It seems Jeffrey Archer treads in Wordsworth’s footsteps…
William Wordsworth and Jeffrey Archer do not, at first glance, appear to have much in common: the first a revered Romantic poet; the second a bestselling popular novelist of whose prose style a critic once remarked that it was “sufficient to send most readers screaming in breathless delirium to the mature, lucid and urgent pages of Barbara Cartland or Enid Blyton”. But the erstwhile Poet Laureate and the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and alumnus of Belmarsh Prison have a shared literary passion: each, in his late career, had a passion for revising his early works.
Wordsworth’s habit of tinkering with his texts, particularly that of his autobiographical work,
The Prelude, has been disapprovingly characterised as the meddling of his middle-aged Victorian incarnation with the fiery Romanticism of his youth. The Wordsworth scholar Stephen Gill disputes this reading, suggesting that: “Wordsworth’s overriding concern was the trajectory of his oeuvre.”
As with Wordsworth, so with Archer. A formidable reviser of his work before publication – he claims to have written 14 drafts of The Sins of the Father – in 2009 he issued a “renovated” 30th anniversary edition of his second novel, Kane and Abel; and a re-revised 40th anniversary edition was launched last week.
When it comes to revision, authors divide sharply into those who do and those, like Lord Byron, who can’t be bothered. “I am like the tyger (in poesy),” Byron wrote. “If I miss my first spring –
I go growling back to my Jungle. There is no second. I can’t correct.” The Beat novelist, Jack Kerouac, insisted that authors should “never after think”.
There is a pattern here: Byron and Kerouac died too young for afterthoughts. Wordsworth survived until 80; Archer is 79. In a
New Yorker essay on late works, John Updike, then 74, discussed the idea of the “senile sublime, a creativity liberated from its usual, anxiety-producing ambitions”. There is time still for Archer to defy his critics and achieve senile sublimity – but perhaps he should leave his early work to speak for itself.
Break that deer, unlace that coney, disfigure that heron and border that pasty. Reducing a chunk of cooked meat into edible proportions is an ancient branch of chivalry, codified by the publisher Wynken de Worde in 1508. Some vestige of that ancient chivalric spirit lingers in the eminently woke figure of St Paul Mccartney, who admits that, despite becoming a vegetarian at the prompting of his late wife, Linda, “I wanted something to carve at Christmas”.
Linda’s solution – a festive slab of macaroni cheese – offered none of the skeletal conundrums that confront the modern paterfamilias and his carving knife. Our fathers’ generation negotiated the physiologies of fowl and ungulate with ease, but in this era of boneless supermarket cuts that bear no resemblance to the creature from which they are derived, carving is a dying art.
However, like other lost specialisms – darning, breadmaking, the grooming of patriarchal beards – carving is poised for a comeback. For a price, you can attend carving “masterclasses” at an assortment of posh establishments, including Simpsons in the Strand and Daylesford Cookery School – though none seem to offer this crucial bit of advice, from Mrs DA Lincoln’s 1891 book, Carving and Serving: “Never stare at the carver.”