It's Never Too Late -- Well, Almost Never: Cautionary Tales for Those Putting Off Writing

     It's never too late to begin a literary career. But that's not to say that you should act as if you have all the time in the world. If you are thinking about writing, don't delay. It may be later than you think.

     Anna Sewell was interested in writing a story about a horse for years, but she waited until she was sick and dying before dictating the tale -- Black Beauty -- to her mother. It was to be her first and only book. She died just five months after its publication, living long enough to see its initial early success, but not long enough to know that she had written a children's classic.

     Swedish writer Helena Henschen enjoyed her late-in-life success a bit longer.

     A designer, founder of a clothing company and children's book illustrator, Henschen launched her literary career at the age of 64 in 2004 with a bang: Her first adult novel, "I skuggan av ett brott" (In the Shadow of a Crime) was awarded one of the 12 European Prizes for Literature just created by the European Union. The Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter heralded the success of a  "grandmother."

     The novel arose out of research Henschen had been doing about an infamous crime that took place eight years before she was born. An 18-year-old son brutally had murdered his father and two maids in the family's Stockholm apartment, then fled with his wife, only to kill her, too, and then himself in an Uppsala restaurant. The bloody tale held a particular interest for Henschen. The sister of the murderer was her mother. Henschen's mother, who was 15 at the time, had been the one to discover the bodies of her brother's first victims. Obviously traumatized by the grisly affair, her mother never talked about her family with her daughter.

     Henschen went on to write "Hon älskade" (She Loved), this time based on her rebellious paternal grandmother. It became a Swedish bestseller. Her third book was going to be a sequel, also based on true events, set during World War II. That manuscript was never finished. Last month Helena Henschen died of a stroke at age 70.

     "She became a writer so late, but she was so ready with that first book," said her publisher, quoted in her obituary  http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/forfattaren-och-formgivaren-helena-henschen-dod 
    

Photo of Helena Henschen by Magnus Hallgren for Dagens Nyheter

     Luckily, Henschen did begin to write down the stories that had been bottled up within her for years. And luckily before her death, she was able to enjoy the enthusiastic reception of her work, albeit only for a few years.

      Fellow Swedish author Stieg Larsson was not so fortunate. He died before his phenomenally popular Millenium-series was even published.

     A Swedish newspaperman and a political activist, Larsson had written a few science fiction short stories when he began to write crime novels in 1997.  In 2003, with two books finished and work started on a third, he finally contacted a publisher. Extraordinary for a first-time author, he landed a three-book contract with the Swedish publisher Nordstedts. The first in the series, featuring hacker Lisbeth Salander, was scheduled to be published in early 2005.

      Then in November, 2004, a few months before the book's debut, Larsson died of a heart attack. He was 50.

     Larsson missed out on the phenomenal success of the Millenium-series, translated in English as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl That Played With Fire and The Girl That Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Last year the gripping tales of the world's most famous fictional hacker had sold 27 million copies in more than 40 countries. 

     But perhaps the saddest of all are the books that remain unfinished. 

    Helena Henschen's published work is too "sparse," lamented Carin Stahlberg in a tribute to the author in Dagens Nyheter.  "It feels sad to not have read the third part of her interesting family history."

    

    

    

BOOKS ON OLD AGE: HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL?

     What will life be like when we are really old? Old old? Will our productive days be over? Or can our creativity last or even flourish into our eighties and nineties? Two recently published books ask those questions and come up with very different pictures.

     Susan Jacoby in Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age says we have not been honest with ourselves about what lies ahead for those of us who survive into ninth and tenth decades of our lives. Jacoby, who is 63, thinks we are wrong to imagine that at 65, the best years of our lives may still ahead of us. She wants us to look more realistically at what the old old have to face.

       "Harry R. Moody, the author of numerous books on the psychology and ethics of of aging," she writes, "came up with the terms 'wellderly' to describe the healthy old, as opposed to 'illderly.' What such distinctions do not acknowledge is that nearly all of the wellderly, if they live as long as my grandmother did, will turn into the illderly." Anyone who lives beyond eighty-five, she reports, has a 50-50 chance of ending up spending some time in a nursing home and close to a 50 percent chance of developing dementia. 

     "We cannot continue to base our image of old age on the extraordinary person, blessed by a combination of affluence and physiological hardiness, who remains 'as sharp as a tack' and takes up a new, youthful hobby -- say, skydiving -- in her nineties," she writes. "We cannot idealize the remarkable accomplishments of a few people who maintain their creative abilities and mental acuity into advanced old age as if those accomplishments were the norm."

     The norm, she says, is more like the case of her grandmother, "an ordinary person with serious health problems and ordinary financial resources" who had to live out her life in a nursing home where she was "one of only a handful of residents who still had a working brain."

      In Lastingness: The Art of Old Age, Nicholas Delbanco focuses on those extraordinary persons that Jacoby says are not the norm in order to figure out why some people do manage to stay productive into old age. He's interested in the artists -- writers, painters and musicians -- who not only continued to be creative in their old age but also did some of their best work in their "twilight years."  He concentrates on artists working past age 70 (Delbanco is 68) and comes up with some fascinating stories about late-in-life achievers such as William Butler, who wrote some of his best work late in life; Claude Monet, who painted well into his 80s, even though his eyes were covered by cataracts; and Pablo Casals, who could barely make it to the podium but was transformed when he began to play his cello.

     Delbanco makes no sweeping judgments about creativity and old age. In fact, he never really comes up with an answer to his question of why some artists do last and some don't. But that doesn't stop him from reveling in the stories of those who do.

    I understand the impulses of both of these authors. Jacoby is concerned that in our rush to battle the stereotypes of ageism we are forgetting the real, material needs of many of the very old. She sees the glass of old age as half empty -- and thinks that those of us who look at it as half full do at our own peril. I agree that you can carry the idea of defying age too far -- although I was surprised to learn that half of the people who make it into their eighties and nineties never see the inside of a nursing home and more than half never experience dementia.  But, no, we're not going to "beat this thing" and Jacoby is right to denounce such baby boomer delusions. Aging successfully is not for sissies.

     Delbanco, on the other hand,  is addressing the more intangible needs we have as we grow old. The need to feel productive. The need to feel creative. The need to have hope.  He doesn't exactly see the glass half full -- he admits that lasting creativity among the old old is rare --  but he prefers to examine those who defy the norm and to take from them his own inspiration.

     As Delbanco says, there is no intrinsic reason why people cannot continue to create late in life. They are not aspiring to be baseball players or ballerinas, professions that do have a restricted shelf life.

      But are Delbanco's examples of famous artists too extraordinary, as Jacoby contends, to be of value in considering what happens to "ordinary people" who survive into their eighties and nineties? Well, consider this: My mother was an ordinary woman with ordinary financial resources. She faced many serious health problems, from cancer to a stroke. Yet in her eighties she began to write with a burst of creative energy, fearless in her drive to create in the last years of her life. She began by writing her memoirs and then, at age 86, launched a monthly column in the Seniority section of a Florida newspaper. Her last column, written when she was in hospice, was a letter to her first great-grandchild whom she knew she would never see grow old. That column was filed on the day she died. She was 92.

     My mother knew, of course, that her writing wasn't going to forestall the inevitable. There were days when writing didn't ward off her aches and pains, both physical and spiritual. But writing gave her a renewed energy that was unmistakable.

     Watching my mother grow strong stronger as she tapped into her creative soul at such a late stage in her life has drawn me into these ruminations on creativity and aging.  I, too, want to address questions even more puzzling than Delbanco's inquiry into the lastingness of artists. It's one thing to continue to create, but what about those who start to create late in life? Why did my mother have such a burst of creative energy so late in life? What can these creative late bloomers tell us about the quality of aging? Should everyone be encouraged to be creative late in life, the wellderly and illderly alike?

   

    

    









    

 

CRUSADING LATE BLOOMERS

     Not every creative late bloomer has been dreaming all her life of becoming a successful writer or an artist. For some, a successful late-in-life creative career comes as much of a surprise to them as to their audience.

     They are the Crusading Late Bloomers, proselytizing experts and activists who turn to creativity late in life to spread the gospel about their pet concerns, either subjects in which they have an expertise, usually honed over a lifetime, or causes for which they feel a burning passion.

THE EXPERTS

       Gardening. Manners. Dogs. Birds. Sex. All these subjects have been the catalyst for successful late-in-life writing careers.

       Gertrude Jekyll, born 1843, launched a creative career late in life because, like Grandma Moses, poor eyesight forced her to abandoned embroidery, the acceptable creative outlet for women of the day. Instead of naive painting though, Jekyll (who also painted watercolors) turned to another colorful outlet: gardening. Meeting up with a young 20-year-old architect, at 46 she began to designed Impressionist-style gardens for his houses -- over 400 of them --  that were considered works of art in themselves. None of the gardens remain, but the 15 books she wrote about gardening, including Colour in the Flower Garden, often dubbed the Bible of gardening.

     Emily Post's cause -- and area of expertise -- was Society with a capital S. In her Forties, her friends urged her to write down what she knew down. Her book on etiquette, published when she was 50, became a bestseller and led her, at age 74, to found the Emily Post Institute which has made her name synonymous with manners.

     A dog trainer for years, Barbara Woodhouse wrote No Bad Dogs: The Woodhouse Way in her 80s and launched a TV series to promote her "no-bad-dogs" philosophy. Erma J. Fisk, a lifelong birdwatcher, never thought of writing a book. Then at 73, with her husband gone and her children grown, she went to live alone for five months in a cabin in the foothills of Arizona's Baboquivari Peak, recording and banding birds for The Nature Conservancy. Her notes because the basis for her first book, Peacocks of Baboquivari, published when she was 78. She went on to write three more books about birds.

    Perhaps the best known expert late bloomer is Karola Ruth Siegel Westheimer. Never heard of her? You probably know her better as Dr. Ruth, the therapist who still is crusading for better sex lives. Married three times and after raising two children, she turned her passion and information about sex into an international career that has included a popular radio show (Sexually Speaking launched in 1982),  over 30 books and countless personal appearances. Her first book, Dr. Ruth's Guide to Good Sex, was published in her mid-fifties.

THE ACTIVISTS

     "Writing for me has always come from being bugged -- agitated by a life, a speaking voice, an idea," wrote a 68-year-old Grace Paley, a political activist who published her first collection of short stories in 1959 at age 37.  For some, that fire in the belly comes later.

     When she was in her Forties, Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun, started up a pen pal relationship with a prison inmate. She went to visit him and ended up witnessing his execution on April 5, 1984. "Like a sacrament, the execution left an indelible make on my soul," she says.  She began to counsel those on Death Row and pray the rosary with their families.

     She felt, however, that she needed to do something more public. So she sat down to write about her experiences on death row. The result was Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, which Prejean describes as a "sustained meditation on love, criminal violence, and capital punishment." She was 54. Based on two capital punishment cases, the book decries the unfair impact the death penalty has on African Americans and the poor and criticizes Louisiana prosecuters for displaying a "Big Prick" award, featuring the state bird holding a hypodermic needle used in executions in its talons. Dead Man Walking inspired the Oscar-winning film starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn and launched Prejean as an anti-death penalty advocate.

     Activism also led Doris "Granny D" Haddock to turn to writing late in life. Very late in life. After walking across the country at age 90 to make people aware of the need for political finance reform, Haddock wrote two books, ran for political office (she lost) and posted regularly on her MySpace page until her death at age 100.