Grow Old Along With Me
Baby boomers can’t do anything without becoming the center of attention. It’s not their fault, of course; there are just so many of them. So now that they’re approaching old age (the vanguard just hit sixty-seven), we can expect a lot more literature on aging. Those of us who are a bit older may resent all the attention they’re getting. We also went to college, got married, gave birth, had midlife crises, and didn’t do so much whining about it all. But that’s why we got called the Silent Generation, and never managed to produce even one measly president.
Lynne Segal’s Out of Time is not so much a book on “the pleasures and perils of getting old” (jacket copy), as the biography of a generation. And it’s not my generation. Moreover, Segal represents a subset of that cohort, those for whom “feminist” is an automatic assumption, and “radical” is synonymous with “good person.” I’m not so comfortable at that particular lunch table either.
The narrowness of Segal’s horizons appears early. She sums up the history of attitudes toward aging in three pages, a sketch that opens in 500 B.C. Athens and closes in 18th century England. It’s hard not to wonder how she can approach such a topic without even a glance at Asia, where (as everyone has learned) Confucius taught veneration for age. Although Chinese does have a word, laobusi, which means “old, but just won’t die,” expressing the exasperation of those venerating heirs toward the venerable who hang around. It’s a sentiment most unfilial westerners would blush to acknowledge.
One of the most vivid old women in literature is the “Old Lady” of the 18th century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber (or Story of the Stone). Matriarch of a large and wealthy family, she wields such authority that her irresponsible sons tremble at her wrath. But what she loves is hanging (the only verb that seems to fit) with her many granddaughters, and she is the first to suggest a feast, a picnic, a riddle game. On occasion she reminisces about her youth and the reader knows exactly the fun-loving, flirtatious girl she must once have been.
The Chinese “Old Lady” illustrates one of Segal’s major themes — in Doris Lessing’s words, “Your body changes but you don’t change at all.” The title, Out of Time, suggests that paradox. Whereas time has brought us to this age, and one of our fears is that time is running out, our unchanging sense of self exists beyond that chronological framework. “In a dream,” as Anne Sexton said, “you are never eighty.” The eyes of a lover who knew us in youth can allow us to maintain that image until his death or desertion catapults us into reality. Lifelong friends may also see the girl or boy behind that wrinkled face, and those of us who have them (or who recover them) are blessed.
Thus also the recurring image of the mirror. What we see in the mirror is not what we expect to see: we see a parent or grandparent, or a monster, or a caricature. Or (I have noticed) we block out the whole picture and concentrate on the one aspect we need to fix, the hair or the lipstick. Here is the Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich in a poem entitled “Mirror:”
I, I, I — what a wild word!
Can that thing there be — I?
Can that thing be what Mama loved,
Grayish yellow, with graying hair,
And omniscient, like a serpent?
Indeed, once you start thinking about literature on aging you realize that even before the baby boomers started writing about what lies before them, the subject was everywhere. (We just didn’t want to read about it before we faced it ourselves). Besides Sexton and Lessing, Segal quotes Frost, Auden and Yeats, and provides lengthy discussions of Philip Roth, Colm Toibin, Roland Barthes, and others. The first author she mentions however, and her true model for this book, is Simone de Beauvoir.
Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse, translated as The Coming of Age, is far less famous than The Second Sex. My copy of The Second Sex disintegrated from repeated reading. All I really remember from The Coming of Age is my shock on encountering a poem that seemed familiar but somehow altered — and realizing the the translator had rendered Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium back into English from Beauvoir’s French, apparently not recognizing the Irish poem. A second shock ensued when I learned that the translator was Patrick O’Brien, whose Aubrey-Maturin novels I love. But then, as we now know, O’Brien lied about being an Irishman anyway.
Beauvoir’s influence determines the form of Segal’s book, which falls somewhere between an academic monograph with lots of citations and footnotes, and a personal essay with autobiographical asides. I prefer the latter form, which is why I found two other books on aging (both of which Segal mentions) more enjoyable. One is Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time, and the other Diana Athill’s Somewhere Near the End. Both are collections of essays rather than unitary texts. (Carolyn Heilbrun, who had long expressed her intention of committing suicide when she turned seventy, eventually did so at seventy-seven — another topic perhaps, for a book on aging).
I seem to have spent most of this blog criticizing Segal for writing the book she wanted to write, rather than the one I wanted to read. But for those who can disregard (or perhaps admire) the taken-for-granted politics, there are some real insights here. I was particularly struck by her insistence on how shame and humiliation haunt the experience of age — whether in revealing one’s altered and distasteful body, in seeking intimacy, or just in seeking human contact. Here Segal hits on one of those sore spots we’d just like to forget, but cannot.
Better to go down in your pride
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all — provide, provide!
