Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (54 page)

Not a word is spoken by the mother, who disavows her executed son. What could words do here? All the eloquence in the world pales in front of this horror. All we see is a woman twice shaking her head to signal “No.” It is unbearable to watch, even if brief to read. In my view, this sequence has the harrowing quality we associate with Mary attending the cruficied body of her son, except that this mother has no saintly or divine aura, is just a hustling canteen lady losing her most precious goods. And having to look hard, hard—twice—at what she’s lost.

I have pointed out that Brecht was ever irked by the tendency to sentimentalize Mother Courage, rather than to indict her for being a party to her ruin, for never understanding that her “business” puts her on the side of the warmongers. This grim lesson will be taught again at play’s end, when Courage is away while Kattrin goes to her own heroic death. Catholic troops have come to a peasant’s farm where Courage and Kattrin have been staying, and we see the peasants beaten into submission, into silence, as the troops steathily make their way toward the sleeping Protestant village, where they will slaughter everyone, children included. Kattrin—who mutely seeks love throughout the play, caressing animals, tending the wounded, drawn to babies, hungry for tenderness, all this despite having been disfigured early on, hence destined for solitude, for no husband—takes hold of a ladder, climbs onto the roof, hoists the ladder up with her, and begins to play the drums for all she is worth, to emit a sound that might wake (and save) the village (and the children). Once again it is pure, almost wordless theater: the Catholic soldiers and ensign are desperate to silence her, but of course she cannot even hear their screams and commands and pleas, so at the end they have no choice but to shoot her, yet her last drumbeats (as she dies) are heard in the village, doubtless saving it from destruction.

The next and final scene of the play has Courage squatting by her (dead) daughter, singing a lullaby, covering the body with a tarpaulin, giving some coins to the peasants to arrange a burial, harnessing herself to the cart, hearing the fife and drums of a marching regiment, and crying “Take me along!” And the play ends with a song expressing belief in life:

What to say? Brecht’s play stays with us as a tribute to the life urge, not to ideological brainwashing. I saw this play as a college student in 1960 at Brecht’s own theater in East Berlin; Mother Courage was played by the famous Helene Weigel, who made the role immortal. I was mesmerized by the spectacle of raw will to live shown in the face and body of a still-living woman who cannot save her children, again shown at play’s end as she takes on the Sisyphean labor of getting in the harness herself to move on. Capitalist fool? I felt then, and feel now, some five decades later, that this woman has borne every possible blow that can be meted out to her but is still standing, still moving.

Old age? Not a word in the play speaks directly to our issue. Yet this play stands in my mind as the pendant to Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
. The American novelist offers us the thoughts as well as sinewy actions of a man past his prime, doing battle with both the elements and his own aging body. It is an old man’s final performance, and its DiMaggio references perfectly convey its impact as final sporting event, final tally of what pluck and muscle and will can achieve against bad odds. I wrote that this novella does beautiful justice to our longing for a final chapter with grace in it. The sharks prevail, the contest is unwinnable, but human dignity wins nonetheless.

Against this spectacle I put Brecht’s play. This woman catches no great fish, nor does she soliloquize or ruminate about the stars. Her task is to get by. She rightly says, “You don’t ask tradespeople their faith but their prices.” She is leery of heroism, believing instead that in a decent country no heroes are needed. DiMaggio would mean nothing to her. It is all far more basic: Germany is ravaged by war as Protestants and Catholics take turns (for thirty years, all told) destroying one another, the land, and the people who live on the land. We are witness to a twelve-year endurance test—not quite a three-day marathon such as Santiago’s—in which the supreme gambit is to feed and clothe and maintain alive both yourself and your children.

And we see that it is a wager that cannot be won. Eilif, Swiss Cheese, and Kattrin all die; they cannot be protected. All Mother Courage’s cunning and prudence and wit are invested in keeping them alive: she tries to outsmart the recruiter, she hands the children black cards to mark their status as death-threatened; she counts on Eilif’s dash and agility, Swiss Cheese’s sweetness and thickness, and Kattrin’s scarred face and mute tongue to keep them on the living side of the ledger. All fail. Each loss appears, almost wordlessly, onstage like an amputation. But the old lady goes on. The children are dead, the mother is not. The author wanted our judgment; he wanted Courage’s blind stubbornness to be exposed as collusion with the war, and his ultimate sights were on stopping wars. In some grim way, he was saying, she got what she deserved, she reaped what she’d sowed. Ideologically speaking, there may be some final truth here. Yet I cannot help seeing this woman’s nonstop mix of struggle and stratagems—undeniably, unstoppably, hypnotically ruling the play, in your face—as the supreme resistance that our species puts up in its final chapters, even in the midst of carnage and death. Her elemental resilience defies, indeed dwarfs, all our fine categories of heroism and moral beauty. She does not die. She trudges on.

Brecht is well known for his interest in the “little people,” the common man and woman who do not always make it into our literature. James Joyce, on the other hand, thought of as esoteric and “high culture,” gives us in his hero Leopold Bloom as shrewd and instructive a case of everyday survival skills as we saw in Moll Flanders and Mother Courage. And he knows something about the problems of aging. In fact, Joyce reprises old Rip Van Winkle, who slept through his marriage, as a figuration of Bloom’s issues of belatedness. We first encounter Rip in the “Nausicaa” chapter of
Ulysses
, where a prodigious amount of erotic information has been coming our way. Bloom sits alone on the beach, busily ogling the young Gerty McDowell (who no less busily fantasizes about the “dark stranger” so intently watching her, so demonstrably worked up by what he’s seeing), who is rocking back and forth, showing her silent admirer ever more leg and thigh and higher up still. Joyce maliciously cuts this mutual arousal scene with a prayer retreat devoted to the Virgin Mary, so that we are obliged to consider all these rapturous ventures—Bloom masturbating, Gerty moving ever further into romantic reverie, the men at the church moving no less deeply into their own passionate adoration of a woman’s body—as a lesson in hydraulics, in what it takes to move the human machine into some kind of altered state and release. What, you may ask, does this tell us about growing old? Bloom is not old—only thirty-eight—but we see him as distinctly past his prime, because that is how he sees himself. While his wife, Molly, is fornicating with her lover—that is what she is doing—he is masturbating on a beach; onanism has replaced copulation. He has arrived at the period of substitutions; in fact, he is something of a genius at substitutions. That would be the lesson of time.

Spent sexually, Bloom muses about his current lot: “he [Boylan, the lover] gets the plums, and I the plumstones,” sensing that youthful passion is now gone, “Only once it comes.” He now recalls a game of charades in which he played Rip Van Winkle, with Molly looking on, and he muses about how he now fits the part: “Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow. All changed. Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the dew.”
His gun rusty from the dew
. Irving’s character was grateful for being out of the action, but Bloom is a wryer figure, unable to change things and to turn back the clock but heartbreakingly unable also to forget the sexual entente he and Molly once shared: “Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.” Growing old means realizing you’ll never have this again. “Me. And me now,” as Joyce’s text has it. Time deals you out; you make the best of it.

But
Ulysses
is out to insert Rip Van Winkle into a stormier, murkier scenario. The long convulsive, metamorphosing chapter called “Circe” is set in a brothel, and Bloom has been subject to considerable bullying—his putative wishes and daydreams are trotted out as if they had been actualized, and he is repeatedly put on trial for them—which reaches its apex in a morphological fantasia: he changes sex; he becomes female, and the brothel madam, Bella Cohen, now becomes Bello. One is free to interpret this psychologically: maybe Bloom has always wanted to be a woman? Maybe he has. But—and this is a real question, not a rhetorical one—has he wanted the kind of upbraiding and sadistic treatment that he’s going to receive at the hands of Bello? Bello threatens the female Bloom with whipping, sits on him, rides him, plunges his arm “elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.” With unerring logic, the humiliation game moves to Bloom’s most anxious area, his genitals, as Bello ridicules his limp organ, contrasting it with the rather more robust business going on between Molly and the hugely endowed Blazes Boylan: “Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! He’s no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush!” Here is a growing-old male nightmare of serious proportions.

Bloom is driven mad by the taunting, claims he “forgot”—forgot what? to maintain sexual relations with his wife? to stay young?—but Bello informs him that all is changed in his marriage since he’s been sleeping “horizontal in Sleepy Hollow [his] night of twenty years.” And on cue, Bloom is now shown “in tattered moccasins with a rusty fowling piece,” looking into the past for Molly, seeing a girl in a green dress and golden hair, only to learn from Bello that it is his daughter, not his wife. Milly Bloom speaks (for the only time in the novel) and informs her father of the central home truth of his life: “My! It’s Papli! But, O Papli, how old you’ve grown!” Out of the mouths of babes the truth is spoken.

We know that Bloom and Molly have not had sex since their infant son Rudy died at the age of eleven days. We also know that Bloom is not,
pace
Milly, old, but the days of sexual heat are behind him. Yet his case is illuminating for us, precisely because he is so wise and inventive when it comes to ersatz solutions to the problems and crises life presents. That his wife is cheating on him is problem number one, but scarcely the only problem: he also reflects on other unchangeable facts, such as the mentioned death of his son and the death (by suicide) of his father. This is a heavy burden, but it has its unarguable generic truth: the older you get, the more hard-to-deal-with cadavers there are in your story. (Dodging bullets is an increasingly urgent and frenetic pastime after one reaches a certain age.) I believe that Bloom evinces, in the face of these hard facts, virtues worthy of Homer, for he has learned that life still engages and charms even when deaths press and youth and passion are past.

One should in fact regard all the Bloom chapters in the novel as prima facie evidence of how one copes with trouble, how one gets back into the game (conceptually) after being cast out of it (factually, even biologically). There is true wisdom here, even if it has nothing to do with grand pronouncements or moral truths.
Ulysses
most fully rewards us by transforming Ulysses into an ordinary man coping with a boatload of troubles—troubles that mount as you grow older, as you find yourself on the far side of things. To borrow a term from Dickens, Bloom is the “artful dodger,” the man who has a peerless talent for slithering through. Slithering through may seem unheroic, but going under is still less palatable. Yet to call Bloom evasive or cowardly is to give him the short end of the stick, for the genius of Joyce’s novel has to do with Bloom’s activism, not his escapism: his capacity for daydreaming, for musing, for pondering, for changing the subject, for getting out of the way, for savoring what there is to savor while maneuvering around what is coming at him.

What is there to savor? A fried kidney for breakfast. A walk to the butcher shop, where he can admire the haunches of the girl in front of him. A curiosity about the way Dublin itself works: its businesses, its cemetery, its taverns, its waterworks, its politics, its stories. A renewed sense of life’s pulse even in the cemetery at the funeral of a friend, where the processes of dissolution and creation—a cemetery is also a picnic ground, Bloom opines—merge in their crazy dance, whetting his appetite for more life. A capacity to “let fly” on the beach when young female limbs are being paraded for him. (Why not? He and she both get something out of it.) An equal capacity to tend to the brilliant but drunken young poet whom he helps out of the brothel and invites to his home. An unequaled capacity to put time’s injuries into perspective, so that he still returns to his marriage bed at the day’s close, and what he finds on the bed—his wife’s body (plus the imprint of her lover’s body)—is still “home,” is still the “ample bedwarmed flesh” that is his anchor.