Out of Time (25 page)

Riley has always been adept at finding just the right words for grappling creatively with the most difficult challenges of identity, change and sorrow. In her reflections on ‘language as affect’, she ponders the consolations people use when facing up to the disappearance of their youthful bodies and looks, while herself preferring a sort of flinty stoicism surveying the precarious joys and many losses of life, especially her own. She notes, for instance, that while anxieties over what is registered as the steady erosion of looks are exhaustively serviced by the colossal commercial industries of repair and regeneration, our actual dread of the fading of beauty is barely admitted. Personal vanity encourages silence, even as fearful apprehensions are incited by ubiquitous cultural landscapes of youthful beauty: ‘consolations of illusion meet and fortify the illusions of consolation’.
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This leads Riley to ponder other sources of possible solace that people turn to, however illusory.

One panacea can be found in the attempt to fortify the ageing self with images of what we now recognize as our past beauty, though hardly aware of it at the time. This is what we saw Doris Lessing suggest in commenting upon older women placing photographs of their youthful selves for visitors to survey, as if secretly saying: ‘
that
is what I am really like’.
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Looking at old photos of ourselves, often together with our friends when
young, can induce a strange mixture of belated pleasure and wistfulness, as the British poet Ruth Fainlight depicts in her poem ‘Friends’ Photos’, written when she was sixty-six:

We were beautiful, without exception.

I could hardly bear to look at those

old albums, to see the lost glamour

we never noticed when we were

first together – when we were young.
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As we saw with Lessing, those who really were aware of their beauty and seductive charms back in their youth, rather than in reconstructions afterwards, are likely to find ageing all the more painful. This is certainly what that keen observer and elegant chronicler of old age, Penelope Lively, has one of her fictional characters express: ‘If you have been a beauty, ageing must be intolerable … The process is bad enough as it is – the ebbing away of possibilities, the awful tyranny of the body – but for those who lose their very trademark, it is savage.’
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Other attempted consolations mentioned by Riley include the type of residual satisfaction that might come from knowing that our former beauty lives on in the memory of others, all the more so if those others have managed to commemorate it publicly in visual or poetic form: ‘His beauty shall in these black lines be seen / And they shall live, and he in them still green’, in the words Shakespeare used to immortalize the youthful charm of a young man he favoured at the time.
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Best of all, of course, is when such enduring memories trigger emotions of the past in the present, so that even when old and sometimes sad, we might feel confident that we remain desirable in the eyes of a longtime lover. It is again Fainlight who knew how lucky she was
that, at seventy-nine, she was still certain that after returning from a trip abroad, ‘my husband would look at me / as wonderingly as if / we still were bride and groom’.
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However, few of us feel, or could remain, so lucky, not even Fainlight, whose husband of fifty years and more, Alan Sillitoe, died soon after she wrote these words.

Then again, as Riley also observes, some of us will be permitted, encouraged even, to take a narcissistic pride in surveying the beauty of our children, or grandchildren, suggesting in the face of time’s erosion that they are now what we have been, our genetic stand-ins. Much has been written and said about the delights, especially, of grandparenting, in keeping ageing spirits buoyant. Apart from the testimony I have from numerous friends (having as yet no grandchildren of my own), we can easily turn to any number of literary sources. One of the most memorable for me was Penelope Lively’s short story, ‘Party’. Here she persuasively recounts the peaceful and creative affinity that can exist between the old and the very young. A grandmother and her grandson feel themselves to be equally the unwanted outsiders at the start of a party hosted by the child’s mother as the adults start to drink and chat. Yet as the hours pass, in this story they end up enjoying themselves the most once they retreat happily into building a model plane together, cheerfully whiling the long night away until, in the early morning, having completed their task, they are ‘the only ones still capable of celebration … in silence and in mutual appreciation they drink to one another’.
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Even more vividly, the late Tove Jansson evokes the humour, insight and strong mutual support that can exist between a very old woman and her six-year-old granddaughter in her immensely popular
The Summer Book
, which has never been
out of print in Scandinavia since it was published forty years ago. This Finnish writer, best known for her enchanting children’s fiction, has her characters bonding across the generations as they discuss the meaning of life and death, helping each other to overcome their differing pains and anxieties after the death of the child’s mother. Jansson wrote the book in her late fifties as a way of coming to terms with her personal grief after the death of her own mother, drawing upon the nature and importance of her relationship with her young niece, Sophia.
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Nevertheless, there can be a more troubling aspect associated with the caring side of grandparenting today, given the increasing expense and shortage of nurseries available to meet the needs of the working parents. Several studies from around the globe have suggested that the demands of caregiving on grandparents are sometimes stressful and exhausting, perhaps exacerbating existing health problems.
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‘It’s exploitation and grandparents are at the receiving end’, the Mothers’ Union from the UK announced over a decade ago, arguing for more government rights and recognition for grandparents’ caring work.
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Grandparents, even those who have been regularly caring for grandchildren, can also suddenly lose all access to them following acrimonious divorces. Yet despite these dangers, for the most part, people with grandchildren routinely celebrate their pleasure in relating to them, especially during the early years of more regular contact.

Denise Riley herself, however, seems largely to reject these possible consolations. As I have suggested, she turns instead to the thoughts of the ancient Stoics for guidance, including the Roman former slave, Epictetus, and the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Quintessentially Stoic, Epictetus counselled self-reliance, acceptance and forbearance at all times, famously
saying ‘Let death and exile, and all things which appear terrible, be daily before your eyes … and you will never entertain any abject thought, nor too eagerly covet anything.’
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Similarly, Marcus Aurelius, in his even more celebrated
Meditations
, maintained that people should expect little from the body, which from the beginning is a harbinger of death: ‘live each day as though one’s last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing’.
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Riley spells out the implications of such philosophy, for instance that the fleeting strength or beauty of youth, being arbitrarily bestowed, is best seen as something that never truly belongs to its bearer, who should remain indifferent to it. As we have seen many others counsel, we should dwell determinedly in the present moment, aiming for a form of impersonal self-transcendence, disinterested in our own fate and hence free from worries about the future or regrets for the past. Yet however sensible this advice, especially when Aurelius was sending his troops into battle, it seems to me hardly likely to succeed for long in preventing the weight of the world bearing down too heavily upon most of us, much of the time, whatever our age. Nevertheless, there is a certain emotional seduction in such language, as well as a clear affinity with the floating meditations of others I have looked at in search of ways of leading a good life in old age, such as those of Sara Maitland, when merging with the landscapes she loves in the timeless moment of the present.

I also see such Stoic fortitude and melancholic strength beautifully expressed by another somewhat neglected author and elegant stylist, Rosalind Belben. In her late thirties she wrote a wry and compelling confessional novel, its protagonist, Lavinia, sharing Belben’s age and circumstances in every detail of time and place. As if laying the author’s life on the
line, Lavinia reviews her present situation and prospects in its opening pages as a childless woman, without spouse, partner or lover, a condition she realizes will remain unchanged now all the way till the end. Two refrains are repeated throughout the text, ‘
This is not the life I imagined for myself
’; ‘I want to make sense of my life’:

As all bodies do I require and desire to love and be loved; to exert myself, to be stretched; to have demands made upon me, not the kind of demands which, paradoxically, are made upon me. I should prefer not to articulate such commonplaces … Bother it, I was, I am, lonely … 
I am not the person I could have been
.
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Yet her painful envy of conventional families, the raw sexual frustration, the horror that she will never again be loved by anyone, which Belben depicts so precisely, are presented in rich counterpoint to continuing moments of joy and fulfilment, as Lavinia is suffused not with resentment – though resentment often shadows her – but in her pleasure of nature, in the countryside she loves, in travel and sightseeing, in the heightened awareness of her wandering and wondering gaze at expressions and movement in the lives of others, above all, in the texture of landscapes. However solitary, the protagonist’s enduring desire for and engagement with the world constantly erupts in poetic engagement with the rhythms of her own life past and present, whether pondering the mother she left her job to care for approaching thirty, or in her love for animals and reflections upon each passing moment: ‘Unfamiliar surroundings content me’ (7); ‘I am helped by the sight of water; rivers and streams; canals; and drops of dew’ (73); ‘I have discovered an amazing gift in myself, a boon. For the first three or four hours in rural
solitude and peace, my senses expand so rapidly that I can smell separate varieties of grass and trees, bracken and gorse or heather, buttercup or vetch. I can sense cow or pig or horse, fox or badger … It makes me giddy’ (118).

In the final section of the book, the protagonist writes of her dreams of the dead, conjuring up the two creatures she has most loved, her mother and her dog. In one dream her mother appears, more tender than in life, hunting through her hair for lice: ‘I feel a strange, physical soothing all through my body, a purely instinctual response: we never touch; it is a novelty’ (132). Thus the book closes, with the protagonist stumbling into a future she had never anticipated, but realizing ‘I have fuel enough in me to blaze alone’ (145).

The Work of Mourning

Fuel enough to blaze alone is, one way or another, perhaps what most of us are seeking, especially when older and, sooner or later, often on our own. And if not to blaze, for that seems rather a lot to ask, at least sufficient energy to help us welcome each new day, holding on ‘stubbornly content’, as Elaine Feinstein concluded in the closing stanzas of ‘Long Life’, the last poem of her recent collection,
Cities
, published as she turned eighty.

These days I speak less of death than this miracle of survival.

I am no longer lonely, not yet frail, and after surgery,

recognize each breath as a favour.

My generation may not be nimble, but, forgive us,

we’d like to hold on, stubbornly content – even while ageing.
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However, unless we work hard at gliding superficially over the miseries of life, whether our own or those of others, then the miracle of survival must involve finding ways of mourning our losses and heeding the suffering of others. Significantly, in what has emerged as a new era of mourning and public ‘remembrance’, much – too much, some have suggested – has been written about mourning over the last few decades. It is all too evident in the sudden popularity of what have been called ‘pathographies’, a word coined to describe memoirs of encounters with illness, failure and death. At the very least, this explosion of writing about grief, memory and survival means that nowadays we are hardly lacking in material about loss.
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‘I am no longer lonely’, Feinstein declared in
Cities
, which is notable because in her previous collection,
Talking to the Dead
, published four years earlier, Feinstein often sounded painfully alone: ‘You were always home to me / I long for home’.
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Talking to the Dead
is her moving collection of elegies to her late husband Arnold Feinstein, who had died a few years earlier after fifty years of marriage.

How does one deal with irrevocable loss? Partly, as we see here and echoed in many other texts, through connecting with the dead, or lost person (the lost ‘object’, as clinicians like to say), in ways that have aspects of unreality or ‘magical thinking’, but which may gradually help a person come to terms with grief. For Feinstein, the dead husband reappears and speaks to her in dreams, as in her poem ‘A Visit’, which begins ‘I still remember love like another country’ before we learn of her dreaming: