A couple of weeks ago I spoke at a seminar on ageing and fiction at Brunel University. My interlocutor was Fay Weldon, who in her 80th year is not only still writing herself, but also holds the chair in creative writing at Brunel. I'm not sure we had anything that insightful to say on the subject, but the audience seemed entertained. I hesitate to ascribe to Weldon the wisdom of the aged – because, inasmuch as she is weightily wise, she always leavens this with a wickedly dry wit; and besides, she seemed exactly the same to me as the first time I met her, which must have been 15 years ago, when she was a mere stripling of 65.
No, what struck me about the seminar was that when the discussion was thrown open to the audience – the vast majority of whom had either grey or white hair – we were asked whether or not we felt it was the responsibility of contemporary writers to present a positive depiction of old age. I demurred – and so did Weldon: both of us thought the character made their own weather, for good or ill. To purposely concoct older characters of a sunny disposition would be as much of a solecism as deliberately fabricating arrhythmic blacks, spendthrift Jews, slacker Japanese and so on. These replies didn't satisfy the questioner, who seemed to feel that such was the extent and depth of ageism any means of combating it had to be considered.
Having now read Lewis Wolpert's chilling little book on old age You're Looking Very Well, I'm more inclined to agree with the snowy owls of Brunel. Of course, I knew ageism existed, and Wolpert's mournful catalogue of the abuses and depredations to which many of the elderly are subjected – neglected in care homes, denied adequate medical treatment, effectively denied benefits by Kafkaesque bureaucracy, lost in the atemporal fugue of Alzheimer's – wasn't unfamiliar; but there was something salutary about seeing it put down in cold print – seeing it clearly through the reading glasses I now wear since, a year or two ago, my age-related macular degeneration got under way.
And that was the other surprising thing about the Brunel seminar: when I tried to muscle in on the twilight territory, by saying I was 49, and therefore well into middle age, first one, then a second and eventually a whole section of the audience pooh-poohed the notion. Forty-nine wasn't middle aged, they said – hell, even 59 barely qualified. Wolpert wouldn't have been at all surprised by this, as he makes clear: the gruel of the toothless is an oddly moveable feast, and the older people get, the older they believe "old" to be. We mostly know this intuitively, but repress it effectively, because it draws our attention to the extent to which, in the modern western societies, "acting our age" is something that requires an enormous suspension of disbelief.
As for portraying older people in an unkind light, I'm not sure I'll be doing that any more from now on in. A statistic Wolpert likes so much he cites it twice is that younger people who have a negative view of old age die younger. Yup, that's right, that spunky young bin man whose YouTube rap sensation condemns the health secretary, Andrew Lansley (born in 1956), as a "grey-haired manky old codger" is cutting short his lifespan just as surely as if he were sucking on a crack pipe while leaping Becher's Brook. Actually, I'm not sure that's really the case – and Wolpert (born in 1929), a distinguished developmental biologist and emeritus professor, should know better than most that by no means all statistical correlations are causal ones. Still, perhaps there's something about old age that brings out the statistician in people – which would explain the age profile of Wisden's readership, if nothing else.
You're Looking Very Well is larded with stats – a not inappropriate trope, given that many of them establish the incontrovertible truth that if you want to live to a ripe old age you're better off not being a lardy-arse. It's also a survey of ageing and old age which, somewhat counter-intuitively, moves along at a brusque trot; its chapters have snappy titles – "Surprising", "Ageing", "Forgetting", "Living", "Curing" – and each page has enough factoids to pepper a PowerPoint presentation by a private healthcare provider pitching to a primary care trust. (One vile piece of information new to me was that when it comes to caring for the elderly, the preferred NHS contracting method is for companies to underbid each other, thus ensuring that the winner will be the one willing to treat its clients as cheap as chips.)
Given the hoodoo Wolpert put on any reviewer below a certain age, I hesitate to introduce a critical note . . . but there is something rather rushed about all this – almost as if he wanted his book to stay fit and active, the better to aspire to posterity. There are plenty of cultural references – from the myth of Tithonos to VS Pritchett's introduction to Muriel Spark's Memento Mori and back again – but I never really felt Wolpert was at home with the non-scientific aspects of organic entropy; whereas when he comes to writing about the biology of ageing he waxes very lucid indeed. His overview of the scientific evidence is compelling, readable, and ultimately stark (unless you're a wacko creationist): evolution cares only for reproduction, and once we've reached the optimal age for spawning, it's downhill from there on in, as the body effectively starts to give up on repairing cellular damage.
Wolpert says he's surprised to discover he's 82, and quotes Oscar Wilde's apothegm "The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." But I confess I found his bafflement a little hard to grasp – he also notes Roger Daltrey's notorious plaint "I hope I die before I get old", but it's very difficult to imagine Wolpert bending to the 1960s zephyr of change, let alone having a bop. For surely it's only with the coming-of-old-age of the postwar babyboomers that old age has become such a looking-glass world. Fifty or a hundred years ago the way-stations from birth to – usually premature – death were well-marked. I very much doubt that back then fiftysomethings had to suspend disbelief in their age, whereas now they need a great deal of coaxing to put denim aside and pick up their carpet slippers.
I think the force of Wilde's observation comes from its prescience. With The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde formulated the modern myth of narcissistic eternal youth – gay men, decoupled from any ability to procreate, would be its avant garde. But with the advent of effective contraception, heterosexuals became able to convince themselves that they, too, should never really age – this is the cultural expression of the great demographic alterations of the 20th century. Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the dépêche mode.
Wolpert, while he skates over the ethical issues implicit in the rapidly accelerating demographic timebomb (on current trends, by 2050 there'll be a near 1:1 ratio of productive workers and the elderly in western societies), still takes an oppressively utilitarian view of it all. So long, he says, as we can have decent standards of care, and an expanding economy, everything in the garden will be rosy. Personally, the prospect of Britain as an enormous if well run care home fills me with dread – indeed, it makes me come over all Roger Daltrey. Luckily, according to the audience at Brunel, I'm still young enough for such heretical hopes.
Will Self's Walking to Hollywood is published by Bloomsbury.
