What did Paul Gauguin, Florence Nightingale and Saint Ignatius of Loyola have in common, I hear you ask? They all had a career-defining midlife crisis. Gauguin only took up painting at the ripe old age of 35, after a chance encounter with Pissarro, which emboldened him to pack in banking, abandon his family and move to Tahiti.
This kind of behaviour, reports the 11 November 1973 issue of the Observer Magazine, is quite typical of men. But most midlife crises are not as exotic as Gauguin’s. Geoffrey Crowther, a miner from Yorkshire, turned 35 and felt compelled to start farming pigs: ‘I’ve always been able to talk to pigs,’ he explains. ‘I like to eat them, too. I always have six or seven rashers for breakfast.’
Geoffrey’s penchant for pigs may not have been great for his waistline, but it certainly paid off financially. As he tells the journalist Pauline Peters, he ended up buying a yacht, surely the dream of every man in the throes of a midlife crisis, that he keeps in Antibes. ‘Well, we may as well use the thing since we’ve got it,’ he says, ever the pragmatist.
But what’s prompted all these crises? ‘The man is worried about his sexual performance or his dwindling chances of promotion,’ says the journalist Carolyn Faulder. ‘The woman feels rejected now her children no longer depend on her and her mirror tells her that soon she will cease to be a desirable object.’
For a woman these middle years are less of a crisis point and more a period of reflection, mostly on the state of her rapidly wrinkling flesh. Interviewer Sally Vincent, who was once told she possessed a face ‘made for silence’, muses that at 35, for women ‘the only true certainty is the hope of a second childhood. I shall spend mine in the sun telling all the young men it’s my 80th birthday as if it’s something to be proud of and being celebrated, once again, with slightly grudged halves of Guinness.’
