WB Gooderham 

My literary lifespan project is nearly complete – can you help?

Wayne Gooderham: For the last three years I’ve been selecting a pair of classic fiction extracts (male and female) to represent each age up to 70. Now all I need is a 69-year-old man …
  
  

Baz Luhrmann's forthcoming film of The Great Gatsby
Jazz age … Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming film of The Great Gatsby, during which Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway, left, turns 30. Photograph: Allstar Photograph: Allstar

Back in 2009, I began a weekly blog taking a year-by-year look at the ageing process as depicted in literature. For convenience's sake, I decided blithely to ignore all evidence that suggests scientific advancements have extended the human lifespan into the high-90s and beyond, and instead toed the Biblical party-line, which gave me the far more manageable cut-off point of 70 years. Thus was born Three Score & Ten: an online anthology of literary characters, with a different male and female character for each year of life, represented by a pair of quotes from the texts pertinent to the age in question.

As well as pandering to a personal obsession with the ageing process, the anthology was intended, when read from start to finish, to give a sense of a life – or two lives: one male, one female – and the impact made on us by the passing of time, with all the hope, excitement, contentment, despair, ill-health, ennui, etc, this brings. Failing that, I'd at least have a nice neat list of literary characters, divided by gender and ranked by age (which I concede may not be everyone's idea of an achievement). Or failing that, I'd at least have expanded my reading. And hopefully there'd be other interested parties out there who might stumble across a quote from a text they hadn't read before and decide to read the whole book as a result. (The quotes preferably had to work as standalone pieces.)

To make sure I included myself in this last aim, I gave myself the rule that I had to read each work from start to finish. Naturally, there were other rules: for the sake of consistency, characters had to be fictional and come from adult novels or novellas, and each character could only appear once in the anthology. Also, I could only use one male and one female character for each year. This meant, in cases where I was fortunate to have more than one character to choose from to represent a specific age, the project turned into a kind of high-brow (or faux-high-brow) Top Trumps, with categories including "iconic status of character", "pertinence of extract", "literary worth", and "just how much do the male and female characters complement each other"? I tried to be as objective about this as possible and not let personal preferences cloud my judgement. And many darlings were indeed murdered as a result: a 17-year-old James Gatz "loafing along the beach … in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants" never really stood a chance against Brighton-based sociopath Pinkie, with his eyes "that had never been young … staring with grey contempt". I did make up for the absence of Gatsby with Nick Carraway's beautifully poignant ruminations on turning 30 (though perhaps I overcompensated for the Gatsby-shaped hole by allowing Leopold Bloom (38), to be trumped by a dissipated Dick Diver). Molly Bloom (32), practically walked it.

Aside from these tussles with literary heavy-weights, there was also a fair amount of frustration at the ones that got away: those iconic characters who – for some perverse reason known only to their authors – hadn't had their age specified. Or, more sadistically, the author had specified their age (often in a roundabout way) without providing me with a usable quote: although it is possible to work out, from the various dates given in Lolita, that Humbert Humbert, for example, is 37, at no point does Nabokov actually state this. Other ageless/unsuitable characters included Madame Bovary, Gregor Samsa, Augie March, Mr Pooter, and perhaps my favourite literary character of all time, Hans Castorp (The Buddenbrook family required an Excel spreadsheet all of their own. This is sadly true). If I hadn't already bagged the likes of Scout Finch, Holly Golightly, Holden Caulfield, Yossarian, Lily Bart, Lady Chatterley, John Self and Winston Smith, it's quite possible I would have despaired.

And now Three Score & Ten is very nearly finished. As I type, all I have left to find is a 69-year-old male, and then I can move happily on to 70 and death. Which brings me to the point of this piece. Does anyone know of a 69-year-old man who might be interested in keeping poor old Nannie Slagg company? Please do let me know if so. As much as I'll miss Three Score & Ten once it's over (though, as none of these entries are set in stone, I doubt it'll ever really be over over), it has monopolised my reading for these last three years far more than I anticipated. And part of me can't help but sympathise with the words of record producer Bob Ezrin upon finishing work on Lou Reed's Berlin album: "Right. Let's wrap up this turkey before I puke."

 

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