Literature and Aging: An Anthology (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 257 Medicine in the English Renaissance—with Shakespeare functioning as a bibUographical afterthought. —Barbara J. Bono State University of New York at Buffalo and James J. Bono State University of New York at Buffalo Martin Kohn, Carol Donley, and Delese Wear, eds., Literature and Aging: An Anthology. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1992. xviii + 434 pp. Paperback, $29.00. Handbook and teaching guide available separately from the Center for Literature, Medicine and the Health Care Professions, Hiram, Ohio 44234. $12.50. According to their preface, the editors have selected works by primarily "distinguished" modern American writers representing "the American experience and vision of aging" (p. xiii). Most of the works are by well-known American writers whose selections are frequently anthologized, such as Eudora Welty ("A Worn Path"), Ernest Hemingway ("A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"), and Edward Albee (The Sandbox). Other works, by equally distinguished authors, have not been previously anthologized , as far as I know; for example, Bernard Malamud's "In Retirement " and Toni Cade Bambara's "Maggie of the Green Bottles." "Variety" is also one of the criteria by which the editors made their selection, with representative works by "persons of diverse color, ethnicity , and experience" (p. xiii). Yet of the sixty-four selections, only a handful are by African-Americans (Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Henry Dumas, and Alice Walker) and only one is by a Chinese-American (Amy Tan). Native Americans and ChÃ-canos are not well represented here. These omissions are curious, since even the Norton Anthology of American Literature, a standard teaching text, incorporates works about aging written by Native Americans and ChÃ-canos, including Leslie Marmon Silko's story ("Lullaby ") of the old Pueblo Chato, and Alberto Rios's verse portrait ("Advice to a First Cousin") of his Chicano grandmother. Also unaccountably absent are late-stage works by such writers as Robert Penn Warren, Richard Eberhart, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Ru- 258 BOOK REVIEWS keyser. May Sarton's "On a Winter Night" appears, but she wrote this in her late forties; more meaningful would be poems or journal excerpts written when she was in her seventies and eighties. The editors also assert that the selections convey "the experience of aging, of being old," and they want "readers of this anthology to experience these fine works without the interference of editorial comment and interpretation" (p. xiii). These statements veil the interpretive interference the editors have already made in claiming that certain works illuminate aging. The editors nowhere offer their definition of what they mean by aging. Two definitions are implied, one in the way the anthology is divided according to what the editors see as four main concerns in aging: identity, love, family, community. Even if aging were defined as a time of these concerns—a definition contested by psychologists, sociologists , and literary theorists—how would the editors delimit the period before aging, since these concerns begin in childhood? A second definition of aging is impüed through the many works portraying characters who have had strokes or are suffering from cancer or some other debihty. This catastrophic concept of aging may be a response to contemporary warnings that too much focus on the healthy, active elderly person can create a false view of aging as "the golden years." The anthology would have benefitted from a more expUcit definition of aging, as well as from acknowledgment that any definition is partial and limited. The reader would have been better served had the selections been displayed in the Ught of other definitions. For example, the editors could have presented William Carlos Williams's "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," Ethan Canin's "We Are Nighttime Travelers," PhiUp Roth's "Epstein," and John Sayles's "DilUnger in Hollywood" in light of the definition of aging as a time of life review, suggested by the contemporary critical theorists Robert Butler and K. Warner Schaie. Even though Erik Erikson's late-stage conflicts between generativity and stagnation and between acceptance and despair seem enacted in Peter Taylor's "PorteCochere ," Tillie Olsen's "Tell Me a Riddle," Malamud's "Idiots First," and Saul Bellow's "Leaving the Yellow House," and...