Sometimes I suggest to psychotherapy clients that one mark of maturity is the ability to hold two conflicting beliefs in our head without feeling too uncomfortable. In the literary world I was more used to hearing strongly held opinions, even though I knew that sometimes people didn’t believe what they wrote.
In 1957 Penelope Mortimer, a novelist remembered for being married to the creator of Rumpole, gave Aubade a scathing review in the London Sunday Times. Never mind that she was careless enough to misquote one of my sentences, and wrote another sentence that made no logical sense. It stung. Fast forward 31 years, and a reviewer in the London Sunday Times gives a reprint of Aubade a favorable review: “It therefore treats very closely the concerns of adolescents, yet is maturely sophisticated in style and structure.”
In 1958 my agent Julian Jebb told me that Aubade wouldn’t be reviewed in the BBC’s highbrow weekly magazine The Listener, despite the literary editor being gay. Or perhaps because the literary editor was gay, and didn’t want to be seen promoting a novel with a gay theme because he was of necessity professionally closeted. It’s even possible he wanted to do his part in protecting me: the publisher Victor Gollancz thought it would be unfair to me to publish such a book at my age. Not that a stubbornly independent boy like me would ever have accepted help, or even admitted that he needed it.
Again, fast forward to 1989, and in The Listener Paul Binding gives the reprint of Aubade a very favorable review. I especially liked his focus on the new Introduction I wrote: “He has written for this edition an introduction scarcely less absorbing and revelatory than the novel itself. Kenneth Martin has a long memory, and his account of his London experiences is acid, poignant, honest, illuminating.”
What to think of such disparities? I suppose one lesson for a writer is to stick around. But I wouldn’t count on it. As I matured in the time of the Angry Young Men when middle-class Oxbridge graduates carefully adopted working class accents—sloppy journalists called me an Angry Young Man, but one reviewer congratulated me on not being angry—Noel Coward was two dirty words, despised for his facility and lack of seriousness. Today he’s acknowledged to be a master of his trade, but I pay no attention, because I’ve internalized those early judgments. Growing up, the last person I wanted to be compared to was Noel Coward.
These days my head buzzes with competing voices, imperfect memories, thoughts I’d rather not have. In the past those voices may have driven some mad because they made us doubt our comfortable selves. Maybe now we can welcome the clamor as a sign of maturity.

I wrote the Introduction to Aubade in 1989, at a time when I’d done little reading for years except what was required for my psychology degree at Columbia and then for the first of my psychology grad schools. I’d had a narrow focus for years, with little time for self-reflection. The Introduction to Aubade is straight recall of events and how I remembered their impact on me. I wrote it straight through in a few days and changed almost nothing before I sent it off to the publisher. I remember thinking intermittently through the years that if I wrote that Intro now without checking back it would probably be very different, in ways I couldn’t predict.
I wrote the first draft of the Intro to Waiting in much the same way: straight through, and getting it off quickly to the editor so that he’d have something if I got stymied making further changes. But for another month I tweaked it, cutting and pasting, adding, subtracting. And not just adding events or impressions: adding personal meaning. It was the most pleasurable writing I’d done in years because I was so fully engrossed in the task. Each morning at 7:30 I couldn’t wait to get my hands on yesterday’s printout, because in writing I was learning more about what Waiting might have meant to me and to others.
After finally accepting the value of Aubade, I’m way more ambivalent about the value of Waiting. After living through them, I’ve become fascinated with the way different generations value different kinds of writing, and what different standards reviewers bring to books in succeeding decades. I’m convinced that today’s writers are far better educated, technically proficient, psychologically aware. Yet books written back when, without that proficiency and awareness, may still be far more deeply treasured by readers (and writers).
I’m also fascinated by what writers don’t—can’t—know when they’re writing and that can only leak through in their writing by accident to later generations. When I wrote Aubade and Waiting I took for granted the austerities of postwar Britain, the limited diet, the fact that even the poorest people were expected to dress up for their office jobs, though how they were expected to find the money for good suits on what they earned is beyond me now. At a time when clothes were far more formal, expensive to buy and to clean, it was inconceivable to most of us that it might one day be acceptable for many professionals to wear jeans to the office, or that we’d even be encouraged to work from home. And don’t get me started on the colonialist prejudices expressed by the hero of Aubade.

“Crystalline” isn’t a word that trips off my tongue these days. In fact I had to go to a print dictionary to check the spelling because spellcheck didn’t recognize it. It came to mind because I remembered using it in some publicity blurb I wrote over half a century ago for the original edition of Aubade. Publishers asked me to write my own blurbs in those days, even before I reached the age of consent.

“Crystalline” got me thinking about something I didn’t have room to discuss in the Intros I wrote for Aubade and Waiting for the Sky to Fall: the kind of writing that was admired then versus what’s admired now. The Belfast Telegraph, which never made a secret of hating my guts after I trashed my hometown in an interview in a London Sunday paper, still had to concede that Aubade was written with the “economy of a born writer.” I remember reading Kingsley Amis’s remark that he’d aimed for “crystalline prose” when he started out. He gave up on that ambition, which is just as well, because no prose is less crystalline that Kingsley’s.

So economical, clear and sparkling was the goal to aim for. But is Dostoyevsky crystalline? These days, is Dave Eggers crystalline? “Crystalline” derailed me for a long time, because it led me to pay more attention to how I wrote than to what I wrote. And it led me to get impatient with a book like Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March because it seemed messy. I think a broad rule of thumb is that as we get older, the more aware we are of the complexity of the world and human consciousness, the less economical, clear and sparkling our prose is likely to become. Maybe when we’re about to croak, and things start to look simple again . . . .