SOURCE: Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. “Another Model of the Aging Writer: Sarton's Politics of Old Age.” In Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, edited by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen, pp. 49-60. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

[In the following essay, Wyatt-Brown investigates different theories of aging and productivity and applies them to Sarton's treatment of the elderly in her work.]

In 1990 I was asked to present a paper on May Sarton's The Education of Harriet Hatfield (1989) at a meeting which the novelist herself was to attend. Unfortunately, the novel initially disappointed me. Some of Sarton's literary decisions seemed baffling. Why should the novelist, who spent her middle age celebrating the courage of elders, as Kathleen Woodward has demonstrated, suddenly write about a woman more than ten years younger than she?¹ Moreover, the fairy-tale elements of this story undermined the credibility of the plot.

On first reading, Harriet, the sixty-year-old heroine, seemed too good to be true, as this brief plot summary demonstrates. She survives the death of her longtime lover, Victoria Chilton, without much sign of despair. Shortly thereafter she opens a feminist bookstore in Somerville, Massachusetts, a working-class district near Cambridge, an unlikely place for such an enterprise. Despite the sometimes violent behavior of resentful locals, Harriet gathers around her a group of loyal supporters. With their help she manages to discover the identity of the perpetrator of the violence. At the same time her bravery in the face of repeated attacks wins the hearts of her neighbors so that the violent opponent, not Harriet, must eventually depart. In the course of the novel, Harriet becomes the close friend of a homosexual couple, the younger of whom is dying of AIDS. Somewhat earlier, Harriet has announced to a reporter that she is a lesbian, and in response to the subsequent story, her brother confides in her about his own homosexuality. All this suffering convinces Harriet that homophobia must be confronted at every turn, but she urges that bigotry should not be replaced by promiscuity. At the novel's end it is clear that Harriet's bookstore will remain a staple of Somerville life, but some important subplots are left unresolved.

Knowing that Sarton might be present made me hesitate to criticize too harshly. Fortunately, the advice of Peter Elbow, a theorist of writing and pedagogy, suggested a solution to the dilemma. In an appendix to Writing without Teachers, he comments wryly on the inability of academics to refrain from criticism. As he puts it, we find the notion of “trying to believe … heretical and self-indulgent.”² Equally heretical, I discovered, would be to apply Elbow's technique of responding to student writing to Sarton's novel, to begin by temporarily refraining from arguing with her premises and instead try to reconstruct her point of view as a novelist. Ultimately, I began to realize that the problem was one of expectations. Based on previous experience, I had come to expect that writers in later life would fit one of two patterns, ones that have already been identified by literary gerontologists. But Sarton's novel, rather than fitting already established categories, creates a new one, one which has not yet been discussed. This discovery makes it clear that the task of constructing models of old-age fiction should now begin, in order to expand our understanding of the many ways in which aging artists react to the experiences of growing older. In this [essay] three ways are identified by means of which writers adapt their work to their changing status in late middle age and old age. Sarton's novel is discussed in the third category.

The first is broadly speaking a model of continuity, and it can best be explained by referring to Erik Erikson's ideas about identity formation. Erikson's theory of life stages is summarized in a famous chart of the life cycle, in which he describes both the values and challenges of each period in life. These writers in the first group found themselves as individuals—established their identities—in adolescence or early adulthood, as Erikson predicted, and have remained faithful to that vision of themselves, fidelity being the value, according to Erikson, that emerges after adolescents have determined what their roles in life will be. At that time they also discover their compelling identity themes as writers, to borrow a concept from literary critic Norman Holland.³ The productivity of this group depends largely upon their choice of themes and their capacity to adjust to the changes of midlife and later. Some are able to adapt their themes to accommodate their perceptions of the world, whereas others lack the capacity to redirect their creativity in middle age when their youthful themes no longer seem compelling.

The more fortunate ones are like the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart, whose career, according to Carolyn Smith, has consistently made the case for the connection of present self with a past or remembered one. She points out that Eberhart developed an interest in aging and its meaning in his youth but had the necessary “cognitive plasticity” to look for “broad life-span meanings” at every stage of his development. As a result, his view of life has not changed much over time. That is not to say that Eberhart's style has been static, or that he is untouched by suffering. Early in his career he discovered his primary theme, the journey from despair to affirmation, and according to Smith he has re-created that journey repeatedly in “an astonishing variety of images and verse forms.” Thus in old age Eberhart has much to write about, and for him poetry is still, as it was earlier in his career, an expression of fundamentally positive feelings. Other examples include Tennyson and Picasso, who, according to Robert Kastenbaum, in youth used their art “to create potential futures” and later on in old age connected “past and future together into a wholeness.”⁴

Thematic continuity in itself, however, does not guarantee productivity throughout the life course. In fact, Anglo-American culture abounds with examples of young poets and novelists who died young or lost their urgent need to create sometime in early middle age. As mentioned in the introduction, quantitative studies by Dean Simonton prove that lyric poets peak early and use up their creative potential before they are well into middle age. Until Margaret Gullette's essay in this volume, however, few literary scholars have attempted to analyze systematically so destructive a pattern in light of social forces that shape writers' attitudes toward art.⁵

Scholars will find insights in the field of social psychology. For example, social psychologist Mihály Csikszetmihályi recommends a systems approach for analyzing creativity, in order to conceptualize the complex relationship of artists and their societies. In this model creativity is viewed as “the product of three main shaping forces”: the creative “individual”; the social institutions that create the “field,” and “a stable cultural domain” that seeks to “preserve and transmit” what has been created to future generations. Psychologist David Harrington employs a similar analysis to show how ethnocentric creativity can be. He argues convincingly that writers need acceptance and social support from readers and publishers, as well as available themes and genres that fit their particular kind of creative talent.⁶ For a variety of reasons some writers do not receive the recognition necessary to sustain their creativity. They seem to have been born either too late or too soon to find an outlet for their particular insights and visions.

This systems approach helps explain why continuity sometimes can lead to lack of productivity in later life. For example, writers like William Wordsworth, E. M. Forster, and Louise Bogan made no radical changes in theme as they aged, but the absence of change had a deleterious effect upon their creativity.⁷ Unlike Eberhart's, their works often reflect melancholic feelings of loss or a sense of exclusion from society. They each developed themes that emphasize the intense feelings of childhood and youth at the expense of maturity and old age. One has the sense that they had an over-developed sense of fidelity to their themes, indicating that they paid too high a price to establish their artistic identity. As a result, in midlife when they found it increasingly difficult to continue to tap their well-established sources of creativity, they were unable or unwilling to chart new courses.

A second, more artistically fortunate group consists of those writers who when confronted with the Eriksonian conflict of integrity versus despair in later life, become liberated by the possibility of radical change. These writers include Elizabeth Bowen, Anita Brookner, Penelope Mortimer, and Barbara Pym. As George Vaillant has remarked, individuals often experience depression during transitional phases in their lives, but these moments also offer the opportunity for making one more attempt to solve “old instinctual or interpersonal needs.” Like an artist whose career Vaillant followed, these writers use their creativity “to ‘affirm the larger meaning of pain.’”⁸

Yet none of this group has experienced this radical change in exactly the same way. For example, Anita Brookner published no fiction in her youth; instead she was a very successful art historian. In late middle age, however, she began writing novels in which she depicts the lives of a variety of isolates, almost as if she were working out her own position in the world. These characters, like Brookner herself, are alone in the world and often find this position difficult to manage. The process of writing and the pleasures of success—she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac (1984)—appear to have been salutary for the novelist herself. Her early fiction projects a relentlessly gloomy message, whereas her more recent work offers some modicum of hope to the protagonists. In contrast to Brookner, in early old age Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym, and Penelope Mortimer continued or resumed well-established careers, but each made dramatic changes in her style and focus to meet the personal challenges of that stage of life. The death of Bowen's husband, Pym's stroke, and Mortimer's traumatic divorce forced them to reexamine their lives and to channel their creativity in a different direction. Their later novels directly confront the authors' sense of vulnerability and lack of control over their lives.⁹

These two models are by no means representative of all old-age fiction. A third paradigm is equally significant. It consists of writers in old age whose days of self-exploration appear to be behind them but whose fame guarantees them a larger audience than they once had. This category includes May Sarton, as well as the late Walker Percy. Their most recent novels can both be described as messages in bottles, their legacy for the next generation. These works are not just novels of protest, although one can find elements of remonstrance in them, as well as in much of their earlier fiction. For example, Kathleen Woodward has pointed out that sixteen years earlier Sarton composed As We Are Now (1973) primarily to protest “the inhumanity of American society toward the elderly.” In old age and ill health, however, both Sarton and Percy (now dead) approach their audience in a somewhat more muted fashion. They do not hesitate to speak their minds, but they adapt the tone of privileged elder giving “a lay sermon,” thus fulfilling Erikson's prediction of the “grand-generative function” in later life.¹⁰ The writers in this third group are at least a generation removed from their heroes. They use these narratives as a means to pass on their wisdom and experience to those who will follow. Furthermore, they write with the confidence that their readers will listen to and perhaps act upon their messages.

Examining Sarton's latest work from this perspective forces us to confront underlying prejudices about the effect of aging upon literary creativity. Most readers will prefer the qualities of the first two models of late-life fiction, particularly writers, like Elizabeth Bowen, who transcend loss or illness and discover new meanings, no matter how tentative, for the rest of their lives. Obviously this creative activity offers hope for our own problematical futures. Moreover, these swan songs often combine intensity of feeling with a complicated and rich structure. Yet authors can be cantankerous. They write what they want, not what their readers necessarily desire. Sarton's narrative strategies constitute a politics of old age; she uses her fame to impart a message that she hopes will alter social attitudes. In order to understand Sarton's narrative choices, it was necessary to review her earlier career, to try to understand the place of this novel in her life's work.

Besides producing an analysis of Sarton's novels that intrigued and pleased the novelist herself when she heard the paper at the conference, this literature review enhances our appreciation of Sarton's lifelong literary accomplishments. Although one might assume that in old age Sarton would celebrate the lives of the aged, as she does in Kinds of Love (1970), a novel that Kathleen Woodward also analyzes in her essay, experienced Sarton readers have learned to expect surprises. Exploring the unexpected has long been her trademark, and the novelist has always been far too adventurous merely to repeat a formula. The death of her parents and moments of depression encouraged her to make loneliness a theme quite early in life. Then, desiring to be honest about her bisexuality, at the age of fifty-three she published a life-review novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), shortly before she began the first of her well-known journals. Once, however, she had examined her creative life and loves in that novel of midlife, she apparently has felt no particular compunction to repeat the experience.

The one common thread in most of her fiction is Sarton's effort to define the meaning of family. For example, her second novel, The Bridge of Years (1946), not only describes a Belgian family she loved dearly but imaginatively creates the life she might have known had her parents stayed in Belgium in 1914 and been lucky enough to have had their two infant sons survive. All that exploration of family life obviously sustained the novelist through the transitions of midlife by offering her what she regarded as secular salvation through art. Writing allowed her to express her sense of loss when her parents died, and her powerful novels, as well as her journals and poems, attracted new friends, many of whom could to some extent substitute for lost family. As George Vaillant has observed, we stop growing when we fail to replace “our human losses”; we need “to acquire new people to care for faster than they die or move away.”¹¹ As a result of her creative efforts, despite a stroke, in old age Sarton's narrative voice is remarkably serene.

Of course we must remember that Sarton is creating fiction in her story of Harriet, not simply retelling her own personal story. Though some of her novelistic energy has a personal source—the plot derives in part from Sarton's musings on the wonders of survival—artistic alchemy transforms this raw material into a folk tale, or perhaps more accurately into a Jungian mythic adventure, like the ones described so movingly by Allan Chinen. Sarton has discovered the truth of Jung's contention that the upheavals of midlife can lead the sufferer into new paths which are potentially regenerative. After all, the novelist left Cambridge, her childhood home, for New Hampshire and then Maine in an effort to put down roots that would be hers alone, not a replication of her parents'. Harriet is about the age that Sarton was when she moved to Maine to finish her quest. At sixty the heroine is a bit older and more vulnerable than many of the powerful empty nesters the psychologist David Gutmann describes, but she still has the energy to seek compensation for what she has lost.¹² Despite the passivity of her past life, her willing submergence in the fabric of Victoria Chilton's life, she discovers unexpected strengths. Like the hero in a Jungian adventure, outsiders help her, in this case friendly bystanders who recall the friendly animals of fairy tales. Harriet is assisted by a most unlikely group of individuals—nuns, a woman who looks like a bag lady but in actual fact is nursing a sick husband, lesbian college students, an artist who is also a battered wife, and a young black professional wife and mother—a mixture much like the one Sarton depicts in her journals.

Sarton willingly bequeaths her resilience to her latest heroine, whose ladylike exterior obscures the steel within. On the first page of the novel Harriet describes her desperate conviction “that I must recreate a self I can live with for the rest of my life” (The Education of Harriet Hatfield, 9), but she quickly discovers that the search is so satisfying that it numbs her pain. Harriet's acute sense of loss becomes retrospective, something she mulls over in private. Like her creator, Harriet survives the loss of her lover because she has the capacity to turn her friends into family substitutes. Sarton makes Harriet relatively young so that telling her story allows the novelist to review the steps by which she became the kind of person she has become in old age. To borrow Margaret Gullette's useful term, the novelist has constructed a midlife progress novel. From Harriet's crisis of early old age, Sarton, like the novelists that Gullette studies, creates “a happier genre,” one that celebrates “the existence of heavenly days.”¹³

Sarton tells the tale entirely from Harriet's point of view, a narrative decision which unfortunately limits the ways in which Harriet's character can be probed. Restricted to a single perspective, Sarton is reduced to having other characters tell Harriet how wonderful she is, statements that often are not convincing or fresh. Sarton rarely uses the “one-person point of view” narrative in her fiction. As We Are Now is the only other novel told entirely in the first person, but in The Small Room (1961), she concentrates so intently on her heroine, Lucy Winter, that she creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, much like the one in The Education of Harriet Hatfield. In general Sarton prefers to explore the perspective of a variety of characters. The novelist, however, seems almost compelled to free her heroine from bondage, to let her speak for herself. This appears to be at least partly a conscious choice. After all, Sarton is well aware of the problems she faced when using the first person. She once remarked that “the danger of being inside one character alone is special pleading”; she realized that “my talents are, I fear, not dispassionate.”¹⁴ By this choice Sarton may lose some of the psychological complexity of her richer characters, but the first-person narration does generate a feeling of urgency from its pared-down prose.

This matter of style is worth further attention because one characteristic of old-age writing can be a new simplicity, prompted by a sense that time cannot be wasted. For example, in her early sixties Barbara Pym focused so intensely on her primary message in a manuscript version of Quartet in Autumn (1977) that an editor warned that it was too short to be publishable and friends begged her to add more scenes.¹⁵ Sarton's minimalism took a slightly different form. Although her novel is longer than Pym's, Sarton stripped away the perceptions of other actors in the drama. Harriet tells her story almost laconically; her unadorned prose reinforces the character's insistence that we must seek an acceptance of human difference. Indeed Harriet's honesty about sexual matters is remarkable when Sarton has portrayed her as the sort of woman for whom even saying the word lesbian is problematical. One cannot help speculating that Sarton herself must have once felt equally as uncomfortable when she first declared her homosexuality in public.

Didacticism in late-life novels is not uncommon; in Sarton's case, she has long awaited popularity and critical acclaim, and a degree of impatience might be an additional reason to preach. Although Norton has published most of her novels since 1961, it was slow to bring them out in paper. For example, The Single Hound (1938), Sarton's first novel, was not reprinted until 1991. Most of her novels appeared in paper ten to fifteen years after their first publication. Few courses in literature have included her novels, and relatively few critics have analyzed her work. In 1977 Sarton complained that she was not in the Norton Anthology, “my own publisher's.” Comments in her journals emphasize her exasperation at the slowness of this pace. Considering the quality of her best work, one can share her sense of frustration with all this “due deliberate speed.” In late life, however, she commands an audience and has a chance to speak frankly about homosexuality to the straight world. For all these reasons, Sarton, like Walker Percy in The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), has used this novel to take a stand. We may be shocked by her refusal to write about a frail old woman and be convinced that the author made the wrong choice, like the boy in the “Story of the Shoe Box,” who, when fleeing from the Nazis, chose the box with practical objects rather than those of personal value. Yet, as Marc Kaminsky has made clear, what matters is that the boy lived to tell his story and that we in turn tell it to others. For writers the essential point is to maintain “narrative possibility.” Thus, sociologist Jaber Gubrium has ample reason to suggest that good luck, good health, and the capacity to use their creativity have allowed certain gifted elders dramatically to postpone or modify the experience of aging itself. In this case, Sarton accomplished through fiction the task of healing which, according to anthropologist Sharon Kaufman, most stroke victims attempt to achieve “by revising and re-creating” their life story so that it reflects what they have learned from their life-threatening illnesses.¹⁶

Sarton also exemplifies the point that artists often resist being categorized at any point in life—be the classification gender, ethnicity, class, age, or sexual orientation. A close examination of her fictional career suggests that she has always chosen her subjects to meet her own desires rather than seek to satisfy our literary demands. At every point in life, the act of writing has almost literally regenerated and sustained her. Metaphors, like the image of the phoenix arising from its ashes, which Sarton told her audience in Gainesville was her favorite, help to explain the forces that generate creative work and transform, at least for a time, the experience of aging itself.¹⁷ Sarton not only uses her new-won fame to challenge social attitudes but in the process radically undermines the theoretical prejudices of gerontologists, as well. Although The Education of Harriet Hatfield is far from her best novel, reviewing Sarton's earlier fiction prepares us for what she has achieved in other, stronger works.

Sarton's case demonstrates that aging theories can offer special insight into the creative process over the life span. Indeed many of the chapters in this volume prove that these ideas sometimes can provide a means of salvaging the reputation of problematical works of art, which otherwise might be dismissed or given a superficial reading. For example, Rembrandt's paintings were not highly valued by his contemporaries. Mihály Csikszentmihályi points out that his “‘creativity’ was constructed after his death by art historians” who were able to discern innovations that contemporaries could not see. Moreover, although equating the writer with the product is a fallacy to be avoided, reading literature within the context of the writer's life and prior writing can uncover some of the author's hitherto concealed intentions. At the same time, models merely furnish a shorthand to understanding. Like all schemata they should be used sparingly. Ideally, theory should reveal something that individuals could potentially discover for themselves. Instead, the linguist Deborah Tannen tells us with regret that although the word schema should imply a developing pattern, rather than a template, in most work “the notion of constant change has been lost.”¹⁸ The best way to evaluate individual difference is to adopt a life-course approach to writing. Rather than beginning an analysis of writers' works with the products of middle or old age, one should, whenever possible, review the entire career in order to grasp the meaning of the changes that occur. Then it becomes less tempting to impose a theory of stages upon the lives of writers, or indeed on anyone else. By such means, we gain respect for the complex pattern that individuals create as they react to the vagaries of fate.

Sarton's novel not only defies our easy assumptions about the nature of old-age writing, but its peculiarities demonstrate that desire, not pure chronology, accounts for the unexpected moments of our lives. In contrast, stage theorists analyze the life cycle seeking broadly predictable patterns. These practitioners believe in the overriding importance of chronology in human life, but such a conviction overlooks the timeless and often disruptive nature of desire. For, as Gubrium has speculated, the ability of specially talented elders to hold age at bay subverts all attempts to foretell human behavior. Moreover, Sarton and other writers who appear to transcend their age are hardly unique. The subjects of another study conducted by Kaufman report feeling “ageless” except when ill. Many are well enough to identify themselves as adults rather than old people, until, perhaps, intrusive questions of researchers remind them of the ravages of time. Elders can often maintain their sense of self despite the loss of family members or diminished physical functioning. Even the prospect of their own imminent death can be transcended, as the case of Barbara Pym demonstrates, if the dying perceive the possibility for growth and change in the life that remains. Thus, recognizing the fluidity of actual experience should help gerontologists guard against the temptation to apply any theories too rigidly to their subjects. For example, Erik Erikson, stage theory's grand old man, has modified his famous chart of the life cycle. In The Life Cycle Completed, he begins the chart with old age, not infancy, in belated recognition that growing old reshapes one's view of prior experiences.¹⁹

In sum, as long as literary gerontologists respond honestly to what they read, worries need not arise about the prematurity of theorizing about models of late-life fiction. If we ground our theory carefully in data and record the many different categories of old-age writing that are in the process of emerging, gradually we will be able to illuminate the complex relationship between aging and creativity. No doubt more paradigms will be uncovered as literary gerontologists both find more examples of these preliminary versions and add new varieties to our list. Indeed, a new one is emerging in subsequent chapters in this book: the aging writer as visual sensualist.²⁰

Notes

1. Kathleen Woodward, “May Sarton and Fictions of Old Age.”

2. Peter Elbow, “The Doubting and the Believing Game,” 147.

3. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 261-63; Norman N. Holland, “Unity Identity Text Self,” 815, “Not So Little Hans,” 54, and The Critical I, 26-27.

4. Carolyn H. Smith, “Richard Eberhart's Poems on Aging,” 75-76. Smith quotes the term “cognitive plasticity” from P. B. Baltes and K. W. Schaie, “On the Plasticity of Intelligence in Adulthood and Old Age,” American Psychologist 31 (1976): 720-25. Robert Kastenbaum, “The Creative Process,” 295, points out that both Tennyson and Picasso developed the theme of death early in their work in response to personal crises.

5. Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, Introduction to this volume; Dean Keith Simonton, “Creativity, Aging, and Chance,” 407-8; Margaret Morganroth Gullette, “Creativity, Aging, Gender,” this volume.

6. Mihály Csikszentmihályi, “Society, Culture, and Person,” 325; David M. Harrington, “The Ecology of Human Creativity,” 149-50.

7. Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, “A Buried Life”; Marcia Aldrich, “Lethal Brevity,” this volume.

8. Erikson, Childhood, 268-69; George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life, 222, 214.

9. Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, “Creativity in Midlife,” “Late Style in the Novels of Barbara Pym and Penelope Mortimer,” “The Liberation of Mourning in Elizabeth Bowen's The Little Girls and Eva Trout,” this volume, and Barbara Pym, 130-36. In a similar fashion, John Updike, in Rabbit at Rest (1990) written after the death of his mother, describes the deterioration of his character Rabbit, whose life he has chronicled for the last thirty years.

10. Woodward, “Sarton,” 109; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Walker Percy”; Erik H. Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed, 63. Marc Kaminsky, “Story of the Shoe Box,” 318, notes that “the impassioned tone of the lay sermon” can be traced back to Thoreau and Emerson.

11. May Sarton, The Bridge of Years; Vaillant, Adaptation, 210, 344. Sarton, I Knew a Phoenix, 65-83, 124-27, describes the Belgian house in which she was born and a Belgian family with whom she lived when she was twelve; A World of Light, 59, 62, mentions the two brothers who died. Mark Taylor, the protagonist of Sarton's The Single Hound (1938), desperately seeks affirmation from the aging poet, Jean Latour, that he too has the makings of a poet.

12. Allan B. Chinen, In the Ever After and Once Upon a Midlife, has illuminated our understanding of the connection between middle and elder tales and Jungian views of later life. David Gutmann, Reclaimed Powers, 208.

13. Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Safe at Last in the Middle Years, xii. Gullette, private communication, Nov. 19, 1990, suggested that HH is a midlife progress novel. Sarton may well be an example of individuals, who, as Gullette theorizes, are “‘born’ into such a hopeful belief and never lose it, despite poverty, lack of education, discrimination, bad luck, even illness.” Still, as Gullette makes clear, such optimism “may take considerable energy to maintain” (Safe, xiii-xiv).

14. May Sarton, “The Design of a Novel,” 31-32, As We Are Now, and The Small Room. In one of her best novels, Faithful Are the Wounds (1955), by using a more omniscient narrator, Sarton has exhibited a remarkable sensitivity to initially unappealing characters like Isabel Ferrier, Edward Cavan's middle-class sister. In the beginning Isabel is a stereotypical Joseph McCarthy supporter, but Sarton's intense ability to understand “the other” does not desert her. Isabel becomes a more complex and troubled figure in the course of the novel. Indeed she ceases to be what Sarton, “Design,” 35, calls “a contrived anti-hero” and becomes worthy of her brother. Moreover, Isabel's pain deepens our appreciation of her brother's despair. We can see that Edward has lost a good deal when he stopped talking to her. Sarton teaches us that pain of loss has forced Isabel to construct the empty life to which she clings in the early part of the novel.

15. Anne Wyatt-Brown, Pym, 136, 182, n. 28, 29, and “Late Style,” 837. Kastenbaum, “Creative Process,” 302, calls “concentrated artistic thought” a common characteristic of late style but emphasizes that some older artists are more “expansive.”

16. Robin Kaplan and Shelley Neiderbach, “I Live Alone in a Very Beautiful Place,” 62; Kaminsky, “Story,” 320; Jaber F. Gubrium, “New Thoughts on Identity in the Upward Years”; Sharon Kaufman, “Illness, Biography, and the Interpretation of Self Following a Stroke,” 217.

17. May Sarton, poetry reading, March 16, 1990, Gainesville, Fla.

18. Mihály Csikszentmihályi, “The Domain of Creativity,” 199; Deborah Tannen, “What's in a Frame,” 139. Kastenbaum, “Creative Process,” 300, points out that critical judgment is usually subject to revision, making the evaluation of late style especially problematical.

19. Gubrium, “New Thoughts”; Sharon R. Kaufman, The Ageless Self, 12-13; Wyatt-Brown, Pym, 147-50 (describing how dying affected Pym's final novel); Erikson, Life Cycle, 8-9. Other valuable examples of stage theories are: Vaillant, Adaptation; Daniel Levinson et al., Seasons of a Man's Life; Ramona T. Mercer, Elizabeth G. Nichols, and Glen Caspers Doyle, Transition in a Woman's Life.

20. It is impossible to avoid theorizing altogether. The linguist Georgia M. Green, Progmatics and Natural Language Understanding, 152-53, argues that even supposedly value-neutral ethnomethodological empirical studies reflect theories of human behavior, despite their authors' expressed anxiety about indulging in “unverifiable and premature theorizing.”

    Examples in this volume of visual sensitivity in old age include: Gloria G. Fromm, “Being Old” and Bethany Ladimer, “Colette.” See Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, Introduction to this volume.

My thanks to Carolyn H. Smith, Gloria G. Fromm, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, whose helpful suggestions have improved the paper considerably. Earlier formulations of this essay appear in Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, “A Message in the Bottle,” and “The Politics of Old Age.”