When I turned 40, a friend about a decade younger asked if I had any lessons to impart from what then seemed a vantage point of maturity. I was stumped, and have only become more so as the years have gone by. One of the strangest things about aging is how difficult it is to describe the experience of being older to younger people. It is simply impossible, it seems, truly to know what it is like to have x years under your belt without actually living through those years. Yet, paradoxically, this has only made me more interested in the work of old writers—just in case one of them has pulled it off at last.
In Gail Godwin’s sixth novel, 1982’s A Mother and Two Daughters, the author wrote a chapter in which two friends, women in their 40s, hike to the top of a bald mountain and sprawl in the meadow grass planning their old age. They decide “that one has to take a position on it, that one has to prepare an image of oneself that one can grow into.” That crafted identity requires a “power base” that can make an old woman “the kind of witch who is feared or admired—perhaps even loved,” rather than ignored and diminished. The source of that power could be fame or money or something more intangible, such as becoming a “beloved local person,” a small-town teacher, perhaps, visited and consulted by her former students. That one chapter alone, Godwin’s editor told her at the time, was “worth the price of the book.”
But those characters, thoughtful as they seemed, had no idea what awaited them. Godwin has published 11 novels plus a few memoirs and guides for writers in the years since those women climbed that mountain. A couple of weeks before her 85th birthday, while trying to water a newly planted dogwood tree on a hot day, she fell and broke her neck. The injury, she writes in her odd, fragmented, and ultimately powerful new book, Getting to Know Death, initially just caused her neck to feel “a little funny.” But she ended up wearing a collar brace night and day for six months. Her therapist suggested she use the time to come to terms with her mortality, giving this meditation its title.
Never in Getting to Know Death does Godwin contemplate her “power base” or the sort of persona the characters in A Mother and Two Daughters consider so essential to being old. You could say that’s because she long ago succeeded in securing her status as that rarest of creatures, a financially successful literary novelist. But none of that is relevant to Getting to Know Death, which is entirely unconcerned with Godwin’s image or what anybody else thinks of her. At times the book is very bleak, at times funny, at times radiant. Death is always present in the book, but not exactly confronted because its nothingness provides so little grist for Godwin’s mill. This is a bit surprising because she is a Christian and presumably believes in an afterlife, but this book is really about the experience of being quite old while retaining one’s creative powers.
Getting to Know Death: A Meditation
By Gail Godwin. Bloomsbury.
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Godwin’s late partner, the composer Robert Starer, who died in 2001, said of his work toward the end of his life, “I used to try to be original. Now I try to be clear and essential.” Godwin herself writes that while working on her 2013 novel, Flora, she noticed that her own style was changing. “I was shaping a shorter, sharper sentence and heading toward an essential focus in theme, almost severe at times.” The most exciting “experiment” for an older writer, she ventures, is to ask: “How much of your story can you convey with the excess stripped away?”
This attitude—as Godwin surely knows—jibes with the conventional notion of an artist’s “late style”: expression honed to its essence, exemplified by the painter J.M.W. Turner, whose late works were initially derided but later heralded as precursors of impressionism and other modernist movements. Often late style is characterized as serene and accepting, although the philosopher Edward Said (in a book written shortly before his own death from leukemia) argued that the discontinuous nature of many artists’ late work conveys “intransigence, difficulty, and contradiction.” They are the equivalent of those impatient old people who will have no truck with euphemism and other niceties, who insist on calling everything as they see it.
There’s some of all of these qualities in Getting to Know Death. Godwin’s thoughts are a swirl of past (of which there is so much) and present (of which there will be a swiftly diminishing supply). Much of the book is addressed to her best friend, Pat, whom she met in second grade and rejoiced in for 77 years. (Pat and Gail are the models for the two friends lying atop that mountain, planning their old age together.) Pat—who gave away everything she owned except for two nightgowns, moved into a Medicaid-funded nursing home, and died in 2021—taught Godwin that “there are moral natures outside of books that are superior to mine.” She served as a constant reminder to her friend that writing and artistic ambition—the nexus of Godwin’s own “power base”—could only be a relatively small part of a worthy life.
Sometimes the imperatives of art can even be a hindrance. Getting to Know Death seems to reflect subterranean reservations about the storytelling that has been Godwin’s life’s work. Godwin finds herself wondering whether the tales she’s invested so much in are actually true. Did 10-year-old Pat really defiantly drink out of a water fountain labeled “Colored” in segregated North Carolina? Who was Godwin’s grandmother, really, a woman she now views as a “big mystery” who “contained more than I ever thought to imagine about her.” This newfound rigor concerning the truth expands outward. “Take care to fact-check websites with titles like ‘Last Words of Famous People,’ ” Godwin advises her reader. It turns out that Henry James did not say, “So it has come at last, the distinguished thing,” when he expired, but rather, “Stay with me, Alice, stay with me.”
Edward Said would insist that the nonlinearity so common in late style represents a rebellion against conventional wisdom and an embrace of the true shapelessness of life, and therefore a rejection of the false coherence of narrative. It’s true that the chronological meandering of Getting to Know Death can make it difficult to track at times. The book was written during the months when Godwin felt imprisoned in her neck brace and was obliged to move downstairs in her house, into the room where her ailing husband spent his final months—an ominous transition. Surely it wasn’t possible to do any sustained writing under those conditions. But the often telegraphic, even gnomic, nature of late style seems just as likely to be the result of the stripping away of what comes to feel like filler and throat-clearing. The essence remains. You just have to know how to read it.
Godwin’s guide in this is Samuel Beckett, a writer whose entire corpus feels like late style. I wouldn’t have associated Beckett with the psychological naturalism of Godwin’s own fiction. But she fell in love with a short Beckett text (written—yes!—in his final years), “Imagination Dead Imagine,” when she was a grad student in her 30s. She includes in Getting to Know Death the full text of a sort of prose poem she wrote under the influence of this work and published in James Joyce Quarterly in 1971. You can see why. It’s very good, and she imagines a conversation with the younger self who wrote it in which she asks, “Help me try to do this again.”
Nevertheless, Getting to Know Death isn’t much like Beckett; Godwin just isn’t as much of an isolate as the author of Waiting for Godot. True, the memoir is spare, and it has its incantatory repetitions and fixations: how much her work borrowed from Pat’s life; her family history of suicide; the despair she felt as a high school graduate with no money for college and the relief when her estranged father offered to pay the tuition. The little dogwood tree she tried to rescue—and in doing so condemned herself to six months in a brace, surgery, and a possibly permanent disability—crops up again and again. Yet even stuck in her sitting room, Godwin is no Beckett character, buried up to her neck in sand. Without her accident, Godwin would never have met individuals she now cherishes, her roommate at a rehabilitation center and her home health care worker chief among them. It is this that endures for her, along with writing and reading: not a power base in money or wealth or reputation, or an identity founded on any of that, but the possibility of newness and discovery in the ever-surprising form of other people. This, at least, never gets old.