Nearing Ninety

by M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE

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IN 1941, when I was a mere boy of seventy-seven, I produced A Venture in Remembrance. My book had no more ambitious purpose than to present, against the background of the changing times through which I had lived, some vestiges of influences and interests, of kinships, friendships, and deepest attachments, which made me what I had then become. At seventy-seven I certainly thought I should have no more to say.

Now that my ninetieth year has amazingly begun, I find that certain happenings and reflections have set these past twelve years apart from their predecessors. My father used to quote the objection of one clergyman to the preaching of another on the ground that he had “the gift of continooance.”Shall I incur that condemnation if I rescue a few of these thoughts and events from the oblivion to which the course of nature unimpeded would consign them?

The special experiences that provoke my recollections of these recent years bear some relation to hospitals. After a nearly fatal illness of twenty years ago I believed myself done with hospitals. Not so. First there came a broken shoulder due to falling one dark night on unfamiliar ground into a hole, whence I was lifted after the manner prescribed for a neighbor’s ass — such indeed I thought myself— which had fallen into a pit. Then there was an operation for cataract on one eye, counted a successful operation for two days, when an inner blood vessel broke and the eye went blind. About six months later a sudden illness drained so much of my own blood away that I had to be sustained by the transfusion of sixteen pints of blood from other veins. I learned that the first two contributors were Irish and Slavic. What other strains were employed to save me I do not know. Perhaps I am a walking exhibit of the United Nations. I do know that after these three experiences the machine that was still to me had to be shifted into lower gear. But this seemed better than coming to a full stop.

In the general field of experience the first happening of all, bringing many reflections with it, has been the arrival of old age, and the recognition of myself not merely as an old man but as a very old man. My friend Jack Chapman went to the root of the matter in the simple statement that “old age is a bad arrangement.“ Certainly, in many obvious details, it is. All that can be said about it, pro or con, has been abundantly said by poets, philosophers, dramatists, and other masters of expression. Shakespeare’s definition of all that should accompany old age includes everything that one could ask, and more than anyone short of royalty is entitled to get. If he had included the item of respect he would have named something which, deserved or undeserved, seems to come to some of us through nothing more concrete than the long-continued piling up of years. At ninety the previous five or ten years can have contributed little or nothing to affect one’s stature in the eyes of others. Yet it sometimes becomes embarrassing to find that one’s opinions, even one’s protracted existence, seem to call for a certain deference never manifested before. Can it be that one has become a miracle, or curiosity, of survival?

In earlier years one has to win this respect from the generations younger than one’s own by a sort of interchange. It is a stupid old man or woman who does not respect the juniors’ right to opinions and ways of their own. There must be many parents who have learned that decisions at which the young, beyond the stage of mere adolescence, arrive are frequently the right decisions — for them. A wise woman has declared that the best way to bring up a girl is to provide her with good principles and a latchkey. A broad application of the truth behind that dictum would go far to promote confidence and respect between young and old.

For the ninetieth birthday of a brother who in 1949 had nearly four more years to live I made some verses about “The Genarians,” whom I divided into the groups of “sexas,” “septuas,” “octos,” and “nonas,” each with its own attributes. Before long, as my years were approaching the nonas in number, the matter took on a more serious aspect, and on my own behalf I made an appeal to “Thieving Time”: —

These terms began at once to find fulfillment. Quickness to move and see have diminished first, and quickness to hear calls after them, “Wait, I shall soon catch up with you!” Yet time has shown some mercy. I am not yet bereft of curiosity and wonder.

Of what do they avail? Curiosity has to do chiefly with the present and the future. What is happening, and will happen, to my children and grandchildren, to friends and contemporaries, to my country and the world, still engages my intense interest. I am irked especially by having to rely so largely on newspaper headlines and a limited recourse to periodicals and books. But the radio, the phonograph, each with the blessing of music, and that cornucopian gift from the Welfare State, “Talking Books for the Blind” — for these the handicapped, whether from age or otherwise, must feel a boundless gratitude.

The alleviants take some care of curiosity about the present. As for the future, curiosity slips easily into the perilous old field of speculation. The accumulated years seem to have taught me nothing more conclusive than that the common lot, perhaps with unpredictable minor variations in matters of both personal and general concern, is probably the surest thing on which to count. Carlyle’s retort to Margaret Fuller, when she declared her willingness to accept the universe, “Gad, Madam, you’d better,” is worn so threadbare by quotation that plenary indulgence must be asked for repeating it. But old truths are often kept moving in old vehicles. For living, not speculation, one of these vehicles carries an old truth beside which it is well to keep on marching. This truth persists in the Sermon on the Mount.

If curiosity relates especially to the present and the future, wonder has to do with the present and the past. Persons who have not lived more than fifteen or twenty years are already adjusting themselves to the wonder of change, the acceptance of new conditions. Television affords a single instance of this. For one who began to notice things in the decade after that of the Civil War — for example, at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, when the Corliss engine and Vienna rolls made their indelible impression on the mind of a twelve-year-old — the acceptance and readjustments have been innumerable. Gerald W. Johnson’s Incredible Tale and The Big Change by Frederick Lewis Allen present a panorama of change — social, economic, political — between 1900 and the present day at which the most hardened observer cannot look without gasping.

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INSTEAD of touching upon any one of those major changes in detail, or considering what it has meant in the nearest past, and how portentously, to be contemporaneous with the Second World War, the United Nations, Korea, and Stalin’s Russia, I should like to symbolize them all by contrasting what used to happen to one who woke up in the night with what happens now. I was well past boyhood when, waking in the dark bedroom of a country house, I had to grope on the bedside table for what was called a “card” of matches, detach one from its Siamese-linked band of brothers — perhaps a dozen — scratch it alight, suffer the pungent, sulphurous fumes it gave forth, wait till the blue flame set its splinter of wood on fire, and then light a candle. That flickering, tiny torch was all one could win from the encircling gloom, and somehow it seemed just as good as the winter gaslight, of a city house, a little bud of flame, “turned up” into a flapping yellow fire tending to spurt upward with a whistling sound.

How is it now — not today but tonight ? I stretch out my hand knowing just where to find a hanging chain or a switch to flood the room instantly with light. On the table by my side I find a radio set, AM and FM, a telephone, a clock. A buzzer to summon any ministration is close at hand. A small box offers the controls of an electric blanket as comforting to a chilly, solitary old man as that beautiful young Abishag who made herself a blameless hot-water bottle for King David when “old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he got no heat.”

As if these wonders were not enough I have only to step into the adjoining room, in out-of-bed hours, adjust a record disk to a phonograph, each provided free by the United States Government, and listen to the generally excellent reading aloud of a good book chosen from the extensive library catalogue of “Talking Books for the Blind.”To say that in the past year or two I have ranged from Paradise Lost, entire, through Tess of the D’Urbervilles, essays of William James, a novel by his brother, through biography, poetry, and history, to Mark Twain and P. G. Wodehouse, is only to suggest how many smaller things than aviation. atomic energy, and mass production are standing at attention to remind the very old that they are now inhabiting a very new world.

An old man living alone is in constant peril of thinking and talking too much about himself. His health and his memories provide pitfalls into which he is too likely to plunge. His friends conspire to the same end. One of their favorite admonitions on parting is “Take care of yourself” —just as if that were not an octogenarian’s chief occupation, if not his full-time job. These friends do not realize that their visits have so exhilarating an immediate effect as to win for themselves the title of “human cocktails.”

Sobering thoughts are bound to follow. An old human mechanism has no more claim to exemption from the repair shop than any other piece of complicated machinery. But a “used car” may still achieve a considerable mileage. The driver must try to get what he can out of the forces still at his command. He had better drop the idea of speed and, in driving the car of his own person, try to keep an open mind, and to count upon friends, such work (or its semblance) as he can still accomplish, and his family (if such there be) for both motive power and satisfaction.

In the article of friends it is discouraging to lose those few seniors who, one by one, must disappear. A. could have enlightened me on this matter, B. on that. Perhaps even more with C. there were bonds of sympathy grown closer through sixty, seventy, or more years. These are not easy to dispense with. Yet one compensating discovery is possible — that new friends can still be made in old age. This is not so likely to happen if you remain rooted in one spot. If you live in Boston, you will do well to visit New York now and then, uncontrolled by that belief of the besotted Bostonians that the best thing in New York is the five o’clock train to Boston. It has never been that best thing to me, though I am tempted to say, like Pope on quitting London, “Dear, damn’d, distracting town, farewell.” In New York it is well to go as often as one can to the Century Club, especially if one is familiar with its smaller “opposite number,” the Tavern, in Boston. What the visitor will discover is a more metropolitan, more cosmopolitan, assemblage of persons than any Boston gathering-place could draw to itself; and it his affiliations happen to be with Harvard, he will wish that Yale had in Boston so large a representation of delightful graduates as it contributes to the society of New York. This is by no means to suggest that size and diversity offset the advantages of intimacy in a small, homogeneous body of men. To the Century I owe a special gratitude for the beginnings of more than one of the old-age friendships which have meant much to me.

For all agreeable associations in which comfort may be found, there is of course much to be said. Yet there is a disturbing consciousness, when one has retired from active pursuits, that the effects of “containment” — by which I mean the restriction of human contacts to persons of one’s own little section of the social order — leave much to be desired. It was something to have worked, and lived briefly, in a settlement house; to have directed the operations of a farm; to have sat at editorial desks to which all manner of aspiring persons resorted. Sometimes I should like to interrupt my relations with elderly Bostonians and others, old and young, and of both sexes, whom I enjoy and value for our common interests and backgrounds, with excursions into more miscellaneous circles. This must now be done more in thought than in deed. When all is said and done, the unchecked stalking of respectability may be cloying, and only the more when you suspect that you are bearing an unconscious part in it.

Then there is work (or its semblance) in which one may find solace. Fortunate is the man with a hobby, especially if it calls, like carpentry, for manual dexterity. Fortunate too is he who can make a little music for himself, on whatever instrument. Not least fortunate is the writer, who can provide himself, as I am now doing, with a harmless, congenial employment, which will have served that one good purpose even if it stops short of print. The spur of fame, that last infirmity of noble mind, need not be felt. If it happens that some of this writing may interest others, so much the better. Perhaps there is nothing more gratifying than to do what one most enjoys doing, and then to be paid for doing it.

The case for old-age employment in general was put in a nutshell by one of the two brothers Smith, now more than half forgotten, whom fate might have concealed entirely by so naming them had they not written “Rejected Addresses.” From the younger brother, Horace, came these lines: —

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A FEW years ago the Boston Herald printed a short editorial on “The Writing Howes.” My three children had added books of their own to a considerable number for which I was responsible. Their additions to the total list have consisted of fiction, biography, and history; nor does the flow seem to have abated. In fact a daughter-in-law and two nephews must now be included in the “Writing Howes.” My own children, through broadcasting and direct speech from stage and professor’s desk, might be called also “Talking Howes,” and by one of those miracles that may attend the easing of pressures on the human system, I appear to have joined them, in the past, few years, through an astonishing fluency of speech — a liberation hitherto unimaginable. Perhaps fortunately for unprotected listeners it has come too late to be used as I should once have used it .

The interests of the younger writing and talking Howes have coincided at so many points with my own that I have had more than a merely paternal concern for their successive undertakings. In the way of help in old age from one’s family, what more could be asked? The scenes of one’s boyhood and happiest later years provide another stay and comfort. In recent summers I have drifted back to my native Bristol in Rhode Island, especially to the house of a beloved younger brother. At eighty-four he celebrated ray eighty-eighth birthday in August of 1952 by a family party at which our older brother in the last of his ninety-three years was also present. The total of our combined ages was two hundred and sixty-five. Our host, in his perennial youth, colored a print of the familiar picture “The Spirit of 1776,” turning to gray the hair of the three Revolutionary patriots, and labeled it “The Spirit of 265.” This may not be a “conversation piece,” but perhaps it will provoke conversation among sons, daughters, nephews, and nieces for some years to come.

My lingering on the stage on which my children are appearing has had one inconvenience, due to an imperfect distinction between my name of four units and my younger son’s of only three. Writings of his have been attributed to me, and vice versa. The confusion has not been lessened by my having written a short biography of the older Oliver Wendell Holmes and his dealing, more monumentally, with the younger. I wonder if the annals of biography afford a parallel to the fact that two greater Wendell Holmeses, father and son, have been the subjects of published study by the two lesser DeWolfe Howes, also father and son.

In the year of 1951 the ties with Rhode Island were strengthened through my becoming an elderly alumnus of Brown University, the college from which five generations of my family have been graduated. It was good, even so late, to find myself no longer outside their academic circle. On Commencement Day in Providence I learned that my father had received his Brown honorary Doctorate of Divinity in 1849, just one hundred and two years before the corresponding degree in Letters was conferred upon the son who bore his name. The long gap may best be explained by the greater precocity of the generation before my own, for my father was only forty-one in 1849, against my eighty-seven in 1951.

It was to Bristol, and to Weetamoe, the family farm, then my home, that in 1899 I brought my wife, a bride. It was in Bristol in 1933, shortly after her death, that I wrote the following lines, long unseen by any eyes but my own: —

As I uncover them now, time has shown that a smile may keep on returning through the dark, a spirit not my own may still burn in my heart. To whatever my children derived from their mother at birth there was added her influence until the youngest of them reached the age of twenty-seven. Were it not for them, and their inheritance of some of her gifts of perception, feeling, and expression, the smile and the spirit which have come back to revitalize my own memories of her might remain in the realm of lamented things. An indication of what these memories mean to me may be found in the fact that hardly a day passes without my doing or saying something (or abstaining from such act or word) in accordance with what I believe she would have liked. This is but one small token of a larger linking of the present with the past. Yet even by small degrees a fraction may acquire some resemblance to an integer.