CELEBRITY LIST: Five Melancholy Elderly Literary Men

On this list, J. M. Coetzee is the youngest—and the most melancholy. In his famous 1999 novel “Disgrace,” he showed the late-life education of a literature professor forced, in a post-literate age, to teach “Communications.” He returned to the theme in his more recent novel—it was released on Dec. 27, 2007, to avoid end-of-the-year-list mania on the blogs—“Diary of a Bad Year.” More humane and generous than “Disgrace,” less tightly controlled, the book nonetheless argues that no one reads books anymore.



A few years ago, John Updike ’54 complained that no one read him in the airports anymore. And this past year, he published a melancholy essay in the magazine of the AARP about the decline of writerly inspiration. “Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first 20 years on earth are most writers’ main material,” he wrote; “little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. By the age of 40, you have probably mined the purest veins of this precious lode; after that, continued creativity is a matter of sifting the leavings.”



No writer alive has been so fully canonized as V. S. Naipaul. He won the Booker, was knighted, had a great masterpiece published (“Bend In the River”), and won the Nobel Prize (too late, he claimed, for it to make him happy). This year he received the compliment of an accomplished warts-and-all biography (lesser writers receive praise while they’re living, and are damned when they’re dead). But he is miserable. Every time he writes a novel he claims it will be his last—because novels and literature are dead, he says each time.



Philip Roth is elderly and literary, but even in the throes of depression it’s hard to think of him as melancholy. Except on one topic. This past year, after a string of disappointing books about old age—in one of them, a young biographer threatened the peace of mind of a departed writer and his still-living, aged friend—Roth published a highly acclaimed novel, “Indignation,” set in the 1950s. Nonetheless, whenever he’s asked, he seems to shake his head sadly and admit that no one reads anymore, that literature is finished, the novel is done.



Alexander Solzhenitsyn was so elderly and melancholy that in 2008 he died. In the final years of his life, back in the homeland he had fought so hard to free from the oppression of the KGB, he came to a disappointing rapprochement with the new ruler of Russia, a former KGB agent. Having for years been tarred with the accusation of anti-Semitism, he devoted his final energies to a two-volume book about the Jews which would, among other things, demonstrate that he was not anti-Semitic. It mostly did the opposite. When, in the wake of his death, Moscow authorities renamed a street in his honor, its residents—outraged that no one had consulted them and that they’d have to change their addresss on the numerous official forms still demanded by Russian life—tore down the new sign that bore his name.