Michael Henderson suggests

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Would they have ended up grumpy old men?

Allan Massie

Wednesday, 9th January 2008

Allan Massie wonders what would have happened to those who died young in their old age

The transition from iconoclastic youth to crusty age is common enough. The emergence of Martin Amis as a critic of Islam (at least in some of its manifestations) may be an expression of solidarity with his old friends Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens, or it may be that, as Terry Eagleton suggests, he is turning into his father. Certainly Kingsley may be held to have gone that way, and many of us, as the years pass, do indeed find ourselves resembling Dad. This must be a disturbing thought, often, for our sons. Those whom the gods love die young — before that happens. ‘When Mozart was my age,’ as Tom Lehrer used to say, ‘he’d been dead for years’. ‘Lucky man’ is the unspoken thought.

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Mark Etherton

January 10th, 2008 4:54pm

For an extremely funny examination of the same theme, read "Les trois Rimbaud" by Dominique Noguez, which divides his life into the three periods. The first ("too often forgotten") is his early life and poetry from 1854 to 1875, the second, his time in Africa from 1876 to 1891, and the third his return to Europe and literary life from 1893 until his death in 1937, as a member of the Academie francaise and Paul Claudel's brother-in-law.

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