Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Peter Richmond, 72, explained how switching careers gave his life renewed purpose. This week, the novelist and playwright Anthony Giardina, 74, writes about why he’s not ready to hang it up.
In one of his late stories, John Updike reports on a party he attended in the 1950s, where he observed the great conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp playing chess. The game, Updike learned, had assumed an outsize importance for Duchamp, who was then 72. “Elegantly disdaining to create any more art,” the artist “was concentrating his powers, for the remainder of his life, on chess.”
Sometime in the mid-1990s, the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski, having completed his masterful film trilogy Three Colors (Blue, White, Red), declared that he intended to give up filmmaking in order to spend the rest of his life sitting in his apartment, smoking. The great Buster Keaton effected a similar late-career renunciation. In his book Notes on a Cowardly Lion, John Lahr writes about a cross-country train trip Bert Lahr and Keaton took when both were nearing the end of their careers. Lahr was surprised to find that Keaton, who had revolutionized the possibilities of filmmaking four decades earlier but was now reduced to providing comic relief for teen movies, exuded “tranquility” and claimed to get a lot of pleasure out of gardening.
I am riveted by such stories, because I find myself, though far less famous or accomplished than any of the above, facing the problem they each seem to have successfully, even elegantly solved: how to approach the moment when life suggests that you begin looking for a graceful way to bow out. I’ve just published my sixth novel, to what I’ll call a less than open-armed reception. This complicated novel about a father and daughter, both of whom are artists, received good reviews when it got them. Even Michael Imperioli, God bless him, weighed in on Instagram, calling it “a fantastic book.” The problem was that it takes a lot more than a few good reviews to move books off the shelves. In the course of a 50-year career, I have faced such setbacks before, and my attitude has always been: Suck it up and move on.
But this time feels different. The message I’m getting from the culture is unmistakable. Literary fiction is having a hard time in general, and that is especially true for people like me. The words of a 74-year-old white man, however well framed, are not going to set pulses racing, not these days. (As an editor recently wrote me, “The manosphere exists everywhere right now except in publishing.”) To retreat to the old just suck it up response feels inadequate, as though there is something I am not quite willing to face.
