Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir by Penelope Lively Read Free Book Online Page B

Bellow’s
Ravelstein
is neither comedy (though not without humor) nor stereotype, but strong writing about the view both of and from old age. And he was old – eighty-four – when the book was published, whereas neither Spark nor Amis were – Muriel Spark was forty-one when
Memento Mori
came out. Just three examples; they spring to mind simply because memorable and effective writing about old age is rare, though there are of course other instances. My point is that old age seems to be a danger zone for many novelists, somehow even more of a challenge than the universal problem of writing about and from the point of view of a man if you are a woman, and vice versa; we all have to deal with that unless we are to be left with a very curiously populated novel. But the old and the young are, somehow, the elusive element; equally, few novelists are good at children.
    “What do they think has happened, the old fools, / To make them like this?” Any reference to Philip Larkin’s poem in this context is almost a cliché. The poem marries perception of age with stark truth: “Well, / We shall find out.” He never did, of course, dying at sixty-three. And the perception is of drooling, confused, incapable old age – not a stereotype so much as an evocation, both harsh and reflective.
    Those of us not yet in the departure lounge and still able to take a good look at what has made them – us – like this can find some solace in doing so. What has happened is such an eccentric mixture of immediate and long-drawn-out, the arrival of a condition that has been decades in the making but seems to have turned up this morning. The succession of people that we have been – Sir Thomas Browne’s “varieties of himself” – are suddenly elided into this – final? – version, disturbingly alien when we catch sight of a mirror, but also evocative of a whole range of known personae. What we have been still lurks – and even more so within. This old-age self is just a top dressing, it seems; early selves are still mutinously present, getting a word in now and then. And all this is interesting – hence the solace. I never imagined that old age would be quite like this – possibly because, like most, I never much bothered to imagine it.
    My attitude towards these earlier selves – varieties of myself – is peculiar, I find. It is kindly, indulgent – as though towards a younger relative, sometimes impatient (you idiot . . .), occasionally grateful. I’m grateful for all that work done – a bunch of other people wrote my books, it can seem. I feel kindly towards those recognizable former incarnations, in whom I can see my present self – reading Sir Thomas Browne in the 1970s, digging our first garden in Swansea in 1961, entranced when my first baby laughs – spring of 1958. I’m angry about the mistakes, the deficiencies, the times I should have done differently.
    This book is to be about the context of a lifetime. Some of this context lies within my own head – the shape-shifting backdrop of memory. There is a rich population here, all those people in the mind, my own previous selves, and alongside them so many others – transient encounters and, most vividly, family and friends.
    My old-age friends go back a long way. Twenty years, thirty, sixty – Susan and I were twenty together – and even seventy-five years, two were known in my Egyptian childhood. And now here we are sharing this new incarnation. Or is it new? Because they all seem to me much as they ever were. We behave toward each other much the same, except that we inquire after health in a way that we never used to – really wanting to know, not that casual perfunctory “How
are
you?” But, I suppose because we have kept up with one another all along the way, we are not taken aback by the metamorphosis, the way we look now. When I was on the other side of the Atlantic a few years ago staying with my best friend in America, she produced a photo she had found