Proof that the grass really is always greener: Martha Southgate writing about age over at The Millions. “The next time a literary magazine wants to bestow a mantle,” Southgate concludes, “here’s hoping the requirements will be: ‘Applicants must be over 40 and have published at least one book.’”

I’ve long had an uneasy relationship with age. I’ve always been younger than the people I spend time with (I am an only child, I skipped a grade, I graduated early from college) and so have often felt that I’m running to catch up, which maybe in part has led me to feel, unlike Southgate, that youth is – despite what fashion magazines and plastic surgeons might say – actually undervalued. Or rather that it is, rightly or wrongly, valued aesthetically but not intellectually. That it’s possible to diminish any achievement of the young simply by saying “oh, but he’s still young”.

My reaction to The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list last year was to heatedly point out to anyone who would listen that only two of the twenty (Téa Obreht, 24, and Karen Russell, 28) were in their 20s; the remaining eighteen were in their 30s. I understand why, logically, there are likely to be more older writers than younger writers on a list like that (if there’s a statistic to prove or refute that, please let me know), but it seemed a shame that The New Yorker could find only two 20-somethings worthy of inclusion on the list.

I don’t think that 20-somethings write better. I understand very well Southgate’s point that “with any luck, your later novels will be better than your first”. And I will happily admit that there are pieces of mine I wrote just four or five years ago now that seem at best trite, at worst abominable, to me now. But I do worry that perhaps we have a fear of transparency, of visualizing or exposing growth and change, whether of a manuscript or of an author herself. I worry that we think literary heroes are better left on the pedestal, and if their early work shows less promise than their later work, we ought to learn from this, to encourage new writers to wait, possibly indefinitely, for the right time to say something.

If we encourage this, we may indeed end up with fewer, better books by slightly older authors. But what do we lose?

Alain de Botton’s first book, Essays in Love, was written and published when he was in his early 20s. It is arguably not as substantive as his later work, but I’m glad it was published, partly because it gives us a point of reference, an enhanced understanding of de Botton himself, but more because it gives us a sense of immediacy. “Most hot young things,” wites the 36-year-old author William Giraldi, “have nothing of value to say.” Maybe. But it depends on how we define value. I would venture to say that most hot young things probably do have something of value to say about youth, for instance, because they are there, in the thick of it. What they write about it is valuable as a piece of documentation. There is value in writing about something as it happens, just as there is value in waiting and reflecting.

Moreover, writers have a habit of hating their own work. In a 1959 preface to Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh regretted the “rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful”. And no doubt if an author lived forever, he’d consider his early work, published when he was just a hot young thing of 200, to be ill-informed and empty.

I guess as with everything, there’s a balance to be struck.

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1.

I’ve been reading Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People who Can’t be Bothered to Do it. I love Geoff Dyer. I have a literary crush on him in the same way I do Alain de Botton. Maybe even an actual crush; I like his photo on the backs of his books and the way he describes himself, in Tripoli – “grey hair, bulbous nose, scrawny neck…I have often ben disappointed by my appearance, but I have never looked so utterly repulsive as I did then.” And I think it would be hard to read anything he had written and feel truly sad, because at the end of the day (or the book), no matter what the subject matter, there remains the fact of someone living in this world who writes the way he does.

But it is also hard for me to read this book and not, at times, feel sad – or, more precisely (if we’re going to talk about precision), on the edge of sad. There is a preoccupation or flirting with ruin; in Rome he reflects, “I was well on the way to becoming a ruin myself, and that was fine by me.” There is the theme of Keats’ “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”, the Autumnal whiff of decay – the sense of vertigo, of tumbling; of simultaneous helplessness and resistance to something as natural as gravity or seasonal change. In Amsterdam he writes: “I was happy to be here in this chair-intensive café in the autumn of my drug-taking years, with my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, Dazed, who a few weeks later would succumb to one of her periodic bouts of severe depression, and my old friend Amsterdam Dave, whom I had met only the night before and who months later, would himself – like the author of the present memoir – go completely to pieces.” So I read the book with the feeling that I am with him on the edge of a precipice; that the fall will be both inevitable and survivable; that it will nonetheless hurt.

2.

In Libya, though, Dyer visits some ruins – Leptis Magna – and observes that, “ruins do not make you wish that you had seen them earlier, before they were ruins – unless, that is, they have become too ruined. Ruins – antique ruins at least – are what is left when history has moved on. They are no longer at the mercy of history, only of time.” And even in Amsterdam, he realises: “I have just described exactly the place we’re in. I’m already in the place I want to go to.”

3.

I have this preoccupation with nostalgic places, places where memory seems to be a stronger motivator than anything else. Oxford is, to me, very obviously one such place; its essence is not actually (for instance) in the happy days of men in boaters punting down the idle Cherwell in the calm after one war and before another, or the mahogany rooms in stone colleges, the sounds of bells and port being poured – it’s in the memory of these things, or, more specifically, a sort of shared, made up memory of these things, an irrational yearning for them.

The reason I feel at home in nostalgia is that it is the only lasting thing. It is comforting. We are all so very much at the mercy of history and time, and nostalgia is the forever-feeling, the feeling that lasts after a thing goes. It is the only safe space, really. You do not wish you had seen ruins before they were ruins; they have transcended the forces that will eventually render you yourself obsolete. And similarly I do not wish I had seen Oxford at any other time, because I know that Oxford at any other time would be just like it is now – constantly looking backward towards those days: “Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint,” Evelyn Waugh writes in Brideshead Revisited; “Oxford in those days,” observed William Morris some fifty years earlier, “still kept a great deal of its earlier loveliness”.

4.

Then there are places on the uncomfortable edge of nostalgia.

One Sunday, while my parents are visiting from California, we drive to Ilfracombe, which is not a place I know anything about. We drive down motorways and then through rainforests along narrow roads. We arrive in early evening and the fierce rain that has followed us from Oxford begins to subside; the sky spits and fizzes, then goes quiet. I am left feeling exactly as I always feel in these sort of seaside towns: as if I have arrived just in time, although nothing has changed for a very long time.

On the walls of our hotel, of every hotel in Ilfracombe, probably, there are photos of the place in happier days: Victorians standing on the shoreline, Edwardians mounting a hill to view the ships below, men holding on to their hats in what is, the photograph manages to imply with its impressionistic blurriness, a mild and welcome breeze, not at all like the angry winds now whipping through the town. The hotels then, I think, would have seemed grand. Or perhaps they are only meant to make us feel like that, perhaps they have always been as grim as they appear now, and the miracle of them is their ability to convince you that in those days they really were something. Women with parasols would have walked out to the water, and there would have been a cheer if not a warmth in the air, where now there appears primarily to be nothing: nothing open, nothing of note, nothing to do, nothing to say, except to sigh and wonder if the fat cat curled up in the alleyway has a home and whether the seagulls are deliberately targeting your car or if the dappling of guano on the windscreen will start to feel normal, soon.

As we walk down the High Street my mother remarks that this is the sort of place that only had its heyday so that we could reflect on it later, that it was built with ruin in mind. Maybe this is true; we pass the empty chip shops and derelict pubs, the charity shops, the vacant storefronts, and the nightclub, open till 3:30 every night, next to the Indian restaurant and across the street from a cashpoint. We eat dinner in a restaurant nearish to the sea; the interior has been recently renovated (so recently, in fact, that all the tools and materials are still stacked up in the back near the toilets). There are straight-backed chairs and fake antlers hung from the walls, and it is full of people looking like they are on their big night out, in dark jeans, with slicked back hair, eating fancy food that is utterly devoid of taste. Even the wine tastes of nothing; I drink a large glass of it without noticing that it is not my water. Across the street is an antique shop selling wooden ships trapped in glass bottles and RAF commemorative china and rusty basins, which sounds nice written down, sort of poetic and eccentric, but looks sad, perhaps because the shelves in the window are so sparsely populated.

But everyone has such a brave – or rather indifferent, which I think is much the same thing – face! Or at least, everyone we see, which is about two people, seems to be the picture of pleasantness. And the proprietress of our hotel is so cheerful and accommodating that she moves two cars just to make room for ours and neglects to ask for a deposit or a card number or any indication, in fact, that we might have a means of paying her.

In my hotel room, trying to mollify my angry tastebuds after a cheesecake the flavor and consistency of ice and a glass of distinctly un-port-like port, I make hot chocolate and listen to the seagulls. Two towels have been neatly folded on my bed, a chocolate resting on each, although I am sleeping alone tonight. There is wifi and a flatscreen television. The chalky taste of the hot chocolate is familiar, and the seagulls, too, remind me a little of my childhood, in the sense that I lived somewhere as a child where you might hear seagulls from time to time.

The problem is that everything is so earnest, and so earnestly awful. I like these seaside towns, I like the crumbling facades and the empty shops and the faded shutters and the ice cream aesthetic. But I like them in a very ambivalent way: I like them in the same way, maybe, that I like Geoff Dyer’s recognition of his own deterioration. And I’m as unfair on these places as we are on ourselves – affectionately, resentfully bemoaning our “bulbous noses”, while the reality is, we’re not so bad after all, we like ourselves really, we’re just surprised, sometimes, by what we see, and in our surprise a little cruel.

5.

So when I wake up the next morning it seems to me that maybe the places on the uncomfortable edge of nostalgia are only uncomfortable because they are – like certain ancient ruins – “too ruined”. After breakfast (heavy pieces of wet white toast, sopping up the yellow egg yokes) we drive to a nearby village, from where we embark on a coastal walk which takes us up and down along the cliffs and affords us great views of the blueish sea and the purpleish sky and the green and brown place where the land begins, and I see that maybe the towns only look tired in comparison.

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I love the South Bank. My understanding of the geography of London is pretty disjointed; I can never really see how one area relates to another (I know the names of lots of places in London, and have been to lots of places in London, but my mental map of the place is disturbingly blank, like there are lots of small areas bobbing in a sea of cheap suits, angry black cabs and Pret a Mangers). And I barely know how the South Bank fits into the rest of London (I only just discovered that the London Eye is south of the river!), but I have this weird fondness for it. I think maybe it’s because I went there with Xander once, right after we first met. It was warm and sunny and this was before iPhones (which makes me feel SO OLD until I remind myself that iPhones only really came to prominence a few years ago) so he had an actual copy of an actual A-Z, hardbound in black leather. I distinctly remember him bringing it out and me being impressed, though in retrospect I can’t think why we needed it, as all we did was get on the Bakerloo line at Paddington and get out at Embankment and then walk across the bridge and look at Antony Gormley statues standing like suicides in the sunshine on the edges of buildings. Then we sat outside and had a beer and watched people and it was pleasant.

Anyway it seems to me that it is always sunny and Saturday on the South Bank, even if it isn’t Saturday and even if it isn’t really very sunny. So it was very nice to find that this Saturday it was both actually Saturday and actually sunny and we were strolling along the waterfront eating pork sandwiches and ice cream and on our way to see Joanna draw on the walls of the Tate Modern bookshop as part of the launch of her fabulous new book London Walks.

By the time we actually got to the Tate it was late afternoon and Joanna found a spot for us on the shop window (near a fashion blogger and a few portraits down from Boris Johnson) and Xander and I stood semi-still for awhile while she drew us. And now, we’re on display! In the Tate! We’ve been temporarily immortalized (the plan is for the drawings to stay up all summer), so do say hi to our window-selves if you happen to be strolling past.

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This weekend I’ve been at the Hay Festival, and last night I went to the launch of Unbound.

Attempted one-line encapsulations of Unbound so far include “crowdfunded publishing project,” “Kickstarter-Byline hybrid” and “‘democratic’ publishing venture“. To me it’s just a really good idea.

I guess I should say that I know these people. I knew about the idea before it was officially launched. So yes, I have a vested interest, in a way. I should also say that it isn’t really my place to talk about publishing, about the need for innovation in a stale industry or the need to adapt to changing technologies and tempos (though there is that). But I love Unbound and I want to tell you why and I want you to love it, too.

Here’s what I know:

1.

It’s exciting to see writers get excited about writing, and readers get excited about reading. And last night people were excited. People continue to be excited. This is good.

2.

As a writer, everything about Unbound makes sense. It feels sustainable and uncluttered. Like maybe you’d just be writing something because you want to write it and people want to read it. And maybe you’d be writing in the first place because what you want is to write and to make a living – whatever that happens to mean to you – from writing – whatever that happens to mean to you. And you’d cut out this heavy, sloppy layer of distraction: the voices (both external and internal) saying what genre is that, exactly? Is it fashionable? Is it marketable?

3.

I think Unbound could encourage authors to use the online space in a way I feel they should be using it but maybe haven’t always: as a space for sharing. As a space for interactive creation, even.

I don’t mean to say that I think every author will do this or that I think every author even should do this. But the thing is, I like looking at the artistic process. I’m interested in what the web has done to expose it, or at least to make it exposable. I want to play with this idea, and I want to see other people play with it too (remember when I wanted to post my half-formed, impulsively written ‘novel’ on Tumblr?). I don’t know if Unbound is precisely the right mechanism for this, but I think the author’s shed could be the start of a movement towards creative openness, towards adding a layer of exploration, engagement and exposure to the act of writing a book. And this aspect of Unbound has more than just the obvious potential to transform the publishing industry and the profession of writing: it has the potential to also transform both the creation and the consumption of literature.

4.

I can see this being dangerous for my bank balance, if rewarding for my mind. I’ve already supported a few projects (Jonathan Meades’ book about places sounds especially delicious) and the idea of patronage is so compelling that even if I ignore (as best I can) the writer-me, and the me that knows some of the people who had this idea and who have helped to make it happen, I still want Unbound to succeed, because I want to see what happens next.

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I’ve been reading Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage, which is ostensibly about a bunch of breathlessly, oppressively clever middle-class Oxford graduates adrift in the great sea of Reality. But the thing about it is that I haven’t read something that summarizes quite so nicely what it is to be in one’s 20s for a long time. And if it was meant to be a portrait of modern life for the female in 1963, it seems that rather shockingly little has changed.

In a way I’m sort of miffed about the book (which, by the way, I’m enjoying) because I feel like it’s a book I could write (or, more precisely, a theme I could write), except that we’re not allowed to write books like this anymore, even if they would be just as relevant today as they were in 1963.

***

Sarah, Drabble’s young protagonist, pondering the nebulous state of her engagement (or not-engagement) to the man she loves, who’s away at Harvard doing postgraduate study, considers that even “had I been never so happily engaged, all the problems of jobs and work and domesticity would have remained. The days are over, thank God, when a woman justifies her existence by marrying.” And Sarah’s friend Gill, recently separated from her husband, says to Sarah, when they meet for the first time in months, “You don’t know…what a difference it makes not to have meals provided. To know that if you don’t start peeling potatoes there won’t be any potatoes. You haven’t been out long enough to know.”

Gill might as well be anyone I know, experiencing for the first time the full weight of adulthood. And Sarah’s understanding that even if she had been settled down with a man she would not necessarily know any better what to do is precocious, hints at what I always think of as being a very contemporary sentiment: that one is never justified by love (and subsequently marriage, children, etc) – only (ideally) bolstered by it. That the great freedom and great burden of being a modern woman is to be able to be in a relationship and grow without growing out of the relationship itself.

The thing that bothers me about all this is that I’m not sure you ever really get good books about it nowadays. It’s as if the subject – which is really just “youth” – is passé somehow. Young people who write books don’t seem so inclined to write books about people our own age. Neither childhood nor old age seems as remote to us, as foreign, as our present situation does.

I mean to say that I don’t think it would necessarily occur to a 24-year-old writer, which is how old Drabble was when A Summer Bird-Cage was published (and how old, coincidentally, I am going to be next week), to write a very simple story about what it’s like to come from a position of relative privilege into The World. It certainly wouldn’t occur to anyone to publish it, I don’t think. Perhaps it’s not representative of enough of us anymore, not relatable to a great enough audience. Or perhaps youth today really is very much more complicated than youth in 1963 was. Anyway it seems to me that nowadays it’s all about quirkiness – people with unusual names and histories picking up and running away to the join the invisible circus and never being seen again (ha, ha) or MFA writing-workshop-worthy tales of growing up in rural Georgia with distant parents and overcoming a bad bout of Religious Fervor before escaping to the wilds of Williamsburg.

I suppose I have some respect for people who can write stories like that. I certainly never could, they’re too far out of the realm of my limited imagination, bear no relation (really) to anything I’ve ever felt.

***

And the thing I’m obsessed with feeling at the moment is to do with the introverted question of identity that, I suppose, a privileged few have the dubious privilege of considering. Consider this – a conversation between Sarah and a friend of her brother-in-law:

“‘So you’re going to be a don’s wife?’ [says the friend]
‘No. I’m going to marry a don.’ [says Sarah]
‘And what will you be?’
‘How should I know? I will be what I become, I suppose.’
‘You don’t find that a problem?’
How could I tell him that it was the one thing that kept me strung together in occasionally ecstatic, occasionally panic-stricken effort, day and night, year in, year out?”

A few months ago I came across this quote by Alain de Botton: “I explained that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.” I’ve heard de Botton speak, too, on a lack of good literature about work. And in a way I think A Summer Bird-Cage is like that, it’s like a portrait of something really mundane that lots of people (not all people! probably not even most people! but still, lots of people) do and feel every day, which is strike out on their own.

***

I know I’m being deliberately blind to make a point here. Probably people are actually writing about this all the time and I’m too self-absorbed to notice. But what I feel is that people my age are being pushed to feel younger and less qualified to expound upon our own experiences than we actually are. We’ve either lost the ability to take ourselves seriously because we feel too young, or else we’re too self-conscious about the awkwardness of this period to really want to write about it. We’ll write about bad sex and the discomfort of growing up, but something about the state of being newly grown-up is still too distasteful or confusing to address.

***

Sarah and her sister Louise put it this way:

“‘Oh, one can’t have everything,’ said Louise. ‘It’s either lovely food or lovely company.’
‘Of course one can have everything,’ I said. ‘Have one’s cake and eat it. I intend to.’
‘I daresay you do,’ she said. ‘So did I.’ She paused, and then said, in a different tone, a tone of intention rather than expectation, ‘and so do I. So do I.’
I didn’t see what she meant. Not for ages. Not until I learned myself how difficult it was to get anything, let alone the everything that is showered on one in garlands and blossoming armfuls until one faces the outside world.”

I don’t actually believe that one can’t have one’s cake and eat it, but I do know the way you assume you can before you have to start paying your own rent and peeling your own potatoes, and the way that the assumption changes after that.

So even though I know how difficult it is to get anything, I keep thinking that the answer to getting everything is just to keep going through life like this. And writing about it.

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