Evening Voices

‘Grant me an old man’s frenzy’ – so Yeats wrote in one of his great last poems, oppressed by a searing discontent with every created thing. ‘Myself I must remake’ – in a quiet way Mrs Saunders would agree with the second statement, but hardly with the first. She brings together in this volume quotations from Chekhov, André Gide, Wordsworth, Montaigne and a hundred others. Her own comments are sensitive and mainly just – ‘Not many would have the temerity to live their lives again. Looking back on the plain of the years from the heights of age I see when I took ‘the road that led my world astray’. Yet, given another chance, even if I avoided my former mistakes I should almost certainly make others, perhaps more stupid and far-reaching.

She emphasises the consolatory aspects of old age – the calmness of detachment, freedom to follow one’s whim, various new pleasures of society and solitude – but at its deepest level her comment is always pessimistic. The fires burn low. Death is near. With the riddle of the stars still unsolved we go down to darkness. So Mrs Saunders gently implies. Yet we have heard of old people (by no means all of them saints) who swore before they died that the meaning of the riddle was joy. We hope to belong to their company.

1956 (136)