From left: Susan Sontag, Barbara Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick and Joan Didion. Photo: Todd Eberle, NY, 1999.
In a blog post on the Times website, Timothy Egan wrote yesterday about those who find success relatively late in life. At one time, he coveted the ‘wunderkind’, the young genius who produces brilliant work early on in their career, like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Vincent van Gogh. But now, perhaps through necessity, he finds inspiration in the late bloomer, “somebody who kicks around in frustration and misdirection for decades before going on a brilliant late-innings streak.”
In politics, Egan points to Ted Kennedy as one who started out as a tempestuous youth, but later became a “master of the Senate”, one who’s “legislative creativity” only increased with age. Hillary Clinton also looks to Egan to be set to follow this route, a better politician and diplomat now than the “policy-making 40-something who had trouble controlling her temper, or getting the results she wanted.”
Similarly, some writers take a little time to get going. “For every J.D. Salinger, who published “The Catcher in the Rye” when he was 32, there is a Mark Twain, who brought out “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at 49,” Egan writes. Though Ernest Hemingway wrote “The Sun Also Rises” when he was just 27, Norman Maclean only settled down to write his masterpiece, “A River Runs Through It”, when he was 74. These writers would appear to hold with Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece, which claimed that for feats requiring knowledge of craft, and constant experimenting to get it right, age may actually be a benefit.
… [S]ometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
There is still another, even rarer category of writer: the great early genius who later dazzles readers with a glorious second act. Susan Sontag wrote “In America” in 1999; Elisabeth Hardwick’s celebrated biography, “Herman Melville”, was published in 2000. Joan Didion is another such individual: seemingly immune to senescence, her late style bears little resemblance to her early work, and yet continues to impress readers with its intelligence and honesty. As Egan puts it:
Nobody was a better American essayist in the 1970s and 80s than Joan Didion. But the writerly sprint culminating in her late-years memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” was breathtaking. She finished the book just days after her 70th birthday.
Of course, the “second-act ace” can be found in other realms outside literature. Vanessa Redgrave will reportedly star in “Driving Miss Daisy”, the play by Alfred Uhry, this October at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway. This comes just a few weeks after confiding in a radio interview that she wished to take a break from work to enable her to “take time to think, to read, to garden with my daughter and be with my grandchildren more and, you know, take stock.”
But, as every second-act ace must surely know, you don’t get a third.