Take Your Sweet Time
Talent is long patience.
–Gustave Flaubert
The novel Pearl by UK author Siân Hughes was just released here in the US a couple of weeks ago. It is a first novel by an author who is 60 years old and both the story in the novel and the author’s own tale are equally interesting.
According to her editor, this first novel was forty years in the making, beginning with her curiosity about an abandoned house she rode past as a teenager, and followed in her twenties by the death of a friend who took his life by walking into a tidal river.
Hughes spent decades imagining the story’s characters as she lived on into her own life experiences and as well as discovering the “Gawain Poet,” specifically his late 14th-century narrative poem Pearl which she used for inspiration.
The only titles of Siân Hughes’ that are readily available at the moment are Pearl and her poetry collection Sunshine & Nothing Else, but I am hopeful that with the popularity of Pearl we will see additional reissues of her collections of poetry and short stories that are currently available only through UK publishers.
Consolation was what I was looking for.
I was ransacking her books for it.
–from Pearl
In Hughes’ novel, the young protagonist struggles to come to terms with her mother’s disappearance when she was a child. She is looking for clues everywhere to understand how her mother could have abandoned her.
She comes upon her mother’s copy of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight and Pearl, and searches the marginalia for clues to her mother’s emotional life, believing that if she reads all the way to the end of the poem she will find the consolation she seeks.
This story would not leave me alone, my mind kept coming back to it… If this is your book, you won’t feel at home with yourself until you write it.
–Siân Hughes
I started thinking about novels, especially first novels, that have had a long interval to gestate, and have thus been beautifully formed by time and experience—as something in nature is formed by epochs and the elements.
This is especially interesting to witness in female artists because of the disruption they so often experience as a result of child rearing and family responsibilities. This reality is often pointed out and given voice through their protagonists.
Anne Youngson’s moving, intelligent first novel, Meet Me At The Museum, was published when she was 71 years old.
It took a long time for the obvious to become obvious: I could not operate in a conventional family.
-Annie Proulx
Annie Proulx didn’t publish her first novel, Postcards, until she was 57, after multiple marriages and bearing four children. Her second novel, The Shipping News, was published in 1993 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her short story Brokeback Mountain was adapted as an Academy Award winning motion picture in 2005.
Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, when she was 41. She was a single working mother after being divorced at 34, with a three-year-old son and another baby on the way.
Incidentally, in addition to her Nobel prize winning novels, she also co-authored eight books for children with her younger son Slade, who passed away in 2010 of pancreatic cancer.
I came heavy freighted with a lifetime of ever-accumulating material, the sense of unwritten lives which cried to be written.
–Tillie Olsen (on attending her first writing class at age 43)
Tillie Olsen published her first book Tell Me A Riddle when she was almost 50. Her fiction engages the reader beautifully in the issues of a working class mother who struggles between her responsibilities and love for her children and her own female identity and inner life.
Talent is a matter of patience over time. It involves studying everything long enough and with enough attention to find an aspect of it that no one has seen or spoken of.
-Guy de Maupassant on Flaubert
The Ravine
by Vincent Van Gogh
I don’t make these observations with the idea of pitting the fresh talent of youth against the rich experience of age. It is simply an exploration into the process by which some things of beauty and meaning come to be.
It isn’t just the idea that some things get better with age, but that some things only become possible with age—with the time and experience it brings. It seems to have been true for these authors, at least.
Happy Reading!
