An Old-Age Memoir: Somewhere Towards the End

Oddly enough, as a child I was enchanted by Grandma Moses.  I loved the fact that she made art out of many of the same experiences I was having growing up on a farm–gardening, sledding, planting, and harvesting.

When she died in 1960, I was 12. But when she was born, Abraham Lincoln had not yet taken office! I learned that she started painting at the age of 76. The lesson I took from that is that old age does not have to be a time of decline.  It just might become the most creative, exciting time of one’s life. Even as a young person, I found that prospect exciting.

Many memoirs take the reader back to childhood.  One of my favorites, Little Heathens, was written by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (reviewed here) when she was in her 80′s. Looking backward seems to come naturally after a certain age.

But Diana Athill, author of Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir chose to go the other direction in this book. She explains her reason for writing about old age this way, “Book after book has been written about being young, and even more of them about the elaborate and testing experiences that cluster around procreation, but there is not much on record about falling away.”

Born in 1917, Diana Athill, educated at Oxford, served other writers as an editor before she became a writer herself. As editor of Jean Rhys, Philip Roth, Simone de Beauvoir. V.S. Naipaul and many other greats, she participated in literary life vicariously until she began to write short stories and then memoir.  The current book is her sixth and most popular one and won the Costa Award for biography. Recently the Queen of England appointed her an Officer in the British Empire. You can read a delightful interview by Kira Cochrane in The Guardian here.

The book itself consists of 16 short chapters, cascading toward the end, just as the life of the author does the same.  The falling away metaphor fits the central image of the tree fern a plant purchased by Athill even though she will never see it grow into a tree.  She enjoys the fern stage and notes, “This little nub is the start of a new frond, which grows very slowly to begin with but faster towards the end–so much faster that you can almost see it moving.”

Life starts out slow and finishes fast.  Or so I have been told.  My own experience as I round the corner on my 60th year, already confirms this: time is speeding up.

Athill’s metaphor of falling deepens every carefully crafted chapter. Whether she is talking about former lovers, caretaking, make-up, or the act of writing itself, she directs a steady gaze at the realities of aging and death–as well as joys still possible. She says no book on aging can end with a bang, but hers does not end with a whimper, either.  She ends by affirming the desire to live. The fact that she wrote the book at age 89 and published it the year the Queen appointed her an Officer, makes her readers want to live as long and as well!

Helen Alderfer, Poet, Mother, Wise Woman, Role Model

My husband Stuart gave me a book for Christmas I did not know existed–a pleasant surprise indeed.  Helen Alderfer, an early woman leader in the Mennonite Church and someone I have long admired, has published a book in her 90th year.  I have always loved reading about people who keep achieving their dreams well into old age–Grandma Moses types.  Well, Helen, you have done what Grandma Moses did–took the natural inclination to relive childhood in old age–and turned it into art.

The primary metaphor in the book comes from the grinding mill, an archaic piece of machinery that for hundreds of years was essential in the transformation of grain into flour.  The longer the life, the more grist for the poet’s mill.  The fact that grinding produces a useful, even beautiful, product means that the poet employing this metaphor might be tempted into sentimentality.

But Helen takes a remarkably unsentimental, almost stoic, atttitude toward tragedy.  Understatement becomes her.  Her father’s death when she was a teenager could have been the subject of saccharine moralizing.  Instead, Helen uses the image of a new brown suit hanging in the closet to express all the pathos of that terrible moment.  Later, another poem about a dream she has in old age about her young father, closes when he says, “Come, I want you to meet some friends.”

Helen is not afraid to reveal her own feelings that would have been labeled selfishness or pride by many Mennonites.  Sometimes these admissions produce a smile on the reader’s face, and a reader who knows the poet can see the twinkle in her eye.  Take, for example, this ending to a poem about the old horse that the children sometimes hated because they wanted a young pony instead:

One November morning Aunt Lena called us for school

“Hurry,” she said, “there is a surprise downstairs.”

Please God, I begged, let it be a pony.

Dashing downstairs we found Grandmother

sitting in her low chair at the kitchen stove

holding a new baby–our brother.

At that moment we knew we would never get a pony.

Helen’s poems speak clearly about universal themes with very particular imagery.  They are memoirs–small particulars–pieces of grist, that the poet grinds in her mill.  I loved the tribute to Rayma Rawson, who taught English at Sterling (IL) High School and who “combed her dark hair almost over one eye./She wore red, red lipstick and a ring watch./I could have swooned when she gracefully/flung her hand into the air to check the time.”

Helen is a tall, graceful, even elegant woman.  This poem explains the mystery of how she became what she admired in that teacher–not only elegant, but literate, willing to take risks to live deeply.

Memoir teaches us that all lives are connected.  A woman like Helen who read, and taught, and edited, and traveled, and voiced her opinion, and wore long, flowing garments was essential to a younger woman like me who longed to do those very things–and more–yet still maintain the connection to roots and the land of ancestors.  I never knew Rayma Rawson, but she influenced me by influencing Helen.

As Helen reveals the spiritual and literary mentors who shaped her–Merton, Blake, Dickinson and many others I also love–I feel spacious and timeless.  But I feel this most when I also see and feel, through the power of imagery, the hard shell around a single grain of wheat–Helen’s answer to Whitman’s blade of grass.