Gray Pastures

By Melvin Maddocks

THE COMING OF AGE

by SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

Translated by PATRICK O'BRIAN

585 pages. Putnam. $10.

Die young or grow old--so far there seems to be no other option. Yet society regards old age as "a kind of shameful secret," complains French Novelist and Treatise Writer Simone de Beauvoir, now in her 65th year. Old people, she argues brilliantly and bitterly, are condemned not only to decrepitude but to poverty and loneliness. In the face of this, they are also asked "to display serenity" so that their juniors will be spared guilt.

With the same tough panache she showed in pioneering Women's Liberation (The Second Sex), Miss de Beauvoir now sets out to champion what might be called the Old Age Revolution. Characterizing the old as "the most unfortunate, the worst-used of all," she suggests that trying to take care of them properly would bring about a healthy moral and monetary upheaval in our society.

Seal Meat. In a fascinating spot survey, Miss de Beauvoir reviews how the old have fared in other places, other times. For example, among the Chukchee, a Siberian fishing tribe, an elder who outlived his time was given a farewell feast of seal meat and whisky, after which his son or younger brother slipped behind and strangled him with a seal bone.

Yet in other societies, elders might maintain their usefulness by presiding over rites of passage and playing tribal historian.

By and large, Miss de Beauvoir finds that the aged have been honored more in theory than in practice. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon pronounced old age a disease, and few men before or since have disagreed. As for the present, she writes: "It is common knowledge that the condition of old people today is scandalous." Any pretense to patriarchy has been mocked by the urban-industrial dispersal of the family; the attitude of children toward aging parents, she writes, is profound duplicity under a veneer of official respect.

"Mystical Twaddle." Turning subjective in the last half of her book, Miss de Beauvoir forces readers to confront the old age that every man contains within himself, "just as," in Rilke's phrase, "a fruit enfolds its stone." How does old age feel? To Juvenal, it was "a perpetual train of losses." To Jonathan Swift, it meant "a state of permanent anger." Even the master exulter of all, Walt Whitman, was finally brought, in his own words, to "whimpering ennui."

Simone de Beauvoir carefully weighs the few whose testimony treats old age as a period of spiritualization. Among them are senescence's biggest booster, Victor Hugo, who wrote: "Fire is seen in the eyes of the young, but it is light that we see in the old man's eyes." Miss de Beauvoir's judgment of that: "Mystical twaddle." Her heroes are not those who praise decline but the men who fight the body's disintegration, like Tolstoy, who learned to bicycle at 67, and Goethe, who at 64 could ride a horse for six hours without dismounting. Alas, even this "incessant struggle" is doomed.

What of ordinary men put out to pasture at 65? Retirement is the "most loathsome word in the language," she choruses with Hemingway. A man's work is his dilemma: his job is his bondage, but it also gives him a fair share of his identity and keeps him from being a bystander in somebody else's world. Old age does not even, as another myth claims, leave men transcendently free of their appetites, particularly sex. The dirty old man--limited as to opportunity but still in there peeping--is, Miss de Beauvoir concludes, closer to the pathetic truth.

The tragedy, as the author sums it up, is that the aged, though often treated as a separate race, are still fully human, and with encouragement can maintain limited participation in a full life. What is Miss de Beauvoir's program? Nothing so simple as the political solutions of "higher pensions, decent housing, and organized leisure," she warns. "It is the whole system that is at issue." Modern man, she complains, is "atomized from his childhood" on. If in his youth and maturity a man "shared in a collective life, as necessary and as much a matter of course as his own," only then would he "never experience banishment" in his old age.

How might this "ideal society" be constructed? The question demands an other De Beauvoir book. In the mean time, she is making an eloquent plea for interim mercies.

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