The Nineties
OK, here’s a question: how many of the authors in these photographs can you name?
Answers after the next photo!
The common denominator is that all of the writers in the first four photographs were (or are) writing into their nineties.
Picture number 1: Mary Midgley, who published her last book (the excellent What is Philosophy For?) at the age of 99.
Picture number 2: John McPhee, who has just published his latest book, Tabula Rasa: Volume 1, at the age of 92.
Picture number 3: Charles Taylor, who has just published his latest 500-page blockbuster, this time on Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, at the age of 91.
Picture number 4: Audrey Donnithorne, who published her last book, China in Life’s Foreground, at the age of 96.
And picture number 5: Laura Ingalls Wilder, the exception to the rule, who published the first of her Little House on the Prairie books in her mid-sixties and the last one at the comparatively young age of 76.
So, where am I going with all this?
Partly, I want to bust the all-too-commonly-heard myth that writing is exclusively a young person’s game, that if you haven’t made it by thirty you’re wasting your time. Partly, I want to push back against the dominant ageism of our contemporary world. And partly, I want to offer encouragement. Maybe you think you’ve missed the boat, that it’s too late to start writing seriously now. It’s never too late.
And it’s never too late to move onto new ventures either. Take a look at these dispirited words in a letter from 1949:
I am now in my fiftieth year. I feel my zeal for writing, and for whatever talent I originally possessed to be decreasing; nor (I believe) do I please my readers as I used to. I labour under many difficulties.
Who was the author of this letter?
None other than C.S. Lewis.
What did he do next?
He wrote the Chronicles of Narnia.
Not bad for a man who was struggling at home and at his writing desk.