Old Man In Italy

Hello, we’re back! Today, we’ll examine the final (ninth of nine) story in David Szalay’s book, All That Man Is.

To begin this one, there is no title, but we have an epigraph:

Time will say nothing but I told you so,

Time only knows the price we have to pay;

If I could tell you I would let you know.

This is the beginning of W.H. Auden’s 1940 poem, If I Could Tell You.

We’ve noted how Mr. Szalay seems to appreciate the poet Philip Larkin and weave Larkin’s style into his prose. Here we have further evidence of Mr. Szalays’s appreciation of poetry and its expressiveness. Let’s say more about this when we’re farther along. I’m guessing that if you’re not familiar with the story or the poem, this epigraph is mysterious. It refers to the experience of time and age as being difficult to communicate. There is always more time till there isn’t, and at that point of death, a human can’t communicate her/his subjective experience.

Here’s the story’s first line:

“The next morning he needs to do the shopping.”

For those of us keeping track, this opening raises the question, most obviously, who is “he?” Why does he need to do the shopping?

This story is about an Englishman, Tony, seventy-three, who has gone from London to stay at a vacation home he and his wife own in Italy. He’s alone—for reasons that will be revealed, and so must do his own shopping. We’ve noted before that each story in this collection has to do with men at different points in their lives, men who are experiencing an emotional crisis over what is truly meaningful. And we must note that this is the final story and that Tony is the oldest subject.

As we’ve discussed before, we humans have different experiences of time. There is chronological time, the thing we measure in minutes, days, and years. We say and/or think: It’s gonna take three hours to get where I’m going! And there is experiential time, which is what meaning we make of our perception of chronologic time. Three hours of my precious life! Wasted. The stories in All That Man Is have to do with experiential time. The first story we looked at, the one about Simon (who will appear in this last one) is about someone making meaning out of being seventeen, that it is an age for adventure and excitement. Last time, we examined Karel, who at thirty apparently concludes it’s time to settle down.

Let’s look at Tony’s story.

“He arrived last night at Bologna airport…The taxi through the wintry darkness to the house. The house was cold. Entropic forces were gnawing at it. There were mouse droppings on the floor.”

Here, we are reassured by the persistence of the author’s style—the short sentences and fragments that impart a jagged choppiness to the story. For a contrast, please read Marcel Proust who writes very long sentences with many clauses and consider what a difference this makes in terms of tone.

“He thinks about death quite a lot now. It is hard not to think about it. Obviously, he doesn’t have that much time left. Ten years? In ten years he will be eighty-three.

“It still seems incredible to him that he is actually going to die. That this is just going to stop. This. Him. It still seems like something that happens to other people.

“There is something very strange about trying to imagine the world without him. The strangeness, he thinks, is to do with the fact that the only world he knows is the one he perceives himself—and that world will die with him…It is the ending of the stream of perception that seems so strange. So unimaginable.”

So, Tony is contemplating his demise and finds that it makes his life somewhat disappointing. He fears the fact that the life that he’s cherished so much will end, renders it unimportant. Let’s remind ourselves that, in terms of story structure, this is Tony’s state at the beginning, before any transformation. He worries that his life is meaningless.

This scene continues with Tony hearing the cleaning lady arrive. He interacts with her briefly while fixing breakfast and thinks about how she lives with her son and that he sometimes gives her a ride home.

“Her son must be thirty. A handsome man. He has met him a few times…”

And this introduces a feature of the story that will be developed as we continue, although I don’t think Tony’s noticing handsome men is the story’s “point.”

Let’s pick things up next time.

Till then.

#AllThatManIs #DavidSzalay #AlanBray