‘No man is a success to himself’ wrote Graham Greene. I am feeling this acutely, as I turn 60 on September 1st and enter the Decade of Reckoning for uncomfortable life truths. As somebody whose literary ambition was only wanting to be a bestselling English social novelist, it’s been creeping up on me that if one hasn’t written that Big Novel by one’s sixth decade, then perhaps throwing in the quill is the only dignified thing to do.
In a desk drawer in my study, there is a cream envelope, postmarked September 1987. That August, I found myself sitting two tables from the Graham Greene in Chez Feliz, a fish restaurant just inside the walls of the old Antibes port. He was 82, and lunching with his mistress Yvonne Cloetta.
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