Nothing to Be Frightened Of

  I very much doubt it—both the male thing, and the writer thing. I used to believe, when I was “just” a reader, that writers, because they wrote books where truth was found, because they described the world, because they saw into the human heart, because they grasped both the particular and the general and were able to re-create both in free yet structured forms, because they understood, must therefore be more sensitive—also less vain, less selfish—than other people. Then I became a writer, and started meeting other writers, and studied them, and concluded that the only difference between them and other people, the only, single way in which they were better, was that they were better writers. They might indeed be sensitive, perceptive, wise, generalizing, and particularizing—but only at their desks and in their books. When they venture out into the world, they regularly behave as if they have left all their comprehension of human behaviour stuck in their typescripts. It’s not just writers either. How wise are philosophers in their private lives?

  “Not a whit wiser for being philosophers,” replies my brother. “Worse, in their semi-public lives, far less wise than many other species of academics.” I remember once laying down Bertrand Russell’s autobiography in a moment, not of disbelief, more a kind of appalled belief. This is how he describes the beginning of the end of his first marriage: “I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realized that I no longer loved Alys. I had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening.” The only logical response to this, to its implications and manner of expression, would be: keep philosophers off bicycles. Or perhaps, keep philosophers out of marriage. Save them for discussing truth with God. I would want Russell on my side for that.

  Chapter 37

  On my sixtieth birthday, I have lunch with T., one of my few religious friends. Or do I just mean faith-professing? Anyway, he is Catholic, wears a cross around his neck and, to the alarm of some past girlfriends, has a crucifix on the wall above his bed. Yes, that does sound more like religious than faith-professing, I know. T. is soon to marry R., who may or may not have the power to remove the crucifix. This being my birthday, I allow myself more interrogatory latitude, so ask why—apart from having been brought up as a Catholic—he believes in his God and his religion. He thinks for a while and replies, “I believe because I want to believe.” Sounding perhaps a little like my brother, I counter with, “If you said to me, ‘I love R. because I want to love R.,’ I wouldn’t be too impressed, and nor would she.” As it is my birthday, T. refrains from throwing his drink over me.

  When I return home, I find a small package pushed through the door. My first response is one of mild irritation, as I have specifically requested No Presents, and this particular friend, known for her giftliness, has been warned more than once on the subject. The package contains a lapel badge, battery driven, which flashes “60 TODAY” in blue and red points. What makes it not just acceptable, but the perfect present, turning my irritation into immediate good humour, are the manufacturer’s words printed on the cardboard backing: “WARNING: May Cause Interference With Pacemakers.”

  One of the (possibly) “worthwhile short-term worries” that follows my birthday is an American book tour. The arrival into New York—the transit from airport to city—involves passing one of the vastest cemeteries I have ever seen. I always half-enjoy this ritual memento mori, probably because I have never come to love New York. All the bustle in that most ever-bustling and narcissistic of cities will come to this; Manhattan mocked by the packed verticality of the headstones. In the past, I have merely noted the extent of the graveyards and the arithmetic of mortality (a job for the Accountancy God in whom Edmond de Goncourt couldn’t believe). Now, for the first time, something else strikes me: that there is no one in them. These cemeteries are like the modern countryside: hectares of emptiness extending in every direction. And while you hardly expect a yokel with a scythe, a hedger-and-ditcher or a drystone-waller, the utter absence of human activity that agribusiness has brought to the former meadows and pastureland and hedgerowed fields is another kind of death: as if the pesticides have killed off all the farm workers as well. Similarly, in these Queens cemeteries, not a body—not a soul—stirs. Of course, it makes sense: the dead ex-bustlers are unvisited because the city’s new replacement bustlers are much too busy bustling. But if there is anything more melancholy than a graveyard, it is an unvisited graveyard.

  A few days later, on the train down to Washington, somewhere south of Trenton, I pass another cemetery. Though equally empty of the living, this one seems less grim: it straggles companionably alongside the tracks, and doesn’t have the same feel of stained finality, of dead-and-doneness. Here, it seems, the dead are not so dead that they are forgotten, not so dead that they will not welcome new neighbours. And there, at the southern end of this unmenacing strip, is a cheery American moment: a sign proclaiming BRISTOL CEMETERY—LOTS AVAILABLE. It reads as if the pun on “lots” is intended: come and join us, we have much more space than our rivals.

  Lots available. Advertise, even in death—it’s the American way. Whereas in Western Europe the old religion is in terminal decline, America remains a Christian country, and it makes sense that the creed still flourishes there. Christianity, which cleared up the old Jewish doctrinal dispute about whether or not there was life after death, which centralized personal immortality as a theological selling-point, is well suited to this can-do, reward-driven society. And since in America all tendencies are taken to the extreme, they have currently installed Extreme Christianity. Old Europe took a more leisurely approach to the final arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven—a long mouldering in the grave before resurrection and judgement, all in God’s good time. America, and Extreme Christianity, likes to hurry things along. Why shouldn’t product delivery follow promised order sooner rather than later? Hence such fantasies as The Rapture, in which the righteous, while going about their daily business, are instantly taken up into Heaven, there to watch Jesus and the Antichrist duke it out down below on the battleground of planet Earth. The action-man, X-rated, disaster-movie version of the world’s end.

  Death followed by resurrection: the ultimate “tragedy with a happy ending.” That phrase is routinely credited to one of those Hollywood directors who are assumed to be the source of all witticism; though I first came across it in Edith Wharton’s autobiography A Backward Glance. There she ascribes the quip to her friend the novelist William Dean Howells, who offered it her as consolation after a first-night audience had failed to appreciate a theatrical adaptation of The House of Mirth. This would take the phrase back to 1906, before all those movie directors had started making wisecracks.

  Wharton’s success as a novelist is the more surprising—and the more admirable—given how little her view of life accorded with American hopefulness. She saw small evidence of redemption. She thought life a tragedy—or at best a grim comedy—with a tragic ending. Or, sometimes, just a drama with a dramatic ending. (Her friend Henry James defined life as “a predicament before death.” And his friend Turgenev believed that “the most interesting part of life is death.”)

  Nor was Wharton seduced by the notion that life, whether tragic, comic, or dramatic, is necessarily original. Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our—to us—ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, “People tell me it’s a cliché. But it doesn’t feel like a cliché to me.” Yet it was, and is. As all our lives would prove, if we could see them from a greater distance—from the viewpoint, say, of that higher creature imagined by Einstein.

  A biographer friend once suggested she take the slightly longer view and write my life. Her husband argued satirically that this would make a very short work as all my days were the same. “Got up,” his version went. “Wrote book. Went out, bought bottle of wine. Came home, cooked dinner. Drank wine.” I immediately endorsed this Brief Life. That will do as well as any other; as true, or as untrue as
anything longer. Faulkner said that a writer’s obituary should read: “He wrote books, then he died.”

  Chapter 38

  Shostakovich knew that making art from and about death was “tantamount to wiping your sleeve on your nose.” When the sculptor Ilya Slonim did a portrait bust of him, the result failed to please the chairman of the Soviet Committee for the Arts. “What we need,” the apparatchik told the sculptor (and by extension the composer) “is an optimistic Shostakovich.” The composer loved repeating this oxymoron.

  Apart from being a great brooder on death, he was also—in private, necessarily—a mocker of false hopes, state propaganda, and artistic dross. One favourite target was a hit play of the 1930s by the long-forgotten regime creep Vsevolod Vishnevsky, of whom a Russian theatre scholar recently wrote: “Even by the standards of our literary herbarium, this author was a very poisonous specimen.” Vishnevsky’s play was set on board ship during the Bolshevik Revolution, and admirably portrayed the world as the authorities pretended it was. A young female commissar arrives to explain, and impose, the party line on a crew of anarchist sailors and old-school Russian officers. She is met with indifference, scepticism, and even assault: one of the sailors tries to rape her, whereupon she shoots him dead. Such an example of communist vigour and instant justice helps win over the sailors, who are soon moulded into an effective fighting unit. Deployed against the warmongering, God-worshipping, capitalistic Germans, they are somehow taken prisoner; but rise up heroically against their captors. During the struggle the inspirational commissar is killed, and dies urging the now fully Sovietized sailors, “Always uphold . . . the high traditions . . . of the Red Fleet.” Curtain.

  It wasn’t the cartoonishly obedient plot of Vishnevsky’s play that appealed to Shostakovich’s sense of humour, but its title: An Optimistic Tragedy. Soviet Communism, Hollywood, and organized religion were all closer than they knew, dream factories cranking out the same fantasy. “Tragedy is tragedy,” Shostakovich liked to repeat, “and optimism has nothing to do with it.”

  Chapter 39

  I have seen two dead people, and touched one of them; but I’ve never seen anyone die, and may never do so, unless and until I see myself die. If death ceased to be talked about when it first really began to be feared, and then more so when we started to live longer, it has also gone off the agenda because it has ceased to be there, with us, in the house. Nowadays we make death as invisible as possible, and part of a process—from doctor to hospital to undertaker to crematorium—in which professionals and bureaucrats tell us what to do, up to the point where we are left to ourselves, survivors standing with a glass in our hands, amateurs learning how to mourn. But not so long ago the dying would have spent their final illness at home, expired among family, been washed and laid out by local women, watched over companionably for a night or two, then coffined up by the local undertaker. Like Jules Renard, we would have set off on foot behind a swaying, horse-drawn hearse for the cemetery, there to watch the coffin being lowered and a fat worm strutting at the grave’s edge. We would have been more attending and more attentive. Better for them (though my brother will refer me to hypothetical wants of the dead), and probably better for us. The old system made for a statelier progressing from being alive to being dead—and from being dead to being lost from sight. The modern, rushing way is doubtless truer to how we see death nowadays—one minute you’re alive, the next you’re dead, and truly dead, so let’s jump in the car and get it over with. (Whose car shall we take? Not the one she would have wanted.)

  Stravinsky went to see Ravel’s body before it was placed in the coffin. It was lying on a table draped in black. Everything was black and white: black suit, white gloves, white hospital turban still encircling the head, black wrinkles on a very pale face, which had “an expression of great majesty.” And there the grandeur of death ended. “I went to the interment,” Stravinsky recorded. “A lugubrious experience, these civil burials where everything is banned except protocol.” That was Paris, 1937. When Stravinsky’s turn came, thirty-four years later, his body was flown from New York to Rome, then driven to Venice, where black and purple proclamations were posted up everywhere: THE CITY OF VENICE DOES HOMAGE TO THE REMAINS OF THE GREAT MUSICIAN IGOR STRAVINSKY, WHO IN A GESTURE OF EXQUISITE FRIENDSHIP ASKED TO BE BURIED IN THE CITY WHICH HE LOVED ABOVE ALL OTHERS. The Archimandrite of Venice conducted the Greek Orthodox service in the church of SS. Giovanni et Paolo, then the coffin was carried past the Colleoni statue, and rowed by four gondoliers in a water-hearse out to the cemetery island of San Michele. There the Archimandrite and Stravinsky’s widow dropped earth from their hands on to the coffin as it was lowered into the vault. Francis Steegmuller, the great Flaubert scholar, followed the day’s events. He said that as the cortège processed from church to canal, with Venetians hanging from every window, the scene resembled “one of Carpaccio’s pageants.” More, much more than protocol.

  Unless and until I see myself die. Would you rather be conscious of your dying, or unconscious of it? (There is a third—and highly popular—option: being deluded into the belief that you are on the way to recovery.) But be careful what you wish for. Roy Porter wanted to be fully conscious: “Because, you know, you’d just be missing out on something otherwise.” He went on: “Clearly, one doesn’t want excruciating pain and all the rest of it. But I think one would want to be with the people who mattered to one.” That is what Porter hoped for, and this is what he got. He was fifty-five, had recently taken early retirement, moved to Sussex with his fifth wife, and begun a life of freelance writing. He was bicycling home from his allotment (hard not to imagine the kind of country lane where Bertrand Russell had his marital aperçu) when he was suddenly blasted out by a heart attack, and died alone on the verge. Did he have any time to watch himself die? Did he know he was dying? Was his last thought an expectation that he would wake up in hospital? His final morning had been spent planting peas (perhaps the nearest we shall get to those French cabbages). And he was taking home a bunch of flowers, which were in a moment transformed into his own roadside tribute.

  Chapter 40

  My grandfather said that remorse was the worst emotion life could contain. My mother did not understand the remark, and I do not know what events to attach it to.

  Death and Remorse 1. When François Renard, ignoring his son’s advice to take an enema, took a shotgun instead, and used a walking stick to fire both barrels and produce a “dark place above the waist, like a small extinguished fire,” Jules wrote: “I do not reproach myself for not having loved him enough. I reproach myself for not having understood him.”

  Death and Remorse 2. Ever since I first read it, I have remained haunted by a line from Edmund Wilson’s journals. Wilson died in 1972; the events referred to happened in 1932; I read about them in 1980, the year The Thirties was published.

  At the beginning of that decade, Wilson had married, as his second wife, one Margaret Canby. She was a stocky, humorous-faced, upper-class woman with “champagne tastes”: Wilson was the first man she had known who had worked for a living. In the previous volume of his journals, The Twenties, Wilson had called her “the best woman drinking companion I had ever known.” There he noted his first intention of marrying her, and also his sensible hesitation: “Well though we got along, we did not have enough in common.” But marry they did, into an alcoholic companionship marked from the first by infidelity and temporary separations. If Wilson had his doubts about Canby, she had even stronger reservations about him. “You’re a cold fishy leprous person, Bunny Wilson,” she once told him—a remark which Wilson, with typical unsparingness, confided to his diary.

  In September 1932 the couple, then married two years, were having one of their separations. Margaret Canby was in California, Wilson in New York. She went to a party in Santa Barbara wearing high heels. As she left, she tripped, fell down a flight of stone steps, broke her skull, and died. The event produced, in Wilson’s journal, forty-five pages of the most honest and self-flage
llant mourning ever written. Wilson starts taking notes as his plane slowly hedge-hops west, as if the enforced literary act will help block off emotion. Over the next days, these jottings open out into an extraordinary monologue of homage, erotic remembrance, remorse, and despair. “A horrible night but even that seemed sweet in recollection,” he notes at one point. In California, Canby’s mother urges him: “You must believe in immortality, Bunny, you must!” But he doesn’t and can’t: Margaret is dead and unreturning.

  Wilson spares himself, and his putative reader, nothing. He preserves every impaling rebuke Canby delivered. She once told her critical, complaining husband that the epitaph on his tomb-stone should read: “You’d better go and fix yourself up.” He also celebrates her: in bed, in drink, in tears, in confusion. He remembers fighting off the flies when they made love on a beach, and iconizes her “cunning” body with its small limbs. (“Don’t say that!” she would protest. “It makes me sound like a turtle.”) He calls to mind the ignorances that charmed him—“I’ve found out what that thing over the door is—it’s a lentil”—and places them alongside her running complaints: “I’ll crash someday! Why don’t you do something about me?” She accused him of treating her as just another luxury item, like Guerlain scent: “You’d be charmed if I were dead, you know you would.”