Tonight:
4°c
It's been announced that Gabriel García Márquez is "laying down his pen". At 82, he won't be writing anything else, his agent says.
A shame? On the contrary, I think the announcement is a shame only in the sense that it is well overdue. García Márquez's last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, published a few years ago, was an embarrassment. It depicted a nonagenarian journalist drooling over a 14-year-old girl.
The opening sentence was gruesomely arresting: "The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." But thereafter it descended into such platitudes as that "age is not how old you are but how old you feel", possibly sourced from waggish birthday cards. The critic Alberto Manguel pronounced the book pitiful, no better than a smutty story.
García Márquez is not alone in his career outlasting his talent. Many writers have ended up publishing unworthy works, including such fine novelists as Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, who spoke the exact truth when he called Basil Seal Rides Again, published in 1964, two years before his death, "a senile attempt to recapture the manner of my youth". Shortly before his death earlier this year, John Updike published a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick called The Widows of Eastwick, which is not a patch on the original.
But then, that is the special horror of such past their sell-by-date productions. They cannot help but be inadvertent parodies of the author's own best work, parodies that have both a more deadly accuracy and damaging origin than any that could be produced by a satirist. An author's work forms a whole and each part sheds light on the rest, sometimes illuminatingly but also sometimes destructively.
It's an all too familiar realisation: if only he'd stop! Those of us who love Bob Dylan sooner or later know this anguish. Witnessing one of the many terrible concerts he has given on his never-ending tour is a torment. Yes, it is still him, yes, he is still singing the songs of his great days - but the performance is a painful travesty, as if he were deliberately setting out to de-nature his own talent.
A few heroes, such as T S Eliot, do manage to stop, more or less, in time. William Empson published two marvellous books of poems and then no more for the rest of his life.
Most writers have to continue, though, if they possibly can, however badly. So we need some new prizes and bursaries for not writing, I think, given how many books are published each year and how few of them are essential. One such useful prize exists already. "The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. Nobody has ever done anything after he got it," Eliot observed, when he got it.
Getting the Nobel didn't stop Gabriel García Márquez, though. Until now, anyway.
Return of the royal gush
Ever since Princess Diana's disillusioning complaints, simpering about royal romance has been uphill work. So we must congratulate Claudia Joseph on her biographical study Kate: Kate Middleton — Princess in Waiting, as it is cautiously subtitled, doubtless to avoid any confusion with the cracker from Croydon. It's full-on fawning, as it used to be. “Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, the shy, retiring schoolgirl has transformed into a confident and glamorous young woman with poise to become a royal bride,” Joseph coos.
She assures us that “the marriage would” — she has, for now, to use the conditional — “breathe new life into the monarchy as the Queen enters the twilight of her reign, bringing new blood and a fresh perspective”. Why not? The mere prospect of it has already breathed new life into authorial curtseying.
The true magic of magnolia
The streets belong just now to magnolias. They are an astonishing sight in full bloom, not just in the privileged enclaves of Kensington but in main drags such as Bayswater Road and down little turnings, bursting out in such extravagant glory for so short a time each year.
They were named in tribute to a French botanist, Pierre Magnol, now, as a result, best known by many as a shade of off-white emulsion. The first one ever to arrive in Europe was sent here, to the Bishop of London, from Virginia in 1688. They are an ancient genus, known from fossils dating back 95 million years. The peculiar texture of their flowers derives from the fact that they evolved to be pollinated by beetles, there being no bees yet.
But there's no need to know any of that to have your heart stopped by them this week. Just have your eyes open.
