Is he the exception to the general rule that authors and artists get worse as they get older?I hate his earlier work but love everything from The Executioners Song onwards.
Well longer you live the more time you get to drink. And bloated faces make reading words harder since your cheeks squeeze against your eye sockets. So half the time they don’t even know what they’re writing and they need assistants and copy printers to do their dirty works
>>25334639Autism
>>25334180Picking this fellow as "the" exception to that rule is a bit silly. You can say "an" exception if you want. That might be worth debating. But then, the "rule" is not much of a rule either.It's commonly believed that poetry is a young man's game, prose less so. There's some truth in that, but plenty of exceptions. (Plenty of exceptions meaning older people writing good poetry, not younger people writing good novels. Very hard to write a great novel in your twenties. You need maturity and breadth of experience. Yes, there's Wuthering Heights, but Emily was Emily, what can you say?)The weird thing is that poetry is more akin to music than is prose, but composers typically do not do their best work when young. Taking the holy trinity for example:Mozart — died youngish (35) but his best stuff was his late stuff (Glen Gould's silly comments notwithstanding).Bach — stayed at a high level pretty much to the end of his life. Died in his sixties in the middle of The Art Of Fugue.Beethoven — his best stuff is definitely his late stuff. But then he died in his early fifties so by modern standards he was hardly "old".A composer has to get very old for any signs of falling-away. (Wagner is one candidate. Gotterdammerung is obviously less energetic and coherent than Die Walkure.)
>>25334701Music is interesting because great musicians can and typically do show precocious talent very early, even if most don't start doing great work until they get through adolescence, and then can continue to grow and show their strength of compositional talent through most of their life. The abstractness and scope of the artform seems to allow this.
>>25334180I think it depends on the person. Most people are motivated to settle and later retire. I would speculate that they get their best ideas out first, then probably lose interest in iterating on a huge effort they've already done. Not all artists are as dedicated as Sam Beckett, chasing something only they can see and continually refining their approach. Mailer was obsessed with literary greatness.
>>25334180>>25334701>poetry is a young man's game... there's some truth in that, but plenty of exceptionsThe exceptions are so big they throw the whole rule into question. Yeats did his best work past the age of 60. Similar deal with Eliot. I think it's easier to "fake it" so to speak with poetry, because you need life experience to write good fiction, but good poetry can be written without life experience as long as you're sharply attuned to what's going on around and inside you
