Tag: Elizabeth Strout

Taking Secrets to the Grave?

I am still thinking about ways to achieve serenity in these elder years, to find a taste of heaven before I die.  One barrier to serenity, it seems to me, is secrets.  Things we don’t talk about, perhaps we don’t even want to think about.  I have them.  I would guess that you do too.

Several recent books [spoiler alert here]– The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, John of John by Douglas Stuart, and Whistler by Ann Patchett – are stories about such truths: facts that finally surface (or fail to surface) at the end of life.  In Strout’s book, the true paternity of the son is known by all but not admitted to each other, while in Stuart’s novel, the Bible-thumping father is gay, and he is living with a son who is also hiding his sexuality.  Patchett gives us the story of a father and his beloved stepdaughter, whom a divorce separated from him many years ago.  The reasons for the failure of the marriage are learned by the stepdaughter, who has pined for her missing stepfather for years.  All of these secrets involve sexuality in some ways – adultery, homosexuality – things that seem important when we are young, but when we get old – not so much.  I think.  But still hidden truths fester – and they are not all about sexuality.  Some are about much more important things.  You know the ones I mean.

In The Things We Never Say the main character, Artie Dam (A.Dam?), has found out he is not his son’s biological father.  He means to confront his wife about it, but he… can’t.  And he sees his false position in parallel with the world around him, with Trump newly re-elected, and doing things that… no one wants to talk about.

Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true:  His country was committing suicide.

He loses interest in all things that used to mean something to him.  The discovery of a hidden truth has pushed him off balance and politics is keeping him that way. His son leaves the country to work for the EU and cautions Artie to talk to him only on burner phones.  He has a breakdown in his classroom and finally, during a heatwave when they have lost their power, Artie goes to lie down.  “When Evie went upstairs she found Artie in his undershorts lying on the bed, his arms splayed out as though he was sunbathing, dead.”  The image of Christ on the cross.  Sacrificed on the altar of getting through life without making a scene.  An autopsy reveals that his heart failed, but we knew that.

The father in John of John has hidden his sexuality from almost everyone except his ex-wife.  Living on the Scottish Isle of Lewis, he is the psalmist for a conservative Christian congregation.  His son, who is also gay but knows nothing about his father’s orientation, comes home with the need and fear of telling some truths to his father.  In the end, it is the father who has the most trouble accepting the truth of his own life – but isn’t that often the case?

Anne Patchett slowly unveils the truths that her characters are hiding.  Those who were children at the time had no clue what was going on – and mistakenly felt responsible for the anguish of the adults around them.  Some people think children know more than they seem to, but there was a lot my childhood self didn’t know, and it seemed that the adults in my life were going to make sure I stayed confused.  Telling such truths to people who were once children in our lives is often a true gift to them.  But it is not easy.

I should mention here that keeping secrets is harder than it used to be.  Ubiquitous DNA testing and data “matching” means that if you tell a lie about a child’s paternity, the child is probably going to find out about it.  Similarly, databases of newspapers, government records, census information, and criminal activity mean that if someone wants to know about us, there are a lot of places to look.  A friend of mine never told her children about an early brief marriage; they discovered simultaneously about both the marriage and the fact that their mother was not always truthful with them.  Secrets need to be weighed carefully against issues of need to know, trust, and the cost of revelation.

Time is running out for we elders – pretty soon keeping mum will not be up to us; that decision will be pre-empted by the run-up to death, or Death itself which “seals up all in rest.” (Sonnet 73)  Some people push it off until after their death – leaving behind letters to explain their past actions and money as atonement – but that is not a solution.  And remember, secrets do not have to be something locked in a real or psychological safe; they might just be things we prefer not to talk about.

In a reading about the Tao this morning I came across this description of the only goal we all have in common: “A gracious death with no regrets.”  We might keep secrets for good reasons, and we should have no regrets there.  But if secrets are impinging on the serenity of late life, it would not hurt to consider exposing some of the truths we keep from others and from ourselves.

For a story about some good deathbed counsel, you might try my story, “The More Loving One.”  And hats off to Auden.

All three novels referenced above are recommended.

 

Lastingness – In Fact and Fiction

Lastingness, by Nicholas Delbanco, may be a book whose title is better than the book itself.  The full title, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age, has a double meaning, presumes two questions: What kind of art is made in the artist’s old age?  What is the art of growing old?  I am interested in both questions.

Delbanco writes an interesting but very subjective book.  He is most concerned with how the author himself will fare in his own old age, which he is just entering.  Delbanco describes bright young lights that fizzled, artists who bloomed late, and others who improved steadily throughout their lives.  There are very few of the latter; it goes without saying that most of us have our ups and downs regardless of age.  There are also those who have what Thoreau calls “two growths like pear trees” – one earlier and one later.  Old age does not have a singular effect.

The area of the book that most interested me was how lastingness, in some cases, involved a change of form or expectation by the elderly artist.  Novelists sometimes switch to shorter forms like poetry (think Thomas Hardy), or artists limit their subject matter (think Monet); musicians change their repertoire, and some artists retire to solitary seclusion.  Many artists repeat themselves trying to rekindle past glory (almost always a mistake), and some go on to do what perhaps they should have done long ago – work only to please themselves.  This last, of course, is one of the greatest gifts of old age.  According to Delbanco, though, “lastingness” can only be determined by “assess[ing] the effect of works on others.” Maybe.  And it is doubtful that artists can always trust “others.”  Again, one of the pleasures of old age is self-evaluation, cultivating inward assessment, and discarding dependence on “the effect on others.”

John Updike’s wonderful article “Late Works: Writers and Artists Confronting the End” was published in 2006, just a few years before his own death, and posits that perhaps lasting is not so much to be valued as a new “senile sublime” that can only be seen in old age.  He defines “senile sublime” in the words of Eve Sedgwick:

…various more or less intelligible performances by old brilliant people, whether artists, scientist, or intellectuals, where the bare outlines of a creative idiom seem finally to emerge from what had been the obscuring puppy fat of personableness, timeliness, or sometimes even of coherent sense.

Oh, that we live long enough to shed our “puppy fat”!   Updike also points out that writers at the end of their lives often realize (and help their readers realize) that there is much about life that is “irreconcilable” with other parts of life.  Miranda, young and about to step into her “brave new world,” and the retiring Prospero have occupied the same stage. Billy Budd with his youth and integrity falls prey to the machinations of the evil Claggart and the dilemma of Captain Vere – and yet serves as a symbol of hope.  Old age seems to accept this opposition.

One novelist who writes about the old and lastingness and irreconcilability is Elizabeth Strout.  I recently read her Oh William!, which focuses on Lucy Barton (again) and her seventy-year-old ex-husband, who is about to become an “ex” again.  One thing that old age brings (particularly in this age of divorce and migration) is a trail of undefinable human connections, which seem to last in the mind if not always in actuality. The relationship between William and Lucy Barton surely endures in both ways.  Lucy is recently widowed by her second husband and feeling her age; William has been “left” by his latest and is refusing to acknowledge his own senescence.  Strout’s books are more about life than about plot, and particularly about the lastingness of relationships.

At the end of the book, Lucy realizes just how corralled William is by his past, and this makes her realize that she too is still moved by history she might not even remember:

And then I thought, Oh William!

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! Too?

Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves?

Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.

We are all mythologies, mysterious.  We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

Those last lines ring true for me.  Old age is about acknowledging the mysteries.  We know everything when we are eighteen; when we are seventy, we finally acknowledge that maybe there is almost nothing that we know.  Yet, I think if we are lucky – and if we last long enough, we come to love the mystery.

For a tale about the parts of ourselves that last into old age (if we can only respect the mystery), you might try my story “Needs of the Living Organism.”

Vollendungsroman, Again and “Olive, Again”

A while back, I wrote about the Vollendungsroman, a term for a novel about the “winding down” of life. It is the counterpoint to the Bildungsroman, a “coming-of-age” story about young people approaching adulthood. There are thousands and thousands of the latter, and as young people, we lapped them up – trying to figure out what life was about, what we were supposed to think, to do. They came in all varieties – from Little Women to Catcher in the Rye. We read them all and we read them for at least two reasons: 1) because we wanted to know how to live our lives, and 2) they made us realize that we were not alone in our human predicament. As we age, those two needs have not gone away.

It is important to me to think consciously about what old age means, how it should be considered, lived. Many of us did not consciously grow into adulthood – we did it messily and often badly; there were repercussions because our dayspring was mishandled. We made the mistakes of youth and sometimes we kept making them even as we left youth behind us. Marriage, parenthood, middle-age often found us too busy to be conscious of anything – our lists were short-term, by psychic necessity. Some of us did plan financially for retirement, but not, perhaps, in any other way. And now we are old. Yes, we are. Call it what you will. I have time now to age consciously. And I look to literature to help me. Philosophy, science, and psychology are good too, but literature about old age allows me peer into the possibilities rather then the probabilities and the logic of it all. And particularly to see how people grapple with their pasts.

For the Bildungsroman is about the life of our origins, of what we were born into – and usually about the process of breaking away. But the novel of old age, the Vollendungsroman, is often about reconciling with our own pasts – the mistakes, the errors, the patterns, that we made along the way. This may include some debris from our family of origin, of course – that business is never over. But mainly it is about the life we have lived, the children we have engendered, the people we have loved, the people we have hurt. Some of it is to be valued, some left behind, some used as a lesson.

I just finished Elizabeth Strout’s wonderful new book Olive, Again. Definitely an example of the Vollendungsroman. The novel reminds me a little of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but set in the world of the elderly. Olive is the central character, but there is also a wide range of people, of family stories. In Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton, the writer/character says of another writer: “And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.” And this is what Elizabeth Strout does – she writes about the human condition and lets us know that 1) we are not alone, 2) it is never easy, and 3) there can be great dignity in it. And Strout knows that aging with dignity is not about acting as young as possible. In the words of one of Strout’s characters, “our job – maybe even our duty – is to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”
Amen to that: with as much grace as we can.

Olive is old when the book begins and very old by the end. We watch her get used to widowhood, struggle with an imperfect relationship with her son and his family, and slide into a second marriage and second widowhood. She finishes in a kind of assisted living center where she is typing on an electric typewriter (her choice and supplied by her son) because her computer and its printer had made her “so frustrated she shook.” (Yes.) Olive is typing up memories, trying to make sense out of the past. In the last chapter, we find Olive marveling at the new buds on a rosebush and contemplating her own impending death; in this juxtaposition “the sense of wonder and trepidation returned to her.” She sits down and writes these two sentences:

I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.

Yes. Not many of us can be that truthful. But we can read about people who are (Olive is often truthful to the point of offensiveness), and consider what it is we really think, what we believe, and how we should act on those beliefs.

Elsewhere, I have provided some lists of readings on old age, including novels, essays, poetry. Today’s story, “Last Things,” is about one woman’s approach to getting old. As might be obvious, I try to figure out how to age not only by reading, but also by writing. In any case, enjoy.