Authors: Lynne Segal
By the time she put together her last collection of essays,
Touching Feeling
, Sedgwick clarified her distance from some of her earlier influential engagement with poststructuralism, work she now referred to as critical theory’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’.
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That earlier work covered her nuanced semiotic readings of the hidden, often-repressive meanings of texts – especially those disavowing dissident sexualities for a privileging of what she referred to as the ‘homosocial’ bonding of heterosexuality. In her later writing, she expressed her liking for the notion of the ‘senile sublime’, borrowed from fellow academic Barbara Herrnstein Smith, referring to possibilities for conveying the more inchoate performances of brilliant old people, or what Sedgwick refers to as ‘an affective and aesthetic fullness that can attach even to experiences of cognitive frustration’.
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This takes me back to my opening thought that what we may come to love and nurture, and in turn receive satisfaction
from, extends well beyond the human to other living creatures. It was the presence of his two beloved dogs, Mark Doty realized, that helped him care for and then cope with the death of his lover, Wally. As he explained: ‘Love for a wordless creature, once it takes hold, is an enchantment, and the enchanted speak, famously, in private mutterings, cryptic riddles or gibberish.’ Years after Wally’s death, however, and in a new and happy sexual relationship, Doty later comes to find his renewed anguish hardly bearable when he faces the approaching death of the last of his most beloved dogs, Arden. Later, mourning Arden, he hovers between feelings of constant loss and recuperation: ‘He’s an absence and a presence, both – the way he will be, to greater or lesser degrees, for years to come … Wouldn’t you know that the most misanthropic of poets would write the warmest of elegies for his dog?’
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Donna Haraway, that formidable feminist scholar and philosopher of science, also living in the USA, has written similarly about her relationship to her own two canine companions. In her
Companion Species Manifesto
, for instance, Haraway describes how she and her two dogs have been mutually training each other: ‘In acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. This love is a historical aberration and a natural–cultural legacy.’
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However, just as one person, even in moments of loss, finds a way of trying to move beyond speech to attend to more enigmatic, affective states, another experiences only an increasingly bitter cynicism: ‘Is that all there is?’ Short of belief in an afterlife, sooner or later we will all realize, whether with humour,
resignation or fear, ‘yes, that
is
all there is’. A certain cynicism about life and its legacies is surely appropriate. Yet, as Angela Carter once suggested via the fabulations in her last book
Wise Children
, not even our closeness to death need preclude moments of pleasure, as we recall, if only from the images we see and the sounds we hear in our heads, ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’ Or, as she added, writing as she was dying of lung cancer approaching fifty, ‘Comedy is tragedy that happens to
other
people.’
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Confronting Mortality
There may, however, be no way of redeeming the particular horror of ageing we saw expressed by some of the men confronting old age in the previous chapter. For instance, when promoting one of his recent books,
The Pregnant Widow
, Martin Amis seemed to be almost satirizing himself in feeding fears of the cultural and economic crisis caused by the ever-rising ‘silver tsunami’ of old people: ‘There’ll be a population of demented very old people, like an invasion of terrible immigrants … I can imagine a sort of civil war between the old and the young in ten or fifteen years’ time.’ His solution, obviously courting much of the publicity it garnered, was to suggest ‘euthanasia booths’: ‘There should be a booth on every corner where you could get a martini and a medal.’
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Some writers, most of them men, are determined to maintain their ability to shock, whatever their age, but the banality of Amis’ proposal, familiar from science fiction, seemed to render his provocation more tiresome than shocking.
That old iconoclast, Quentin Crisp, did it better, almost forty-five years earlier:
there should not be this undignified element of hazard about the date of a person’s demise. There ought to be a Minister of Death, though, in Orwellian terminology, it would be named the Ministry of Heaven. This august body of men, all preferably under thirty years of age, would deal with the chore of exterminating old people … they would have to agree on a time limit (say, sixty) to live beyond which would be an offence (punishable with life?).
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Writing this at sixty, that celebrated old rogue lived on for over another thirty years.
In contrast, although Philip Roth also likes the notoriety of scandalizing his readers, we can just occasionally glimpse another side to his routine depiction of the woes of ageing phallic hubris, at least in the portrayals of old age in one of his books,
Patrimony
. Here, in a memoir of his father, we are given a very different portrait of the ageing author, who was already fifty-eight when this book appeared. In these pages, Roth is himself the caretaker and comforter, the one who is presented as both willing and able to console and reassure his father immediately after the death of his mother. He depicts himself enjoying the physical and emotional closeness he can now offer this overbearing, obstinate, obsessive and opinionated old man, even being prepared, literally, to take up the place of his mother in the bed:
We took turns in the bathroom and then, in our pajamas, we lay down side by side in the bed where he had slept with my mother two nights before, the only bed in the apartment. After turning out the light, I reached out and took his hand and held it as you would the hand of a child who is frightened of the dark. He sobbed for a moment or two – then I heard the broken, heavy breathing of someone very deeply asleep, and I turned over to try to get some rest myself.
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Roth later hears that his father has said of him: ‘ “Philip is like a mother to me” ’; a mother, he notes, not a father (181). In other ways too, it is in this book that Roth is able, for once, to shed much of his masculine carapace, revealing the softer, supposedly ‘feminine’ traits it exists to hide. In dreams, once his father has died, he sees his own weaknesses emerging in what he takes to be the stunned and bereft image of his father arriving in the USA, when still a child: ‘my own pain so aptly [captured] in the figure of a small, fatherless evacuee on the Newark docks’ (237). As we discover in this book, there was much the son had to learn to hide: ‘People don’t realize what good girls we grew up as, too, the little sons suckered and gurgled by mothers as adroit as my own in the skills of nurturing domesticity’ (40).
Nevertheless, any such excursions into the possible satisfactions or challenges of nurturing domesticity, or indeed any form of care and commitment, are rare in Roth’s portrayals of men and the dilemmas of ageing. First and foremost, he focuses on what he sees as the loneliness of the productive man when, post-retirement, he realizes he has lost all trace of his old sexual allure: ‘There was an absence now of all forms of solace, a barrenness under the heading of consolation, and no way to return to what was.’
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Other male writers, however, including John Updike, have found more varied modes of escape from similar accounts of the perils of priapic obsession that their writing elsewhere depicted. For in Updike it is possible to find consistently gentler, affectionate images of men’s old age, including his own, especially when pondering mortality, which makes his
thoughts worth returning to. Updike often writes lyrically of old men losing themselves in contemplation of the moment, enthralled by particular landscapes, as well as by their sexual reminiscences. This is most evident in Updike’s writing in his seventies, when his own preoccupations with ageing encourage him to project more benevolence, more complacency perhaps, but certainly, greater possibilities for enjoying the pleasures of kinship, connectedness and hope, onto his characters as they handle the travails of old age.
Most people, like me and my friends and acquaintances, face our own ageing by moaning, mulling it over, or reading about it, though usually, for as long as possible, by simply disavowing it. Updike, so he tells us, learned how to age by writing about it: ‘I never thought of myself as old until I wrote this book about an old man’, he said in an interview at sixty-five. He was referring to his novel
Toward the End of Time
: ‘I used to look at people my [current] age and I would think how can they stand being that close to death without screaming in terror? And now I’m of that age. In some odd way you adjust to the proximity of death. But something else in you fights it.’
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Screaming in terror is the thought that another word-spinner, the British poet, Philip Larkin, saw as appropriate when pondering old age in his mid-life: ‘What do they think has happened, the old fools / Why aren’t they screaming?’
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However, as I’ve suggested often enough, and as Updike illustrates, we aren’t all screaming partly because we are never fully convinced by the age we are, the age that others, including one’s own mirror, together conspire to bestow upon us. In his memoir,
Self-Consciousness
, written in his late fifties, Updike expresses many times the thought that we never quite accept mortality: ‘As we get older we go to more and more funerals, and sit there in a
stony daze, somehow convinced that it will never happen to us, or if it does, we will be essentially elsewhere.’
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In one of the most evocative of the short stories from his final collection,
My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
, published posthumously, Updike has the nameless narrator reflecting: ‘Approaching eighty I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know, but not intimately.’
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The protagonist in this story, ‘The Full Glass’, feels he is not so intimate with the old man he sees in the mirror, since he is in many ways a less familiar creature than many of the former selves he can more readily recall. Although this man is depicted as very ordinary, a person not given to introspection, yet with so much time on his hands, and so many memories hanging around, he cannot refrain from sometimes ‘digging deeper’. He recalls past pleasures, experiences occasional bouts of remorse when flashes of unpleasant choices he has made come to mind, then again he summons up times when life seemed completely full and precious, as in childhood, remembered as a time of perpetual eagerness ‘for the next moment of life, one brimming moment after another’.
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As ever with Updike, the life explored in this tale largely mirrors that of his creator, especially in the recollections of adultery and its destructive effects, primarily on the other woman involved.
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The narrator in ‘The Full Glass’, however, as in most of the other stories in this final prose collection, still enjoys the care and comfort of a (second) wife who has forgiven and supported him over more than thirty years. Updike depicts this old man, swallowing the pills that now keep him alive, as someone who still finds immense pleasure in surveying the busy maritime life he observes on the full, flat ocean visible from his bathroom window, as he calmly anticipates the next
day with all its boring routines: ‘If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.’
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If I can read Updike aright, he is able to capture here something of the experience of having lived a full life, a relatively satisfied life, in which the comfort of receiving the constant love of another helps to overcome fears of death and dying. Some of the verse in his last book of poetry,
Endpoint
(again published posthumously), is written about, and often for, his own (second) wife Martha: ‘My wife of thirty years … I need her voice; Her body is the only locus where / My desolation bumps against its end.’
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Updike realizes that these supportive wives, who appear regularly in his fiction, may sometimes have a harder time. ‘I’d give anything not to have married you’, a husband describes his second wife repeating when she is ‘angry or soulful’ in ‘Personal Archeology’; she is only partially consoled by her husband’s reassuring words, ‘You’ve been a wonderful wife. Wonderful’ (23).
Updike is nevertheless able to depict a certain tranquillity in the face of ageing, and even imminent death, in his older men who manage to enjoy the present, while living only for the next brief moment: ‘Give me another hour, then I’ll go’ (3). In
Self-Consciousness
, feeling himself already old at fifty-seven, Updike provides some disparaging reflections on what he sees as his former egotistical, attention-seeking, ambitious, faithless or distracted selves, yet also manages to find a certain solace in the process: ‘when I entertain in my own mind these shaggy, red-faced, over-excited, abrasive fellows, I find myself tenderly taken with their diligence, their hopefulness, their ability in spite of all to map a broad strategy and stick with it’.
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Neither Updike, nor Roth, however, had any experience of or showed
any real interest in how ageing might affect the far grimmer lives of men without status or money.