A fortnight ago Sam Leith, reviewing Neil Powell’s book on the Amises, father and son, wrote:
Powell is insistent — and for all I know dead right, but that’s hardly the point — that Kingsley was a sufferer from depression. Of the last sentence of The Anti-Death League (‘There isn’t anywhere to be.’), he writes: ‘This — the last sentence especially — is the authentic voice of depression, and only a depressive could have written it.’ You may wonder where that untestable assertion gets us.
You may indeed, though the answer is pretty obvious: not very far. Powell has fallen into a trap that catches many critics and also, though perhaps less often, ordinary readers: the assumption that everything in a novel or play derives from the writer’s experience, rather than his imagination. It’s absurd.
Take another example: ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ To the last syllable of recorded time;/ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death.’
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