Tag: Sackville-West

Bad Grandmothers and Wallowing in Old Age

Good grandmothers, society’s traditional grandmothers, have been defined by Hallmark: they bake cookies, love their grandchildren above all else, and are always available to babysit.  There are plenty of these good grandmothers in literature, but it is a welcome change to read about bad grandmothers.  Some bad grandmothers are selfish, some are just self-protective, but they all warm my heart.

First, the disclaimer.  I have eight grandchildren and I love them all.  But there are limits.  When they visit us, we put them (and their parents) in a hotel.  We refrain from birthday gift wish items of which we do not approve.  We almost never babysit.  On the other hand, we have traveled a lot over the years in order to have an opportunity to know them, for them to know us, and to watch them grow.

In our neighborhood, where there are many grandmothers, we sometimes take note of those grandmothers who stay home for Christmas instead of visiting progeny during the most hectic travel season.  Sometimes I am in that group and sometimes not.  We joke about it and call ourselves the “bad grandmas” as we sip our holiday eggnog, but it is humor tinged with guilt.  Aren’t we supposed to be hopelessly devoted to our offspring once and twice removed?  What is Christmas without greedy children hanging their stockings, crowded airports, and airlines losing your luggage?

But, back to fictitious grandmothers.  I just finished Margaret Drabble’s Witch of Exmoor.  You guessed it – the “witch” of the title is the grandmother, Frieda.  Frieda, who never had an excess of maternal feelings, has increased her distance from her offspring by buying a big, gothic, hard-to-get-to seaside house and then disappearing into it.  Her three adult children are angry, confused, and worried about their mother and about her will.  While Frieda does not have much in the way of traditional motherly love, she does appear to have money.  She published some successful books in her day, one of which is being turned into a movie if only they can find the author to sign the contract.

Frieda’s grandchildren see her disappearance as just another example of adults acting in inexplicable ways.  As Drabble explains, Frieda’s adult children have a more personal view:

…Frieda has turned the tables on them this time.  They are surrounded by friends who complain at length about the burden of visiting their aged relatives, their aunts with Alzheimer’s, their fathers grumpy with cancer or heart conditions or gout, their mothers whining about the treacheries of the past: none of them has a mother who does not want to see them.  It is against the natural order.

Frieda has made clear that she is fine on her own, and they pretty much leave her that way.  She is a delightful character, and it is a pity that she disappears in the middle of the book. (It turns out she has fallen off a cliff and drowned.) She has not stopped being a bad actor, though, as she leaves her fortune (not as large as her children suspected) to only one of four grandchildren.  Not only does this arouse outrage in the children, but it almost ruins the life of the one member of the family it was designed to benefit.  No one is happy.  (There is a lesson there.)

Frieda is a more malicious version of my very favorite “bad grandmother,” Lady Slane of Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  After years as the wife of a statesman, Lady Slane becomes a widow.  She has had it with adult children, big houses, and social obligations.  She remembers a lovely little house she once saw from a train, goes back to find it, buys it and moves in with her maid (of course, she has a maid).  She tells her family to stay away unless invited.  And then she spends her time entertaining a small circle of elderly men and sitting in deep revery about the life she has led.  It is one of the most delightful books of old age.  A fairy tale of senescence.  As in the Witch of Exmoor, we read much about the consternation of the adult children.  Who does their mother think she is anyway?  Doesn’t she know she owes them something?  No, Lady Slane acknowledges no unpaid debts; she has raised her children and now she is done, thank you very much.  After offers from her daughter to visit frequently and bring the grandchildren, Lady Slane answers firmly:

“…that is another thing on which I have made up my mind.  You see, Carrie, I am going to be completely self-indulgent.  I am going to wallow in old age.  No grandchildren.  They are too young.  No great-grandchildren either; that would be worse.  I want no strenuous young people, who are not content with doing a thing, but must needs know why they do it…. I want no one around me except those who are nearer to their death than their birth.

“I am going to wallow in old age.”  I love that woman.

But let me say this.  In these days when so many grandparents end up raising grandchildren because they have no other choice, perhaps it is unfeeling to exalt selfish grandmothers.  I honor the sacrifice that is made when old people do not have the luxury of carving out some space for themselves at the end of their lives.  There are many such grandparents, and I commend them.  They may not be blessed, but they are a blessing.

I do not really want to emulate Frieda or Lady Slane, but they are fun to read about.  There is something heady, especially for older women, about protecting the space we have finally “earned” after a lifetime of careers and child-raising.  When I look back on my days of rushing from work to daycare to the kitchen to feed my brood, I don’t know how I did it.  I’m enjoying a rest and some space in which to contemplate what has been and what is.  Children read about superheroes, even though they cannot really emulate them.   I read about feisty old women who have thrown guilt out the window.  It is a vicarious pleasure.

I have written about grandmothers many times before – you might look at “The Age of Grandmothers” or “A Grandmother’s Despair.”

Wendell Berry and His Portrayal of the Elderly

I have written before about my penchant for works about old age written by the old, by those who have experienced it.  It is particularly interesting to compare a work about the old written by an author before he has entered that uncharted territory with a work completed in his own old age.  There are many authors whose writings spanned long lifetimes, but today I want to talk about Wendell Berry (now 88), and two of his best novels: The Memory Old Jack and Hannah Coulter.  Old Jack was written when Berry was 40 and concerns a character who is 92.  Hannah was published when the author was 70; the title character is 79.  Let me start by saying that they are both wonderful novels and fantastic reads.  Both novels will have you pining for times gone by, even though those times are depicted as challenging and tragic.  If you have never read Berry, these are good books to start with, but be sure you have in hand a genealogy of Berry’s Port William, Kentucky – there was one in Hannah Coulter, and I found it invaluable.  Hannah Coulter and Old Jack appear in each other’s novels; like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Robinson’s Gilead, Berry has created a place and a community of people (referred to as “the membership”) that you will want to visit again and again.

But, back to old age.  The title, The Memory of Old Jack, has a double meaning.  Berry tells the story of Jack’s last day on earth through the eyes and memories of those around him. Jack’s past life comes out through his own overwhelming memories, which can be prompted by the smell of an apple pie, the creak of an opening door, a touch on the shoulder.  Sometimes these memories and observations intersect; the people around him are also the subject of many of his recollections.  But mostly, Jack’s own memories take over his whole being, and the ones who love him can just watch:

Old Jack has become a worry to them…. They have all found him at the various stations of his rounds, just standing, as poignantly vacant as an empty house.  And they have watched him, those who care about him, because they feel that he is going away from them, going into the past that holds nearly all of them.

And going into the past he is, seeing from a distance all that he could hardly comprehend when he was living it.  Like Sackville-West’s Lady Slane, “all passion is spent” and he is using his extreme old age to reflect on his past, something the elderly Lady Slane characterizes as “life’s last supreme luxury.”  Ah.

While Hannah Coulter also reflects on her life, it is in a more conscious manner.  The book opens with her memories of her dead husband’s memories (now alive only in her recollection of what he told her) and with her own story, told as she lives out an active life in the community that took her in and nurtured her when she was a young and lonely girl.  We get the past more consciously than we get it in Old Jack.  Berry is no longer writing of a sleepy, stationary oldster – Hannah is still living her life, as she takes time to reflect on her past: “Like a lot of old people that I have known, I am now living in two places: the place as it was and the place as it is.”  And place is critical.  “By those who have moved away, as my children have done, the dead may be easily forgotten.  But to those who remain, the place is forever a reminder.”  Jack is seen from a distance by a younger Berry; Hannah is perhaps the kind of old person Berry is or wishes to be.

Both Hannah and Jack are also preoccupied with their legacy – not in money or reputation, but in the stewardship of the land they tended for so long.  It is heart-breaking to both of them that their children did not return to the land.  Hannah’s children understand her attachment to the farm, but they know what farm life is and have made other choices.  Jack’s only child does not even understand.  Hannah thinks about leaving her land in some kind of conservancy; Jack tries to arrange for a young couple who have been renting his farm to buy it after his passing.

The two novels are different in many ways.  Old Jack is a figure of respect and care for the community.  He is on his last legs.  People round him up for meals and give him rides when they meet him on the road.  Hannah is still someone who is there to help.  She is a good elder in that she seldom offers unsolicited advice, but she is ready to help when people present themselves at her doorstep, as happens when she takes in a ne’er-do-well grandson.  Now, it is true that Hannah (79) is younger than Jack (92), but it seems that Berry has moved from musing on care for the elderly (in Old Jack) to the care and wisdom that the elderly are able to give to their community.

In an even later Berry novel, the title character, Andy Catlett, remembers his grandfather sitting empty-handed in a rocking chair and “studying” every night in front of the fire.  From a perspective of years later, the older Andy says that he had no idea at the time as to what the old man was “studying,” but “now I have aged into knowledge of what he was thinking about.”

This blog (When I Come to Be Old) is titled after a series of admonitions that Jonathan Swift wrote to himself about old age, when he was but thirty-two.  He promises himself not “to tell the same story over and over to the same People,” “not to talk much or of myself,” “not to boast of my former … favor with the ladies,” and so on.   The list is lively enough to show that Swift has given the matter some thought; it also shows a lack of sympathy with the elderly around him.  He is wise enough to end it: “Not to set up for observing all these Rules; for fear I should observe none.”  Old age is another world; Swift calls the state of extreme old age as being as a “foreigner in his own country.”  By the time that Berry has reached that stage, he is giving his older characters more depth, more autonomy.   Or so it would seem.  Both books are highly recommended.

This week’s story, “Skillful Means,” is about the distance between intention and reality.  It was written (partially) out of my own memory and my own good intentions.