In the year in front he died, Beethoven in some manner constructed in the silence of his mind a fiendishly hard string foursome, the Grosse Fuge. (He was by then unable to hear anything he composed.) Shakespeare, in the last of the plays that academic posterity will unambiguously attribute to him, brought together themes of paternal loss and originative decline in The Tempest. Philip Larkin, fearing that poetry had given him up after the publication of what would establish to be his terminal collection, focused his concentration to drive home just one more major poem, Aubade, distilling his terror of death.
These ar all pieces the critics would categorize as late work: words or music in which an creative person combines a lifetime of experience with the technique perfected through a long career to offer a climactic contribution to the art pattern they have served. But check the dates and you'll find that Beethoven, Shakespeare and Larkin were just either side of 50 when they committed their last thoughts. Increasingly, by modern-day standards, the Grosse Fuge, The Tempest and Aubade would stand as transitional works of middle age.
This week, PD James publishes her in style crime novel, The Private Patient, at the years of 88. And she is non the oldest author in the autumn lists: former Booker swag winner Stanley Middleton, 89 this month, has precisely published Her Three Wise Men. But James and Middleton ar more or less adolescents in comparing with Elliott Carter, wHO this summer became the first living composer to be given a centenary concert at the BBC Proms. Carter is motionless composing at an age when most people are doing the opposite: this year's celebrations included a new flute concerto, and two more pieces are said to be in preparation.
In down and stone, long regarded as a business for the young and unmatched in which there has been a sentimental regard for early death, the best reviews of the year for live execution have been shared by Leonard Cohen, 73, and Neil Diamond, 67. The nervous showbusiness tradition of performers pretending to be younger than they ar - fearful of seeming like the parents of their fans - may soon be reversed, with rookie musicians shifting their birth dates backwards, like army volunteers.
It can appear ungallant to make a song and dance around the age at which people ar still singing and dance. It's wise to be wary of Queen Mother syndrome, the process by which, in a noted figure's last years, nigh any evidence of undamaged faculties is met with cries of: "Aren't they amazing? At their age!" But on that point has been a marked change in the traditional trajectory of an artistic career. The general increase in longevity bestowed by medical developments has combined with a growing regard for professional veterans, to create a new genre: very late work.
What makes these pieces intriguing is the expectation of an even more concentrated construction of the values traditionally attributed to late act: a deeper accumulation of history, wisdom, expertise. It's the same impulse that leads local museums to interview senior members of their communities for oral history projects. The Tempest is a good representative of this kind of end-of-career piece. The play demonstrates Shakespeare's poetic maturity and hard-learned stagecraft and, in the moment when the conjurer Prospero breaks and jettisons the tools of his trade, encourages us to take this as the closest we will ever get to a memoir from an irritatingly invisible author.
These conventional expectations of late act - the serenity of seniority, the perfection of a philosophy - have been challenged by the literary critic Edward Said in his influential book of account On Late Style (2002). Said, a dedicated contrarian, argued that what made autumnal culture most interesting was non that the writer had come to some kind of final understanding of their world and their work, but that they had failed to do so. Career codas such as Beethoven's Grosse Fuge or Missa Solemnis - dark, heavy, dragged out of hearing loss - were a statement, he argued, of "intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction".
As Said freely acknowledged, his interest in this topic came partially from the knowledge that his own book would rank among his late work: he had begun the lecture programme that inspired it following the diagnosis of leukaemia, which killed him in 2003, at the age of 67. On Late Style is itself an example of the kind of final writing that the volume approvingly cites. Said's theories about creativity in its attenuation days are difficult, adamantine and sometimes contradictory.
But his views ar illuminating when it comes to very late work - in particular, PD James's do work of her 88th year. Baroness James of Holland Park has worked in a conservative literary tradition - the classic English detective enigma - and, in that sense, is the kind of artist to whom Said would least have got warmed. In some ways, The Private Patient, her 19th novel, does fit the sentimental template of stories that sit towards the end of a writer's bookshelf: there ar several reflections on the unstoppable musical passage of time, the conclusiveness of end and the consolation of relationships. However, even so late in the day, James - like Said's Beethoven - also struggles against the subjects and structures with which she works.
For example, for the first prison term in her books, she explicitly and graphically describes the import of death from the perspective of the murder victim. This passage suggests an endeavour to make believe the fullest possible employment with the ultimate criminal offense that has been her great topic. There is also little that is serene and accepting in the atmosphere of this book. Christian religious religion, a repeated touchstone for James's characters, seems in The Private Patient no more than a comforting ritual: a suicide takes place on holy ground, and James's sentiments throughout feel closer to the atheistic doctrine of Philip Larkin - "what will survive of us is love" - than any sense that the many corpses in her story are felicitous in shangri-la. Nor is there whatever comforting dispensation of department of Justice, of the sort that Commander Adam Dalgleish easily achieved in his early cases. Key issues remain, to borrow a favourite Said watchword, unresolved.
Stanley Middleton is another author who kit and caboodle in a traditional form - "well-made" novels about the peasant middle classes - and his very late novels find him worrying away at the literary and social values that have informed his work. There is too the feeling of dead authentic coverage of the experience of being one-time in a culture slanted towards youth: the experiences of sickness, bereavement, pensions and policy bureaucracy. When, in a recent novel, Middleton featured a character with Alzheimer's, there was a moving sense of a write up being sent back from a carnage by one of the few to escape.
Of course, there crapper be weaknesses in the novels of advanced seniority. The jr. characters in both James and Middleton speak an English unbelievably free of swearing and text abbreviations; and the prevalence in James's books of single brothers and sisters wHO share houses perhaps first Baron Marks of Broughton her as an Edwardian, born in a flow when such living arrangements were kind of more common. But, at their topper, these books offer the pleasure of writers completely at ease with their craft, and still desperately concerned with life and society.
What's especially impressive about James is her continuing energy. Whereas Graham Greene's afterwards works were eccentric novellas - a classic good example of the tendency of climactic creativity towards fragments - The Private Patient alternates numerous viewpoints over 400 pages. Commending James for such productivity, however, again raises one of the risks of selfsame late work: the trend to praise the istence of the work rather than its subject matter. At the centenary concerts for Elliott Carter, there was a feeling that concert-goers wHO would instinctively dislike his complex and edgy compositions were simply applauding his longevity. And yet Carter represents the fascinating contradiction of a modernist centenarian - an old creative person still interested in newness.
In the like way, anyone who went to interpret Leonard Cohen or Neil Diamond this year in some modality of arch surprise at their power to keep going would soon have realised that the rife spirit of these performances was not heritage conservation but reinvention and experimentation. Although both performed many old numbers pool, the point was what they brought to them now, later on periods of personal difficulties in both cases.
The usual objection to singers in the concluding phase of their careers has been that their voices go. During the final tours of Frank Sinatra and Nina Simone, audiences had to fight an instinct to shout out for an ear, nose or throat surgeon in the house. But what's bewitching about Cohen in particular is that, if his voice has gone, it has only gone to another property - and, probably, a better one. Listening to Cohen's 1970s and 80s recordings later on seeing him perform in Dublin and London this year, I was surprised to discover that what had formerly seemed unequivocal recordings of Hallelujah and Suzanne felt somehow abstemious and lilliputian. Now that he has taken the sensible precautions of giving up smoking and taking up yoga, there is a remarkable combination of gravity and clarity in Cohen's tones.
Admittedly, it's hard to envisage the singers continuing for as long as the novelists and the composers - Diamond or Cohen with guitars slung round their necks at the age of 88 or 89 - but a society in which the ageing often feel marginalised or ignored seems to be redressing the balance in culture. Roll o'er, Beethoven: this is what we average by late work �
� The Private Patient by PD James and Her Three Wise Men by Stanley Middleton ar both published in hardback this workweek.
� Leonard Cohen plays the SECC, Glasgow (0870 040 4000), on November 5 and 6, then tours.
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