Back in the 14th century, Dante Alighieri wrote perhaps the definitive verse about the onset of male menopause: “Midway in his alloted threescore years and ten, Dante comes to himself with a start and realises that he has strayed from the True Way into the Dark Wood of Error.”
The problem with mid-life crisis, usually considered to occur between the ages of 40 and 50, is that it happens way past the halfway mark in a man’s life. Once you hit your late 30s, as Martin Amis observed in The Information, nature’s done with you.
Understandably enough, male writers are obsessed with the subject, from Yeats, Roth and Updike right up to William Leith’s new book Bits Of Me Are Falling Apart: Dark Thoughts From The Middle Years. A few weeks ago, the Australian novelist Tim Winton said: “In middle age that sense of being naked and confused and bewildered and outpaced and misunderstood and self-conscious, it all comes around again. I think that often takes people by surprise. It’s often trivialised when people talk about mid-life crisis as though everybody in the world as a male goes out and buys a sports car and humps the secretary or whatever, but most people just feel disoriented and awkward and inadequate in the same way you did at 15.”
So spare a moment’s thought for the many poor schmucks muddling through the second act. Some, like Lester from American Beauty, will gleefully relive their adolescence. Some surrender to premature old age. Some will drink and smoke themselves to a slow death; some will hit the gym and the tattoo parlour. Some will prosper and fatten, others will buckle under the yoke of mortgages, back taxes, alimony or palimony payments. Some will carry out humble acts of daily heroism on behalf of their families, some will fuck up royally, and some will find a few small, good things to keep them alive.
I’ll be 40 this November, and Iggy Pop’s spoken word piece ‘No Shit’ tolls in the mind like a bell.
“It was in the winter of my fiftieth year when it hit me: I was really alone, and there wasn’t a hell a lot of time left. Every laugh and touch that I could get became more important. Strangely, I became more bookish, and my home and study meant more to me. As I considered the circumstances of my death, I wanted to find a balance between joy and dignity on my way out. Above all, I didn’t want to take any more shit. Not from anybody.”