- guardian.co.uk, Sunday April 21 2002 01.12 BST
- The Observer, Sunday April 21 2002
By way of introduction, the mother insisted on reading our palms. We were all tired and wanted to hit the hay (literally, in this case), but not wishing to appear rude, we duly offered up our hands. As her daughter translated, she told my first friend that he would move far away from England. She told my second friend that he would become a teacher. Then it was my turn and, after a few seconds of intense study, the crinkled old lady refused to say what she had seen. Her daughter looked embarrassed. There was a slightly eerie silence, which I broke by laughing. 'Don't worry,' I said.'I don't mind whatever it is.'
Eventually, after my two friends also insisted, the daughter relented and told me her mother said that I would die at 40. 'Oh,' I said, still smiling. And then we all went to bed. I didn't think much about it at the time - I was 24 and, as now, a convinced rationalist - but down the years that little scene has hung around the fringes of my memory like a bad smell. My first friend moved to Australia a couple of years later and has never returned to England. My second friend is now a lecturer in Birmingham. And I turn 40 in June.
If it's done nothing else, the old Thai woman's prediction has added an extra piquancy to what is perhaps the most symbolic of all birthdays. And one that already carries more than enough foreboding. In contrast to other celebratory milestones, the age of 40 is still widely recognised as a distinct turning point in life. At one end of adulthood, coming of age is staggered from 16 (the age of consent) to 21 (the traditional age of majority), and at the other, retirement has become a movable feast. Between those flexible limits, however, remains the same bold line that for generations has clearly, and unforgivingly, separated youth from maturity.
'It used to be,' notes Margaret Lock in a collection of essays entitled Welcome to Middle Age!, 'that an individual's family status, rather than chronological age, determined "public recognition" of maturity in premodern Europe.'
But in age-obsessed modern Europe 40 is the moment when life runs out of promise and begins stacking up disappointment, when looking back becomes easier than looking forwards. And as such it's often spoken of less as a landmark than an entrenched border. In the popular imagination 40 is a bit like the division of Korea: to the south lies energetic ambition; to the north bleak resignation.
Indeed, in terms of professional opportunities, the big Four-O has come to occupy the position of checkpoint between South Career and North Career. At this crossing, though, the movement is all northwards, fast-tracked from youthful potential straight through to ageing obsolescence.
Studies show, for instance, that scientists working in medicine are most likely to make a contribution to medical progress during the age span of 35 to 39. With physicists it's even earlier, and most other professions also see a peak before forty. And one of the more curious aspects of all those best novelists under 40 lists is that they are almost a tautology: the exception is a novelist writing his best book over 40.
But it's not just about work. In the land situated on the other side of 40, people, especially men, are said to undergo a strange transformation. Something happens to them, some existential revelation that brings bitterness, cynicism and depression. Seemingly contented individuals with stable lives and firm goals suddenly react against all the preconceptions they once held dear. Such are its disorienting effects that it causes men to leave their wives, their careers, their former selves - and, in extreme circumstances, to purchase leather trousers. It's what's commonly known as the midlife crisis.
But what is it about entering the fifth decade that is so momentous and problematic? For at the age of 39 and 10 months, I could almost ask, if I was not terrified the words would come back to haunt me, Crisis? What crisis?
Obviously I'm not unfamiliar with the desire to turn one's back on responsibility. I know about self-destructive impulses, feelings of worthlessness, the temptation to create unnecessary emotional chaos, and the profound, aching need to engage in reckless, life-warping fun. I am, after all, a man. But what's so different about being a man at 40? In what way is the midlife crisis unlike all the other crises that have preceded it?
The standard explanation is that it's the halfway mark in life, and thus a time, like no other, for intense morbid reflection. When you've had 50 per cent of your allotment, the reasoning goes, it's only natural that you might want to stop and contemplate the meagreness of the remains.
That would only recently be true, however, and even then only trueish. In 1950 the life expectancy of a British man born in that year was 66.2 years (for women it was 71.1). Last year, men moved up to 77.82 (women passed 80). So given that I was born in 1962, I should have selected somewhere on the sliding scale between 33 and 38 to ponder whether my glass was half-empty or half-full.
Yet as far back as the fourteenth century Dante referred to 40 as a period of confusion and despair. In The Divine Comedy, he writes: 'I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard it is to tell what that wood was, wild, rugged, harsh; the very thought of it renews the fear! It is so bitter that death is hardly more so.'
That passage is often cited as one of the first references to a midlife crisis. But in the middle ages the middle-age mark was more like 25 (Dante himself lived till 56). For the average 40-year-old in those days, meditations on mortality were perhaps a little more pressing than they are for a 40-year-old today.
So in any real sense the midlife crisis is an invention of the twentieth century. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung first coined the phrase - or, if you prefer, diagnosed the condition - back in the Thirties. Unlike his one-time colleague Freud, who argued that all personality conflicts are the result of unresolved issues from childhood, Jung believed that different facets of the personality emerge at different stages of development.
'We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the life's morning,' he wrote, 'for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at the evening have become a lie.'
The period between 35 and 40, he suggested, saw a clash of identities - the youthful and the mature - that amounted to a midlife crisis. The idea did not gain popular currency until the Seventies, when books like Gail Sheehy's Passages heralded the beginning of the personal growth culture.
Much of the psychiatry that Jung pioneered has had limited impact in medicine. Nowadays Prozac is prescribed more often than psychoanalysis. But outside the scientific realm, Jungian thought continues to underpin a huge and ever-expanding market of therapies and pseudo-psychologies, many of them directed at resolving the problems that supposedly set in after the age of forty. As the cultural critic Margaret Morganroth Gullette has observed: 'Belief in midlife decline is a pandemic peculiar to our age.'
All those personal Quests for the Sacred that clog up the bestsellers charts are steeped in Jungian archetypes, rituals and conflicts. They are also written by fortysomethings who have presented a new persona to the world in the afternoon of their lives - and isn't it a coincidence that the new persona is always that of bestselling author?
When it isn't encouraging us to journey to our souls, self-help literature for midlifers wants us to take a trip around our bodies. There are, of course, all manner of bio-physical changes that take place around the 40 mark. For women it has historically been viewed as the end of their fertile years. Yet a combination of scientific innovation and social restructuring means that plenty of women are starting families after 40. Even so, as things stand, 40 still represents a genuine barrier for most women, a point after which, to put it in crude genetic terms, they can no longer fulfil their biological function. It's not hard to see that life, at that juncture, could appear to lose some of its purpose.
But, despite rumours to the contrary, there is no such thing as the male menopause. Men can pretty much continue to father children up until the day they drop dead. There are no vital functions that stop at forty. The body continues to go about its business, it's just that it tends to do it in reverse. Everything begins to accelerate the wrong way: the spine shrinks, the stomach and prostate grow, joints stiffen, the skin thins, the lens of the eye hardens, the hair falls out, and the gums recede. It's not a comforting picture, and it reminds us of George Orwell's unsentimental dictum that by the age of 40 every man has the face he deserves. Orwell's stoicism in front of the mirror, needless to say, has gone completely out of fashion. The wisdom nowadays is that nobody deserves to look 40, least of all a 40-year-old.
Body maintenance has become something of a religion. With women, perhaps because there is an irreversible physiological change, the message is often diluted with some vague psychology. If you feel good about yourself, the rider says, then you'll be happy with how you look. The advice aimed at men, though, prefers on the whole to steer clear of that kind of complexity.
To enter the world of male midlife health guides is to grapple with life's big questions: How can I prevent periodontitis? What's the best way to perform abdominal crunches? How can I double my earning potential?
When A Man Turns Forty: The Ultimate Midlife Manual by Curtis Pesmen is full of bright tips on these old favourites and many more. It's the same sort of sterile, upbeat advice that is found in men's health magazines: floss your teeth and firm up your stomach and you'll live a long life with a contented wife - as long as you're also raking it in. Such is the relentless papering over superficial cracks, that you can't help but wonder if, deep down, life after 40 really is ugly and meaningless.
In this morally and physically simplified world, a monogamous marriage is the nonpareil of midlife success. And if you're really successful, a series of monogamous marriages. Accordingly, in his guise as marital counsellor, Pesmen details five vital questions for 40-year-olds to address. My favourite is number two: 'Do you and your wife look into each other's eyes at the moment of orgasm, as David Schnarch, PhD, co-founder of the Marriage and Family Health Centre in Evergreen, Colorado, and author of Passionate Marriage , recommends?' There has surely never been a sentence better designed to make you keep your eyes closed and your clothes on.
In reality, the identity issues men fall prey to after 40 are seldom to do with not looking when they are coming, but more about an inability to see where they are going. In the words of The Survival Papers: Anatomy of a Midlife Crisis: 'They suffer terrible moods that gnaw at their innards. They have dark thoughts, suspicions and fantasies that give them no peace. Their outlook is bleak. They lose their energy and ambition, they are anxious and feel they've missed the boat, life has no meaning. They hurt and they have thoughts of suicide.'
Hey, you want to say, it's just a birthday. Chill out, floss your teeth, smell the flowers. But we learn that a man in the grip of midlife crisis is no flower-smeller. As The Survival Papers , a Jungian tract, goes on to say: 'There is of course nothing to stop [a man] from taking a two-room cottage in the country, or from pottering about in the garden and eating raw turnips. But his soul laughs at the deception.'
That's why, presumably, his soul craves a sports car and the new young blonde in the office. That at least is the myth. But in fact a good deal of research suggests that the deception to be laughed at is the notion of a midlife crisis. Michael P. Farrell and Stanley D. Rosenberg conducted a study with two groups of men, one aged 25 to 30, the other 38 to 48. There was no difference between the age groups in response to questions relating to midlife crisis. Another study sampled men aged from their thirties to their seventies and focused on the symptoms associated with midlife crisis. But again those reporting such symptoms were not concentrated in the midlife age group.
George Bernard Shaw wrote that every man over 40 is a scoundrel. And whether or not there is such a thing as a midlife crisis, there is certainly a sense that the one of the few compensations for reaching 40 is the issuing of a licence to misbehave.
Shaw was writing in 1903, long before midlife made claims as a clinical complaint, but patently the idea of male waywardness in the post-forties was already established. It was made into a forgiveable expectation by psychoanalysis. But it was fiction that turned midlife poor behaviour into creative obligation.
Just as Freud's theories about the subconscious reshaped filmmaking, so did Jung's work on character development revolutionise novel writing. But whereas psychoanalysis was an extension of the old Socratic maxim that the unexamined life was not worth living, postwar fiction writers helped promote the idea that the unlived life was not worth examining.
The protagonists who populate the novels of writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller and John Updike, are desperate to start living their lives. Often trapped in the 'living death' of mid-century marriage, they are dissatisfied men, hungry for the experiences they feel have been denied them. Yet at the same time they are victims of mortal dread, 'the stifled terror,' as Updike says of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, 'that always made him restless.'
'In these portrayals,' write Farrell and Rosenberg, in Men at Midlife , 'the transition into middle age is viewed as inextricably bound up with a sense of frenzy, if not a total crisis in identity.' And what fun it appeared. The Sixties and Seventies saw the arrival of a new kind of literary anti-hero, a midlife man in revolt against the consumer society, corporate values, the nuclear family (and getting older). Let's call him Mr Bad.
Mr Bad doubts the point of life. Later, in the Eighties and Nineties, he is joined in literature by another midlife model whom we'll call Mr Sad. Mr Sad doubts the point of himself. The embodiment of post-feminist male's insecurity, Mr Sad is in retreat from everything, especially women (and getting old). The critic Kenneth Tynan once noted that after the age of 40 there was nothing left to do but cry and fuck, and that, respectively, is pretty much what Mr Sad and Mr Bad do.
Adultery is to the midlife crisis novel of the Sixties and Seventies what Africa was to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century writers like Conrad: 'It's a way of giving yourself adventures,' as one character says in Updike's Couples. 'Of getting out in the world and seeking knowledge.'
By contrast, Richard Tull, the 40-year-old - you can't call him an anti-hero, more of a fall-guy - of Martin Amis's The Information is monogamous and impotent. He is the saddest of Mr Sads. We meet him crying in his sleep.
'What is it?' his wife asks.
'Nothing,' he replies. 'It isn't anything. Just sad dreams.'
Mr Bad and Mr Sad. They're not exactly a pair of role models (on closer inspection, of course, they frequently turn out to be one and the same person: Mr Mad). And yet down the years I've found them enormously reassuring. There is undoubtedly a vigorous appeal to a life spiralling out of control. It comically testifies to the absurdity of thinking that life might go in any other direction.
One of the most nonsensical aspects of our culture is the age versus achievement competition which men are prone to take very seriously. Until quite recently, for example, one of the first things I used to do on reading a book by a near contemporary would be to look up the author's age in the biographical notes. If he was younger, I felt challenged. If he was older, I could relax and get on with not doing anything. Now, as 40 looms into view, I no longer care, at least not in that finely calibrated way. Because after 40 it's one great indistinguishable mess of post-youth.
For if 40 represents the end of a certain freedom - the freedom of youth - it also marks a liberation from expectation. I recall reading in some men's magazine or other a list of things men were supposed to have done by the age of 30 - stuff like sleeping with two women (that's not in total, mind, but simultaneously) and freefall parachuting. Rubbish, of course, but it plays to that feverish anxiety of having missed out.
What would a comparable list look like for things you should have done by the age of 40? Got a pension? Been made redundant? Buried a parent? These are not matters to inspire manic competition.
You could add to that list: had a child? Here, perhaps, is the single factor that has transformed the nature of midlife since everyone began writing about it. Not long ago it was the norm for men to have families in their twenties and early thirties. By the time he was my age, my father had five children. Living with wives who effectively mothered them, men routinely took on a huge responsibility for others without ever learning to be responsible for themselves.
That process has now been inverted. It's not unusual for a man to spend the years between 20 and 40 responsible for no one but himself (Nick Hornby's About A Boy is the key text for this new model man). It has been well observed that no group has benefited more from sexual liberation and equality than men in their twenties and thirties. So what exactly is it that a man reaching 40 feels compelled to rebel against? If you've had 20 years of indulging the self, there's a reasonable chance that you might want to eschew that lifestyle and start taking care of others.
That's not to say that the symbol of this updated midlife crisis is instead of a sports car, a people carrier. Rather an acceptance of the possibility that at some stage - and why not 40? - growing older may necessitate growing up.
The alternative is to become a Mr Sad in the more modern meaning of the word, endlessly pursuing a life to which one is increasingly ill-suited.
According to Jim Conway, author of Men In Midlife Crisis: 'Escaping the midlife development crisis is probably as likely as the child escaping adolescence.' But turning 40 could turn out to be a question of development rather than crisis, precisely because it marks a big child's long-overdue escape from adolescence. Then again, with just two months to go to the day, I would say that. Perhaps I should bear in mind a warning from an expert in the field.
A couple of years ago I mentioned to Howard Jacobson, author of No More Mr Nice Guy (Mr Sad becomes Mr Bad), that I was not anticipating a midlife crisis because I had already had racked up enough turmoil, one way or another. 'Oh, you mean you got yours in early,' he said. 'Well, I suppose so,' I replied. 'Yeah,' he nodded, flashing me an expression of almost fatherly tenderness. 'That doesn't mean you won't have another.'
