A few years ago I lent some support to Stephen Spender in his pleas for discretion in the publication of his letters after he was dead, urging that they could give unnecessary distress to people still living and to his own family.
I did not know whether Stephen Spender wanted or needed my support. (I had known him to say ‘Hello’ to for more than thirty years, but oddly enough I do not think we exchanged more than a sentence all that time.)
Kirsty McLeod in the Daily Telegraph argued that ‘As for the great man himself: be he painter or writer, he has – despite what Spender says – been trying to draw attention to himself from the very moment he first picked up a paintbrush or wielded a pen.’ And in a letter in reply in the Telegraph I totally disagreed. She did not make – and many people do not make – the distinction between an author’s work and an author’s private life. Of course authors want publicity for their work – it is their life blood – but not every author wants to parade his personal private doings, or even his personal appearance, before the public. Some do. Some adore it. To be seen about and recognized! To be feted! To be followed by the press! To be asked for their opinion, to go to fashionable dinner parties, to go round publicizing their latest novel! It’s heaven. But for some it’s hell, and we should be allowed to choose. Some do choose: four such are, or were, Graham Greene, John Fowles, John Le Carré, William Golding.
How far Stephen Spender sought or shrank from personal publicity I do not know; what he was arguing for in this case was that his personal letters, written when a young and no doubt impetuous man, should not be bandied about and analysed by any Paul Pry who came along after his death and fancied displaying his Freudian prowess. I will not, I imagine, ever be famous enough to attract this form of tabloid journalism, but even if I were as notable as Conrad or Hemingway there would be little about my private life which would merit the unearthing. As I have said in the preface, although I have had a modest share of sinfulness, it has been too ordinary, straightforward and unmuddied by complexes or fixations. I have had one wife, and I loved her and she loved me. I did not terrorize, browbeat or woefully neglect my children. I have never frequented public lavatories. I do not get drunk and disorderly. All very dull.
And I do not want to go to literary lunches, open fetes, give readings of my books, or otherwise appear in the public eye. I have by now written a great many novels, and must through them have surely revealed a fair amount of my own nature and personal feelings. Let that suffice.
Tolstoy says somewhere: ‘There is no point in visiting a great writer, because he is incarnate in his works.’ Should this not to some extent be true of the less important writer? Even down to the least important of all?
A few years ago, after reading through a novel I had just finished, I wrote these few lines. Maybe they sum up something of my philosophy, and act as a suitable envoi to this book:
Perfection is a full stop.
Give me the comma of imperfect striving,
Thus to find zest in the immediate living.
Ever the reaching but never the gaining,
Ever the climbing but never the attaining
Of the mountain top.
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Memoirs of a Private Man Page 29