Literature: What Old Age is Really Like

 

Tattoo exhibit, Royal Ontario Museum, photo of Fang-od Oggay - June 2016, Toronto

Below are excerpts from: What Old Age Really Looks Like, a 2015 article by novelist and essayist, Ceridwen Dovey, published in The New Yorker. I have made a few structural changes for more visual readability here, such as chunking and bulleting. 

What does it feel like to be old? Not middle-aged, or late-middle-aged, but one of the members of the fastest-growing demographic: the “oldest old,” those aged eighty-five and above? 

This has been the question animating me for a couple of years, as I’ve tried to write a novel from the perspective of a man in his late eighties. ..... 

Somewhere along the way, though, things went wrong. My protagonist became Generic Old Man: crabby, computer illiterate, grieving for his dementia-addled wife. .... I forced on him a new love interest, Eccentric Old Woman: radical, full of energy, a fan of wearing magenta turbans and handing out safe-sex pamphlets outside retirement homes.

In other words, I modelled my characters on the two dominant cultural constructions of old age: the doddering, depressed pensioner and the ageless-in-spirit, quirky oddball. 

After reading the first draft, an editor I respect said to me, “But what else are they, other than old?” ....

... Why did I so blithely assume that I had the right to imagine my way into old age.... when I would approach with extreme caution the task of imagining my way into the interior world of a character of a different gender, race, or class? .... 

The conundrum of who has the authority to write about old age .... 

....  like any fictional representation, old age can be done well or badly ... but there’s less chance of being called out on hackneyed depictions of old age, in part because those in the know—the over-eighty-five-year-olds themselves—haven’t historically had any cultural power.

Stereotypes of old age, whether positive or negative, do real harm in the real world, argues Lynne Segal, the author of “Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing” (2013). ...

... [In] age critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s ... 2004 book, “Aged by Culture[,]” Gullette highlights the limitations of having only two socially accepted narratives of aging: stories of progress or stories of decline. 

Neither [narrative] does justice to the “radical ambiguities” of old age, Segal says. We’re forced either to lament or to celebrate old age, rather than simply “affirm it as a significant part of life.”

Old age is perplexing to imagine in part because the definition of it is notoriously unstable. ... We tend to feel younger as we get older: almost half the respondents aged fifty or more reported feeling at least ten years younger than their actual age, while a third of respondents aged sixty-five or more said that they felt up to nineteen years younger. ....

... Young and middle-aged adults anticipate the “negative benchmarks” associated with aging (such as memory loss, illness, or an end to sexual activity) at much higher levels than the old report experiencing them. However, the elderly also report experiencing fewer of the benefits that younger adults expect old age to bring (such as more time for travel, hobbies, or volunteer work).

These perceptual gaps between generations are large and persistent. Simone de Beauvoir, in her exhaustive study “The Coming of Age” (published in 1970, when she was sixty-two), wrote, “Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species.” ...

... We age as individuals and as members of particular social contexts, yet the shared experience of old age continues to be overstated. The eighty-two-year-old British novelist Penelope Lively writes that her demographic has “nothing much in common except the accretion of years, a historical context, and a generous range of ailments.” At the same time, though, she warns that aging is such a “commonplace experience” that nobody should “behave as though … uniquely afflicted.”

The actress Juliet Stevenson, who is in her late fifties, recently commented that “as you go through life it gets more and more interesting and complicated, but the parts offered get more and more simple, and less complicated.” ...

... [An example of nuanced writing about an elderly character] is the thirty-seven-year-old Australian author Fiona McFarlane’s 2013 début novel, “The Night Guest.” McFarlane’s protagonist, Ruth, though succumbing to dementia and at the mercy of an unreliable caregiver, is capable of seeing beauty or taking great pleasure in her present—in a sexual encounter, for example—while also deriving equal parts enjoyment and pain from memories of her unusual past. She is neither hilarious nor terrifying. McFarlane says that, while writing Ruth, she thought of her as “an individual who, at seventy-five, is the sum of years of experience, memory, opinion, prejudice, decision-making, and desire.”

But why search for depictions of old age by the young when I should instead be seeking out narratives by natives of old age? I don’t mean the rich body of work by late-middle-aged authors, which tends to be more about the fear of aging than about the experience of old age itself ...,  but literature written by authors aged seventy-five and older.

......  Frank Kermode summed up the problem: “Those who have had actual experience of old age are likely to be dead or very tired or just reluctant to discuss the matter with clever young interlocutors.” Philip Roth, for example, who is now eighty-two, decided to retire from writing at the age of seventy-eight, after the publication of his quartet of “Nemeses” novels, saying in an interview about fiction, “I don’t want to read any more, write any more of it, I don’t even want to talk about it anymore ... I’m tired of all that work. I’m in a different stage of my life.” .....

[Penelope] Lively has also chosen to share her view from old age in a memoir, “Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time,” from 2013. This is not a traditional memoir but a meditation on old age and memory. She takes pride in her right to speak of these things. “One of the few advantages of age ... is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here.” She also highlights the importance of the mission: “Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers.” She likes the anonymity that old age has given her; it leaves her “free to do what a novelist does anyway, listen and watch, but with the added spice of feeling a little as though I am some observant time-traveller.” ... 

... My to-read list now includes:

• Stories by the ninety-six-year-old Emyr Humphreys; 
• Late work by Doris Lessing, Chinua Achebe, and Seamus Heaney; 
• Poetry by Elaine Feinstein, Dannie Abse, Maureen Duffy, and Ruth Fainlight;
• A new novel by the seventy-three-year-old Erica Jong, “Fear of Dying”; 
• Fiction by William Trevor, David Lodge, Kent Haruf, Toni Morrison, and Kenzaburo Oe; 
• Memoirs by Vivian Gornick, Roger Angell, and Diana Athill.