Out of Time (29 page)

Suffering, and resistance to it, opened up for Rich a concept of ‘radical happiness’, which she developed from Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘public happiness’, both terms referring to the shared happiness that can be found in public displays of freedom, or the forging of communities working for better times.
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This is the happiness that Rich saw flowing from a sense of ‘true participation in society’, a condition she longed to see extended to everyone.
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She talked of experiencing such public happiness in Chile, speaking to the 50,000 people attending the huge poetry festival that followed the arrest of Pinochet in 2001. It was a feeling she could sense around her again, she said, travelling that same year to Seattle where the World Trade Organization was meeting, to witness the collective spirit of ‘anti-globalization’ protest, which had grown even larger since its beginnings in November 1999.
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This is what she was seeking in her old age, whether in life or in poetry, both in life and in poetry, as she said introducing a general anthology of American poetry in the
mid 1990s: ‘I was looking for poetry that could rouse me from fatigue, stir me from grief, poetry that was redemptive in the sense of offering a kind of deliverance or rescue of the imagination, and poetry that awoke delight … pleasure in recognition, pleasure in strangeness.’
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Over ten years later, her thoughts were much the same. As she wrote in 2009, the year she turned eighty: ‘Wherever I turn these days, I’m looking, from the corner of my eye, for a certain kind of poetry whose balance of dread and beauty is equal to the balance of chaotic negations that pursue us … A complex, dialogic, coherent poetry to dissolve both complacency and despair.’
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However, while engagement in the political may offer individuals some form of transcendence of their isolation, or at least a sense of meaning to life beyond the purely personal, it too can let us down, begetting its own forms of anguish. Confronting complacency and dissolving despair was what women’s liberation set out to do over forty years ago. The ‘personal is political’ became a key axiom of the movement in the 1970s, though hardly one that has survived as an unambiguous unifier. At first, it meant the spotlight of political analysis was to be shone on shared confusions, constraints and troubles in women’s personal lives. Later it was suborned as an entitlement to individual satisfaction, or mocked in the sale of Liberty lifestyle accessories – whether as the Faveo ‘freedom bra’, or liberty footwear or belts for women. It is a more challenging question to wonder whether, as Rich hoped, the political can remain a way of guiding one’s life to the end, encouraging us as best we can to support struggles for social justice and, in the process, helping us to maintain meaningful ties to others.

The American feminist and full-time activist Carol Hanisch is generally taken to have coined the phrase ‘the personal is
political’ in her 1969 paper of the same name. In fact, as she later pointed out, the phrase was not her own, but the title attached by others to a piece she wrote to defend the significance of ‘consciousness raising’ in the search for collective solutions to many women’s problems: ‘Women, like blacks, workers, must stop blaming ourselves for our “failures”.’
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Exactly twenty years later, in 1989, living alone with little professional, social or emotional security, Hanisch wrote to a friend about the personal costs of being an ageing activist in dispiriting times: ‘I have had some pretty bad bouts of depression and burnout, and even sometimes when I’ve had to focus on just getting through to keep from going down all the way … I know the panic and fear that getting older engenders – especially without money and family.’
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At other times, she wrote, her political energy and focus would return, especially when new progressive struggles emerged, enabling her ‘to present something more than a despairing, beaten down, aging feminist waxing nostalgically for the “good old days” ’.
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Many other pioneering women’s liberationists from the USA expressed similar sentiments at much the same time. Rosalind Baxandall, for instance, shared her disappointment with the political legacies of women’s liberation in the 1990s: ‘I never imagined twenty years of conservative rule, nor the steady watering down of feminism by professionals, liberals and self-help artists.’ Nevertheless, the majority of these radical women, like Baxandall herself, conclude that politics had enlivened their lives and would continue to be ‘a large part’ of it, however arrested their dreams for change.
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Moreover, it is still politics that deepens and gives meaning to their lives, whether animating them with desire, or with despair.

In October 2011, a fresh article by Baxandall, now in her
seventies, expressed a surge of delight as she reported back from visits to the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest, camping out in Zuccotti Park in New York. In it she voiced her unexpected hope that a new movement was being born, one educating itself about the causes of the banking crisis, knowing that even as so many North Americans had lost almost everything – their homes, savings, health insurance and jobs – the salaries of bankers and managerial staff simply continued to rise: ‘At last the 99 per cent are shaming them’, she wrote exuberantly:
‘This is not a Recession; It’s Robbery
, one sign read in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement.’ Suddenly, for many erstwhile rebels, women and men alike, public joy was again being shared. Baxandall captured what she saw as the renewal of her old ideals: ‘The Occupiers have dreams and a vision, too: of a just, peaceful, diverse, democratic world, where democracy serves more than global capitalism and the greedy one per cent.’
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However flickering it may prove, Baxandall is thus one of a cross-generational multitude of young and old whose dissenting voices are being heard again throughout the USA. Having been influenced by the Arab uprisings in the winter of 2011, and in turn influencing occupations in other cities around the globe, OWS in its opening weeks not only managed to elicit a radical spirit cutting across generational divisions but, surprisingly, as the British journalist Polly Toynbee celebrated, quickly gained support from 54 per cent of Americans aware of the protest, and strong endorsement from a quarter of the population, according to a poll in
Time
magazine.
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Commitment to radical politics certainly has its pitfalls, yet it often turns out to be enduring, even when political hopes wax and wane as resistance is crushed and its initial impact dims.
This is confirmed by Margaretta Jolly, the British scholar who specializes in analysing life-stories. She has studied a variety of late-life memoirs, including my own, which suggest how fluid the boundary can be between success in the mainstream, involving consent, and participation in oppositional protest and dissent: ‘People’s stories show them going back and forth, often working simultaneously on both sides.’
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Another practitioner of narrative research, the British sociologist Molly Andrews, also reported on the enduring significance of political commitment throughout the course of a lifetime. She looked at the life histories of fifteen men and women she interviewed, aged between seventy and ninety, who had worked for progressive change for half a century or more. With a couple of exceptions, these were not famous people, but ordinary men and women who ‘despite, or perhaps because of, their advanced years’ remained committed to securing social justice when called upon for support.
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All her interviewees had been active in the peace movement and several in the Communist Party of Great Britain. Each explained that, just as it always had, it was politics that still gave meaning to their lives: ‘It gives you a motive for going on living. It’s very strong. It is survival’ (171), confided the peace activist and long-term member of the Communist Party, Eileen Daffern, in her late seventies. Others in their eighties were just as confident that socialism was a goal worth fighting for, fighting over, though knowing they would not see it realized in their lifetime. In the closing pages of the book, Andrews quotes from her interviews with the late Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, who had dedicated his life to the anti-Apartheid campaign in South Africa, where he had lived for many years. In his late seventies he reflected: ‘I’ve become more revolutionary
every year I’ve lived. And certainly now, because life is so much shorter’ (204).

The lesson that Andrews herself is eager to convey to her readers is that certain people sustain their radical outlook to the very end, whatever the obstacles, and moreover that, just as we saw with Adrienne Rich, it is precisely this fighting spirit that in turn sustains them in old age. Once again we can turn to another poet, storyteller and feminist heroine of mine, Grace Paley, for an eloquent reiteration of the theme. She also always emphasized what she had gained personally from her political commitments, especially the political ties that kept her in touch with a younger generation as she aged. Approaching seventy she reflected that being more than twenty years older than the movers and shakers of women’s liberation, the menopause and the movement arrived together in her life, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, enabling her to savour the ‘wild, delighted’ activities of her many new friends in women’s liberation:

The high anxious but hopeful energy of the time, the general political atmosphere, and the particular female moment had a lot to do with the fact that I can’t remember my menopause or, remembering it, haven’t thought to write much about it … I’ve asked some of my age mates, old friends, and they feel pretty much the same way. We were busy. Life was simply heightened by opposition, and hope was essential … If I were going through my menopause now, I think I would remember it years later more harshly.
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A few years later, introducing an anthology of all her writing to date in 1994, Grace Paley again briefly surveyed her own life and work. The first piece of ‘little luck’ in her life was, she
said, the way in which she managed to get her early stories published, when it turned out that the father of one of her children’s friends worked in publishing. However, the ‘big luck’, as she saw it, had to do with political movements. It was the fact that before too long her writing coincided with and soon contributed to the women’s movement, a powerful wave she felt added buoyancy, noise and saltiness to both her life and her work.

Again she stressed that her political writing and activism also meant she continued to meet new young people, on demonstrations and in meetings, little and large, whether in demanding play spaces for children or in coalitions for peace and justice. It meant as well that she continued to meet the same old companions who, whether ‘in lively neighbourhood walks against the Gulf War’ or ‘in harsh confrontations with ourselves and others’, managed to remain ‘interested and active in literature and the world and are now growing old together’.
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The collection is dedicated to one of those friends, the writer and fellow peace activist, Sybil Claiborne, whose black humour she had always shared, even as she lay dying of lung cancer in a hospice. This was a woman with whom Paley had talked and talked for nearly forty years. Three days before Sybil died, Paley recalled, ‘she said slowly, with the delicacy of an unsatisfied person with only a dozen words left, “Grace, the real question is – how are we to live our lives” ’.
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Even at death’s door, the question remains open until that exit finally closes behind us.

What was unusual about the old people Andrews chose to interview was their certainty that one day, however distant, their radical goals would be accomplished. Few of us share such certainties today, whether we incline towards French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s radical suspicion of any application of universal standards and values, or are more in tune with the
German critical theorist Theodor Adorno’s sense of the inevitability of tragedy in human affairs. Faced with the power and tenacity of the forces producing and sustaining continued inequality and oppression today, a certain intellectual pessimism seems hard to avoid. Nevertheless, a refusal to abandon some form of resistance to the brutalities of the present, and the determination to acknowledge the existence of those whose suffering is routinely ignored or denied, will always add a certain significance and meaning to life. Or perhaps, as Judith Butler pondered recently, on receiving the prestigious Adorno Prize in Frankfurt in 2012, it will enable us to wonder, even when nothing is as we would wish it to be: ‘Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life?’
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For certain, our political hopes may continue to be disappointed or defeated much of the time. Yet here again, in collective endeavours as in personal life, the conscious effort to understand and communicate the near inevitability of a certain tragic residue in the wake of political struggles helps keep us alive to life itself. Amidst much gloom, resistance has for some of us, and certainly for me, its own intrinsic beauty.

6
Affirming Survival

The real question is – how are we to live our lives? Many may feel that, at some point, old age makes that question redundant. I do not agree. It should be posed so long as we are still capable of asking it. The tragedy, however, may be that there is nobody left alive who is really listening to what the old have to say, especially for those without resources, if or when they become increasingly dependent.