Bereft — of widows, aging & Jane Kenyon

    Always the weather,
writing its book of the world,
returns you to me.
Ordinary days were best,
when we worked over poems
in our separate rooms.
I remember watching you gaze
out the January window
into the garden of snow
and ice, your face rapt
as you imagined burgundy lilies.

Your presence in this house
is almost as enormous
and painful as your absence.
Driving home from Tilton,
I remember how you cherished
that vista with its center
the red door of a farmhouse
against green fields.

— Donald Hall, “Letter with No Address” [to Kenyon] Without

Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721-82), Self Portrait

So gentle readers,

How many widows and widowers are there in Austen? Come,come, surely you can count them off on your fingers. To start you off: from the 3rd of the Collection of Letters in the juvenilia, Lady Greville; in S&S Mrs Dashwood, Mrs Jennings, Mrs Ferrars; in P&P Lady Catherine de Bourgh:

1979: P&P (Judy Parfitt comes closest to Austen’s conception);

Lady Susan in the novel named after her (yes a widow, her friend, Alicia, hopes to become one); in The Watsons, Emma Watson’s aunt, Mrs Turner, widowed 2 years, made bad choice and as Mrs O’Brien cannot get her Irish husband to keep Emma with them so her remarriage causes Emma to have to return home &amp), Lady Osborne (another snob, older woman but attracted to Mr Howard, the household tutor) and Mrs Blake (sister to Mr Howard with a good-nature and complex past); in MP Mrs Norris, by the novel’s close also Mrs Grant; in Emma Mrs Bate (Emma); in NA, Mrs Thorpe; in Persuasion, Lady Russell, Mrs Clay, Lady Dalrymple, Mrs Smith, the most apparently sympathized with, but I suggest the third volume would have shown her gossip was faulty, misleading:

1995 Persuasion: Mrs Smith (Helen Schlesinger): poor, ill

In Sanditon, Lady Denham. Have I omitted anyone? I have omitted older single women never married, not many of those you’ll find, unprompted we all utter Miss Bates.

Then for widowers alone: The Watsons, Mr Watson; Emma, Mr Woodhouse, Emma’s father; Mr Weston (who however does not remain so), Mr Churchill by the novel’s end:

2009 Emma: Mr Woodhouse (Michael Gambon) not surprised Emma not keen to go to Box Hill again (“one can have too much of a good thing”)

In NA, General Tilney; in Persuasion, Sir Walter and William Elliot, Captain Benwick (honorary, does not last). To be sure, these are not idealized figures either.

What is the era’s response to old women, especially widows. Hostile mostly, insistent they erase themselves or risk ridicule (as lecherous if they have sexual desire still), better not advertise your later novels. Yes resentment the woman alone with money might be powerful, the insistence she is not to be trusted to make good decisions (so see Emma Watson’s aunt marries a worthless “Irishman” who takes her for her money).

What is our attitude. Well let’s look at Downton Abbey: four widows (at least) to start with: in Downton Abbey, Violet the Dowager whose presence is dominating and is a popular figure (Maggie Smith, comically beyond sex); Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton, much mocked in the series for her progressive views and continually thwarted desire to dominate), Martha Levinson, over made-up haggard mother-in-law (Shirley MacLaine); and the almost taken in (by a fortune-hunter), Lady Rosamund Crawley Painswick (what a name) played by Samantha Bond (aka, Maria Bertram 30+ years ago, a madam in Fanny Hill, Mrs Weston in 1996 Emma), who gives Lady Mary very bad advice and almost loses her the hero.

The lonely aging woman forced to see her maid in bed with her prospective groom

Compare the treatment of Mr Mason (Paul Copley), the story’s one widower thus far, William’s father, all kind wisdom, generosity, self-erasure:

He tells Daisy (another widow), the lowest in the house, “Now you’re special to me.”

Fellowes says they wanted the Dowager to appear in black, with (vulture) hat

As does another older single woman, Miss Obrien, and Mrs Hughes (dark sombre clothes though she is not a widow, simply did not marry), Mrs Patmore (we don’t know her marital status).

Season 3 Tom Branson (Allen Leech) is a widower, Season 4 Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) a widow. There’s a multiplication of further widows and widowers, Duchess of Yeovil (Joanna David) attempting to comfort Branson, and wooing our present widows, Lord Aysgarth (Edward Fox — previously unhappily married and now seeking Isobel Crawley), Sir John Bullock (?, Andrew Alexander, fortune hunter)

Austen’s Sir Walter looks to remarry but not Lady Russell; widows remarrying were frowned upon (the family would lose out). We have some sympathetic figures but on the whole they are not to be trusted (not really wise as Mrs Jennings for all her good nature is not) or are bullies. Lord Grantham is ever saying to his mother, “That’s not helpful.” She doesn’t always mean to be.

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Relatively unknown image of Madame du Deffand

I recommend two books about older women alone (a less tendentious category than widow) in the 18th century: Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850 (includes Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Catherine Macaulay), Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anna Barbauld, and let in Jane Austen), and Joan Hinde Stewart’s The Enlightenment of Age: Women, Letters and Growing Old in 18th Century France (Francoise de Graffigny, Marie du Deffand, Marie Riccoboni, Isabelle de Charriere). These reminded me that not only is the women’s subjective memoir, book of letters, becoming ubiquitous in the 18th century, many of them are by older women now living alone. I remarked in August that nowadays too, the widow’s memoir is practically a sub-genre; throw in all those dying in misery of cancer (also increasingly ubiquitous), and you begin to have bookcases full.

As I have found companionship in French women’s memoirs of the 18th century (Blood Sisters anyone? including Madame Roland written imagining herself about to be guillotoined), a form of grieving, of memory, I have now personal companionship in understood shared experiences, solace and comfort and strengthening. From friends, from letters, and from books by people I don’t know except as authors but to me they are people I know as well as those I might meet daily physically.

Transition: in poetry women have presented themselves as grieving widows from at least the European Renaissance on (Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara are the two widows whose sonnet sequences I have translated); but when did prose make the transition? When did it become common for people to present widows as bereft? Not in the long 18th century, when the treatment is satiric, and without a sense the relationship could have been one based on love, companionship. As lonely. It takes having sympathy for aging people. By our era this is implicit (in Downton Abbey treatments too).

Contemporary versions: This morning after I finished a bout of Hall’s Without the pain was lessened somehow. I can tell the difference between false or made books, which I think Oates’s A Widow’s Story is (something factitious, acting out about it, signalled by her never mentioning before the end of the year she had a male significant other whom she married), as well as Constance Beresford-Howe’s A Serious Widow (superficially treating money worries) — and books which are from the heart. A book can be a fiction and speak truth that helps: Susan Hill’s In the springtime of the year (a young woman’s husband has a tree fall on him), Swift’s Last Orders. Some have both qualities: Joan Didion is ever thinking of her audience and writing to sell or please as she goes but she is sincere too, utterly; Marilyn French (A Season in Hell) is rightly angry and wants to stir us up and see some reform, some progress in cancer, but she is speaking from her body within when she describes the horrors she went through.

Sincere, not overly presented as mourning or moving, great are Suzy McKee Charnas’s My Father’s Ghost (she takes in her dying father after decades ago his having deserted her and her mother); Margaret Forster’s Precious Lives, she takes care of her difficult father in his 90s); and Fanny Burney’s 200 page narrative of her husband’s death, which event she denied was coming past his becoming a corpse.

Powerful secondary reading: John Wiltshire, “Love unto Death: Fanny Burney’s ‘Narrative of the Last Illness and Death of General d’Arblay’, Literature and Medicine 12:2 (Fall 1993):215-234); to move into the next century, Karen Chase, The Victorians and Old Age; and last, not least, Susannah Ottaway, Silencing Pain in Old Age in the Long Eighteenth Century.

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I close with another sort of foremother poet posting: Jane Kenyon died young, but she knew she was dying and she now comes framed by Hall’s Without.

Pissarro, Winter, Sun and Snow (1869-70)

Walking Alone in Late Winter

How long the winter has lasted-like a Mahler
symphony, or an hour in the dentist’s chair.
In the fields the grasses are matted
and gray, making me think of June, when hay
and vetch burgeon in the heat, and warm rain
swells the globed buds of the peony.

Ice on the pond breaks into huge planes. One
sticks like a barge gone awry at the neck
of the bridge …. The reeds
and shrubby brush along the shore
gleam with ice that shatters when the breeze
moves them. From beyond the bog
the sound of water rushing over trees
felled by the zealous beavers,
who bring them crashing down …. Sometimes
it seems they do it just for fun.

Those days of anger and remorse
come back to me; you fidgeting with your ring,
sliding it off, then jabbing it on again.

The wind is keen coming over the ice;
it carries the sound of breaking glass.
And the sun, bright bur not warm,
gone behind the hill. Chill, or the fear
of chill, sends me hurrying home.

She too died in great pain, a second bout of leukemia at 48. I’ve been much moved by Hall’s book of pain, truth, memory and mourning about her last years. It’s hard to share any single poem by him, since the effect of the whole, the parts, the trajectory itself gives power to any single one, but I’ve picked out this from the first half, partly because I find when it’s discussed the quieter second half is the one that’s quoted when the one about cancer itself is part of the point of the book

Air Shatters in the car’s small room

Distracting myself

on the recliner between
Jane’s hospital bed

and window, in this blue
room where we endure,
I set syllables

into prosy lines.

William Butler Yeats
denounced with passion
“the poetry of

passive suffering.”
Friends and strangers
write letters speaking

of courage or strength.
What else could we do
except what we do?
Should we weep lying
flat? We do. Sometimes,
driving the Honda

with its windows closed
in beginning autumn
from the low motel

to Jane’s bed, I scream
and keep on screaming.

Her poems are quite different. They move to comfort, to affirmation (and thus are liked). But not all. One by her reminded me of my telling Jim about Obama and Kerry’s shameless war-mongering, urge to strike at Syria with their allies, the Nairobi “massacre” while he lay the way Jane does:

Threee Small Oranges

My old flannel nightgown, the elbows out,
one shoulder torn …. Instead of putting it
away with the clean wash, I cut it up
doe rags, removing the arms and opening
their seams, scissoring across the breast
and upper back, then tearing the thin
cloth of the body into long rectangles.
suddenly an immense sadness …

Making supper, I listen to news
from the war, of torture where the air
is black at noon with burning oil,
and of a market in Baghdad, bombed
by accident, where yesterday an old m~man
carried in his basket a piece of fish
wrapped in paper and tied with string,
and three small hard green oranges.

She often offers an unexpected angle:

Taking Down the Tree

“Give me some light!” cries Hamlet’s
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it’s dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.

The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother’s childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.

With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.

By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it’s darkness
we’re having, let it be extravagant.

This found in Margaret Forster’s Precious Lives:

Reading Aloud to My Father

I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov’s first
sentence I knew it wasn’t the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.

The words disturbed both of us immediately,
and I stopped. With music it was the same —
Chopin’s Piano Concerto — he asked me
to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank
little, while the tumors briskly appropriated
what was left of him.

But to return to the cradle rocking. I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That’s why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.

At the end they don’t want their hands
to be under the covers, and if you should put
your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
of solidarity, they’ll pull the hand free;
and you must honor that desire,
and let them pull it free.

To contextualize by Forster’s book: at the close of the memoir, she describes her father’s last couple of years. He was 96 and falling apart physically, most of the time in a state of misery from physical ailments or his own exacerbated isolated sensibility (sensibility may seem an odd word for this as the old man was continually hard and harsh to everyone he spoke to, a lifetime habit, but I think it appropriate), yet everyone conspired to keep him alive — the nursing
home, the medical staff,she and her siblings (no matter how conflicted and she relieved when he died). She asks the question why and offers the idea this comes
from an unexamined idea about life’s value as well as fear (for ourselves). So the last line of Kenyon’s poem in this context can mean the man should have been allowed to “pull” his hand “free.”

But then there’s how it felt to her, an intense appreciation of herself as an alive body, not willing at all to let go, be “freed”:

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

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Jane Kenyon

Writing about her: John H. Timmerman’s Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life; at the Poetry Foundation; Hornback, Bert G. (1 September 2000). “Bright Unequivocal Eye”: Poems, Papers and Remembrances from the First Jane Kenyon Conference (publisher Peter Lang). (Sept 2000):11–26; Kate Covintree’s “Having it out with Melancholy” Poetry for Students. Ed. David A. Galens. Vol. 17. Detroit: Gale, 2003. (like Anne Finch, she analyses her depression as mental illness); Gordon, Emily. “Above an Abyss.”Nation 262.17 (29 Apr. 1996): 29-30. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 57. Detroit: Gale, 2004.

Donald Hall, bereft widower

Ellen

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