Love Among the Ruins

By Melvin Maddocks

APOSTLES OF LIGHT by ELLEN DOUGLAS 307 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95.

Everybody is born a king, Oscar Wilde once remarked, but most people die in exile. In Wilde's mood of royal bitterness, Ellen Douglas has written a savage little novel about life's next-to-last disenfranchisement--that deportation to Siberia known as old age.

Martha Clarke, a retired schoolteacher in the mythical town of Homochitto, Miss., still lives in the family homestead. But now, in her mid-70s, she is almost blind and beginning to turn senile. Picking their way past a Spanish oak tree and a small jungle of cane and Virginia creeper, Martha's nephews and nieces stage a meeting of the clan in the ancestral manse. While she sits in her period rocker, they discuss their Aunt Martha problem as if she were as inanimate as the leather classics in the glass bookcases about them. "Isn't it strange," Martha thinks, "that they're able to talk of disposing of me as if I were a child?"

Miss Douglas' notion of family politics can make Machiavelli seem an innocent, as anyone knows who has read her prizewining first novel, A Family's Affairs. In Apostles of Light, Martha's relatives talk love and practice expediency. Before her on-again, off-again brain registers what is happening, Martha's house has been converted into a small nursing home called Golden Age Acres and filled with motel lobby furniture, polyethylene philodendrons, and assorted old folks eagerly abandoned by their own loving kin.

As a civil rights case in support of the latest, though not the most fashionable "minority," Apostles of Light effectively makes its point: the very old are as invisible a group today as the blacks used to be. But Miss Douglas has composed far more than an old people's brief in fiction. A native Mississippian herself, Ellen Douglas has made her argument palpable in her milieu. The Southern-Gothic setting--decaying classical porticos plus mazes of wisteria and Confederate jasmine--closes around the reader and, like a perfect symbol, becomes the substance as well as the metaphor for the author's theme of human dissolution. The politics of old age turns into the poetry of mortality.

Lucas Alexander, the doctor who has been Martha's old flame, comes to join her in the Golden Age ghetto, and without a false touch of pathos, Miss Douglas writes a love story as passionate as it is asexual. Old age, she suggests, is a wicked spell cast upon lovers and life lovers, and she stocks her story with appropriate witches and ogres--a Lesbian nurse concealing a record as an abortionist, a nursing-home manager smarmy with greed and Bible-Belt piety.

In the presence of these active forces of anti-life, as well as the passive bystanders--Martha's relatives--Miss Douglas refuses to write a happy ending to her fairy tale. Martha and Lucas go up in the sort of gorgeous ritual blaze of self-destruction that besets Southern-Gothic houses in Southern-Gothic novels. But Martha and Lucas qualify, in Miss Douglas' phrase, as "celebrators of life"--and so does she, dramatizing with all the reason and passion at her command the bland and heinous modern crime of burying one's ancestors before they are dead.

Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.