INTRODUCTION Like so many members of the post-World War II generation, Dudley Clendinen sometimes imagined that his parents would live forever. It was an expectation he had to revise as his mother and father, who had once seemed so invincible, began to surrender to the passage of time. Yet even as they aged, they did not do so in the same ways as earlier generations. Thanks to advances in diet, medication, and elder care, people who grew up during the Depression and fought in World War II--the Americans known as the Greatest Generation--are living much longer than any generation before them. The longer they live, the more their children are drawn into their lives. Women and men who never expected to see their eightieth birthday are now celebrating their ninetieth or hundredth. They have become part of an unprecedented demographic phenomenon that Clendinen calls the New Old Age--an experience for which neither they nor their children have been prepared. In his work as a journalist and author, Dudley Clendinen has long been engaged in telling the stories of people in America who, like the rest of us, are too often invisible.
In his latest book, A Place Called Canterbury , he has written a warm, witty, painful, real-life account of the challenges that face older people, as well as the children who become responsible for them, in a society that has enabled us to live longer without saying how. A Place Called Canterbury is a nonfiction soap opera about two hundred feisty old people who have come together from across America, and the world, to live at Canterbury Tower in Tampa, Florida--and about the staff that cares for them to the end. With all the compassion, sensitivity, and conflicted feelings of a devoted but sometimes bumbling son, Clendinen chronicles the last years of his mother, who, though felled by a pair of debilitating strokes, evinces no desire to let slip her hold on life. Trying to communicate with her, reliving memories of earlier, more vibrant times, Clendinen struggles to come to terms with the person his mother was and has now become--someone who only partly resembles the charming, complicated, controlling woman he knew, but who still exerts a hold on him and still stirs depths of admiration, love, and frustration. The unfolding relationship of mother and son is just one of many tales and themes in A Place Called Canterbury . In these exquisitely rendered, dramatic, and often very funny pages, we meet people like Karl Richter, the "Archrabbi of Canterbury," who escaped Nazi Germany as the storm clouds of World War II were preparing to burst; Emily Moody, a.k.a.
the Emyfish, the arch, theatrical old New Yorker who spurs a movement to have the aged women of the complex pose nude for a calendar; the Sweetso, Canterbury''s combative, liberal, book-loving atheist from Pennsylvania; and Wilber Davis, the confused, gentle-hearted ninety-year-old from Tampa who loves to dance, and who urinates in his roommate''s closet, misses his wife, and chases women around the nursing wing. Thoughtful, witty, and heartbreaking, Dudley Clendinen''s book is a microcosm of life, a story told by a son who chose to live out these last comic and painful years with his mother and her friends and keepers in a very special place, A Place Called Canterbury . ABOUT DUDLEY CLENDINEN Dudley Clendinen is a former columnist for the St. Petersburg Times , an assistant managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and a national reporter and editorialist for The New York Times . He is the editor of a book of essays, The Prevailing South, and the author of the text for a book of photographs, Homeless in America. With Adam Nagourney, he is the coauthor of Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland. A CONVERSATION WITH DUDLEY CLENDINEN Q.
How were you able to spend so much intimate time at Canterbury? Did you have to get permission to write A Place Called Canterbury ? Well, yes and no. When I decided to do it, I wrote the board of trustees a long letter introducing myself, explaining what I had in mind, and asking for a hearing. Some of them knew me. We had a meeting. I had a legal right to be in the building, because I had my mother''s power of attorney and was her trustee. And I had Mrs. Vinas''s support. She liked the idea, and we trusted each other.
If she had been against it, the board would never have agreed. But they''d never had a writer loose in the place before, and the board members were worried that the book might take advantage of the residents, invade their privacy, and make fun of their debilities. What did I want? they asked. Just for the board to write a letter explaining to the residents and staff who I was, that I was going to be working on a book about life at Canterbury, I said, and that I might want to interview them. They could agree or refuse. It was entirely up to them. I thought it might take a couple of years. Could they see the manuscript before it was published, one asked? No, I said.
And they shouldn''t want to, because I couldn''t let them edit it, and if they saw and approved it, then the residents who didn''t like when it was published would hold the board responsible. It was my book, not the board''s. I had to be responsible. If the board refused, would I do the book anyway? another member asked. Probably, I said. But it wouldn''t be as good or balanced a portrayal of Canterbury if they refused to let the staff talk to me. Canterbury was a good place, I said. But if I couldn''t talk to the staff, it would distort the picture and damage the portrayal.
After talking about it in private, the board agreed. Then sent out a letter that essentially said, "Watch out. Here comes the bogeyman!" It scared hell out of a lot of residents, but it was a very honest, open way to begin. I could start, and everyone was warned. Q. How did you get the residents--and also the staff--in A Place Called Canterbury to trust you and talk to you? Were there some who wouldn''t? The short answer is time, patience, good humor, a refusal to go away, and lots of explanation. Yes, after the letter went out, there were some who refused. Sometimes I was glad; sometimes I wasn''t.
I began by putting up notices of meetings to which anyone who was interested could come and ask questions, and I would explain. About twelve people came. Then I began the interviews with Helen Hill, who might have been the oldest person in the Tower and who knew me and my family. She''s a very definite personality. Everyone, of course, asked her what it was like to be interviewed by me. When she told them it wasn''t so bad, they began to relax. But basically, I just kept coming back, listening and asking questions, doing interviews, and just being there. Living the life, figuring out who was interesting, who was open, which ones might be the best characters in the life of this village.
I''m speaking now of the residents. The staff talked to me in part because I''m easy, but really only because Mrs. Vinas told them they could. They don''t do anything without her approval. Q. Was there ever any point at which you worried that you might be supplying the reader with too much information on your subjects'' lives? Yes. All the time. I threw tons of stories and narratives and descriptions and biographical details away.
Tons . I have restructured, rewritten, restructured, rewritten, thrown out, and rewritten this book four or five times. I have honed and shrunk, rephrased, compressed, and written through every page of it, probably one hundred times. Or more. Q. Were you surprised by the overall candor of the people whose experiences and memories helped you to write this book? In some ways, yes, hugely. In others, no, not really. The Emyfish, for instance, is a very cagey personality.
Even though she''s known me from birth and loves me, she''s a very wary interview subject, because she''s always guarding the secret of her real age, or anything that might give it away. Mrs. Vinas is a very hard interview, in a way. Because she''s so controlling, because she guards everyone''s privacy, beginning with her own, so carefully, she doesn''t relax into easy conversation. She doesn''t give up information easily, and she doesn''t want a tape recorder on. Among residents, the men particularly are reticent and can be hard to draw out. Males of that generation just aren''t accustomed to talking about themselves and their feelings. The women are, of course, though some of them tend to put up a lot of screens and mirrors.
Sarah Jane tells great stories but is always saying, "Now, Dudley, you can''t use that." I loved Mary Davis and Nathalie for being so open. Ditto Martha Cameron. The Sweetso was a born observer and commentator, and sensationally candid. And the rabbi was wonderful. Considering how cautious so many of them were at the beginning, I was amazed to realize what I had at the end. Q. Did you know which residents and what themes and stories would be in the book when you started spending time at Canterbury? Did you know how you were going to write it when you began? Why did it take so long--seven years--to write A Place Called Canterbury ? The answers are no, no, and because that''s how long it took me to figure it out.
Someone else might have been faster, but no one else has ever tried to do this before--or anyway, done it. I knew that Mother--or my relationship with Mother--would somehow be at the center of the book. But that was tricky. I hadn''t ever made myself a narrator and character in a book before. The closest I had come was in essays and magazine articles. And Mother was already stroke-damaged and silent when I.