Joanna Trollope has said that authors should desist from writing until they are 35 and life has “knocked them about a bit”. “To write good fiction, you need to have got a lot of living under your belt, and that includes the pain as well as the joy,” she told a literary festival in Dubai.
On the surface, this is one of those wild generalisations that you think has some merit. Who, after all, wants to read a shallow piece of fiction from some know-it-all twentysomething who in reality knows nothing. But in fact it’s nonsense. The muse takes no account of age. Indeed, being knocked about can actually make you less likely to write a great book.
Take F Scott Fitzgerald. He published The Great Gatsby when he was in his early 30s and, weighed down by drink and his wife’s illness, never wrote as well again. Or Truman Capote: a prodigy in his 20s who wrote virtually nothing for the last two decades before his death at the age of 59, done down by drink, drugs, celebrity and self-loathing.
Maybe it’s an American thing. Herman Melville was also in his 30s when that monster Moby-Dick appeared. He barely wrote after the age of 40 – dogged by drink, depression and poverty – and had to take a job as a customs inspector. He died, largely forgotten, in his 70s. Age and being knocked about by life are by no means a recipe for writing well. Think of all those novelists in their 50s and beyond who go on churning out passable novels on the back of some long-ago success.
The Great Gatsby was voted second on the Modern Library’s list of 100 best 20th-century novels. OK, these lists are always highly subjective, and this one is only for works written in English, but the top 10 is interesting. On the surface, it could be seen to support Trollope’s point. The average age of the authors on publication was about 37, but that’s only because Vladimir Nabokov was in his mid-50s when Lolita appeared. None of the rest were over 40.
James Joyce was in his mid-30s when Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist started to appear in magazines; DH Lawrence was a tender 28 when Sons and Lovers was published; William Faulkner just 32 when The Sound and the Fury appeared; Joseph Heller (Catch-22), John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon) were all in their mid-30s.
The energy and engagement – several of these novels are autobiographical – of the young writer will more than compensate for any later sagacity or technical competence. In fact, technique and a desire to innovate can get in the way of communication: think of the impossibility of Finnegans Wake or the convoluted syntax of late Henry James, who advised his readers to attempt only five pages a day, the better to appreciate his art. The portrait of the artist as an old man can be an unedifying one. Not every writer is Philip Roth.
This is, if anything, even truer of playwrights, who almost invariably have their greatest success in their 20s and 30s and then produce a string of respectable duds. Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams spring to mind. Harold Pinter gave up almost completely after his mid-40s; Arnold Wesker’s first play, The Kitchen, written in the late 1950s, remains far better known than the score of plays he has written since; Tom Stoppard’s recent work has also met with less than unanimous applause. It seems that the shelf life of a playwright is about 15 years; then the zeitgeist moves on.
Trollope would be far better to turn her fire on other occupations. I’d rather like to have a rule that no estate agent could be less than 40 years old, thus (one hopes) eliminating all the gum-chewing, ultra-brash young men called Matt and Ben who greet you with “All right?” when you enter their offices. In fact, make that 50.
Policemen who look as if they’ve just left school are irritating – for obvious reasons. Ditto absurdly youthful doctors. They should start at 55, rather than retiring to the golf course at that age and deepening the crisis in the NHS. Newsreaders ought to be old and grave, not young, attractive and smiley. No one wants to be operated on by a young surgeon or psychoanalysed by anyone under the age of 50. And newspaper columnists should not start writing until at least 55 – this is a world where “being knocked about” is a decided advantage.
Above all, politicians should not be permitted to enter politics until they are 40-plus. In the US, there is a stipulation that the president should be at least 35; a senator 30 and a member of the house of representatives 25. It’s a start, but I’d add at least 10 years to all those ages.
The UK is a prime example of how youthful career politicians can give politics a bad name, with the three current identikit leaders of the “main” parties having worked as wonks and spads for a decade or so before getting to the top of the greasy poll. No sense of being knocked about by life there.
Forty should be the minimum age for an MP; then they can have a crack at being leader or PM in their 50s. Churchill’s finest hour came when he was 65; Disraeli got to the top when he was 70; Gladstone was still PM in his mid-80s. And no one ever threatened to empty-chair Gladstone! For one thing, it removes the embarrassment of what to do with clapped-out politicians (see House of Lords passim) or, worse, former PMs – ponder the Flying Dutchman-like career of Tony Blair.
Politicians are in their prime between 50 and 75; not 35 and 50. They should find something to do in their 20s and 30s that makes them think about life rather than politics. Maybe, pace Ms Trollope, they could try writing a novel.
