Barkskins, Annie Proulx told an interviewer this week, is the last novel she will publish, but not because of waning powers (it is 720 pages long, and was cut down from 900 or more when her editor felt an intervention was called for). Like JD Salinger, who cited “the marvellous peace of not publishing” after stopping doing so in his 40s in 1965, she will continue writing but as “a solitary person ... I cannot bear the signings, interviews, book tours and all the PR stuff. I hate it. Really, really hate it.”
Tender scepticism may be the best response to this latest authorial retirement, given how often such explicit or apparent exits have been followed by comebacks. Stephen King, for example, declared he was “done writing books” and going out “on top of my game” back in 2002 – End of Watch, out this month, is his 17th book since then.
Alice Munro seemed to signal she was stopping in 2006 (“I don’t know if I have the energy to do this any more”), only to publish further story collections and win the Nobel prize. Anne Tyler looked to be heading for writing-without-publishing in the style of Proulx when she said in 2013: “I want to not ever finish a book again.” But A Spool of Blue Thread was finished, published and Man Booker-shortlisted last year, and Tyler’s Vinegar Girl is just out. While it’s true that Philip Roth has so far remained retired, it has been less than four years since he revealed he was quitting, and he said merely that he was “finished with fiction”, not other genres. Such has been the spate of resignation news that the website Media Mass this week ran a spoof report on Paul Auster hanging up his pen (“‘Being an author just isn’t fun any more,’ he might have said, says a source who remains anonymous”)
In the UK and Ireland, too, authors have retired only to reappear. Michael Holroyd assured Review readers in 2010 that A Book of Secrets was his “final” book, a year after his wife Margaret Drabble vowed she and fiction were through because she risked repeating herself; both flip-flopped in 2013, publishing On Wheels and The Pure Gold Baby respectively. Jim Crace cheerily spoke of Harvest as his last book and embraced freedom when it was shortlisted for the Booker in the same year, but soon admitted he and literature were an item again: “I just needed a break. I thought I wanted a divorce from writing, but it turns out it wasn’t so.” The most spectacular volte-face on this side of the Atlantic was performed by Maeve Binchy who managed six more novels after saying 2000’s Scarlet Feather was her final bow. Disastrously, she had asserted: “I’m not at all a Frank Sinatra person who can be lured back.”
Why do writers, normally so careful with words, get it wrong? Perhaps it has to do with the oddity of the notion of literary retirement, on which we and sometimes they impose misleading models from office life (although authors are not physically quitting a place or group, have no leaving dos), entertainment and sport (although they have no farewell performances, unlike, say football, rock or dance stars). Without a comparable public rite of passage providing closure - the only equivalent is the retirement interview such as Roth’s or Proulx’s, usually in print and hardly ever on stage - a tendency to misspeak is forgivable; and how can they know, when creatively blocked or fed up with the publishing process, if the Muse will irresistibly return, if an idea will tug their sleeve and refuse to be shrugged off?
Coverage of authors who stop is also prone to mix up the different forms of retirement, as if they were all as straightforwardly ageing-related and inevitable as the departures of singers who’ve lost their top notes and no longer speedy athletes. There have been retirements due to infirmity (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass); but they can also be Salinger-like retreats from the public gaze but not fiction, giving up one genre only (Forster and the novel, Eliot and poetry), or the enforced result of rejection (Barbara Pym’s 16-year hiatus) - all of which are reversible and don’t entail abandoning authorship altogether.
Still, when they make their sheepish comebacks, those who mistakenly assumed they were finished can point to a distinguished precedent. Shakespeare’s epilogue to The Tempest (first produced in 1610 or 1611, around the time its author left London for Stratford) is unmistakably a farewell to the stage - and it was Shakespeare’s last solo play, ending with the words “set me free”. But he was soon drawn back to write the first of his collaborations with John Fletcher.
