Half-century blues

Saturday, 8th October 2011

I’m saying farewell to my thirties for the tenth and final time

‘I’m just at the dangerous age of 50,’ Evelyn Waugh snarled at a BBC interviewer in 1953. So, on 23 November, shall I be. Any 49-year-old who feels no dread at the prospect is a liar, especially if he has read Dorothy Parker’s horrific essay on turning 50, ‘The Middle or Blue Period’. (Comparatively mild sample: ‘You have said farewell to the thirties for the tenth and last time. Now you face it, baby. Now you take it smack in the teeth, baby. Quote baby unquote.’)

The sole celebrity who shares my birthday and birth year seems to be Merv Hughes, who arrived in north-eastern Victoria within hours of my doing so in Sydney. During other years than 1961, 23 November saw the births of Billy the Kid, Boris Karloff, Lew Hoad, Shane Gould and two fairly renowned composers (Manuel de Falla and Krzysztof Penderecki), as well as, alas, France’s revolutionary loon Gracchus Babeuf. Most of 1961 had action aplenty. The Berlin Wall went up. Yuri Gagarin went into space. Valium and Private Eye first hit the shops. West Side Story first hit the cinemas. Terrorists hijacked a Portuguese cruise ship in Venezuela, thereby hoping to destroy Prime Minister Salazar (as Salazar resided in Lisbon, one wonders about the terrorists’ geographical training). The Bay of Pigs fiasco confirmed JFK’s essential unfitness for any political office higher than dog-catcher. Yet not much action occurred when I arrived. Except, tragically, in Campinas, Brazil, where on that day an Argentinean plane crashed into treetops, killing all 52 on board.

They’re dead, but I’m not. How would I impress an insurance agent? Physical, as opposed to mental, health: tolerably good. Sight: no feebler over the past 15 years than beforehand. Hearing: recently an audiologist declared my eardrums in better shape than those of headphone-wearing nightclubbing kids. Memory: so inherently unreliable that a non-Alzheimer’s decline is almost oxymoronic. Poor memorising always sabotaged whatever IQ I had, dooming my hopes of being a concert pianist, who must memorise or die. Hair on head: quantitatively somewhere between Paul Keating’s and Peter Garrett’s. Wrinkles: I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention. What, if anything, have I achieved as I face the Big Five-Oh?

Well, the most important thing I ever did was undergo Catholic baptism in 2002, after years of futile, snobbish dickering. I did it ultimately for the same simple reason Chesterton did: ‘[Catholicism] is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret.’ Is Catholicism pleasant? No more and no less than wheelchairs are for lifelong paraplegics. Is Catholicism an emotion? To Melbourne’s football-crazed halfwits, unquestionably; to adults, I hope not. Is Catholicism comforting? To saints, perhaps; but most of us, amid the Church’s most emetic sexual scandals since at least the tenth century’s Vatican pornocrats, simply and daily echo Waugh’s words: ‘Pray God I will never apostatise.’

Against apostasy my co-religionists and I have one awesome weapon: the world-historical loathsomeness of the ex-Catholic bellyacher, above all if Australian and notionally female. Sometimes, in my nightmares, an Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake has cast me in the Kevin McCarthy role, with the pod people being led by Germaine Greer. (In the remake’s X-rated computer-game counterpart, the chief pod person is Anne Summers.)

Naturally I grieve that, aged 50, I have neither wife nor children. ‘Childless, middle-aged, loveless’ is the phrase of Brideshead Revisited’s narrator, though he, unlike me, was also homeless. Having spouse and family makes such sense in Realpolitik terms as well as in health terms that the ever-sagacious Dr Johnson gave it blanket approval, saying in Rasselas: ‘Marriage has many pains, but celibacy no pleasures.’ Well, perhaps one pleasure: watching erstwhile roués from one’s youth now negotiating their third divorce/sixth facelift/eighth schoolgirl named Jennifer.

At parenthood I might well fail. What I could not do, by definition, is bring to such failure the same awesome malice exhibited by Rousseau, Marx, Stalin, Bertrand Russell, Marie Stopes and William Faulkner (who once characteristically roared at his daughter, ‘Who the [expletive deleted] ever heard of Shakespeare’s daughter?’), not to mention taxpayer-funded antipodean examples currently protected by libel laws.

I have two precious, cherishable adolescent nephews for whom I would gladly sacrifice my life. It is their welfare which sharpens my longing to see — as Diderot might have put it — the last sacerdotal kiddy-fiddler hanged with the bowels of the last modernist bishop. They are both such intelligent lads, so amusing and amusable, so hard-working, that being their uncle is more than I deserved. Should Australia have a future as a First World nation, they, I swear, will both uphold it.

If I try to put myself in their shoes, I find myself quoting (with atypical enthusiasm) Martin Luther King: ‘We ain’t where we wanna be, we ain’t where we could be, but we ain’t where we were.’ The latest Concise Oxford Dictionary has deleted ‘Eurocommunism’, for which relief much thanks. Those Molochs whom my generation’s gurus worshipped have proven as insubstantial, in their outright knavery, as was the Wizard of Oz in his microphone chamber. Marx, Freud, Malthus, Darwin: those four idols were as revered in Quadrant (consult Frank Knopfelmacher’s 1980s tributes to the first two) as in Meanjin or National Times. Today Marx and Freud are stale jokes. Malthus’s remaining devotees inhabit the abortuary-industrial complex, whose generalissimos will never actually read him. Darwin has been so debunked at book-length — sometimes by atheists — that his remaining devotees must now be the few dolts unaware of Chesterton’s lethal insight into Darwinian tautology: ‘the “survival of the fittest”, meaning the survival of the survivors.’

So there. In AD2011, Afghanistan seethes. Somalia starves. Norway’s best-known Freemason turns the Western Enlightenment Project’s theory into mass-murdering practice. Australian television plumbs new depths of vulgarity. Real-estate racketeers still rule Sydney with unhindered despotism. But I have, at least, the happiness of seeing that the recent past’s pseudo-intellectual scams will never hypnotise my nephews. It’s my 50th birthday, but it’s they who get that wonderful spiritual present. From Marxism, Freudianism, Malthusianism and Darwinism — those four horsemen of the totalitarian apocalypse — I can tell my nephews (another reluctant hat-tip to MLK): ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, you are free at last!’

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