Do Writers Think They’re Immortal?

Some say they don’t care one way or the other. Some won’t give you a straight answer. Some believe they really are, and for good reason.

Researching my book, I kept a file on whether writers I admired cared about living on in some way, via their work or through those who knew them. Franz Kafka, not surprisingly, held out neither hope nor desire. “The meaning of life is that it stops,” he said. I ran across that quote in an interview Philip Roth gave to the New York Times. Roth’s reverence for Kafka is well-documented, but whether he signs on to “the meaning of life is that it stops” is hard to say. After Roth announced that he was retiring from novel-writing, he went back and reread every word of his thirty-plus books. He wanted to find out if he’d “wasted his time,” he said. The verdict: “I did the best I could with what I had,” Roth said, echoing another hero of his, boxer Joe Louis.

Flannery O’Connor, who never married, spent her too-short life living with her mother in Milledgeville, Georgia, maintained that she couldn’t imagine anyone taking an interest in her life, now or later. “Lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy,” she said. On the other hand, she once confided in a letter to a lifelong correspondent: “It is a pity I can’t receive my own letters. If they produce as much wholehearted approval at their destination as they do at their source, they should … keep my memory alive and healthy.”

Martin Amis, of all people, gave what I thought was the most satisfying answer when asked about the future value of his work and whether he’d somehow live on as a result. “If I die tomorrow,” Amis said, “at least my children…will have a very good idea of what I was like, of what my mind was like, because they will be able to read my books. So maybe there is an immortalizing principle at work even if it’s just for your children. Even if they’ve forgotten you physically, they could never say that they didn’t know what their father was like.”