Djelloul Marbrook

I recently took part in a deeply rewarding discussion of late-life writing. Sponsored by Passager journal and press, housed at Baltimore University, the panel at Rehoboth, Delaware, explored not only the challenges facing elderly writers but the elderly’s special strengths.

We were all writers on the panel, Shirley Brewer and I were guests, and Passager’s editors, Kendra Kopelke and
Mary Azrael presided. The people who came had moving stories to tell and were living creative lives. I remember one woman who had been a librarian. In her retirement she decided to move into a community more culturally and ethnically diverse than anything she had known, and she felt richer for it.

Going to the conference I had wondered what to say, what to share. How could I shed light? How could I be encouraging when I myself was encountering so many difficulties on the way to publication. I decided to make two points, one encouraging, one daunting.

I said our long-term memory as elderly writers serves us superbly. We can shine bright light in dark places unburdened by the anxieties of the young. I said we filter our words through years of hard-earned experience and we are not driven helter-skelter by the hormones and insecurities and ambitions that prod the young.

But I also said that our work often winds up in the hands of young editors or agents who are unable to appreciate our angle of vision, the way we filter life through such long lens, and this is an obstacle to publication. Another is the fact that marketers envision a youth market into which we fit poorly if at all, and they don’t want to invest in people who won’t be around as long as they will.

This latter challenge is, of course, exactly what Passager seeks to redress. Indeed it has just taken a major step forward by publishing not only its first book, but a first book by an 85-tear-old woman named Jean L. Connor (inset). Connor’s A Cartography of Peace is an objet d’art not only for its poetry, redolent of William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson while unique in its own right, but because its production values are exquisite. It is an altogether auspicious debut for author and press.

But as I rode the Lewes ferry across Delaware Bay back to New York I realized I had failed to speak about the most poignant and at the same time important aspect of our growing elderly population: to the day we die we are of immense value to each other and our society, but to derive this value we must respect each other at every stage of our lives, to the very end, because the creative impulse resides in us to the end and is as capable of taking us unawares as are angels.

The persistent idea that artists, meaning writers too, produce their greatest work early in their lives, is both exaggerated and misleading. I think of the Frenchman René Char who tended to write aphoristically, placing roman numerals atop his brief bursts of poetry, insight and wisdom. Thinking of this style, we should remember that on his deathbed an elderly writer is capable of writing three lines that may endure longer than thirty volumes. Marketers of course don’t think of that, nor do they care.

At another level, a mere gaze, squeeze of the hand or reassurance speaks to the value and significance of the elderly as much as a big score on Wall Street by a thirty-year-old master of the universe. We don’t know it, and we don’t care, but history will not think well of a culture that could not grasp this about its elderly. And what is particularly ironic in our case is that we are (bloody-handed) successors to a Native American culture that revered its elderly and looked to them for instruction.

I regretted on that ferry that I hadn’t told the people who came to Rehoboth about my artist-mother who in her half-blind nineties painted with sticks and ink because she could no longer distinguish colors or handle large canvases. And I regretted especially that I hadn’t told them that these captivating stick drawings were often wildly and hilariously erotic.—DM