Letter from America
At 50, I’m happy to age and die – unlike my neighbours
‘Fifty today, old lad?/ Well, that’s not doing so bad:/ All those years without/ Being really buggered about.’
I came across these lines by Kingsley Amis in David Pryce-jones’s new memoir, Signatures, while under house arrest. David is a sprightly 84. He can remember annoying Bernard Berenson at lunch and being relieved that Somerset Maugham didn’t put the moves on him at bedtime.
The Amis/pryce-jones one-two reminded me to stop worrying about reaching 50 not out this summer. As the monstrous milestone loomed by life’s foreshortened highway, I’d become somewhat discomfited by the speed with which I was morphing from buggerer to buggeree. One minute you’re wronging the ancientry; the next your knees tell you when it’s going to rain and your children are laughing because you think ‘dick pic’ is a Dutch footballer. But that was before the consolations of philosophy.
During the interlude in which the usual flapping and whirring of time’s wingèd chariot was supplemented by the wail of ambulance sirens, I shared some of these concerns with Mrs Green.
Instead of saying how nice it was to spend more time chatting, now that Mr Trump had locked us indoors together, she affectionately reminded me that it was two in the morning, she was available for comment only because I snore like a warthog, and I was born old.
I listen to old music and read old books; I dress like my great-grandfather, who was last seen in 1947; I get up in the night and crawl around trying to trace imaginary draughts; for the last 25 years, I’ve done nothing but complain about hypochondriacal symptoms of imminent death. As the wish is father to the dream, do I really believe it does me any good to think like that?
This was infuriating because it is true.
Like a pharaoh building his pyramid, I’ve been preparing for oldiedom all my life. I was born actuarial. Cannily, I’ve stashed my money where the IRS can’t reach it. Where once were yellowed stumps, there now stands a splendid set of gleaming American gnashers.
Dental necessities aside, I reject the American cult of eternal youth, or at least its factitious impression. No tucking of the jowls; no nipping of the eyebags; no weaving of someone else’s hair into my scalp. When I go to the gym, it is to read the newspaper and take a nap in the sauna.
I stopped buying fashionable clothes, and tight clothes of all kinds, about 20 years ago. I could comb my hair over, but I’ve kept it short ever since the day in 1996 when a builder, sitting on a kerb in the West End with his colleagues, like Socrates with his lads in the agora, shouted, ‘Oi! Lionel Blair!’
Unlike American men of my age, I do not attend parent-teacher conferences in head-to-toe black Lycra. I wear a tweed suit in the style of Mr Toad. This liberates me to make inappropriate and offensive remarks with an innocent face. I’ve stopped sunbathing before the crinkling makes me look more like Sid James in mid-guffaw than it already does.
I recently spent a lovely afternoon with a married woman who razored 32 warts and skin tags from my face, neck and armpits, and then told me that her husband has them Down There. I also get an annual prostate tickle from a small man with large hands, who lives in the suburbs with his mother.
I avoid wearing jeans, because after a certain age if you shuffle around with your trousers hanging low, people will assume you’ve let yourself down. When I approach water, I fear death by it. I have forsaken the primary-colour Speedos that all of us young Tadzios wore in the 1980s, adopted the white suit of Aschenbach in my forties, and now find no holiday activity so genial as drinking a Bellini on the floating bar of the Gritti Palace and contemplating death in Venice.
The death is always someone else’s. Once I enjoyed the wedding of someone I barely knew. Now nothing is as satisfying as the funeral of a distant acquaintance, except reading the obituary of someone I dislike and working out my chances of living longer than he or she managed.
My shameless and public relish of ageing is downright un-american. Death is one of the many great unmentionables of American life. Real American oldies work themselves half to death, and then vanish to Arizona or Florida, to expire in an elephants’ graveyard with golf carts. These places are notorious for the clap. The high ratio of widows to widowers means that men in retirement communities carry on like sailors on shore leave: blue pills at dusk; STD shots at dawn.
Call me an old romantic, but I feel Mrs Green deserves better in her twilight years.
Dominic Green is Life & Arts editor of Spectator USA