Where are the GOMs?
Posted February 2, 2009, 18:02 ET Comments Off
Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale described how a writer might acquire eminence through longevity, as the Grand Old Man of English letters. Maugham had the middlebrow Hugh Walpole in mind. Since then we’ve seen more worthy GOMs, Bertrand Russell and Malcolm Muggeridge, people to whom we deferred on the quesitons of the day, people whose opinion mattered, people who survived the Oedipal urge to kill one’s father.
But where are the GOMs today? Updike died last week, and he certainly wasn’t a GOM. Nor was Mailer, who was simply an embarrassment. If ever we had a reverence for elderly writers, we don’t see it now. We expect them to keep up, and like Widmerpool to ape the latest fads. We are like the Chins of Burma, as described by Colonel McNabb. “When a man grows old and feeble and is unable to extract his dues by force, then his son gradually begins to take his place. Instead of the son deferring to the father, the father defers to the son, and finally he is turned out of his house and made to end his days in a small hut…The man who in his prime may have been a power in the land, the hero of a hunded raids.. is, in his old age, a nonentity.”
That said, I have hopes for Mick Jagger.
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