by Susan Gubar
What will happen to us as a people, to our society, if the ancient arts of reading, copying, interpreting, and analyzing continue to be marginalized? That was the worry informing those late-night conversations with Molly, Kieran, and Suneil. Marilynne Robinson, who has spent years of her life “lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of—who knows it better than I?—people who do not exist,” believes that “fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.”
If she is right, fiction serves as a basis of community, for “community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.” The novelist Ian McEwan, who credits fiction with providing the possibility of “imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself,” argues that this process is “the basis of all sympathy”: “Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.”
Last year, about 43 percent of adult Americans read at least one work of literature. In other words, last year the majority of Americans did not read any imaginative works at all. What an impoverishment, it seems to me. What a loss for those people. Where have we educators in the humanities gone wrong, I fulminated before wincing at the sound of my hectoring voice in a megaphone.
Lila reads and copies sentences throughout Robinson’s novel; however, she finds herself unable to convey, even to the benevolent John Ames, the ghastly circumstances of her experiences. Is this because the discarded Lila did not count as a human being? The philosopher Stanley Cavell, who wrote extensively on love, once explained, “Something counts because it fits or matters.” Four- or five-year-old Lila neither fit nor mattered. Because she did not count, Lila cannot recount her past in the way that Don and I and so many other later-life lovers repeatedly do.
Throughout Robinson’s novel, of course, Lila silently remembers, but she blurts out only bits and pieces to John Ames, sometimes to warn or tease him. Yet the last sentence of Lila holds out hope that her introspective self-recounting may translate into more communicative recounting: “Someday she would tell him what she knew.” That certainty has everything to do with faith in future trust that she will fit and matter. But what exactly would she tell Ames? Will she tell him that all the lost children are found? Or that creation is not the beneficent beauty he takes it to be? Late-life love offers security, insight, and pleasure, but no easy resolution.
Counting, it strikes me, is what less traumatized late-life lovers do obsessively, even if for the most part Lila cannot, because she does not have a birth date and because for much of her life days followed days, seasons seasons, without any calendar at her disposal. In the shack at the edge of Gilead, however, she does begin to count off the days to figure out when Sunday will come around and she might see John Ames in his church.
From Elizabeth Barrett Browning, counting the ways, to García Márquez’s Florentino Arizo, counting the fifty-one years, nine months, and four days he waited to declare his love, late-life lovers count. We count the years we lived before we met, we count the wide gap in time between our first meeting and our later unions, we count backward to ceremonies of innocence, we divide our pasts, we multiply our memories, we calculate the remainders of our futures, we consider our percentages, we cultivate the roses on the graves of those beloved to our beloveds. After being released from stony silence, Shakespeare’s Hermione wants to recount her experience to her daughter. Recounting is what Robinson’s John Ames does in the journal composed for his son. Those of us who are old have many different ages within us, all of which must be numbered.
Aging involves counting and recounting, I think as I counted back to my time in Iowa City, some half a century ago. When with John Ames I encountered a recipe for a ghastly “molded salad of orange gelatin with stuffed green olives and shredded cabbage and anchovies,” I remembered that Gayatri Spivak and I shivered at the sight of just that sort of gelatinous mess on the smorgasbord of an Amish restaurant. Then she taught me how to make Indian cauliflower. Back in the sixties, when we attended wild and crazy parties where faculty (she was in comparative literature) and graduate students (I was in English) rocked together to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, I had no idea that Gayatri would become a prominent thinker. We exchanged costumes: she gave me a sari and I lent her a one-piece pants jumper. It was black and, I thought at the time, totally cool.
To show Don, I was poised to go upstairs and bring down an album with pictures of us then, but he was holding out the wishbone I had forgotten to offer Eli.
“Want to make a wish?”
We were standing at the kitchen counter.
“You won,” I said in surprise.
“But remember, you can’t lose.”
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
USING EVERY ONE of his remotes, Don had been unable to find the made-for-television movie I wanted him to see, and my assistants could not obtain a DVD in any library. A study of love devoid of popular movies would be doomed to irrelevance. It had been a dreary week and now, in a dreary examination room, I anticipated a dreary trip home, where I would be too faint from hunger to cook dinner.
The frigid cubicle, in which Don and I sat on two plastic chairs, contained a paper-covered gynecological table, a poster of the female belly sliced open to display the four stages of ovarian cancer, a stool, two labeled waste canisters, a blood pressure stand, a sink, and a computer on a ledge of shelves. Earlier that day, the annual mammogram had infuriated me since the document I signed proved that only well-insured patients would receive the better multidimensional imaging. Before and after it, I drank gallons of the sickeningly sweet Gastrografin solution that people under 130 pounds have to imbibe before abdominal CT scans. The trial required recurrent CTs—after thirty or more, my scanxiety disappeared—even though the images were always indeterminate, the radiation could not possibly be good for me, and the second intravenous contrast would undoubtedly harm my kidneys.
The CT itself had taken only seconds. Fully clothed, I lay down on a plank, holding on to a triangular bar above my head. The plank, like a conveyor belt, moved me so deep into the hole of the donut-shaped mechanism that the overhead metal bar (which I clutched with upraised hands) clanged against it. Only my head remained outside the cavernous machine.
“Take a breath and hold” a mechanical female voice said. Did they change it to a male voice for men? I wondered.
Conveyed back out, I heard, “Breathe.”
Through the accessed port, the technician injected the second contrast agent. “It will give you an awful taste in your mouth and make you feel like you are peeing your pants,” she cautioned, and then the process was repeated.
“Take a breath and hold.”
“Breathe.”
I waited on the plank for a nurse who could take the needle out of the port. Because the hospital had cut back on staff, the wait was longer than usual. If not this scan, then the next would show a tumor, I thought, or the trial drug would itself cause a secondary cancer. But upon the nurse’s arrival, I remembered that Alesha would want the usual blood tests. With the tubing taped onto my chest, I proceeded to Hematology, where I would see Dr. Matei for the very last time.
Blood samples were sent to the lab, the port de-accessed; however, Dr. Matei was running late. The news on my iPhone—killings at a Planned Parenthood clinic, the San Bernardino massacre—deepened my gloom. I had not heard a word from Fran on my birthday and I doubted that the letter I had drafted would convey anything meaningful. On the drive up, Jayne had pointed out Canada geese—still here, she said, because of global warming. My going-away present seemed inappropriate.
In a small leather pouch of my mother’s, I had tucked a strand of pearls from my grandmother. It was the only gift I could conceive of commensurate with what Daniela Matei had given me. Back at diagnosis in 2008, when I first met her, she had mentioned a promising drug in the pipeline, but worried it might no
t be available in time. After my third recurrence, astonishingly, she found a trial and got me in it. Could a string of pearls amply thank her? In fact, it might embarrass her. I slipped the necklace back into my purse when she entered. As always, she raised the room temperature with her ardent intensity and clarity.
“I will miss you,” she said. “But we’ll stay in touch and you’ll be in good hands. I’m giving you to the principal investigator of your trial, a breast cancer specialist; she knows more than anyone about the genetics of your disease. She lectures a good deal and won’t see you for six weeks—just think: you’ll have a six-week vacation from the hospital! When has that ever happened? You won’t have to be here again until 2016! And I’m leaving you in good shape—no evidence of disease!”
“It feels odd using the word ‘remission,’ what with the daily drugs.”
“Say ‘remission-on-maintenance’ then. You are the only one still alive, and you are on the higher dosage. I’m hearing the NIH will do a study on people like you . . . on the tail of graphs; they call them ‘exceptional responders.’ ”
She was laughing and nervous about moving her family to Chicago and excited about the named chair and, after a hug, out of the room in a flash. We would have to wait for the brown bag of pills Alesha had gone to fetch from the pharmacy, and then for checkout, and then for the valet parking, and then for the emailed blood test results, which would tell me if I could take the pills, and then, after an hour, I could eat.
Jayne offered to drive through the worst of the construction. On the way home, spurred by Dr. Matei’s upcoming move, Don told a story of his working at Montgomery Ward and hearing that there was an oxygen machine in the lobby of the Wrigley Building. For a quarter, you could get a whiff that was supposed to be good for hangovers, though maybe this was an urban legend.
The last month of the year stretched before me with the positive prospect of not having to go to the hospital or, not quite as bad, to the Modern Language Association convention. A furlough: it was a good time for movies. Since my favorite late-life love movie was available only on YouTube, I replayed Love among the Ruins on my laptop. To me, it represents the best of the romantic comedies through which Don had suffered during the past year.
Even though George Cukor’s film won a number of awards, it is generally taken to be a piece of fluff. Perhaps the fact that it was made for television led to its critical dismissal, despite the fine performances of Katharine Hepburn and Sir Laurence Olivier. Love among the Ruins launches a witty assault on the bad reputation of older women. Set in Edwardian London, the plot revolves around the wealthy dowager Jessica Medlicott (Hepburn), who engages the services of the eminent barrister Sir Arthur Glanville-Jones (Olivier) to defend her in a breach of promise suit brought by the youthful fiancé she dumped.
In her opulent gowns, ornate hats, and boas, the aging Jessica Medlicott poses and proclaims as if to remind us of the successful acting career she had pursued decades ago. Upon her first meeting with Sir Arthur in his chambers, he tries to allude to his youthful passion when he waited for her by the stage door in Toronto decades ago. “Ottawa?” she asks. “Toronto,” he repeats. Baffled that she seems oblivious to a love affair still vivid in his mind, he nevertheless agrees to represent her in the courtroom sparring that turns into a battle of the sexes . . . with him the apparent victor.
The pleasure of this very verbal movie derives from its repartee. During their first sustained conversation, Sir Arthur asks Jessica Medlicott to “consider the boy who loved you,” a reference either to the discarded fiancé or to himself in the past. She keeps on insisting that “the worm” Alfred Pratt should not get one farthing of the 50,000 pounds he demands. Trying to make her understand why a jury might side with the impoverished young man, Sir Arthur asks whether she loved her husband or had she bartered her youth for an old man’s gold. Her answer—that she grew to love her husband “in time”—begs the question. While Sir Arthur escorts her to a car, they discuss her role in The Merchant of Venice, but he believes she has forgotten Portia’s most important words: “I pray you know me when we meet again.” The wide gap of time, more than forty years, has not dulled his memories but apparently has obliterated hers.
Which infuriates him, as he lets off steam with her solicitor: “I could kill her,” he says. “I could tear her to pieces.” In particular, he fumes, she had promised to wait one year for him to finish his law degree, declaring that there were only two things she wanted in life: “to be your wife and to die before you.” Yet before he returned to her, she married a rich, older man. The irony of the present legal case is not lost on him: she had broken her promise to him, yet now he will defend her against a breach of promise suit.
The antagonism between the dowager and the barrister permeates the remaining courtroom scenes in which Sir Arthur punishes the woman who wrecked his life by presenting her as “a ruin of a woman.” After she refuses to take his advice to dress as plainly as possible—she shows up instead in a bright red dress ornamented with flounces of white finery—the defense lawyer gratifies her by emphasizing her appeal : “If this be December, were it not folly to wait for spring?” But Sir Arthur insists that the age disparity proves Pratt guilty of exploitation. A youthful man like Pratt could not possibly have desired such a pitiful has-been; he wanted only her money.
On the stand, Jessica Medlicott refuses to reveal her age—“I was born in the year of my birth”—but the exasperated Sir Arthur goes on to portray her as a deluded old lady: at that point, she erupts in rage and must be dragged out of court. As the jury moves in her favor, Love among the Ruins seems to subscribe to the customary view that the genuine attraction of a young man toward an older woman is implausible. She has won the law case, but lost her composure and her pride. Sir Arthur has had his revenge by making her look ridiculous. But the story does not end there: unexpectedly and happily, George Cukor subverts this traditional rap in the movie’s conclusion.
First, Jessica Medlicott delights in a verdict that does not surprise her. Her experience on stage enabled her to play the typecast role of the narcissistic has-been, clinging to her youthful charms. By performing the stereotype that Sir Arthur exploited, she empowered him to right the wrong she had done to him decades ago so they could reunite on a more level playing field. Finally, the hoodwinked Sir Arthur appears to apologize for his brutality in court.
As she congratulates him on pleading her case brilliantly and mentions other women in his life—his mother, his aunt—it becomes clear that Jessica Medlicott has remembered all along exactly what transpired in Toronto forty years ago. Admitting that a horror of poverty caused her to jilt him for a wealthy husband, she begins playacting their earlier romance. They are “relics,” both agree, but “we’ve survived.” Embarking on a “late start,” they exit the courthouse accompanied by a recitation of Robert Browning’s “Grow old along with me. . . .”
Shutting down my computer, I gathered all the DVDs that had been recalled by the library. It was not easy to get into that building, because of construction. Neither could I get into the office I shared with other retirees in the English department: the lot attached to Ballantine Hall would be full. But I could pop the movies into a drop-off box near the theater. Maybe because, like Don, I lived at home while attending an urban college, being on a residential campus always delights me. Going there and back, I marveled at the beauty of the wooden bridges, the brick walkways, the arboretum—even the new buildings looked established in their limestone façades—and at all the movies Don had resisted watching: The Bridges of Madison County, An Affair to Remember, Brief Encounter, The Exotic Marigold Hotel, Last Chance Harvey. He had seen them before, he claimed, though I didn’t remember most of them myself.
In romantic comedies about late-life love, boy does not meet girl so they can overcome obstacles and marry to live happily ever after. Sometimes, as in Love among the Ruins, aging men and women recall the boy and girl they had been as they overcome obstacles so they can begi
n a relationship again. Sometimes, as in On Golden Pond, long-married men and women confront the obstacles of unhappy children and physical deterioration as they hope to continue living and loving for a few more years. But a number of later-life romantic comedies end in death. In The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, a lonely widow who falls in love with a ghost can unite with him only in death. In Harold and Maude, the romance between a ghoulish teenage boy and an antic old woman closes with her funeral.
The tender movie Love Is Strange begins with a marriage. After thirty-nine years together, the painter Ben and the schoolteacher George stand at their wedding ceremony, while the officiator asks, “Are you both making this decision of your own free will?” The scene reminds me of the three questions that cracked up Don and me in the jail: were we biologically related, under the influence, or married to anybody else?
In Love Is Strange, the public legitimizing of Ben and George’s relationship causes the Catholic supervisors of George’s school to fire him. Without his salary, the couple can no longer afford their Manhattan apartment. As in the Depression classic Make Way for Tomorrow, in Love Is Strange Ben and George must split up, crashing in other people’s apartments. They continue to talk on the phone and in one sequence attend a concert together, where we see them holding hands, moved by the beautiful music. The last image of Ben—descending the staircase into a subway station—becomes haunting after the final scenes of the movie when the grief of his survivors is made manifest.
“Why limit yourself to romcom?” Jonathan asked via email. “There’s a terrific Icelandic movie that just came out . . . late-life love of sheep.”