'The Smear It Casts on Life'

In a letter to her friend William Maxwell, Louise Bogan describes how her father, Daniel Joseph Bogan, then eighty-two, got lost on arriving in Grand Central Station. Bogan and the stationmaster – “a very brisk, intelligent, and human man” – eventually found him. She writes in her October 5, 1943, letter to the novelist and New Yorker editor: 

“Meanwhile, I have the experience of what age is; and either God or Saturn or someone evidently didn’t want me to miss that.—My father isn’t senile; that isn’t it exactly. It’s age; and the smear it casts on life. Age without wisdom . . . [Bogan’s ellipsis].”

 

It dawns on Bogan that her father is getting old, a human evolution more complicated than senile/not senile. We all know elderly friends and relatives who appear to have lost little or nothing to attrition. They remain energetic and “lucid” – an adjective I find a little patronizing in this context. We also know young people whose heads are mush. Bogan chooses a useful image to describe the impact of aging on some of us: “the smear it casts on life.” I think of the delicacy required to work in watercolors. Hastiness, too much water – an unsightly, meaningless smear, often impossible to fix.

 

Later this month I turn sixty-nine, an age I once would have found amusing for at least two reasons. Whatever senility I’m experiencing is a longtime companion – “grandfathered in,” as they say. Forget wisdom, though I am more cautious and tempered, more likely to think through potential speech and actions. It may sound morbid but every time I drive to the drug store I’m aware it could end with me under a cement truck. And don’t forget meteorites. In 1987, Eudora Welty writes a letter to Maxwell in which she says:

 

“I hope you can read this letter through the typing (like between the lines). It’s just my hands being rusty in every way. Remember the old New Yorker cartoon? A doctor is telling his elderly patient, ‘Mrs. Norris, think of yourself as an old rusty gate.’ I feel all right, just the same, only tired. But if life these days didn’t make me tired, I’d be crazy.”   

 

Thank God for the delete key. I blush to think of all the typos I made transcribing Welty’s six sentences.

 

Bogan’s father died in 1951 at age ninety. Bogan died at seventy-two in 1970, and Maxwell died in 2000, two weeks short of his ninety-second birthday. The following year, Welty died at ninety-two.

 

[You can find the Bogan letter in A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005). Welty’s is in What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (ed. Suzanne Marrs, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Also, see Maxwell’s 1997 essay “Nearing Ninety.”]