Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (53 page)

These issues do not, I think, loom large when we are young. As we grow up, our forward propulsion is so great, our appetites so real, our enmeshment so thorough, our past itself so relatively short, that little time or energy is often spent on either retrieval or review. It is as if we were not yet attentive to either our own shadow or our own larger estate. But these matters go well beyond the narrative lines of one’s own life, for they extend into the world itself, the manifold variegated pulsing strange world that contains us and warrants our attention. Perhaps one reason the old often seem so engaged in travel and tourism has to do with a heightened later sense of all that one has missed, of the teeming spectacle that one never attended to, for one was so busy making one’s own way. Pondering such matters—one’s own plenitude and that of the stage one has been on—is a project of old age, when a good bit of one’s doing has been done, when measures ask to be taken.

It is dumbfounding to realize how often literature seems to have been hijacked by romance, by the story of love quests and social struggle; i.e., the affairs of the young. One longs to find more stories that do justice to the temporal span of an existence, that track a character from birth to death while offering some sense of life’s sheer zest and vibrancy, beyond all moralizing, located in the endless material particulars that flood all of us every day. Defoe’s novel of 1722,
Moll Flanders
, is a raucous and episodic picaresque fiction devoted to the wit and survival tactics of one shrewd woman (without fortune or papers, equipped only with good looks and smarts) trying to make it in London. Defoe has given us a rare account of staying power in his portrait, and I want to claim that staying power, the sheer fact of having managed for a lifetime, deserves recognition as one of the rewards of growing old. Yes, this sounds a bit like a marathon view of old age, with the disturbing corollary that its greatest (and only?) significance is simply that you make it to the end. But there is more than that.

We call Defoe’s book
Moll Flanders
, but this is how he titled it:
The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a
Whore,
five times a
Wife
(whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a
Thief,
Eight Year a Transported
Felon
in
Virginia,
at last grew
Rich,
liv’d
Honest,
and died a
Penitent. This is quite a mouthful. There can be no doubt that Defoe was counting on the shock value of Moll’s crazy quilt of a life—and much of the book’s richness inheres in how Moll continues to be Moll, even though she changes course with such prodigious frequency—but I want to insist on something else that shines in this title: the chameleon-like nature and sheer longevity of a life. In reading Defoe, one grasps a shocking truth: that all lives, looked at longitudinally, are picaresque. (This dirty secret is fiercely elided from all résumés.)

Here, then, is a story that transcends romance, even though Defoe is much exercised to depict Moll’s erotic escapades and liaisons; but he also limns her second career as thief, and he goes on to chart her stay in America, replete with reversals of every sort, including incest, continuing all the way to her return, late in years, to London with ample funds. The book has the heft of a long and varied life, full of turns and surprises, chugging on. This medium-length novel gratifies us by its gargantuan but egalitarian gift of a life’s ongoing density: Moll as child, as young woman, as seasoned manhunter, as infamous thief, as mother, as Newgate prisoner, as exile to Virginia, as returnee to England—gargantuan and gratifying because most of us cannot easily summon up our own longitudinal story. It is not by accident that Moll informs us that she was judged “the greatest artist of her time,” and although she is referring to her prowess as thief and impersonator, we should assess her real artistry more along existential lines: she has constructed a life.

Because living is an artisanal proposition. And old age is the moment when the amplitude of existence most fully shows. One of the most pungent notations of Defoe’s novel comes when Moll meets up again with Mother Midnight, the woman who ran the Lying-in, who helped her years earlier when she was down and out and ready to give birth, the lady who got her back on her feet and nursed her spirits. What has time wrought for Mother Midnight? Moll discovers that

I am humbled by this passage. It is supremely politically incorrect—Mother Midnight indulges in major-league vice, stealing children—yet it is a testament to grit and fortitude. Proust wrote that bodies are the material that makes time visible, but I’d want to revise his (true) statement by claiming that time is required to demonstrate character, to display mettle. One might quarrel with me by saying that morality is absent from Defoe’s view of character, that lasting to the end is perhaps not all that praiseworthy in itself. What did you do (worthwhile) during your life? would be the tough question. It’s a test Mother Midnight would have trouble passing, on ethical grounds. Yet there is a kind of quiet pride expressed in that portrait of this stirring, bustling woman, for it suggests that qualities such as resilience, pluck, and initiative deserve our serious consideration as virtues.

Raw capitalism is what Defoe is said to be giving, according to some, raw survivalism, Darwinism before Darwin; but what most appeals to me here is the glimpse of a pact we make with life: we are dealt a hand, and our honor consists in making the best of it we possibly can for as long as we can. Mother Midnight is a
bricoleur
, someone who bounces from role to role, using whatever small trumps she has, intent only on staying in the game. Roth’s Everyman was fueled by the same drive. There is a pleasure in staying in the game: it is the pleasure of using one’s indwelling resources, including the wit to harness circumstances, bric-a-brac, and “realia” and to transform them into resources. Then, in old age, you can look back at the journey—and Defoe is a chronicler in just this sense: he makes us see the journey—and see that it dwarfs any one of its single episodes, that it is a long road and it is, cumulatively, you. Getting this far matters. To be sure, no one beats mortality; we know we must die. But we know almost nothing about why we live. Mother Midnight’s dance through time whispers to us: life is good. Defoe’s writing breathes on every page a paean to living, living a long time; it is about the rightness of staying the course(s), about the savor—not the value—of experience after experience, as the reward of existence.

Moll and Mother Midnight make it successfully into old age. They have the survival skills that our young protagonists Lazarillo and Pablos, not to mention Rastignac and the Invisible Man, were bent on learning, and they exercised those talents from decade to decade, over the long haul. But please note: each of those figures carries no baggage, is ultimately a loner. But life does not always afford us the luxury of needing only to save our own skin. Lovers know this. Families know this. “Life’s plenitude” has a very different value when the life you’re talking about is that of a loved one. Sickness and war can cut plenitude short, thereby conferring on it an unbearably poignant value. The story of private want and private need yields, in terrible times when the sky falls in, to a larger and graver narrative of responsibility and linkage. On this front, little surpasses the account of a mother’s pluck, travails, and losses during the Thirty Years’ War as depicted in Bertolt Brecht’s magisterial drama of 1938,
Mother Courage
.

Brecht is arguably the trickiest writer of modern times. A committed Marxist, he devised a model of dramatic writing stamped by what he termed the
Verfremdungseffekt
, or the “alienation effect,” by which he meant that the audience forms a critical judgment of the events depicted onstage that is at radical odds with the attitudes of the stage players themselves. These matters can become rather abstruse, but Brecht’s basic target was the famous notion of identification with art, which, in his view, was virtually a narcotic for the audience rather than the badly needed comprehension or critique, which might show how the play’s actions were either wrong or blind or self-defeating. (Mind you, this is an uphill fight, since audience involvement has been a central element of theater ever since Aristotle defined catharsis.)

I called Brecht tricky because his great plays seem inevitably to work against his theoretical program, inasmuch as they not only depict humans caught up in powerful ideological forces, but the audience all too often bonds/identifies with these trapped players, sees them as noble and moving victims but not as dupes who should have behaved differently, not as creatures of a system that needs utter overhauling, indeed overturning. Nowhere is this truer than in the reception history of
Mother Courage and Her Children
—Brecht’s epic account of a feisty, strong-willed woman (based on a seventeenth-century Grimmelshausen work) plying her (capitalist) trade as canteen woman with cart from 1624 to 1636 and losing her three children in the process—where the public invariably identified with Anna Fierling (Mother Courage), and saw her as an irresistible tragic victim whose stubborn energy and loyalty to her kids mattered far more than her presumable political blinders. After the play was launched and lauded, Brecht wrote tirelessly about the mistakes made by actors and theaters, who repeatedly failed to foreground the writer’s key point: that Mother Courage loses everything but learns nothing. We should leave the theater in anger, Brecht claimed, but instead we leave it in tears.

And we do so, I believe, because Brecht’s elemental grasp of human nature—a concept he would surely dispute, deeming it constructed—is incomparably richer and more affecting than his politics will ever be. Anna Fierling’s twelve-year struggle to get through the endless war without losing her children, while also making a profit, deserves a place of pride in this study of growing old. Brecht never accentuates Mother Courage’s aging as such, but he shines his light on what it takes to keep your (grown-up) kids out of harm’s way, and he makes us realize that it’s impossible. Perhaps the fallacy inherent in our notion of growing old is that we see it as an individual fate handed to us by time, whereas often enough the truth is a more plural proposition: we are meshed with loved ones, and we cannot protect them or prevent them from dying. Further, in war, the logic of mortality that usually ensures the death of parents before the death of children is often smashed to bits, as the voracious war devours half of Germany and demands its due. Mother Courage never had the eminence of Oedipus or Lear or Gertrude or Phèdre; she is common stock, low profile, scraping by, yet somehow indomitable and filled with folk wisdom. As the play opens, we see her and the cart, pulled by all three children: Eilif the daring, Swiss Cheese the honest, and Kattrin the mute. When the play closes, all three children are dead and gone, but the old lady and the cart are left, so the old lady puts herself in harness to continue plying her trade. Life goes on.

“Like the war to nourish you? / Have to feed it something too” is what the recruiter says to Mother Courage after he has successfully lured her son Eilif into signing up for the army. Brecht put all his political anger into those two lines, showing us that the woman with the cart who traipses across Germany selling her wares and making a living via her bargain with systemwide destruction is logically, fatefully caught up in a wager that will use her children for fodder and kill them. Moreover, at each critical juncture when a child is either lost or killed, Courage is inevitably in midbargain with someone else, trying to cut costs and boost gains, seeking to eke out a living in very hard times. The most heartbreaking instance of such behavior happens with Swiss Cheese, who has had the bad luck and bad judgment to be taking care of the regimental cash box for the Second Finnish Regiment just as the Catholics gain the upper hand. Immediately they are on his tail, sending out a one-eyed spy to trick and trap him, and we watch the mute Kattrin try desperately and futilely to warn him, via hoarse but incomprehensible noises, as he takes the money out of hiding and slips it under his tunic. Moments later he is led back by two men, put face-to-face with his mother; it is a tight corner: he claims he doesn’t know her, a claim she goes along with. At this juncture he is again taken away, and Courage learns that he can be ransomed via a bribe of 200 florins; her only way of getting this money is to trade the cart for it to Yvette Pottier, the friendly whore, whose decrepit Catholic colonel lover will be good for it. Courage is in a tight spot and tries to bargain, offering 120 florins, thinking it may be enough. At the last minute, she springs for the full 200, hoping it will save the day.

It doesn’t. We hear the drums roll, and we know that Swiss Cheese has been executed. Then comes one of the most awful moments in theater, and it is lodged entirely in the stage directions: