Ageing, Creativity, and Memory: The Evolution of Erica Jong’s Literary Career

ABSTRACT

Taking a life-course perspective, this article considers the intersections of creativity, memory, and ageing in Erica Jong’s middle and later works, and explores underlying changes in the author’s self-perception as a writer. It demonstrates the substitution of Jong’s initial “fear of writing” by increased self-knowledge, courage to speak her mind, and gradual capacity to ignore negative criticism in later years. Although her later life works and her most recent personal accounts reveal that ageing does not render the creative process easier, in Jong’s case the act of life writing becomes fearless with age. An examination of the relationship between memory processes and the narrative construction of a sense of self through the act of writing demonstrates how the writer becomes more self-assured, grounded, and mature over time, which challenges the pervasive narrative of decline and helps to better understand the complex realities of ageing and the artistic achievements of older adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Ageing
• late-life creativity
• life writing
• memory
• confidence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ieva Stončikaitė’s PhD thesis (2017) focuses on the intersection of ageing, sexuality, body politics, and the literary creation in the works of Erica Jong. She has co-taught as assistant lecturer at the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Lleida, and is a member of the research group Grup Dedal-Lit. Her current research interests include cultural gerontology, senior tourism, active and healthy ageing, and social innovation and inclusion in rural areas.

Notes

1 Creative achievement has predominantly been identified with the period of youth, as exemplified in the works of well-known Romantic poets who died young: Keats died of tuberculosis, Lord Byron of cholera in Greece, and Shelley drowned (Cohen-Shalev 1989, 25). Similar ideas are also observed by Emma Domínguez-Rué, who argues that artists of the first decades of the twentieth century associated ageing with the loss of their creative potential, which led to personal conflicts and anxieties (2004, 63). These notions are reflected in the works of some well-known writers, such as T.S. Eliot in his “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), F. Scott Fitzgerald in his Tender Is the Night (1934), or Evelyn Waugh in his Brideshead Revisited (1944). Yet, Cohen-Shalev claims that the assumed power of youthful creativity is a cultural construct and depends on dominant ideologies about age in different historical periods (1989, 25).

2 The writer did not blame men for ascribing an inferior status to women writers. According to her, men take in this notion through mainstream culture and patriarchal discourses, which make women’s writing seem less valuable, weaker, and more sentimental. Although Jong has achieved celebrity status as a writer, past her midlife, she continues to think that women are less represented in male-dominated literary circles. For the author, “[a] woman writer must not only invent the wheel, she must grow the tree and chop it down, whittle it round, and learn to make it roll. Then she must clear a path for herself” (1994, 145). Even though men, like women, also struggle to be recognised in the literary domain, they are not obliged to “convince the world that [they have] the right to find [their] voices” (Jong 1994, 145, emphasis in original).

3 In her early forties, Jong confessed that since graduate school she considered Nabokov as the “cleverest writer in the world” (as quoted in Templin 2002, 146). She attempted a Nabokovian style novel under the title God on West End Avenue about a young mad poet who considered himself God (1974, 264).

4 Germaine Greer’s view on old age might be considered too simplistic as it seems to offer the other extreme of the narrative of decline.

5 On Erica Jong’s attitudes towards sexual practices and the perception of sexuality in later years, please see: Ieva Stončikaitė. 2017. “‘No, My Husband Isn’t Dead, [But] One Has to Re-Invent Sexuality’: Reading Erica Jong for the Future of Aging.”