179
Book
ReviewWhat
Do My Memories Call Up for You?The last gift of time: life beyond sixty. Carolyn C.
Heilbrun, 1997. New York: Ballantine; ISBN 0-345-42295-3, 226 pp., $13.95
paper
SAGE Publications, Inc.2004DOI: 10.1177/09675507040120020507
Penny Lowery
University of Exeter
With
the emergence of age studies as a discipline, a body of work is evolving that
will no doubt soon be labelled — if it has not been already—`autogeriography',
the writing of one's old age. Carolyn G. Heilbrun's last book remains a welcome
addition to the genre. It maps the upward years of a feminist scholar and
novelist who, at the age of 70, added her insights into ageing to her previous
views on life-writing and gender.
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In the
light of Heilbrun's suicide last year, The last gift of time will attract
a particular kind of interest and be read in a particular way — not
out of mere Schadenfreude, I suspect, but from a readerly tend- ency to look
for clues to Heilbrun's decision to end her life at 77. There are clues to
be found, of course — such as her reported conver- sation with a friend
about `leaving the party while it's still fun' (p. 9) — but to limit
one's perception of Heilbrun to her death, simply because it was at her own
hand and relatively recent, would be a mis- take. For, as anyone who has read
her work will know, Carolyn Heilbrun was much more than a suicide; and her
determination to end her own life, rather than wait for illness to do it for
her, appar- ently reflects not a depressive nature but rather a buoyant spirit
and lively wit, at least as far as her writing persona is concerned. A desire
to reconcile Heilbrun's work with her life, then, which is just one rea- son
to explore this highly enjoyable text, is part of what her friend and colleague
Nancy K. Miller has called `a tension between life and text that is never
fully resolved'.1 The book has an emphasis on `relational identity ... not
about terminal ``moi-ism'' ... but, rather, a rendez-vous with others'.22
Since the 1970 s, Heilbrun has advocated the use of personal ma- terial into
her theoretical writing, part of her insistence on seeing women's lives as
texts. The last gift of time is written in a relaxed, humorous style, which
occasionally had me laughing aloud. Overall it offers an optimistic view of
later life, which can offer new freedoms as well as difficulties to overcome.
Each chapter is an autobiographi- cal essay dealing with an event, opinion,
or aspect of Heilbrun's life: `The small house', for example, documents her
attempt at solitude by buying a smaller country house than the family pile,
a refuge from the city, which was intended for herself alone, and yet which
ineluctably came to include her husband. He, it seemed, `didn't want to be
in the other house without [her]' (p. 23), but his unexpected appearance at
the `small house' was welcomed. `I had wanted to prove I could be a woman
alone, and I had failed' Heilbrun concludes cheerfully (p. 22), manifesting
here as elsewhere her own personal variety of lib- eral feminism. Despite
finding a house that was `small, modern, and full of machinery that worked
' (p. 15), she was not only incompetent in practical matters but found herself
preferring the `solitude to- gether' (p. 23) that comes with a long marriage.
Similarly, `The dog who came to stay' offers insights into the especial kind
of community a retired woman can find with a non-human companion. Heilbrun's
declaration that having an animal may be a restriction on travelling, but
that she dislikes travel anyway, is refreshing in its honesty: she claims
she `never understood the attraction of having been some-
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where,
taken pictures of the sights pointed out, and then returning to inflict the
details of your journey on acquaintances' (p. 32). There are other positive
changes with age: `[r]outine' Heilbrun asserts, `which I used to scorn as
next door to incarceration, holds new appeal for me' (p. 33). She includes
a chapter of insights both personal and critical on her friend the writer
May Sarton, for whom Heilbrun acted as lit- erary executor: the portrait of
Sarton is affectionate and realistic, and points out the importance of Sarton's
work on ageing `before that became a marketable subject' (p. 73). Heilbrun
continues to surprise her reader by challenging some of the assumptions about
what the old(er) enjoy: she is delighted by the fast, cheap and non-invasive
communication offered by email, whereas travel holds no appeal. She thinks
about death, and it holds no fear for her except as it threatens the loss
of loved ones. She deals entertainingly with friendship, love and sex. Far
from insisting that age is no bar to sexual pleasure, Heilbrun suggests that
```the elderly'' leave romance to the young and welcome friendship' (p. 112).
Heil- brun had long been exasperated by the `marriage plot' to which women
have been confined in both literature and life. In this book, she attaches
more importance to friendships of different kinds, in- cluding the `unmet
friends' made through writing; intergenerational friendship is important,
she asserts, as is listening to the young(er) — but not about sex. Despite
her celebration of friendships with both men and women, she maintains that
men have poor listening skills, and she puts her conviction that `psychoanalysis
got off to such a sticky clinical start' down to the fact that `Freud and
Breuer ... are really lousy listeners' (p. 167). Her thoughts on memory are
as individual as other aspects of her personal philosophy. The memories of
past events that haunt most people as they age are unwelcome to Heilbrun; for memory, she maintains, is unreliable and troublesome, and to be ignored
as far as possible rather than held in consciousness to be recounted as a
`frozen anecdote'; not so experience, which once processed becomes a useful
part of the self. In contradiction to her philosophy on mem- ory, however,
she recounts one or two random episodes of memory triggered by chance events; and the reader may forgive this apparent lapse, for the memories recounted
are as entertaining as the rest of the text. The book ends with a chapter
on mortality. Heilbrun was preoccu- pied by `the ultimate indifference of
the dead' (pp. 205-206), but also found herself `seduced' by indifference,
and `assaulted' by apathy, a tendency she considered dangerous and struggled
to resist. Towards the end of her sixties she admits to being, in Keats' words,
`half in
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love
with easeful death' (p. 207). Conversely, in the previous chapter, on sadness,
she attributes some of her melancholy to the idea that things will continue
after her death without her presence there to see them (p. 184); but while
drawn to death for herself, she cannot bear to contemplate the death of her
husband, and reveals herself to be fully aware of the double standard this
implies (pp. 210-11). These thoughts on death may shed some light on Heilbrun's
decision to end her life. Her conclusion is that the awareness of mortality
lends a particular quality to the latter years of a long relationship, the
knowledge that the other person is unlikely to change their `habits of loving'
being countered by the knowledge that one may well lose him or her to death.
Her recommendation for these final years is to live them in the moment, and
she closes the book with a poem by Jane Kenyon on contentment and mortality,
the oft-repeated refrain `it might have been otherwise' a haunting reminder
of Kenyon's own life-threatening illness and of the ephemeral character of
the human subject. This is a text that resonated powerfully for me, and while
I cannot guarantee that it will do so for everyone, I found in it what Nancy
K. Miller has called `an unwitting but irresistible collaboration between
other texts and other lives' (p. xiii). No doubt it will still hold a fas-
cination for those with whom it does not resonate; for differences are as
compelling as similarities, or in Miller's words, `reading the lives of other
people with whom we do not identify has as much to tell (if not more) about
our lives as the lives with which we do'.1 The last gift of time will have
a popular appeal, not just as a special- ist text on ageing but as a work
of interest to scholars (and anyone else) interested in life-writing, feminism,
or identity. Though not designed as an academic text, it demonstrates the
literary/autobiographical essay at its best, and is accessible enough to be
of value in undergrad- uate courses. The last gift of time is above all an
amusing testament to one woman's take on the last years of life, and its acute
observations and subtle humour make it a fine epitaph for Carolyn Heilbrun
and an excellent contribution to the study of age. NOTES
1 Nancy K. Miller, But
enough about me: why we read other people's lives. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002, p. xiv.
2 Ibid., p. 2.