by Susan Gubar
258“Like a second mother”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 12.
258“You can eat the roots”: Robinson, Lila, pp. 27, 21.
259“It is seldom indeed”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 194.
259“Have to answer”: Robinson, Lila, p. 101.
259“If God really has”: Robinson, Lila, pp. 129, 43.
260She studies biblical texts: Robinson, Lila, p. 68. John Edgar Wideman includes a similar scene of redemptive biblical reading in a story about the second chance of late-life love. See Two Cities (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 51.
260“And out of the midst”: Robinson, Lila, p. 68.
261“Lovingly absorbed in the thoughts”: Marilynne Robinson, “Imagination and Community,” in When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 21.
261“Imagining what it is like”: Ian McEwan, “Only Love and Then Oblivion. Love Was All They Had to Set against Their Murderers,” The Guardian, 15 Sept. 2001, www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2. “The basis of all sympathy”: quoted in Kate Kellaway, “At Home with His Worries,” The Observer, 15 Sept. 2001, www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/16/fiction.ianmcewan.
261About 43 percent of adult Americans: Tracy Mumford, “Americans Aren’t Reading Less—They’re Just Reading Less Literature,” MPR News, 7 Sept. 2016, www.mprnews.org/story/2016/09/07/books-reading-rates-down.
262Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 205.
262Robinson, Lila, p. 261.
263“Molded salad of orange gelatin”: Robinson, Gilead, p. 143.
ENORMOUS CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE
268Love among the Ruins, directed by George Cukor (ABC Circle Films, 1975).
268A number of awards: In George Cukor: A Double Life (St. Martin’s Press, 1991), Patrick McGilligan notes that “Emmys went to the writer (James Costigan) . . . and to both of the stars. . . . Cukor himself won a Best Directing Emmy” (p. 318).
272Love Is Strange, directed by Ira Sachs (Parts and Labor, 2014).
273The Icelandic movie Ram, directed by Grimur Hákonarson (Cohen Media Group, 2015), focuses on the enmity of two neighboring brothers who try to save the last unsickened sheep of their decimated herds. It ends with them holed up in a loving embrace during a ferocious snowstorm.
273Grace Paley, “Goodbye and Good Luck,” in The Little Disturbances of Man (Viking Press, 1968), pp. 18, 21, 21–22.
274A charming scene: Mrs Hurst Dancing and Other Scenes from Regency Life, 1812–1823, watercolors by Diana Sperling, text by Gordon Mingay (Gollancz, 1981), plate 33.
276“To me, fair friend”: William Shakespeare, Sonnet 104, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Colin Burrow (Oxford World’s Classics, 2002), p. 589.
277Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, directed by Stanley Kramer (Columbia Pictures, 1967).
277Something’s Gotta Give, directed by Nancy Meyers (Columbia Pictures, 2003); Nora Ephron, “I Feel Bad about My Neck,” in I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (2006; reprint, Vintage Books, 2008), pp. 3–8; It’s Complicated, directed by Nancy Meyers (Universal Pictures, 2009).
279Robert Browning, “Love among the Ruins,” in Men and Women (1855; reprint, Ticknor and Fields, 1863), p. 1; online at name.umdl.umich.edu/ABF1203.0001.001.
CHRISNUKKAH
280William Shakespeare, Sonnet 138, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Colin Burrow (Oxford World’s Classics, 2002), p. 657. On Shakespeare’s sonnets about aging, see Christopher Martin, Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature, from Queen Elizabeth to “King Lear” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), pp. 113–25; also see his excellent discussion (pp. 125–35) of Donne’s “The Autumnal,” mentioned later in this chapter.
282“Youth is hot”: William Shakespeare, “The Passionate Pilgrim,” in The Oxford Shakespeare, p. 353.
282John Donne, “The Autumnal,” in The Complete English Poems, edited by A. J. Smith (Penguin Classics, 1971), p. 105.
285William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems (New Directions, 1962), pp. 153–82.
286Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992; reprint, Vintage International, 2003), p. 228. Morrison’s fifty-year-old Violet and Joe Trace have outlived their era’s life expectancy for nonwhites. See Philip J. Hilts, “Life Expectancy for Blacks in the U.S. Shows Sharp Drop,” New York Times, 29 Nov. 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/11/29/news/life-expectancy-for-blacks-in-us-shows-sharp-drop.html.
286“Picked out and determined”: Morrison, Jazz, pp. 95, 133, 135.
286“The one thing everybody loses”: Morrison, Jazz, pp. 120, 228.
287“Ecstasy is more leaf-sigh”: Morrison, Jazz, p. 228.
287The last page of Jazz: Morrison, Jazz, p. 229. In Toni Morrison: A Biography (Greenwood Press, 2010), Stephanie Li argues that the narrator of this complicated narrative is the book itself and that Morrison viewed it as a love song to the reader (p. 89).
289Philip Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb,” in The Complete Poems, edited by Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), pp. 71–72.
290“The hands the wrong way round”: Larkin, The Complete Poems, p. 437.
291“Love isn’t stronger”: Larkin, The Complete Poems, p. 436.
291The “central paradox”: A. T. Tolley, My Proper Ground: A Study of the Work of Philip Larkin and Its Development (Carleton University Press, 1991), p. 88.
291For Shakespeare’s boasting, see Sonnet 55, in The Oxford Shakespeare, p. 491.
291Emily Dickinson produced two versions of “Safe in their alabaster chambers” (J. 216 / P. 124), both of which can be found in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (1960; reprint, Back Bay Books, 1976), p. 100.
292“Time’s wingèd chariot”: Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” in Complete Poems, edited by Elizabeth Story Donno (1972; reprint, Penguin Classics, 2005), p. 51.
293Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 124.
293On W. H. Auden’s revision of the final line in “September 1, 1939,” see Edward Callan, “Disenchantment with Yeats: From Singer-Master to Ogre,” in W. H. Auden, edited by Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 1986), p. 170.
293Maxine Kumin, “The Long Marriage,” in The Long Marriage: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 85. Alix Kates Shulman, To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 4.
293Carolyn Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time: Life beyond Sixty (W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 164.
294Charlie Smith, “The Meaning of Birds,” in Indistinguishable from the Darkness (W. W. Norton), pp. 83–84.
LATER
298“For them, making love”: Arlene Heyman, “The Loves of Her Life,” in Scary Old Sex (Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 4 (ellipses hers).
298“Looked like a small round neck”: Heyman, “The Loves of Her Life,” p. 7.
298Trying “very hard not to look pleased”: Heyman, “The Loves of Her Life,” p. 13.
298Recent handbooks by sex educators stand in contrast to the reticence of creative writers. See, for example, Joan Price, Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex (Seal, 2011).
299“Taut as a young girl’s”: Heyman, “The Loves of Her Life,” p. 22.
30245 Years, directed by Andrew Haigh (Artificial Eye, 2015).
304James Joyce, “The Dead,” in Dubliners (1920; reprint, Penguin Books, 2014), pp. 151–94.
304David Constantine, “In Another Country,” in In Another Country: Selected Stories (Biblioasis, 2015), pp. 9–20; quotation, p. 12.
304“Liberty and Union”: Maureen N. McLane discusses Marianne Moore’s use of Daniel Webster’s famous speech in her poem “Marriage”: see My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), pp. 100–101.
305Guy de Maupassant, Like Death (1890), translated by Richard Howard (New York Review of Books, 2017), p. 201.
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305Charles Olson, “Maximus, to himself,” in The Maximus Poems, edited by George F. Butterick (University of California Press, 1983), p. 56. Elizabeth Bishop’s letter to Alice Methfessel is quoted by Megan Marshall in “Elizabeth and Alice: The Last Love Affair of Elizabeth Bishop and the Losses behind ‘One Art,’ ” New Yorker, 27 Oct. 2016, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/elizabeth-bishop-and-alice-methfessel-one-art. The letter was sent in March 1971, “a month before [Bishop’s] sixtieth birthday and two weeks past Methfessel’s twenty-eighth.”
306Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (1978; reprint, Penguin, 1990), p. 131.
Text Credits
“The Aging Lovers,” from Poems of Love and Marriage, by John Ciardi. Copyright © 1988 Judith Ciardi. Reprinted with permission of the Ciardi Publishing Trust, John L. Ciardi, Trustee.
“In View of the Fact,” from Bosh and Flapdoodle, by A.R. Ammons. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission of John Ammons c/o Writers’ Representatives, LLC.
“Late-Flowering Lust,” from Collected Poems, by John Betjeman © 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001. Reproduced by permission of John Murray, an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. Reproduced by John Murray Press, a division of Hodder and Stoughton Limited.
Excerpt from translation of Fyodor Tyutchev’s Last Love by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright © Vladimir Nabokov, used by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.
Excerpts from “The Porcelain Couple” “Air Shatters in the Car’s Small Room” and “Without” from Without: Poems by Donald Hall. Copyright © 1998 by Donald Hall. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Jane Kenyon, excerpt from “Otherwise” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by The Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Excerpts from “An Arundel Tomb” from The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett. Copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
“An Arundel Tomb,” from The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett. Copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
“The Meaning of Birds.” Copyright © 1990 by Charlie Smith, from Jump Soul: New and Selected Poems by Charlie Smith. Used by permission of W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.
Acknowledgments
SANDRA M. GILBERT suggested the title for this book. Her extraordinary influence on my writing goes beyond the boundaries of our collaborative work on many projects. I can never fully express my gratitude to her for encouraging me to pursue the topic in my own idiosyncratic way.
Many colleagues and friends have offered suggestions about texts and contexts. My thanks go to Cynthia Bannon, Bob Bledsoe, Matt Brim, Jim Craig, Ellen Dwyer, Jason Fickle, Jen Fleissner, Constance Furey, Erik Gray, the late Kenneth Gros Louis, Edward Gubar, Kelly Hanson, Bert Harrill, Kenneth Johnston, Eileen Julien, Oscar Kenshur, Sarah Knott, Stephanie Li, Julia Livingston, Ellen MacKay, Herbert J. Marks, Alyce Miller, Janel Mueller, Walton Muyumba, James Naremore, Cornelia Nixon, Alvin Rosenfeld, Scott Sanders, John Schilb, Zak Szymanski, Stephen Watt, and Charlotte Zietlow.
Christoph Irmshur sent me hither and yon with fabulous recommendations. Nancy K. Miller, just a hoot and holler away on email, shared her bleakly hilarious insights into feminism, friendship, and cancer.
Administrators at Indiana University facilitate my work, as do the generous secretaries in the English department. Other individuals enrich my life in too many ways to enumerate, so I resort to listing: Evelyne Brancart, Judith Brown, Shehira Davezac, Nathan Davis, Dyan Elliott, Jonathan Elmer, Mary Favret, Georgette Kagan, Jon Lawrence, George Levine, Andrew H. Miller, Alexandra Morphet, Suneil Setiya, the late Aidan Smith, Jan Sorby, Jayne Spencer, and Rick Valicenti. As for my British cousins—Colin and Helen, Bernard and Georgina—I consider you a source of strength.
My assiduous research assistants—Shannon Boyer and Patrick Kindig—schlepped books and movies from the library, filled in footnotes, negotiated permissions, and queried an early draft. When a manuscript is drafty, it feels dicey to give it to readers. With abiding appreciation, I thank those who gave me the precious gift of their expertise: Judith Brown, John Eakin, Susan Fraiman, Kieran Setiya, and Elizabeth Abel enhanced the manuscript with abundant insights.
Ellen Levine, my agent, has always been a font of wisdom and a pillar of strength. For this book, she was also an inspiration. Jill Bialosky, my editor, became the driving force in my effort to integrate literary interpretation with personal reflection—without subordinating one to the other. Her energetic and forthright advice definitively shaped this book. Jill’s assistant, Drew Elizabeth Weitman, astonished me with her savvy responses. It was a great comfort to have my cherished friend and former graduate student Alice Falk spin the safety net that only a brilliant copyeditor can provide. Over the years I have also been buoyed by the support of a traveling salesperson who knocked on my office door in Ballantine Hall decades ago. Since then, Julia Reidhead—now the president of W. W. Norton—has been a treasure for scholars invested in the humanities.
Of course, Don Gray was advising throughout the process of composition. Our gallant sons-in-law—John Lyons, Kieran Setiya, and Jeff Silverbush—provided books, movies, jokes, ideas, and much-needed ballast. We cannot express our devotion to our beloved girls: Julie Gray and Susannah Gray, Marah Gubar and Simone Silverbush. Or our delight in our marvelous grandsons. Jack, Eli, Samuel, and Jonah: long may you prosper. I promise not to be hoodwinked by phone callers claiming to be one of you with an urgent “Grandma, my car just crashed on Sunset Boulevard and I need your credit card numbers.” I will try to be circumspect.
ALSO BY SUSAN GUBAR
Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal
Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer
Judas: A Biography
Lo largo y lo corto del verso Holocausto
Rooms of Our Own
Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew
Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century
Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture
Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama
(with Sandra M. Gilbert)
No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (with Sandra M. Gilbert)
Volume 1: The War of the Words
Volume 2: Sexchanges
Volume 3: Letters from the Front
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (with Sandra M. Gilbert)
EDITOR:
True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School
Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader
(with Sandra M. Gilbert)
MotherSongs: Poems for, by, and about Mothers
(with Sandra M. Gilbert and Diana O’Hehir)
English Inside and Out: The Places of Literary Criticism
(with Jonathan Kamholtz)
For Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography
(with Joan Hoff)
The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women:
The Traditions in English (with Sandra M. Gilbert)
Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets
(with Sandra M. Gilbert)
Late-Life Love is a work of nonfiction. Some names
and potentially identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2019 by Susan Gubar
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