8/8/2019 You'Re Never Too Old to Start Writing

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You're never too old to start writingWalt Whitman remains a fine riposte to all the 'best writer under 40' lists

Robert McCrumThe Observer Features Sun 27 Jun 2010

When, at the age of 36, the poet first self-published the collection for which hewould become famous, it received just two reviews, both written by himself under apseudonym, but otherwise fell stillborn from the press.

Only now is Walt Whitman generally recognised as the artist who inventedAmerican poetry and gave his people an authentic lyric voice with Leaves of Grassas surely as Mark Twain created American fiction with The Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn.

The mystery of Walt Whitman, explored in the latest New York Review of Books,goes deeper still. Until Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman was heroicallyunpromising a carpenter, a schoolteacher, a printer and journalist, and the authorof a "temperance" novel. In the words of one critic, until well into his 30s,"Whitman was a non-poet in every way, with no mark of special talent ortemperament".

In the absence of an explanation for Whitman's creative leap forward was it,

perhaps, the fruit of his service in the civil war as a hospital orderly working interrible battlefield conditions? most biographers have retired, baffled. EvenWhitman's champion, the sage of Boston, RW Emerson, seems to have understoodthat this extraordinary new voice had undergone a mysterious and secret gestation."I salute you at the beginning of a great career," wrote Emerson, acknowledgingLeaves of Grass, "which yet must have a long foreground somewhere."There are so many approaches to the mystery of creativity. For the New Yorker,which has just published another top 20 list of "most promising novelists", it hasbecome slick, modish and briskly packaged for the impatient consumer. "Under 40"

is its dominant criterion, pioneered by Granta as long ago as 1983. Inevitably, therehave been some unconvincing copycat lists. Leaving aside the taxonomic difficultiesof cramming the next generation into a straitjacket, there are larger issueshere."Under 40" recognises the truth that this column has addressed before: mostsuccessful writers have made their mark before their fourth decade. Tolstoy? 35(War and Peace). Dickens? 38 (David Copperfield) Fitzgerald? 29 (The GreatGatsby). Naipaul? 29 (A House for MrBiswas).

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But the ruthless cut-off of 40 does not address the complex trajectory of creativegrowth: for every novelist or poet who explodes skywards with a first or secondbook, there are many who only achieve mastery as they reach the shady side of theslope. The onset of middle age, or the approach of oblivion, is perhaps as sharp aspur to literary effort as the intoxicating self-belief of youth.

Daniel Defoe completed Robinson Crusoe just before his 60th birthday, after aturbulent life as a journalist. Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn aged 49.Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov in hismid-40s. Closer to home, Mary Wesley launched The Camomile Lawn at 70.Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn, this year's American literary sensation, aVietnam novel of astonishing power and insight, worked on his manuscript for 33years and finally saw it published in his 60s. He now enjoys rather more recognitionthan the Oxford poet Craig Raine, who has just published his first novel,Heartbreak, aged 65.

The artistic provenance of these late bloomers will be as complex as Whitman's, butI think Dr Raine's title gives a clue to one common thread: these books areinvariably love stories, in the broadest sense, inspired by a person or a memory inTwain's case, of the Mississippi for whom the writer calls up one final surge ofcreative energy.

On the very short list of timeless themes, "love" must come near the top. Bookswith "love" in the title are often winners. Experience, plus maturity, mixed withlove, can sometimes achieve the most astonishing results. There can be something

poignant, even elegiac, about such novels. Huckleberry Finn is hilarious, but itsclosing pages might move you to tears. "If I'd a knowed what a trouble it was tomake a book," writes Twain, "I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't agoing to no more."That's the true voice of the over 40s. I wonder which literary magazine will firsthave the nerve to publish a list of the top 20 grown-up novels?