Reading in Old Age

ABSTRACT

A consideration of how reading may change in retirement and old age, demonstrated in relation to five books by women

KEYWORDS:

• Reading
• old age
• memory
• autobiography

When Harold Rosen, my old boss, retired from the London Institute of Education where we both worked, he used to speak of the joys of ‘civilian reading’. Henceforth, interest, pleasure and chance would dictate what he read; and it’s been like that for me these last 23 years. There was a time when my children mocked me for reading books with titles that began with ‘Towards’ or occasionally ‘Beyond’. No longer. Nor do I take notes or think of revitalising a reading list. But there’s something else. I’ve become obsessed with time, with the when of a novel or an autobiography, and with what has changed and what hasn’t during my nearly ninety years. That wasn’t true in the past. In those days there was simply ‘those days’ and now. Today I quite often make sense of what I’m reading by putting it alongside moments and memories from my own life, somewhat egotistically perhaps. I may associate what I’m reading with a world inhabited by my grandparents or my parents, for instance. And more and more often I realise that I’m reading about lives that run parallel to my children’s lives or even my grandchildren’s, but not quite to mine.

I’ve always read too fast, too carelessly. Now I do a great deal of rereading. I often have to read whole pages again because I scanned them while thinking of something else. I sometimes like a book so much that I start it all over again as soon as I’ve finished, either because I simply can’t bear to lose its voice and be out of its orbit or because I was confused by its opening pages. I reread novels that have won prizes in the hope of understanding why. I know all too well that this isn’t how I was taught to read literature, nor how I taught other people to. The pandemic has intensified habits that developed in retirement. Only occasionally do I rely on reviews. Usually it’s loans and offerings and other people’s enthusiasms. I promise my resident ‘loved ones’ that I won’t acquire more books. There is nowhere to put them. But sometimes, in the dead of night and shamefacedly, I make swift purchases online.

There has been some order in all this randomness. I had a month or so of plague novels at the beginning of Lockdown, and another month of Paradise Lost and Regained accompanied by a marvellous recording by Anton Lesser. Several weeks were filled with James Baldwin’s novels and essays and the films and videos made about him. Simon Schama’s two-volume Story of the Jews (a third is promised) have lasted for several months while I was also rereading the novels and autobiography of an aunt of mine, who left Zhitomir (which was in Russia then) when she was twenty for Palestine and then for a lifetime here in England.

Recently, and more or less accidentally, there have been books by five women, four of them alive and kicking and a good deal younger than me. But the fifth and most recently read of them contains letters written more than 100 years ago by Ida Nettleship, who was Augustus John’s wife. They met at the Slade. She gave up painting when she married him, gave birth to five sons and died of puerperal fever when she was thirty. She was not only of my grandfather’s generation, she was friendly with four of his seven sisters, briefly engaged to one of his brothers and a lifelong friend of another brother (he had four more). She had to miss my grandparents’ wedding because of a pregnancy, but she and her father sent them a present.

Some of Ida’s letters are written to my relations, who loved her and mourned her for the rest of their lives, but the later and most interesting ones are written to other women friends, to Augustus himself and to Dorelia, his lover. Michael Holroyd, John’s biographer, and Rebecca John, Ida’s granddaughter, have assembled her letters and provided a commentary. They’ve called the book The Good Bohemian, as if to remind us that some Bohemians are bad, which they probably are. Ida was a brilliantly lively letter writer and friend and in some ways an astonishingly wise young woman. Not only does she deal with her husband’s importing his adored mistress into the family, she welcomes and protects her. Yet she also sometimes thinks and writes about suicide and about leaving Augustus, but can’t see how either course of action would provide a solution to their tangled lives. What might be a solution is the plan to leave Augustus in London and move to Paris with Dorelia. This works well for a bit, despite the passionate disapproval of her sisters and of a friend to whom she writes,

Perhaps you think I am selfish going away leaving Gus – but it is because of him a great deal – that is I should not go if I thought it better to stay for him. But he has had too much of women and children – for a time & that is most of what we are to him. He says himself he would rather live with us all ‘if it were not for the distractions’. Art is his life, and we are distractions.

I could hardly bear to read that passage, especially its last line. I want Ida to be angry; but she is more complicated than that. Her periodic desperation, depression, despair is caused less by jealousy or feelings of rejection – though she tells Dorelia that she feels both – than by her abandoning of painting, her exhaustion and boredom looking after her small boys, her purposelessness. Difficulties enliven her. I was sorry to hear that the caravan I’ve always believed was a gift from my great uncle Michel to Augustus cost him £30, which, the book’s footnotes tell me, is the equivalent of £3000 in today’s money. But perhaps it was worth it. Ida seems never to have been happier than when she and Dorelia and Augustus and at least three of their small boys lived in a fly-blown tent and that caravan. John’s pictures of that part of their lives are the ones I’m most fond of.

Ida’s letters overflow with interest in other people, exuberance, determination to be truthful. She lives with her own contradictions, never expecting them to be resolved. ‘It’s a pity one’s got to live with a man’, she writes at one point, and I cheered her, longed for her to stop having babies, longed to tell her that Augustus John became less of a painter at about the moment when she died. But she won’t be swayed and may even have guessed that death was her only way out. If she’d lived she’d have gone on having babies as my great grandmother did (16, I believe in all, and no contraceptives, though my great grandfather did queue up at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital for wet nurses). ‘Gus is my king’, Ida insists, though also ‘suave and innocent as ever’, and – more uncertainly – ‘a mean and childish creature besides being the fine old chap he is’.

Jane Feaver belongs to my children’s generation and she is better at anger than Ida. She has written a fine novel, in which she figures under her own name as narrator and central character. I take it that we’re to read it as a novel created out of the author’s life, and that turning actual experience into a novel provides some escape or respite from fury and frustration. Letters never quite allowed Ida to do that, but in Crazy, Feaver creates a novel that is often witty and moving about impossible experiences. These begin in childhood with a father whose own vanity suggests to him that his daughters must not be allowed mirrors or vanities of their own. He cautions them above all to avoid being ‘bourgeois’, and that entails a ban on most modern comforts. When he leaves their mother for a younger woman who is allowed such comforts and may look in mirrors whenever she wants to, Jane, as the oldest, has learned not to expect much from men and even that she may deserve nothing much. She’s clearly a clever girl, but like most clever girls she knows there are men who are even cleverer, and by falling in love with the beautiful and cleverer-still Ardu at Oxford she gets what she’s learned to expect. Crazy is his name for her. He doesn’t want her, love her or even like her much, and this only increases her obsession with him. He is brutally and pathologically sceptical, cynical, squashing and unkind, and despite his Firsts and his pedantic and unproductive ‘brilliance’ it quite quickly becomes clear that he will never get his life together, and Jane realises belatedly that he is an alcoholic and unable to do much about it. Almost inadvertently they marry, however, have a daughter, scraps of a marriage. But nothing works for them, and a good deal of the novel consists of the phone calls he makes to her from digs somewhere or a pub, in which he manages to keep up his sneers and snubs from afar and she learns to turn their conversations into arias.

Once away from him, Jane becomes a creative writing teacher, who is so good at what she teaches that she turns her father and Ardu into all too believable bullies and tyrants she can manage to live with once they’ve become her personal creations. The novel is written in short scenes, that move back and forth in time and are full of speech, brilliantly caught and delivered, as well as all the details of living a twenty-first-century version of a Bohemian life. One of the funniest sex scenes I’ve ever read is just one of the moments of a novel rich in them. If only Ida had had time to make a painting of Augustus lolling and smoking as his two women and their seven children mill distractingly around him.

The twin girls at the centre of Brit Bennett’s novel The Vanishing Half leave their mother and their home for New Orleans in August 1954, during, as it happens, the long vacation between my second and third years at university. They were 16 and I was 21. We’re near contemporaries. Two years later I spent a week or so in New Orleans, encountering American racism for the first time. Two of my companions had come to New Orleans especially to hear musicians like Leadbelly in the flesh. I remember that we asked the man at the filling station just outside the city where we’d find the best black music. ‘We’ve got welfare for that’, was his reply. Segregation in schools had been outlawed in 1954. 1956 was the year that 12 black students walked into Clinton High School in Tennessee, accompanied by a white minister, who was badly beaten up. There was the most violent and hateful opposition to desegregration outside schools and universities all over the South that year.

It’s difficult to explain why these coincidences of time and place mattered so much as I read this remarkable book. I think of how blithely I wandered round New Orleans, marvelling at the music, remarking on the sadness, even the blankness of the black faces I encountered. How much sunnier they seemed when we got to California. Bennett has not only explored a whole range of black lives of those days, she has set them in a recognisable history that we could have shared, though of course we didn’t.

Bennett’s twins are black, but they are pale, ‘light’, and they are leaving the strange small town in the south where they’ve grown up, which is inhabited entirely by pale, black people like them. They leave to escape what could become a lifetime of drudgery and boredom working as maids in a white household. Dolores marries a black man who beats her, while Stella marries her white boss and passes as white. Most importantly, they drift apart, into different worlds, and we follow them. 1968, the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, is an important year for both of them as it was for many of my generation in Europe. Dolores returns to her mother’s strange off-the-map town with a very black daughter, Jude, who is mocked and bullied at school and will leave the town too when she reaches adolescence. Stella has been living a blameless but always anxious white life in a comfortable American suburb. Her baby girl, who might have been worryingly blacker than her mother, doesn’t let her down. She is ‘perfect; milky skin, wavy blond hair, and eyes so blue they looked violet’. She’s named Kennedy, presumably after those other martyrs of the 60s. Stella keeps out of trouble until a lively and successful black family moves into the hitherto exclusively white enclave. Stella befriends Loretta, the wife and mother of the family, and they are seen together by a neighbour, who reports on their

sitting side by side on a bench. Their shoulders rounded, casual and easy, Loretta said something that made Stella laugh, and Stella actually reached for Loretta’s cigarette and took a drag. Put that colored woman’s cigarette in her own mouth …

Her story circulates, so that Stella feels she must drop Loretta, who leaves the ‘estate’ with her family shortly afterwards. That moment shocked me more than any other in the novel. Would I, would people I know, whether here or in America, have reacted to that moment as Stella’s neighbour does? Would Stella have needed to drop her new friend? Would Stella’s husband have given up on her if she’d revealed her blackness? Bennett makes that scene all too believable, yet it reminded me of something like lazy indifference, that must have carried many of us through those years, for all our radicalism and commitment to the mood of ‘les evenements’: our racism not so much institutional as careless, unthinking, feebly imagined.

I was struck, I remember, by the way that Doris Lessing begins her autobiography by describing her parents’ depression at the end of the first World War, their lost youth; and how she, who was born a year after the war had ended, somehow inherited and experienced their discontent and their pessimism,

I do know that to be born in the year 1919 when half of Europe was a graveyard and people were dying in millions all over the world – that was important.

My father was a few years older than Lessing, but he too seemed to me marked by that war and its effect on his elders. I am haunted by the thought of such an inheritance, by the legacy of outsiderdom, by the disruptions and chasms in children’s lives caused by their parents’ – perhaps temporary, perhaps not – inability to cope with parenthood or anything else. Arifa Akbar’s Consumed is not a novel, but a painful trawling of a lifetime’s memories and indeed what she knows of her parents’ lives before she was born, in order to understand and explain why, when her older sister Fauzia dies in her forties, she, Arifa, feels such guilt as well as sadness. Her story begins with her father’s disorienting migration from India to Pakistan as a boy at partition, a first and secret marriage to a German woman and then his arranged and unhappy marriage to Akbar’s mother.

She remembers the poverty and misery of the family’s early days in London, in contrast to their comfortable lives in Pakistan. Her father had gone ahead of his wife to London, but he didn’t thrive there. A job as ticket collector was all he could find and a great deal less than he had lead his new wife to expect. His older daughter wept with fear when she rejoined him. And he, who could be so genial and loving to his second daughter, Arifa, is incomprehensibly brutal to her sister, and it’s a brutality that neither she nor her mother were able either to prevent or assuage. Her mother’s failure to protect her older daughter in those days is remembered resentfully, though also as if she was somehow ‘immobilised’: a good word to describe a woman, who is financially dependant, lonely, exhausted and responsible for children and indeed for family survival. Something like stasis has set in and it becomes impossible to move, make choices, decisions, objections.

Akbar is now in her forties and a successful journalist, who writes about plays for the Guardian. She tells her story as someone who has survived the experiences that lead to and may explain her sister’s early death, but only just. Fauzia suffered debilitating breakdowns and wrestled with eating disorders and other addictions all her life. It is TB that kills her, though it went, inexplicably, undiagnosed until the day she died. Fauzia had been Akbar’s loved and emulated older sister. The fact that she outstripped her sister is part of her guilt. So is her exasperation with that sister’s endless difficulties, their lengthy froideurs. While writing about a particular history and its painful legacies, Akbar looks to a wider history and to myth and literature to help her unravel her sister’s life and her own. She researches TB, both as an illness and as a literary trope, travelling to Rome to visit Keats’ last home. She studies the Antigone of Sophocles for its story of sibling dependence and rivalry, and she reads the letters of Theo and Vincent Van Gogh for the same purpose. Some time after her sister’s death she starts to inspect what turn out to be hundreds of extraordinary embroidered pictures that Fauzia had made behind her sister’s and her mother’s back. They tell stories that reveal her sister in new ways, and they are the products of such expertise and talent as Arifa had not expected of her sister. The discovery of these beautiful things her sister has made with such skill and passion is shocking but also enlightening. Clearly, she had ignored her sister’s creativity, denying her autonomy.

Maria Stepanova starts from things: at first they are the things that her Great Aunt Galya stored in orderly profusion and which are all that is left of her when she dies: towels, newspaper cuttings, clothes, diaries. In her In Memory of Memory Stepanova looks everywhere and scrutinises everything in her search for the past, and for the reality and detail of lives that are over: photographs, letters, memories, but also objects. Running beneath her stories, like an underground river that surfaces importantly and unpredictably, is the history of Russia in the twentieth century: the two world wars, the revolution, the Soviet years up to the late 1980s and then the time since then. For Stepanova, who is not yet 50, there is a serious need to know how her family fared during those years before she was born. She is a poet, an essayist, an editor, and clearly as well read in English and American literature as in Russian. This book, she tells us, is the one she’s wanted to write since she was ten years old. She offers her Jewish family as ordinary, unremarkable people and survivors, who were as strange and special as all ordinary and unremarkable people are. She even sets it out as a poem:

• No one died in the Stalinist purges

• No one perished in the Holocaust

• No one was murdered

• No one was a murderer

One great grandmother was imprisoned as a very young woman in the Peter and Paul Fortress for marching and singing revolutionary songs – though she never joined the Bolshevik party – before training to become a doctor in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century, believing that as a Jewish woman she wouldn’t be allowed to train in Russia. Her daughter became a doctor too, and in 1951 the work of both women was seriously undermined by the famous ‘Doctors’ Plot’, when Jewish doctors were accused of trying to poison Russia’s leaders, and many lost their jobs. Stepanova was five when her adventurous, singing great grandmother, by now ‘a tiny little woman, shrunken to a husk’, died at 90. In 1914, while she was still in Paris, she sent her future husband postcards with drawings of old women on them, and the words, ‘Surely we won’t turn into old people like them. The very thought horrifies me. I’ll never allow it! It must be that in old age we think differently and want different things – otherwise life would be unbearable’.

Then there is Stepanova’s ‘paternal grandfather’ who ‘was the only person in my family for whom the revolution was like rain in July, like the emptying of a full load of grain onto the waiting earth’. He spends time in prison too, for harbouring a service pistol his unreliable sister had given him. One part of the family issues from a small town near Nizhny Novgorod. Stepanova visits this and other small towns where the family had once had businesses, one or two quite lucrative, which had to be handed to the state after 1917. Later on, most of the family were doctors or teachers. These were educated people who knew how to stay out of trouble and knew they were lucky to do so. They survived, but, as Stepanova writes towards the end of her book, ‘The more I think about our family history, the more it seems like a series of unfulfilled dreams’. She is uncertain how to react when her parents, who are more or less my contemporaries, decide to emigrate to Germany. They left the Moscow Belorussky Station in April 1995, and their daughter writes,

I was just considering whether I should be crying when a man holding a can of beer glanced at me from out of a train door and said: ‘Kill the yids and save Russia.’

Rather as Arifa Akbar feels it as a survivor’s duty to understand the past and to make the dead known and valued, Stepanova is determined that a life, a person, may be brought to life and known by their smallest droppings. She has written an extraordinary book, that tells us more about Russian lives in the last century or so than any other I’ve encountered. She is an extraordinary reader as well as an extraordinary writer, superbly served here by her translator, Sasha Dugdale. She can read a bit of found life from a searching inspection of both sides of a postcard or of the bits of a photograph the photographer may not have noticed or wished to be there. It’s a difficult book to describe because it can seem at first to dissolve into fragments. Essays, readings, detailed descriptions of paintings, of places, of writing, of clothes jostle with memories, stories, portraits. But the fragments join up, the book itself becoming the holder of remembered lives. I can’t at the moment think of a book I’d rather have written. It does what is always so difficult, alighting on what is unique about a person and a life, while embedding those peculiarities in a history that explains them but is also theirs, made by them. Curiously, Stepanova has taught me to think about and take seriously the reductions of age and to be grateful for memory and the past it still delivers.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Miller

Jane Miller is Professor Emerita of the UCL Institute of Education. She taught in the English and Media Department there from 1976 to 1998 and edited Changing English from 1993 to 2013. She has written books about bilingualism, women teachers and literature.