Click here to read about “Post-40 Bloomers,” a new monthly feature at The Millions.
1.
There is something about
Mary Wesley’s work that loves a blurb. “
Jane Austen with sex” is the one heard most, but you also find “arsenic without the old lace,” “upper-middle-brow potboilers,” and “posh smut.” She was prolific, writing ten novels in 14 years, all largely concentrated on a particular place, time, and set of mores, and thus easy to pigeonhole despite complex plotting and surprising characters. The question of whether “write what you know” is good advice was never an issue for Wesley; her mid-20th century heroines fall in and out of affairs, marriages, and privilege, much as she did throughout her long career.
Mary Aline Farmar, born in 1912 in Englefield Green, England, emerged into relatively genteel circumstances. Her father,
Harold Mynors Farmar, was an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers and spent the first years of Mary’s childhood fighting overseas. Her mother Violet’s family, the Wellesleys, were descended from the
Duke of Wellington. The legendary travel writer
Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor was a distant cousin. She was not close to her parents, who preferred their more easygoing older daughter Susan, and was raised by a succession of 16 governesses in as many years because, according to her mother, “None of them liked you, darling.”
Mary related best to her maternal grandmother, Hyacinthe, a legendarily free and racy spirit. Mary, too, was driven by distaste for the constraints of the life she was groomed for, although she was quick to take advantage of the privileges. She uninhibitedly loved men, not only for sex — although her libido ran high well into her senior years — but for the world of knowledge they represented. Her own schooling had been mediocre, mostly under the tutelage of the above-mentioned governesses, and for much of her early life boyfriends would express shock at how little she knew of history, politics, and literature. But her “muscular Marxists” were all too happy to further her education, giving her books to read and bringing her to political rallies. Mary was lithe, with dark hair and eyes and a sexy smile, clever, and sexually vivacious. In her late teens and 20s she was rarely without a lover, or several.
Although she was pursued by all sorts of eligible characters, at 25, Mary finally succumbed to a wealthy young peer named
Charles Eady, known as Carol, the second
Baron Swinfen (his father bought the title, but no matter). While there wasn’t much chemistry between the two, she explained, “He lent me his car when I needed it, he was always around, always agreeable.” And then, of course, there was that small matter of the title: when they married, Mary became Lady Swinfen; she attended the coronation of
George VI in a peeress’ robes and tiara.
Lack of sexual chemistry notwithstanding, Mary and Carol managed to conceive a son, Roger, during a night of serious drinking; but even as a young mother Mary could not settle for celibacy, and Lord and Lady Swinfen eased into an amicable semi-separation. When war broke out in 1939, a friend recruited Mary to do codebreaking work for MI5, and she resumed her cosmopolitan, swinging lifestyle without a backward glance. Around that time she fell in love with
Heinz Ziegler, a dashing Prague expatriate. The relationship didn’t last — Ziegler went on to join the RAF, and was eventually shot down over Budapest — but he was generally believed to be the father of her second son, Toby, whom Carol Swinfen would nevertheless treat as his own.
Mary found the terror and drama of wartime sexually liberating. This would be a recurring theme in her novels: “War makes drunkards and lovers and loosens all values.” She and Swinfen divorced in 1945, by which time she had met and fallen in love with
Eric Siepmann — a sporadically employed novelist, journalist, and handsome man-about-town — who would become her second husband. And there her extracurricular erotic adventures ground to a halt. Theirs was a true love match, and the two drew even closer as Siepmann’s wife Phyllis made their first years miserable, waging a slanderous letter-writing campaign to their friends and acquaintances and getting him fired from several jobs. When the court finally granted Eric a divorce (a judge ruled her “disgraceful, diabolical, and wicked”), he and Mary married two weeks later.
The years that followed were romantically solid, if not always stable. Siepmann could be volatile, and he drank; he had no trouble losing jobs without his ex-wife’s help. But they were content, for the most part, and their son Bill was born, in 1953, when Mary was 41. Both elder boys were off at school: mild-mannered Roger was a week short of his 15th birthday; Toby, all rebellion and curly hair, was nearly 11. But in 1964 Eric had a car accident from which he never fully recovered, and he began to exhibit symptoms of Parkinson’s. In 1969 he took a deliberate overdose of pills while Mary was driving Bill back to school after Christmas and never regained consciousness.
Mary was devastated and haunted by guilt — Eric had spoken often of killing himself. Hoping to divest her darkest secret and lighten the load of her grief, she confessed to her sons that Carol Swinfen was likely not Toby’s father. But the admission drove a permanent wedge between the boys, and her meddling brother-in-law attempted to have Toby disinherited in a long and ugly legal battle (Swinfen gallantly rose to the occasion by testifying that he had always considered both boys his sons, and as far as he was concerned they were). Her mother died less than two years later, and Swinfen not long after that. Mary’s health declined sharply; she was bereft and impoverished, with an inadequate widow’s pension and no professional skills to speak of. Inside the front cover of her datebook, she carefully wrote “Please do NOT Resuscitate” before nearly succumbing to pneumonia.
But even the best-laid Do Not Resuscitate plans can go awry; and life had something entirely different in store for her.
2.
Mary had always written. In a 1990
Publishers Weekly interview, she explained:
I started writing a novella when I was in my teens. I don't know what became of it. When I was in Cornwall during the war, pregnant with my second baby, I spent a lot of time alone in a great big double bed, writing poetry. I never thought about sending it out. I had no confidence.
There had been several abortive attempts at tell-all autobiographies as well, but she only began to write in earnest during the years Eric was bedridden. Shortly before his death she managed to find a publisher for two young adult novels,
The Sixth Seal and
Speaking Terms, though neither one met with any great success. Still, she kept working, finishing a third book for young audiences,
Haphazard House, and a very adult novel,
Jumping the Queue -- a dark yet oddly chipper tale of a widow who sets out to commit suicide (death being the queue in question). The book, which also involved matricide, rape, incest, and the death of a dog, was turned down by a number of publishers who were understandably “put off by the general morbidity.” But in 1982, her agent submitted the manuscript to Macmillan, and by early 1983, when Mary was 70 years old, both works had been published.
Haphazard House, though nominated for the Carnegie Medal for children's literature, didn’t make much of a splash.
Jumping the Queue, on the other hand, was an instant success.
For all its off-putting subjects, the novel showed a light touch, combining black humor with a gentle, pervasive melancholy. When has talk of death ever been so sweet as between the suicide-bound widow and the escaped murderer she takes in?
Owls on their silent hunting zoomed over the fields. Holiday-makers drove along the main road, making for the motorway and urban life.
Matilda lay in Hugh’s arms. “You will flash before my eyes,” she murmured.
“Hush.” He kissed her mouth gently.
“I am old enough to be your mother.” He kissed her, running his tongue along her teeth as a child rattles railings with a stick. “A good joke. Sleep now, it’s not the moment to say so.”
And yet still, Mary adopted a pseudonym — Wesley, a corruption of her Wellesley ancestors’ name — so as not to embarrass her family.
But there was no stopping her now; she pulled out another work that had languished for several years and wrote like a woman possessed, scrawling on the back of old manuscripts and whatever she could find. This book,
The Camomile Lawn – once again brimming with Mary’s pet themes of love triangles and guilt-free sex, unconventional relationships, the erotic qualities of wartime, and a deep love of animals -- was published the following year, and proved to be so popular that the BBC turned it into a miniseries. Two months after she sent it off she began her next novel,
Harnessing Peacocks (1985), a cheerful tale of sex and class about a young single mother working as a cook and part-time prostitute to send her son to a posh private school. The following book,
The Vacillations of Poppy Carew (1986), was more of a romantic comedy, fraught with Shakespeare-worthy mistaken identities and crossed signals before all ends happily.
Not That Sort of Girl (1987) was a rather sweet story of a lifelong extramarital romance, which still managed to get in its digs at tradition, unhappy marriages, and class conventions. It also introduced one of the more wonderful nasty couples in her cast of characters, the incestuous twins Nicholas and Emily Thornby.
The next book,
Second Fiddle (1988), featured as the protagonist Nicholas and Emily’s daughter Laura as an adult.
A Sensible Life (1990) charted a lonely girl’s love for three men, and highlighted another of Wesley’s favorite motifs, i.e., self-absorbed and neglectful parents.
A Dubious Legacy, her reimagining of Jane Eyre, came out in 1992, followed by
An Imaginative Experience (1995) and
Part of the Furniture (1997). All of her books made appearances on bestseller lists.
And then? She was done writing, at age 84, explaining simply “If you haven’t got anything to say, don’t say it.”
Mary Wesley claimed that
Jumping the Queue was “a means of working out despair” after Siepmann’s death, and certainly it must have been therapeutic. But the book’s merits, and that of her writing career, went far beyond comfort. Her accomplishments were a vindication of having lived life on her own terms — not just that she got rich and traded her wool for cashmere, but that she was able to turn it all into art: the eternal fantasy of the black sheep. She had a soft touch for dark themes, offering deception and adultery the same respect as the rest of the natural world they occupied. The only sin she couldn’t forgive her characters was cruelty.
From
Not That Sort of Girl, in which she's been in both love with Mylo and married to Ned for most of her life:
Dear kind Ned. Was there a moment when I could have cried halt? It was my fault, thought Rose, I was inattentive…. I used him to deflect attention from Mylo. I trailed Ned as the lapwing trails her wing.
Mary died of cancer at the end of 2002, ironically the same week that
Granta published its third “Best of Young British Novelists” issue. She was, and remains, a consolation amidst the cult of the fresh-faced, and a testimony to the value of a life fully lived.
Writers we plan to feature include, tentatively, Penelope Fitzgerald, Daniel Orozco, Isak Dinesen, George Eliot, William Gay, Walker Percy, Helen DeWitt, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, and Harriet Doerr. And we’ll kick off later this month with Yvvette Edwards, whose debut novel A Cupboard Full of Coats was longlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize. There are more in the works, so worry not if your favorite late-bloomer/late-starter is not mentioned above.
Two words: Norman Rush.
Born 1933. Had a life as a book dealer and then a Peace Corps director in Africa before publishing his first story in The New Yorker in 1978, in his mid-40s. First book, Whites, a model short-story collection, arrives in 1986, at the age of 53; it becomes a Pulitzer finalist. First novel, Mating, follows in 1991, when he is pushing 60. It wins the National Book Award, and it’s a totally remarkable reading experience. Followed by an impressive follow-up, Mortals in 2003. Look at those dates and I think it tells the story: the man is an endless polisher and perfectionist, and it pays off.
Very excited about this. Onward!
I’m excited, and encouraged, to read about the launch of this new column. As a (relatively) new forty-something year old writer, I’m eager to read about others who have also started writing later, whoops, I mean, at a more mature stage of life.
What a great idea this is!
I published my first short story at 41, then went back to school for an MA in creative writing, where I was the oldest person in my cohort by 15 years. My current ambition is to complete my first book before 50. I admire the young and gifted writers out there, but I’ve stopped wishing I could have been one of them. My writing just wasn’t that good in my 20s and 30s. I was one of those people who needed to have a life before I started writing seriously and well.
Thank you, Sonya Chung and The Millions! Can’t wait to read more.
Wow. I knew “Older and Wiser” was flying around and a lot of people liked it, but I couldn’t be more thrilled to see The Millions actually taking some action in response. Thanks so much. A couple of things: one: I believe James Hannaham, the author of a really terrific novel called “God Says No” was 40 when it was published (hope he doesn’t mind me divulging his age). Also, any writer of any age who has had more than one book published and lives outside New England should check out the Grub Street Novel prize. Details can be found at http://www.grubstreet.org
Great idea. Walker Percy is a longtime favorite of mine. Norman McLean is another late bloomer who comes to mind. You might also keep an eye on Korrektiv Press. They published my first (and hopefully not last) book, House of Words, last year when I was forty-five; and they are set to publish a novel by Brian Jobe, another first-time author in his md-forties.
Love this. I believe Willa Cather was over 40 when her first novel was published- so there’s one more to the list. I commented on Martha Southgate’s great piece and love that The Millions continues on with this issue/concept. I frankly somewhat embrace being a middle aged curmudgeon, who has little interest – for the most part, of course there are MANY exceptions- of the work of 20 somethings. In Freedom, there is a wonderful, hilarious riff by Patty on her disdain for youth culture. Anyway, looking forward to this column!
From what sometimes feels like the edge of the time horizon (60), I send applause. I look forward to this discussion & hope it will include struggles as well as successes.
I love this! My first short story was published October 2010 when I was 42 and I have two books coming out in May and June 2012. Before that, I was raising five kids and writing notes on the back of diapers but I didn’t feel the overwhelming need to be published when I was younger. Now I can appreciate the ride. ;)
We’re thrilled that everyone’s excited about this feature; we have lots of good stuff on the way.
Martha: Believe it or not, Sonya started working on this column before we ran your piece, but your very compelling essay helped confirm for us that we were on the right track. It’s always interesting to discover these shared ideas floating around in the ether.
Yes! I love this idea. I am a twenty-something writer myself, but I am far more interested in learning from late-starters than the overly celebrated young and fast.
Thank you!
Thank you for this.
I love this idea! Especially the focus on self-reinvention.
One caveat — I’ve been a fan of Daniel Orozco’s for some time but wouldn’t call him a post-40s bloomer. His story Orientation was in Best American Short Stories in 1995, when he must have been in his young/mid 30s. He didn’t have a book out until this year, but he’s certainly been on the literary scene, and publishing, for a long while.
Hooray, what a brilliant post. I can now feel confident to take my steps of faith into the writing world. I do not want to take anything away from young authors, because I read and admire their work. However, I was beginning to feel that I was having a midlife crisis and my ambitions would create and flow in my head. Thank you for making me know that it is possible!
Yes yes yes. In a culture where true adulthood is often delayed until one’s 30s, that it takes until one’s 40s to have actually lived and learned enough to have something worthwhile to say makes a whole lot of sense. Consider Isak Dinesen and Walker Percy and Penelope Fitzgerald and Norman Rush as comprising a vanguard; my money’s on a healthy number of older-and-wisers making a splash in coming years.
Of course, there’s self-interest at play in my opinion. May we all bloom in good time, indeed!
I was 42 when I sent the first three chapters of a novel I had written, “The 41st Sermon” to Walker Percy. Shortly after I received his handwritten response on my cover letter: “Randy: It reads well — I’d be glad to look at rest, but must tell you I’ve had to give up finding agent or publisher for unpublished writers — I’d be doing nothing else. Everybody in South is writing a novel – Best, W.P.” I sent the MS to him and waited and waited and then in May the following year woke up one morning to read his obituary in the paper. I’d be happy to send any Percy fan interested in seeing a scan of the note an email. I’ve entered the world of epublishing so The 41st Sermon is now live on Smashwords and soon will be on Amazon.com My email address is [email protected]
I’ve been blogging about “late” bloomers from all the creative fields for about a year, but you mentioned a few writers I hadn’t heard of. Looking for to the series!
This is a wonderful essay. So many writers in low-residency MFA programs (like VCFA, where I teach) qualify as “late-bloomers” of one sort or another, and they would all benefit from your words here, Sonya.
I’m really looking forward to this column! Thank you for creating it. Just a few weeks ago I was lamenting that I’m 45 and a late bloomer, to which my friend looked me in the eye and declared: “You’re blooming.” Now I walk around thinking, “I’m blooming, I’m blooming!” :)
Excellent. Late starter is wonderful way to describe. Look forward to your posts.
Having published a debut novel a month shy of my fiftieth birthday, I feel encouraged. Thank you.
Love this. And the comment about Norman Rush, who holds a place near Tolstoy in my heart. And I’m signing up for updates, hoping to find “new” authors to read.
well, thanks for that anyway (not saying “late”). i’m 46 and the reason i’m turning to writing now is because i was busy doing other things — starting and running multiple businesses, raising a family, and other adventures. i don’t feel late. if i have enough time, i’ll eventually get around to learning how to play the drums. i won’t be “late”. you can’t do everything at once. you’ve only got so many hours in the day.
James Herriot and Jan Karon are two examples that come to my mind. Their much-loved books came out of already full lives.
In a world where youth is celebrated, it is important to highlight the depth and wisdom that accumulates with years of life experience.
Thank you for starting this series. I look forward to reading it.
Thanks for this column. I just published my first collection, at 41, and sometimes feel almost sheepish about it. As if I missed my true wave. (Which never could have happened for me at 30 — it took me ten years to write this book for a reason. For me, it was a “digging in, a deep breath, and a leap off the cliff” all at various times.) I’ve never felt this way before, but now, when talking to people, I sometimes feel reluctant to mention my age — as if (and I know this is absurd) — it will somehow diminish the work, or mark me as “not-the-next-bit-thing.” Definitely not a 20-under-40. I know this column will help.
I was nearing 50 when I started writing poetry and have just finished my 3rd collection. I find the gift of starting later is that with different career aspirations I can just enjoy the process of writing and find satisfaction in having people tell me that my work has been important to them–maybe a “reward” rather than an “Award.”
My first book was published this past July. I am 42. I’m strangely grateful that success didn’t find me sooner; I don’t think I was fully formed in my 20s. Of course I’m not now, either — but I am more in command of my powers and more aware of my weaknesses. I love this salient bit of verse from Emily Dickinson:
I shall keep singing!
Birds will pass me
On their way to Yellower Climes —
Each — with a Robin’s expectation —
I — with my Redbreast —
And my Rhymes —
Late — when I take my place in summer —
But — I shall bring a fuller tune —
Vespers — are sweeter than Matins — Signor —
Morning — only the seed of Noon —
This was pure oxygen to me – how did you know my life?! I’ve been scribbling in notebooks since childhood, something kicked in about the age of 50, another engine fired up 2 years ago, and this past spring, at the age of 59, I realized the dream: my first poetry chapbook published. Second manuscript in the works, as is a third. Thank you so much.
Thrilled! I’ve found a home for my writing self. Working with an editor on a memoir whose current working title (I’ve had over 50) is Stumbling Toward Elderhood.
A million thanks.
I started writing in my late thirties and won’t have a published book until I’m 40. I don’t see this as late. Of course I would love to have written my novel sooner, but I just wasn’t ready. The book was in my head since I was 17, but I wasn’t ready for many reason to write it any sooner. I needed the reflection and life experience to write the best work possible.
Forty isn’t as old as it was when I was 20 anyway. :)
A suggestion for your list: the great German novelist Theodor Fontane, who was approaching 60 when his magnificent first novel – Before the Storm – was published.
See G.B. [Gerald Basil] Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page.
Marvelous, I feel completely vindicated having started writing fiction at age 60!
Thanks so much.
Johanna van Zanten