The Dead and the Dying
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing THE DEAD AND THE DYING BY PEARL K. BELL THAT WE LIVE in a time of hysterical devotion to the present, loud with the carpe diem of the swingers, is only one reason I want to send...
...In their "documentary, which employs some of the techniques of fiction," Miss Rabinowitz and Mrs...
...an embarrassment...
...For what he gives us is not the whimsy of the antiquarian, but the precise meaning of human continuity...
...Then they go away for good...
...there is no place for them in the lives of those they once meant everything to...
...Part biography, part family chronicle, part American church history, it is more than any such category can contain, a loving but unsentimental tribute to all the living and vanished generations that contributed their accidents of destiny and plans of the heart to Maxwell's life in Lincoln, Illinois, before World War I. Now in his 60s, Maxwell has devised his own perfectly informal, perfectly controlled method of family archeology, working from such disparate sources as a cousin's genealogical tables...
...Nielsen describe two homes in savage detail, each a masterpiece of theoretical logic made practical absurdity...
...That is the existential condition in the gravest sense of that misused word...
...Though much of the book's substance is the stuff of formal history, and it is at every point informed by a desire to pin things down in time and get them right, its feeling and shape resemble those of no history I have ever read...
...or his father, who removed himself quietly from the fire of such fanaticism...
...Maxwell compels our belief in the importance of such remembering, whether or not it fits the harsher truths of Sherwood Anderson...
...I have to get out an imaginary telescope and fiddle with the lens until I see something that interests me, preferably something small and unimportant...
...In place of their anecdote about the aged roue who sent off for a kit to restore his sexual prowess, I prefer the old tailor I met who loved to sew but scorned the Singers the women used...
...letters and stories from cousins and aunts with long memories...
...Surrounded by nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, occupational therapists, and an infantry division of social workers, the residents of a home should by all that's reasonable feel not only cared for but cosseted, every need, ache, pain, itch immediately dealt with...
...IN THE WORLD of William Maxwell's childhood, there was room for everyone, even and perhaps especially the old: "The person with plenty of air and space around him takes on an individuality that is felt as stature...
...Yet the aged linger on—senile, hobbled, frightened, and bemeaned by their inability to cope with the simplest acts of everyday life...
...and a chronicle of the dissenting Presbyterian sect, the Disciple* of Christ (later called, with touchingly uncluttered certainty, the Christian Church...
...Nothing could point up the stark contrast with our own time more brutally than Home Life (Macmillan, 288 pp., $7.95), an anecdotal, funny, terrifying account of life in two New York homes for aged Jews, written by a former social worker, Dorothy Rabinowitz, and a gifted recreational therapist, Yedida Nielsen, who has worked for years with old people...
...Some of Maxwell's remarks about the role of the dead among the living also acquire a grim pertinence to Home Life when one substitutes "aged" for "dead": "It is not true that the dead desert the living...
...How the Disciples of Christ broke away from the Presbyterians is set down in great detail, which on first reading I found excessive and on second reading both fascinating and indispensable to the book's architecture...
...I believe in Winesburg, Ohio, but I also believe in what I remember...
...Modern medicine becomes an instrument of irony, keeping them alive in a world that has neither room nor patience for their rage and their frailties...
...But sooner or later a time comes when they are in the way...
...The ladies' concern for literary effect is often transparently self-conscious...
...Lacking this rich account of camp meetings and bitter theological quarrels, of the revivalist preachers who swept thousands toward salvation, one could not understand the quality of his devout paternal grandmother, who took the New Testament literally...
...To read Home Life along with Ancestors makes one realize with numbing horror just how much the physical and moral space of our world has shrunk...
...It is a leisurely, subtly passionate walk through the landscape of his past, extending back to an ancient fortress in Scotland (whose photograph hung above his aunt's horsehair couch) and forward to his own young daughters...
...or the sweet balm of his mother's Kentucky family, light-years removed from the Maxwell severities in their tolerance and charm...
...I can't tell you why?old and young don't mix—that's all.' " Once the aged have faced up to the devastating and desperate commitment of living in an institution, they are safe from the particular terrors normal life holds for them...
...Nielsen give their kooky administrators dialogue with the well-honed economy of sure-fire stage gags, and much gets lost in the laughter...
...Even the most enlightened and generous care of the aged, as in Denmark, does not satisfactorily solve the problems that a life toward its end is heir to...
...William comes of tough, courageous, incredibly hadrd-working stock, men who could move patiently across the Alleghenies until they came upon the fertile farmland of Illinois...
...their presence is...
...He insisted that the home provide him with an industrial sewing machine, and it did...
...Pioneering farmers and God-intoxicated preachers figure strongly among Maxwell's American forebears, beginning with the earliest Scotch emigrant, Henry Maxwell, his great-great-great-grandfather...
...He evokes the innocence and placidity of the small-town Illinois life he knew before 1918 with extraordinary grace and affectionate candor, allowing that while these may not be the facts as others knew them, this is how memory has held those days in trust for him: "Men and women alike appeared to accept with equanimity the circumstances...
...Miss Rabinowitz and Mrs...
...Most of them feel nothing of the kind...
...In portrait after portrait of the residents and their horde of overseers, the authors point up the overwhelming conclusion that no nursing home can offer anything resembling a humane and realistic existence to the people who live there...
...a grandmother's patchwork scrapbook full of old letters, Christmas cards, photographs, and yellowed newspaper clippings...
...Maxwell is of course a distinguished novelist, and he admits early on: "I know that it is possible to consider history wholly in the context of ideas—the rise of this abstraction, the pressure exerted by that—because people do...
...More seriously, they slight the truth that old age is a betrayal of a man's very soul by his body, with all the attendant loneliness and despair that aging brings in its wake...
...After the initial relief that comes with knowing they need no longer cope for themselves—a blessing bought at the price of voluntarily giving up their apartments, their personal possessions, their bankbooks, and their families—they realize too late that although the home may be as safe as the grave, they are still alive...
...little-read accounts from the state archives about the settling of Illinois...
...In his hands it is no longer unimportant, as he tries to undo the elusive damage worked by "the simple erosion of human forgetfulness...
...It is hard to be old...
...But that isn't the way my mind works...
...In all fairness, perhaps my distrust of their reportorial probity stems simply from the fact that I have often visited one of the homes they describe—fiction, my eye—and I remember its teeming reality as being much less antic and deplorable than they cleverly make it out to be...
...They go away for a very short time, and then they come back and stay as long as they are needed...
...of their lives in a way that no one seems able to do now anywhere...
...Writers & Writing THE DEAD AND THE DYING BY PEARL K. BELL THAT WE LIVE in a time of hysterical devotion to the present, loud with the carpe diem of the swingers, is only one reason I want to send up an ardent prayer of thanks for William Maxwell's Ancestors (Knopf, 311 pp., $6.95...
...The other, Byron, is in love with the word "creative," and enforces a hectic program of activities, from needlepoint to Yiddish performances of Shakespeare...
...One director, Trommler, regards old age as pathology, and runs his home as a social-work school whose residents provide a bottomless fund of data...
...When the narrative moves into the span of Maxwell's own lifetime, it is obviously no longer history but memory, the experiences of this particular man that have shaped his singular being...
...not merely the sense of the past, but the nobility and wonder of its perseverance, through the intricate chain of generations, into the thick immediacy of the present...
...Their values, memories, feelings, especially their infinite capacity to be offended by patronizing geriatric specialists, are continually exacerbated by daily institutional life...
...And are impatient and even enraged if you suggest that human personality enters into it...
...And they would not, he makes clear, have been able to survive without the stern Protestant faith that cast its supporting light in the wilderness...
...But there is an air of haste about Home Life, too strenuous a reach for laughs in the midst of outrage, that seriously mars the book's dignity and its sober purpose...
...It's no good with children...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 15
