Never Too Late To Begin

There's a sense out there in the publishing community that writers have to begin when they're young. Hence, the freshly minted MFA is such a hot writing credential that the owner is positively smoking. What if you're thirty-something? Maybe not too long in the tooth, but it's getting there. In your forties or beyond? Sure you're too old to have anything to say that's worth hearing. Nobody wants an old author with his old-fashioned writing.

So we all take heart in the saga of Harry Bernstein, making his literary appearance at the age of 96. No one in New York would look at his manuscript, not when he started to write at the age of 93. The query letters would have given away his age, with an air of polite manners and proper format that is unseen in the fledgling MFA. One glance at the query and the publishers would have laughed. Christ, he's old, who gives a rat's arse about his book, they might have said. Some senile old man, rambling on and on. That's not for today's publishing climate. We want hip, we want quirky, we want urban fantasy and realism and grit and the next DaVinci Code.

The manuscript had to be discovered in England, where the art of writing, the love of words, still exists in some amber-encased reliquary that pays homage to the likes of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Kate Elton, an editor in Random House's London branch, ran across the manuscript after it had languished for a year in the slush pile, and she found that she could not put it down.

What Mr. Bernstein put down on paper as an exercise in mental health therapy turned out to be a book filled with moving characters and a vivid story. It's true, his little book, with the story of a religious divide and a Romeo-Juliet love story that has been done to death, except that this telling is fresh and real. The author reveals a life spent in poverty, facing anti-Semitism and the violence that was part of a rough childhood.

Don't think that Bernstein has never written something before, because he's worked as an editor of trade magazines and penned freelance articles. He's a keen reader, which is the best training for a would-be writer, and he has survived a difficult life with an alcoholic father and a saintly mother. No wonder he's looked on as the newest incarnation of Frank McCourt.