A Banquet of Canapés
Lynne Segal, Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing
Verso, 320pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781781681398
reviewed by Gee Williams
In 1996, Jenny Joseph’s poem ‘Warning’ was voted the most popular post-war poem by BBC viewers and listeners. When I am old I shall wear purple has spoken to at least two more generations since its 1961 birth. It spoke to me once. It said there’s one less thing to worry about then. Reading Segal’s dense literature search on the same subject left me with a strong need to check back with Joseph. (Find her, now eightysomething, reading it on YouTube. I did.) Maybe a fan letter is imminent.
But there’s plenty to intrigue in this scholarly text, which of course never aspires to the lightness of Joseph’s genius touch. For a fiction writer like myself there’s the delight of Sigmund Freud’s three, all equally absurdist contributions, timed to cut through their stodgy prose surrounds with the sharpness of cranberries. First we have Freud the Great Analyst. Segal writes: ‘At forty-nine Freud decided older people were unsuitable for analysis because of their psychic inflexibility’; before quoting him directly: ‘near or above the age of fifty, the elasticity of mental processes on which treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking: old people are no longer educable.’ Just a year shy of petrifaction of the ψυχή, are we witnessing a fine mind focused with scientific detachment, staring into the abyss? Well, not so much. In 1919, when he is 63, he publishes ‘The Uncanny’, which Segal describes in detail and will refer to subsequently. Travelling by train, alone and at night, Freud strikes upon an ‘an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and travelling cap’; Segal goes on to retell the story of ‘this ageing figure’, who turned out to ‘to be none other than his own reflection in the mirror of the connecting door.’ But crueller, and more enjoyable for feminists, is the seventy-seven year old Freud bemoaning the poet HD Doolittle’s indifference to his sexual advances: ‘The trouble is – I am an old man – you do not think it worth your while to love me.’
Yet the sparkle is brief. Most of Segal’s book patiently deconstructs a variety of notions linked to The Age Problem. Personality as viewed and experienced through linear time is exposed as infinitely more fractured: by the likes of Virginia Woolf, the biologist Lewis Wolpert, Robert Blythe and most tellingly, Simone de Beauvoir. For this archetypal feminist, being 54 was her absolute nadir. (After that, things bucked up, mainly due to a nourishing lesbian relationship with a younger woman and also – ah, the schadenfreude! – because bits were dropping off her great love Jean Paul Sartre’s body a lot quicker than her own).
Segal then draws back from the particular to examine cultural responses to ageing as manifest in the relationship between old and young through history. Quite rightly, she exposes the rosy myth of elder veneration to be just that. For a start, there were fewer of them to clutter the place up. Fewer survivors back then of war, famine and disease: and if you were one of the ones that made it, you were likely to be rich. (And of course these elite relics were rarely that old; Margaret Beaufort springs to mind: Victress of the War of the Roses she may have been, but she still only just surpassed our modern retirement age). While to the Ancient Greeks: ‘All heroism, beauty, and sweetness resided in youth, and youth alone.’
The chapter ‘The Perils of Desire’, deals with the difficulties of the libido; sexual desire seeming to hang around after most other on-board facilities have been jettisoned. It can be a gross embarrassment to the young and a reproach to the mid-lifers, yet exists in many powerful forms. In ‘The Ties That Bind’ there are some touching narratives on the topic of love in general, and the ways in which families form and dissolve as support mechanisms. But the statistics are stark and cruel. Young men tend to be loners by choice. Old ladies by compulsion. However, the clarity of these sections and the book’s succeeding ones is obscured by Segal’s all-inclusive name-dropping and referencing to the point where, although apt and germane, they fail to hold together into any graspable theorem. The reader longs for the main course but chapter after chapter brings on yet another impressive spread of canapés.
And where do they get us? In the final one, ‘Affirming Survival’, Segal makes some attempt to inject her own conclusions, bolstered as ever by literary friends past and present: Stuart Hall; Raymond Williams; John Berger; Denise Riley. The results are (maybe in unkind précis): Stay Connected. Be a Player. Hemingway – distinguished by not getting an invite to this feast – was onto the same idea with: ‘The world’s a fine place and worth the fighting for.’
Fair enough.
Jenny Joseph had it after all.
But there’s plenty to intrigue in this scholarly text, which of course never aspires to the lightness of Joseph’s genius touch. For a fiction writer like myself there’s the delight of Sigmund Freud’s three, all equally absurdist contributions, timed to cut through their stodgy prose surrounds with the sharpness of cranberries. First we have Freud the Great Analyst. Segal writes: ‘At forty-nine Freud decided older people were unsuitable for analysis because of their psychic inflexibility’; before quoting him directly: ‘near or above the age of fifty, the elasticity of mental processes on which treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking: old people are no longer educable.’ Just a year shy of petrifaction of the ψυχή, are we witnessing a fine mind focused with scientific detachment, staring into the abyss? Well, not so much. In 1919, when he is 63, he publishes ‘The Uncanny’, which Segal describes in detail and will refer to subsequently. Travelling by train, alone and at night, Freud strikes upon an ‘an elderly gentleman in a dressing gown and travelling cap’; Segal goes on to retell the story of ‘this ageing figure’, who turned out to ‘to be none other than his own reflection in the mirror of the connecting door.’ But crueller, and more enjoyable for feminists, is the seventy-seven year old Freud bemoaning the poet HD Doolittle’s indifference to his sexual advances: ‘The trouble is – I am an old man – you do not think it worth your while to love me.’
Yet the sparkle is brief. Most of Segal’s book patiently deconstructs a variety of notions linked to The Age Problem. Personality as viewed and experienced through linear time is exposed as infinitely more fractured: by the likes of Virginia Woolf, the biologist Lewis Wolpert, Robert Blythe and most tellingly, Simone de Beauvoir. For this archetypal feminist, being 54 was her absolute nadir. (After that, things bucked up, mainly due to a nourishing lesbian relationship with a younger woman and also – ah, the schadenfreude! – because bits were dropping off her great love Jean Paul Sartre’s body a lot quicker than her own).
Segal then draws back from the particular to examine cultural responses to ageing as manifest in the relationship between old and young through history. Quite rightly, she exposes the rosy myth of elder veneration to be just that. For a start, there were fewer of them to clutter the place up. Fewer survivors back then of war, famine and disease: and if you were one of the ones that made it, you were likely to be rich. (And of course these elite relics were rarely that old; Margaret Beaufort springs to mind: Victress of the War of the Roses she may have been, but she still only just surpassed our modern retirement age). While to the Ancient Greeks: ‘All heroism, beauty, and sweetness resided in youth, and youth alone.’
The chapter ‘The Perils of Desire’, deals with the difficulties of the libido; sexual desire seeming to hang around after most other on-board facilities have been jettisoned. It can be a gross embarrassment to the young and a reproach to the mid-lifers, yet exists in many powerful forms. In ‘The Ties That Bind’ there are some touching narratives on the topic of love in general, and the ways in which families form and dissolve as support mechanisms. But the statistics are stark and cruel. Young men tend to be loners by choice. Old ladies by compulsion. However, the clarity of these sections and the book’s succeeding ones is obscured by Segal’s all-inclusive name-dropping and referencing to the point where, although apt and germane, they fail to hold together into any graspable theorem. The reader longs for the main course but chapter after chapter brings on yet another impressive spread of canapés.
And where do they get us? In the final one, ‘Affirming Survival’, Segal makes some attempt to inject her own conclusions, bolstered as ever by literary friends past and present: Stuart Hall; Raymond Williams; John Berger; Denise Riley. The results are (maybe in unkind précis): Stay Connected. Be a Player. Hemingway – distinguished by not getting an invite to this feast – was onto the same idea with: ‘The world’s a fine place and worth the fighting for.’
Fair enough.
Jenny Joseph had it after all.