How great literature can change your life

Wednesday

I once had an exuberant friend, stage actress Maurine Holbert Hogaboom, who declared that each decade of her life was better than the one before. Her sixties were better than her fifties, she said, and her seventies better than her sixties. To be sure, she stopped saying this once she reached her nineties—she lived to be 98—which would mean that, in her eyes, she reached her peak in her eighties. Still, she made a compelling case for the joys of aging.

I thought about Maurine while reading a recent New Yorker article by Arthur Krystal, who is skeptical of such claims. Krystal takes aim at the spate of books claiming that our senior years are a time “to celebrate ourselves and the wonderful things to come: traveling, volunteering, canoodling, acquiring new skills, and so on.” He pays special attention to “five chatty accounts meant to reassure us that getting old just means that we have to work harder at staying young.” In Krystal’s contrarian view, it’s still better to be young.

Literature for Krystal has more authority than the various sociologists, psychologists, and self-help gurus he mentions. I use today’s post to dig into the literary works he mentions.

Looking at recent fiction, Krystal notes the sheer number of novels that are being produced:

Now that we’re living longer, we have the time to write books about living longer—so many, in fact, that the Canadian critic Constance Rooke, in 1992, coined the term “Vollendungsroman,” a somewhat awkward complement to “Bildungsroman,” to describe novels about the end of life, such as Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn, Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, and Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird.” Since then, plenty of elderly protagonists have shown up in novels by Louis Begley (About Schmidt), Sue Miller (The Distinguished Guest), Saul Bellow (Ravelstein), Philip Roth (Everyman), and Margaret Drabble (The Dark Flood Rises). 

“The library on old age,” Krystal observes wryly, “has grown so voluminous that the fifty million Americans over the age of sixty-five could spend the rest of their lives reading such books, even as lusty retirees and power-lifting septuagenarians turn out new ones.”

Krystal doesn’t attempt to synthesize the vision of aging that arises from these novels other than to say that “there are as many ways to grow old as there are people going about it.” If one is to go by the classic authors that he cites, however, aging is a grimmer process than the recent flood of self-help books indicates.

To be sure, there are exceptions, one of which is Walt Whitman:

YOUTH, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace,
 force, fascination?

And of course, there’s Tennyson’s well-known “Ulysses,” although Krystal points out that it was written when the author was “a mere twenty-four”:

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

Krystal finds many more grim versions of aging, including Gulliver’s Travels’ Struldbrugs, some of whom are born immortal. Sounding like one of those old age enthusiasts that Krystal targets, Gulliver initially sees this as a blessing:

I cried out, as in a rapture, “Happy nation, where every child hath at least a chance for being immortal!  Happy people, who enjoy so many living examples of ancient virtue, and have masters ready to instruct them in the wisdom of all former ages! but happiest, beyond all comparison, are those excellent struldbrugs, who, being born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature, have their minds free and disengaged, without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehensions of death!”  

Gulliver figures that the Struldbrugs will have the wisdom to provide the best counsel. This perspective, incidentally, is shared by Plato, who according to Krystal “thought philosophy best suited to men of more mature years.”

Gulliver, however, in then informed that immortality is a nightmare:

When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying.  They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren.  Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions.

This sounds more like Aristotle’s vision of the elderly. Krystal notes that Ars Rhetorica “contains long passages denouncing old men as miserly, cowardly, cynical, loquacious, and temperamentally chilly.”

Other literary characters that offer up unflattering images of old age include:

–January from Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, who marries May and, for such a violation of the natural order, is predictably cuckolded. (The same occurs to the old carpenter in The Miller’s Tale.)

–Tennyson’s Tithonous, once beautiful but, like the Struldbrugs, now aging without any hope of death. Tennyson writes:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,

The vapours weep their burthen to the ground…

…I wither slowly in thine arms,

Here at the quiet limit of the world,

A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream…

–old people as described by the misanthropic Jaques in As You Like It:

                             The sixth age shifts
 Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
 With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
 His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
 For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
 Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
 And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
 That ends this strange eventful history,
 Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
 Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

–Yeats’s old man in “Sailing to Byzantium,” who sadly acknowledges that “this is no country for old men” as he watches the young in one another’s arms. In the course of the poem he describes himself as

a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, 

and containing  a heart that is

sick with desire 
 And fastened to a dying animal...

Krystal quotes poet Louise Bogan’s observation that “[a]t first we want life to be romantic; later, to be bearable; finally, to be understandable,” but only to challenge that final goal. “I have my doubts about whether the piling on of years really does add to our understanding of life,” he says, and then quotes King Lear’s second daughter:

Doesn’t Regan say of her raging royal father, “Tis the infirmity of his age: yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself”? The years may broaden experience and tint perspective, but is wisdom or contentment certain to follow?

To accentuate the point, he quotes the poet author of Ecclesiastes:

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever. In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. . . . The fate of the fool will overtake me also. What then do I gain by being wise? This too is meaningless.

To all these overvaluations of old age, Krystal answers with depressing biological facts and the following dash of cold water:

Sure, there’s life in the old boy yet, but certain restrictions apply. The body—tired, aching, shrinking—now quite often embarrasses us. Many older men have to pee right after they pee, and many older women pee whenever they sneeze. [Clinical psychologist Mary] Pipher [author of Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age] and company might simply say “Gesundheit” and urge us on. Life, they insist, doesn’t necessarily get worse after seventy or eighty. But it does, you know. 

Given how well-read Krystal is, I’m amazed that he doesn’t mention Samuel Johnson, either Rasselas or The Vanity of Human Wishes. Both systematically deconstruct the prospect of elderly happiness. In Rasselas the youthful protagonists seek out an old man and are disabused of the notion that they have anything positive to look forward to:

As they walked along the banks of the Nile, delighted with the beams of the moon quivering on the water, they saw at a small distance an old man whom the Prince had often heard in the assembly of the sages.  “Yonder,” said he, “is one whose years have calmed his passions, but not clouded his reason.  Let us close the disquisitions of the night by inquiring what are his sentiments of his own state, that we may know whether youth alone is to struggle with vexation, and whether any better hope remains for the latter part of life.”

…

“Sir,” said the Princess, “an evening walk must give to a man of learning like you pleasures which ignorance and youth can hardly conceive.  You know the qualities and the causes of all that you behold—the laws by which the river flows, the periods in which the planets perform their revolutions.  Everything must supply you with contemplation, and renew the consciousness of your own dignity.”

“Lady,” answered he, “let the gay and the vigorous expect pleasure in their excursions: it is enough that age can attain ease.  To me the world has lost its novelty.  I look round, and see what I remember to have seen in happier days.  I rest against a tree, and consider that in the same shade I once disputed upon the annual overflow of the Nile with a friend who is now silent in the grave.  I cast my eyes upwards, fix them on the changing moon, and think with pain on the vicissitudes of life.  I have ceased to take much delight in physical truth; for what have I to do with those things which I am soon to leave?”

“You may at least recreate yourself,” said Imlac, “with the recollection of an honorable and useful life, and enjoy the praise which all agree to give you.”

“Praise,” said the sage with a sigh, “is to an old man an empty sound.  I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of her son, nor wife to partake the honors of her husband.  I have outlived my friends and my rivals.  Nothing is now of much importance; for I cannot extend my interest beyond myself.  Youth is delighted with applause, because it is considered as the earnest of some future good, and because the prospect of life is far extended; but to me, who am now declining to decrepitude, there is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet less to be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they may yet take away, but they can give me nothing.  Riches would now be useless, and high employment would be pain.  My retrospect of life recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy.  I leave many great designs unattempted, and many great attempts unfinished.  My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, and therefore I compose myself to tranquillity; endeavour to abstract my thoughts from hopes and cares which, though reason knows them to be vain, still try to keep their old possession of the heart; expect, with serene humility, that hour which nature cannot long delay, and hope to possess in a better state that happiness which here I could not find, and that virtue which here I have not attained.”

He arose and went away, leaving his audience not much elated with the hope of long life.

Vanity of Human Wishes offers more of the same. If you wish to grow old, you will either get (1) days filled with pain or, (2) days filled with the death of friends and loved ones, not to mention a fading of life’s joys. On the one hand, “Unnumber’d maladies his joints invade, /Lay siege to life and press the dire blockade.” On the other,

New sorrow rises as the day returns,
A sister sickens, or a daughter mourns.
Now kindred Merit fills the sable bier,
Now lacerated Friendship claims a tear.
Year chases year, decay pursues decay,
Still drops some joy from with’ring life away...

Take your choice.

Krystal’s article is very Johnsonian only Johnson takes an axe to youth as well to aging. In fact, give up on ever achieving happiness in the material world, the great cham informs us. The final chapter of Rasselas is entitled, “Conclusion, in which nothing is concluded.”

Given that Krystal wants to rip off our rose-colored glasses and show aging for what it really is, he would stand to benefit from the concluding advice of Johnson’s Vanity. Look to heaven, Johnson tells us, because only there will you find “the celestial wisdom that calms the mind, /And makes the happiness she does not find.”

So happiness in old age? Forget it.