Out of Time (9 page)

I know some of these men, mourning their youthful days of righteous rage and self-dramatization. But I also know many other men who have found ways to continue some of their old progressive activism for a fairer world, in one form or another. They remain less prominent than the better known ageing men of the left who retain both their old political energy and can still find platforms for proclaiming their former socialist convictions, such as Stuart Hall, David Edgar, Tariq Ali, Robin Blackburn, John Pilger, Richard Gott, John Palmer, Richard
Kuper, and a multitude of other older denizens of remaining left institutions and publications. Nevertheless, I suspect that feminism, among other things, has provided a more durable lifeboat for many women of the left.

Sinclair is thus probably right to detect more disaffected older men from amongst the left. These are those who are not only more likely to agree with Hutton, but also to become far more belligerent castigators of their own generation, joining the latest judgmental chorus. Certainly that is the disparaging tone of the fiercest of the self-styled contrarians of recent years, including the journalist Nick Cohen, or writers such as Martin Amis and the late Christopher Hitchens in the decade before his recent death. All have been regularly full of bile and fury against what they regard as the self-deceptions, faults and follies of the left to which they once belonged. Amongst older women, the only equivalent I can think of is Melanie Phillips, who always hovered at the centre of the political spectrum before lurching violently to the right, whether in relation to socialist or feminist arenas.

There is little or no chance of ever communicating with the new contrarians. It would be instructive, however, if Will Hutton, and those more mildly inclined to agree with him, were to glance, perhaps again, at the memorable words of one our most incisive and poetic forebears, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin condemns exactly those who dismiss the diversity of the seeds of hope that have animated the struggles of the past:

In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it … Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
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Thatcher and her monetarist friends, even today, especially today, have not ceased to be victorious, as the current Tory-led coalition in Britain returns to her polities of welfare cuts, military ventures, and the expansion of an insecure and deregulated workforce.

Moreover, far from all boomers have shared the luck of their professionally successful peers. Although the number of pensioners living in low-income households has fallen in recent years, over 20 per cent of those who live in poverty are pensioners, rising to around 30 per cent if they are single women, with at least a third of that group being people in their sixties. Many boomers have no good fortune at all to feel guilty about, remaining instead often vulnerable, sometimes isolated, and with meagre pension entitlements. This may be for reasons of class, ethnicity, disability, ill health, or other circumstances; indeed, sometimes among my close acquaintances, hard times have come precisely because they refused to buy into any of the lures of professionalism and the corporate world. We should not need the assistance of the meticulous research of British historians, such as Pat Thane, to direct us to the residual poverty of my generation. Writing a few years ago, Thane indicates that for many women:

the difficulties … of providing for their old age have been known for over a century, have changed little and have never gone away … Our pension system has been characterized by a state pension too low to live on and dependence on occupational and private pensions which cannot provide a comfortable old age to the low-paid and irregularly employed, most of whom are female.
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Other feminist writers, such as the feisty journalist Beatrix Campbell, have been more prominent in confronting the media’s misdiagnosis of the causes of the ongoing economic crisis. As she rightly argued, simplistic attributions of generational blame stand in the way of a political understanding of the policies that have triggered the present recession, with its high unemployment, insecure and highly stressful working conditions, and lack of affordable housing.
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Clearly, today, it is the young who are hit the hardest by the continuing recession. However, to blame the older generation for the effects of policies many of us opposed is merely to foreclose any useful analysis of the present crisis. It also undermines the faltering efforts of those who are still trying to continue what we once began, looking around for and sometimes finding younger voices to support. This also involves wondering how best to remember, as well as critique, the diverse and conflictual histories of political radicalism.

Understanding the present crisis is a task that both younger and older generations would do well to embark upon together. It is the growing inequality
within
, not
between
, the different age cohorts that underpins the current economic and social crisis, especially in the USA. Many leading economists, such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Thomas Palley, have been making this point for years. Thirty years of comparatively declining wages in the USA, plus the shortage of affordable rented accommodation and above all the new banking policy of lending to the poor (whose growing indebtedness did not allow them to repay their loans) and then selling on the ‘toxic’ debts to other banks, was what actually triggered the subprime mortgage crisis that
generated the threat of a global banking collapse. Larry Elliott, a British economic journalist who stays close to his roots in the progressive left politics of yesterday, regularly points out that in the USA, as increasingly in the UK, it is the concentration of wealth at the top, together with the undermining of trade unions and the eroding of welfare protection, which have all contributed to greater social inequality and instability.

The solution, tragically eschewed by the current UK and US governments, is to support many of the goals we ageing folk fought for back in the ’60s and ’70s: increased wages for the majority of workers, especially the low paid, stronger trade unions, a platform for movements representing the interests of all those marginalized, whether by gender, race, ethnicity, or other sources of exclusion or vulnerability. In other words, Elliott concludes: ‘We need to junk the right-wing dogma that has dominated economic thinking for the past 30 years. And, in the case of the UK government, still does.’
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This view resonates with the perennial stance of that ageing British medical epidemiologist, Richard Wilkinson. Together with Kate Pickett, he recently once again presented elaborate statistics showing that, across the whole social spectrum, overall inequality produced more social and health problems in highly unequal societies when compared with the more equal (typically Scandinavian) ones. Mental illness, for example, was 500 per cent higher in all social groups in the most unequal societies.
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What does my age group of late mid-lifers, or early elderly, have to contribute to puzzling over the dilemmas of the present? Again I return to the ebullient Marina Warner, suggesting that ‘it’s crucial to recreate the conditions that brought about our generation’s energy: the opportunity of free education, the valuing of ideas over profit, because social wellbeing … will
follow imagination and inventiveness’.
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However, fear eats the soul as threats of redundancy, disregard, abandonment and isolation routinely dampen the spirits of most people as they age, even when they remain economically privileged.

Leaping the Barriers

Fear eats the soul because, regardless of the recent liberal critique evident in the naming of ageism, the present moment remains saturated with different forms of prejudice against the elderly. It can be sensed everywhere in the reiterated statistical panic over the ‘greying of the world’ as more people are living longer. On the one hand, there is the weight of history, language and culture in its visceral abhorrence of old age. On the other, there is the significant incitement to generational blame evident in the scapegoating of ‘Baby Boomers’ reaching pensionable age. Both are present in the fears expressed about those over seventy-five, now increasingly living into their eighties and nineties or beyond, and seen as needing expensive care. Nevertheless, despite confronting so much negativity and alarm, there have always been crevices from which countervailing voices have arisen, trying to reach across the generations. They have done this for diverse reasons, though more often than not their efforts remain somewhat muffled by larger, if sometimes subterranean, forces of fear, shame or diminishment.

However, once we set out in search of the varied voices and texts eager to subvert the cultural chorus of age warfare they are not so hard to find. While they may be rarely evident in the oppositional binaries the journalistic mainstream likes to uphold and amplify, the promotion of more harmonious contact
between the young and old is apparent nowadays in some of the more creative academic research and across different disciplines. In Britain, the literary scholar Helen Small exemplifies this new trend in her book,
The Long Life
(2007). Writing in her early forties, Small is interested in what scholars and writers have had to say about old age, wanting to explore the chequered relations between a long life and a good life as well as the impediments to conjoining the two. Repeatedly, she regrets the dearth of interesting philosophical reflection on old age in modern times. Such considerations are essential, she insists, because of their ‘repercussions for what we deem to be a good life’, alongside what old age tells us about ‘how we measure happiness’ and reflect upon issues of virtue and justice.
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More generally, over the last twenty years there has been a rapid expansion of what is known as humanistic gerontology, which aims to move away from the strictly empirical discourse of mainstream gerontology that was primarily concerned with the ageing body and its needs. Those who take a humanistic approach, such as Thomas Cole and Ruth Ray, state that they are more engaged with issues of interpretation, rhetoric and narrative, thereby encompassing what are seen as psychosocial, ethical, existential and spiritual concerns. Indeed, breaking down the barriers between generations has become one of the mainstays of this approach, in its consistent effort to create and sustain a more optimistic view of ageing. From the humanistic perspective the key epistemological question on ageing is: ‘what does it mean to grow old?’
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Framed in this way, the concern with what it means to grow old, what it feels like to age, dominates the forms of enquiry that have accompanied what is known as the ‘cultural turn’ in intellectual life, which became ever more prominent in the final
decades of the twentieth century in the humanities and some of the social sciences, as attention shifted to the creation and instabilities of subjectivity and meaning. Such questions direct us, in particular, to the proliferation of memoir writing and other forms of autobiography in both scholarly and popular domains during recent decades. Despite all that we know of the inevitable selectivity and distortion of memory in the shaping of life narratives, it sometimes becomes easier, and altogether less threatening, to make connections across the generations when personal lives are narrated in ways that allow us to explore the perils, pitfalls and pleasures occurring in the course of a long life. In the context of memoirs and of certain fictions that mirror them, old age no longer appears as simply a type of foreign country separated off from the rest of a life. Rather, in such texts the experiences of the old unfold and collapse back, like concertinas, into narratives that are rarely reducible to age itself, but reveal multiple threads that can remain visible from the struggles, choices, contingencies of the younger life once lived, their psychic traces enduring to the end. Moreover, these strands are usually evident whatever the unexpected rewards or cruelties of fate, chance, or shifting national or global conjunctures. Indeed, as I will explore in far more detail in later chapters, they are sometimes all the more visible in a person’s distinct ways of encountering suffering and loss in old age.

Just a few literary critics have been exploring these ideas of late. One of the first was Barbara Frey Waxman in her study of the autobiographies of ageing people,
To Live in the Center of the Moment
(1997), which she wrote when facing her own middle age at forty-nine. She embarked on this project, she says, with the personal and ethical expectation that combining literary criticism with the reading of autobiographies of ageing
might be able to ‘transform our fear of ageing and our wariness of elders’.
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High hopes perhaps, but her own thinking, she reports, was indeed changed by her reading of the words of many of her older compatriots: May Sarton, Doris Grumbach, Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, poet Lucille Clifton, and others. In the UK, ageing has remained a largely missing topic in literary theory. Nevertheless, providing much of the material I will rely upon, memoirs and related fiction are certainly emerging. As we saw in the last chapter, Jane Miller’s elegant reflections on what it feels like to be old suggested she preferred her old age to her memories of being young.
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Of course, she admits that there are many bad things about ageing, while also pointing to what can often be the difficulties of being young. She knows she has been more than usually lucky, having been happily married for forty years, remaining in the same house throughout this time, a place that was once one of the hubs of literary London, and finding the career she most enjoyed at mid-life. She writes of her own assorted ailments, pains, memory lapses and more, alongside the terrible sorrow surrounding the deaths or calamitous debility of friends. Nevertheless, she and many of her friends, we learn, remain active and mostly cheerful. The difficulties of trying to bridge the gulf between young and old remain, however, even with her own young relatives of whom she is so fond: ‘I see that there is really no reason for the young to bother themselves with old age … Being able to ignore the future and possible endings is what you’re young for, after all.’
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