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My oldest child, Bobbie. I didn’t get to know her till she was nineteen. She was already at Oxford (reading History).
‘Yes, that’s the way to go about it,’ said my pal Salman (oh, and I apologise in advance for all the name-dropping. You’ll get used to it. I had to. And it’s not name-dropping. You’re not name-dropping when, aged five, you say ‘Dad’). ‘Don’t get to know them’, said Salman, ‘until they’re already at Oxford.’
A nice remark, but that’s not the way to do it, as we were both aware. And I often feel regret, sometimes uncomfortably sharp, that I never knew Bobbie as an infant, a toddler, a child, a pre-teen, and an adolescent. But there it is. There won’t be much about her here: she already starred in a book I wrote after my father’s death in 1995, and now she’s a whole ocean away…
So I helped raise two boys, and I helped raise two girls. I know about boys and I know about girls; what I don’t know so much about is how they mingle. In recent years Bobbie has ‘presented’ me, as they say, with two grandchildren, a perfect boy and a perfect girl. So maybe I’ll learn something – at one remove, through the wrong end of the telescope.
On the other hand, I grew up as a middle child: with an older brother, a younger sister. Nicolas was and is a year and ten days my senior (my Irish twin). But Myfanwy (pron. Mivvanwee), four years my junior, died in the year 2000. That event, too, took a long time coming, and a long time going.
A word about the unnatural interest I started taking in suicide – my extended period, in fact, of what they call ‘suicidal ideation’.
It officially began on September 12, 2001. I wasn’t reacting to the suicidal events of the day before (though I suppose I was feeling unusually porous and susceptible). It was not Osama bin Laden who threw me. It was an ex-girlfriend, a woman called Phoebe Phelps (and Phoebe will not allow herself to be kept offpage much longer).
…The poet Craig Raine said of Elias Canetti that he had ‘a swarm in his bonnet’ about crowds (his best-known book was called Crowds and Power). Oh, and by the way here’s an intriguing bit of gossip: Canetti, the Nobel-winning Dichter, was a lover of the young Iris Murdoch (and you wonder about the quality of their pillow talk). Phoebe Phelps put a bee in my bonnet – but it felt like a swarm.
You won’t believe this, but turning sixty, for men, is a great relief. To start with, it’s a great relief from your fifties. Of the seven decades: the thirties constitute the prince, the fifties the pauper. I assumed that my sixties would differ from my fifties only in being much, much worse, but I’m finding the gradient unexpectedly mild; in fact it embarrasses me to say that the only time I’ve ever been happier was in childhood. True, you have to deal with an uncomfortable new thought, namely: Sixty…Mm. Now this can’t possibly turn out well. But even that thought is better than nearly all the thoughts of your fifties (an epoch to which I will bitterly return).
More recently I’ve been wondering, How exactly am I going to get out of here? By what means, by what conveyance? Not that I’m at all keen to be gone (even at the height of my suicidal-ideation period I was never keen to be gone). You just feel the exit coming closer – as you’re drawn (in the dignified phrase of an American writer we’ll be meeting very soon) towards ‘the completion of your reality’.
And coming closer with ridiculous haste. In fact you start to feel a bit of a dupe every time you open your eyes and get out of bed. The psychic clock (people have written about this) definitely accelerates…After I turned sixty my birthdays became biannual, then triannual. The Atlantic Monthly gradually became a fortnightly; and now it’s the Atlantic Weekly. Just lately, I shave, or feel as though I shave, every day (and I provably don’t shave every day). In the New York Times the op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman used to appear on Wednesdays only, but now he writes a piece every twenty-four hours (following the example of Gail Collins and Paul Krugman); and when it’s bad, I seem to be settling down to these authors, over a leisurely breakfast (fruit, cereal, softboiled egg), every forty-five minutes.
You feel a schmuck and a patsy because it’s somehow as if you’re colluding in your own demise. A certain poet, who will also appear before long, put it more sombrely, in ‘Aubade’ (aubade – a poem or piece of music appropriate to the dawn):
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now.
Time has come to feel like a runaway train, flashing through station after station. But back when I was climbing trees, playing rugby football, and giving the girls in the schoolyard an occasional game of hopscotch (and all three activities now strike me as appallingly dangerous) – the runaway train was moving no slower. Nabokov even gives the speed: 5,000 heartbeats per hour. Life moves towards death at 5,000 hph.
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You must be aware of it – and you must’ve been tempted by it: the huge sub-genre now known as ‘life-writing’. It spans everything from Proust to the personal ads, from Sons and Lovers to the travel piece, from Does My Bum Look Big in This? to…I was going say to Mystic Meg’s astrology column; but at least Mystic Meg has gone to the trouble of making it all up.
In a way I’m excited by the challenge, but the trouble with life-writing, for a novelist, is that life has a certain quality or property quite inimical to fiction. It is shapeless, it
