like a contradiction, but it's not. We get bored easily, but we don't want real change, we're not interested in real literary development, and in the age of the cult of youth and personality we are frankly frightened of the kind of change that overtakes dewy young faces as the years go by. We want a new brand of the same product: tales of youth adorned with pics of authors with sulky pouts and slides in their hair and little-girl cardigans. (Apologies to Gwendoline Riley, but then I never said I wasn't a bitch; now there's an author who managed to publish a very short novel - see 'Odds and Ends' in the Art of Fiction - and I suspect it wasn't simply on the strength of her prose, good as it is.)

But so it goes, to quote the great man (now there's a supple subversive literary mind inside an old shell).

Everyone's at it, no one can avoid it: the esteemed Ra Page ain't above it all, indeed his whole publishing venture seemed founded on the practice of eschewing established practitioners of the short story in favour of persuading established practitioners of other forms - poets and playwrights - to give it a go. Anything to be able to say you're offering something new in the way of authorship as opposed to simply writing.