‘Should there be a retiring age for writers?’ Discuss

‘You writers never retire, do you?’ said the guest at the party condescendingly. ‘“Scribble, scribble, scribble, right to the end,” as Edward Gibbon said.’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘it was said to Gibbon, either by George III or the Duke of Gloucester, accounts differ.’ ‘Quite a know-all, aren’t you?’ the man said. ‘But my point is this: there’s no retiring age for writers, and perhaps there ought to be.’

I might well second that wish, ill-natured though it was. I recall vividly V.S. Pritchett, then in his late eighties, telling me how he had to drag himself, groaning and cursing, up the high stairs to his study at the top of the house every morning to do his daily stint. And there was J.B. Priestley, on the eve of his 90th birthday (he didn’t quite make it) grumbling to me that he was still at it, with the Inland Revenue still bombarding him with letters. ‘Why can’t they agree an age and, after that, just leave you alone?’ he asked — in vain, of course. If, for instance, the Revenue were to stop pestering at the age of 80, or even 85, there’d be something to look forward to for the highly productive elderly, who are still churning out their 2,000-words-plus every morning. But that will never happen. People who can still earn money in their eighties will remain galley-slaves of the state, for all time.

Not that writers, at any rate in the long centuries when English literature was in the making, often made it to their eighties. We don’t know for sure how old Chaucer was when he died but it looks like not more than 60. And he had had a lucky, well-rewarded life, his belly with good capon lined, and drinking fine wine supplied by the Crown (and he knew what he was drinking, too, for his father had been a successful wine merchant, like Ruskin’s).