As Michelangelo knew, it’s never too late to start again...
SECOND ACT by Henry Oliver (John Murray One £20, 368 pp)
In the final decade of his life, Michaelangelo was so keen to work on his sculptures that he made himself a hat which held candles, in order that he could continue late into the night.
Sadly, henry Oliver doesn’t give any more details — there are clearly some health and safety issues it would have been intriguing to explore — but you take his overall point. the latter stages of your life can be a time of great achievement.
the definition of ‘latter’ has changed somewhat since the American writer Walter Pitkin published his self-help book Life Begins At Forty in 1932 (when he was 45).
the title became a cliche, but back then the average life expectancy in the U.S. was 62 for men and 63 for women. these days 40 is barely halfway through a typical lifespan. Ray Kroc was 52 when he met the McDonald brothers and began the process of turning their burger restaurant into an international chain. he credited his success with paying attention to the tiny details.
his top executives were issued with a small packet containing a nail file, comb and some brushes. ‘For me,’ said Kroc, ‘work was play.’ he maintained this attitude even in retirement, when he would watch his local McDonald’s through binoculars from his home, and telephone to ‘give them hell’ if he saw standards slipping.
Katharine Graham inherited the Washington Post when she was 45. the newspaper had been run by her father, who then handed control to his daughter’s husband, Philip Graham. In 1963, Phil committed suicide, leaving Kay (as she was known) to take the reins.
She was determined not to repeat her father’s egotism — even as proprietor of the newspaper that ended Richard nixon’s presidency, she refused to complain if she was given a bad table in a restaurant.
She got on with trying to do the best she could: her approach to the job was ‘learning by doing’. And the learning was done in tough circumstances. During a violent strike, in which unions were trying to maintain their corrupt practices, one leader carried a placard reading ‘Phil shot the wrong Graham’.
So what can late bloomers tell you about
reinventing your life? Oliver says there are ‘no hacks or tricks to leapfrog you to a new life’. Instead, we get biographies and parts of biographies, and Oliver’s sometimes very detailed thoughts on what they might show us.
We learn that Margaret Thatcher once said it was easier for a woman than a man to give up power: ‘I can fill the time spring cleaning the house’. (By the time she actually did give up power, less than willingly, I suspect she’d changed her mind.)
We meet Madonna Buder, an American nun ‘who started athletic training aged 48, and began competing in Ironman competitions in her 80s’.
And indeed, her British counterpart, Sister Wendy, achieved television fame in her 60s, after a life of isolation. In 1982, she attended a party to celebrate the BBC’s 60th anniversary, at which footage of the first four-minute mile (1954) and England’s football World Cup win (1966) were shown. It was the first time Wendy had seen either.
Incidentally, this is the first book I have ever read whose acknowledgements include a thank you to ChatGPT. Oliver says the artificial intelligence programme was ‘an invaluable research tool and proofreader, and was one of the early readers of the manuscript; at all stages it offered sensible insights with great swiftness’.
ChatGPT is less than two years old. Imagine what it’ll be able to do when it’s 40.