Out of Time (31 page)

If I am asked to list the things I see as the essential elements of a good life, all the usual comforting clichés immediately surface. Most of them involve the diverse gratifications of close amicable ties to others. At a minimum, a reasonable quality of life must include some form of recognition, respect and concern from those around us; better still, it encompasses moments of shared admiration, inspiration, laughter, joy; ideally, the satisfaction of what we can identify as mutual love, whatever form it takes. These ingredients inevitably sound trite, are never guaranteed, and are certainly always complex, perhaps even contradictory, especially when encompassing tales of love and desire. Many of us, myself included, know we will often have to make do with only remnants or memories of many of those things we have most cherished in the past.

I notice nowadays I have less to say about individual goals, and anyway, as a product of the 1960s, I always shared what was perhaps the conceit of imagining that my main ambitions involved collective struggles for a better life, a better world for all. Nonetheless, of course, personal ambitions remain, tied in with the enduring desire for the validation and approval of others. On the one hand, I know one sorrow that comes with ageing, often mentioned by others such as Beauvoir, is that there
will be little if any time to achieve goals one might have hoped to fulfil, especially new ones. Although for me, and I suspect for many, such personal ambition really does seem to become a little less pressing. On the other hand, life is also more than the sum of our relationships to others, whatever their confirmations, joys and disappointments. I too know something about the many things that can, and sometimes must, be enjoyed in solitude, whether they involve intellectual work, sensual pleasure or erotic reverie.

At the most basic level, our sense of wellbeing begins simply with what the anthropologist Daniel Miller sums up as ‘the comfort of things’.
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Material objects play a crucial part in sustaining identities, ‘things’ have meaning, which is what is so terrifying about exile or destitution, especially in old age, or perhaps just removal into a care home, at least in most of the institutions providing such services. Looking up from my writing, for instance, I see first the colourful felt flowers given to me recently by my friend and colleague, Matt. Winter flowers, I call them, and they make me smile, all the more pleased with their effect as I have placed these cheap and cheerful knitted objects in the middle of a live plant, creating the most incongruously textured floral and live waxy leaf display. When people visit, I like to point out these fake flowers, hoping they will be admired. Our special relationship to things – material objects, sounds, texts, food and much more – can include all the challenges and pleasures available to the senses, whether actively producing or passively absorbed in music, dance, images, writing or whatever most engages us across the whole array of creative pastimes. But the delight we find in them, when we do, surely stems from all the joyful associations they conjure up for us from over a lifetime.

John Berger, that lyrical observer and versatile draftsman, now in his eighties, is still eager to express through text, drawing and photographs the interconnections between objects, places and people. His many books in recent decades, mostly written from his rural retreat in the far South of France, all elucidate how objects, and our attentiveness to the most mundane of experiences, as well as the most awe-inspiring, remain our keys to unlocking the past and its pleasures. They may also serve as triggers for reflection on the present, with its widespread political pessimism, continuing injustices and distance from the world many of us, and certainly I, once hoped for. In the lyrical collection of short stories gathered together in
Here is Where We Meet
, for instance, which is perhaps the nearest Berger has come to the autobiography he says he will never write, his protagonist, a man named John, walks alone through all the cities and villages he has most loved – from urban Lisbon to rural Poland. These stories allow Berger not only to depict places he clearly knows so well in the most vibrant and memorable detail, but also to comment upon their history, transformations and diverse traditions, while conjuring up dead people whom he has loved as they resonate with his latest experiences in each city.

In the exquisite opening story, set in Lisbon, it is a mother who appears. They converse lovingly as Berger depicts her returning, playfully, poignantly to haunt him while he recalls their conversations and quarrels, his own boyhood bravado, guilt and pride, alongside memories of her cooking, his favourite pastries, and her unassuming ways. It is the trams that bring her back, this mother of his who has been dead for fifteen years, and he has her explain: ‘The dead don’t stay where they are buried.’
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Berger recalls the tram – number 194 – that he and his
mother took every day when he was growing up in Croydon, South London. On and off those trams, now vanished from most British cities, he remembers how he would routinely contradict his mother’s certainties, which he feared veiled vulnerabilities, hoping he could thereby goad her into displaying an underlying invincibility. Instead, he now realizes, his perpetual disagreement would leave her ‘more frail than she usually was and the two of them would be drawn, helpless, into a maelstrom of perdition and lamentation, silently crying out, he now feels, for an angel to come and save us. On no occasion did an angel come’ (6).

I think that angel does finally appear in Lisbon, as John wanders in reverie around the city. It enables him to imagine that he might make some deferred reparation for those wounds he knows he inflicted long ago. ‘All my books were about you’, he tells his mother. ‘Nonsense! Maybe you wrote them so I should be there, keeping you company. And I was’, he imagines her replying, but ‘I had to wait until now, until you are an old man in Lisboa, for you to be writing this very short story about me’ (41). Regrets? Perhaps he has a few, and they can be put to work in his creative labour.

Sometimes it is returning home that triggers the reveries connecting time and place, people and things. Here is Berger again, back in London, in a recent commentary reflecting upon urban life today, following the riots that began in Tottenham in the summer of 2011. He muses that for him, any moment, anywhere, has its joyful resonances. He doubts this could be true for the young rioters, urged everywhere to display their status through the possession of the latest high-tech and other commodities, while living without them, bored and near penniless, in the commercial noise of urban spaces. The free delights of an
ageing man in rural France, he points out, could not be further from their horizon:

The taste of chocolate. The width of her hips. The splashing of water. The length of the daughter’s drenched hair. The way he laughed early this morning. The gulls above the boat. The crow’s feet by the corners of her eyes. The tattoo he made such a row about. The dog with its tongue hanging out in the heat. The promises in such things operate as passwords: passwords towards a previous expectancy about life. And the holiday-makers on the lakeside collect these passwords, finger them, whisper them, and are wordlessly reminded of that expectancy, which they live again surreptitiously.
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Interestingly, Berger himself, like Julian Barnes, has always seemed to show considerable respect, never even a trace of horror, when pondering the process of ageing. Back in the mid 1960s, in his controversial book on Picasso published almost five decades ago when he was not yet forty, he wrote: ‘There is not, I think, a single example of a great painter – or sculptor – whose work has not gained in profundity and originality as he grew older.’
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As if to prove the accuracy of Berger’s comment, throughout 2012 London was filled with the work of ageing artists. The year opened with tens of thousands of people going to view the work of the British artist David Hockney at the Royal Academy exhibition entitled ‘A Bigger Splash’. The public (if not always the critics) showed near-ecstatic enthusiasm for Hockney’s gigantic landscapes. The artist, at seventy-four, had made his way back home to evoke so vividly the Yorkshire he had left behind over forty years earlier.

The following month, at Tate Modern, a six-decade
retrospective of the eighty-three-year-old Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, was being summed up by many reviewers as magical and full of surprises, her recent work suggesting that she is today perhaps more in touch with current events than ever before.
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Around the same time, London’s Freud Museum was displaying some of the work of Louise Bourgeois. The most beautiful and memorable piece, ‘The Dangerous Obsession’, consisted of a blue figure cradling a sphere of blood red glass, made in 2003 when the artist was ninety-two. This was interpreted as the artist’s awareness of the damage inflicted by clinging to past torments, while other late work seemed to reveal a shift away from a fixation on her father’s bullying and philandering to focus more on memories of her mother’s nurturing care.
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By the summer of 2012, the National Portrait Gallery was exhibiting seven decades of work by the late Lucian Freud, establishing that the extraordinary portraits he continued to produce, right up to his death at eighty-nine, retained the stylistic development and technical virtuosity of his youth.

Looking at artists across the generations, one can find a continuous array of figures from Rembrandt at the opening of the seventeenth century, through Klee, Matisse and Picasso, up to Barbara Hepworth, Frank Auerbach or Paula Rego, closer to home, all working in new ways in their old age. Much the same could be said of various composers, from Bach who was still creating his complex fugues and canons shortly before his death at sixty-five, to Haydn who composed his two great oratorios
The Creation
and
The Seasons
approaching seventy, or Schoenberg, busy composing his difficult and haunting concertos in his seventies. I have looked earlier at the writing of various ageing authors. Any other list of writers might seem unending, but would certainly include William Trevor and Alice Munro, two
authors in their eighties I have not discussed, though they are currently writing some of the most lyrical short stories available about the dreams, dilemmas and sorrows of old age.
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In his eighties, and looking backwards, the masterly Chinua Achebe, who died in 2013, reflected on the traumas and legacy of the Biafran War over four decades ago. Toni Morrison’s extraordinary writing, too, remains as vibrant as ever, her last book,
Home
, vividly evoking the strictly segregated world of the fifties America of her youth.
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Furthermore, what may be produced or consumed in old age clearly extends well beyond the potential pleasures of high culture, or any delight in surveying the sensual abundance of nature or of erotic encounter. Mass culture today offers infinite possibilities, especially in the virtual arena. In my view, we are lucky to be ageing at a time when there are ever-expanding online communities. In another of his texts on material culture,
Tales from Facebook
, Daniel Miller researches the impact of the global internet and social networking sites on inhabitants in Trinidad. In one of the twelve vignettes in this book, Miller explores the world of a once very active but now housebound man in his sixties. This man maintained his ties with the world and regained much of his former confidence through his communications on Facebook, telling Miller that through it he has been ‘gifted his life back’.
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Miller suggests that, on the one hand, sometimes it is material possessions that ‘can be made to speak more easily and eloquently’ of a person’s sense of who and what they are, and their relationship to the world, than can interpersonal exchanges. Yet on the other hand, he wants us to think more carefully about the possibilities of virtual communities and exchanges. Nevertheless, despite his keen interest in monitoring
material culture and its uses, Miller also reports that in the thirty households he entered on a random street in South London his informants almost all tended ‘to equate living alone with failure’, whether single themselves or coupled up.
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This equation of living alone to failure is a combination that is hard to dislodge, despite all we know about the fractures of intimacy inside relationships, which is a theme I explore more fully below.

How Queer Is That?

Most of my adult life I have lived outside the traditional family unit, trying to sustain alternative forms of intimacy. Some of my earliest writing explored and celebrated this new trend, beginning with the first book I edited thirty years ago,
What Is to Be Done about the Family?
, which concluded confidently: ‘To call for the return of the traditional family is like calling for the return of the British Empire. Its time has passed.’
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Some years later I wrote another essay about the family, inspired by Angela Carter’s last novel,
Wise Children
, whose bizarre plot illustrated her desire that we could put families together from ‘whatever comes to hand’.
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Here are Carter’s words: ‘Grandma invented this family. She put it together out of whatever came to hand – a stray pair of orphaned babes, a ragamuffin in a flat cap. She created it by sheer force of personality. It is a characteristic of human beings, one I’ve often noticed, that if they don’t have a family of their own, they will invent one.’
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Would that it were so!

I was both right and wrong in my predictions about the future of the family, just as Carter’s words were both exhilarating and exaggerated. On the one hand, surveys routinely
reported in our daily papers tell us that only a small minority in Britain, just 16 per cent indeed, see themselves as part of a traditional family unit, that is, one involving married parents and two or more children; on the other, as I write, our current government’s defence of this consecrated unit seems as robust as ever, with David Cameron, the Tory leader, still promising to legislate for tax breaks for married couples.
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Many have indeed tried to invent alternative modes of lasting intimacy, but how easy has it been to sustain them?