Fresh Air Fiend Read Online Free Page B

smells. The man of fifty has the most to say, but no one will listen. His fears sound incredible because they are so new—he might be making them up. His body alarms him; it starts playing tricks on him, his teeth warn him, his stomach scolds, he's balding at last; a pimple might be cancer, indigestion a heart attack, he's feeling an unapparent fatigue; he wants to be young but he knows he ought to be old. He's neither one and terrified. His friends all resemble him, so there can be no hope of rescue. To be this age and very far from where you started out, unconsoled by any possibility of a miracle—that is bad; to look forward and start counting the empty years left is enough to tempt you into some aptly named crime, or else to pray. Success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. Then it is clear: the ship is swamped to her gunwales, and the man of fifty swims to shore, to be marooned on a little island, from which there is no rescue, but only different kinds of defeat.
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    I wrote that in my novel
Saint Jack
when I was twenty-nine years old, and I think it is inaccurate as it applies to me—I cannot identify with that person or relate to that state of being middle-aged and clapped out. Nor can I share even remotely the sense of loss Philip Larkin expresses in his fiftieth-birthday poem, "The View":
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The view is fine from fifty,
   Experienced climbers say;
So, overweight and shifty,
   I turn to face the way
   That led me to this day.
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Instead of fields and snowcaps
   And flowered lanes that twist,
The track breaks at my toe-caps
   And drops away in mist.
   The view does not exist.
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Where has it gone, the lifetime?
   Search me. What's left is drear.
Unchilded and unwifed, I'm
   Able to view that clear:
   So final. And so near.
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    These sentiments give me the willies. Larkin at fifty seems to regard his life as just about over. I do not feel that way; I hope I never do. I have always felt—physically at least—in the pink, no matter what my age. One line in
Saint Jack
goes, "Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us," and this remark, which I regard as prescient, is one of the themes of this excursion today.
    When I began writing
Saint Jack
in 1970, one of my friends was turning fifty in Singapore, and it seemed to me, I suppose, salutary to observe that climacteric, for as I say, one of the strangest aspects of growing older is that people constantly remind you of things that never happened—and worse, they ignore what actually took place. The invented reminiscence of "I'll never forget old what's-his-name" has a cozy quaintness and seems harmless enough, but the element of self-deception in it can lead you badly astray.
    Lately I have been wondering about the relationship between memory and creation, and between memory and perception—and behavior, too. It all seems scrambled together. I say "lately" partly because of this half-century birthday and also because of several dramatic changes in my life: becoming separated from my wife, traveling extensively in the Pacific, resuming residence in my American house. My life has been full of changes, all of them unexpected. When I was young and felt downtrodden I thought,
My life will be pretty much what it is now,
because people were always prophesying, saying they knew exactly what was going to happen to me, even if I didn't—another example of people alarming me with their lies.
    I often think that I became a writer because I have a good memory. When I say "a good memory" I do not mean that it is a totally accurate memory, only that it is a very full and accessible one, packed with images and language. Montaigne, who discusses the question of memory in his essay "On Liars," claimed to have had a terrible memory. He makes the case for the virtues