Authors: Lynne Segal
Even so, the potential desolations of old age are real enough in some of Updike’s descriptions of men’s ageing in his fictional world. He is less bitterly corrosive than Roth, but convincing in his depictions of men, post-retirement, coping with a sense of isolation and child-like helplessness, especially as they watch their often younger, usually second wives, still active as ever with ‘committees and bridge groups and book clubs and manicure appointments’ (148).
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Indeed, Updike sometimes depicts the situation of the ageing man as not so much that of a ‘woman’, as Beauvoir and others have seen it, but rather as a return to the helplessness of childhood. Either way, whether seen as more like a woman, or sensing his own weakness, Updike once again captures here the distinctly male fear that the ageing man may come to occupy the subordinate position traditionally reserved for the woman or the child.
More often, however, Updike’s old men find ways of holding depression at bay in the comfort of the attachments they have finally learned to cherish. In his short story ‘Free’, for instance, the once adulterous and now widowed husband, briefly experiencing ‘the old beast’ sluggishly stirring within as he revisits a woman with whom he once had a passionate affair, decides to return chastely home: ‘To the repose he found in imagining [his now dead wife] still with him. Since her death she was wrapped around him like a shroud of gold and silver thread’.
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It was, by and large, the conservative routines of Updike’s white, middle-class, patriotic and church-attending American Christians, with their adequate pensions, their memories and usually a wife, all functioning to sustain them, which enabled these old men to live without rancour in a world they now realize exists primarily for
young people: ‘Their tastes in food and music and clothing are what the world is catering to, even while they are imagining themselves the victims of the old, the enforcers of the laws’.
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It was also Updike’s conformity as a good US citizen that left him untroubled by thoughts that many of the young might also be seen as the insecure victims of the fierce marketing of the badges of status in the contemporary USA, facing futures where home-ownership, pensions and even secure partnerships, let alone soothing ocean views, would remain completely inaccessible.
Finally, however, it is clear that there is one other thing Updike and Roth unquestionably shared in confronting old age: their ties to their creative work, and simply being able to keep on telling their stories of men’s lives in the best way they could. Updike died with his pen in his hand, knowing the great consolation he received from the ability to just continue writing, likening it to riding a bike, knowing ‘if I were ever to stop pedaling, [it] would dump me flat on my side’.
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Roth has just recently announced that he will write no more books, and it will be interesting to see whether he can manage life without this support. Beauvoir, we have seen, agreed with Updike. She just kept on writing to the end, declaring: ‘There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual and creative work.’
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Meanwhile, she was clear that part of the problem for the working-class man is that his labour was never highly valued or seen as important when he performed it, hence the meaning of his existence was ‘stolen from him from the very beginning’.
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Living with Fear
Martin Amis believes that young men lose their sense of impregnability on reaching forty. Some men, however, seem never to have shared his sense of impregnability, even when young, nor to need any reminding of life’s brevity. The English writer, Julian Barnes, for instance, could be seen as our leading thanotophobic, having thought about dying every day since he was thirteen or fourteen, with intermittent nocturnal attacks: ‘Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel’, he tells us, ‘as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day’s hiking.’
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During the night, he experiences ‘that alarmed and alarming moment, of being pitch-forked back into consciousness, awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting “Oh no Oh No OH NO” in an endless wail’ (126). Yet what is interesting about Barnes is that over his lifetime he has shown little horror of old age itself. He has no problems calmly depicting his fears of death, nor indeed in portraying old age in richer hues than most of his contemporary male writers. He has had a lot of practice: ‘The thing about your books, Julian’, the late Beryl Bainbridge is said to have announced at a literary festival some years ago, ‘is that they’re all about
death
. All your books are about dying.’
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She exaggerated only a little. Meditations on mortality have featured in most of Barnes’ novels, even in the thoughts of the sixteen-year-old narrator in his first novel,
Metroland
(1980), begun in his twenties; while death and suicide appear prominently in most of his subsequent books, including the novel that established his literary eminence while still in his thirties,
Flaubert’s Parrot
(1984). However, it is in
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
(2009) that Barnes tackles his fear of death directly, incorporating reminiscences of the deaths of his parents. In that book, Barnes suggests people are divided into two types: those more afraid of dying, and those more afraid of old age, illness and incapacity. As someone firmly in the latter camp, along with most of my friends, I think he may be right. I also suspect that the former group, the ‘thanatophobes’, is a smaller one, which Barnes currently heads up – although we learn it has included Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman, along with some of the author’s own unnamed friends, whom he suspects of competing with each other to be the most death-fearing.
That it is death rather than old age that frightens Barnes also resonates with the absence of any of the customary expressions of horror accompanying the portrayals of old age in his writing. Although he mistrusts the idea that ageing brings serenity, he does think it can bring wisdom: ‘The good news is that we do indeed sometimes become wiser as we grow old’, even supplying the information that, unless we are among the minority who will suffer from Alzheimer’s, ‘the higher intellectual functions of the brain are much less affected by the cognitive cellular morbidity causing physical decline’ (199).
Barnes never attempts to probe what might be the psychic make-up of the differing psychologies he mentions. He knows all about the tricks of memory and is a sharp observer of surface nuance and fluidity in people’s dealing with the contingencies of a life, but he is clearly wary of any form of psychic reductionism, Freudian or otherwise. Rejecting any settled explanatory framework for the perpetual flow of observation, Barnes seems to see as all-too-neat those clinicians with their conceptual tool kits always waiting in the wings, eager to stamp and package
us. For Freud, especially in his early work, the unconscious knows nothing of the finality of death, hence fears of dying and death are interpreted as displacements of castration anxiety or, more often nowadays, fear of abandonment by the mother.
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In
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
, Barnes certainly presents us with an unsympathetic image of a cold, critical, insensitive, narcissistic and controlling mother – his own – whom he would not wish to meet again, even in fantasy. Quite different are the warm reflections on his late father, whose final years he saw as tyrannized by a wife ‘always present, nattering, organizing, fussing, controlling’ (103). However, unlike Roth, Barnes prefers his readers to refrain from ‘knowing’ speculation. Indeed, when summing up his life, he reiterates that there is little at all to say about him, suggesting simply that he had ‘achieved as much happiness as his nature permitted … He was happy in his own company, as long as he knew when that solitude would end. He loved his wife and feared death’ (178).
Death may be round the corner in Barnes’ account of his daily fears, as well as in much of his fiction, but for me one pleasure in reading him comes from his ability to express not just compassion but true affection for many of the old people he brings to life in his texts. This is much in evidence in his collection,
The Lemon Table
, where we learn that in China the lemon is a symbol of death, and the lemon table the place where men gather to talk of death. In one of the stories here, ‘Knowing French’, Barnes imagines receiving long letters from an unmarried upper-class woman in her eighties, writing to him about the books she reads, including his own, while wittily depicting her daily frustrations in the ‘old folkery’, all the while ruminating on old age and death. She is forbidden to mention these topics in her institution, hence her need for the sympathetic ear of ‘Julian
Barnes’, whom she knows will read and respond to her ‘senile garrulity’. Whatever dissatisfaction she faces, however, this old lady rejects suicide as ‘vulgar and self-important, like people who walk out of the theatre or the symphony concert’.
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Barnes clearly shares her views. He too will go on, however demanding the challenge and whatever his fear of death. And he has gone on, this man, who claims that there is little that is special about him apart from his love for his wife and his fear of death.
Barnes has continued to write, and indeed won the much-coveted Booker prize for his short novel
The Sense of an Ending
(2011), despite the merciless speed of the unexpected death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh, within a year of the publication of
Nothing to Be Frightened Of
. Since then, two other collections of short stories have appeared, the first,
Pulse
, containing one haunting story, ‘Marriage Lines’, narrated by a man whose wife has recently died. It explores his feelings revisiting the Scottish island where he and his wife holidayed together every year throughout their marriage, for over twenty years. The story opens with the lines, ‘They, their: he knew he must start getting used to the singular pronoun instead. This was going to be the grammar of his life from now on.’
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He weeps as he leaves the island, realizing his own presumption in imagining the visit could somehow help him manage his grief at his loss: ‘But he was not in charge of grief. Grief was in charge of him. And in the months and years ahead, he expected grief to teach him many things as well. This was the first of them’ (127).
Reading this story in 2011, it is impossible not to think of it as autobiography, especially given Barnes’ belief in the continual slide between fiction and non-fiction. Yet it is almost uncanny to learn that the story was written in 2007, two years before his wife became ill. I do not know if it is presumptuous to hope that
this constant rehearsal of fears of death and dying somehow makes it that little bit easier to tolerate when death pays a visit.
It does now seem to me that being able to confront mortality, at least at times and however fearfully, may prove one way of being less disdainful and dismissive of old people. Long before I had begun to think about either mortality or ageing myself, the book that first alerted me to Barnes’ unusual empathy with old age was his earlier novel,
Staring at the Sun
(1986). (This was the fourth novel written under his own name, although Barnes had by this time published three crime thrillers under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.) I read the book when I had just reached forty, the age Barnes was when it appeared, although unlike him I had as yet hardly ever, knowingly, let thoughts of my own ageing or mortality cross my mind. I was intrigued that Barnes should choose to depict the life and memories of a very old woman, finding his portrayal of the 100-year-old protagonist, Jean Serjeant, utterly compelling. Jean is depicted, and sees herself, as having lived a very ordinary life, apart from her single revolt – choosing to separate from the husband who had never made her feel good about herself when she unexpectedly found that she was pregnant for the very first time, at thirty-eight.
Jean’s long, healthy life gave ample scope for Barnes’ imaginings of very old age, which here are far from gloomy. Rereading the book today, I see that it encompasses so much of what have since become my own feelings about ageing, although only after much recent thought. The accord is almost total when I reach the opening pages of its final section, when Jean reflects on old age, suggesting that in her fifties ‘she was still feeling in her thirties’, ‘at sixty she had still felt like a young woman; at eighty, she felt like a middle-aged woman who had something a
bit wrong with her; at nearly a hundred she no longer bothered to think whether or not she felt younger than she was – there didn’t seem any point’.
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The novel is set in 2020, and Jean has been able to take the medical advances over her lifetime for granted. She now rarely goes out, no longer keeps up with public events, and has little interest in examining herself in the mirror. She is more fearful, forgetful and stumbling, but is content, she suggests, to live increasingly inside her head, pondering her memories, of which there are now so many, far too many, and noting the smirking paradox of old age: ‘how everything seemed to take longer than it used to, but how, despite this, time seemed to go faster’ (140). The reason it was all bearable, she reflects, is that
You never did age instantly; you never did have a sharp memory for comparison … You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people’s eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you. It wasn’t that you couldn’t walk as far as you used to, it was that other people didn’t expect you to; and if they didn’t, then it needed vain obstinacy to persist. (139)