BUT WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY? A MEDITATION

One of the effects of great age is a penchant for reflecting on the arc of life.  As Erik Erikson observes in one of the most beautiful passages of his great work Childhood and Society, “An individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history."  None of us chooses where in the unfolding of human history he or she will be born, but very little is as important in determining the arc of life.  Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.”  Edmund Burke was sixty when the Revolution broke out [or fifty-eight, depending on when you date it from], and that fact, as much as anything else, may have contributed to his jaundiced view of it.

I was born in December 1933, during the depths of the Great Depression.  World War II was the first big geopolitical event of which I was at all aware, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, for the first eleven years of my life, Mr. President.  My father was born in 1901, during the Gilded Age, and my two sons were born in 1968 and 1970, during the Viet Nam War.  None of us chose the moment for our particular life cycle to begin, of course, but nothing could have been more significant in shaping our different perceptions of the world.

Since so much of my life has been devoted to the production of words, and since I wrote so much when I was young, I have always been especially fascinated by the life experiences of authors who made a splash early and then lived off the fame, as it were, for decades on end.  I think of J. D. Salinger, who published The Catcher in the Rye at thirty-two, went into seclusion shortly thereafter, published his last work at forty-six, and died forty-five years later at ninety-one.  Or Ralph Ellison, whose one and only novel, the great work Invisible Man, was published when he was thirty-nine.

How strange to be so successful so young and then to depend for a sense of oneself on that fame as the decades pass by.  I have always thought it must be rather like having a great sports career as a young man or woman and then being forced by the inevitable aging of the body to retire at thirty-five, just about when those in other lines of work are beginning to have some success.  If you are an old baseball star, you can open a sports bar and sit around signing autographs, or if you are a basketball immortal, like Michael Jordan, you can open a Nissan dealership in Durham, NC, not too far from the site of your earliest triumphs.  I suppose if you are a novelist who peaks early, you can always teach Creative Writing to undergraduates. 

Salinger strikes me as somehow a failed writer for having written nothing during the last forty-five years of his life.  But suppose he had been born in 1879 rather 1919 and had published all of his work in the last fifteen years of his life.  I would view his career as a triumph of persistence and ultimate success.  And yet, the words on the page and the dates of publication would in either case be the same.

In 1981, when I was offered a professorship in the Brandeis Philosophy Department so that I could follow my first wife to Boston as she took up a position at MIT, the appointment was vetoed by Brandeis President Marver Bernstein.  In his letter of denial, Bernstein wrote that I had done some good work when I was young but that I was played out.  It is the only time I have ever paid any attention to what critics said about me, and the words really stung.