MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Aging Moderns illuminates an unrecognized reality for modernist artists: that they age. Herring argues that, despite being lauded in their prime, modernists continued experimenting with the avant-garde to age creatively in the late twentieth century. Focusing on modernist artists who occupy the margins of discussion, Herring effectively argues that innovation did not cease as artists grew older; rather, "while modernism lived on, so, too, did the modernists" (4). Herring beckons scholars to expand their understanding of modernism as a movement by examining modernists' experimental aging in their later lives' work.

Herring introduces several integral terms that support his argument in the introduction. The most important is "geromodernism" (5), an examination of the long-term aesthetic experiments of aging modernists' work. Herring asserts that society suffers from "gerontophobia," the view that elderly people are unable to create and provide for themselves, which erases the strides these artists took to keep modernism alive decades after its prime. He references Kathleen Woodward and Margaret Morganroth Gullette's idea of "double jeopardy" (8) to emphasize how some of these modernists fought both racial and ageist prejudices, calling attention to work that has been excluded from the modernist canon. Herring also uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of the "senile sublime" (24) to reference elderly people's lasting creativity despite their aging bodies. Importantly, Herring terms these modernists artists or moderns instead of authors because their work extends past literature to include activism and fine art. Herring states that his aim is to unearth "sundry modes of exemplary experimentalism" (19) to share lesser-known modernists' battles against gerontophobia with a new generation of scholars.

Herring progressively enlarges the scope of modernism as a concept through six case studies: Djuna Barnes, Samuel Steward, Ivan Albright, Tillie Olsen, Charles Henri Ford and Indra Bahadur Tamang, and Mabel Hampton. By highlighting sideline contributors to the modernist movement, Herring broadens modernism to include people of color and LGBTQIA+ artists, likening them to high modernists through modernist tendencies in their work that are not limited to literature. Herring begins with Barnes, a recognized modernist writer, whose continual marginal notes, changing typewriter colors, and fragments of poems scrawled on napkins all highlight how "writing is a revolutionary state of perpetual revision" [End Page 727] (34). Through descriptions of her later life, Herring emphasizes how Barnes continued to innovate literary modernism into her elderly years despite not publishing, situating her continual revisions as her senile sublime. By positioning Barnes as the first case study in his book, Herring begins widening the conversation surrounding modernism by highlighting an artist who stopped publishing after her initial successes but did not stop creating.

Herring examines amateur modernist writer and artifact collector Steward in chapter 2. He argues that Steward's modernist artifact hoarding and unsuccessful novels were modernist in nature because Steward's introduction of these artifacts to younger generations of scholars allowed them to create new modernisms in the late twentieth century. Steward's collecting and showcasing of modernist artifacts to new generations classify him as a modernist more than his prose, according to Herring, as he reintroduces "experimental writings to other [younger] appreciators" (77). Steward's senile sublime combines literature, hoarding, and exposing artifacts to new appreciators, further developing Herring's definition of modernism as work both on and beyond the page.

Chapter 3 highlights Albright's poetry and paintings that prematurely aged their subjects, referred to by Herring as "decline paintings," which Herring claims battle gerontophobia by making people face their aging bodies and see the beauty in them. Herring describes Albright's work as that which focuses on the aging body instead of the aging mind. Herring eloquently explains that the premature aging in Albright's paintings and lack of pronouns in Albright's poetry unsettle societal perceptions of aging and make society come to terms with aging not as debility, but as opportunity. Similarly, Herring offers a slight departure in chapter 5 that details the experience of collage artist and poet, Ford, and his caregiver, Tamang. Like Steward, Ford was gay and outlived his modernist counterparts, scribbled verses in notebooks like Barnes, and, because of the age gap between Ford and Tamang, practiced intergenerational modernism. Herring argues that their relationship was increasingly collaborative as Ford grew older and could create less independently, which prompted Tamang to take pieces of Ford's previous work and collage them together, creating what Herring terms "surrealist frailty" (140) that added to Ford's modernist footprint. These men's work further contributes to Herring's interpretation of modernism by including art that confronted aging and crossed generational boundaries, reinforcing his idea that the senile sublime for aging moderns extended beyond literature. Though these chapters initially seem out of place, Herring connects [End Page 728] them to other moderns through their fight against gerontophobia, making them rich additions to his argument by identifying modernist trends in other forms of art. Herring then transitions to a discussion of activism as anti-gerontophobia through discussions of Olsen and Hampton.

Chapters 4 and 6 examine a new concept in Herring's discussion of modernism: feminist age modernism, an age-consciousness connected to the older female working class. Olsen championed the life review form, which allowed her to "integrate the individual's consciousness across the lifespan" (119) in her old age to prevent generational amnesia, or the loss of knowledge about adverse circumstances of previous generations. Herring connects Olsen to other modernists through the stream of consciousness style she employed in her life reviews, which allowed her to continue reinventing modernisms as a working-class woman. Similarly, Hampton was a pioneer during the 1980s Harlem Renaissance revival, where she experimented with collages as a form of activism that represented intergenerational modernism for women. Both Olsen and Hampton participated in intergenerational modernism like Steward and Ford, but their activism embraced modernist trends along with their art. As her form of the senile sublime, Hampton's activism filled the gaps left by generational amnesia, reaching beyond literature and fine art as Herring's most concrete example of generational amnesia.

Herring's goal is to examine aging moderns and combat society's assumptions that to be old is to be uncreative. His six case studies explore the multifaceted nature of gerontophobia and modernism by illuminating a wide range of artists that reach beyond literature in their modernist experimentation. Herring infuses concepts such as the senile sublime and feminist age modernism into his case studies to expand scholarly understanding of modernism. His application of double jeopardy and feminist age modernism allows more perspectives to be represented in the study of modernism as a movement. Herring continually hearkens back to his thesis throughout his book and his gradual outward expansion of modernism is a thoughtful way to reexamine the later modernist movement. Herring's shrewd examination of these artists' unique contributions to modernism in their later lives fruitfully achieves his goal. [End Page 729]