Chapter 8

Naked On The Shore

And what if the powers above do wreck me out on the wine dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too. For in my day I have. had many bitter and shattering experiences in war and on the stormy seas. So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more.

The speaker is Ulysses; the place, the island of the nymph-goddess Calypso, who has held Ulysses captive for seven years during his trouble-filled voyage home; the time, the morning when Calypso, on the orders of Zeus, father of the gods, has told Ulysses that he may go, but that much misery still awaits him before he will see his wife, Penelope.

Helped by the goddess's gifts of working tools and the provision of woodlands, Ulysses within four days builds a splendid boat. Well provisioned with water, wine and appetizing meats and aided by a warm, gentle breeze springing up at Calypso's command, he sets out on what he hopes will be the last leg of his long homeward journey. For 17 days, in fact, Ulysses sails on fair seas under a calm sky, steering by the stars. But on the eighteenth day his implacable enemy, the god Poseidon, raises terrible storms and giant waves-seas so mountainous that, "great heart" though he is, "Ulysses' knees shook and his spirit quailed."

The unrelenting storms destroy his craft. Ulysses finally has to strip and thrust himself into the monstrous foaming seas, where he swims for two days and nights until finally, partly by his strength and courage, partly by his shrewdness and common sense, he is able to reach the land which, just before Poseidon's raising of the tempest, he had seen looking "like a shield on the misty sea."

Splendid physical specimen though he yet is, Ulysses seems for a while more dead than alive: "all his flesh was swollen and streams of brine gushed from his mouth and nostrils. Winded and speechless, he lay there too weak to stir, overwhelmed by his terrible fatigue." He is a king, yet at that moment he owns nothing but his life; he is friendless in a strange country. Naked on the shore, he faces the hard decision whether to sleep overnight beside the wet river bed, chancing chills and illness; or climb the hill, lie down in dense undergrowth, and risk being attacked by beasts of prey. No wonder "he grimly faced his plight."

After reflection, the hungry and naked king decides to travel into a shelter on the wooded hill, where he falls asleep. In the morning his fortunes turn. The lovely princess Nausicaa and her maidens come to the river to wash, and their shouts of joy waken Ulysses who, after some understandable hesitation, "crept out from under the bushes, after breaking off with his great hand a leafy bough from the thicket to conceal his naked manhood." At the sight of this salt-encrusted warrior, whom the poet compares to a "mountain lion . . . with fire in his eyes," the maidens scuttle off in every direction, except the princess, in whom Ulysses soon fmds a courageous and warm admirer. Nausicaa provides him with olive oil, a cloak, and a tunic and takes him to her father Alcinous, ruler of the country. This is the turning point in Ulysses's fortunes: he is able to reach Ithaca without further peril.

Of all his qualities, the one that makes Ulysses unforgettable is not so much his capacity for success as his intense humanity and his intrepidity in the face of failure-and Failure was his frequent companion, no less terrifying because so often sent by forces he could not control: the capricious and hostile gods from Olympus. Yet even in the midst of groans, and burning tears for comrades lost to the Cyclops, or to Circe's magic, or to Poseidon's storms, Ulysses's fine mind was still at work on how to overcome these disasters, and his strong will, checked for a little while like a naked and battered swimmer resting exhausted on the shore, resumed its journey.

The Ulyssean life is bound many times to encounter failure. Its practitioners do not, of course, court failure --courting failure is the domain of the death-wishers, not the life-wishers -but neither do they pretend that it is nonexistent. The Ulyssean life is possible in spite of failure, in the midst of failure. Furthermore, the Ulysseans have often known enough failure in their earlier lives to recognize it for what it is: sometimes the result of their own human misjudgments and missteps, but sometimes-many times-the result of circumstances, the result of Fate.

This truth of the human condition is an important corrective to the universal "I'm not ' OK" guilt feeling of Western man: the terrible (and false) conviction that whenever and however failure occurs, somehow it is all one's own fault. In fact, this is exactly the neurosis to be expected in a culture that adores success, and in which credit for whatever the "success" may be is typically and publicly attributed to the individual himself

Rudyard Kipling, who had certain Ulyssean traits himself, touched unerringly on this point in his famous poem, "If," which, whatever its merits as pure poetry, resonantly strikes the chord of the hazards and inherent heroism in certain Ulyssean adventures in later life:

 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings,

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings,

And never breathe a word about your loss...

Kipling is certainly talking about adults of, at least middle age, because he speaks of stooping and building one's life and work again "with worn-out tools."

The Ulyssean answer to great and inexplicable misfortune was furnished by Ulysses himself. to say in effect, "Why has this happened to me? How have I deserved this? Is there no end to such catastrophes?" thus proving that one is a human being. Then after this first flood of sorrow and despair, which coincides with one's being naked on the shore, in a strange and lonely country, bruised and wounded by storms and mysterious forces, to seek new imaginative strategies to recommence the journey.

One Ulyssean exercise is to look upon misfortune as a learning experience. Friends of mine have taught me much about the utility of this approach-Helen Ansley of Seattle, Washington, a devoted leader in later-life therapy programs, telling me that the rough business of recovering at 75 from a broken hip and having to have a steel pin inserted was "a learning experience"; and Professor Virgil Logan at 68 remarking how intently and with what interest he observed the doctors' arrangements to help him recover from a cerebral hemorrhage. And then there was Percy Wyndham Lewis's wonderful demonstration of this attitude, in his blindness, at 71, writing his third-last novel "in silence, hour after hour, dropping each page as it was completed into a deep wooden tray on the floor at his side."*

 

*Hugh Kenner’s Introduction to Self-Condemned. By Wyndham Lewis.

 

Modem times have furnished some striking examples of Ulyssean people who have been cast naked on the shore, and whose creative imagination as much as their undoubted courage made it possible for them to resume interrupted adventures or launch new ones, or both.

An interesting case in politics was Harry S. Truman, who began life as the son and grandson of pioneer farmers in Missouri. In spite of poor eyesight he managed to get into World War One, and emerged with a captaincy and the warm friendship of hundreds of men attached to his battery. It was chiefly the support of this veterans' group that launched him into politics after the failure of his men's clothing firm, due to the Depression. (He spent years trying to pay off the creditors.) Truman had the support of the powerful Pendergast organization in Missouri, but the evidence is clear enough that, far from being its tool, he was sand in the machine. As a result, he waited for years for the preferments to higher offices that went to more pliable associates.

When Roosevelt chose him to be his running mate as Vice-Presidential candidate in 1944, it was not because Truman was a nonentity --although the Vice-Presidency was designed for nonentities-but because he had become a respected member of the Senate. He had completed two years of law school by evening study back in Kansas City and had been a county court judge for ten years; he had kept up his omnivorous reading and homework for Senate committees. Although he was a dedicated (Democrat, he was very much his own man. On one occasion he sent Roosevelt's press secretary a cryptic message just after supporting a difficult Roosevelt measure: "Tell the President to stop treating me like an office boy."

When Roosevelt died in April, 1945, Truman was catapulted into the Presidency. After a fumbling start, at which point Time Magazine with flip omniscience forecast that as he was "a man of distinct limitations ... there are likely to be few innovations and little experimentation," Truman's first administration became marked by a series of extraordinary events: The controversial Hiroshima nuclear bombing, the creation of an Atomic Energy Commission, the magnificent Marshall Plan to assist in the rebuilding of war-ravaged Europe (it might as appropriately have been called the Truman Plan), new Fair Employment Practices legislation, new unemployment insurance legislation, recognition of the state of Israel (with limitations, however, displeasing to some Jewish groups).

Still, powerful blocs of the Democratic Party were sulking by the time the nomination months reappeared in the spring and early summer of 1948. For those who chose not to adjust their blinkers, Truman seemed to lack the dimensions of a world leader, a "great President": he was, it seemed, too earthy, too gauche, too stubborn, too partyridden.

A glamorous candidate appeared from the Republican side: Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of New York State, who had once been the gang-busting district attorney of New York City. The media, who had never grasped Tniman's dimensions, possibly because of his self-destructive tendency to assign heavy credit for new ideas to legislative and administrative colleagues, had consistently downplayed his record, and now thought they beheld certain disaster for the Democratic Party in the 1948 elections. (There were, of course, enlightened exceptions.) Conservative Congressmen, both Republican and Democrat, viewed the "interim" President very much as conservative members of the Curia must have viewed John XXIII when they discovered they had an aging tiger on their hands.

Truman was by now 64 years old, no longer a young or even a younger-middle-aged man. In a way, nothing had prepared him for anything else, and yet everything had prepared him for everything else-notably how to handle failure and the threat of failure sent by whatever is the modem version of Poseidon.

In the suffocating July heat of the Democratic convention hall in Philadelphia, Truman was indeed re-nominated, but he rose to accept the nomination in an atmosphere of oppressive gloom. Certain sections of the delegates were unhappy or hostile; the new and prestigious opinion polls week after week rated Truman as being hopelessly behind his younger, seemingly more exciting, and so far unmarked Republican opponent.

In her biography of her father, Margaret Truman would have one believe that from the beginning of this desperate situation in 1948 her father alone exuded quiet confidence. This may indeed have been the outer expression-it is just too much to believe that there were no inward groans. Yet at exactly this moment of nakedness on a very barren shore, the bright, shrewd mind was at work: not just the courageous nature of the man --courage was not enough, courage alone would take you down like the valiant but misguided captain drowning with his ship --but the Ulyssean mind, which at 64 was still young with hope and large plans.

What Truman needed in his acceptance address was not just fighting words, although from his opening sentences, long after midnight on the national radio networks, it was evident that his cocky promise to defeat the Republicans took the delegates by surprise and galvanized them: "Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make those Republicans like it-don't you forget that." It was an electrifying performance-but it was not enough. He had saved the best, the imaginative, wholly unexpected idea, for the very end of his address:

On the 26th day of July, which out in Missouri we call Turnip Day, I am going to call Congress back and ask them to pass laws to halt rising prices, to meet the housing crisis-which they are saying they are for, in their platform.

At the same time, I shall ask them to act upon other vitally needed measures....

Now my friends, if there is any reality behind that Republican platform, we ought to get some action from a short session of the Eightieth Congress. They can do this job in fifteen days, if they want to do it. They will still have time to go out and run for office.

The effect of the statement was not just the pandemonium that broke loose in the convention hall itself. Across the continent millions of radio listeners (including great numbers of Canadians, like myself) felt the euphoria of hearing a wholly unexpected stratagem outlined in the crisp Missouri voice of the beleaguered President. It was the stratagem of attack, of a supreme and cool disregard for the odds. In fact, when the dismayed and angry Congressmen assembled for their unheard-of brief pre-election session later in the summer, little happened. But the initiative was never lost.

Truman had one other major creative plan, much larger and equally aggressive, in his fight to retain the kingdom that foes and sometime friends were trying to take away from him: the whistle-stop campaign. While Governor Dewey was flying back and forth across the United States to mass rallies and uttering sonorities that would not rock the boat, Truman made hundreds of stops by train to greet crowds that steadily swelled as the campaign progressed-warm, friendly crowds that responded to Truman's intimate speaking style and his relentless attacks on congressional apathy and the smug self-satisfaction with which he claimed the big interests were backing his opponent. He was able to make millions of people feel that somehow his cause was their cause, as to a substantial degree it undoubtedly was.

Even so, Drew Pearson had drawn up in readiness his forecast of the members of the Dewey cabinet; four days before the election Life Magazine published a photograph of the "next President," that is, Thomas E. Dewey, traveling by ferry boat across San Francisco Bay. On election night, the new Univac machine began forecasting a Truman victory; engineers and announcers anxiously conferred, and apologized for the machine's malfunction! Even when at midnight Truman was far more than a million votes ahead, one of the three or four best-known national commentators kept insisting that he was sure to lose. A Chicago paper carried the headline of Dewey's victory in the early-morning hours even as the man who couldn't lose was losing past recall. In fact, Truman got a greater proportion of the total vote than Roosevelt had got in 1944: he had over 300 of the votes in the Electoral College, and he had carried a Democratic majority into Congress with him.

Truman was 68 when he left the Presidency-still vigorous, still intensely interested in human affairs. He survived his Presidency by 20 years. He returned to his old home in Independence where one further Ulyssean act climaxed the last phase of his life. He obtained the funds to build a library in the centre of the town, to contain millions of public papers from the White House, thousands of private papers, books on history and politics, especially on the Truman era, and colorful murals. And he continued far into his 80s to rise at dawn and to take the 6 A.M. walks that during his Presidency had astonished and exasperated the reporters.

Ulyssean women, too, in public careers, especially in the arts or in the humane professions or in hereditary sovereignties, have innumerable times been left naked on the shore. There is something intensely moving in the sight of older women who begin the process of resuming their personal odyssey through the courage of simply holding on in the face of failure. The great achievement, however, is to begin new creative enterprises that are highly personal and idiosyncratic, no matter how small and timid at first. Among the many women who illustrate the Ulyssean ideal is the Danish novelist, Isak Dinesen, in private life the Baroness Karen Blixen.

Karen Dinesen, as she was known before her marriage, was born in 1885, into a family of wealthy Danish merchants with highly placed political connections. Her father, who committed suicide when Karen was ten, was a brilliant and versatile man with a marked literary gift, which, however, he was reluctant to develop. Because Karen and her father had had a special rapport, his death affected her more than it did the three older children. She showed early talents for writing poetry, small plays, and stories, and a distinct ability to draw portraits in charcoal. She studied briefly in Paris, and upon return to Denmark began to be published in literary magazines. Thus far her life was bounded by a warm family circle and by the pleasant artistic activities of well-to-do Danish people in the early 1900s.

In 1913 Karen married a Danish aristocrat, Baron Bror von BlixenFinecke, a year younger than herself. The marriage produced two immense and potentially catastrophic changes in her life. One was her husband's decision to emigrate to Africa where he wanted to buy land for a coffee plantation. The couple left for Mombasa in German East Africa in December, 1913, built a house, hunted lions, and in time bought a farm of 800 acres, chiefly to raise coffee. The other event was that Karen contracted a venereal disease from her husband that forced her return to Denmark for treatment before she had completed even a year in Africa. By that time the war was on; the progress of the ship was slow; and even when Karen reached Denmark she lost still further precious time by trying to make arrangements for treatment while concealing the situation from her mother, a kind woman but a typical Victorian. There were no miracle drugs in those days. The best that Karen could do was to halt the advance of the disease; for the rest of her life complications remained to harass her physically. What the episode did to her emotional system can be imagined. She was a glowing, warmhearted girl, none of whose many photographs taken at the time give any inkling of the inner agony she must have known.

She returned to Africa, where in 1921 she and Bror Blixen separated, and for ten years she managed the farm alone as owner of the Karen Coffee Company, helped from time to time by her younger brother, Thomas, who had always been particularly close to her. Still, his visits could only be for a few weeks at a time. Management of this large African plantation was a lonely, burdensome job, relieved by Karen's remarkably sensitive and warm understanding of the African people who worked on the farm, and of the neighboring Masai and the Kikuyu, whose respect for her was shown in the title they gave her: "The Lioness."

Friends and relatives occasionally came out from Denmark to try to ease her loneliness. She needed all the loyalty and company she could command: the coffee market was falling apart in the postwar years; as her markets closed, her debts rose. By the late 1920s it seemed impossible that she could save the farm, or indeed any personal assets. In the midst of constant gloom and worry, three facets of her world filled her life with a certain'beauty. One was her relationship with her native Kenyans and her undoubted simple joy in much of African daily life. Another was that she had begun to fill the long, lonely evenings on the plantation by writing stories again and she had high hopes of being published again in the Danish magazines. The third was a kind of personal miracle: she met an Englishman, a leader of safaris, whom she rapidly learned to cherish as a close intellectual friend and someone dear to her as a person. Denys Finch-Hatton was the son of the Earl of Winchelsea and Nottingham, a radiant, handsome man then in his late 30s who had had a classical education at Eton and Oxford, loved music, and was a first-class athlete and pilot.

In him, Karen Blixen found the companion to whom she could read her stories and test out her ideas. Life must have taken on fresh hope for her in the late 1920s. Perhaps the coffee market would right itself, after all; perhaps her manuscripts, now in the mail to Denmark, would give her a new sphere of creative life; perhaps in time her relationship with Denys would develop into something even deeper and more lasting than dear friendship.

But Poseidon, or some other vindictive god, was to end Karen Blixen's brief journey on fair seas. The Danish journals returned her manuscripts: Denmark was not interested in what she had to write at this stage. The coffee markets collapsed: by late spring, 1931, Karen was certain that she had lost everything-even the sale of the house and plantation could not pacify her creditors. And on May 8, 1931, Denys Finch-Hatton flew his Gipsy Moth from the farm, saying that he would be back the following Thursday. Karen was waiting for him, but the plane never arrived. It had crashed on the flight from Mombasa to Voi, and Denys was killed.

Karen Blixen was now 46. She was sensitive to the needs and, far more, the rights of the native people, and had seriously considered heading a movement to guarantee greater fairness and justice to the native Africans; she would have done so had not financial disaster overtaken her. She could have recouped much of her loss by selling her farm to developers who would carve it up and dispossess the native people who trusted her, but she refused to do so. (In the end this was the fate of her native friends and retainers, anyway.)

Now everything seemed lost. She had lost her plantation, and was in fact destitute. She had failed to regain entry to the literary world of the Danes, and thus to a second career. She had lost Denys Finch-Hatton, opening a wound so deep that 30 years later she was still in symbolic ways in her life remembering him, treasuring him. She was, in truth, naked on the shore.

She could at least go home-that is, to her mother's home-and she had in addition the support and affection of her brother Thomas. When Karen's ship reached Marseilles on August 19, 1931, he was at the wharf to greet her. Her first act was to look ahead, not back-except for essential books and manuscripts, she unpacked nothing from her African trunks and boxes for 13 years. She then made an early and heroic decision: she asked Thomas (who had had his own family for more than five years) to support her for two years while she stayed at her mother's house and wrote in English, for an English market, the stories that throbbed in her mind. She did this, even though there was no publisher standing by.

The book she wrote, Seven Gothic Tales, was finished within the two-year period. Karen went herself to London to urge the claims of the Tales, without success, and she returned, surely close to despair. Then her good angel, her brother, as certain of his sister's creative genius as Vincent Van Gogh's brother was of his, was able to make a contact through the American novelist, Dorothy Canfield, with the American market. The result was publication in the United States. (Its publisher could not resist it, but predicted that it would not sell.) Early in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and the author, under the name of Isak Dinesen, was famous in England and America. The following year, when the Danish translation was published, celebrations were held in her honor in Copenhagen. Two years later, with the publication of her account of her life in Africa, Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen's fame was secure.

Karen Blixen died in September, 1962, at 77. To the end of her long fife she continued to produce stories, articles, and taped interviews. In spite of fragile health she traveled much, steadily developed her admirable gifts as a gardener, entertained friends from among the African people who visited her, and encouraged young writers and artists. Her photographs in the later years are filled with warm smiles.

In his foreword to Clara Svendsen's biography of Dinesen, Frans Lasson gives a poignant glimpse of the author's inner life. He rema k that Svendsen, who was Karen Blixen's secretary, had for years watched her, each night before going to bed, open the door to the yard, pause, then go to "Ewald's Room," so called because it had once been occupied two centuries earlier by the great Danish poet of that name. Finally, Clara Svendsen asked Karen Blixen what this invariable ritual meant. She explained that the door looked toward Africa, and that she went into Ewald's Room to look at the map of her African plantation. Frans Lasson adds that Blixen did not say that in the same room, always standing on the windowsill by her desk, and never mentioned by her, was the portrait of Denys Finch-Hatton. And Lasson suggests that all this expressed Blixen's longing for wings, her faithfulness to things living now only in the realm of her mind, and the unhealed wounds that enabled her to enrich her writing through her suffering.

Just as forces of circumstance or whatever passes for fate in our time can deal out crushing blows against Ulyssean people, often when their hopes are high and prospects bright and fair, so also powers and events wholly outside their control can rescue them when the situation looks lost beyond recall. The intervention of these beneficent strokes of fortune really takes nothing away from the Ulyssean recovery: the intervention simply creates a new potential, which it is up to the individual to exploit or not.

Examples of this benign interference by outer forces abound, but two illustrations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can make the point vividly. One was the case of George Frideric Handel; the other, a much less well-known episode from the life of Cardinal Newman. In both cases, forces beyond their personal control had halted, and in fact almost immobilized, these creators, both in their later maturity-Handel was in his mid-50s, Newman well past 60. In both cases good fortune intervened to provide a possibility of recovery, which both men seized.

Handel was living in London in the early 1700s, where he had achieved an enormous success as a composer of Italian-style operas. Crowds packed the opera theatres to hear his musi6; he was a great favorite at court; and his creative powers seemed inexhaustible. Handel needed all his genius, because his appearance and manners were unprepossessing. He was grossly stout, awkward, often uncouth, imperious, and difficult to deal with. This unattractive outer personality, however, partly concealed a noble inner spirit. He had many enemies in the envious musical world of London in the 1730s, one of them the formidable Prince of Wales; these he could handle, but not the tidal wave of financial failure and debt that swept down upon him when the London audiences abandoned their interest in Italian opera and deserted his theatres. He wrote with his usual abundant creativity-what was said of Saint-Sa6ns many years later could have been said with equal truth of Handel: that he was throughout his life like a great flowering and ever fruitful tree-but the market was gone. Simultaneously his health failed-the worst blow was a paralyzing stroke from which he slowly recovered after a rest cure in France.

A fine and rarely seen film about Handel's life, produced in Great Britain in 1947, shows in an especially moving way Handel's bachelor life in those lonely and bankrupt days, shadowed by the menace of the debtors' prison. Except for isolated walks at times when the streets were empty, the composer remained in the house, which somehow he had been able to retain, brooding over the dark turn of events-naked on the shore. Then an extraordinary event occurred that was outside his control. Late one summer morning a delegation' of three men arrived from the Duke of Devonshire to ask Handel to prepare a work for a charitable performance. Almost indifferently the composer asked if they had a theme in mind. Rather nervously the leader of the delegation suggested that something involving the New Testament had been discussed. The effect upon the hitherto indifferent, almost somnolent composer was remarkable: "Do you mean," he asked, "the life of our Lord?"

This was what they did mean, and Handel, accepting the commission, shut himself into his workroom, saw no one but the women who placed his food at the door, and wrote the oratorio, The Messiah, in 25 days. He was in the grip of a magnificent creative obsession; many times tears flooded his eyes. To his servant he made the famous statement about what was to be the immortal Hallelujah Chorus, "I did think I did see Heaven before me, and the great God himself." He was then age 57, and from the long crisis of terrible financial loss and physical and social desolation, which had lasted many months, he had derived a new masterpiece-to be followed by still others in his late years.

John Henry Newman's experience is a fascinating parallel of seemingly utter failure, intervention by a wholly unexpected event, and creative exploitation of the new circumstance by a Ulyssean adult. Before he was 50, Newman was famous as one of the leaders of the new Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England. The idea of restoring much of the ancient, beautiful ritual that had been lost in Puritan days in the Church of England, and of restoring some of its Catholic beliefs and practices, had created so great an upheaval that its leading spokesman became celebrated, hated, and adored. He was the author of a famous hymn; an awesome controversialist and sought-after speaker; a popular and brilliant priest and don.

Then Newman, for reasons that would be irrelevant to enter into here, became a Roman Catholic. At once the whole tenor of his fife changed. The huge audience he had once commanded in the dominant Anglican world now left him; at the same time he found a cold welcome among Roman Catholics, notably and specifically at Rome itself, where he had expected to receive at least generous respect from Pius IX and the cardinals. All that he gained instead was the headship of a group of Oratorian Fathers in the provincial city of Birmingham.

Then came a succession of prospects from outside forces and imaginative ideas of his own which he hoped would advance the cause of Roman Catholicism in Great Britain and restore much of his shattered influence in the prestigious circles of thought: the offer of a bishopric, mysteriously withdrawn after he had accepted it and had bought the robes; the appointment to the rectorship of a so-called Catholic University of Ireland, which involved him in a period of intense travel and organization in Ireland, only to find a chimera; the prospect of a Catholic hall at Oxford, of which he would be the rector: this was Newman's own plan and dream, a plan defeated by his enemy within the Church, Cardinal Manning, also an Anglican convert.

In whatever direction Newman looked he was blocked. With all his great gifts, and in spite of his former fame, he had come, so it seemed, to a complete dead end. It was about this time that Newman wrote in his journal that he could hardly bear to get up in the morning; the day stretched before him already dreary and defeated. He was, in fact, naked on the shore.

Then occurred the mysterious interposition of the gods. Newman, who had been neglected for so long, was suddenly and angrily attacked by Charles Kingsley, one of the most noted Protestant writers of the day, for his desertion to the Roman Catholics, for his insincerity, for his opportunism, for his jesuitry. Kingsley's attack also extended to the church Newman had espoused. What was Newman to do with these searing and highly personal onslaughts? Turn the other cheek and let them pass? But this would be both masochistic and provocative to further attacks. Write two or three letters to The Times and responding letters to the magazine that had published Kingsley's initial paper? But responses in article form to original polemics never carry the weight of the original; and they die with the temporary nature of nearly aft journalism.

No. What was needed was a book that would give real substance to Newman's defence of himself and his conduct, and which would be read long after he, Kingsley, and the other polemicists were dead. It took Newman seven weeks of intensive work to write a reply to Kingsley that was to become one of the most famous statements in the world of theological debate, yet a book well within the range of the average intelligent person: the Apologia pro Vita Sua. Like Handel, Newman often wept as, standing at the wooden lectern on which he wrote most of the Apologia, he carried forward his brilliant and eloquent defence of himself and of the Roman Catholic Church. He must have wondered whether his will power and creative generativity were sufficient for the work. He was, after all, 65 years old-"retirement age," in twentieth century terms.

In fact, Kingsley had been the unwitting rescuer of Newman from utter defeat. The Apologia, with its fire and zest and artistry, was a triumph, read and acclaimed everywhere. Without Kingsley, it would never have been written-but then, without Newman, it would only have been another humdrum treatise ultimately gathering dust on the shelves of pious Victorian homes. Nor did Newman, to the end of his very long life at age 89, lose his ability to think originally and write creatively. (His career was unexpectedly crowned by the Cardinal's cap when he was 78.) The bright, quick mind, with its sensitive humor, mature irony, simplicity of enthusiasm over human projects, and its tender faith, can be said to have remained Ulyssean until the day of Newman's death in 1890.

"But then," says the inevitable cynic of those Ulysseans, "what options had they?" If they had no choice, it was because of their essentially life-loving and striving natures, always open to the presence and possibility of creativity. To contradict the cynic, they indeed had other options, important options chosen by innumerable older adults just as much today as formerly.

One choice is self-pity-"Who has known such woes as I have known?": one can make a career out of this, and many have. Everyone knows of someone who by personal mistakes or, much oftener, the injury and blockage of external fate, has not written the novel, conducted the orchestra, created the business, bought the long-dreamed-of house, visited Scandinavia, painted the portraits as he or she had hoped to do, and whose reaction has been immobilizing self-pity. (Who, on the other hand, had more excuse for self-pity than the remarkable modem Ulyssean Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose brilliant books were forbidden publication by his Church up to his death and in the years preceding John XXIII-but who wrote them anyway?)

Another option is to live more cautiously; play it safe; move back into the comforting conventions of routine life. There is a basis of good sense and reason here, and of human practice. Even the Ulysseans in terrible misfortune are first saved by routine. If you are Thomas Carlyle, and you discover that a housemaid has unwittingly burned the just-completed manuscript of your History of the French Revolution, in the writing of which 20 cartloads of books have been employed, you undoubedly feel crushed. For the time being it may be the routine that saves you-the cup of tea, the usual walk, the familiar companionship of a dear friend. But because you are Carlyle, and a Ulyssean, you rewrite the history. If you are the painter, Eug6ne Delacroix, keeping also a journal fine enough to be published years later and read by thousands of people since, and if you leave one complete year of the journal in a Paris cab one night, and never recover it, you can never rewrite the entries. One piece of creative work done over a whole year is permanently missing. The world of small routines will save you, as it saves years of life of lonely and desolate women in their late years-but because you are Delacroix and a Ulyssean, you recommence the journal.

The routines of conventional living can heal and save. However, they can and do engulf and enslave. Worse, there are also the demonic conventions that wait for all who have suffered terrible reverses and sorrows: alcoholism, drug addiction, cruelty to other people and oneself, sustained bitterness.

Sometimes the type of creativity evoked by the depths of disaster is not what Maslow called "special talent creativity," but "self-actualizing creativeness"-how the Ulyssean person responds in his or her personal life to the blows of Fate. A provocative example of this is the life of the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, who at her death on November 24, 1%0, was the last surviving sister of the Tsar Nicholas II, murdered with his entire family at Ekaterinbourg in 1917, ending the 300-year Romanoff dynasty. After the revolution the Grand Duchess Olga and some other members of the royal fan-Lily escaped to Paris and other western capitals.

The fleeing nobility and former ministers had certain critical choices to make. If they had enough money (few had), they could try to maintam the illusion of temporary exile in some villa or resort in Italy or France. If they had not, they could seek some kind of dignified work, or as in many cases, any kind of work. Ideologically, the exiles could continue to live in the vanished world of Imperial Russia. Or they could, while preserving loving contacts and memories, -look toward a world from which Imperial Highnesses had vanished.

What was remarkable about the Grand Duchess Olga and her husband, Colonel Nikolai Koulikovsky, was that they made a Ulyssean decision when she was 66 and he was 67 to go to Canada to farm a property of 200 acres with the aid of their two sons and a couple of elderly servants. The decision was unmistakable in its symbolism. They had chosen for themselves and their sons not the world of yesterday, including intrigues and jealousies of certain royal and ex-royal circles in Europe, but the world of tomorrow in a wholly new country.

At first the venture seemed successful, but as the years passed, Colonel Koulikovsky found it impossible to hire the extra help he needed for his farm; his sons chose new careers; and as his health failed, he and the Grand Duchess moved to a modest house in Cooksville, a small community near Toronto. There was a garden, and Olga made the house charming with many mementos of their former life.

The old servants died, and Colonel Koulikovsky's health steadily deteriorated until he, too, died in 1957. The Grand Duchess Olga was left alone in the Co6ksville house. What was she to do? Although her health was good, she was 74 years of age. She decided not to move, and by living very simply she was able to carry on. She became a familiar figure in the town, shopping and gardening. There was no Russian Orthodox church in Cooksville, and on frequent Sundays Olga made the trip into Toronto to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where after the service elderly members of the congregation and their families and grandchildren would swarm around her to pay their respects to almost the last living member of the Russian Imperial royal family. "Almost," because there was still one other living grand duchess, her sister in London, England, who as it turned out was to die shortly before Olga's own death in November, 1960.

In his biography, The Last Grand Duchess, the Greek journalist Ian Vorres tells that he drove out to Cooksville from Toronto to see if he could interview her for an article. One early autumn day, he found a small, spare woman working in her garden-this was the Grand Duchess Olga. From the beginning Vorres was struck by her ease and graciousness of manner, and by her warm, friendly spirit. He found out that Olga had often been invited to write or permit the writing of her life story, but she had always refused. But the young newspaperman and the elderly grand duchess, then 75, became fast friends; and Vorres was able to persuade her to let him write her life story-fortunately completed before her death.

It was not only Olga's vitality and courage that drew Vorres's admiration, but her sense of humor and her wise humanity. She had seen much and lost much-in the material sense, almost everything. She was, of course, lonely; she could not blot out the past, and history continued to pursue her. She still received letters and occasional visits from former Russian subjects who cherished her as a symbol, and also tiresome intrusions from imposters. Yet there was a modernity in her manner and her way of thought that reflected the new country and new style of life she and her husband had chosen so late in their lives.

In midsummer, 1960, she became ill, and had to enter hospital in Toronto, where the routines tired her and made her unhappy and restless. The medical staff, who became fond of her, were willing to send her home, but there was no one to nurse her in the silent house at Cooksville. Then an elderly Imperial Russian Army officer and his wife, Captain and Mrs. Martemianov, invited her to go with them for "convalescence." They had a small flat above a hairdresser's shop on Gerrard Street East in Toronto. It was there that Olga died on November 24, 1960.

Thirteen years later, also in November, I made a short nostalgic journey across downtown Toronto to visit the site where Olga had last lived and made the following entry in my journal:

From Gerrard Street East, the sky could be seen slate-blue on the late autumn day above the quiet Sunday traffic, the air frosty and damp. The building housing the apartments, one Storey above the shops was as photographed in Ian Vorres's life of Olga.

It was only in the last four or five months of her life that the Grand Duchess lived here. Released from hospital, which she hated, she apparently found a certain joy in being at home with an elderly Cossack officer and his wife, who loved her, and in seeing the walls around her bed covered with the beloved icons of her faith.

One can, I think, imagine fairly well the final stage on which Olga played out her days. Her small room, filled with some charming things rescued from the past, but with the simplicity of her poverty; the warmth of being in and being home; the smell of good soup; lamplight; the presence of two or three loving people, and some cards and messages from others; and the visits of the young journalist, a close friend across a difference of forty years of time, who revered and loved her.

Here then, passed from this world that lovely-spirited lady, Olga Alexandrovna, the last grand duchess of the Romanoff dynasty, on a commercial street in Toronto, Canada, among little boys whose bikes turn over and whose jugs of milk are upset, among young couples who dash laughing up the stairs, among schoolgirls carrying books across the parks, among pizza takeouts and cut-rate pharmacies, among amiable truck-drivers and elderly ladies carrying shopping bags, among neon signs and parking lots, among church rummage sales and "ethnic" moviehouses and restaurants, among thousands of family groups.

It is not all so incongruous as at first it seems. In a deep human sense, it is not incongruous at all. It has something to do with "citoyenne du monde" -----something to do with "noblesse oblige." And there is something very Ulyssean about it.

Among the disasters that can overtake Ulyssean achievers are crippling illnesses that severely impair or immobilize the body's action. Sometimes the disease or disintegrative process attacks exactly the physical instrument provided by the body to carry through the creative performance. A notable example was Auguste Renoir, one of the masters of French impressionism, who was overtaken by severe arthritis in his early 50s. His hands became more and more twisted until, by the time he had reached his late years, the deformation was so complete that he had to have the paints squeezed onto the palette for him, and he moved the brush not by his fingers but by his arm, through an apparatus attached to his rigid fingers and wrist. Nevertheless, he continued to paint great works until his death. Nothing exhausted his great talent-in fact.it was inexhaustible, even though the disease forced him into a wheelchair at so early an age as 60, and he later became bedridden.

For a long time Renoir was in great pain until at last the arthritic fires burned themselves out. When he was 71, the Renoirs actually found a doctor in Paris who was certain that he could make the painter walk again --something that would have been like a gift from heaven. In fact, he did walk again: a few steps around his easel and then back to his wheelchair. But it. required so great an effort that Renoir remarked to the physician that he would use up all his energies, and he needed, he said, all his willpower for his painting. Having to make the choice between walking and painting, he chose painting. In fact, he asked for paintbox and brushes on the morning of his death, and completed a lovely painting of some anemones the maid had brought him. According to his son, Jean, as he completed this painting and had his brush taken away, he said something like, "I think I am beginning to understand something about it."

Still, Renoir's condition in late life, cruel though it was, was by no means wholly tragic. He had, after all, a great talent that he realized; he was famous; and he accomplished much that he was born to do.

But what if you are wholly immobilized at a late age, unknown to the world, and with the feeling that you have never been able to realize i~hatever gifts you had? In so dire a situation, one form of the ultimate test of the human spirit can be seen. Is there even creativity in the survival of self over senility? Is it possible that this "I," so encircled by "disgust and despair" that its terrible urge is to take flight into somnolence and extinction, nonetheless creatively maintains its own existence and identity?

An example of this most calamitous form of being "naked on the shore" is that of Isabelle Buchanan, an aunt of mine, born in the lovely old town of Parkhill, near London, Ontario, in 1870, who died in London in 1963, age 93. Her case seems to be as clear an example of a tragic waste of human talent as the records could disclose. Nor does the achievement of a very long life do much to make up for it.

Belle Buchanan was born into a Highland Scots-Canadian pioneer family, the oldest members of which had helped build the farms and towns in Middlesex County, Ontario. The family had a heritage of great health and vitality. Belle, a beautiful, high-spirited girl, going to the dances, skating parties, sleigh rides, plays, and church functions of a small Ontario community, had a magnificent obsession: to be a nurse. Nursing was then on its way to becoming a profession, and in those days Detroit was where you went for training in nursing.

But then Fate intervened. One of Belle's grandmothers in a district ten miles away had a massive stroke. There was no one to nurse her --could Belle do it? It would mean a short postponement of her imminent arrangements to begin her training in a hospital in Detroit. But the condition of the imperious old lady did not improve. Three years went by; Belle was told that if she nursed her grandmother through the illness, she would be well remembered in the division of property at death, which was the way payment was often made within pioneer families.

The grandmother died; in fact, no provision was made for Belle, who was by now a young woman. The chance of studying nursing was lost-Belle Buchanan began the life of a spinster in the age of the unliberated woman. Because of her beauty and vivacity, she had a number of offers of marriage, all of which she turned down. In the family, it was said that she was always looking for a Prince Charming who never arrived. She may also simply have been what a later age would call "a career woman." After the death of her elderly parents Belle and a younger sister were left in the old house, and the two women carried on with the slender ftinds available from renting land, the sister's skills at dressmaking, and interest from modest investments left by their parents. In spite of this, they entertained many visitors and became special figures in the life of the little town.

In 1940, when the vivacious girl whose dream had been to be a nurse, was 70, Belle Buchanan had lost something of her radiant health-she had been drenched too often at her work out in the orchards and the grazing land and she began to develop arthritis. She was still beautiful: you could see the lovely girl that she had been. Then one snowy winter night in 1941, without warning, her sister died. There was no telephone in the old home. Belle, in the wild panic and sorrow of the crisis, threw on some clothes and went to the house of some neighbours to call for help.

After this, events followed swiftly. The home was sold and its contents auctioned off. Belle's health was irremediably shaken by these personal catastrophes, and the arthritis advanced. At first she found a certain happiness and excitement in staying with relatives in London for a few months; then as a boarded guest in the home of a married nurse whose teen-age daughter filled Belle's days with interest and joy; then, briefly, in a Roman Catholic hospital where the nuns were kind; then finally in a nursing home for old ill people in London. She entered the nursing home at age 77; here she remained until her death-16 years during which she finally arrived naked on the shore.

As nursing homes go, it was a good one, clean and warm. Belle was by now wholly immobilized; her weight had gone down to about 70 pounds. Still, frail as she was, she refused to let anyone feed her. She was in a room with seven or eight other elderly women, the majority of whom slept most of the time or were senile. The staff were good, but there were no stimuli for the mind. Belle was so crippled that it was difficult for her to read. Sunday visits from a few family members of the ininateshelped to break the monotony. I came from a busy existence 400 miles away, three or four times a year, to stay a day or two; and a cousin, Mary Fisher, came in often to talk with her.

As time went on, Belle had long periods of unbearable loneliness. One calm summer evening, her eyes filling with tears, she hummed for me and half-sang in her still-melodious voice the words and tune of "My Ain Folk," the poignant Highland song of exile: "Though I'm far across the sea, It's in Scotland I would be. At Home, in dear old Scotland, with my ain folk." Yet she was always glad to talk about the old family days and was never morbid or talked resentfully, and she had no self-pity. Only very rareJy did she seem confused. Usually her mood was a quiet brightness. I dreaded the day when I might arrive to find her sinking into senility as so many other old women had done in those rooms.

A few years before her death, Belle was moved to a front room with two beds. At first she was pleased, assuming that this was the "best room in the house," which in a way was true. But the location increased her isolation and her loneliness,. In the other bed was a timid, very fragile, senile (of course) old lady-this was her companionship. Sometimes when this person was especially silly in comments or actions, Belle would draw my attention to her with an ironic smile. Somehow I dimly resented this as mocking a defenceless old woman and a sister in misfortune. I should have known that it was from this ironic humor, still vividly awake, that part of Belle Buchanan's own mysterious defences against senility came.

The last evening, a Saturday, as usual I had supper with her, eating from a tray as she did, giving her the pleasure of feeling that I was her guest, as I was. That October evening all was at peace; we fell into a contented silence, and I drowsed. Suddenly to my astonishment, she said with great clearness-I am sure that she thought I was asleep-"I should have gone to Detroit."

My aunt was 93. Still, so tenacious was the grip of her girlhood dream that after 76 years she could mourn the great chance lost, the divide in the road not taken.

The following Wednesday I had word from my cousin in London that Belle Buchanan had died in the early morning-gone in the moment between sleeping and waking.

In what possible sense was such a woman a Ulyssean? Because of her terrible immobilization, she could not have done what Major A. F. Graves of the United Nations Society of Ottawa did at the end of his life when, desperately ill with cancer, he went out in his self-propelled chair into the corridors of the hospital, for weeks comforting other people. Was her creativity, then, self-actualization?

It seems to me now that her defeat of the steady menace of senility in an arena where many others had succumbed was in itself a Ulyssean adventure. She had a whole repertoire of defences and counterattacks against being engulfed. She had learned how to handle loneliness. She was sorrowful and angry at times, and at rare intervals clearly felt that somehow she had been betrayed-but she was then angry and outspoken, not silent and bitter. Incredibly, although she read little and saw few people, she remained open to the rich world of fantasy and dreaming which, in a certain sense, was also one of the deficits of her life. And if at the end she was left veritably naked upon the shore, she eluded self-pity. She retained an unconquerable hope into the late, late years; and when that finally dimmed and perhaps died, she never lost the sense of being the protagonist in a significant drama. Thus I came to attach to her the strong and tender accolade: Ulyssean.*

 

*Another remarkable Ulyssean of this category is an immobilized male in his late years in a Toronto nursing home who has trained himself to travel in his mind as though traveling with his body to distant places and to have rewarding encounters with imaginary people.

 

Sometimes the ingenuity and gallantry of the Ulyssean performance outwits death itself. Romain Gary, the French novelist, tells in his memoir, Promise at Dawn, of an astonishing adventure that his mother embarked upon during the last two years of her life-during which she expected death.

Refugees after World War One, Gary and his mother had wandered across Europe while she tried to keep them both alive. She felt that her boy should emerge at the top in whatever occupation he chose-from tennis to politics to the army. Her wonderful gutsy sense of life, her panache, filled her young son's life with verve and laughter, and robbed his occasional moments of embarrassment of their sting. Naturally, after 20 or more years of such companionship, with poverty and hardship from time to time, mother and son were close in mind and spirit, yet Gary had his own full identity.

In 1940 when Hitler invaded France, Romain Gary joined the Free French air crews flying out of England on sorties over the continent; his mother remained behind with good friends, in what must have been to her a sorrowful separation. Her solution, of course, was to try to bridge the gap by writing her son wonderful weekly letters designed to keep up his morale. When peace came, he rushed home -only to find that his mother had died two years previously.

When she learned that she would probably die before her son's return, she devised a Ulyssean stratagem. She prepared enough letters for a period of more than two years and arranged that the devoted friends with whom she stayed would send them to her pilot son.

The prospect of imminent death may' seem too overwhelming for even a Ulyssean to cope with. This all depends upon how powerfully the individuals have learned to internalize their sense of permanent uniqueness or value of life. And, it depends, too, upon their having developed or swiftly grasped toward the end of their lives the undoubted truth that fate is just as capricious one way as the other-that the cause seemingly lost may in time be the cause well won.

The life of the Sicilian prince and author Giuseppe di Lampedusa, who died in 1959, illustrates this strange working of fate. Lampedusa at age 60 was a tall, rather heavy, princely-looking man (this is more than can be said for many princes) who had capably fulfilled the demands of his heritage. He was the master of two palaces in Sicily, one of which was obliterated by American bombers toward the end of World War Two. He was also something of an oddity in his aristocratic circle because he was devoted to study and reading; and had for many years talked about writing a novel, which no sensible person expected him to write.

He was capable of attempting it. He had already written from time to time; and in his later years, he actually won a prize. But who expects a prince to write a novel that might be published by a commercial publisher and read by all sorts of people? Even in these days when princes have come down in the world, they are embalmed in social protocols, especially if, like Lampedusa, they are administrators of large estates. Administration is the mortal trap of serious activity outside its own sphere.

For many years Lampedusa's duties as an administrator took precedence over his urge to write. He had the Ulyssean's open and sensitive reaction to life, and when the war brought the destruction of a great part of his heritage, he was at first obsessed by the loss. To divert his mind, his wife urged him to write. He did so, and we have Alexander Colquhoun's little cameo of the result:

From now on, his routine-the café tables he used, the waiters who served him, even the cakes he ate-followed an invariable pattern: breakfast at the Pasticceria del Massimo in Via Masqueda; a call at Flaccorio, the imaginative bookseller and publisherwhose shop is a kind of literary club, and who was the first to encourage him to publish; by mid-day he would be settled in his personal version of an ivory tower, the back room of the Café Mazzara under the only skyscraper in town. I

The brief case opens. It contains, as well as maybe a few cakes from the last café, books, the addiction which made him as great an object of suspicion to his fellow grandees as his great-grandfather had been with his telescopes and comet-finders ... This concentrated reading throughout the day at the Café table (mysterious scribbling) was in a way creative.

What Lampedusa was soon engaged upon was the actual writing of the novel, The Leopard, which had been in his thoughts for 25 years.

He began it in his mid-60s, and finished it in about three years. Meanwhile he wrote other pieces. He had the novel typed and sent off, encouraged by both his wife and by the bookseller Flaccorio. Now, however, another disaster struck. He was found to have cancer, which, as it turned out, ended his life. The publisher, as publishers often will, held the manuscript for weeks. Finally, and just before his death, the letter came -a rejection. Lampedusa received the news with noble composure; still, his inward disappointment must have been intense. A day or two later, while quietly talking with his physician, the prince suddenly died. Within a matter of weeks The Leopard was submitted to another publisher, and accepted. It became an international best seller and a notable film. It is accepted as one of the distinguished novels of our time.

The performance was splendidly Ulyssean, but who outwitted whom-Death or Lampedusa? Death is a formidable adversary, and platitudes and histrionics do little to assuage his effects. Yet, in this case, Lampedusa had finished his novel, and its effects far outreached his death. Furthermore, the writing of the novel was, in itself, a personal fulfillment, a justification and actualization of the self.

This last point is crucial in considering the adventures and attempts of the Ulyssean life. Ulysses's last voyage was a failure, and it was uncompleted-still, this takes nothing away from the splendor and individual creativity of the act. Chichester's last effort to win a transocean race, which he had to abandon because of the pain and immobilizing effect of his last illness, was no less splendid than any of the other Ulyssean adventures of his later years. Surely we do not have to listen more than once to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony (which was not only unpublished at his death, but lost for years in a cellar) to understand that creative fragments are beautiful things in themselves.

One creative person who thought a lot about this last point was Robert Louis Stevenson, and with reason. Stevenson, who fought a long losing battle with tuberculosis in the late nineteenth century, when the medical profession was unable to cure it, dealt superbly with the subject of death and creative achievement in a now almost forgotten essay, Aes Triplex. In that essay, Stevenson notes how well many old people deal with possible disablement and death. He takes, as one example among many, someone he had admired, Dr. Samuel Johnson, of whom he writes:

No one surely could have recoiled with more heartache and terror from the thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and yet we know how little it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass [aes triplex], did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. . . Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him through triumphantly until the end!

Then Stevenson moves to the great question of whether it is worthwhile to begin creative acts that, after all, may turn out to be fragments:

Who, if he were wisely considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much more considerable than a halfpenny post-card? Who would project a serious novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?

This is a Ulyssean speaking, even though Stevenson's own life was to end at 44:

By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good work with their whole hearts have done good work,, although they may die before they have the time to sign it.

And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?

"By all means begin your folio. . . "

The folio, a natural symbol for a writer, is Stevenson's shorthand for any creative opportunity that exists almost simultaneously with the threat of serious illness. The human tendency, which no one has the right to criticize or patronize, is to abandon everything that seems to interfere with the awesome threat to one's life. But is this always or even usually the only or the wise action? There remains the possibility of the Ulyssean action, which is what Stevenson is writing about. Two incidents from my own experience may illustrate the point.

About 20 years ago I heard the story of a married couple in their mid-60s. They had planned for years to wander through Europe but had been kept from doing so by family responsibilities and business difficulties. At last they were free to do so. The husband had just been able to retire, and retire comfortably; they were, after many years of marriage, much in love; they had spent some happy months in the early summer just before his retirement planning their itinerary, gathering tourist and guide books, and assembling luggage and clothing. They had their tickets for the passage. Then each decided to have a medical examination as an extra precaution. Her returns were clear; her husband's were dismaying-the odds were against the husband's living as long as a year. Shaken, and sorrowful, the couple cancelled their tickets; the husband began treatment and in fact lost his fight with his rare illness in about a year.

I learned of this episode from a close friend of the couple. My friend described the wife's poignant double sorrow: not only the loss of someone dearly loved, but that of the long-planned-for, dreamed-about trip to Europe. When she finished, there was a few moments' silence between us. Then she said, "What would you have done?" I said, "I would have gone to Europe." My friend smiled: "I too. But it's easy for us to say. He was faced, after all, with what turned out to be a fatal illness ..... That's true," I said, "but there are great physicians in Europe." "They are beautiful people," she said, using the present tense lovingly, as though the husband were still alive. "I wish that they had strolled in the sunshine on St. Mark's Square, and sat in a café in Paris. He wanted so much to see Athens. . . They could have had a little odyssey. "

In 1967, when traveling by bus between Montreal and Ottawa, I met an extraordinary person. He was a 78-year-old Australian, spare and heavily tanned, with rather gnarled working hands, plainly dressed; it was midsummer, and the day, and the bus were intensely hot. It was easy to move into conversation with this keen-eyed traveler with the quick, warm smile. Where was he going? To my surprise, I learned that he was bound for Calgary, to see the Stampede. He and his wife had arrived in Los Angeles to cross North America and then Europe by bus, and to find a passage home from the Near East. They were visiting their daughter and her family in Montreal-meanwhile the Calgary trip was his personal side expedition to fulfill a long-held dream. He and his wife would resume their odyssey when he returned. They liked big buses-you could often stop, stroll, have the feeling of being close to the land and the people. Sometimes they stopped over; often they traveled through the night, and in "America" there were usually splendid middle-of-the-night restaurants and rest stops. They had had so much fun seeing things together.

I asked about fatigue: no, this was not a great problem. If they felt themselves getting too tired, they "stopped over." I did not mention, of course, the inevitable thought held in the back of my mind, placed there by the conventions of our society: Suppose one or the other became ill --after all, both were about 78; suppose ... But it was impossible, talking to this vital, obviously life-loving man to whom I said a warm farewell in Ottawa, to keep dwelling on thoughts like these. I knew that I had met another of the Ulysseans.

"By all means begin your folio. . . "

Chapter 1 ] Chapter 2 ] Chapter 3 ] Chapter 4 ] Chapter 5 ] Chapter 6 ] Chapter 7 ] [ Chapter 8 ] Chapter 9 ] Chapter Notes ] Selected Bibliography ]

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