MY YOUNGER SELF often fantasised about older women, though seldom acted upon those fantasies; my younger self seldom acted upon anything. The habit of yearning probably turned me into a writer. People who live rich lives full of opportunity tend not to become writers, while we fantasists do, which, oddly, makes us seem worldly when in reality we are anxious geeks, pining after someone confident, glamorous, and truly worldly.
My fantasising has never been the boring defloration mania, nor the connoisseurship of the paedomorphic face and figure, the Hollywood starlet, the pop-music object of desire that looks like a seal pup in a tank top labelled Boy Candy. That kittenish teenybopper with soulful eyes and skinny legs is the undoing of many drooling geezers, which is just what they deserve. I don’t think I could describe my ideal woman, but my fantasies have often circled around someone resembling Mrs Robinson. How else to explain myself as a 16-year-old boy at the movies, looking at Ava Gardner in The Barefoot Contessa and having trouble breathing?
This subject of the younger man having an affair with an older woman still interests me greatly, because time passes and “younger” and “older” mean different things to me. Thirty is old to a young man of 20. I don’t spend much time with thirtysomethings. I am now older than Mrs Robinson, and yet sex is not theoretical; it is actual, always a possibility. I still stare at women all the time thinking, are you beautiful? — and, like all men, flunk some, pass others, and give a few of them high marks. This is what most men do all their waking hours.
I have grown older, but this question of age difference and desire is all the more fascinating to me now. Age is the central point of The Graduate: the affair between the young man and the older woman is what we remember most clearly, and the same drama is central to a great many masterpieces. The subject is invariably an older man and a young object of desire, usually a girl, sometimes a boy. Death in Venice is obsessional on the subject of the desirability, the perfection of youth: Tadzio’s beauty and von Aschenbach’s helpless adoration of the unattainable boy. Lolita is the self-conscious, classic study of a middle-aged man infatuated with a teenager. She is a nightmare, we know, and hardly virginal, but that does not deter Humbert from his pursuit. It’s the source of the novel’s comedy, for we see him as he sees himself, a much mocked but willing victim.
Almost 25 years ago I wrote an essay, Home to Mrs Robinson, in which I tried to imagine what it might be like to be involved with an older woman. I imagined her self-possessed, confident and intensely sexual, somewhat domineering and most of all knowing the score. Her most attractive quality, it seemed to me, was the one we usually assign to the young, the ability to live in the moment. But younger people tend not to do that. They worry about the future; they don’t want to waste time. They think: is this good for my CV? They fear that casual sex might erode their self-esteem. They tend to look for Miss Right, not Mrs Robinson.
I said all those years ago that the older woman is not husband-hunting; she knows what she wants and, if you measure up, you are hers for the taking. She knows the essential things about concealment and has a heightened awareness of time. As a boy sees maturity in a sexual encounter — proof of his manhood, another statistic to relish — the older woman has been granted a reprieve and in the encounter has outwitted her age. For her it is a private, mutual compliment.
The classic situation is nothing long-term; indeed, she might not particularly want to see you afterwards. The preliminaries, the half-truths, the confidences, the wooing — all these are dispensed with. There isn’t time; she comes straight to the point and then goes back to her life. She is doing to you what older men do to younger women.
And, unlike many of her younger counterparts, she does not want to be entrapped. She doesn’t need witnesses. For someone younger, sex is not an end in itself but a means to another end; job, money, marriage, power, family, position. And so, if they never know an older woman and deal only with the 20-year-old and her tough twinkle, most men grow up believing in sex as a favour they have been granted — sex as strategy or currency or power. Therefore, the act itself is full of threat. The older woman typically is indifferent to being dominated or getting something in return. Her age has liberated her from those deceptions. She is interested not in power but in pleasure.
At the time I was writing on this subject I was a theoretician in my presumptuous thirties. I said: “A woman between the ages of 30 and 50, sexually, is all right — her manner might be cool but her body blazes.”
Now that I am older and know more of hormones, I would raise the bar: women of 60 can be intensely sexual, too. And if they have been the least bit active, they know every trick in the book. I am speaking not of love but of desire. Many are still beautiful.
In general, literature is no help in understanding this mismatch. Robert Louis Stevenson was married to a much older woman, and so was Raymond Chandler. Their wives were extremely attractive if a bit neurotic. Neither of the men wrote fiction on the subject. Turgenev was involved with an older married woman, but his most memorable tale of sexuality is about a man who has an affair with his son’s girlfriend. Henry James adored the company of older women but tended to limit his hugs and endearments to younger men. Madame de Vionnet in The Ambassadors is his Mrs Robinson, and Byron offers up one or two in Don Juan. Of the other greats, Dickens, Melville, Conrad, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, there are no Robinsonian affairs. The older woman has not been well served by fiction writers.
Movies and plays have succeeded where novels have failed to deliver the goods. The films that come to mind are Sunset Boulevard, Bergman’s Torment, This Sporting Life, Nothing But The Best, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (also a novel but better as a film), A Cold Wind in August, The Last Picture Show, Room at the Top, and the brilliant Fassbinder film Fear Eats the Soul. Deborah Kerr in The Gypsy Moths is the older woman to perfection.
And, of course, Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. The director, Mike Nichols, created a powerful reality in the scenes between the young man and the older woman. The most telling episode was not in the bedroom but in a bar when the young man was out of his depth, leaving Mrs Robinson to take charge.
Taking charge is the essence of sexual vitality. Mrs Robinson is resourceful, responsive, independent, and a knockout. Was there anyone who saw that movie and did not regret that the hero went off with the daughter and not the mother?
It is nonsense to relate such desire to the Oedipus complex, which is about infants anyway. I think much more often of myself at 10 or 11, when my mother’s old schoolfriend visited and left behind an odour of perfume and cigarette smoke and the aphrodisiacal smudge of lipstick on her gin glass. I think of the first schoolteacher I wanted to possess — Miss Murphy, probably no more than 22 — though I did not know how it was done. The first woman who knew more about sex than I did was older than me, more experienced, and perhaps for the first time in my life I felt I was in capable hands.
Twenty-five years ago I wrote: “The older woman gives us something that is very nearly incomparable, the chance to complete in adulthood what was impossible to complete as a child, a blameless gift of lechery that combines the best of youth, a maturity, romance, and realism in equal parts.”
I still think so. Sex is only sometimes procreation, and the rest of the time it is pure lust, from the imagery imprinted in childhood. The fulfilment in adulthood of childhood fantasies is the very definition of happiness.
© Paul Theroux 2003
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