Light at the end of the tunnel? (Photo by Brandon Dill)
In 2012, in a move that surprised many, Philip Roth, 79 at the time and America’s greatest living novelist, announced that he was through with writing and publishing.
The idea of an artist ceasing to create was met by readers and others alike with incredulity, with curiosity, and with skepticism. Before his death in May 2018, many mourned that there would be no more Roth novels. Earlier and more notoriously, J.D. Salinger not only walked away from writing, but from the public world itself.
I thought it would be interesting to ask a handful of Memphis writers, all with genuine connections with this part of the world and all, shall we say, past the bloom of youth, what they think about the concept of retirement. Here’s what some of them said:
Beth Ann Fennelly (Tender Hooks: Poems, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs) I was stunned when I read that Roth was ‘retiring.’ I’m putting the word ‘retiring’ in scare quotes because I didn’t really believe he could, or that any writer could. Not that he didn’t deserve to. But writing, his writing, maybe all writing, comes out of a way of looking at and engaging with the world that I’m not sure a person can just turn off. But I believe it would be a relief to try.
John Grisham (The Firm, A Painted House) I’m 63 years old and have written almost 40 books over the past 30 years, and I cannot imagine reaching a point in my life when I get tired of writing and decide to quit. However, I can understand a writer running out of stories. A lot of writers keep writing long after they should stop, regardless of age. If and when I reach a point where everything new seems stale and dated, I hope I have the good sense to walk away, like Philip Roth.
I can understand a writer running out of stories.
— John Grisham
Cary Holladay (Horse People, The Deer in the Mirror) There are times when ideas just don’t come, or else I’m developing a story in my head and haven’t begun drafting it. Some of the writers who are thought to have stopped may simply have expired during a literary silence, with every intention of producing more work. I don’t want to think about dying! I’d rather write.
Dana Sachs (If You Lived Here, The Secret of the Nightingale Palace) I want to keep writing. I love it too much to stop and nothing makes me happy in exactly the same way that writing does. Perhaps Roth and Salinger both suffered to some extent from the world’s expectations about what they would produce next. Those expectations, I imagine, could inspire fear, a sense of responsibility, worry about disappointing others, and maybe some resentment over all the pressure. Unlike Salinger and Roth, most writers don’t have readers, agents, publishers, and editors constantly pestering us for more material. We just write because we want to. In some sense, then, we may have more freedom than the most famous authors. We can write for the pleasure of it.
Robert Gordon (It Came from Memphis, Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion) Writing for a living is different from being a creative person. It’s not about finding the on switch, it’s being unable to turn off. What’s the saying? Inspiration likes to find you … working. The daily grind for a creative person — well, for me — doesn’t always ripple with the excitement of creating; it’s often a slog, amassing and assembling the material that I can then rewrite (which I find much more rewarding). Chipping away at the shape of a story is a long and fraught process. “Creative” sounds so warm; “productive” evokes the factory.
Several decades into this grind, I’ve grown weary of the tyranny of ideas, of having to come up with something that, first, I can sell, and second, I’m willing to devote a hunk of my life to creating. And somewhat conversely, as I’ve gotten older, the bar has been raised for what I’m willing to commit my remaining time to, making it harder to find worthy ideas and thus making me less productive.
I don’t read enough, I don’t watch enough, I don’t seek inspiration elsewhere enough — because of the demand to produce. And without the outside influences, the well dries up. So, I’ve been actively trying to work less and explore more. But old habits die hard. And humans die easy. So if Phillip Roth wanted to retire from the factory, that made sense to me. I’d pitch in on the gold watch. As for me, better to be producing words and images than license plates.
Margaret Skinner (Cold Eye, Molly Flanagan and the Holy Ghost) Part of the universe, part of the whole. As long as I am amazed and/or dismayed by what happens in the world, especially in my little corner of it, I will write — not necessarily to be published, but because I want to understand.
As long as I am amazed and/or dismayed by what happens in the world, especially in my little corner of it, I will write.
— Margaret Skinner
Steve Stern (The Frozen Rabbi, The Pinch) In an unforgettable scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one knight is hacking the other to bits. With the blood spurting like a faucet from his severed limbs — there’s nothing left of him but a head and a truncated trunk — the abbreviated knight vows to fight on. That’s the way it is with most writers: While the heart still pumps and the veins throb, the cadence of the blood prompts the rhythm of sentences that continue to flow.
Sometimes great writers — Thomas Hardy, E.M. Forster, Philip Roth — deliberately stanch that flow, and we ask why. I’m more inclined to wonder why not, when the alternative is to bleed out and die. Case in point: myself. The memory’s gone, the imagination’s wasted, and I ache in the few joints that haven’t been replaced by titanium. Nobody reads my goddam books anyway, and the little time I have left would be better spent by volunteering in a soup kitchen. And yet the pulse persists, the sentences trickle now rather than flow, but their eking progress is all that reminds me that, for better or worse, I’m still alive.
Alice Faye Duncan (Honey Baby Sugar Child, Willie Jerome) I write for young readers. Macmillan purchased my first manuscript 23 years ago. At the time, I was 27 and driven by the heady thrill of crafting picture books that sold, quickly. I signed three book contracts in two years. Then, like Elijah at Cherith, my brook dried up. A decade passed without one contract, and I told writers in my critique circle, “I QUIT!”
The long years of rejection left emotional bruises that triggered my giving-up. However, the creative compulsion was too strong. I never stopped writing. Every free moment still found me in a corner — click-clacking on a keyboard. Two decades passed. And while my publications were spotty, a beautiful thing happened. I lost that desperate and feverish drive to land new contracts. As I aged, I grew patient with the slow unfolding of my creative process and I found the hard-won joy of researching, revising, and writing well. Just writing well became my primary goal.
As I aged, I grew patient with the slow unfolding of my creative process and I found the hard-won joy of researching, revising, and writing well.
—Alice Faye Duncan
John Pritchard (Junior Ray, The Yazoo Blues) Certainly, no true artist, writer, or worthy dilettante ever intends to retire. I, like so many sensitive writery youths, was convinced that at the end, and as Dylan Thomas suggested — I’d be burning and raving and raging “against the dying of the light.”
But Thomas didn’t know black-eyed peas about “the end,” much less about old age and dying lights. He drank so much whiskey he was hardly alive when he died at 39 — a short distance from the White Horse on Hudson and West 11th — where I, at 22, also drank a great deal and hoped I might be Dylan Thomas — not the dead one but the one who drank a lot.
Hampton Sides (Ghost Soldiers, Hellhound on His Trail) It’s annoying that so many people think writers are public property — the equivalent of a municipal spigot from which the waters are supposed to flow until the pump fizzles and dies. We scribes should feel free to hang it up whenever we damn well please. We aren’t slaves — not to our muses, not to our publics, not to our craft. I for one will probably keep pecking away into my dotage, but then again I might not. It’s nobody’s business but my own.
Richard Bausch (Thanksgiving Night, Living in the Weather of the World: Stories) I’ve always said that I will continue to write novels and stories as long as it is given to me to do so; and I think of Robert Penn Warren, in his early eighties and writing arguably the best poetry of his life. I don’t know about other folks, but for me it’s just my work, and I like having it to do. So, I doubt I’ll stop until something stops me.
Tova Mirvis (The Ladies Auxiliary, The Book of Separation: A Memoir) It was hard for me to imagine what it means to really retire as a writer — I understand the feeling of not wanting to write another entire novel — writing a novel feels like embarking on a very long journey. It is grueling and creatively exhausting, and maybe there comes a time when you decide you are not going to set out on that long path again. Writing is the way I think about the world, how I understand people and how I ask questions. It’s hard for me to imagine that there could come a day when I won’t want to do that anymore.
Alan Lightman (Einstein’s Dreams, Screening Room) I do not plan to stop writing, ever. For me, writing is part of being alive. I may stop writing after I’m dead, but I haven’t made a final decision about that.
Corey Mesler is the author of Memphis Movie: A Novel (2015), Robert Walker (2016), Among the Mensans and Other Poems (2017), among other works.
