A question that people like to ask of the writing life is: at what age do writers produce their best work? What I find remarkable about the question is that people try to answer it. Most answers favour youth. Sam Tanenhaus, for example, suggests that creativity peaks early. He acknowledges late-bloomers like Nabokov and DeLillo and Roth, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule, whatever that means. Personally, I like the answer offered by an economist who finds that the creative peak comes at the 0.618 fraction of the artist’s lifespan. Granted, he was studying the output of painters, but presumably we could come up with a similar fraction for poets and novelists. Then there’s the work of UC-Davis psychologist, Dean Simonton, who says … are you sitting down? … it all depends. Poets and physicists peak young. Novelists often require time to master complexity, to experiment and make mistakes, to work through less clearly defined goals, before they can excel.
These studies ignore the actuarial dimension of the problem. If writers have short lifespans, then their peak output necessarily happens when they’re young. So, to answer the question accurately, we have to:
a) distinguish the life expectancies of writers who lived a long time ago from the life expectancies of writers living today;
b) ask if there’s anything about the writing life that adversely affects life expectancy e.g. the tendency to commit suicide or OD or contract strange diseases or drive too fast;
c) ask if there’s anything about the writing life that adversely affects performance even for those with average life expectancies e.g. alcoholism, opium smoking, chronic depression.
This takes me to the question I’d rather be asking: what’s the best age for a writer to commit suicide? You know, as a career move. A publicity stunt. If people seriously pose the question about the writer’s peak age, then they should be just as serious when it comes to the question of optimal suicide age. Most pieces that deal with David Foster Wallace’s suicide repeat (plagiarize?) the claim that he was suffering from depression, had problems with an MAOI medication he was sometimes taking, and hanged himself as a result. But it’s also obvious (just read his books) that he was concerned with contemporary media and their manipulation as part of everyday experience. It’s at least plausible to suggest that his suicide was him going to extreme lengths to demonstrate how it’s done. If so, it was a top flight demo. Thanks to DFW, we now know how to cloak our literary reputations in a mystique of poignant and untimely loss. Would we have given DFW half as much attention if he’d moved on to male pattern baldness, rheumatoid arthritis, a hip replacement, and cataract surgery?
Most of what I’ve just said has been said before, but here’s a thought I haven’t noticed elsewhere:
If it’s true that writers have, historically speaking, peaked early, then it’s fair to say that most literary accounts of what it’s like to be old are not merely fictional, but uninformed by direct experience. Sylvia Plath can’t tell us what it’s like to go through menopause. Hemingway has nothing to say about what it’s like to be a man’s man in a seniors’ home. DFW completely ignores the widespread middle-aged male experience of prostate gland enlargement because he never lived long enough to discover its joys.
On the other hand, if this is an actuarial issue, then it’s reasonable to suppose that as the giant cohort of baby boomers hits its senior stride, a new pool of geriatric writers will bring us an unprecedented exposure to great novels and poems presenting an insider’s view of what it’s like to grow old. I can hardly wait. Actually, I have no choice because I have to go to the bathroom. Would somebody please go to the drug store and get me another package of Depends?