THE JESTER AND THE SAINT

I’ve been spending the last few weeks reading biographies of writers who defied the odds and wrote deep into old age—not that there are lots of these to pour through. Most writing oldsters, if they make it past 70, never achieve enough fame to warrant anyone studying the last decades of their life, so the examples necessarily come from big names like Goethe, Edith Wharton, H. G. Wells, Thomas Mann.

I won’t lie here; I’m looking for pointers on how to write deep into old age myself, just as, when I was younger, I compulsively read writer biographies to learn how I could get started, what I must develop in myself in order to bring out any talent I might be lucky enough to possess. I knew no writers, had no connections to that world; I needed to find role models I could emulate by reading about them in books.

I did find them—and I did learn. Conrad taught me that writing fiction was as risky and adventurous as rounding Cape Horn in sail during a raging southwester; in gratitude, I carried his tattered photo in my wallet for many years. Willa Cather taught me that writing novels is an art, and anyone who pursues it must think of it as a discipline that absorbs every fiber of their being.

Kafka taught me that there’s heartbreak involved, loneliness, darkness; Proust, that no detail must be lost on you, nothing in your experience for one second forgotten; Chekhov, how modesty and quiet determination is the stance best suited for the kind of career I wanted to achieve.

In all my recent reading about oldsters, graybeards, the grande dames, I resolved not to pay much attention to the ills they suffered as they got older, their relationship to their spouses and ex-spouses (often terrible), or their children (often terrible), the honors bestowed upon them, but focus on the writing itself, the basic task of it—how it went for them when they turned 70, 80, or even 100.

An important point to keep in mind here is that there are famous oldsters whose last years are totally useless when it comes to emulation. Both J. D. Salinger (91), and Harper Lee (90) lived to ripe old ages, but the former published nothing after the age of 46, and the latter, nothing for 55 years after Mockingbird, not until her caregivers talked her into agreeing to have an early attempt published as a “new” novel just before she died.

Salinger was supposedly working all those silent years, and we’ve been promised a trove of posthumous fiction, but it’s been fifteen years since he died and there’s no sign of anything new. Not writing for him, for Ms. Lee, turned out to be shrewd career moves, turning what now seems suspiciously thin talents into something legendary, garnering them great renown as they grew older for being creatively impotent.

(It’s funny about Salinger. He lived not many miles from me, and our paths may have crossed at a bookstore or supermarket. His neighbors took pride in protecting his privacy when nosy reporters came to town…people thought, once he died, all the local gossip about him would come pouring out…but the only thing neighbors could think to say after his passing was that he loved the monthly roast beef suppers at the local church, and would always make sure to be first in line when the doors opened.)

Ralph Ellison lived into his 80’s, but never published another novel after his classic Invisible Man came out in 1955; at his death, it was rumored than he had been 2,000 pages into a second novel, but no one’s ever seen it. A much sadder story than Salinger’s and Lee’s, since his talent was so much larger, the loss to the literary world all the greater. If there’s a lesson for the older novelist in his life it’s a depressing one: Avoid writing a masterpiece at 40, since it’s all downhill after that.

In studying how the greats did old age, let’s start with Leo Tolstoy, since no novelist ever enjoyed more respect, more fame, in the last years of his life, not just in Russia but across the world. His pacifism, his asceticism and deep religiosity, led his disciples—Tolstoyians—to compare him to Jesus, and at the end this did not seem much of an exaggeration.

His last years were tumultuous, not serene. The czar’s secret police kept watch on him, afraid of his influence; his marriage to Sonya (certainly the stormiest on record; both partners kept diaries where they aired it all out) only became rockier as he neared 80—and then it all ended with the famous episode where he fled Yasnaya Polyana with a hobo’s bundle over his shoulder, only to die at the little Astapovo train station, while the whole world, via telegraphed bulletins, kept watch at his deathbed.

The legend arose that right to his last breath he was still at work, dreaming up characters to match Pierre Bezukhov or Anna Karenina, daring death to stop him.

“His fingertips made writing motions,” Henry Troyat explains in his celebrated biography, “moving swiftly and gracefully across the bed sheet. Tireless laborer, lost in the mists of fever, what new novel did he think he was composing?”

Not surprising, that there would still be voltage left in those writing fingers. At 70, he had published Resurrection, a flawed masterpiece but a masterpiece all the same, this being Leo Tolstoy, the moralist in who never quite subsumed the artist—and so, in telling the story of a man who spends his life trying to atone for a careless sin, he left us perhaps the richest novel ever produced by a writer that age.

Tolstoy himself seemed puzzled and awed by the fact his creativity never grew old. During the celebrations for his eightieth birthday, he abruptly excused himself, went to his study to jot down ideas for new novels.

“I suppose that, just as nature has endowed certain men with a sexual instinct for the reproduction of the species,” he wrote to a friend, “she has endowed others with an artistic instinct, which seems to be equally absurd and equally imperious. I see no other explanation for the fact that an old man who is not utterly stupid should devote himself to any occupation as futile as writing novels.”

The artist in him always warred with the saint—and so in 1891, much to the horror of his heirs, he put all his copyrights into the public domain, the better to achieve his vow of poverty.

Tolstoy never stopped writing, mostly in his voluminous diary, but also with essays and short stories, including the extraordinary “Master and Man,” and 1897’s provocative “What is Art?” (Having gotten burned by sharing his diary with wife Sonya, he began a new one titled “Diary for Myself Alone.”)

No old writer ever spent his last years brooding so deeply on morality, fate, human conduct, art, God, the afterlife; no old writer ever had a better right to let us know where these thoughts led him. A volcanic genius whose last years can’t possibly serve as a model for lesser mortals…but how exhilarating, to know an old writer like him once existed.

And he was capable of a last surprise or two, Count Leo.

Nearing 70, he took up the latest craze, bicycle riding, an instructor being summoned to Yasnaya Polyana to teach him how to keep his balance. It’s said he mastered the skill surprisingly quickly.

The one American colossus whose death was mourned as widely as Tolstoy’s was Mark Twain’s, who came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835, and went out with it when it next returned in 1910.

Though their dates overlapped, there were vast differences between the men, especially in old age. Tolstoy gave away his copyrights; Twain schemed to make sure they would still be in effect far beyond his death. Tolstoy devoted himself to God; Twain bit his tongue not to declare his agnosticism. The writing urge in Tolstoy stayed vigorous until his last moments; Twain’s grew limp and flaccid; if his fingers twitched on his deathbed it was because he imagined they held a cigar not a pen.

He was aware of this creative falling off, responding to a young writer asking for advice:

“I am very glad you are profoundly absorbed in your art & your labors & you care for no other pleasures. It is as I used to be with the pen, long, long ago…I am taking my holiday now after 60 years of work and struggle and sorrow and vexation, and am willing to know nothing ever any more of the wars of life or literature.”

But he never stopped writing, not entirely. He published his bitter self-reflection What is Man? in a private edition of 250 copies, using the pen name to his pen name, “J. W. Bothwell.” He became convinced that Francis Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays, wasted valuable time trying to prove it. And just before the end, taking time out from his endless hours playing billiards, he wrote “Etiquette for the Afterlife,” being a satiric manual on the deportment to be adopted with Saint Peter before entering heaven.

He took a victory lap in his final years, collecting honorary degrees, accepting awards, basking in his celebrity, though, as one biographer puts it, “his creative brilliance now belonged to the past.” No old writer ever looked better in photographs, wise, wry, avuncular—those white suits and thick cigars became his famous trademarks. Three out of his four children died before him, his wife, too, so his last years were far from happy, celebrated as he was.

You get the sense, reading his life, that he would have had a more satisfying old age if he had dug into a big writing project, not the silly stuff that was all he managed. He devoted a lot of time to writing his autobiography, dictating it to a prudish, prissy, uptight stenographer, so, as usual with him, the best, most sardonic passages were self-censored before they got written down.

Shrewdly, he arranged the autobiography’s publication in such a way that the copyrights would remain in effect for decades; the last volume, an immediate bestseller, was only released in 2015, and the final copyright under his name won’t expire until 2047, almost 140 years after his death. Good business decision—but also a poignant one, a desperate attempt to keep control of his destiny far beyond his passing.

For all his reputation as a truth-telling iconoclast, Twain usually kept his mouth shut on the controversies he cared most about; he could poke and prod conventional morality, but if he hit too hard it would hurt him in the pocketbook, and this…after failing so spectacularly in his business dealings…was the one thing he was determined to avoid. His literary caution only grew more pronounced toward the end, just when you would think he could be honest about his opinions at last.

It’s clear that he wanted to say out loud, just once in his life, “This religion thing, this Christianity business, is all made up, total bunk, a shambolic farce,” but he never quite got up the nerve. And maybe that’s the lesson Twain gives aging writers: If you have something important to say at the end better say it.

But you can’t write about an aging giant like Twain without giving him the last word—a wistful one, and in his case very sad.

“There is no appreciation of my books that is so precious to me as appreciation from my children. Theirs is the praise we want, the praise we are least likely to get.”

Note…I’ll be sharing more from my reading in future columns, spurred on by a George Orwell quote that got me thinking—and made me mad.

“Writers ought to stop writing when they reach middle age.”