Late-Life Love

by Susan Gubar

  9The verse by Martial is translated by Palmer Bovie and quoted by Bertman, “The Ashes and the Flame,” pp. 165–66.

  9Michel de Montaigne, “On Certain Verses of Virgil,” in The Essays of Montaigne, translated by Jacob Zeitlin (Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), book 2, pp. 48–106; quotations, p. 104.

  10Isaac Bashevis Singer, introduction to Old Love (1979; reprint, Penguin, 1982), p. 7. One obvious exception to Singer’s generalization is Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders.

  11Jenny Diski, Happily Ever After (Penguin, 1991), pp. 131, 132.

  11“A pas de deux with desire”: Diski, Happily Ever After, pp. 133, 133–34, 139, 140.

  12“The mad woman in the attic”: Diski, Happily Ever After, pp. 54, 23, 20.

  13Many books about aging agree with the foundational argument made by Simone de Beauvoir in La Vieillesse (translated in Britain as Old Age but in America as The Coming of Age). According to Beauvoir, to be old is to be “the other,” estranged from ourselves and certainly from anyone who views us as old. On Beauvoir’s later-life relationships with Claude Lanzmann and Sylvie Le Bon (later Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir), see Bethany Ladimer, Colette, Beauvoir, and Duras: Age and Women Writers (University Press of Florida, 1999), pp. 106–28, 139–40. On the later life of Georgia O’Keeffe, see Charlotte Cowles, “Exclusive: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Younger Man,” Harper’s Bazaar, 24 Feb. 2016, www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a14033/georgia-okeeffe-0316/. On Frederick Douglass, see John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (Twelve, 2008), pp. 313–14.

  13When Harry Met Sally, directed by Rob Reiner (Castle Rock, 1989). The number of people over fifty who cohabit with an unmarried partner increased 75 percent from 2007 to 2016: Paula Span quotes the Pew Research Center’s findings in “More Older Couples Are ‘Shacking Up,’ ” New York Times, 8 May 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/health/older-americans-unmarried-couples.html.

  13Eve Pell, Love, Again: The Wisdom of Unexpected Romance (Ballantine, 2014), pp. 6, 161. See also the interviews in Connie Goldman, Late-Life Love: Romances and New Relationships in Later Life (Fairview Press, 2006).

  14On Our Time, see Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray (W. W. Norton, 2016), p. 315. Roger Angell, “This Old Man,” in This Old Man: All in Pieces (Doubleday, 2015), pp. 280–81, 276, 278.

  15Average life expectancy: See Maggie Scarf, September Songs: The Good News about Marriage in the Later Years (Riverhead Books, 2008), p. 25.

  15Joyce Carol Oates, “Deep Reader: Rebecca Mead’s ‘My Life in Middlemarch,’ ” New York Times, 23 Jan. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/books/review/rebecca-meads-my-life-in-middlemarch.html.

  15Harold Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), p. 49.

  A SECOND CHANCE

  18Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (2010; reprint, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011).

  21Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (1978; reprint, Penguin, 1990), p. 192.

  21“Level above mere pleasant acquaintance”: Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, p. 111.

  22“A welcoming goddess”: Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, p. 155.

  23“A boy could be forgiven”: Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, p. 232.

  27Jane Juska, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance (Villard Books, 2003), p. 12. Round-heeled is old-fashioned slang, meaning “promiscuous.”

  27Autumn Tale, directed by Eric Rohmer (La Sept Cinéma, 1998).

  27On the particular difficulties facing older, widowed, or divorced women, see the chapter “Intimacy beyond the Dreams of Youth,” in Betty Friedan, The Fountain of Age (Simon & Schuster, 1993), especially pp. 256–71.

  29Dyan Elliott’s (unpublished) song is titled “Rampage.”

  SIGNS OF DECLINE

  31Louis MacNeice, “Bagpipe Music,” in Collected Poems, edited by E. R.

  Dodds (Faber and Faber, 1979), pp. 96–97. The actual quotation is “But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.”

  32On Freud and aging, see Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 29. She also revises Jacques Lacan’s idea of the infant’s mirror stage to analyze “the mirror stage of old age,” in which the aging person dis-identifies with an image in the mirror that figures disintegration and dependency (see p. 67).

  33“For the sake of these guns”: Helen Simonson, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (2010; reprint, Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011), p. 341.

  34In a chapter titled “Age Anxiety in the Male Midlife Marriage Plot,” in Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain (State University of New York Press, 2009), Kay Heath discusses the two Trollope novels in detail as well as other older and self-doubting fictional male suitors who suffer from insecurity about being inappropriate suitors (see pp. 25–72).

  35The Lunchbox, directed by Ritesh Batra (Sikhya Entertainment, 2013).

  35Fay Weldon, Rhode Island Blues (Grove/Atlantic, 2000), p. 131.

  36“An indignity and an absurdity”: Weldon, Rhode Island Blues, pp. 245, 230, 263.

  39Jane Smiley, At Paradise Gate (1981; reprint, Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1998), p. 216.

  39Robert Kraus, Leo the Late Bloomer (HarperCollins, 1971).

  40“What to make”: Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird,” in The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), p. 120.

  FALLING IN LOVE

  44Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850; reprint, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1936). The sequence can also be read in its entirety on the Web. See the excellent scholarly interpreters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, especially Helen Cooper, Sandra M. Gilbert, Erik Gray, Angela Leighton, Tricia Lootens, Dorothy Mermin, Mary Sanders Pollock, Glennis Stephenson, and Rhian Williams.

  54Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury USA, 2014).

  55Anne Bradstreet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 3rd ed. (W. W. Norton, 2007), 1:153; see also “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment,” p. 153. Katherine Philips, “To Mrs. M.A. at Parting,” in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, 1:171 (ll. 49–50).

  57The lines by Robert Browning begin his 1864 poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra”: see Rabbi Ben Ezra, edited by William Adams Slade (T. Y. Crowell, 1902), pp. 27–37. The poem can be read in its entirety on the Web.

  THE TRACE

  60Philip Larkin, “The Old Fools,” in The Complete Poems, edited by Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), pp. 81–82. See also W. H. Auden, “Old People’s Home,” in The Oxford Book of Aging, edited by Thomas R. Cole and Mary G. Winkler (Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 334–45.

  60“Sans teeth”: Jacques’s speech on the last stage of the seven ages of man in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, edited by Juliet Dusinberre (Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 2.7.170.

  61Juvenal is translated by Rolfe Humphries and quoted in Stephen Bertman, “The Ashes and the Flame: Passion and Aging in Classical Poetry,” in Old Age in Greek and Latin Literature, edited by Thomas M. Falkner and Judith de Luce (State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 163.

  61Jane Austen did include a happily married midlife couple, the Crofts, in her last novel, Persuasion (1817), which charts an autumnal story of a second-chance romance for its central character. For Philip Larkin, see “Annus Mirabilis,” in The Complete Poems, p. 90.

  62The King and I, directed by Walter Lang (Twentieth Century Fox, 1956); the King was played by Yul Brynner.

  66Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Old Love,” in Passions, and Other Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), pp. 24–42; quotations, pp. 31, 33.

  67“Wait till we’ve stood”: Singe
r, “Old Love,” p. 37.

  67“Dear Harry, forgive me”: Singer, “Old Love,” p. 42.

  67Ludwig van Beethoven, Fidelio, performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Sir Georg Solti, London Records, 1979.

  69A musicologist: Paul Robinson, Ludwig van Beethoven: “Fidelio” (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 69, 97.

  71C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (1961; reprint, HarperSanFrancisco, 1989), p. 25.

  71“Even if we both died”: Lewis, A Grief Observed, p. 26.

  71“Probably have recurrent pains”: Lewis, A Grief Observed, pp. 65–66.

  PROPS

  74“Shake me up, Judy”: Mr. Smallweed’s refrain in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53).

  75Dickens’s aged flirt Cleopatra: Charles Dickens, Dombey and Sons (1848), edited by Andrew Sanders (Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 431.

  77“There is so little one can do”: Samuel Beckett, Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts (1961; reprint, Grove Press, 1989), pp. 24, 26.

  78“Not head first, stupid”: Beckett, Happy Days, pp. 27, 25.

  78“We had no toolshed”: Beckett, Happy Days, pp. 19, 37.

  81“What’s the idea?”: Beckett, Happy Days, p. 44.

  82“To know that in theory”: Beckett, Happy Days, p. 29.

  82“Always full of cries”: Beckett, Happy Days, pp. 61, 64.

  83“Eggs” and “Formication”: Beckett, Happy Days, pp. 32, 66, 68, 55.

  83“Don’t look at me like that!”: Beckett, Happy Days, p. 68.

  83“Every touch of fingers”: Beckett, Happy Days, pp. 69, 15.

  85Zadie Smith, On Beauty (Penguin, 2005), p. 56. “Say goodnight, Gracie”: The sign-off (with the response “Goodnight”) of the popular comedy team George Burns and Gracie Allen, from their 1950s television show. The later duo Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, famous for Laugh-in, did add to the joke by signing off “Say goodnight, Dick.” “Goodnight Dick.”

  86Old lovers know: The literary critic who argues most stringently against the commonly held idea that “love is invulnerable to the instabilities of narrative or history, and is a beautifully shaped web of lyrical mutuality,” is Lauren Berlant in Desire/Love (Punctum Books, 2012); quotation, p. 92.

  86“Sucked up” into “the blue”: Beckett, Happy Days, p. 36.

  86“To have been always”: Beckett, Happy Days, p. 56.

  86Kathleen Woodward discusses Malone’s exercise book in Beckett’s 1951 novel Malone Dies as a transitional object, associating it with “his last not-me possession,” in Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 142.

  ALTERATIONS

  92Rebecca Mead, My Life in “Middlemarch” (Crown Publishers, 2014), p. 16.

  92Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys was made into a 2006 movie directed by Nicholas Hytner (Fox Searchlight Pictures); the quoted observation is spoken in act 2 by a literature teacher.

  92Ovid, Metamorphosis: A New Translation, Contexts, Criticism, translated and edited by Charles Martin (W. W. Norton, 2010); for the story of Baucis and Philemon, in book 8, see pp. 222–26. Line numbers are given in parentheses in the text.

  93Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (1978; reprint, Penguin, 1990), p. 116.

  94The elderly couple appeared in “The Joys of Love: never forgot. A SONG,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1735, p. 153, a poem often attributed to Henry Woodfall; Darby and Joan clubs for seniors proliferated in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century.

  96Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words, translated by Ann Goldstein (Knopf, 2016), p. 163. Lahiri also discusses Ovid’s tales in “Teach Yourself Italian,” New Yorker, 7 Dec. 2015, pp. 30–36.

  97Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Advanced Degree: School Yourself in Resilience to Beat Depression,” Mamm Magazine, Sept. 2000, p. 24.

  99A. R. Ammons, “In View of the Fact,” in Bosh and Flapdoodle (W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 29–30.

  101“Who would have thought”: George Herbert, “The Flower,” in The Complete English Poems, edited by John Tobin (Penguin Classics, 1991), p. 156.

  102On long partnerships: Richard Hoggart, First and Last Things (1999; reprint, Transaction Publications, 2002), p. 172.

  102Molly Haskell, Love and Other Infectious Diseases: A Memoir (Morrow, 1990), p. 280.

  LOVESICKNESS

  106“Gerontophobia”: Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, translated by Edith Grossman (1988; reprint, Vintage Books, 2003), pp. 37, 26.

  107“Inflamed their feelings”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 28, 29.

  107of Dr. Urbino’s “stallion’s stream”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 30, 40, 238.

  108“The disadvantage of being ten years ahead”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, p. 224.

  109“With the control and the courage”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, p. 47.

  110“For more than half a century”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 50, 51.

  110“Fifty-one years”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, p. 53.

  111“Frenetic correspondence”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 71, 83, 102, 129.

  111“He had some twenty-five notebooks”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 152, 197. On the game of love, see John Alan Lee, Colours of Love: An Exploration of the Ways of Loving (New Press, 1973), especially his discussion of “Ludus,” the form of love that becomes a contest challenging the lover’s skills (pp. 57–76).

  112“One hundred and seventy-two infallible cures”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 262, 263, 277, 293.

  112“Intestines suddenly filled”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 304, 314, 327.

  113“Two icy fingers”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 329, 335, 338, 339.

  113“Final step”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, p. 340.

  113“They made the tranquil, wholesome love”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, p. 345.

  114“A little cosmos”: Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (1978; reprint, Penguin, 1990), p. 139.

  114John Betjeman, “Late-Life Lust,” in Collected Poems (1958; reprint, John Murray, 2006), pp. 171–72.

  115“Calcinated flatlands”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, p. 336.

  115“Clouded by his passion”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 337, 62, 152.

  116Stendhal, On Love (1822), translated by H.B.V. under the direction of C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (Grosset & Dunlap, 1947), p. 16; he also writes, “The moment he falls in love . . . even the wisest man no longer sees anything as it really is” (p. 34). Robert Graves, “Symptoms of Love” in The Penguin Book of Love Poetry, edited by Jon Stallworthy (Penguin, 1973), p. 45. Robert Lowell calls love “The whirlwind, this delirium of Eros” in “Wind,” in Notebook (Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 160. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, pp. 120, 128. Anne Carson discusses the classical poets who associate desire with lack in Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 148.

  116García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, p. 293.

  117On setting a “trap” for the reader, see Raymond Leslie Williams, “The Visual Arts, the Poeticization of Space and Writing: An Interview with Gabriel García Márquez,” PMLA 104 (1989): 136.

  119See not only Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, translated by Stanley Applebaum (Dover, 1995), but also “The Black Swan,” in Mario and the Magician and Other Stories, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter (Vintage, 2000), pp. 299–366. In the second text, the flowering of late-life love is associated with gynecological cancer.

  WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

  122Olimpia Zuleta, who “preferred to remain naked”: Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, translated by Edith Grossman (1988; reprint, Vintage B
ooks, 2003), p. 217.

  123“Entrusted by her family”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 272, 274.

  123“She cut him into pieces”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 296, 336.

  124“A deluxe servant”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, p. 221.

  124D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920), new ed. (Penguin Classics, 2007), p. 352. John Bayley, Elegy for Iris (Picador, 1999), p. 44.

  125An “elegant, large-boned mulatta”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 240, 241, 243.

  125“Panic-stricken love”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, pp. 246, 250.

  126“Black, young, pretty, but a whore”: García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, p. 182.

  129The meaning of the word frottage has been analyzed in Brian Blanchfield’s essay “On Frottage,” in Proxies: Essays Near Knowing (Nightboat Books, 2016), pp. 109–19.

  132Charles Wright, “The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear,” in Scar Tissue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), p. 68.

  LATE-LIFE LECHERY

  133Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (1966; reprint, Dalkey Archive Press, 1984).

  135“The delightful imbecility of lust”: Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (2001; reprint, Vintage International, 2002), p. 15.

  135The sexless matrimonial “cage”: Roth, The Dying Animal, pp. 24, 51, 69.

  136“Sleek pubic hair”: Roth, The Dying Animal, pp. 28, 37, 38, 32.

  136“The force of her youth”: Roth, The Dying Animal, pp. 34, 41, 29, 32.

  136In Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, the gods intervene to reveal the sexual betrayal, but May persuades her husband not to believe his newly restored eyesight. See The Canterbury Tales, translated by David Wright, new ed. (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 245–73.

  136“The pornography of jealousy”: Roth, The Dying Animal, pp. 41, 94.

  137“Attachment is my enemy”: Roth, The Dying Animal, pp. 100, 89.

  138“Ruined” by surgery: Roth, The Dying Animal, pp. 131, 134, 135, 148.