'It was a monologue, but it was a monologue that I wanted to hear'

Praise a certain kind of novelist and he will smile in a way that says: 'Well, of course you enjoyed my book; it's by me.' Francis Wyndham is not this kind of novelist. Tell him that you enjoyed his slim novel, or his short stories, and his wide, rectangular face, which can look lugubrious in repose, will split in two in a delight so genuine you could almost warm your hands on it. 'Oh, I'm glad you thought that was funny!' he says, when I tell him that a line of his made me cry with laughter. 'It's so important for writing to be funny. Don't you think that, in life, things are sad and funny almost at the same time?' His hands flutter momentarily in the air, like tiny birds. 'In a kind of way, something doesn't exist until it is read. So I am always pleased if I hear someone did like it.' A pause. 'But then, I can also completely understand if someone doesn't get it.' Another pause. 'Though I don't think anyone's actually going to hate it.'

It's not only innate modesty that enables him to talk of his work in so politely halting a way. The unlikely arc of a long writing career has lent him what you might call perspective. Wyndham, who was born in 1924, wrote his first collection of stories, Out of the War, as a teenager but, rejected for publication, he put them away and forgot all about them until 1974, when they finally appeared between hard covers. Another decade passed. In 1985, a second collection appeared, Mrs Henderson. Then, in 1987, he published The Other Garden and, at the somewhat mature age of 63, he won the Whitbread First Novel Prize.

He followed this with a collection of his journalism, The Theatre of Embarrassment but, thereafter, silence reigned. The fiction fell slowly out of print. Until now. Next month, Picador will publish it again, in a single volume with an introduction by Wyndham's friend Alan Hollinghurst ('Exceptionally accomplished... a writer who never wastes a word or puts one wrong...'). How does this new - I refuse to say final - twist make Wyndham feel? 'Oh, I am terribly grateful. Things mostly don't get reprinted these days, unless they're famous and important. There could be something melancholy about it, but there isn't. So I'm just very grateful.'

Did the writing leave him or did he leave the writing? Neither, really. 'It would be lovely to think that I'd written a lot of books, instead of just these. But I believe that a lot of writers write too much. I don't mean that they shouldn't, but... I had jobs, you see. I had to sort of make a living. I had a few ideas. One or two things. Occasionally, I did try. But I didn't feel that I owed it to myself or to anyone else. When nothing happened, I didn't feel guilty about it.' While he concedes that 'it's rather embarrassing that The Other Garden remains my only novel', he also likes 'sitting still' far too much to do anything about it. A few years ago, his old friend Lucian Freud asked Wyndham to sit for him. 'He suddenly rang me up and said, "I want to see you." He came round at once in his Rolls and took me off to a restaurant. He was nervous. I thought it might be some histoire with David [Sylvester, the art critic, who was also a friend]. But then he said, "Will you sit for me?" I said of course. And I loved it. It was terribly interesting. We've plenty to talk about. He's wonderful company and the only way to see Lucian unless you're a beautiful young girl is to be painted by him. But it's also that I like sitting for a painting more than anything. I love sitting still, and that's what you have to do, and by doing it, you're helping this very talented person.'

In the gaps between his writing, Wyndham has made something of a career out of helping talented people. Over the years, it has fallen to him to be a first reader of manuscripts by, among others, VS Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Bruce Chatwin and, more recently, Edward St Aubyn. This, a literary career that has so far spanned six decades, and the fact that his maternal grandmother was Ada Leverson, the writer Oscar Wilde called 'the Sphinx', means that talking to him is not only fascinating but ghostly, too; he connects you to a past that you've previously heard about only via fat biographies. He is not a name dropper, but the names, nevertheless, tumble out: Henrietta Moraes, Sonia Orwell, Diana Melly...

At one point, I ask him about Rhys, whose literary executor he eventually became. A notorious drunk, was she as difficult as they say? 'People say she was always drunk, but she wasn't when I knew her. She had a ... light head. We'd have a cocktail, put Piaf on the gramophone and then we'd gossip. She was very egotistical, but since I was interested in her, that didn't matter. She'd talk about Ford or being a chorus girl.' It takes me a moment to grasp that when he says Ford, he means Ford Madox Ford, the author of The Good Soldier, with whom Rhys had a brief but seismic love affair. See what I mean? It's enough to give anyone goose bumps.

Francis Wyndham lives above a dry cleaner's on a busy road in west London, surrounded by books and pictures. It's not exactly where you expect him to live - he comes from rather posh stock - but his attitude to it is of a piece with his personality, which is to say that he sees the good in everything: 'I am rather deaf, so I don't notice the noise.' He grew up in Wiltshire, in the dreamy rural isolation that he describes so beautifully in The Other Garden. His father, a retired colonel, came from a grand family (he was connected to the Wyndhams who owned Petworth House in Sussex, though I'm not sure exactly how) and was much older than his mother, with the result that everything is 'a bit lopsided in my family'.

His father's first wife, who died in the flu epidemic that followed the First World War, had given her husband a family long before Francis and his brother came along: two sons, one of whom had been killed in the war, and a daughter, thanks to whom he had met Francis's mother; the two young women were friends, having both been nurses in the war. In Mrs Henderson, a rather revelatory book, I think, he tells the stories of this half-brother and sister. The brother was a painter ('a bit Bohemian; he drank') whose elder daughter was writer Joan Wyndham, and whose younger daughter, Ingrid, married first a Guinness, then Paul Channon, the Tory politician. The sister fell in love with a well-known black actress of the day, and went to live with her in connubial bliss in Harlem.

'My father was more like a grandfather, really,' he says. 'He died when I was about 16. But I was very fond of him.' But it was his mother's side of the family that had the greater influence on him, especially Ada, who was difficult and yet always so alive to the world, even as she grew older (after the death of her friend Wilde, a generation of younger men - Harold Acton, Osbert Sitwell, Ronald Firbank - sought her out, seeing her as a fascinating survivor of the faded Yellow Book past).

'I was very glamoured by the fact that she was a writer. I was only nine when she died, but I do remember her, and I adored her - and later, I slithered into that literary world, which she was in, too.'

After Eton - 'I wasn't bullied, it wasn't David Copperfield; I just didn't want to be there' - he went up to the desolate, empty Oxford of the war, spending just a year there before he was called up. Was he full of dread at what would happen next? 'Not really. One didn't allow oneself to think about what was happening on various fronts. Occasionally, when one was in London, and there were buzz bombs, it was rather exciting, though it sounds awful to say.' Besides, in the end, he saw no action. 'I was at the Britannia Barracks in Norwich, where the army doctor, I discovered later, was known as the Butcher. I kept on going sick. He thought I was pretending. Then I fell off the bars in the gym and broke my ankle. In the convalescent home, they found I had pleurisy and that it was of tubercular origin, at which point I was out.'

He thinks he may have caught the infection from the woman on whom he based the mysterious Kay, heroine of The Other Garden, a painting of whom hangs on his wall to this day; a woman who is more than the narrator's friend, yet less than her lover, and who, thanks to her own TB, dies tragically young.

Though he never went back to Oxford, soon after he began writing reviews for the TLS, whose fiction editor was Anthony Powell. 'It was a very Grub Street-George Gissing sort of a life - you know, selling your review copies. There was this place on the Strand we all went to. It was very embarrassing; sometimes - you'd see the author of the book you were selling.' Then, in 1953, he made a resolution that he should get a proper job. So he did, in publishing. First, he worked for a man called Derek Verschoyle, a character straight out of Muriel Spark's A Far Cry From Kensington (i.e. a fly-by-night), and later for André Deutsch. He was a reader. One day, he was sitting in his reading room when Diana Athill, then an editor at Deutsch, came in and asked him to look at something by one VS Naipaul. 'Yes, I made friends with Vidia, and with Jean,' he says, now. 'But I don't want to go on boasting about this.' Oh, go on. Boast away! 'Well, in the case of Jean, I thought she was dead. I'd shown her books to Diana, who had loved them, but said we couldn't reprint. Why did I think she was dead? Julian Maclaren-Ross [Soho diarist and dandy] had told me she was dead - she'd died in an asylum or sanitorium or something - and stupidly, I believed him. Then she was discovered! [By Athill, in the Radio Times, improbable as this may sound.] So I wrote to her and she wrote back and said she was writing something, and this was Wide Sargasso Sea. She would send it to me as she was writing it, bit by bit. It was so exciting. I know that she was difficult, that she had her rages, but I only ever witnessed one rage and that was about being old. I was very moved by it. She knew I was a great fan of her writing. I think she knew, too, that she was good and that quite a lot of people couldn't see that she was good. So we had all that unspoken between us. She was a bit frail, like an actress. Sonia Orwell and I used to stay in a hotel near where she lived in Devon and take her out. She lived in a prefab kind of house. She didn't want a biography but, in the end, I betrayed her and allowed one.' He sighs. 'I know why she didn't. She didn't come out of it well.'

Wyndham left Deutsch to join Queen magazine (Mark Boxer, its art editor, was a friend); he was its theatre critic, then its literary editor. Then, in 1964, he followed Boxer to the Sunday Times magazine and began a new life editing juicy journalism and writing interviews; he often worked with Snowdon, still a friend. Uh oh. I reviewed the new biography of Snowdon; he sounds awful.

'Yes, I saw your review,' says Wyndham, sweetly. 'It's hard to explain. He's fascinating to be with, though it's true that he never reads a book. Often, we used to go on assignments and he'd never heard of the person. "Do tell me who this Tolkien is," he'd say. But I rather loved that.'

It was Wyndham who brought Bruce Chatwin, then just a 'brilliant young person at Sotheby's', to the magazine as its artistic adviser and it was Wyndham who encouraged him to write, commissioning him to write a piece about Madame Vionnet. What was he like? 'I absolutely loved him. I found him life-enhancing. You wouldn't see him for ages, then he would just turn up. He was a bit like Jean; he would talk about what he wanted to talk about. It was a monologue, but it was a monologue that I wanted to hear.'

Did Wyndham know when Chatwin, now famous for his exaggerations, was telling the truth? 'Well, I don't really like travel books and Bruce is famous as a travel writer. So when people say he invented a lot of In Patagonia - that's probably why I liked it.'

His other great friend from this time, though he can't remember exactly when he met her, was Henrietta Moraes, the model whom Francis Bacon painted 16 times. During her period as an unsuccessful cat burglar (she was also a drug addict and alcoholic), it fell to Wyndham to guarantee her bail. 'I met her at a party. When I first knew her, she was beautiful, adventurous, but vulnerable. She became a liability after a time. She and her boyfriend burgled a house in Hampstead, and then passed out on the Heath with what they'd stolen. But when she appeared in court, she came over all Francis Bacon to the judge. [He adopts a camp Cockney sort of voice]. "Ooh, I don't like you, dear! I don't fancy you!" Once, she was on a shoplifting charge. She'd taken something from Wallis. Well, she was outraged. "As if anyone would hoist from there!" But she had, of course. It did get...' A bit much? 'Yes. But she was sensitive. She gave me a holiday in the end. We remained friends to the end, and I helped her with her book [of memoirs]. I went on loving Henrietta.'

Did he know Bacon? 'Yes, but I wasn't at the heart of that scene. I don't think Bacon liked me and I didn't buy the whole thing. I'm not certain of his greatness.'

Wyndham finally left the Sunday Times in 1980. He was ready to leave; he had ideas for more of the stories that eventually became Mrs Henderson. But still, this was a difficult time. His mother died and he gave up smoking. He entered a kind of thoughtful retirement - sometimes writing, but mostly not - which has continued ever since. He lives alone, but his unerring capacity for friendship seems to have protected him from the things that sometimes happen to those who live alone; he is still resolutely in the world, awake to its possibilities in a way that many older people are not. Does he despise being old? 'I think I always was! I think it rather suits me. For some people, the point of them is that they are young: Jean, Henrietta. But not me. Some people get very bitter when they get older; they hate modern painting or whatever. Not me. And I like an excuse for not doing things. I've always been one for saying, "Oh, shall we just not bother?"' He laughs.

I don't know if there have been love affairs, unrequited or otherwise. Probably. But there is a marvellous story in Mrs Henderson in which the narrator becomes so desperate to avoid the concerned yet needy phone calls of his pals following the death of his mother that he absents himself temporarily from their incessant ringing by pretending to be involved in an affair. For the benefit of the friend who thinks he's gay, he makes up a male lover; for the friend who believes him to be straight, he invents a girl. With funny results. Does he look back at his life, so amazingly rich and full, with astonishment? 'Oh, yes. I have been very lucky. Of course, there have been long periods of my life when nothing seemed to happen at all. But I tried to put those in my work. Rather a lot of life is spent in a kind of limbo. '

For the first time since we have been talking, his hands are now still, clasped prayerfully, perhaps in thanks that, with the publication of his collected work, the latest of these periods has now been triumphantly punctuated.

· The Other Garden and Collected Stories will be published by Picador on 5 September

Francis Wyndham: A life

Born Francis Guy Percy Wyndham in London, 1924. Worked as a staff writer at the Sunday Times (1964-1980) and as an editor at André Deutsch. Credited in the 1950s with the rediscovery of Jean Rhys, whose letters he also published after her death.

Key works Out of the War (1974), a short-story collection written during his teens; Mrs Henderson and Other Stories (1985); The Other Garden (1987), which won the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Theatre of Embarrassment (1991), a collection of essays.

He says: 'What I've always wanted to do in fiction is to write about the hours and hours and hours, the enormous proportion of life which is spent in a kind of limbo, even in people's active years. It seems to me that it isn't sufficiently celebrated.'

They say: 'He belongs in a tradition of social comedy going back through Henry James to Jane Austen' - Alan HollinghurstImogen Carter