Rules for Old Men Waiting by Peter Pouncey
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The story behind a novel can be better than the novel itself. That is not the case with Rules for Old Men Waiting, a grand achievement by Peter Pouncey. The book is even better than the remarkable story about it.:
It’s a debut novel by a 67-year-old author. Pouncey, a former classics professor at Columbia and retired president of Amherst College, began writing Rules it in 1981. Talk about late and patient bloomers.
In 210 pages, it says a lot more than scores of novels twice as long. its length. It deals with three wars and the power of imagination, memory and art. And it’s an emotionally rich portrait of a marriage that is severely tested and emerges as the envy of any couple.
The old man waiting to die is Robert MacIver, a former Scottish rugby hero, retired historian and a recent widower. He’s left with rage at all he’s lost and bittersweet memories of the accomplished life he’s led.
He’s alone on Cape Cod, in his crumbling summer house that’s “older than the Republic.” The house and the old man “were well matched, both large framed and failing fast.” .
MacIver complies a list of “Rules For Winter Watch,” a plan to “take back his life, until he could give it away on an acceptable basis.” Rule 5: “Play music and read.” Rule 7: “Work every morning. Nap in afternoon if needed.”
Work means writing a story, set in the trenches of World War I, “the great folly that set the century reeling on its catastrophic way.” That story, about loyalty and revenge, becomes a novel within the novel. We not only get to read the story, but watch a writer at work.
When MacIver isn’t writing or thinking about his characters, he remembers his wife, an accomplished painter, one of the “real women who gentle our condition.” .
He thinks about their son, who dropped out of Yale to enlist as a medic in Vietnam. He left home with a elegiac farewell, “It’s all right, Dad. I’m not going to get killed,’’ echoing MacIver’s father in World War I.
The novel moves seamlessly among MacIver’s rememberances. He realizes he’s making “some kind of tally of his memories, as though completing the inventory might tell him what his life amounted to.” .
He relives his part of World War II and ponders a character in the story he’s writing:
“This is a man who is never fully himself unless he’s at war. (Yes, MacIver thought: we still meet his kind, and often we admire him. God help me, sometimes I admire him, not his general so often, but the expert fighting man himself. Three thousand years and more after the Trojan War, it’s still possible to show an Achilles at home guiding his reluctant men through his own private Hades.)” .
It’s a novel as layered as the richest wedding cake, but far more nourishing. Pouncey reminds me of Norman MacLean ("A River Runs Through It") and Wallace Stegner ("Crossing to Safety"), two other scholars who knew how to tell powerful stories that stick with you long after the last page.