Dancing with Carolyn Heilbrun
Carolyn Heilbrun’s last book, The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty, is a pertinent read for anyone on the cusp of life-change. It’s a collection of essays, some more engaging than others. I am very different from Heilbrun, and her experience doesn’t reflect mine. But I don’t find her saying what I’ve heard before. She’s opinionated, bossy, bravely self-revealing, tough, and original. She makes me laugh and wonder, and see myself more clearly, so I’m grateful to the woman in Costa Rica who suggested this book to the friend who told me about it; and I’m grateful to Carolyn Heilbrun for writing it.
I saw her once. She gave a guest lecture at Smith while I was teaching there in the 80s. I remember her sardonic tongue, her sharp and good-humored insight, her lumpy body and thin white hair. I have since quit going to see writers talk. I’d rather know them at their best, in their books, where I can underline the parts I like, scribble arguments in the margins, and not have to dress, drive, and (worst of all) meet them, both of us tongue-tied and uncomfortable, flailing about for something to say. She felt the same way. One of the essays I like best is “Unmet Friends,” in which she talks about the connection readers feel with authors who move them, authors they have never met. “Unmet friends,” she says, “have called upon the same strengths to escape or endure the same kinds of situations” (153).
This explains why my relation to Heilbrun is more that of an unmet acquaintance than friend. Heilbrun writes in her Preface, “I have had a privileged education, worked for over thirty years as a professor of English at Columbia University before my retirement, and now enjoy a comfortable income” (2). I share with her the flight from academia: “I was shocked…by how little I missed it, how relieved I was not to have to plunge,ever again, into that poisonous atmosphere” (39), but I have nothing with which to compare her long-term marriage to a companionable man, her good Jewish family, her deeply-entrenched upper-middle-class life in New York City with two country houses. We have traveled much the same intellectual territory, but our circumstances have not granted us the same situations. Still, my heart lifts as she describes what she found once she retired from teaching: “I entered upon a life unimagined previously, of happiness impossible to youth or to the years of being constantly needed both at home and at work. I entered into a period of freedom…” here I am sailing along with her in perfect harmony until I hit the wall of her next few lines: “and only past sixty learned in what freedom consists: to live without a constant, unnoticed stream of anger and resentment, without the daily contemplation of power always in the hands of the least worthy, the least imaginative, the least generous” (39).
In that case, I am more than ever grateful for my freedom. Had I stayed at Smith, I would by now have achieved a comfortable income, and I would be teaching one or two courses a semester instead of five, and enjoying research grants; but if those pleasures had only come at the cost of living with that stream of poisonous anger and resentment, they wouldn’t have been worth it. I’m glad I left, and if I am about to become a homeless mendicant, then I’m still certain it’s a better thing to be than full of poison. Heilbrun writes at great length about May Sarton and her rages and then confesses that the “ultimate temptation of one’s last decades” is “to recall grudges, to dwell on ancient wrongs and miseries and betrayals, to allow these memories, if they are not properly controlled, to dominate thought and therefore life” (117). Good grief. Not my ultimate temptation!
I am tempted to romanticize the past and idealize the future, to bore my friends and embarrass young people with dusty tales of amorous exploits, to edit from my memory the difficulties that have given me the strength I have; but even when I try, I can’t recall grudges, wrongs, and betrayals–except, occasionally, the ways I have wronged or betrayed others, the grudges they ought, by rights, to bear against me.
I’ve had two enormous benefits she didn’t have. She never had psychotherapy, while I enjoyed many years of it (thank you Beth, Art, Ann, Phyllis, and Graeme; and all the friends who put up with me while I was so self-involved); and she apparently never discovered meditation. Both are ways I lanced what might otherwise have been the boils of poison. I am a lucky woman, as Dave says. Lucky.
I rejoice in, and share, her lyrical praise of her dog, her love of solitude, her deep enjoyment of books (especially those of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf), her joy in friendship with adult children, her difficulty connecting with grandchildren, her dislike of television and parties, her decision not to wear dresses and pantyhose, her Anglophilia, her preference for communing with people one-to-one instead of in groups, her practice of listening to the young(er), her stunned delight in email, and her impatience with domesticity (especially shopping, cooking and gardening–although doing any of those three in community seems less a waste of time to me than doing them alone). I appreciate her politics: “What might be called political sadness arises, I have found, not from a single affront, or even a multiplicity of them, but as an indirect response to organized and publicly condoned selfishness and revenge….” (180). Amen.
However I profoundly disagree with her declaration, “aging women who have had a career of adventure and accomplishment…still find themselves at a loss to come up with a late adventure that is not romance” (107). She complains, “Romance, at any age, is ubiquitously boosted as the best game in town” (109) and finally concludes, “Am I able to suggest a substitute, unromantic adventure for women’s later life? No, alas, I am not, although I have considered the matter long and hard” (113). By writing that, she makes me more conscious of the difficulty of this quest I’m on.
If she hadn’t committed suicide when she was 77, I would invite her over to this blog, where I am making a public nuisance of myself by attempting, in front of anyone who wants to look, to shape a grand adventure in my after-sixty years that is (1) not amorous, (2) not boring, (3) spiritually rich, (4) generous toward others, (5) joyful, (6) imaginative and surprising, (7) intellectually stimulating, and (8) kind to myself but also (9) politically respectable. I defend Heilbrun’s right to take control of her exit, and I reserve the right to do the same thing, but I doubt I will. I’m too curious to see what lies over the next cliff-edge.
Tags: Books and Movies, Carolyn Heilbrun
Kendall
Hi Kendall–I was delighted to see you comment on my retirement blog.
I love what you have to say here–I, too, had many one-sided arguments with Heilbrun. Curiously, I took home the lesson from her book that women need adventures after 60, but I forgot her notion that those adventures should be romantic. Hey, I’m romancing the Muse–that does it for me!
You can still get email to me through Hampshire, amcneal@, and it would be great to reconnect.
Ann
I love this talk about ‘making romance’ after sixty, and being well over that age myself endorse the attempt thoroughly. The notion of ‘romance’ of course has to be broadened beyond its adolescent associations, and it’s in that respect that the older have the advantage, or anyway so long as they’ve already made the best of the adolescent versions. ‘Romance’ is just using the imagination, inventing stories, considering possibilities plausible or otherwise, and to that mill everything is potential grist.
I loved other things too in what I have seen of this book, previously unheard of: sadness is not ‘depression’, for instance, and the delights of this miraculous modern device.
And I couldn’t agree more with this assertion, that the most sinister and dangerous threat, and the one from which escape is most necessary, is “a constant, unnoticed stream of anger and resentment, … the daily contemplation of power always in the hands of the least worthy, the least imaginative, the least generous” Maturity and romance are certainly necessary to deal with that one!
Stephen
I’m nowhere near retirement age — 47 in the new year — and continue to be so deeply disturbed by Heilbrun’s suicide that I appreciated your reflections. Have you read her “Collected Stories,” written as Amanda Cross (1997)? In two of them, “Tania’s Nowhere,” and “The Disappearance of Great Aunt Falvia,” older female characters simply disappear… I found the stories haunting considering Heilbrun’s decision a few years later to do her own disappearing. However to suggest as some have that her suicide stands as the achievement of the ultimate act of autonomy; this still rankles… surely taking ourselves out of the adventure is no achievement at all….
Good point, G. Thanks for your comment. I am not sure…I’m open on this question. If the choice is a long and dwindling, painful, and expensive death after years of being a drain on everyone who loves you, vs. a painless passing when you’re still able to take care of yourself, I don’t begrudge her the choice and can admire her for the power she took into her own hands. There’s not much adventure in Alzheimer’s or brain cancer….