Starting off the new year with a book about old age isn’t the most obvious approach but These Vintage Years by Margot Benary-Isbert proved to be just the right way to start 2024. After all, what is aging but another adventure to be embarked upon, just like a new year:
…I prefer to call old age, this time of vintage, an adventure, while others may call it a calamity. The different is that a calamity has to be endured passively; an adventure must be accepted. In both there are the same dangers: those that can be anticipated and those that are unexpected, real ones and imaginary ones. To accept the challenge of adventure means freedom; though every adventure involves risks. At the same time it is the unexpected, the new, the surprise, and for those who are brave enough to consent, a strong temptation.
Fittingly, the original German title for this when it was released in 1965 translates as “The Adventure of Aging” and that is very much the spirit in which Benary-Isbert, a popular author of children’s novels in both her native Germany and adopted homeland of America, writes. Born in 1889, she was in her mid-seventies when she wrote this, and was both seeking and providing guidance how to proceed gracefully and enjoyably.
Little of Benary-Isbert’s life had gone to plan and her retirement was no exception. The planning had begun well though:
What a lot of plans we had when Ben stopped working in Chicago in 1955 and we moved to Santa Barbara! Once again we were starting a new venture in our life that had been so rich in changes. For the first time since our flight from the Benary family-place in 1945, when the Russians took over Thuringia, after ten years of homelessness we had acquired a small house of our own again. It had swallowed our meager savings, and we knew we would have to manage rather tightly until we could see whether my books in the United States and other countries would succeed well enough to supplement Ben’s social security income. This didn’t worry us more that it does young people who marry on uncertain income. Weren’t we experienced adventurers? In the thirty-eight years of marriage we had known poverty and wealth, hunger and cold, abundance and insecurity as well, and neither had meant much to us. After we had survived the threat of wars and inflations, of bombs and the Nazi menace, we felt that we had every reason to be full of hope and good cheer.
Sadly, just five weeks after arriving in Santa Barbara to begin their happy retirement Benary-Isbert’s husband died suddenly, leaving her alone in a strange place with no support network aside from a daughter who was overwhelmed with her own small children. The following years are dealt with in a few blunt sentences but, ten years on, it is clear she had learned how to live on her own and to find happiness. If there is one thing her life had prepared her for, it was change, and at least she was young enough to adapt to her new circumstances. She recalls the struggles of her parents’ generation to make a fresh start after the devastations of the Second World War:
Our parents’ generation was too old for a new beginning when the war ended. For them, there remained only the letting go and the accepting – and how admirably did some of them achieve it. My father was in his ninth decade when he lost, in one night of bombing, all the material belongings he treasured: the comfortable old house where he had lived for forty years, the garden with his roses, the fruit trees, the lilac hedge, and the contents of his choice wine cellar. For his proud heart the hardest to bear was the financial dependence which was his lot after the currency reform. We never heard him complain about it.
Having enjoyed so many of Benary-Isbert’s books last year (chief among them The Ark), I loved the bits of her biography that are peppered through the book, but that’s not really the structure. It’s an odd mixture, with some of her own life and thoughts but much of the advice coming through lengthy excerpts from friends’ letters. Then there are then opinionated excerpts on how to monitor yourself for sloppy habit (what did 1960s American grandmothers made of her assumption that they would be out hiking as a primary source of exercise?), frank descriptions of dealings with not always satisfactory grandchildren, and randomly inserted exotic travel adventures accompanied by haikus (which I hope worked better in the original German than in the English translation). It is definitely a unique mix and I have no idea how it ever got published but I quite enjoyed it, both for the glimpse it gave me into Benary-Isbert’s life and for its still applicable advice about getting older. Benary-Isbert lived until 1979 and I hope she had many more adventures in those final years.
This sounds fascinating (haiku aside!) – I love the sort of book that is baffling to have ever been published. They’re often the most enjoyable.
As much as I enjoy Benary-Isbert, I can’t pretend this is the most enjoyable thing I’ve read by her, but it is enjoyably odd.
Sample “haiku” for your pleasure:
The moon glances over the hill
and admires his image
in our goldfish pond