Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

Next he feels a rush of guilt, remembering Roo’s letter, which is still lying desolate and unanswered on top of a pile of unread scholarly books in his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He’ll write her now, Fred thinks as he turns his back on the studio and starts home. This afternoon.

But the mails are slow; it will take ten days for a letter to reach Roo. Maybe he should phone; the hell with the cost. But after such a long silence-over four weeks since she wrote, he remembers with a groan-Roo could be furious with him again; she has a right to be. She could hang up on him, scream at him. Or there could be somebody with her when he calls, some other guy. She has a right to that too, damn it. No. He’ll send a telegram.

AT the London Zoo, Vinnie Miner sits on a slatted bench watching the polar bears. Several of them are visible: one splashing lazily in the artificial rock-pool; one asleep on its side at the entrance of a stone cave, looking like a heap of damp yellowish-white fur rugs; and a third padding back and forth nearby, occasionally turning its heavy muzzle, on which the coarse hair has separated into spiky clumps, to give her an inquiring glance from its small glittering dark eyes.

Though she lives only a few blocks from the Zoo, this is the first time Vinnie has visited it all year, and she’s only here now because some American cousins insisted on coming. These cousins, who are frantically “doing London” in three days, have already gone on to the National Gallery. Vinnie lingers here partly from the sense that, having paid several pounds to enter the Zoo, she might as well get her money’s worth, and partly because it’s a fine day and her project is ahead of schedule. All her London data has been collected; she has read most of the relevant background material, and she has traveled to Oxford, Kent, Hampshire, and Norfolk to talk with experts in children’s literature and folklore.

It isn’t in Vinnie’s nature to be wildly euphoric, but today she is at the peak of her own emotional curve, even off the graph. She is happier than she has been in months-maybe even in years. Everyone and everything looks good to her: the animals, the other visitors, the graceful new-leafed trees and the damp, shining lawns of Regent’s Park. Even her cousins, whom she usually thinks of as boring, today seem only forgivably naive. She hasn’t had a visit from Fido-or even thought of him-for days. For all she knows, he has followed Chuck to Wiltshire.

As she sits alone on her bench, Vinnie not only feels happy but curiously free. She is far from Corinth University, and from the duties and constraints of the role of Spinster Professor. The demanding and defining voices of her colleagues and students and friends are stilled. Moreover, English literature, to which in early childhood she had given her deepest trust, and which for half a century has suggested what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become, has suddenly fallen silent. Now, at last, all those books have no instructions for her, no demands-because she is just too old.

In the world of classic British fiction, the one Vinnie knows best, almost the entire population is under fifty, or even under forty-as was true of the real world when the novel was invented. The few older people-especially women-who are allowed into a story are usually cast as relatives; and Vinnie is no one’s mother, daughter, or sister. People over fifty who aren’t relatives are pushed into minor parts, character parts, and are usually portrayed as comic, pathetic, or disagreeable. Occasionally one will appear in the role of tutor or guide to some young protagonist, but more often than not their advice and example are bad; their histories a warning rather than a model.

In most novels it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction. They may be struck by lightning or pruned by the hand of man; they may grow weak or hollow; their sparse fruit may become misshapen, spotted, or sourly crabbed. They may endure these changes nobly or meanly. But they cannot, even under the best of conditions, put out new growth or burst into lush and unexpected bloom.

Even today there are disproportionately few older characters in fiction. The conventions hold, and the contemporary novelist, like an up-to-date fruit-grower, reconstructs the natural landscape, removing most of the aging trees to leave room for young saplings that haven’t yet been grafted or put down deep roots. Vinnie has accepted the convention; she has tried for years to accustom herself to the idea that the rest of her life will be a mere epilogue to what was never, it has to be admitted, a very exciting novel.

But the self, whatever its age, is subject to the usual laws of optics. However peripheral we may be in the lives of others, each of us is always a central point round which the entire world whirls in radiating perspective. And this world, Vinnie thinks now, is not English literature. It is full of people over fifty who will be around and in fairly good shape for the next quarter-century: plenty of time for adventure and change, even for heroism and transformation.

Why, after all, should Vinnie become a minor character in her own life? Why shouldn’t she imagine herself as an explorer standing on the edge of some landscape as yet unmapped by literature: interested, even excited-ready to be surprised?

Today the Zoo, her immediate landscape, is at its best. An early-afternoon shower has sluiced the dust from the still-shiny leaves and the mica-flecked paths, and has lent the air a scented freshness. It has also given Vinnie a chance to wear her new raincoat: dramatic, full-cut, of shimmery silvery-blue waterproofed silk-the sort of coat she could never have afforded to buy, and in fact hasn’t bought. In it she feels taller and better-looking, almost proud of herself.

She is proud of London too today. She rejoices in its natural and architectural beauty, the safety and cleanliness of its streets, the charm and variety of its shops; in its cultural sophistication-the educated, ironic tone of its press, its appreciation of historical tradition, its deference toward maturity, its tolerance of, even delight in, eccentricity.

Today, events that at another time would have infuriated or depressed her seem mere annoyances. The arrival in this morning’s post of the current issue of the Atlantic , containing a letter in praise of L. D. Zimmern’s article, hardly rippled her mood. Poor stupid Zimmern, imprisoned in ugly, dirty New York and in his own sulky spitefulness. Vinnie imagines this spitefulness as a deep cold muddy rock-pool like the one in the polar bears’ enclosure. She visualizes L. D. Zimmern as sunk in it up to his (in her imagination) pudgy chin, unable to climb out. Whenever he attempts to clamber up its slippery sides, the largest polar bear-who has now hauled himself out of the water and is lying dripping on the rocks beside the pool-places a heavy paw like a sopping-wet floor mop on his head and shoves him back down again.

Since she feels so good, and it is such a nice warm day, Vinnie refrains from actually drowning Professor Zimmern in her fantasy. It would be bad publicity for the London Zoo, such a death. Besides, it might be upsetting for the bear-and perhaps even dangerous, if the keeper discovered that his prize Thalarctos maritimus was a man-killer. She rather likes this particular bear. It is true that his movements are slow and rather clumsy and his coarse yellow-white fur coat none too clean; and he doesn’t look awfully intellectual. But he is satisfyingly large, and he has a humorous, sly, agreeable expression. To tell the truth, he is a little like Chuck Mumpson. She saw exactly that look on Chuck’s face when they were shopping in Harrods last week, just before he left for Wiltshire.