Michael Frayn and Julian Barnes have announced that they won’t be writing any more books. It is a hard habit to kick
“R
etirement is the ugliest word in the language,” Ernest Hemingway said. Writers, like artists in general, aren’t the retiring sort. And what does it actually mean? As the playwright, novelist and former Guardian journalist Michael Frayn quipped 20 years ago, “Nobody comes in and gives you a clock.”
Frayn was 72 at the time. Since then, he has added a further novel (Skios), a play (Afterlife) and two memoirs to a backlist that includes the hugely successful plays Noises Off and Copenhagen (a revival of which has just finished at the Hampstead theatre in London). Now, at 92, that clock has caught up with him. “Sadly it’s over,” he told Radio 4 this week. “Writing has been my life.”
On his 80th birthday earlier this year, Julian Barnes announced that his aptly titled novel Departure(s) would be his last. “I’ve played all my tunes,” he said. Like Frayn, Barnes has been suffering from health issues. But this sense of an ending, to borrow the title of Barnes’s 2011 Booker prizewinner, is more existential than physical.
