Our two Thursday post series, the moths and the frugal tips, have been funded and will go live if and when my eyes recover from this new chemical reaction. I can still see, but changing the focus of my eyes irritates my irritated tear ducts. Being indoors feels much, much better than being out on the screen porch with Internet access, so web research is out of the question, for now. But I do expect this to change. Nobody is suicidal enough to go on spraying this horrible stuff into the air--and if they are, we can at least hope they'll disable themselves right away!
Meanwhile, consider Lydia Schoch's short list of writers from whom she would have looked forward to another book:
My list, likewise, consists mostly of writers who obviously won't be writing any more, with a few writers who have stopped where they stopped for good and sufficient reasons. Agatha Christie, we observed earlier this year, did go on giving her fans "just one more" book, with the result that critics now think her last several novels were rewrites of earlier ones and she degenerated into "just writing the same story over and over." Other writers don't need to do that. This list is not intended to prod any living writers; it is, mostly, a memorial to departed ones I find worth collecting.
So, ten names, as they popped into mind, though typed in alphabetical order:
Douglas Adams
Died far too young.
Joan Aiken
Wrote a lot of things, including a novel that explained the right to die to young people, and I respected her awareness of mortality all the more for the fundamental cheerfulness that shines through every page she ever wrote. Still, if she'd lived another fifty years and written another fifty books, it'd be fine by me.
Rita Mae Brown
The preposterous Mrs Murphy Mysteries went on far longer than a real cat and a real cancer survivor could have gone on, and placed more murders in the little town of Crozet (which really exists) in a few years than have actually happened in the town's entire history. As if anyone cared. Each new Mrs Murphy mystery was always fun.
Art Buchwald
The first nonfiction writer I ever followed, starting at age ten, basically retired about the time I was old enough to buy books. Everyone in Washington loved his columns and begged him to write more; the Post always put them on the front page of the section, when he felt up to the work of writing one. But for years he was writing only occasional columns, not enough to make into yearbooks. I wished at the time that his last years had been healthier, and I still do.
Elizabeth Goudge
Worked a little too hard to paint a sunny picture of jolly old England, during the war years that were anything but jolly. Her books, fiction and nonfiction, were brain candy. I liked her brain candy.
Judith Martin
"Miss Manners" wrote one novel. I wish she'd written more.
Henry David Thoreau
Consider the size of his literary corpus. Consider the size of Ralph Waldo Emerson's. Visualize their corpora as stacks of books. Now consider which of those stacks contains more words worth reading.
Calvin Trillin
He could be funny enough if all he wrote about was what he had for lunch, and in fact he may be best remembered for whole books about things he had for lunch, but he could write that well when he was doing Real Journalism and digging out the facts after a media circus had settled down. That kind of writing demands a lot of time and energy, and can even be dangerous. I understand why writers stop doing it. I wish he'd done more of it, anyway.
Cynthia Voigt
I would not have minded reading about the next generation of the Tillerman family.
Rose Wilder Lane
She put more of her energy into other things than writing. Now she's gone, only her writing is left, and I wish there were more of it.
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