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    Authorial self-isolation

    While looking up Jeeves' Christian name on Wiki last night, I invariably fell down a Wodehousian rabbit hole, with the main article claiming that his post-war exile from England actually enhanced his latter writing, due to his internal vision of his homeland becoming frozen in aspic, which would invariably have been desecrated had he ever returned. The counter-argument, of course, is that it is a literary duty for great novels to reflect developments within modern society, and as such should include the political, social and cultural debates of the time to give greater weight to the authorial voice. Perhaps a synthesis of both positions is the happiest medium, with the writer remaining aloof from and above social media frenzies, taking time to ruminate over what is truly of intellectual value, yet not falling into such Proustian excesses as to ostracise himself from the masses in an ivory tower of arrogance and delusion.

    #2
    Orwell was isolated in his last phase but was still keeping up with the news and his correspondence (when health allowed) so I don't know if Nineteen Eighty-Four benefitted from that.

    J.D. Salinger seems a negative case because he never matched his Nine Stories and Catcher In The Rye, which were both finished before he went into his cabin in the woods AFAIK, and he didn't publish at all after 1965 or so.
    Last edited by Satchmo Distel; 22-05-2022, 07:18.

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      #3
      In an interview not long before he died Sam Beckett outlined a last wish.

      'Hurry up and invent Sky TV, so I can watch test cricket'

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