‘Old end-game lost of old,’ Beckett calls it, ‘play and lose and have done with losing.’ A human being is old when he has survived long enough to name, with absolute confidence, a year, one of the next thirty, which he won’t be there to see. Clinically speaking, during these last stages he is likely to lose his memory for recent events, his skill at problem solving, his power of abstract reasoning, and his ability to work with new and unfamiliar systems. (This will be partly because he can’t adapt to them, but just as much because he doesn’t admit the need for them.) What survives, if his body doesn’t let him down completely, will be word fluency, understanding, enthusiasm, memory of long past events.
This looks like a special providence for old writers. Story time can continue to the very end, even if they are reduced (as Shakespeare surely was) to playing the last games against themselves. The memory of distant events and atmospheres, in particular, will stand by them. ‘My mind,’ George Eliot found, ‘works with the most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remote past.’ Middlemarch followed. But the writer’s memory is of a special kind. The opening of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between—‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’—suggests that the return to childhood may not be consoling or even safe. At the age of fifty-eight Hartley felt himself compelled to go back there, putting it, however, a few years earlier than it really was, partly so that there would be no telephones and the small boy would be absolutely necessary to the lovers at the great house as a go-between, partly because the date 1900 would show Edwardian England at its deceptive ‘new dawn.’ There the narrator, as an ageing man, re-enters the old domain of half-guilty, half-innocent emotions, ‘ignorant of the language but compelled to listen.’
An old writer is even less likely than any other old person to be serene, mellow, and so forth. More probable are a vast irritation with human perversity, sometimes with fame itself, and an obstinate sense, against all odds, of the right direction for the future. ‘I detest the hardness of old age,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, the year before her death. ‘I feel it. I rasp. I’m tart.’ But she added, ‘I walk over the marsh saying, I am I: and must follow that furrow, not copy another.’ This certainty, even if it makes the readers uneasy, acts as a call to order, even as an unintentional reproach.
Tolstoy wrote Resurrection at the age of seventy-two, ferociously and without warning, to raise money for a charitable appeal. By this time he treated all fiction, and his own in particular, with reckless injustice. He was, he said, simply the clown in front of the ticket office, grimacing in order to get the crowd inside, where they would learn the truth. They would learn from Resurrection that man-made law and punishment—but also man-made revolution—is useless and evil. The resurrection takes place now and on this earth in the individual soul of every man and woman, as soon as they begin to pity each other. Prince Nekhlyudov is serving on a jury when a prostitute is brought into the dock, accused of murdering her drunken client. He recognizes her as his aunts’ ‘half servant, half ward, the black-eyed, light-footed Katusha.’ Ten years earlier he had seduced her and left her pregnant. Now, when she is sentenced to exile, he follows her, trying to make reparation, from one convict camp to another across the breadth of Russia to Siberia. As readers we struggle alongside, knowing very well that Tolstoy cares nothing for our difficulties. The pages are crowded with characters whose names we can’t remember, some introduced almost at the last moment. We are lectured unmercifully, and there is nowhere to hide from Tolstoy’s indignation. But the old storyteller’s art still beguiles at one moment and then, at another, strikes like a blow in the face.
To finish it, Tolstoy worked day and night, violently resentful of interruptions. Boris Pasternak, whose father did the illustrations, remembered the glue sizzling on the range ready to mount the drawings while a uniformed guard waited outside to take them to the Petersburg train. Such was the urgency of the old man and his book. The fact that the secretary of the charity committee had second thoughts, feeling that they ought not to have accepted the profits from Resurrection because it aroused lust, shows that moral giants were in conflict here. Tolstoy replied with forbearance, but could have done so in the terms Joyce used about Ulysses—‘If Ulysses isn’t fit to read then life isn’t fit to live.’ So, too, could Thomas Hardy, meeting the attacks on Jude the Obscure (‘Jude the Obscene,’ Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus, called it, when sent out to buy it in Dublin). This powerful novel was the last of Hardy’s ‘ventures into sincerity.’ He had meant to call it The Simpletons—Jude being a simpleton to dream of a university education when he was born a stonemason’s son, and Sue, the ‘slight, pale, bachelor girl,’ ‘the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves,’ being even more of a simpleton in trying to defy nature. For the first and only time (he was fifty-five) Hardy was writing about his exact contemporaries (when Sue leaves Jude she takes a steam tram). He had direct reforms, in education and in the marriage laws, to press for. But the book’s subject, as he made clear, was the ‘deadly war between flesh and spirit,’ which Jude is drawn into against his will, and which no reform is ever likely to alter. It was this, in 1895, which caused outcry. Hardy must have expected it, but he knew how to pretend to be astonished. Criticism of Jude, he said, completely cured him of any interest in novel writing. He had thirty-three more years to comment on the ironic and self-defeating business of living and dying, but he preferred to make his farewells in poetry.
Some late novels, however, have a note of leave-taking. News from Nowhere was one of the last books William Morris wrote, publishing it as a serial in The Commonweal in 1890. The subtitle is ‘An Epoch of Rest,’ and although the rest is for the future inhabitants of England, the ‘Once Poor,’ I don’t think Morris would have chosen it if he hadn’t been getting on for sixty. He begins by looking at himself with kindly detachment as he comes back one night on the Hammersmith Underground, disgusted at having lost his temper at a socialist meeting. The party work is for equality, peace and fellowship, but ‘if I could but see a day of it! if I could but see it!’ When he wakes next morning, into the London of the twenty-first century, the builders and haymakers also see a day of William Morris. It is this that gives the story its pathos and tension. Morris is the guest of the future. He is treated with overwhelming hospitality, but, as he sees from the first, he is ‘other.’ His intellectual curiosity and interest in history make him an odd man out, and at times he gives the bright, contented people a touch of uneasiness, ‘making us feel as if we were longing for something we cannot have.’ The interaction between past and present follows him like a shadow. His journey up the Thames leads him to his own house at Kelmscott. It stands unchanged by the water meadows, but the garret bedrooms belong now to little boys, the sons Morris never had. And at Kelmscott, the journey’s end, he finds not that the vision fades but that the people of Nowhere can no longer see him. ‘I noticed that none of the company looked at me. A pang shot through me, as of some disaster long expected and suddenly realized.’
At the head of the last section of his James Joyce, Richard Ellmann printed a line from Finnegans Wake: ‘Quiet takes back her folded fields. Tranquille thanks. Adew.’ For Finnegan, the giant presence who sleeps beneath the city of Dublin, the wake is a resurrection as well as a funeral party, but Joyce, as he made an end of his book, felt exhausted, as though all the blood had run out of his brain. He calculated that the last passage, where Anna Livia runs out, ‘sea-silt saltsick,’ into the Irish Sea, fading into a murmur at the last, had cost him sixteen hundred hours of work since he started on his book. It had taken him fifteen years to find the words for the journey of the night mind, asleep and dreaming, which we all share between us. Two years after publication he was dead. He referred to the Wake as a monster and believed that in the course of it words had gone as far as he could take them. They had become ‘pure music.’ It may be for this reason that composers—John Cage, John Butler, Stephen Albert—have paid the Wake so much attention. But Joyce certainly never ceased to believe that speech is the distinguishing mark of human beings, and that things, too, have their language. Language and speech can both be reassembled, in Joyce’s own phrase, as a scissors-and-paste job, cut out and reassembled from everything he had heard and read, ‘engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded’ to represent the truth even of the unconscious. The boldness of such an attempt at the end of a career, Gide thought, was more beautiful than the boldness of a young man. But Joyce, as always, was surprised that his readers didn’t laugh more at what, for him, had been comedy on the grand scale. Even in the final passage, where the river’s voice confounds sleep and death, he had not intended to be bitter. One might say, no more bitter than is necessary for a good Irish joke.
While Tolstoy and William Morris both came to doubt art’s power to change society—and if it failed in that it failed for them in everything—James Joyce and Virginia Woolf entrusted themselves to it, for its own sake, entirely. ‘Now they’re bombing Spain,’ said Joyce in 1936. ‘Isn’t it better to make a great joke instead, as I have done?’ Virginia Woolf’s Miss La Trobe, in Between the Acts, is her last version, perhaps consciously her last, of the artist in relation to society. Finishing the book, as always, was a strain on her perilous mental balance. It was written, but not revised for the press, when she walked out of her garden gate and down to the river to drown herself.
From 1938 onwards Leonard and Virginia Woolf were living for longer and longer periods in the country, at Rodmell in Sussex. Between the Acts is contained in a day and a night, and in one country house with its barn, pastures, and gardens. Poyntz Hall is old but middle-sized and ordinary—as far as anything described by Virginia Woolf is ordinary. There is no mention of it in the guidebooks, but ‘driving past, people said to each other, “I wonder if that’ll ever come into the market?”’ But although its beauty is real, its suggestion of a settled contentment is not. A closer look shows ‘vast vacancies’ of body and spirit. Children are divided from adults, husband from wife, servants from employers, and Poyntz Hall itself seems cut off from the war and almost unconcerned, although at any moment ‘guns might rake the ancient land into furrows.’ Miss La Trobe is the unlikely force that will make for wholeness. She is a bizarre, disconsolate figure, a lesbian deserted by her lover, fond of drink and known to the villagers as Bossy. Her art is as a presenter of pageants. She ‘gets them up,’ composing everything herself, words, music, and passing shows. A setting is required—Poyntz Hall itself—and an acceptable cause, in this case a collection for the repair of the parish church, but these are not the things that matter to Miss La Trobe. A heap of old clothes and a cast of amateur actors who don’t always know their parts are all that she has to work with, and she despairs, or almost despairs, of making her audience ‘see.’ What she had had in mind to show them had been the whole history of their island, back to the ‘night before roads were made, or houses,’ through to the present moment when they would be asked to see their own reflections in great mirrors and looking glasses, borrowed from the Hall and held up to their view. All this had been her intention, but in her own judgement she has failed. She needs company, she needs a drink, but in the village she is an outcast and she knows that when she goes into the public bar, the customers will fall silent. This, however, is not important to her (just as Virginia Woolf tried to persuade herself, time after time, that what her critics said was unimportant). For her the failure—worse than death—is failure as an artist. But when the pageant is over and the audience has drifted away, leaving the park to the cows and the roosting swallows, Miss La Trobe is already possessed by a new idea. She has ‘heard the first words.’ These are words that other characters in the book will speak, but have not yet spoken. In fact, we never know what they are. But Miss La Trobe does know.
She strode off across the lawn. The house was dormant: one thread of smoke thickened against the trees…From the earth green waters seemed to rise over her. She took her voyage away from the shore, and, raising her hand, fumbled for the latch of the iron entrance gate.
from End Games, edited by Maura Dooley,
South Bank, 1988