Men at Middle Age
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union MEN AT MIDDLE AGE BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS The editor has sent me three books about what it is like to be middle-aged. Why he has asked me to assess these works I can't imagine....
...I write more letters, make fewer phone calls...
...In the '70s something else occurred...
...That his partners were mostly male is interesting but not, I think, germane to this extraordinary tale...
...That reminds me of yet another sign of my middle-agedness...
...We drifted into a lugubrious discussion of the high cost of raising children, the latest marital crackups and the morbid details of a contemporary's fatal heart attack...
...It still bears the mark of newspaper featuredom: a collection of short pieces in which various experts pontificate on middle-age miseries...
...I read more history, less fiction...
...They fretted about their mortality—apparently the harsh truth had just occurred to them—and they asked questions like, "What is a marriage really about...
...everyone must be fulfilled, whether they want to or not...
...More adolescence...
...He realized that he had never made love to anyone—no sexual intercourse, nothing...
...The most sullen is Pat Watters' book, which he has chosen to call The Angry Middle-Aged Man: The Crisis of the Last Minority (Grossman/Viking, 190 pp., $7.95...
...His upside-downness makes Reich an ideal barometer of youth's different moods, whatever the decade...
...Watters' mother fell down in the Big Star supermarket and broke her hip...
...He was seldom disappointed...
...Is it really you...
...The chastity was painful, but he didn't seem able to do anything about it...
...In the '60s—you guessed it—he taught at Yale, where he wrote a book announcing the coming of universal love, equality and peace...
...I wear shirts a size bigger than before (but I do not yet wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled...
...On account of things that go bump in the night he develops a mild case of insomnia, sitting in his darkened living room till dawn and wincing with "each stab of unreasoning terror...
...At that point the friend shot his dazzling bolt: Maybe, he mused, "there was some kind of 'middle-age crisis' that everyone went through...
...I climb no oaks...
...He is angry now, in part, because he awoke one morning to find he had lost his job as editor with the Southern Regional Council after putting in 12 years of underpaid, under-praised service...
...Watters looks for fellow victims, other middle-aged men fired from jobs and soured on America...
...He seems to have stood the usual processes of psychological development on their head, leading a staid, careerist's existence in his youth, then exploding into adolescent glory in middle age...
...We get it all verbatim, or so it seems...
...There is much commotion here, but it is lightweight and swirly, like stuff from a leaky pillow...
...It, too, has the feel of an autobiography...
...It is the greening of Charles Reich, and it is good to look upon...
...I have come to the conclusion,' he writes, "that personal growth represents the one and only adequate means of bringing about fundamental political change in this country...
...Plenty, "I will be a pattern of all patience," he said...
...In my case the signs are legion: I hold the steering wheel with both hands...
...then he interviewed a few dozen mental health types and traveled widely in search of middle-aged men and their crises...
...But I shall tell you something about them, and perhaps they will speak to yours...
...And something else?something that occurred to me the other day while I was reading poems to a class of schoolchildren from a book I wrote eight years ago...
...I fill in check stubs, keep close accounts...
...I do not daydream...
...A veteran and distinguished civil rights reporter based in Atlanta, Watters has always been at his best when he is at his angriest...
...But then, just when he should have stopped, he goes off on another tangent: He seeks political paradise through individual salvation...
...Not everyone he listens to is angry...
...It is a question any middle-aged man worth his years might ask himself...
...The back of the book jacket has my picture on it, so as I stood before the children and read from the volume they could see me twice—then and now...
...what lends them an uncommon freshness here is Watters' honesty...
...What I propose is nothing less than a revolution against alienation itself...
...Let us see is this real, Let us see is this real, sang the Sioux warrior before battle, This life I am living...
...Where have we heard that before...
...Reich is 48, but his middle years seem to have been different from yours and mine...
...I enjoy emptying my wastebasket...
...The rest sinks into the bottomlands of first-person journalism, often bordering on tantrum...
...one 1 should have mentioned earlier: I no longer propose revolutions...
...The first chapter, where Watters gives us the details of his personal struggles, is brilliant...
...Among the young cul-tists and communards of the '70s, naturally...
...I do double acrostics...
...Pat Watters' inner world is more believable, if only because it is described from the inside looking out...
...Reich is something of a puzzle...
...I wake up before the alarm rings...
...I fall asleep at concerts—a sleep of the charmed...
...According to the flap, Chew once worked for the National Observer, where a fair amount of the book first appeared...
...one of them asked...
...He wore Brooks Brothers suits, dined at chic restaurants and dated Wellesley graduates...
...Is that you...
...they do not speak to my middle years...
...What pleases one is that Reich succeeded in setting free a lifetime's worth of suppressed emotions some 40 years after fate, or his parents, had locked them up and thrown away the key...
...He was a flower child with an egghead vocabulary...
...It's a bona fide middle-age crisis, all right, just the sort Chew was looking for and never found...
...I have little patience for the books at hand...
...That did it...
...I buy no candy...
...Chew's work first: It arose, he says, from "the chance remark of a friend" made on a chilly day as the two watched their sons play football...
...I do not play touch football...
...What do I know about being middle-aged...
...In the end, Watters turns on his country—not just the government but the whole national "climate"?and blames it for his troubles...
...I forget what everyone said at last Saturday night's dinner party, especially what I said...
...Reich made friends with his students, let his hair grow and smoked pot...
...Charles Reich has gone still further, attempting to convert his personal victories into material for a nationwide spiritual crusade...
...Is it really me...
...They were a dour and brooding lot...
...I talk mincingly to our cat...
...Now for the books...
...and his bank account registered empty...
...He feels guilty about his mother—what else??because he has neglected her all these years, not phoning her often enough, not thinking about her...
...They recall one's adolescence...
...At length he repaired to San Francisco—that city of benign breakthroughs—and there sure enough, he learned to make love...
...I dream of trolleys...
...I hope for less from strangers, for more from friends...
...This country," he complains, "has taken so much of the joy and creative pleasure from the basics of my existence...
...First, though, let me explain how a man knows he is middle-aged...
...Nearly everyone he met seemed at the end of his tether—getting divorced, shloshing around in whiskey, chasing nymphets, or all of the above...
...He finds some and tapes their stories —sad, bewildered, endless narrations on the vicissitudes of being in mid-passage...
...All of which is good for consciousness-raising but fatal to the book...
...Well, what did King Lear know about being old...
...even Dostoevsky can seem sopho-moric...
...Reich's barometer is still working...
...He was making it...
...some of his subjects are merely docile, and this further enrages our short-fused author...
...The silliest is Peter Chew's The Inner World of the Middle-Aged Man (Macmillan, 352 pp., $8.95...
...These are not unfamiliar problems to the over-40 set...
...People lapped it up, especially the young...
...Later that week still more of his fragile roof fell in: A close friend was told he had cancer...
...And a bit later, after a series of small but nasty run-ins with a cop, a realtor and a nurse, he tells himself, "You are loose in a land of loveless, unlovable people, made that way by a country you can't bring yourself to feel is fit to raise children in...
...they scare me half to death...
...If the answers were delayed, some of the truth-seekers took up Zen or went into monasteries...
...The business of an editor," said William Allen White, "is to turn his private prejudices into public issues," and that is what Watters has tried to do—alas, unsuccessfully...
...In the '50s he went to Washington as Justice Hugo Black's clerk and stayed on to work for a prestigious law firm...
...The most gladsome of the three is The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef (Random House, 266 pp., $8.95), an autobiography, sort of, by Charles {The Greening of America) Reich...
...It is not enough for Reich to have achieved a measure of fulfillment...
...Chew started reading Jung, Freud and Robert Pirsig...
Vol. 59 • December 1976 • No. 24
