"O das Alter!"

...The most absorbing sections of The Coming of Age deal less with the aged as discardable objects of a profit-driven society—nominally the book's point of concentration—than with the subjective responses to growing old that have been given us by writers, artists and statesmen...

...As one might expect, what such extraordinary people tell us about themselves is in the end far more illuminating than the social scientists' tables and summations...

...Being old makes me tired and furious...

...O das Alter...

...In her indictment of present-day practices, Mme...

...de Beauvoir's objective evidence of the way men have felt about growing old comes almost entirely from a creative elite, endowed with that very supportive sense of purpose she claims is ruthlessly crushed in "workers" under capitalism...

...In her conclusion she argues that it is not retirement alone that drains a man's life of meaning and purpose, for "the meaning of his existence has been stolen from him from the very beginning...

...As an outraged expose of an inexpressibly bitter problem, as a fascinating historical summary, The Coming of Age is a moving document...

...As far as she is concerned, nothing has really changed since the early-industrial world described by Dickens in Hard Times...

...The blame for the scandalous illness, poverty and solitude of old people in our society, she contends, rests squarely on "the exploitation of the workers, the pulverization of society, and the utter poverty of a culture confined to the privileged, educated few...

...Retirement breeds not only poverty but boredom, apathy and the crushing of all intellectual and social curiosity...

...Her generalizations are so sweepingly indifferent to the realities of modern life that often they seem nothing less than ludicrous...

...de Beauvoir becomes facile, reductive, shrill...

...This explains "the incredulity and the profound indignation that the revelation of his age so often provokes in the elderly man...

...Since the man in the mind's eye resists the years and remains unwrinkled, erect, without gray hair or humiliating weakness, it is supremely difficult for a person to manage the subjective acknowledgment that the outer man is decaying...

...On the other hand, Mme...

...We thus have to rely upon the statements of lawgivers and poets, who, she maintains, "always belong to the privileged classes, which is one of the reasons why their words have no great value...

...I am everything that I was and indeed more, but an enemy has bound and twisted me so that although I can make plans and think better than ever, I can no longer carry out what I plan and think...

...Socialism is clearly not the whole answer since, as she shows in an appendix, the aged do not fare appreciably better in the nonprofit countries than they do in the money-mad West...

...Mme...

...These form an engrossing anthology of commentary and confession about the changes brought on by old age...

...But if the poets' and lawgivers' words have no great value, where is any evidence to be found...

...Also in his 70s, deaf and almost blind, Goya produced some of his greatest painting, and at 80 inscribed a caricature of himself: "I am still learning...

...From the formidable range of quotation and example presented by Mme...

...For it is precisely out of these "valueless" shards of Western civilization, from Biblical times through our excessively documented own, that she pieces together the best portions of her book...

...is the consequence of a deliberate social choice...

...Yet when she asks herself, rhetorically, "What should a society be, so that in his last years a man might still be a man," her lame, vague answer is "he would always have to have been treated as a man...

...Unhappily, only a tiny fraction of the continually increasing numbers of old men and women (there are now 20 million people over 65 in the United States) are blessed with such creative ambition and the stamina to fulfill it...

...the entire civilization is ruled by profit...

...In discussing the aged in historical societies, Mme...

...Exactly how this ideal state is to be achieved, we are never told...

...de Beauvoir there emerges this incontrovertible human fact: Rare is the man or woman who can face with equanimity the merciless mortal chain of degeneration, both physical and mental...

...Tolstoy went on working until the end (and learned to ride a bicycle at 67...

...Even during their youth and maturity, the life of the majority of men in capitalist countries "prefabricates the maimed and wretched state that is theirs when they are old...

...When the helpless are ultimately placed in the understaffed and overcrowded leper colonies called old-age homes, they have ransomed everything they own merely for a place to die...

...Even if one feels by the end of this exhaustive study that her effort is longer on detail than on insight, it is certainly not for want of intellectual courage, outraged idealism and sheer hard work in the Bibliotheque Nationale...

...What she tends to ignore, even in the face of her own evidence, is that not all those who suffer in old age are necessarily the mistreated victims of social injustice...

...It is in her analysis of basic causes and her prescriptions for change that Mme...

...The bulk of her research, in fact, gives us little reason to believe, as she does, that once poverty has been eliminated, the last age of man will be "a period of life different from youth and maturity, but possessing its own balance and leaving a wide range of possibilities open to the individual...

...Whitman, who glorified old age before he reached it himself, found in his own due time that an aged man is anything but "Day full-blown and splendid...

...de Beauvoir admits to a serious handicap: From the earliest records through roughly those of the mid-19th century, the condition of old people is rarely mentioned...

...Indeed, her impeachment goes even further...

...Of course, there is considerable truth in her condemnation of capitalist societies for creating and tolerating some of the conditions that lead to criminal neglect of the old...

...de Beauvoir rightly assails the mandatory retirement that, "in taking from the workers the possibility of working, condemns the greater part of them to poverty...

...And even then there will in all likelihood still be those who exclaim, like the Vi-comte de Chateaubriand, that "Old age is a shipwreck," and those who lament, like Goethe, "O das Alter...

...This astonishing dismissal is typical of the way Simone de Beauvoir's radicalism, and its corollary anti-intellectualism, can distort her thinking to the point of seeming to repudiate the very material she is using...

...de Beauvoir provides some moving examples of astonishing creative vigor that not only persisted but increased far into an artist's final years...

...Forced finally into the recognition that they are aging, most of the writers and artists cited by Mme...

...de Beauvoir rail at their fate with eloquent futility...

...Predictably, a wealthy society is less apt to kill or abandon its unproductive members, and though old age in any form of human organization is an inevitable fact of existence, "the condition of the aged depends upon the social context...

...If all humanitarian efforts are "window dressing," how does she account for the billions that these countries she condemns spend every year on welfare measures...

...Yeats, who wrote some of his finest poetry about growing old ("an aged man is but a paltry thing"), was exasperated by his powerlessness...

...There is no significant difference, as she points out, between the powers of a man of 50 and one of 60, and "the idleness forced upon the aged is not something that necessarily happens in the course of nature but...

...Yet ironically, how few examples of a contented, busily fulfilled old age she was able to find among all those dedicated men ! Why should we assume that the workers in an ideal society would be any different...

...Verdi wrote his most adventurous operas, Otello and Falstaff, in his 70s...

...Writers & Writing 'ODAS ALTER!' BY PEARL K. BELL Simone de Beauvoir has set herself an uncommonly demanding task in The Coming of Age (Putnam, 585 pp., $10.00)—a stupidly misleading "translation," by the way, of the French La Vieillesse...

...Armed to the teeth with anthropology and history, literature and painting, philosophy and geriatrics, she documents not only the appalling conditions of the old in our own era but also the treatment of the aged in other times and other societies...

...The Utopia she envisions would require as profound and improbable a change in the nature of man as in his society...

...She examines first the role assigned to old men and women by the Eskimos, the seminomadic Yakuts of Siberia, the Thonga of South Africa, the Hottentots, the Canadian Ojibway, and many other primitive cultures, and demonstrates that "the old play a less important part among those nations that are sufficiently advanced not to believe in magic and to think oral tradition of no great consequence...

...But she puts a severe strain on credibility when she grandly declares: "As for humanitarian feelings, they do not enter into account at all, in spite of the flood of hypocritical words...