The Observer review
Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2004 9:17 pm
...and the last one from Dick!
Time on our side
Sex isn't the preserve of the young. It actually belongs to those old enough
to appreciate it
David Aaronovitch, columnist of the year
Sunday October 24, 2004
The Observer
Last Thursday morning, the boys and I were down at the cafe discussing our
funerals - stuff to do with caskets, speeches and the disposal of ashes.
John, the oldest, said that he wanted Steve and me to speak at his send-off.
I immediately began thinking - the way one does - of what I was going to say
and, almost as quickly, of who I wanted speaking at mine.
It was heartening, then, to read the next day of the new Gabriel García
Márquez novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which has just gone on sale
in the Hispanophone world. Márquez is 76 and unwell, but his book seems to
be about sex, love and age, not age, death and funerals. Its principal
character is a retired journalist, just turning 90, who decides to mark his
birthday by sleeping with a 14-year-old virgin prostitute (the book is set
in Colombia in the 1950s, putting plenty of cultural distance between us and
the uncomfortable morality of that time and place).
What is a nonagenarian to do with a teenager, especially since she has been
drugged and left in a stupor by the madam of the brothel? The hero declines
to have sex with the naked, comatose girl and, instead, sits beside her,
contemplating her beauty, reading to her, singing to her and reflecting on a
life full of sex but devoid - until now - of love.
At the same time as a million copies of Melancholy Whores are appearing in
Spain and Latin America, hundreds of thousands of copies of the Canadian
poet/singer Leonard Cohen's latest album, Dear Heather, have been shipped
all over the world. Cohen, always the oldest rocker, has just turned 70 and
the themes of Dear Heather seem to bear an interesting resemblance to those
of Melancholy Whores .
The second track, 'Because of', goes, in part, like this:
Because of a few songs
Wherein I spoke of their mystery,
Women have been
Exceptionally kind
to my old age.
They make a secret place
In their busy lives
And they take me there.
This tells us a number of things. First, that there are better things for
middle-aged men to be doing than discussing their caskets. Second, it
illustrates the ancient male-female paradox - that the more a man talks
about love to women, the more sex he has. Third, that many Suzannes have
continued to offer Cohen pleasures well into his third age. Fourth, he
thinks it's nearly over.
Evidence that all this entering of secret places hasn't been entirely
straightforward came during Cohen's relatively recent religious period. In
1993, his career resurrected after quiet times, Cohen went on a five-year
retreat to a Zen Buddhist Centre in California, was ordained as a monk and
took on the name of Jikan or Silent One. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't
imagine that a successful heterosexual star has more sex in a monastery than
outside it, so it's plausible that one of Cohen's motivations was the need
for a little renunciation.
Which brings me to that great renunciator of sex, Malcolm Muggeridge.
Readers under 40 will not have heard of the journalist and broadcaster who,
in his later years, became a convert to Catholicism and a fierce critic of
what was then called permissiveness. In my sixth-form days, Muggeridge was
famous for telling my generation that it was having too much pot (cannabis)
and sex, just when we were feeling that there was nothing like enough.
By coincidence, Muggeridge has cropped up twice for me in the past
fortnight. The first occasion was when I was researching a chapter for a
book and needed to look something up in his autobiography. Though the
subject was the Soviet Union in the 1930s, it was a passage about his early
married life that most amazed me. In it, Muggeridge seemed to be criticising
his and wife's younger selves and their sexual pleasures, including all the
'grunting, coaxing, sweating, murmuring, yelling'.
'So the world began,' Muggeridge continued, 'with vast turbulence in the
genitalia of space.'
And none the better for that, you felt, because all this sex was, he later
realised, the obsession of a 'restless and confused generation'. Then came
the phrase for which St Mugg became famous: 'Sex is the only mysticism
offered by materialism.' By the 1970s, he was campaigning against abortion,
gay rights and easier divorce.
But a Radio 4 programme about Muggeridge, broadcast the week before last,
told me that he hadn't just been a bad boy in his far-off youth. In fact,
he'd been fairly carnal most of his life; the ascetic element had only
kicked in with advancing years. Christopher Hitchens was once told by
Kingsley Amis about a drunken evening with Muggeridge, at the end of which
the future saint suggested that the two men take turns at making love to the
semi-conscious Sonia Orwell. The man had been, as Anthony Howard put it, 'a
tremendous lech'.
Those who met Muggeridge (including his biographer, our own Richard Ingrams)
insist that there was nothing insincere about his House of the Rising
Sun-style desire that youth shouldn't do what he had done, even if he seemed
to have forgotten doing it. But analysts would be interested in a passage
from his essay, 'The Great Liberal Death Wish', in which he writes of the
modern era: 'As the phallic cult spreads, so does impotence.' This suggests
that envy might be playing a larger part than he acknowledged.
The desire sometimes fades, the attraction is less, the body fails to
respond. In his early sixties, WB Yeats considered that this was the time
for the older man to make the shift from physical pleasures to thinking
about the more permanent glories of human existence. An aged man was 'a
paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick', whose best option was to sail
to Byzantium and look at monuments.
Ever since I hit my late 40s, I have felt the pressure to sail to Byzantium,
whether I wanted to go or not. Write about politics, culture, anthropology,
anything you like, but not sex. Love, even, but not sex. It's always the
generation just before yours who are the ones who most want you to die or
disappear, reminding them, as you do, of what comes next. And, most
particularly, of the poignant and fallible meeting of desire and absurdity
that sex represents. So This message has been classified as spam and will be deleted by the moderators is ridiculous in a way that hip replacement
or cataract surgery isn't, and middle-aged men (and women) writing about sex
for an audience that might include young people is somehow tacky.
People seek what comfort they can. In art, in morality, or, in the case of
Márquez's hero, in love. This man, having slept with more than 500
prostitutes in his life concludes: 'Sex is the consolation that you are left
with when you do not attain love.'
But isn't it the other way around? One of those ubiquitous 'surveys' was
released over the summer, this one concerning the sex lives of the middle
aged. Such things are always to be approached with trepidation, redolent as
they are of magazines where the words 'health' and 'sex' are coupled
horribly. You don't have to be Barbara Cartland to find the idea that it is
good for prostatic health for men to ejaculate twice a week somewhat
unromantic.
Anyway, what this large survey showed was that 50-year-olds believed they
were having the 'THIS MESSAGE IS SPAM AND WILL BE DELETED AS SOON AS THE MODERATOR WAKES UP' of their lives (for 3.1 per cent of them, this
was happening in the potting shed. I had no idea there still was such a
place). Why were things better? Because they knew what they liked, because
they were 'comfortable' with themselves, well beyond the appalling
self-consciousness of youth. Another reason (though this does not come from
the survey) may be that the middle aged just know so much more than they did
about the unexpectedness, the unruliness of love and sex.
So bugger them, these oldsters and youngsters who expect you to give up on
the caress and the groan, on the tea and oranges that can still come all the
way from China. Let's not go quietly. Let's do the other thing noisily.
Time on our side
Sex isn't the preserve of the young. It actually belongs to those old enough
to appreciate it
David Aaronovitch, columnist of the year
Sunday October 24, 2004
The Observer
Last Thursday morning, the boys and I were down at the cafe discussing our
funerals - stuff to do with caskets, speeches and the disposal of ashes.
John, the oldest, said that he wanted Steve and me to speak at his send-off.
I immediately began thinking - the way one does - of what I was going to say
and, almost as quickly, of who I wanted speaking at mine.
It was heartening, then, to read the next day of the new Gabriel García
Márquez novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which has just gone on sale
in the Hispanophone world. Márquez is 76 and unwell, but his book seems to
be about sex, love and age, not age, death and funerals. Its principal
character is a retired journalist, just turning 90, who decides to mark his
birthday by sleeping with a 14-year-old virgin prostitute (the book is set
in Colombia in the 1950s, putting plenty of cultural distance between us and
the uncomfortable morality of that time and place).
What is a nonagenarian to do with a teenager, especially since she has been
drugged and left in a stupor by the madam of the brothel? The hero declines
to have sex with the naked, comatose girl and, instead, sits beside her,
contemplating her beauty, reading to her, singing to her and reflecting on a
life full of sex but devoid - until now - of love.
At the same time as a million copies of Melancholy Whores are appearing in
Spain and Latin America, hundreds of thousands of copies of the Canadian
poet/singer Leonard Cohen's latest album, Dear Heather, have been shipped
all over the world. Cohen, always the oldest rocker, has just turned 70 and
the themes of Dear Heather seem to bear an interesting resemblance to those
of Melancholy Whores .
The second track, 'Because of', goes, in part, like this:
Because of a few songs
Wherein I spoke of their mystery,
Women have been
Exceptionally kind
to my old age.
They make a secret place
In their busy lives
And they take me there.
This tells us a number of things. First, that there are better things for
middle-aged men to be doing than discussing their caskets. Second, it
illustrates the ancient male-female paradox - that the more a man talks
about love to women, the more sex he has. Third, that many Suzannes have
continued to offer Cohen pleasures well into his third age. Fourth, he
thinks it's nearly over.
Evidence that all this entering of secret places hasn't been entirely
straightforward came during Cohen's relatively recent religious period. In
1993, his career resurrected after quiet times, Cohen went on a five-year
retreat to a Zen Buddhist Centre in California, was ordained as a monk and
took on the name of Jikan or Silent One. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't
imagine that a successful heterosexual star has more sex in a monastery than
outside it, so it's plausible that one of Cohen's motivations was the need
for a little renunciation.
Which brings me to that great renunciator of sex, Malcolm Muggeridge.
Readers under 40 will not have heard of the journalist and broadcaster who,
in his later years, became a convert to Catholicism and a fierce critic of
what was then called permissiveness. In my sixth-form days, Muggeridge was
famous for telling my generation that it was having too much pot (cannabis)
and sex, just when we were feeling that there was nothing like enough.
By coincidence, Muggeridge has cropped up twice for me in the past
fortnight. The first occasion was when I was researching a chapter for a
book and needed to look something up in his autobiography. Though the
subject was the Soviet Union in the 1930s, it was a passage about his early
married life that most amazed me. In it, Muggeridge seemed to be criticising
his and wife's younger selves and their sexual pleasures, including all the
'grunting, coaxing, sweating, murmuring, yelling'.
'So the world began,' Muggeridge continued, 'with vast turbulence in the
genitalia of space.'
And none the better for that, you felt, because all this sex was, he later
realised, the obsession of a 'restless and confused generation'. Then came
the phrase for which St Mugg became famous: 'Sex is the only mysticism
offered by materialism.' By the 1970s, he was campaigning against abortion,
gay rights and easier divorce.
But a Radio 4 programme about Muggeridge, broadcast the week before last,
told me that he hadn't just been a bad boy in his far-off youth. In fact,
he'd been fairly carnal most of his life; the ascetic element had only
kicked in with advancing years. Christopher Hitchens was once told by
Kingsley Amis about a drunken evening with Muggeridge, at the end of which
the future saint suggested that the two men take turns at making love to the
semi-conscious Sonia Orwell. The man had been, as Anthony Howard put it, 'a
tremendous lech'.
Those who met Muggeridge (including his biographer, our own Richard Ingrams)
insist that there was nothing insincere about his House of the Rising
Sun-style desire that youth shouldn't do what he had done, even if he seemed
to have forgotten doing it. But analysts would be interested in a passage
from his essay, 'The Great Liberal Death Wish', in which he writes of the
modern era: 'As the phallic cult spreads, so does impotence.' This suggests
that envy might be playing a larger part than he acknowledged.
The desire sometimes fades, the attraction is less, the body fails to
respond. In his early sixties, WB Yeats considered that this was the time
for the older man to make the shift from physical pleasures to thinking
about the more permanent glories of human existence. An aged man was 'a
paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick', whose best option was to sail
to Byzantium and look at monuments.
Ever since I hit my late 40s, I have felt the pressure to sail to Byzantium,
whether I wanted to go or not. Write about politics, culture, anthropology,
anything you like, but not sex. Love, even, but not sex. It's always the
generation just before yours who are the ones who most want you to die or
disappear, reminding them, as you do, of what comes next. And, most
particularly, of the poignant and fallible meeting of desire and absurdity
that sex represents. So This message has been classified as spam and will be deleted by the moderators is ridiculous in a way that hip replacement
or cataract surgery isn't, and middle-aged men (and women) writing about sex
for an audience that might include young people is somehow tacky.
People seek what comfort they can. In art, in morality, or, in the case of
Márquez's hero, in love. This man, having slept with more than 500
prostitutes in his life concludes: 'Sex is the consolation that you are left
with when you do not attain love.'
But isn't it the other way around? One of those ubiquitous 'surveys' was
released over the summer, this one concerning the sex lives of the middle
aged. Such things are always to be approached with trepidation, redolent as
they are of magazines where the words 'health' and 'sex' are coupled
horribly. You don't have to be Barbara Cartland to find the idea that it is
good for prostatic health for men to ejaculate twice a week somewhat
unromantic.
Anyway, what this large survey showed was that 50-year-olds believed they
were having the 'THIS MESSAGE IS SPAM AND WILL BE DELETED AS SOON AS THE MODERATOR WAKES UP' of their lives (for 3.1 per cent of them, this
was happening in the potting shed. I had no idea there still was such a
place). Why were things better? Because they knew what they liked, because
they were 'comfortable' with themselves, well beyond the appalling
self-consciousness of youth. Another reason (though this does not come from
the survey) may be that the middle aged just know so much more than they did
about the unexpectedness, the unruliness of love and sex.
So bugger them, these oldsters and youngsters who expect you to give up on
the caress and the groan, on the tea and oranges that can still come all the
way from China. Let's not go quietly. Let's do the other thing noisily.