by Susan Gubar
139The nameless companion says, “Don’t” : Roth, The Dying Animal, p. 156.
143David Foster Wallace, “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One: Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?,” Observer, 13 Oct. 1997, http://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-phallocrat-drops-one-is-this-finally-the-end-for-magnificent-narcissists/.
144“The worst thing you’ve ever done”: John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (Random House, 1990), pp. 497, 396.
144Harry had “been afraid”: Updike, Rabbit at Rest, pp. 407, 407–8, 203.
145Junichiro Tanizaki, Diary of a Mad Old Man, translated by Howard Hibbett (1965; reprint, Perigee Book, Putnam’s Sons, 1965), p. 5.
SUNSETS
148Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (1509), translated with an introduction and commentary by Clarence H. Miller (Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 48–49.
149On the girl given as a gift by the father to the husband, see Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975), in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, edited by Linda Nicholson (Routledge, 1997), pp. 27–62.
149Susan Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging,” in No Longer Young: The Older Woman in America: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Aging, edited by Pauline B. Bart et al. (Institute of Gerontology, University of Michigan–Wayne State University, 1975), pp. 31–39.
150Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; reprint, Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 2. Hurston’s unusual depiction of Janie Crawford and Tea Cake makes it clear that the heroine worries about their age difference, though it hardly plays a role in his response.
150Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder (Paramount, 1950). The best book on representations of cross-age relationships throughout history is Lois W. Banner, In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality (Knopf, 1992). Her chapter on Sunset Boulevard (pp. 30–55) is especially nuanced about the casting of the characters.
151Erica Jong, Fear of Dying (St. Martin’s Press, 2015), pp. 26, 151.
151Sontag, “The Double Standard of Aging,” p. 34.
152Harold and Maude, directed by Hal Ashby (Paramount Pictures, 1971).
152Ursula K. Le Guin, “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty,” in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (Shambhala, 2004), p. 163.
153“Pink and white”: Colette, “Chéri,” and “The Last of Chéri,” translated by Roger Senhouse with an introduction by Judith Thurman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), pp. 8, 21, 24, 83.
153Mae West, speaking as the character Ruby Carter in Belle of the Nineties, directed by Leo McCarey (Paramount Pictures, 1934).
153Benjamin Franklin, “Old Mistresses Apologue” (25 June 1745), in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, edited by Leonard W. Labaree (Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 27–31; quotation, p. 31.
153“Walked with difficulty”: Colette, “Chéri,” and “The Last of Chéri,” p. 56.
154Bodies “joined together”: Colette, “Chéri,” and “The Last of Chéri,” pp. 133, 136, 145, 150, 153.
156“She was not monstrous”: Colette, “Chéri,” and “The Last of Chéri,” pp. 215, 221, 223.
156“Unsexed” in old age: Colette, “Chéri,” and “The Last of Chéri,” p. 228; Michel de Montaigne, “On Certain Verses of Virgil,” in The Essays of Montaigne, translated by Jacob Zeitlin (Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), book 2, p. 104.
156“I should have made”: Colette, “Chéri,” and “The Last of Chéri,” p. 152.
157Doris Lessing, “The Grandmothers,” in The Grandmothers (2003; reprint, Harper Perennial, 2005), pp. 3–56. In this story, two friends take each other’s sons as lovers.
158Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Knopf, 1999), pp. 307, 285.
158Doris Lessing, Love, Again (Flamingo, 1996), pp. 136, 337.
159Clouds of Sils Maria, directed by Olivier Assayas (CG Cinéma, 2014), with performances by Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, and Chloë Grace Moretz.
159Jong, Fear of Dying, p. 8; Marge Piercy, He, She and It (1991; reprint, Ballantine Books, 1993), p. 162.
159Lessing, Love, Again, pp. 33, 338–39. The 1950s lesbian cult classic The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith, revolves around a midlife woman and a younger woman, as does its 2015 movie adaptation, Carol. Significantly, what threatens the relationship is the contested custody of the older woman’s child.
160Muriel Rukeyser composed a terrific answer to the Sphinx’s riddle in “Myth,” in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, edited by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), p. 480.
160Fyodor Tyutchev, “Last Love,” translated by Vladimir Nabokov, in The Penguin Book of Love Poetry, edited by Jon Stallworthy (Penguin, 1973), pp. 183–84.
CUPIDITY
165“She grabbed his erection”: Louis Begley, About Schmidt (1996; reprint, Ballantine Books, 1997), p. 187.
166“Had become paternal”: Louis Begley, Schmidt Steps Back (2012; reprint, Ballantine Books, 2013), p. 196.
166Louis Begley, Schmidt Delivered (2000; reprint, Ballantine Books, 2001), p. 249. Phyllis Rose, “An Ordinary Bigot,” New York Times, 22 Sept. 1996.
166John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover,” in The Penguin Book of Love Poetry, edited by Jon Stallworthy (Penguin, 1973), p. 182.
167Galway Kinnell, “Oatmeal,” in A New Selected Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 137–38.
171Sandra M. Gilbert’s short story “Shiksa” has not yet been published.
171Orson Welles is quoted in Keith Uhlich’s review of Make Way for Tomorrow (dir. Leo McCarey), in Slant Magazine, 8 July 2004, www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/make-way-for-tomorrow. Inspired by Make Way for Tomorrow, Yosujiro Ozu’s masterpiece Tokyo Story (1953) depicts a long-married couple who visit adult children too busy to find time for them.
171“The temptation to disinherit”: Begley, Schmidt Steps Back, p. 219.
172Kent Haruf, Our Souls at Night (2015; reprint, Vintage Contemporaries, 2016), pp. 5, 147, 152. The movie—starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda—appeared in 2017, directed by Ritesh Batra.
172“I want you to stay away”: Haruf, Our Souls at Night, p. 164.
173“Late-onset puppy love”: Begley, Schmidt Steps Back, pp. 14, 16.
174“Night in the sack”: Begley, Schmidt Steps Back, pp. 262, 291, 290.
175Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer star in Elsa and Fred, directed by Michael Radford (Cuatro Plus Films, 2014), a remake of Marcos Carnevale’s 2005 Argentine original.
175He “wasn’t sure he had heard”: Begley, Schmidt Steps Back, p. 218. The Renaissance adage is quoted by Philip D. Collington in “Sans Wife: Sexual Anxiety and the Old Man in Shakespeare,” in Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations, edited by Erin Campbell (Ashgate, 2006), p. 202.
WRINKLED IN TIME
178Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent (Hogarth Press, 1931), p. 79.
179Altersroman: The German term (age novel) was coined by Linda A. Westervelt by analogy with the term Bildungsroman in Beyond Innocence, or the Altersroman in Modern Fiction (University of Missouri Press, 1997), p. xii. See also Barbara Frey Waxman, who uses the term Reifungsroman, or “novel of ripening”: From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 2.
179“A slight irritability”: Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, pp. 80, 24.
179William Shakespeare, King Lear, edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, updated ed. (Simon & Schuster, 2015), 1.4.302–3.
180“If one is not to please oneself”: Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, pp. 67, 68.
181“Those days were gone”: Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, pp. 117–18.
181Michel de Montaigne, “On Certain Verses of Virgil,” in The Essays of Montaigne, translated by Jacob Zeitlin (Alfr
ed A. Knopf, 1934), book 2, p. 49.
182“She was eighty-eight”: Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, pp. 201–2.
182“So old that they were all”: Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, pp. 207, 209.
183“Had exploded a charge”: Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, pp. 214–15.
183Carolyn Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time: Life beyond Sixty (W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 112. On friendship, see William Butler Yeats, “After Long Silence,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Cedric Watts (Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 226, and Ezra Pound, “Und Drang,” in Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, edited by Michael John King (New Directions, 1976), pp. 167–74, especially p. 173. Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic (Pantheon Books, 2003), pp. 17, 34.
184On telic versus atelic activities, see Kieran Setiya, Mid-Life Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 133–39.
184“That little white box”: Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, p. 223.
187“Young people compel one”: Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, p. 98.
188“Think how much I shall annoy”: Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, pp. 259, 288.
188“The unled life”: Andrew H. Miller, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives (forthcoming).
188John Keats, Selected Letters, edited by Robert Gittings (2002; reprint, Oxford World’s Classics, 2009), p. 340.
188“Eternally vanishing”: Keats, Selected Letters, pp. 365, 370. Fanny Brawne, “March 27, 1821,” in Letters of Fanny Brawne to Fanny Keats, 1820–1824, edited by Fred Edgcumbe (Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 26.
GIVE AND TAKE
190Donald Hall, “The Porcelain Couple,” in Without (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 14.
194“I wish you could feel”: Donald Hall, “Air Shatters in the Car’s Small Room,” in Without, p. 27.
194Amour, directed by Michael Haneke (Les Films du Losange, 2012).
195“ ‘That’s it, Perkins,’ she said”: Donald Hall, The Best Day, The Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 118; “Without,” in Without, pp. 46–47, 47.
195“Vincristine ara-c cytoxan vp-6”: Hall, “Without,” p. 47. “The days were endlessly the same”: Hall, The Best Day, The Worst Day, p. 97.
198“Jane said he looked”: Hall, “Air Shatters in the Car’s Small Room,” p. 22; Still Alice, directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (Lutzus-Brown, 2014), with performances by Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin.
199John Bayley, Elegy for Iris (Picador, 1999); Iris, directed by Richard Eyre (BBC, 2001); Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Knopf, 2001), pp. 275–323; and Away from Her, directed by Sarah Polley (Foundry Films, 2006). See also The Savages, directed by Tamara Jenkins (Fox Searchlight, 2007), with performances by Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman; the movie depicts how two siblings deal with a father who is spiraling into dementia.
199The “omnipresent anxiety”: Bayley, Elegy for Iris, pp. 38, 53, 39.
200“Spreads to the one”: Bayley, Elegy for Iris, pp. 38, 241.
200Alix Kates Shulman, To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 102. Hall, The Best Day, The Worst Day, p. 35.
201How can longtime companions: See Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015; reprint, Vintage International, 2016), p. 45: “How will you and your husband prove your love for each other when you can’t remember the past you’ve shared?”
201Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No worst, there is none,” in The Major Works, edited by Catherine Phillips, rev. ed. (2002; reprint, Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 167.
202Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good,” Chicago Review 13, no. 2 (1959): 51. Bayley, Elegy for Iris, p. 127.
202“A whole infantile language”: Bayley, Elegy for Iris, pp. 33, 181, 51.
203Marion Coutts, The Iceberg (Black Cat, 2014), pp. 166, 170, 266.
203“If Iris could climb inside”: Bayley, Elegy for Iris, p. 127.
203Brian Aldiss with Margaret Aldiss, When the Feast Is Finished: Reflections on Terminal Illness (Little, Brown, 1999), p. 138.
204“Inseparable—in a way”: Bayley, Elegy for Iris, p. 127; Anne Roiphe also refers to her marriage in terms of Baucis and Philemon in Epilogue: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 2008), p. 212. Hall, “Letter in Autumn,” in Without, p. 62.
204“He felt shame”: Donald Hall, “Blues for Polly,” in Without, p. 34. “Lost two thirds of a liver”: Donald Hall, Life Work (Beacon Press, 1993), p. 123.
204Jane Kenyon, “Otherwise,” in Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 1996), p. 214.
TEQUILA MOCKINGBIRD
209“Batty man! Bum bandit!”: Bernardine Evaristo, Mr. Loverman (Akashic Books, 2014), pp. 119, 130, 133. See also Beginners, written and directed by Mike Mills (Olympus Pictures, 2010), a movie about an elderly man coming out of the closet.
209“To leave here”: Evaristo, Mr. Loverman, p. 44.
210“That the female is a female”: Evaristo, Mr. Loverman, pp. 123–24.
210“Indestructible ivories”: Evaristo, Mr. Loverman, pp. 17, 11, 15.
211“Second thoughts”: Evaristo, Mr. Loverman, pp. 110, 206, 231.
212“The good guys are all taken”: Evaristo, Mr. Loverman, p. 212.
212“Contemplating how”: Evaristo, Mr. Loverman, p. 173.
213“Any time this country starts Nazifying”: Evaristo, Mr. Loverman, p. 115.
215“All about philanderers”: Evaristo, Mr. Loverman, p. 55.
216Tequila Mockingbirds: For the recipe, see Tim Federle, Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist, illustrated by Lauren Mortimer (Running Press, 2013), pp. 45–46. This book is the source of the punny cocktails mentioned later.
217“Basically, what I have”: Evaristo, Mr. Loverman, pp. 99, 250.
217“Barrysexual—correction”: Evaristo, Mr. Loverman, pp. 277, 270.
WINTERING
223For my understanding of The Winter’s Tale, I am indebted to the introduction to the play by Stephen Orgel, whose edition I use (Clarendon Press, 1996).
224William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Colin Burrow (Oxford World’s Classics, 2002), p. 527.
225William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, edited by John Wilders (Routledge, 1995).
231“The pellet with the poison”: from The Court Jester, directed by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama (Paramount, 1955).
232“Ole rocking chair”: from Hoagy Carmichael’s song “Rockin’ Chair,” composed in 1929.
234Nicholas Delbanco, The Years (Little A, 2015), pp. 16, 87. This novel is a revision and extension of Delbanco’s Spring and Fall (Grand Central Publishing, 2006).
234“The school of second chances”: Delbanco, The Years, pp. 189, 193, 216.
235Hermia’s “passion”: Delbanco, The Years, pp. 225, 282, 284.
236On the stresses of youthful and midlife marriages, see Maggie Scarf, September Songs: The Good News about Marriage in the Later Years (Riverhead Books, 2008). Scarf discusses the U-shaped curve of marital happiness: research indicates that “a couple’s sense of satisfaction and well-being is at its peak during the honeymoon and then begins to erode.” For couples who survive the erosion, “a more positive direction predictably occurs” (p. 78).
236Marianne Moore, “Marriage,” in Complete Poems (Penguin Classics, 1994), p. 63.
237“The temporal layers”: Zadie Smith, On Beauty (Penguin, 2005), p. 203.
237“Two by two”: Denise Levertov, “The Ache of Marriage,” 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), 2:863.
SILVER THREADS AMONG THE GOLD
238Paul Auster’s actual sentence is “Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land”; The Invention of Solitude (Sun, 1982), p. 32.
239Marilynne Robinson,
Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), p. 19.
240“Unspeakably precious”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 129.
241The “begats”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 75.
241“Not that I hadn’t loved”: Robinson, Gilead, pp. 55, 44, 55.
242“As if my soul”: Robinson, Gilead, pp. 203, 206, 209.
243“Like a handsome young family”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 141.
244“Why’d you have to be”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 50.
245His “colored” wife: Robinson, Gilead, pp. 219, 220.
246On the story of the prodigal son, see Peter S. Hawkins, “A Man Had Two Sons,” in Ancient Forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, and Christian, edited by Charles L. Griswold and David Konstan (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 158–75.
247“Love is holy”: Robinson, Gilead, pp. 209, 14, 139, 245.
247M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (W. W. Norton, 1971).
248“Existence is the essential thing”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 189.
248“The beauty there is in him”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 232.
248“The Lord make His face”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 241 (quoting Numbers 6:25–26).
249“I say ‘old Boughton’ ”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 28.
250“Make new friends”: the beginning of a round sung by Girl Scouts.
RECOUNTING THE WAYS
252“Old” and “had been old”: Marilynne Robinson, Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), p. 19.
252“Pinched off little pills”: Robinson, Lila, pp. 6, 12, 30.
253“Was sharp as a razor”: Robinson, Lila, pp. 133, 239, 241.
253“Till it was worn soft”: Robinson, Lila, pp. 13, 70, 134.
253Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl,” 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), 2:931–35.
255The “beautiful old man”: Robinson, Lila, pp. 34, 253.
255“I can’t see how”: Robinson, Lila, pp. 84, 86.
255“I want you to marry me!”: Robinson, Lila, p. 89.
256“Creeping into the old man’s bed”: Robinson, Lila, pp. 103, 253.