Out of Time (18 page)

I read these women’s words, and I ponder my own life. I can see that I identify with those women who keep doors open to passion of all kinds as they age. At the close of my sixties, I am still pushing on doors myself, still in need of attention, affection and praise, fearing that one day I will lose them all. Yet while I know I am hardly unique, I can see others making different accommodations with ageing. I do not share the tranquillity of those who feel that they are freed from the perils of physical desire, or who say they no longer fear the loss of the world’s regard, but as I will explore further in later chapters, perhaps they are following pathways I have yet to find.

4
The Ties That Bind

There is another side to intimacy that does not involve the kindling and consummation of sexual activity. Instead it includes all the diverse forms of attachment, commitment and the many personal responsibilities we feel towards others, with their promise of comfort and support, and their risk of encumbrance and loss. There is little doubt that the symbolic ideal of such attachment, as well as its often-messy actuality, comes first and foremost from the original maternal encounter. The woman giving birth to a baby for the very first time is jolted into a reality where she will find that she is no longer the autonomous being she was before, but rather someone who must be ‘there for another’: ‘Yes, motherhood’, as Lisa Baraitser writes, ‘is the pitilessness of the present tense … The [baby’s] cry pulls me out of whatever I was embedded in, and before I have a chance to re-equilibrate, it pulls me out again.’
¹
In Freudian thought, which so often mirrors aspects of folk wisdom, we love in order to be loved, telling us that there is always a narcissistic component to our love for another. Yet love, in any depth, also necessarily means surrendering something of oneself to another person.

What we may come to love and nurture, and in turn receive
satisfaction from, also extends beyond the interpersonal to other living creatures and even specific spaces, activities and situations, as we project ourselves into familiar surroundings and events, animating them with properties that soothe and comfort us in our own care and attention to them. The gay American poet Mark Doty, for instance, in his lyrical memoir
Dog Years
, describes how his attachment to the two dogs, Beau and Arden, he loved for sixteen years, helped him to bear the grief of caring for his lover, Wally, as he died from AIDS.
²
As we will see, Donna Haraway also writes eloquently of love and forms of intimacy that extend from humans to animals, especially those interacting most closely with humans. It is these enduring ties, whether to people, places or pursuits, that can facilitate ways of visualizing the process of ageing as a time of preservation and possibility, quite as much as one of devastation and decline.

Forging Myths

‘Old age can be magnificent’, the redoubtable May Sarton wrote in one of her prolific reflections on the topic in her journal,
The House by the Sea
, published in 1977 when she was sixty-five.
³
Sarton was so resolutely drawn to recording her experiences of ageing over many decades that she can be seen as America’s poet laureate of ageing, commanding our attention if only for her determination to live passionately to the very close of her life and influencing others who would attempt to follow in her footsteps. Sarton died in 1995 at eighty-three, maintaining till the end such a large readership that she often complained that answering her fan mail would kill her off. Yet, ironically, it was long periods of solitude and immersion in the beauties of the
natural world that Sarton famously said she longed for. Her ties, she alleged, were to her animals, her gardening, the joy of seeing her plants in bloom, arranging her flowers in vases, planning her writing, recording her reading. However, in what was just one of her many contradictions, Sarton relied upon the acknowledgement and love of her friends and admirers in order to fight off depression, even as she resented them for interfering with her solitude.

Opening
Journal of a Solitude
, the first and perhaps best known of her published journals, written when she was fifty-eight, Sarton reflected on living alone in Maine, suggesting ‘Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.’
⁴
Nevertheless, in just one of her contradictions, she longed for recognition of her work from the literary establishment, which she only received in old age, and then, especially, for her memoirs and journals so vigilantly depicting the creative challenges and triumphs of ageing. Sarton seemed not so much to fear ageing, or death, as to worry about not being adequately recognized as a poet and writer, aware that she would never ‘feel secure enough no longer to crave praise’.
⁵
In my experience, this longing for recognition and acceptance from those in whom we have invested power and authority rarely fades over the years, nor the particular delight of receiving praise from people we most admire, unless such longing is violently stamped out of us. If extinguished, as it may well be from lack of any sort of nourishment, what goes with it is usually the ability to feel any desire at all.

Born into the American upper middle class, Sarton knew that it was her financial and imaginative resources that enabled her to separate her physical dependence from the common disempowerment of ageing. Suffering quite early on from various
degenerative diseases, she sometimes indicated, unusually, that old age had enabled her to appreciate the joys of dependency on her closest friends for support and comfort: ‘Here’s a good thing’, she told one interviewer at seventy-nine, ‘I’ve certainly become much more passive.’
⁶

Moreover, she registers the plight of those less fortunate than herself, with no one to lean on, evident in the novel she wrote on reaching sixty,
As We Are Now
. This happened to be the first of Sarton’s books I read and admired in my own late thirties. It forced me to think in ways I had hitherto evaded about the extreme dispossession and humiliation faced by the old if they end up helpless and alone when in need of care. In this novel, the dehumanizing treatment in a nursing home is described in chilling detail, with its protagonist arousing the reader’s sympathy and concern throughout, even as her despair and final loss of all hope facing the bullying by the staff leads her to commit the terrible crime that closes the book, burning down what Sarton has depicted as a type of ‘concentration camp for the old’.
⁷

However, Sarton herself was most loved by her admirers – or censured by her critics – for the more characteristic stress she placed on depicting her own spiritual ties and cominglings with the natural world, remaining forever open to its aesthetic joys, while also describing how she tried to surmount the challenges each new day might offer. Though some critics saw her writing as overly self-absorbed, when looked at from the perspective of ageing it seems to me that there was always a type of politics to Sarton’s personal predilections. This involved her determined self-presentation as lacking any deep fears about ageing, combined with her love for those older people, usually women, who served as her main mentors, friends and lovers from her teenage years. Certainly, the American literary critics now
concerned with ageing, including Kathleen Woodward, Anne Wyatt-Brown, Barbara Frey Waxman and Silvia Henneberg, all suggest that her work is critical for anyone interested in old age.
⁸

In so many ways Sarton seems to have spent her whole life rehearsing for a creative old age, and throughout her adult life she claimed that ‘I have always been fond of old people, and I always wanted to be old.’
⁹
Or at least, what she always wanted were fresh chances to reinvent and re-imagine herself, something she felt she could learn from those older people to whom she was attracted. It was old age, she would say, which provided her with a deepening awareness of the fleeting transience of things, a thought she found moving rather than depressing, as long as she could capture it in memory and in writing, which for her slowed down the passing of time. It is not that Sarton was free from the fear ‘of dying in some inappropriate or gruesome way’, but that she was simply determined to hold on to what life offered her. It was this quality she used to beat back life-long threats of depression. She summed this up in her poem ‘Gestalt at Sixty’:

I worked out anguish in a garden.

Without the flowers,

The shadow of trees on snow, their punctuation,

I might not have survived.

…

How rich and long the hours become,

How brief the years,

…

I live like a baby

Who bursts into laughter

As a sunbeam on the wall,

Or like a very old woman

Entranced by the prick of stars

Through the leaves.

I am not ready to die,

But I am learning to trust death

As I have trusted life.
¹⁰

Having subverted the routine denigration of old age, Sarton later admitted that she tended to romanticize it.
¹¹
Nevertheless, given her life-long attachments to older women, any idealization on her part was not a self-serving outlook, acquired only when joining the ranks of the elderly herself. Throughout her life she was a genuine saboteur of the cultural segregation which most of us practice in our youth. She pioneered an approach decades before it was publicly politicized, first of all by just a few feminists, such as Cynthia Rich, younger sister of poet Adrienne Rich. In 1983, aged fifty, Rich co-edited the trailblazing book,
Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism
, with Barbara Macdonald, her much older lover. There she presented rallying calls echoing Sarton’s conviction that:

It is not natural, and it is dangerous, for younger women to be divided by a taboo from old women – to live in our own shaky towers of youth … It is intended, but it is not natural that we be ashamed of, dissociated from, our future selves, sharing men’s loathing for the women we are daily becoming. It is not natural that today … old women are still an absence for younger women.
¹²

It may be in a sense ‘natural’ for us to reach across the generations, given that as young women we will always have a strong, if usually ambivalent, connection to at least one older woman: our mother. However, it seems that it has been easier for certain lesbians, though far from all, to experience lasting love and friendship with older women, even as many straight women have found it easy to love and remain with older men.

Sarton was, famously, one of the first to celebrate her lesbian passions in fiction, at a time when this was still risky for a writer. In
Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
(1965), Sarton depicted her formidable heroine, Hilary Stevens (a character resembling her creator), reflecting upon the many women she has fallen in love with in the past who, although often unattainable, have always inspired her poetry. Sarton wrote this book when she was fifty-three, although tellingly she makes her eponymous heroine a woman already in her seventies.

It was always clear, however, that Sarton’s determined belief that creative reinvention can be intensified with ageing, even when very old and facing serious illness or death, extended well beyond her enjoyment of any erotic ties with women, many of which she had found anguished. Indeed, when she opens her journal,
At Seventy
, asking herself, ‘What is it like to be seventy?’ she at once supplied a string of cheerful responses. ‘I do not feel old at all, not as much a survivor as a person still on her way’, while adding: ‘I suppose real old age begins when one looks backwards rather than forward, but I look forward with joy to the years ahead and especially to the surprises that any day may bring.’ She admits to being haunted by the mistakes she has made in the past, but this only seems to lead her to repeat more strongly: ‘This is the best time of my life. I love
being old … I am surer about what my life is about, have less self-doubt to conquer.’

It was the difficult process of writing itself, her daily entries in her journal and the labours they recorded, but above all what she saw as her receptivity to change and the unpredictability of the future, that gave new meaning to her life. Sarton believed she coped with life far better at seventy than when she was fifty: ‘I think this is because I have learned to glide rather than to force myself at moments of tension.’ Moreover, she continued to form new emotional attachments at seventy, though she knows these erotic ties with women may no longer involve the same sort of physical sexual connection. Towards the end of this journal she described a delightful day she spent with her much older friend, Lotte Jacobi: ‘we talked and teased each other about our mutual propensity to become violently attached to someone, she at eighty-seven, me at seventy, the living proof that love is always possible, that special kind of love that always brings poetry with it’.
¹³

Sarton’s writing set the tone that many other women have followed, hoping to bring poetry into their own lives when dealing with the dilemmas of ageing. ‘She was … deluged with adorers, fans, visitors and letter-writers in love with her life, fulsome with praise’, as Sarton’s literary executor, the author and feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun commented.
¹⁴
What is less clear is the degree to which these admirers and followers noted what Sarton herself always acknowledged, namely the degree of
invention
she put into her self-making: ‘We are all myth-makers about ourselves’, she wrote in her mid-fifties, embarking on her first memoir,
Plant Dreaming Deep
(1968).
¹⁵
Indeed, she later confessed, one reason for writing her popular
Journal of a Solitude
(1973) was that she worried that she had
given the wrong impression about her ‘solitary’ life in that earlier book: ‘without my own intention, that book gives a false view. The anguish of my life here – its rages – is hardly mentioned. Now I hope to break through into the rough rocky depths, to the matrix itself. There is violence there and anger never resolved.’
¹⁶
The degree of fabrication, and all that was left unsaid about the difficulties of her ‘solitary’ life – a life that was actually often filled with friends and helpers – is also evident in a later interview for a documentary film about her work made when she was seventy-nine: ‘We have to make myths out of our lives in order to sustain them and I think this is partly how one handles the monster.’
¹⁷
The monster being life itself.