by Susan Gubar
Because Hollywood movies tell me more about American culture than do prize-winning foreign films, I think. Released last year, Love Is Strange marks a positive change in the romantic comedy tradition: the inclusion of gay men. Would there be future Hollywood movies about gay women and about heterosexual couples confronting not only the stigmatization of older women but also their resiliency in dealing with it? Why not a movie about the zaftig immigrant Rosie Lieber, the central character of Grace Paley’s story “Goodbye and Good Luck”?
Entranced by the promiscuous “Valentino” of the Second Avenue Yiddish theater, Rosie has an off-and-on affair with him until his wife of nearly half a century divorces him for adultery. When he proposes resuming where they left off, Rosie says, “How could you ask me to go with you on trains to stay in strange hotels, among Americans, not your wife? Be ashamed.” Of course, an actress would have to capture the cadences of the aging Rosie triumphantly exclaiming to her niece, “I’ll have a husband, which, as everybody knows, a woman should have at least one before the end of the story.”
The prospect of these sorts of movies and the mild weather conspired in my gladness that the baby in New York was thriving: a miracle in which I rejoice very quietly, because I don’t want to put the kibosh (whatever that is) on it. Sandra was falling in love again: that, too, seems a wonder. Judith has returned from India, and Don found a brilliant cover for his and Mary’s new edition of Pride and Prejudice, a charming scene in a book of watercolors: a Regency parlor with one young lady playing the piano and several couples dancing.
I was buoyed, too, by not having to prepare for the MLA convention that used to come right after Christmas. Don had a theory about its timing: the daddies wanted to flee the horror of the holidays—kiddies home from school, trikes and bikes needing to be assembled—so the professors met on December 27. I always had to spend the first weeks of December preparing for various sessions or talks that Sandra and I presented: on one occasion, when Toni Morrison was speaking simultaneously in another hall, to an almost empty room; on another, to an overflow crowd laughing at a joking parody of the profession inspired by her husband, Elliot. On or about the time women entered the profession in force, the date of the MLA convention was changed, but I had already retired.
While I waited through Don’s haircut at the barbershop, recalling conventions of the past, I gazed at two faded signs on the wall: “Trespassers Will Be Violated” and “Unattended Children Will Be Given Espresso and a Free Kitten.” They emboldened me to ask ancient Herschel if he had time to shave my head. He did not blink when I took off my wig. Instead, he launched into a history of his own terminal diagnosis decades ago, which made him grateful for reaching his seventy-first year. Could he really be my age, I wondered, as Don took one look at me and said, “You got your money’s worth.” Then he added, “The Nazis shouldn’t have shaved collaborators. It made them more attractive.”
At the barbershop and later when Don and I purchased a pair of real shoes with laces, I considered two memorials I had organized. Before the panel in honor of Carolyn Heilbrun, Grace Paley marched over to Don, who was suffering from a terrible cold. Coming up to his breastbone, she tapped him on the chest and with each tap instructed him, “Eat soup. Eat soup.” While putting together the panel in honor of Barbara Johnson, I remembered striding down the aisle of a huge ballroom to accept a book award she had been too sick to receive herself. How could the most subtle literary interpreter I knew—at the English Institute, she looked like a schoolgirl—be dying so young?
Friendship must be honored, I decided back at home. Even a defunct friendship should be honored, if only with some honest grieving. No, I would not mail the flaccid letter I had written to Fran. In it I had explained that reading about late-life love made me realize that I could not possibly comprehend her intentions or perspective or even her own situation and therefore should not have passed judgment. But in fact, I acknowledged (not in the letter but to myself), she had not broken the friendship; I had.
During Don’s falls and surgeries, I must have been off my rocker with anxiety. I should have reached out to her and expressed my needs; she surely would have responded. Why did I wait, like some kind of pathetic damsel-in-distress, for an offer of help? And regardless of how I interpreted her last letter, she had made the effort to communicate. Did it read like a foreign alphabet because of my own stunted soul? I had prioritized my wants over hers. I could not appreciate then—and sometimes I cannot appreciate now—that her spiritual aspirations were as pressing as my physical problems. Is it the case—how can it be the case—that both of us feel abandoned by the other? The unsent letter indubitably conveys my failure and my sorrowful loss, for I had wanted to grow old along with her. Recurrently, the loss widens into an abyss that swallows me, and I am bereft.
“To me, fair friend, you never can be old,” Olivier had recited to Hepburn. “Love and Freindship” is the title of the juvenilia that Sandra and I used to represent Jane Austen in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. “Love and freindship” was how I signed cards to Fran. I will always mourn the absence of someone who gave me the invaluable gift of her unique presence throughout four decades. I cherish my younger and older friends, but she was my prized contemporary, up to and into our seventies, when (I can only surmise) she launched a quiet quest of her own, an inward journey obscure to me but nevertheless compelling and completely unrelated to romance. Neither her story nor our story has yet to register in movies, though surely they might in the future, or so I think as the memories abide.
Growing old in friendship plays a big part in the comedies that Spencer Tracy made with Katharine Hepburn. In the last one, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he tells the parents of their white daughter’s black fiancé that “in the final analysis it doesn’t matter what we think. The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt . . . that’s everything.” He turns toward Hepburn: “Old, yes, burnt out, but I can tell you memories are still there.” By acting in her last movies without Spencer Tracy and with her tremors on display, Hepburn went on to bravely address the physical deterioration of aging.
Less poignant than amusing, a sex scene between two characters in Something’s Gotta Give represents the worn bodies of older lovers. Diane Keaton hands the aging lecher Jack Nicholson a pair of scissors to cut off her turtleneck and then takes his blood pressure before proceeding to make love. The turtleneck captures the anxiety about old flesh that Nora Ephron considers in “I Feel Bad about My Neck,” as does the taking of blood pressure. In It’s Complicated, after Meryl Streep undresses, Alec Baldwin collapses . . . and then must point his finger at Flomax (which eases his urine stream). Nicholson looks haggard and Baldwin overweight, but Keaton and Streep look lovely throughout. Is it just because of my professional prejudice that for the most part literature seems to me superior to film on this subject?
Movie characters—especially the women—tend to appear too rich, too thin, too white, and too attractive. The single exception I can think of is the father in the television series Transparent, who explores a late-life gender change as well as late-life sex while looking her age. Does the need to reach a large audience of people ready and willing to go out to the movie theater—which Don and I are not able to do—lead to these faults? In fact, this past year we haven’t been to one of the classical concerts in Auer Hall that we used to attend regularly or to the jazz at Bear’s Place that we used to attend even more frequently.
Perhaps the tyranny of visual attractiveness renders the visual less valuable in describing the pleasures of late-life love. What late-life lovers do may feel nice and yet not look nice. But it doesn’t matter what others think. The only thing that matters is what we feel, I decided as I tried to plan a red, white, and blue supper, but couldn’t think of anything blue in season that I could digest. I would settle for a meal of balls—matzoh ball soup, falafel with all the fixings, and maybe I could buy some chocolat
e truffles or donut holes.
When Zak phoned in the midst of Susannah and Jack’s arrival, I had no wish to look at another condo in Windermere Village that had just come onto the market. It was a rainy, gray day and the place sounded too small: only two bedrooms. But, he insisted, it has a den that could become a second study.
Susannah waltzed through the rooms, enthusing about its closeness to shops, its hardwood floors, and its spacious living room.
“The kitchen is terrible. Cramped,” I said.
“You can tear down the dining room wall,” she said. “Open it up.”
“The bathroom is a pit.”
“Yes, you’ll have to redo it. That shower is antique fiberglass,” she said.
“It’s got park-like views and in better weather it will get good light,” Julie said.
“It’s going to be hell to renovate,” Don and I agreed. “And to downsize from 4,000 to less than 2,000 square feet.”
But standing with him in the bedroom, I asked if he could imagine living alone in the apartment and he said yes, and of course there were already other people interested in the place; and so Julie and Susannah and Zak persuaded us to embark on enormous changes at the last minute by offering the asking price.
When I pulled into the long driveway of the Inverness, Don and I saw three deer, unflustered by our approaching car, grazing on the peaceful slope of the meadow bordering the circle of beauty. Someone else has lived here before and someone else would live here after, but the landscape will endure. As I thought of the opening of the Robert Browning poem that had captivated George Cukor—“Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles / Miles and miles / On the solitary pastures”—Don opened his window and called out to the deer, “You’ve won, guys. We’re leaving.”
Chrisnukkah
ON THE MANTLE over the fake fire in the Trace lobby, glittery gold letters spelled out R E J O I C E, but a woman’s voice down one hall kept on droning, “No no no . . . no . . .” A skinny Santa Claus hurried through the door with a guitar and disappeared into an adjacent dining hall, as it dawned on me that I had been wrong about Philip Larkin and also about my mother. I was leafing through a sheaf of papers that I had printed out: the most ambitious poems on late-life love by Shakespeare at the start of the tradition and, surprisingly, by Larkin toward the end. What startled yet perplexed me is how paradoxical late-life love poems are. Why should that be, and what does it tell us about late-life love? The answer to these questions may help me sum up in a rousing peroration, since sadly (for me) there is only one more chapter to go.
Shakespeare’s justly famous Sonnet 138 sets the mark when its over-the-hill speaker describes how his lady flatters him with deceits about his youthfulness that he pretends to believe:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming truth,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
Shakespeare’s surrogate credits the truth of what he knows to be false: his lover’s declaration that he is young. Although she realizes that his best days are past, she chooses to suppress the truth and he willingly conspires with her.
The aging speaker wonders about their collusion in deceit: why, he asks, does she refrain from acknowledging his years and why does he not admit that he is old? “Truth” rhymes with “youth,” but with aging obfuscation takes over in the service of maintaining “love’s best habit.” Later-life lovers need to habituate themselves to “seeming truth,” for they do not want to remind themselves that their lost prime threatens their passion. In the final couplet, the poet explains that this repression enables late-life-lovers to lie (in bed) together as they refuse to acknowledge the lies (or shams) that bolster them. Collaboratively arrived at frauds secure late-life lovers’ troths.
This paradox is strengthened by the ultimate irony of the poem: namely, that the aging poet speaks honestly about his own and his beloved’s dishonesty. Shakespeare’s worldly speaker will take what he can get; and at his time of life, the getting is good only by keeping up pretenses. Sonnet 138 subverts another line by Shakespeare that reiterates the common, depressing notion that “Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold.” In Sonnet 138, the aging speaker is neither weak nor cold. Life-affirming, his witty and wily decision to continue lying to his mistress so he can continue lying with her endows him and the verse with exuberance.
It is hardly surprising to find paradox at work in John Donne’s “The Autumnal,” I thought, as the voice moaning “no no . . . no” persisted beneath the strums of the guitar. In an email, my friend Ken’s partner, an editor of Donne, informed me that critics split in viewing the poem as a tribute to Lady Magdalen Herbert (the poet George Herbert’s mother) or an exercise in praise of an older woman as a love object. “Why take an either/or approach?” she reasonably asked. The opening of “The Autumnal” certainly emphasizes the poet’s love for an aging woman: “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace / As I have seen in one autumnal face.”
But there is a sinister glitch when Donne begins to describe the lines on this face: “Call not these wrinkles, graves,” he declares. The injunction immediately does make the wrinkles seem like graves. And these grave-like wrinkles next become Cupid’s trenches and then his tomb. The creased face makes me ponder the link between three words: cracks, crocks, and croaks. Donne insists, “Age must be loveliest at the latest day”; paradoxically, however, “the latest day” invokes carnal “decay.” Shockingly, Donne then associates the beauties of autumn with the horrors of a harsh winter that, we know, fall must usher in. He keeps on instructing himself not to name the nightmares of the last season, but he goes ahead and lists the slack skin of the soul’s sack, the shaded eyes, and the toothless holes of death’s-heads.
“Do you think ‘The Autumnal’ should be read as a dramatic monologue?” I had asked Don, after he read the poem. “Like the speaker is a lunatic?”
“Didn’t he sleep in a coffin?”
At the end of “The Autumnal,” Donne’s appalled speaker determines to descend “down the hill” with his beloved lady; however, they are progressing toward a physical corrosion that clearly terrifies him. How might the lady have received this expression of his affectionate reverence, I wondered, as the strains of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” started to drown out the “no . . . no.”
It is impossible to read poetry when the words of carols intercede. For me, it is also impossible to hear a chorus of old voices—tremulous, thin, mostly soprano—without feeling the same poignancy that children’s concerts instill. I attended all the choir performances in which my mother participated. She loved the carols, but insisted that one Chanukah song be included in every Christmas concert program.
Before her decline into senility, my mother had made a heroic adjustment—from her rhythms in Manhattan to the Indiana retirement community that, on her count, sprouted some twelve Christmas trees in its public rooms and not one menorah. She had joined the German table, the writers’ circle, the reading club, and the trips to fast-food joints that seemed exotic to her. She appreciated visits from the rabbi, she would never become a “Jew for Jesus,” but she attended Sunday services of various denominations because, she informed us, “Jesus was Jewish.” Even when we realized she was dying and I gave her little kisses all over her face, she said yes and not no. She giggled at my “smooching” and the
n curled up in her bed, intent on her sleep and on arriving straight at her own death in the middle of the night. I commemorate my mother on her birthday, whereas I remember my father on his death day.
The ping! of the iPhone interrupted “Frosty the Snowman.” That it was a lavish blurb for my cancer book—an advance copy was due to appear in the mailbox—elated but also unnerved me. Once between covers, my books always feel dead and defenseless, no longer growing networks of living thoughts. The Times essays—here today, gone tomorrow—would continue to keep me honest, as would this project, I reassured myself. And then there were innumerable emails from Zak and the engineer, who had to be consulted on the Windermere condo, and from the homeowners’ association about whether or not the dining room wall was weight bearing.
Back at home, interminably emailing, I marveled at the tree that Judith and Aidan had hauled in and trimmed. Don and I would be alone with it and our buyer’s remorse until Mary arrived for a visit at the start of the new year.
“We’ll never get the money back for renovations on that kitchen,” either he or I would say.
“But we need to make it open or else we’ll feel caged,” I or he would say.
“Maybe we should take a lower price for the Inverness, let the new owners fix it up,” he or I said.
“Zak says it will not sell as is and anyway we owe it to the place,” I or he said.
“We won’t be able to leave until the spring,” we agreed.
“It will be hard leaving,” I said.
“I’m glad neither one of us is leaving alone.”
“I worry about all the memories we’ll leave behind.”
“We’ll take those with us.”
I shifted my position on the blue couch so I could see the musical instruments, the ducks, and the Alice ornaments. I put off my trepidation about boastful Christmas letters—they would arrive as email attachments and were bound to make my family feel like losers—by turning to the longest late-life love poem I had found, William Carlos Williams’s “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” My sympathy for its touching origins jarred with my reservations about the work itself. Williams published it when he was seventy-two, after several strokes had depressed him, as did the blacklisting that kept him from an appointment at the Library of Congress. Partly paralyzed, he wrote it to obtain the forgiveness of his wife of forty years.