Tag: Sophocles

Very Old People, Vollendungsromans,  and Lore Segal

When I was young, I devoured “coming of age” novels.  These works are often classified as Bildungsromans – bildung meaning “education” and romans, “novel.”  Think of Catcher in the Rye, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or Little Women – you surely had your own favorites.  I clung to such books because I was looking for a chart for navigating my changing world.  Now, I suppose, YA (Young Adult) novels fill this niche – although I would guess there might be a good reason to read an adult-level book if an adult is what you are trying to become (grumbles the old lady).

As I approach old age or move from a “greener” old age to a drier, more fragile, old age, I look for books about the coming of an even older age.  There is also a term for books about the “winding down” of life: Vollendungsroman.  And, while it is important to me that such books be written by someone who has experienced the last vestiges of life, there are not a whole lot of people who are still writing at the outer limits, into their 90s or beyond.  I have written about some of them here, but we just lost a master in this regard, and it is Lore Segal whom I want to talk about today.

Last October, there was an article entitled “A Master Storyteller at the End of Her Story” in the NYTimes Sunday magazine about Lore Segal’s last days.  It was published in the same month that she died at age 96 and noted that she wrote (sometimes dictating) until the very end. In the article was this notation from an author-friend of Segal’s:

“With writers who survive into their old age my sense is that sometimes the spirit is willing, but the ability to get it onto the page starts to wane,” says the critic and author James Marcus, a close friend of Lore’s. “It’s just not true for Lore.”

He goes on to say that he was struck by her late writings’ “unsparing depiction of a period of life – namely the end – that is typically rendered with a gauzy wistfulness, if it’s ever rendered at all.”   Segal herself says this:

The point of writing, I believe, is finding the right words.  And being old is being old.  Dying is dying.  You must not be scared to say it.

No euphemisms for this old lady.  She wrote a series of stories about a group of old ladies who have met periodically for lunch over the decades.  Many of the stories were collected in Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories, but the last one was published in the New Yorker just as Segal died; it was a series of vignettes about her ladies and was entitled “Stories About Us.”

When I was newly married, I talked to other young women about keeping house (how often do you wash your sheets?), furnishings, saving up to buy a house.  When I was a young mother, I queried my friends about how to get babies to sleep through the night.  As a working woman, I had lunch with my friends and talked about our bosses, chances for promotion, what to wear to the office, and whether to divorce our husbands.  Later, when we were all middle-aged, we talked about retirement – where, when, how much did we need?  Newly retired people talk about travel, classes, investments, hobbies.  Slightly older people seem to discuss physical therapists, dental work, cruises, and fears for our grandchildren.  All of this is familiar I am sure – but what do really old people talk about?  Lore Segal gives this to us. Her ladies are done with trivial topics.  Together, they are looking into the face of the death, and it is refreshing.

Segal’s ladies have rules.  They take a full twenty minutes (and no more) to chronicle their latest ailments; they keep up with each other’s families, but also with a limit.  They strategize with each other about how to stay in their own apartments (despite the machinations of their desperate families). They think out loud about the end of life.  How will it happen?  Who will go next?  They have conversations that they could not have with their children or grandchildren.  “Our children would not believe how calmly we look around the table wondering which one of us will be next,” says one of the ladies.  They are proud of being “commonsensical.”

They talk about all the things they have resolved never to do again – travel, see movies in the theater, driving – and then they talk about reneging on their resolutions.  They bond against their common enemies – who are often their own children.  They support each other, while realizing that holding on forever is a losing cause.  And they are brave.  Oedipus at Colonus walks into the sacred grove to meet his fate; these ladies face the ambulances and nursing homes with the same grace. (By the way, Oedipus at Colonus was written when Sophocles was over 90.)

Many of the ladies in the stories are Holocaust survivors; Lore Segal was one.  She came to England on the Kindertransport, and later to New York with her mother.  In the end, these ladies come back to that early experience of knowing death was just outside the door.  “There are no happy endings,” one of the characters reminds us.  They reminisce that they have spent their busy, intellectual lives asking “why?” and “what is it all about?”  with few answers.  And still the end comes knocking at the door.  Reading Segal reminds us that this is the human condition.  And the attitude toward the human condition should be sharing, acceptance, and the noticing of how the “fuchsia blooms” on our way out.  Lore Segal’s stories are highly recommended.

Drama of Old Age – Oedipus at Colonus

Sophocles was in his nineties when he wrote Oedipus at Colonus; we think it was not performed until after his death.  It is, of course, part of the cycle that starts with Oedipus Rex  and ends with Antigone, but Colonus was written last and reveals an Oedipus with a different temperament than the younger, brasher man who was overcome by and angry at his fate.  Oedipus is now old and has found a kind of reconciliation with what has happened to him: “You’ll never find / A man on earth, if a god leads him on, / Who can escape his fate.”  So Oedipus seems to have dispensed with the guilt.  He is in a grove near Athens, getting ready to die, and to lend his protective spirit to Athens rather than to Thebes.  The gods have said that whoever accepts the dying Oedipus will be “blessed.”  Oedipus has no wish to bless Thebes, the city that cursed him.   

Oedipus is not the only old person in the play.  Old Creon shows up trying to convince Oedipus to die at Thebes, and the chorus is composed of “elders.”  Oedipus has come to the sacred grove at Colonus (outside of Athens) with his adoring daughters (Ismene and Antigone), and has a confrontation with one of his two hated sons.  But, while the passionate young Oedipus spurned fate, the aged Oedipus has decided to accept his fate and die in the sacred grove.  Zeus thunders his approval. 

In his posthumous book, On Late Style, Edward Said differentiates between two artistic approaches at the end of creative lives.  He proposes that some aging literary and musical artists reflect “a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity often expressed in terms of miraculous transformation of common reality,” and puts the Sophocles of Oedipus at Colonus in this category, along with the Shakespeare of the late romances (think of Winter’s Tale or The Tempest).  These writers have come to a kind of late serenity, and perhaps also a kind of truce with death.  I would probably put Eliot’s Elder Statesman in this category too.  There are angry old people too, though, and not everyone comes to resolution, peace.  While Oedipus says that his “experience and length of days teach me to be content,” even Oedipus comes to no reconciliation with Thebes, Creon, or his sons.  Reconciliation should not require capitulation.  And perhaps contentment does not require any reconciliation beyond one’s own conscience.

Colonus influenced Eliot’s Elder Statesman and also influenced other writers.  E. M. Forster (at a much younger age) rewrote Colonus as a perfectly wonderful short story (“The Road to Colonus“) with a completely different ending.  In the story, the aging Mr. Lucas is touring Greece with his caring daughter Ethel.  The story starts with the sentences: “For no very intelligible reason, Mr. Lucas had hurried ahead of his party.  He was perhaps reaching the age at which independence becomes valuable, because it is soon to be lost.”  And, of course, we find out that it is already too late. We can all relate to that.  The party comes through the parched countryside to a ramshackle inn by a spring in a grove of trees.  An oasis of sorts.   Mr. Lucas finds some peace there by an old tree; he wants to stay; he wants to die there.  But unlike the obedient daughters of Oedipus, the efficient Ethel is having none of this.  He gets tricked into leaving and spends the rest of his life not exactly living with his daughter and her husband back in England.  We learn later that the inn was destroyed when the tree fell later that evening; Mr. Lucas was meant to die there but did not accept (or was not allowed to accept) his fate.  While his daughter Ethel says, “Such a marvelous deliverance does make one believe in Providence,” we are left to conclude that escaping Providence was a disaster for the poor old man living half a life in his daughter’s house back in England, forever complaining about the noise and forever being ignored.

Colonus is full of strange and mysterious occurrences.  So is life.  We can rage against the things we do not like (including our own mortality – think of Dylan Thomas’s advice that “Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light”).   However, if we rage on and on,  we may lose any ability to enjoy the parts of life that we do like.  “Our life is not as pitiful as you’d think,” says the elderly Oedipus, “as long as we find joy in every hour.”  This sounds a little like Lear’s speech to Cordelia: “Come, let’s away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage… and take upon’s the mystery of things.”  There is, perhaps, time in old age to take upon ourselves the mystery of things.  And to let them be. 

I drafted a novel once about the Great Books Institute which takes place every year at Colby College.  If you are interested in what my fictional readers had to say about Colonus, click here.