What Monet, Yeats and O'Keeffe Knew That You Don't

Author Nicholas Delbanco is frank about his dread of his later years. "My inner horror," he says, "and I suspect it's a widespread one, is sitting in a chair all day and staring at a wall. It's a very real prospect for many of us."

So at an age when retirement started to beckon, Delbanco set out to explore the other extreme: the dogged souls who keep going and going. What is their secret? What ultimately inspires them?

To find answers, he delved into the lives of creative immortals -- among them Pablo Casals, who composed and conducted music well into his 90s; Georgia O'Keeffe, who painted in the remote New Mexico desert when she was so blind and infirm she had to run her fingertips over the canvas to "see" the art; and William Butler Yeats, who crafted his most enduring poetry long after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

What they shared was not just talent and a genetic disposition toward health and long life, Delbanco discovered. They also possessed a profound ability to remain passionate for their work and for creating something of value, which seems to stand apart from the many accolades they earned.

"More and more . . . [the] gratification turns inward," Delbanco, now 68, writes in his new book, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age. "Incrementally, the making of the thing itself displaces its reception; reviews and sales and standing ovations come to matter less."

Throughout the book, the one-time literary wunderkind -- who published his first novel, The Martlet's Tale, at age 23 -- intersperses his own observations about growing older with short profiles of artists, musicians and writers who remained productive during virtually all of their middle and later years. Delbanco sees the book as an examination of people who did it right, and whose exploits might inspire people of any age or profession.

"The artists who seem to diminish over time -- or, at best, repeat themselves -- are those who, in my grandmother's language, have bad character," Delbanco says. "They take to flattery too easily. They take to drink too easily. We have examples of this all over the place." By contrast, the men and women at the core of his book managed to maintain a steadfastness about their work, to continue producing whether they were particularly inspired or not, and to find fresh directions without abandoning the strengths that made them successful, Delbanco says.

"They have what the ancients call wisdom," he says. "This business of character is one we ought to be focusing on."

Love What You Do

The notion of loving what you do, often for its own sake, comes across in page after page of Delbanco's narrative. "None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm," he writes, quoting Henry David Thoreau.

Artist Claude Monet, for instance, one of the founders of Impressionism, lived to be 86 and, despite failing eyesight, painted almost until the end in the French village of Giverny, outside Paris. His renditions of water lilies on his estate during those final years became some of his most celebrated works, but the driven, intensely self-critical Monet kept most of his paintings from public view, destroying many of them, Delbanco writes.

"At the last, one has the sense he painted for himself, and himself alone," Delbanco observes. To compensate for his poor vision, Monet exploited a style that made hard lines and exactitude seem beside the point. "What interests me . . . is how Monet took advantage of what might have seemed a deficit," Delbanco writes. "The photographs of the painter in old age (looking rather like Rodin, another titan of creative industry) suggest a physical robustness that goes some distance to explaining his unstoppable output at Giverny. This was his great undertaking and, like Michelangelo's labor on the Sistine ceiling, an act of sustained concentration."

American artist O'Keeffe, who ranked as one of the world's pre-eminent female painters when she died at 98 in 1986, shared Monet's single-minded dedication. Delbanco quotes from an interview in 1962, when O'Keeffe was in her 70s. She reeled off a list of life's daily chores -- gardening, shopping, fixing the roof -- and said, "But always you are hurrying through these things with a certain amount of aggravation so that you can get at the paintings again, because that is the high spot. In a way, it is what you do all the other things for."

Enduring Role Models

Some of the examples confirm what Delbanco says he learned from influential figures in his own life. Casals, the master cellist who lived to be 96, eventually lost the virtuosity needed to perform in concert, so he shifted his attention to composing and conducting. He spoke in his twilight years about the energy that music gave him: "My work is my life. I cannot think of one without the other. . . . The man who works and is never bored is never old."

Delbanco's father lived by a similar creed. An artist whose work made it to the National Portrait Gallery, Kurt Delbanco never quite achieved break-out fame -- and yet he never quit. "At 98, he continued to say, 'A painting a day keeps the doctor away,' and bend [over to paint in] his coloring book," Delbanco writes.

The book also tells the remarkable story of Delbanco's father-in-law, Bernard Greenhouse, a former student of Casals who became a renowned cellist in his own right. Now 95 and on oxygen, Greenhouse still takes up the cello daily. "In all other respects, he's an old and tired man," Delbanco says, "but not when he plays the cello." When he plays, Greenhouse's blood saturates with oxygen; the monitor that tracks it goes up 20 points -- to nearly normal. "It has something to do with the sheer aerobics of it," Delbanco says. "But it's not merely a function of exercise. It's a function of engagement."

Finding New Challenges

Delbanco suggests that Lastingness is especially relevant as so many baby boomers advance into middle age. The habits of the great, lifelong achievers are a template for anyone. But the book, Delbanco's 25th, also is a personal exploration as he strives to maintain his own creative zeal. The London-born author, who was raised in Larchmont, N.Y., was a whirlwind by the time he graduated from Harvard University, envisioning stories, banging out pages. His wife, Elena, remembers a 10-month world tour they took soon after their marriage in 1970.

"Every single day, I woke up in a hotel room to the sound of Nick locked in the bathroom, typing -- often sitting in the bathtub," she says with a laugh. "These were tiny bathrooms."

Delbanco wrote 10 novels by the time he was 40 -- and then got stuck. He hit a fallow period. His good friend Alan Cheuse, a novelist and book critic on National Public Radio, suggested that he diversify by writing short stories and nonfiction books, forms he had never attempted.

"He had such wonderful nonfiction material -- music from his father-in-law's side and art from his father's side," says Cheuse, who is two years older than Delbanco and has a new novel, Song of Slaves in the Desert, hitting the bookstores. "I did as a friend will sometimes do -- I said, 'You really should write those stories.'"

Delbanco credits the new challenges with restoring his edge. He continues to teach writing and literature at the University of Michigan, near his home in Ann Arbor. He is a father of two daughters and three granddaughters and is collaborating with Cheuse on a new edition of a three-volume textbook on writing due out in January 2012. In August, Dalkey Archive Press is reissuing his trilogy of novels -- Possession, Sherbrookes and Stillness -- about a 76-year-old man from Vermont. Delbanco wrote the stories when he was in his 30s. Now that he is so much nearer to the protagonist's age, Delbanco says he insisted on revising the works, which will appear as a single volume, Sherbrookes.

Elena Delbanco says her husband gets grumpy unless he is toiling at the keyboard each day, preferably by 6 a.m.

"I'm not sure I would be of much use as a human being if I didn't do that," the author says without apology. "I still feel that same passion, and I know how lucky I am to feel it."

SecondAct contributor David Ferrell is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer and the author of Screwball, a comic baseball novel.