Anthony Trollope's last completed novel, a race-with-the-undertaker effort, is called An Old Man's Love (1884). A superannuated gent, William Whittlestaff, falls for a slip of a girl, only to realise that, at the end of the day, there's no lead in his pencil. He lets her go to a younger rival, whose staff is less whittled by anno domini. The "old man" of the title is 50. In Middlemarch, "ancient" - and, as we apprehend, wholly impotent - Casaubon (husband of the 19-year-old Dorothea) is in his early 40s. All those patriarchal husbands in Dickens, manifestly incapable of impregnating their young wives (Dedlock, Dombey, Bounderby), are in their 50s and over the sexual hill. Limp members and whittled staves are everywhere in Victorian fiction. Oats are in very short supply after a man's middle years.
In The Golden Bowl, Charlotte tells the lusty young prince that she and the billionaire Verver will "never" have children. Why not? Because they will never have sex. At his age? Even 20-year-olds don't get their end away that often in the tight little world of Henry James.
It is the law of the literary universe. In Hamlet, one of the things that nauseates the young prince is the thought that Gertrude and Claudius are still going at it in the royal bed-chamber. At your age, the prig of Denmark tells his 40something mother, the "heyday in the blood" should be tame. So it is with decent Shakespearean folk. When Prospero (50ish) breaks his staff (symbolic act) he goes off to live in a monk's cell. His every third thought, he announces, will be of "death". The other two, we may assume, are not of crumpet. What fun does a monk have? Nun (if only).
But the literary universe has changed utterly. It's all down to a little blue pill. The first flagrant work of Viagra fiction was Tom Wolfe's (70) Man in Full (1998). Charlie Cropper ("just turned 60") is full of vim. In the first paragraph he enters riding a stallion. Charlie, we are told, never lets his young wife forget "what a sturdy cord - no, what a veritable cable - connected him to the rude animal vitality of his youth". It's not just broncos that buck in Mr Cropper's world.
Last year we had Saul Bellow's Ravelstein. The two heroes, Abe and Chick, are (like their author) decades into their bus-pass years. Both of them (gay and straight respectively) are wheeled into the intensive care ward with proud hard-ons. Abe's last request, as he succumbs to HIV, is for a hand job. Chick will, we assume, survive his near-death experience to sire a child on his new wife, Rosamund. That, of course, is what newly married Bellow (86) did a couple of years ago.
Last week the bookstores received The Dying Animal, by Philip Roth (68). Dying he may be, but the 70-year-old hero, David Kepesh, goes out screwing, his animal energies undiminished. As his admiring young Cuban mistress tells the old Jewish goat, he is the only man who has ever given her body "real" pleasure. Those young Hispanic guys? Nowhere. If Hemingway were still around, he'd probably give us The Old Man and the Semen.
Since Viagra was released to the American public at $10 a pop, 80% of the millions of prescriptions have gone to 50-and-over males. The results, inside and outside wedlock, have been dramatic. Bob Dole (too old at 70 to be president) once more enjoys a "full marriage", as the judge in the first Jeffrey Archer (61) trial primly called it. Nevada brothels, meanwhile, report a 20% increase in business. There's a Niagara of vintage sperm washing through American life, radically changing the sexual norms of literature.
How different the classics would be if you could take your Wellsian time machine and slip some energising Viagra to Edward Casaubon, William Whittlestaff, Adam Verver and Sir Leicester Dedlock. And, while you're at it, to Ebenezer Scrooge, King Lear, Ivan Ilyich, and all those other sadly drooped patriarchs of the freshmen's literature course. As Roth puts it: "Not too many years ago, there was a ready-made way to be old, just as there was a ready-made way to be young. Neither obtains any longer." Add the blue pill and literature's a whole new ball game, my old cock.
