The Perils and Potentials
of the Later Years
Two formidable antagonists stand on the great highway that leads to the late creative years, menacing those adults who still seek to be
Ulyssean.. Their names are Lack of Time and Failure of Powers, and not even the monsters met by John Bunyan's Pilgrim on his heroic journey were as fearful-although they are blood relations of Giant Despair.
Late middle age, for those who are reasonably fortunate, has both a real and a deceptive beauty. The tired analogy, that compares the life journey and the seasons was never truer here. For just as in early fall there is a period when nature seems to remain poised between summer and winter, so the later years also have their halcyon period.
Certain excitements, dreams, and pleasures are past. For those who married, the children are grown and away, and at last there is the chance to live for oneself and rediscover oneself. For those who are unmarried, elderly parents and other relatives, lovingly protected while they were here, are gone, and along with the sadness comes the understanding of releases to be more oneself and to reawaken certain subdued aspects of the self. Certain feverish ambitions are past: either older adults have attained much of what they wanted, or else they have become mostly reconciled to whatever their talents, their deficits, and especially the element of sheer luck, have delivered them to.
For those later adults who seem fortunate, there are the satisfactions of a pleasant house or apartment, secure for many years; a circle of friends for encouragement and stimulation; the opportunity to continue and to enrich the reading habit acquired long ago; the chance to travel as never before and sufficient funds to do so; and the possibility of taking up any of dozens of interests that may lead to further self-discovery and creativity. Youngish grandparents welcome adults like themselves as well as younger people for whom such people often represent the good life.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, the gerontologist Bernice Neugarten has written impressively about this sector of older adults which she calls "the young-old." These are men and women between 55 and 75 whom she describes as "vigorous and educated ... already markedly different from the
out-moded stereotypes of old age." She notes that "relatively healthy, relatively well-off . . . they will want a wide range of options and opportunities for self-enhancement and community participation." She differentiates them from the "old-old" of years beyond 75. Their problems in general are different; their still-zestful opportunities are different. (She apologizes later for too drastic time-lines between the two later-age types.)
But even within the parameters of ages 55-75, literally millions of older adults do not meet Neugarten's "young-old" standards of health and prosperity. Millions are pursued into the later 50s and 60s and 70s by all or some of the same conditions that have harassed them during most or all of their adulthood. They are without financial security, without good and secure housing, without good health, saddled with debt, and bedeviled by the anxieties that come from family disruptions and misfortunes-especially by Anxiety itself, the great
Fearmaker.
Too often, the accumulation of these negative forces---consecutive sorrows, loneliness, remorse, gnawing insecurity, fear of abandonment if struck down by some crippling illness, and little or no equipment to make use of the kingdom of the mind-may extinguish what is left of the self-actualizing spirit. The fate of the once-buoyant priest in H. M. Robinson's novel, The Cardinal, is symbolic of great numbers of older adults. joyous and confident when he first took on the pastorate of the monstrously debt-laden church, he struggled to bring fresh light and life to it, and at the end his physical and emotional powers were as crushed as though the huge building itself had fallen upon him. The theory of Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of human needs" finds confirmation enough in the fate of such later adults who are condemned to coping with safety and even subsistance needs at the point when their greatest life concern should be creativeness and self-actualization.
For such older individuals it is possible to stand in a kind of autumn paradise and to have their pleasure senses so eclipsed by fear, worry, and grief that much or all of the paradise is lost. These are the multitudes of people in later life for whom no glib rhetoric or strategies can meet the complex needs of their dilemmas. For them "the loneliness of the long-distance runner" carries a special meaning and poignancy.
For only a proportion, it is true, is there total loss of joy in the halcyon years. For many, in spite of continued misfortune and deprivation,some of the qualities of the enchanted early autumn of the life journey emerge, on their own terms. Life and their own initiatives produce areas which, though radically different from those of the "fortunate" people, nonetheless offer opportunities for continuing growth and creativity. "Nonetheless," because personal growth of the self, which should be a great continuing adventure, may well be aborted among the so-called "fortunate," while, on the other hand, it can be stimulated by defeat and adversity-in some cases, even by despair. Yet many of the physically and environmentally "fortunate" cease to be active seekers. Many of them become as locked into a constricting,
spectating, and nonpersonally creative lifestyle as though they were not liberated, as they technically are, to pursue the highest stages of Maslow's hierarchy. Blandness and comfort may be, and often are, the embalmers of the creative spirit. In addition, they also may feel the shadows on the trail ahead of the twin monsters, Lack of Time and Failure of Powers.
But most affected of all later adults by these somber giants are the seekers, the would-be
Ulysseans, the truly "beautiful people." For these people are the bearers of dreams. The dream may be very recent, born late in the day, or it may be (and very often is) a dream cherished for years but never actualized because of force of circumstances. Thus Lloyd C. Dougin and Thomas Costain kept their ambitions to be novelists in rein until far along the lifecycle; Grandma Moses did not begin to paint until past 70; Alcide de Gasperi was forced to suspend his plans and hopes for a new Italy until at the age of 64 he was finally released from the obscurity of a librarian's post, where he had waited out the interminable years of World War Two. Likewise, many private cc secret dreamers" can be named: the educator who deferred his dream of graduating as a lawyer until he was 69; the elderly woman who waited until her 80s to begin studying a foreign language; the two senior men in Canadian broadcasting, both in the early 60s, their wives recently dead, their children grown, who began at last the studies for the priesthood, which under different life conditions they would have started years before.*
(*A fascinating reverse case is seen in the career of John Tettemer, an American Passionist monk, who in 1924 at age 50 left the order in which he had become the second-highest world officer to assume secular life, marry, have children, and become a film actor in his later years. The separation from his order was without rancor, and in fact with affection on both sides.)
The adult seeker often becomes intensely conscious of Time as the Antagonist through the media's obsession with the ages as well as the exploits of "people in the news." Thus, we get the absurd comedy of the news magazine that brackets the ages of newsworthy adults, regardless of whether age has any relevance to the situation or not. For example: "Unsmiling, balding Wendell Supercrat (48) stumbled out of the 6.30 A.M. flight from Kansas City." The news magazine clearly dislikes
Supercrat, but the ultimate idiocy is its obsession with his age.
We are constantly told by one of the few hoary classical tags that still have wide currency in an era too clever for the classics, that life is short and the arts are long-but in fact there is a period when there seems all kinds of time ahead, say, during the 20s and 30s and even into the early 40s. For example, the typical "reading adult" reads widely and carelessly during much of that stretch of the lifespan. Many people realize only at age 50 or 55 that there is only so much time left and so many books to read-books that really matter-that they must establish some kind of rigorous priority system.
As with reading, so with many other countries to be visited, so many talented musicians to be heard; so many new and growth-bearing experiences to be encountered, so many creative efforts, large or small, to be made. And above all, so many enriching relationships to be opened or deepened, so many ways of actualizing one's role as wayfaring companion to the companionless, that it seems that there is world enough, but no time, no time. Where has all the time gone?
Now the temptation is to play a new numbers game-secretly to subtract one's age from the announced average lifespan of men and women in our time, and to balance the difference against the needs and goals of the older adult, opportunities lost and possibilities remaining. Some adults learn to reflect, wisely, that life is, after all, a kind of smorgasbord-we can never have everything we want. To try is certainly to risk the tragedies of Faust or Hamlet. Wisdom is selection: our rational self knows this to be true. But man is also insatiable-that is both his tragedy and his triumph. And for the seeker-adults, there is rarely "world enough and time."
Nor is the longest shadow thrown on the trail ahead in the later adult years that of seeming Lack of Time alone. For many older adults the greater threat is Failure of Powers; many believe it is so, many can feel that it is so, and almost everything in the folklore of the human fife journey reinforces their pessimism.
Clearly, the decline of physical powers is one of the rules of the game. Diminution of perfect hearing begins at an early age in adulthood, usually from about 30 on; loss of high tone perception is common among adults over 40, and increases rather markedly for many after 65, for men more so than women. The same is true of sight: visual acuity begins to decline slightly from about the mid-20s to the 50s, and then often shows a rather pronounced deterioration. The bifocal years are a stage in the process, with the late years presenting for some adults the problem of cataracts, fortunately usually solved by modem surgery. Among the aged population of a huge home in New. York', 86 percent were described as having from good to adequate vision; in an even bigger institution in California, out of 1,500 late adults, only 3 percent were described as functionally blind. Blindness, although it occurs, is not a serious threat: for those who seek to live as fully as possible, and to create, the fatigue often induced by waning powers of sight may be the greater hazard.
Power to taste is apparently slightly affected for many people by a slight decline in the number of taste buds up to age 70, with a greater decline thereafter. Still, taste is a highly individualized reaction that does not yield easily to research criteria. In any event, for some items of the modem North American diet, loss of the sense of taste would not necessarily be a catastrophe. Consider, for example, the taste of massproduced bread (loaded, of course, with its rejuvenating vitamins) --which led the Ulyssean Henry Miller to write indignantly, on returning to America after many years, that "not a bloody mother in the bloody land can bake a bloody loaf of bread."
Investigators of physical decline have tested the power of young and old adults to respond to touch, and of course the power to smell. On the latter, there is little to report, in spite of the occasional complaints of loss of this sense by older adults: for some this may be one form of the pastime, which some relish, of enjoying loss of youth. On the former, the evidence of researchers is that there is no change in sensitivity to touch until about perhaps age 50 to 55. Curiously enough, such loss as occurs in the later years is in the lower body rather than in wrists, hands, and elbows, which retain nearly all of their sensitivity.
What disturbs and saddens many people as they enter and proceed through the later years is their feeling that in addition to generalized infirmities, they are now more exposed to the great organic killer illnesses--strokes, heart diseases, cancer-than before, and this is of course true. Birren's remark, that to live to be elderly is itself a kind of achievement, is some consolation but for the Ulysseans perhaps not much.
The modem writer who has most thoroughly documented what she conceives to be the almost undiluted tragedy of old age is Simone de Beauvoir in The Coming of Age (1972.) Old age clearly fills her with revulsion, and few of its attributes reveal anything to her but loss and darkness. Thus she is driven to choose incidents from late life, excerpts from journals, and recorded statements by individuals, that ultimately build an overwhelming portrait of the late years as a time of bitterness, desolation, and defeat. No one escapes. The wonderful
Ulyssean, Victor Hugo, at first raises one's heart with the magnificence of love of life and the creativity with which he illuminated his late years, but Beauvoir pursues him into the very late phases, when he lost much of his power after a stroke. Here, as in a hundred other cases, Beauvoir piles everything upon the evils of old age: Hugo, after all, might well have been immobilized by a massive heart attack at 48, or have died at 55! For so fine a writer and thinker, it is extraordinary that she does not see that nearly all lives end in anti-climax. The sad, short finish of Eleanor Roosevelt's life takes nothing away from the splendid Ulysseanisin of her last 17 years, after the death of her husband.
Likewise, it is prejudicing the case to quote three or four sentences or brief extracts from the journals that many Europeans have kept, and which reflect their civilized sense of culture and of time. Valdry and Gide are both quoted as hating to look in the mirror when they were very old; yet each handled his late years with admirable style.
Gide, especially, quoted by Beauvoir as complaining of "all the little dispositions of great age that make an old man such a wretched being" and that "my mind almost never succeeds in distracting me from my flesh," in fact emerges in the full journal of his last years as a still vital, intensely human being beyond age 80, still attempting to "get up" his Latin, still curious and interested in the human scene. Indeed, 20 years earlier, on his trips to North Africa. Gide had little complaints to make about his physical condition.
Only at long intervals does one get the flash of humor of which Beauvoir is capable, as in her delightful comment on Victor Hugo's eager curiosity to see and to talk to God, "that is to say, another Hugo." But even when Beauvoir seems to be conceding that old age has attributes of joy, she then consolidates her case that all in the late years is vanity and sorrow. Thus, Gide's charming comment, "My heart has remained so young that I have the continual feeling of playing a part, the part of the seventy-year-old that I certainly am" makes her speculate, surely unreasonably, that for Gide it may have been "out of horror of old age that he looked upon his behaviour as a seventy-year-old in the light of an act." -
Actually, the long shadow of Failure of Powers appears as early as late middle age (for some people, still earlier) in the two physical areas of beauty and of psychomotor skills.
Beauty, of course, is a "power" since it plays an important role in the building and maintenance of the self-image, which in turn affects both a person's own performance throughout the life drama and his or her day-to-day relationships with other human beings. "Beauty" should mean not merely the "combination of (physical) qualities ... in human face or form . . . that delights the sight" (Concise Oxford Dictionary), but the whole personableness of the individual that conveys some degree of charm or magnetism. However, to pure physical beauty per se, the aging process is of course considered to be the supreme threat, with the exception of disfiguring illness. Chilling, semiclinical accounts exist, taken from many novelists and other recorders of life, of the inroads of physical aging upon both male and female beauty. (It is part of the long sickness of Western-and especially North American-society, that it has for so long denied "beauty" to both sexes.)
The eternal footnote, "for -his (or her) age," becomes a kind of threnody of comment upon middle-aged and especially later adults which they have to learn to expect. "John jogs daily at the Y; he is in really excellent condition for his age"; or, "You remember what a show-stopper Ursula was? Well, she's still a beautiful woman, for her age." And so on.
There is, however, a higher maturity that makes different judgments, and sometimes, interestingly, it develops early. For example, a youthful student friend of mine from Finland once made the arresting comment that "No matter how old a woman gets, she never really loses the beauty of femininity. " This was the kind of wisdom one might have expected from the Canadian bestseller of the '60s, In Praise of Older Women, the account of a succession of love affairs, until it turns out that the "older women" in question were only in their 30s! Nonetheless, the higher maturity wisely notes that for both men and woman what the years take away in the first fresh loveliness of face and form, they restore with a different kind of beauty. In fact, to the highly mature, nothing is more incongruous or disappointing than the constantly "lifted" face, which in the later years shows none of the etching of sorrow, joy, anxiety, compassion, and pain.
Those of us who are moving through the later years of the life cycle had better achieve the higher maturity, because the aging process leaves no one's physical self unscathed. Once in a while, among the men who throng the pools and exercise rooms of health clubs (and who may be of all ages from very young to very old), a man of age 50 or 55 or even older appears who has retained the form of one of the youths 30 years younger who is racing away to the handball court or the weightlifting room-but he is not the same. In close proximity to him one usually finds him in admirable condition, but he is no longer a youth. Age has put its mark upon his hair, skin, and eyes, and of course upon his suppleness and his psychomotor skills. Likewise, the silly advertisement that attempts to confuse the television audience as to which of the pair of women is mother or daughter is itself as cosmetic an exercise as the product it displays. The mother is not the daughter. The years will continue to make their transformation. Her peril lies in identifying the beauty of her self with the face and form she had as a girl. Her rich potential lies in, recognizing the new forms of beauty that arrive along with the undoubted deprivations of the years. And these new forms, which are true of men also, are acquired, not in spite of sorrows and crises and physical losses, but because of them.
As for psychomotor skills, the naked human eye can see the effects of aging in slowing the swift ease of movement that is at least the potential state of most young people. The picture is somewhat clouded because of the appalling deficiencies in carriage, speed, and grace of large numbers of late adolescents and people in their early 20s. The ascending lines of people going up to street level in the subways of the North American cities and often moving at tortoise pace are as likely to be slowed by some slouching and slow-footed teen-agers as by some old man or woman. Older people tend to be slowed down by the thickening and stiffening of their bodies, but many who could walk and even still run with speed and grace actually think themselves into a routine of staidness and slowness. Some rationalize their sloth by claiming that too great haste leads to premature heart attacks. We are not talking, however, about haste, but about the swift grace that adds cachet and zest to the life process.
. Birren usefully defines a psychomotor skill as "an acquired pattern of finely coordinated voluntary movements. . . not merely as muscle movements, but rather as complex chains of events in the nervous system, with resulting muscle movement." Thus there is a complex interrelationship between the muscle movement function of the body and the line delivery via brain and nerve cells. For many older adults there is some physiological loss, because of either physical attrition or disuse, and there is the. possibility, where mental zest is lost, of increasing slowness or awkwardness in delivery because of a certain slowing of the line communications.
Much of the evidence is concealed because older workers in industrial plants, for example, develop a system of compensations that wipes out or diminishes the losses of performance that aging might bring. Numerous studies indicate little or no change in worker performance through most of the working life of the adult up to the mid-50s. Even beyond this point, the output of many older workers excels that of younger ones. Perhaps, however, a selective process is at work here, only the most proficient of older workers surviving the route to age 65. Temporary losses clearly occur in cases where industry keeps demanding changes in techniques, and they naturally occur where the worker has been injured on the job, although not immobilized.
However, practice also makes perfect: much heartening evidence exists that even into the 70s, a good many individuals continue to show marked proficiency in the psychomotor skills of occupational tasks. There is a minority of remarkable people about whom we need to know much more, if only to gain more and more evidence for the Ulyssean life. Certainly from age 40 on there is as a rule a reduced capacity in strength and in sensory acuity. Reaction times begin to be longer-a factor that surely contributes heavily to the relatively high traffic accident rate of age 65-plus, and very certainly age 70-plus. The twin peaks in North American statistics for traffic accidents are ages 16-21 and age 70-plus. A study by B. W. Marsh in 1%1 on "Aging and Driving" cited speed as the major contributing factor for accidents for drivers under age 30, double that of people in the 70s; whereas exactly the reverse was true of right-of-way conflicts, where the older drivers, in spite of usually slower speeds, were also markedly slower in reaction responses.
Athletics provides the most striking illustration of loss of psychomotor power with aging. The problem of adjustment especially affects boys and men, since they are often more involved in sports than are girls and women. From as early a period as age 30 on, the human male has to make adjustments to the increasing limitations that aging places on his athletic skill and prowess. For many men, coming to terms with physical losses is quite as traumatic as a woman's having to adjust to the loss of youthful beauty. The record varies, of course, with the sport; nor do many men realistically expect to become champions. Still, one can hardly name a sport in which champions emerge at age 40 or more.
In some sports the champions are incredibly young. Olympic swimmers, for example, are "old" at 22, and slalom ski champions, gymnasts, and figure-skating champions are often in their teens. In other fields, once considered (almost derisively) the domains of middle-aged men-for example, golf and curling-younger men and women in their 20s and 30s are dominant or are taking over. A magnificent golfer like Sam Snead has represented the older adult who rarely wins a title but is still considered a superb performer "for his age." However, there are not many Sam
Sneads.
Practice may make perfect, but it will not put the 45-year-old boxer or tennis player back into the championship circle or even among the near contenders (wonderful exceptions like Archie Moore and Pancho Gonzales only prove the rule). Occasionally an enterprising older adult will create his own arena for conquest, like the remarkable South African of the 1960s who became world record-holder for the running of 60-, 80-, and 100-mile marathons. And some fields of very intense psychomotor activity can certainly be classified as
sports-round-theworld competitive yachting, for example-in which remarkable older adults are leading figures.
Yet, says the higher maturity, there is no essential tragedy in the fact that human beings lose long before the middle years the capacity to be championship contenders or even high performers in many sports. "Though much is taken, much abides." There are many exceptions: fishing, hunting, cycling, hill-climbing, billiards (what psychologist of adulthood ever had the imagination to study Willie Hoppe?), and dancing (who has had the wit to do other than superficially interview Fred
Astaire?). There are numerous other sports activities that prevent surrender simply to parlor games. In addition, it is probable that with the 49new athlete" of recent years we are on the threshold of new breakthroughs in longevity of performance.
The real tragedy is the abdication of too many men and woman from one of the most important domains of the self-the physical. The most disturbing fact about the gymnasiums and arenas where sports are played in North America is the small number of adults in their middle years and older. To participate in no activity that allows the body to delight in its own freedom and movement, and to attempt to replace this loss by constantly watching professional athletes on the TV screen, is a mournful and, in some cases a dangerous, choice of alternatives. Health rationales aside, the tragic loss is psychic. Fortunately, there is a new emphasis in North America on fitness, and people of all ages are running, jogging, joining exercise classes and health clubs, and enjoying sports activities as never before.
To love one's self. this is where all psychic healing begins; to love, not to adore, not to condone, not to deceive. And an aspect of self-love almost wholly neglected by the pundits, and by people in general, is the role of love of one's body. To neglect and finally be repelled by one's physical state is a special danger of later adulthood. This destructive self-revulsion, conscious and unconscious, can turn into a sour hatred of youth and beauty and poison the wells of the creative and Ulyssean life. Some psychological historians have traced this state to its most dramatic climax in international and legal affairs. They speculate on the role played by the hatred of old men of power for the youth and beauty of young men in the making of war and the delivery of hideous verdicts in the courts.
No doubt this tendency to transfer self-revulsion to antipathy and hatred for others is at work in thousands of less dramatic arenas every day. But the crucial intersection between Failure of Powers in the physical sense and the capacity to maintain vital. and creative growth through the later adult years provides the chance for physical joy on some terms for almost everyone. It has little to do with size and shape for those who are on the way to the higher maturity. Throughout nearly all of life, into and through the very late years, it is possible to tap some of the springs of joy in one's body, to keep experiencing some glow of pleasure in the marvelous human system that is one's own, and vicariously in the marvel of other human bodies, including the young.
Regrettably, some older adults seem to get a doleful satisfaction out of the Failure of Powers. One once-noted educator, well known to me, a man who is now as they say, "quite elderly," finds his consolations (or his kicks) in not only noting his own decline and fall but observing that of others, including the middle-aged. For example, he is the originator of the following little hurried dialogues on elevators or on busy streets:
Elderly educator: Oh, hello. Where are you going?
Oneself. Back to the office. I managed to forget my briefcase.
Elderly educator: Yes. Well, that's what happens when we get older.
Or:
Elderly educator: (with anxious pleasure): You're looking rather tired.
Oneself: I didn't sleep awfully well last night.
Elderly educator: Well, that's what we have to expect as we get on in years.
Oneself (drily): There was a four-alarm fire in the apartment house next door.
Elderly educator: Oh. Oh, well, we can't take these things so well as we get older.
Thus in the only game he still plays-the game of Mournfully Enjoying Failure of Powers and in which he must find a partner-he is at least always able to return your shot. But it is a game in which he is also the continual and disastrous loser. Once a handsome and impressive man, with an air of verve and confidence, he has shrunk not only physically (something of this often occurs in the very late years) but in the inner self and in his self-image, which are the generators and creative agents of his life. He is watching what he conceives to be his inevitable decline with fascinated regret, and he is determined to pull others down with him. Anything further from Ulyssean adulthood cannot be imagined.
An enormous need for many older adults, notably the
Ulysseans, is energy, physical and psychic---energy to help renew the body, but also to begin new projects and to complete them. "If only I had the energy I had when young" is the frequent cry. And it is surely true that for most .adults there is a decline of physical energy in the later years. Still, how real is this state when applied to Ulyssean needs? We talk of the "boundless energy" of youth, without remembering (1) that many young adults suffer from low energy systems and (2) that a great deal of youthful energy, to use another cliché, is "frittered away."
What we should be concerned about in later adulthood is what I earlier called "essential energy," which is the amount of energy essential for the carrying-through of Ulyssean tasks and exercises. This essential energy is usually available to us if we set priorities carefully and conserve personal energy wisely. Thus, the woman who hopes at last to write a novel, learn a new language, or set out on new travels cannot as a rule be simultaneously preparing mountains of refreshments for a succession of church suppers! It is true that for many men and women the days are past when they can pour out energy indiscriminately, go to bed exhausted, and rise exuberantly. But it is equally true that most later adults have pools of essential physical energy quite adequate for Ulyssean projects. And obviously psychic energy need not only not decline in the later years, but may reach new levels of power.
In one of the greatest. of physical joys, sexual intercourse, there is also, of course, a certain failing of powers across the adult lifespan. Among the adult population a small minority might be described as natural celibates who abstain from all intercourse. A large number of others, in the Puritan idiom of North America, "indulge" in intercourse as part of the pattern of what "normal" people do, and then as the years bring some waning of sexual powers, seem content to relinquish much or all of this area of their lives, in numerous cases almost with relief A large group of men and women form a third category. They view the decline of sexual virility and fertility as a catastrophic threat to their selfhood, and for them waning sexual strength becomes one of the most disorienting and disfunctionalizing influences in their disappointed later years. This is truer of men than of women. A 1975 poll of a large cross-section of North Americans found that middleaged and older men rated sex third in their personal priorities, while women rated it eleventh. There is, of course, a fourth category: the
Ulysseans-whose style, if they remain interested in sexual intercourse, is simply to go ahead and enjoy it, without worrying that they may not have the full sexual stamina "as in old days," but continue to find a wholesome pleasure in the fact that ','much abides."
Does much abide? Certainly it does. Nothing is more absurd than to proclaim that men and women are not capable of rewarding sexual experiences in the later years. According to A. C. Kinsey's study of sexual behavior among North American adults, the frequency of orgasms a week in the male declines in a steadily falling line across the lifespan. Thus, where the "median frequency" of orgasms was more than three a week at ages 16-20, and just under three at ages 21-25, the num r lessens to about one a week around ages 51-55, and declines somewhat again in the next few years. These are, of course, median figures, and a considerable number of older adults would exceed the number given for age 5 1-plus. (Victor Hugo's doctors had to advise him in his late 70s to slow down on his sexual activity!) The frequency of marital intercourse declines on the same steadily falling line-again for the median and with numerous and notable exceptions among individual couples.* (*In 1972 an American study of approximately 800 professional men over age 65 revealed that 70 percent of them regularly had sexual intercourse and that clergymen were the most active. For some curious reasons, medical doctors, editors, publishers, and journalists were relatively low performers. The men questioned came from Who's Who in the United States, people from business and the arts as well as the professions. Dr. J. A. Silcox of the University of Western Ontario medical school, in commenting on this study, remarked that society wrongly looks on sex for older people as humorous or bizarre.)
What might be called solo sex, which is to say masturbation, with its accompanying fantasies, likewise declines (if the many respondents were reporting accurately to Kinsey), less so in women than in men (although women in general masturbate less frequently than men). In spite of the often traumatic experience of the menopause, sexuality remains a factor in the fives of many older women. However, it may be sublimated to attempt to conform to what is "expected" and "fitting" in conventionalized society---one aspect of the life of Total Expectedness.
At one time there was an omnipotent pseudo-Christian and Puritan viewpoint that morbidly maintained that all play functions of the body in sex were channels of self-entrapment, venereal disease, and destruction of self. Dr. Alex Comfort in The Anxiety Makers has pointed out that the more hysterical promoters of this attitude helped to spawn terrifying books designed to frighten boys and young males out of the "damnable" practice of masturbation. As he suggests, a certain proportion of older men may be sexually crippled by having read books by sadistic physicians and quacks whose nightmare prescriptions to control an innocent practice make an appalling account.
From the same sexually sick society emerged the conception of the "dirty old man" or woman. The same society that so much of the time brutally ignores or neglects its older adults is nonetheless busily attentive to what it considers their "acceptable" behavior. Both Kinsey and the now equally important reporters of Human Sexual Response (1966), William J. Masters and Virginia Johnson, found a marked reluctance on the part of males over age 60 to give information about their sexual practices or
nonpractices. This nervous withdrawal from a mature and valuable area of inquiry is surely one sign of how afraid or shy older adults are to even admit confidentially to frankly sexual fantasies, desires, and thoughts, let alone deeds.
According to Masters and Johnson, "aging males" tend to diminish, and desist from, their earlier sexual activity for reasons having little to do with actual physical competence to continue. For example, these factors contribute greatly to inhibition of sexual play and intercourse: boredom with a repetitious sexual relationship (often, presumably, however well beloved the partner); preoccupation with career activities; mental or physical fatigue; overindulgence in food or drink; various aspects of physical and mental infirmities; fear of failure (which Masters and Johnson consider of enormous importance in hindering and arresting the sexual practice and achievement of the male past, say, age 60-plus).
If an older adult consigns the sexual life to some nostalgic area unattainable to the alleged "failing powers" of the later years, he or she places an undue load upon the success of earlier experience and signs away the possible recompenses and joy of sex in later life.
People persist in looking at "senior citizens" as though they were flat photographs in a sentimental family portrait. Simone de Beauvoir insists that the very young are shocked at evidences of sexual activity in the aging: but in fact it is precisely the "new young" of modern society who are probably most sympathetic.
Surely she is right in stressing the negative and often tragic role that unliberated public opinion still plays in constructing a widely held image of older adults as people for whom it is neither "nice" nor natural to talk about sex, to enjoy it, and to have sexual desires and drives.* They must be, as Beauvoir admirably says, made "ashamed of their own desires." She quotes the thorough research done by the American medical scientist, Dr. J. P.
Runciman. Runciman closely studied the sexual practices and the responses of 200 adults aged 40 to 89. He concluded that "psychological barriers" were chiefly responsible for forcing an end to the sexual activity of older adults. In his view, the taboos of the Victorian morality in which they had been brought up were too powerful for their personal needs and desires to prevail.
Western society-by no means only North American society (as witness
Beauvoir~-has long sought to make the older adult who continues to "indulge" in sexual interests and activity a figure either of shame or of comedy. Literature across the centuries has always ridiculed men *Fortunately, there seem to be perceptible trends arising in the 1970s and 1980s indicating increased social acceptance of sexual activities among older adults. whose wives are unfaithful, but none is so absurd as the old cuckold. This assiduous refusal to accept sexuality as a natural and beautiful phenomenon among older adults is seen again in the perennial jokes about May-December marriages. In spite of examples of happy marnages between young women and elderly men, or at least men over 60, in such cases as Pablo
Casals, Zoltan Kodaly, Charles Chaplin, and Pablo Picasso, or similar relationships outside marriage, there are people who impute the worst of motives to one partner or the other. When Justice William 0. Douglas of the United States Supreme Court at the age of 78 married a girl of 21 as his fourth wife, a group of imbeciles in Congress attempted to get legislation passed to cancel his appointment to the bench. Their real motive was Douglas's long support of liberal causes, but it is significant that they cloaked this in what they conceived to be a widely accepted folk attitude. Significantly, the marriage lasted lovingly until his recent death.
Even more incomprehensible and unacceptable, especially to the species Americanus
vulgaris, which has its equivalent in all cultures, is the sight of a young man marrying an elderly woman. Yet in spite of the obsessive references to "gigolos and exploiters of women," instances abound of successful and deeply loving relationships between older women and young men, sexual-if not always manifested in actual intercourse-at least in the many loving physical contacts that also are expressions of sexuality. Edith Piaf was a case in point; so was Gracie Fields. An illuminating report on this area is Older Women and Younger Men, by Jane Seskin and Bette Ziegler (1979).
No doubt there were numerous cases like The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone or something comparable. In this play by Tennessee Williams a middle-aged woman is driven partly by genuine feelings of love and partly by sexual hunger into a transient affair with a young man of intense physical attractiveness, an affair that fails, and after which in despair she finally opens her hotel suite to the dangerous youthful hustler who has long been watching and waiting in the street below her window. It is also clear that many homosexual adventures in which one partner is an older man or woman often end in bitterness and recrimination and with both partners resuming the eternal hunt. Yet, especially in the arts, there have been many successful relationships, sexual, platonic, and also what can be described as generalized noncopulative affection.
When that wonderful human being, Andr6 Gide, was far on in the life journey, he still had a deep fear of contracting venereal disease, and this presumably inhibited him from much sexual intercourse. A homosexual who had married and who loved his wife, but found it-to his later remorse---difficult to maintain a devoted relationship, Gide continued his love of adolescent youths far into his later years. This took curiously moving and innocent forms, which yet were exercises in sexuality. In the summer near the seashore, he would interrupt a game of chess or a conversation with a friend in the garden looking out on the sea, to drag his friend down close to the shore where they could watch adolescents bathing and shouting in the water. Or he would feel a certain pleasure in the accidental touching of a handsome youth in the bus. Once he wrote of his delight in observing the beauty of a young Parisian standing at the side of the pool in a Turkish bath.
Unconventional though these predilections and small adventures in Gide's domain of love would seem to many North Americans, only a very sick mind could describe Gide as a "dirty old man." His "deviation from the sexual norm" (to employ one of the dreary phrases of psychology) was not a block to his creativity nor a disgrace to his old age. He was, of course, often frustrated and unhappy (are we to suppose that these are the attributes only of old age?), but his late sexual life seems to have operated under the code of love: that is, in what he did he tried not to harm others or himself. A certain radiance filled his old age.
When very old people marry each other (often two residents of a nursing or retirement home), the event is frequently treated with amused astonishment or thinly veiled contempt, as if to say, whatever the aged should be doing, they should not at least be engaging in the futility of very late marriage. Since such a marriage is not common, the media play it up, often with a tolerant schmaltziness that is almost as distasteful as hostility. To the press it is all one with the absurdities of old ladies traipsing on a platform as can-can girls, or the hymn-sings that are supposed to be the staple of the institutionalized old. Of course, if the couple are people of private means, the marriage passes in public silence and no doubt in private peace, except perhaps for the exasperated comments of frustrated heirs.
These mixed reactions are not always the case, nor should they be. Pope John's words, "Any day is a good day to be born, and any day is a good day to die," transpose perfectly to marriage at any age, provided it is indeed a marriage of two people who cherish one another. Besides, the sexual encounter is dispensable in a very late married life, although the partners are usually quite capable of it. The Mexican saying that each man has three loves: in his youth, in his prime, and in old age, is a fine example of discrimination between the sexes-women in their very late years have this privilege too.
There are, of course, older adults who bring an atmosphere of nervous comedy to anything in their life that appears to disturb the stereotypes they accept as readily as the rest of a conventional and rigid society. Because they aro courageous, or desperate, they take the plunge, but all the time they persist in seeing themselves in the mirrors of "what is expected"; their tense bravado or strained apology partly destroys the calm dignity of actions that are purely their own business. And this includes the decision to marry very late, which often may be a creative decision in the direction of a richer life. just as it is beautiful to see adults in their later years deciding to continue their sexual life and interest, making it a natural and continuing function of the life drama, likewise there is another choice among "those that mourn," which is moving and beautiful. For many men and women, when death has taken a beloved companion in the late 50s or the 60s-in our society the one. lost is much more often the man than the woman-the rest of the journey is, by choice, a solitary one.
For these people the path taken is well described in the forgotten lines of Fanny Kemble in the poem, "Absence":
