Age

by Hortense Calisher

Rupert is an honored American poet; Gemma a retired architect. They live happily and comfortably in a Greenwich Village apartment; the setting, for over thirty years, of their married life. Each with a previous marriage behind them - which left her with two daughters and him with the promise of greatness - they are now facing the challenge of old age together. Both, in their own way, defy the inevitability of death, and yet both are busy preparing for it. The alternating entries of their private journals, which make up the body of Calisher's text, tell a story of familiarity and the fear of loss, love and uncertainty of the future, meanings and habits. With rare verve and panache, Hortense Calisher has confronted a difficult and often neglected subject - and has triumphed magnificently.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Hortense Calisher was an American writer of fiction.

Calisher involved her closely investigated, penetrating characters in complicated plotlines that unfold with shocks and surprises in allusive, nuanced language with a distinctively elegiac voice, sometimes compared with Eudora Welty, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Critics generally considered Calisher a type of neo-realist and often both condemned and praised for her extensive explorations of characters and their social worlds. She was definitely at odds with the prevailing writing style of minimalism that characterized fiction writing in the 1970s and 1980s and that emphasized a sparse, non-romantic style with no room for expressionism or romanticism. As an anti-minimalist, Calisher was admired for her elliptical style in which more is hinted at than stated, and she was also praised as a social realist and critic in the vein of Honore Balzac and Edith Wharton.

Reviews

[Noreen Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised and drawn in by the focus on a somewhat neglected age of character and side-by-side husband/wife journal entry presentation.Calisher does a phenomenal job of adapting the tone and voice of the separate journal entries to fit the two unique characters, Rupert and Gemma. Through the eyes of 73 year-old Rupert and his 77 year-old wife, Gemma, the reader is confronted with the very real concerns of the last-stages of life. A variety of aspects are touched upon as they confront their own mortality and that of neighbor, Mr. Quinn, and their friends/colleagues/writing competition Sherm and his companion Kit.

The reader will feel like they are walking away from dear, old friends by the time they reach the end of Calisher's novel.

[Ron Mohring · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely, nuanced writing. I couldn't help but think of my own parents as I read through this short novel, admiring Calisher's characterizations and dialogue (which reminds me of Albee in the way that characters who know each other can half-speak or hint and still communicate fully because they are fully aware of their history together).

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I began reading I was reminded of the French film Amour from 2012. Anne and George (from the film) are not that dissimilar to Rupert and Gemma. Both couples are old—Rupert is 73, Gemma, 77 (the actors in the film were in their eighties)—and yet are still very much in love, a romantic love which for so many by that time of life has become too much work. All four are creative types—the French couple were both piano teachers, Rupert is a poet, Gemma an architect—and all, at least when we first meet them, are in reasonable health all things considered. And yet death is never far from their minds, dying more so.

In the film Anne suffers a stroke and it becomes clear she’s not going to recover. In the book it’s friends and family—is an ex-wife still family? ex-family, perhaps?—that suffer but they remind Rupert and Gemma that their time on this earth—and, more importantly, their time together—is limited. They decide to keep a joint journal, an almanac:

      For company—to the one of us who survives. To be read by him or me—only afterward.
       ‘You start—’ Rupert said. ‘Pen-and-ink comes easier to you.’

They takes turns, first Gemma, then Rupert, each providing a different perspective on their lives and what’s happening. It’s a clever conceit but poorly executed. I say ‘poorly’ not because it’s not well done but because it’s too neat; one account dovetails into the next and I would’ve expected it to be rougher for there to be repetitions, omissions and inconsistences. It feels like each has read everything that preceded what they are about to write and so don’t cover the same ground. I would’ve preferred something rougher and I would’ve liked their writing styles to have been more distinct; most of the time I forgot who was narrating the section I was on and it didn’t really matter. Many years ago I read an early novel by John Fowles called The Collector. In it we have a similar situation—a man and a woman tell their versions of the same events—but what Fowles does is present them separately; we read his version of events—and accept it as truth—and then she tells hers and that forces us to reassess what we’ve read previously. I think it might’ve been better if Calisher had taken that approach here.

The project only lasts a short time; they decide to stop but not because of illness or anything. Mostly their entries deal with mundane matters but a visit by two of their old friends, Sherm (“the grand old countryman of American culture”—so said People magazine) and Kit (“a onetime Village beauty and darling of the poets and painters of her period”—so says Rupert) transform the account into something the two authors hadn’t intended. Sherm and Kit are hangers on, ever willing to take advantage of a rich acquaintance’s offer to have them housesit or a free bottle of good wine. It’s been four years since the couple have seen each other and so there’s catching up to do.

We learn that Gemma has two daughters to her first husband: one, Francesca (the younger one, the difficult one), has died recently, the other, Christina, now in her forties, pregnant for the first time and living in Saudi Arabia. Although Gemma and Rupert seem happy enough now it’s clear that they’ve been through difficult times too. Sherm and Kit haven’t just happened to be in the area; they envoys, heralds more like: Rupert’s ex-wife, Gertrude, seeks an audience:

       ‘She’s here,’ Sherm says. ‘She came over partly because she wants to see you. They encourage them to see the family if they can.’ He coughed. ‘She seems to regard you two as family now. Her only one.’
       ‘Here? ’ Gemma says. ‘With you?’
       ‘At the Plaza,’ Sherm says. ‘Naturally, she needs a—an aegis.’
       ‘Aegis?’ Gemma says, as if it’s some form of medication. Even now I’m often not sure whether or not she knows the meaning of some fancy words.
      Kit is biting her thumb and looking at Sherm with venom. ‘We are staying with her. That last man of hers did her rather well. Still does. Though he won’t see her.’
      Then of course I know who they are talking about. There’s nothing like old rage to clear the head. I had had to do the same with her as that man. Refuse.

Gertrude is dying and it’s seen as bad form to refuse to meet at times like this so Rupert and his current wife get dressed, hop on a bus and head off to the Plaza Hotel where a suite has been transformed into a hospice to have what Gemma thinks of as “A death party, with the friends we think we owe it to.”

Born in 1911 Calisher was eighty-six when this novel was published (and she went on to publish another seven books) before she died at the age of ninety-seven. Death does sometimes drag his heels. Age is a novel written by a woman who clearly knows how to string a sentence or two together. It’s written by someone who gets it. Even with the best will in the world I can’t see a twenty-year-old rattling this one off. At one point, after a fall that brings both of them crashing to the floor, Rupert writes:

We shall have to act together—as one. As a single, slightly damaged persona we now are. Taking care as we can that the Rupert half and the Gemma half are not non compos mentis at the same time. Plato would be interested.

He doesn’t mean literally. No bones were broken. He is, however, painfully aware of his and Gemma’s limitations.

Rupert and Gemma are a nice old couple set in their routines and wrapped-up in themselves but although their lives have had a few ups and downs we only get glimpses of their more interesting pasts which was a shame. I struggled to warm to them and to become invested in their story; they never became any more than characters on a page for me unlike, for example, the Bloggses in When the Wind Blows. The writing is economical—one might imagine the old don’t have words to waste—although at times her word choice is off-putting—a good example is, “While behind me, in a room scattered with our cottony orts and wastes, impregnated with the mucosa of all our cavities, is the view I must have.”

Not a bad book by a long chalk and worth a read. If you enjoyed it and are looking for something similar you might want to consider Michael Kimball’s Us .

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember liking this much more when I read it, at MaryLynn's suggestion 35 years ago. The writing is probably what captured me. There are passages that are beautiful, satirical, biting, and so sad. The New York wealthy set doesn't interest me that much any more, although the two protagonists...a couple who have decided they will each keep an account of their days, and of their marriage for the one who survives the other's death to read. It's a bad idea. One of them insists they won't do it anymore. Their lives and friendships, told in these alternating accounts, are poignant. But it doesn't seem as important somehow as it did half a life-time ago.