The other view, the counterview to the administrators and the ageists, is that this is the human race adapting again, and how interesting. How significant, how challenging that there is now this new demographic, this hefty group of people who have notched up seven or eight decades and counting, many of whom are still in good health, with all their marbles, able to savor life.
Up to a point, that is. I am a diarist. It is a working diary, mainly, in which I jot down stuff that might possibly come in useful at some point. This means that I can never find anything I think I may once have noted, but during a trawl recently I came upon my visit to a specialist in 1994, around the time the spinal arthritis first struck that has plagued me ever since. “‘Anno Domini, I’m afraid,’ says the man kindly. ‘Whoever designed us didn’t make sufficient allowance for wear and tear.’ Which chimed nicely with my view of the Great Designer in the Sky – a piece of malevolent sabotage to ensure that when the human race gets to the point of discovering penicillin and sanitation and generally prolonging life those prolonged won’t find it worth living anyway.”
I beg to differ, eighteen years on. One does; today, and for a while, perhaps. Most of my friends of my age group would agree, I think, and most of them have been slammed with something: hips, knees, teeth, eyes . . . We do indeed wear out before our time. The science of aging is complex and intriguing. The gerontologist Tom Kirkwood gives a technical but lively account in his book Time of Our Lives. He quotes John Maynard Smith’s dry definition: “Ageing is a progressive, generalized impairment of function resulting in an increasing probability of death.” Quite. But what is going on? Why do we age?
The short answer seems to be: because we are disposable. And we are disposable because our own genes have decided this; their interests in keeping us going do not coincide with our own. The maintenance of certain cells most affected by the aging process takes many resources. If this is reduced, then energy is released for growth and reproduction, so natural selection favors such a mutation. This is called the “disposable soma” theory; my digest of it is inadequate – please go to Professor Kirkwood for a proper account. There is a cool rationality to the process (of course, natural selection is always rational) and while this is not exactly a palliative (it remains a natural response to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”) at least you can see what it’s all about. And what would be the alternative? Swift’s Struldbrugs in Gulliver’s Travels, born to immortality, were condemned to an eternity of senile decay and estrangement from society. They presumably suffered from some genetic derangement; I think we must prefer genetic normality and accept the consequences.
Society is stuck with us, I’m afraid, and it will get worse. In countries with high life expectancies, a third of today’s children may reach one hundred. In 1961 there were just five hundred and ninety-two people over the age of one hundred in this country; by 2060 there will be four hundred and fifty-five thousand. Consider those figures, and gasp. Old people were of interest in the past simply because there weren’t that many of them – the sage is a pejorative term suggesting that old age necessarily implies wisdom. That view may have changed radically toward the end of the twenty-first century, I’d guess, when the Western world is awash with centenarians. Goodness knows what that will do for attitudes toward the elderly; I’m glad I shan’t be around to find out. I am concerned with here and now, when I can take stock and bear witness.
*
One of the few advantages of writing fiction in old age is that you have been there, done it all, experienced every decade. I can remember worrying when I was writing at forty, at fifty, that I didn’t know what it was like to be seventy, eighty, if I wanted to include an older character. Well, I didn’t know what it was like to be a man, either, but you have to stick your neck out – use empathy, imagination, observation, all the novelist’s tools. But it is certainly a help to have acquired that long backwards view; not only do you know (even if it is getting a bit hazy) what it felt like to be in your twenties, or thirties, but you remember also the relative unconcern about what was to come.
You aren’t going to get old, of course, when you are young. We won’t ever be old, partly because we can’t imagine what it is like to be old, but also because we don’t want to, and – crucially – are not particularly interested. When I was a teenager, I spent much time with my Somerset grandmother, then around seventy. She was a brisk and applied grandmother who was acting effectively as a mother-substitute; I was devoted to her, but I don’t remember ever considering what it could be like to be her. She simply was; unchangeable, unchanging, in her tweed skirt, her blouse, her Shetland cardigan, her suit for Sunday church, worn with chenille turban, her felt hat for shopping trips. Her opinions that had been honed in the early part of the century; her horror of colors that “clashed;” her love of Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Berlioz. I never thought about how it must be to be her; equally, I couldn’t imagine her other than she was, as though she had sprung thus into life, had never been young.
Old age is forever stereotyped. Years ago, I was a judge for a national children’s writing competition. They had been asked to write about “grandparents;” in every offering the grandparent was a figure with stick and hearing aid, knitting by the fireside or pottering in the garden. The average grandparent would then have been around sixty, and probably still at work. When booking a rail ticket by phone recently, I found myself shifted from the automated voice to a real person when I had said I had a Senior Railcard, presumably on the grounds that I might get muddled and require help – which was kind, I suppose, but I was managing quite well. We are too keen to bundle everyone by category; as a child, I used to be maddened by the assumption that I would get along famously with someone just because we were both eight.
All that we have in common, we in this new demographic, are our aches and pains and disabilities – and, yes, that high C evoked by Anthony Burgess. For the rest of it, we are the people we have always been – splendidly various, and let us respect that. The young are in control, which is as it should be, and mostly we wouldn’t wish to be out there now taking the flak, though there have always been majestic exceptions, with politicians the high fliers: think Churchill, prime minister at eighty, think Gladstone, think Bismarck. But we do not wish to be arbitrarily retired, or to have assumptions made about our capacities and our tastes, and since we are likely in years to come to make significant demands on national resources, then it would make sense to make use of us for as long as we are fit, able and willing to contribute. How you set about this I wouldn’t care to say – I am a novelist, not a think tank; some sharp young minds could surely apply themselves to the matter.
“Go West, young man, go West.” The second part of that exhortation usually gets left out: “. . . and grow up with the country.” I sometimes think of that when noting the influx of young foreign males in my part of London – the Polish builders busy making over my neighbors’ houses; the teams of two, shoving fliers through the doors, chatting away in some language I can’t identify; those loud on their cell phones as they pass me in the street (is that Bulgarian? Czech? Russian?). I have had many an interesting conversation with minicab drivers, apparently arrived in this country a month ago and already whisking around the city: “Where are you living?” “I am in Lewisham. There is house that is all Afghan mans. Pity is no Afghan womans.” “What do you think of London?” “Is pity is so many old building, but they put up new I see, perhaps in time the old go.” “How did you get here . . .” No, best not to pursue the matter.
These resourceful young are not going to grow up with a new country, but are cashing in on an old one, and you cannot but admire them. That takes courage, determination – and sometimes desperation. And, of course, youth. You don’t plunge into an alien city, you don’t stow away in a cargo truck, unless you have that panache, that as yet unstifled optimism, that ingrained sense that the road ahead is there, still there.
*
> “The party’s nearly over,” says a friend and contemporary; she says it a touch ruefully, but gamely also. We have had a party; we’ve been luckier than many. And we are attuned to the idea of life as a narrative – everyone is. Just as the young Afghan knows his story has only just begun – and he is hell-bent on seeing that it continues – so we take a kind of wry satisfaction in recognizing the fit and proper progress, the shape of things. The sense of an ending.
The trajectory of life, the concept of universal death, conditions our thinking. We require things to end, to mirror our own situation. The idea of infinity is impossible to grasp. When I am invited to do so, watching one of those television programs about the expanding universe, with much fancy computerized galaxy performance on the screen, and sober explications from Californian astrophysicists, I can’t, frankly. And what is intriguing is that they too, while evidently accepting the concept in a stern professional physicist way, seem also to have an ordinary human resistance. Last time, two of them said “mind-boggling,” reaching helplessly, it seemed, for that most jaded cliché to account for something that is beyond language. They couldn’t find words for it; neither can I.
I have had much to do with endings, as a writer of fiction. The novel moves from start to finish, as does the short story; at the outset, the conclusion lurks – where is this thing going? how will I wrap it up? how will I give it a satisfactory shape? You are looking to supply the deficiencies of reality, to provide order where life is a matter of contingent chaos, to suggest theme and meaning, to make a story that is shapely where life is linear. “Tick-tock”: Frank Kermode’s famous “model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form.” The need to give significance to simple chronicity: “All such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning.” This is the satisfaction of a successful work of fiction – the internal coherence that reality does not have. Life as lived is disordered, undirected and at the mercy of contingent events. I wrote a novel recently which mirrored this process but tried also to make a point about the effects of the process, which seemed like having it both ways and was fiendishly difficult to do, and that served me right, but it was a chance to explore the alarming interdependence that directs our lives.
We have this need for narrative, it seems. A life is indeed a “tick-tock”: birth and death with nothing but time in between. We go to fiction because we like a story, and we want our lives to have the largesse of story, the capacity, the onward thrust – we not only want, but need, which is why memory is so crucial, and without it we are lost, adrift in a hideous eternal present. The compelling subject of memory is for another section of this book; the point here is simply that we cannot but see the trajectory from youth to old age as a kind of story – my story, your story – and the backwards gaze of old age is much affected by the habits of fiction. We look for the sequential comforts of narrative – this happened, then that; we don’t care for the arbitrary. My story – your story – is a matter of choice battling with contingency: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men . . .” We are well aware of that, but the retrospective view would still like a bit of fictional elegance. For some, psychoanalysis perhaps provides this – explanations, understandings. Most of us settle for the disconcerting muddle of what we intended and what came along, and try to see it as some kind of whole.
That said, it remains difficult to break free of the models supplied by fiction. “The preference for progress is a basic assumption of the Bildungsroman and the upward mobility story, and an important component of much comedy, romance, fairy tale,” writes Helen Small in her magisterial investigation of old age as viewed in philosophy and literature, The Long Life. “It is also an element in the logic of tragedy: one of the reasons tragedy (certain kinds, at least) is painful is that it affronts the human desire for progress.” We are conditioned by reading, by film, by drama, with, it occurs to me, long-running television soaps being the only salutary reminder of what real life actually does – it goes on and on as a succession of events until the plug is pulled; we should note the significance of Coronation Street and EastEnders. We want some kind of identifiable progress, a structure, and the only one is the passage of time, the notching up of decades until the exit line is signaled.
Helen Small has written also of the debate – usually between philosophers, it seems – about the concept of eternal life. Is death in fact desirable? A moot point indeed, and of course it depends on what sort of life you suppose – some kind of imagined eternal youth or the inevitable decline we all know and do not love but recognize. Swift’s Struldbrugs seem to me to have had the last word. And the very euphemism we use for death – an end – seems to reflect our fictional conditioning, our sense of an ending. It is appropriate, that end.
Appropriate in theory, though we view it without enthusiasm. The thing that most vexes me about the prospect of my end is that I shan’t know what comes after, not just – in fact, perhaps least of all – in the grand scale of things but on my own immediate horizon: how will life unroll for my grandchildren? What will they make of it? I shall be written out of the story (like disposable actors in soap operas), and my story is hitched to many other stories. Every life is tangled with a multitude of other lives, again in a perverse mix of choice and contingency. You choose partners and friends; you don’t choose those you end up working with, or living next door to. Either way, your story has wound in with theirs, and because of this you can be wrong-footed by your own existence. There is existence as it has seemed to you, and there are those other versions served up by other people. You think it was like this; your parent, child, discarded lover, professional rival, says no, the view from here is subtly different.
I shall never know the view from my grandchildren, which may be just as well. And the discordant aspects of any life are of course the stuff of fiction – the ambiguities, the contradictions. When it comes to reality, plenty are anxious to get in a preemptive strike by way of autobiography and memoir, especially those who have been on the public stage and are well aware that they are going to get a good going-over in due course; there can’t be many politicians who have not spent their declining years honing their version of things before it is too late.
There is a vogue for “life writing” at the moment, both for publication and as private endeavors. I am all for it, partly because I gobble up other people’s lives, as a reader, but also because it seems to me a productive personal exercise – to stand aside and have a look at your story and try, not to make sense of it, which may be too taxing, but to trace the narrative thread, to look at the roads not taken, to see where you began and where you have got to. An exercise also in solipsism, perhaps, but we are all solipsistic, and actually the exercise itself demands as well a measure of detachment.
There is one thing missing, of course, from personal life writing: that requisite ending. Tick without the tock. I would find that most unsettling, were I to attempt any sort of conventional memoir (which I shan’t do); the novelist in me requires that tension between start and finish, the sense of a whole, of a progress towards conclusion. But I am quite at home with the idea of my life – any life – as a bit-player in the lives of others; that is the stuff of fiction, again, and the challenge of any novel is to find a balance for the relationships within the cast list, to make these interesting, intriguing, to have them shift and perhaps unravel over the course of the narrative. So that side of things is fine; fact and fiction nicely reflect one another. It is the search for an ending that is the problem.
Which takes me back to the prompt for this digression: the parabola between youth and age, and the way in which it conditions the view in winter. The winter of old age is not going to give way to spring, so the term is inept, but it suits the static nature of old age, the sense that things have wound down, gone into suspension. The party’s nearly over, yes, and that euphemistic ending is somewhere just over the horizon, but in
the meantime there is this new dimension of life – often demanding, sometimes dismaying, always worth examining.
*
Am I envious of the young? Would I want to be young again? On the first count – not really, which surprises me. On the second – certainly not, if it meant a repeat performance. I would like to have back vigor and robust health, but that is not exactly envy. And, having known youth, I’m well aware that it has its own traumas, that it is no Elysian progress, that it can be a time of distress and disappointment, that it is exuberant and exciting, but it is no picnic. I don’t particularly want to go back there.