Has Time Run Out for You?
On Becoming a Writer
Do you ever say about writing or any of the arts: “Interesting, but I’ll never really do it. The really gifted start when they’re so young, and now I see there’s an awful lot to know about all this.”
I’m here to encourage and give hope.
A prime example: Consider my next guest
who started late for a variety of reasons that she reveals in some of her work, and she’s now on Substack with amazing success, essay after essay—so eloquent and moving that your heart will break when you read her.She knows this that May Sarton said: "You must give yourself away if you're going to be a professional writer. It's the price. Look at someone like Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint; it's obvious that everything is himself though he's not saying 'I.' I had a letter from Willa Cather where she says that every one of her books is written out of a personal and usually painful experience—she who seems so classic and uninvolved."
More Wise Words
Here’s more that I’ve collected over the years and that have helped me.
Mary Granville Pendarves Delaney (1700-1788) whom Molly Peacock wrote about in The Paper Garden: An Artist [begins her life’s work] at 72 —yes, you read that correctly: at 72—who in 1772 invented the art of collage: She took hundreds of bits of brightly colored paper and composed botanically accurate portraits of flowers on dramatic black backgrounds. She didn’t think of herself as an artist but rather an amateur as she remade her world through her extraordinary creative work. –I’ve interviewed Molly and will post that, probably on my personal site, soon.
Note: I said this earlier with my heartfelt thanks to for the Empress Questionnaire
Somerset Maugham: “When I was young, I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirks because they would take too long.” [1]
Get this: Productivity was highest in their later years for Duchamp, Chagall, Trumbull, Chardon, Bracque, and Ernst, when they produced 28% to 40% of their work.
Degas did the bulk of his work (34%) in his forties, and Benton and Goya were most productive in their fifties.
For Rouault and Corot, a peak occurred in their seventies when they produced 25% to 43% of their work. There are even more exceptional individuals.
Picasso had three peaks: his forties, sixties, and eighties, when he accomplished 68% of his work. Matisse had four peak periods: in his twenties, forties, fifties, and sixties. He did 91% of his work in those decades.[2]
May Sarton, poet, novelist, and essayist who suffered cancer and a stroke, wrote into her late eighties. “I have always looked forward to old age, and the reason, as the poems make clear, is that I have known so many great old people. Well, I looked forward to old age wrongly because I imagined it would be serene and uncluttered, and rightly because it would make it possible for me to grow and to create poems and books that have growth in them. I am convinced that we are on earth to make our souls. And to that extent old age, of course, is the most thrilling time of all. Because we are coming close to an end, this conviction that the making of a soul is of paramount importance is very much with us.”
In February 1996, The New York Times best seller list included Tiger in the Grass by Harriet Doerr (age 85) and Having Our Say by Sara and Elizabeth Delaney, African-American sisters (ages 99 and 100, respectively).
Three years after her husband’s death, 65-year-old Harriet Doerr returned to school to complete a B.A. in European history. In 1984, at age of 73, Doerr’s first novel, Stones for Ibarra, won the American Book Award. The Delaneys had no previous book. They were working as a schoolteacher and a dentist.
No one ever told Doerr or the Delaneys they were too old to be creative. They, and thousands of other older adults who have joyfully entered into the creative process, have what one observer called, “this divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension [that is] the source of artistic energy.”
Germain Greer: “You know I'm awfully surprised when I reread anything of mine and dismayed because I feel I could never do that now. I feel very much weaker than my best work. Whenever I start a novel, I think I know nothing—and after all there are twelve or so novels—and I think, 'Well how do you get someone into the room' or 'what is dialogue all about?' I go through the whole process of discovering the form again and of how to do it. It's terrifying. I'm trying to do a novel now and I'm absolutely terrified. So when I go back, I'm sometimes pleasantly surprised, although I wouldn't do it that way now.” (Women Writers Talking: see footnote 3)
Isak Dinesen: When Karen Blixen was forty-six she came out of Africa back to Denmark. Her coffee plantation in Kenya had gone broke; though it was auctioned off to pay the accumulated debts, the stockholders lost more than £150,000. Her unfaithful husband, whom she had forgiven for giving her syphilis, had insisted on a divorce, which she had agreed to with reluctance. All her hopes of pregnancy had been dashed, and she had quarreled with her lover, who was killed in a plane crash days later. She had attempted suicide at least once during this turbulent time. She was so thin and frail that her friends had suggested that she go to a clinic in Montreux; there she found out that her syphilis, which had been supposed cured, had become syphilis of the spine, tabes dorsalis. The course of the disease was well known; locomotor ataxia meant she would never again walk properly, anorexia meant that food would nauseate her, she would develop perforating stomach ulcers, and her face would soon take on a deadly pallor and be covered with a grid of tight wrinkles. Her greatest bereavement was the loss of Africa, which left her with a physical longing for the light, the sky and the bush that never faded. Crates of treasured possessions followed her to Denmark, but she did not open them for thirteen years.
Baroness Blixen's way of dealing with her intense physical and mental pain at this crisis time, a climacteric in every sense of the word, was to be reborn as Isak Dinesen. Isaac was the post-menopausal child of Abraham and Sarah, who said when he was born, "God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me." Dinesen was Blixen's maiden name. She herself called this time her fourth age, saying she began to write "in great uncertainty about the whole undertaking, but, nevertheless, in the hands of both a powerful and happy spirit."
In 1934 this new forty-eight-year-old writer produced Seven Gothic Tales.
She thought she had one foot in the grave when she wrote Out of Africa, published in 1937, about the Africa she lost, and with it the love, hope, health and light that she would never know again; it is imbued with the elegiac feeling that is the reward for having been able to mourn and to let go. [4]
Remember this: It’s never too late and it ain’t over till it’s over—to be a bit trite, but, darn it, also true.
Mary Tabor writes
[1] Some of these quotes come from this book: Elderlearning: New Frontier in an Aging Society by Mary Fugate, Lois Lamdin; Oryx Press, 1997.
[2] Adams-Price, Carolyn E., Creativity and Successful Aging: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches, Springer Publishing 1998
[3] From: Women Writers Talking by Janet Todd; Holmes & Meier, 1983.
[4] “Serenity and Power” from The Other within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging by Marilyn Pearsall; Westview Press, 1997.
And then there is Mary L. Tabor, who spins her own gold out of the lost and found of years.
I'm not in the same league as the people you write about, Mary, but I love being an older writer at age 83. You have more to say than you ever had and much less to lose by saying it. I am much more willing to take risks than I would have been years ago.