Rose Tremain, at 83, on outliving her literary generation
As a new novel about Daphne du Maurier appears, the British writer reflects on seventy years at her desk and the shrinking ranks of her contemporaries.
Rose Tremain, 83, has published a new novel centred on Daphne du Maurier, and marked the occasion with a reflection in The Guardian on seven decades of writing and on what she calls the dying of her generation.
Tremain writes that of the twenty novelists named on Granta's celebrated 1983 list of Best of Young British Novelists, six have since died, among them Martin Amis, whom she calls their "most princely satirist," according to The Guardian. She notes that others among the survivors carry visible marks of the years: Salman Rushdie, attacked with a knife, and Julian Barnes, living with blood cancer, while some contend instead with the quieter injury of being forgotten.
She asks, in the piece, whether readers still want to hear from writers of her cohort, and wonders whether Barnes's own announcement that he was stepping back from writing because of illness carried an intuition that younger generations had had enough of what she calls "old birds and geezers" who came of age when Sean Connery still had dimples and David Hockney had just dyed his hair yellow.
Despite the tally of losses, Tremain says she has no plans to stop writing, framing her new du Maurier novel as evidence that inspiration can still arrive late in a long career.
Sources
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