Such wintry wisdom may briefly convince. I almost persuaded myself for the time I was writing the paragraph above. Except that the indifference of the world has rarely reduced anyone’s egotism. Except that the universe’s judgement of our value rarely accords with our own. Except that we find it difficult to believe that, if we went on living, we would bore ourselves and others (there are so many foreign languages and musical instruments to learn, so many careers to try out and countries to live in and people to love, and after that we can always fall back on tango and langlauf and the art of watercolour . . .). And the other snag is that merely to consider your own individuality, which you are mourning in advance, is to reinforce the sense of that individuality; the process is one of digging yourself into an ever larger hole that will eventually become your grave. The very art I practise also runs counter to the idea of a calm farewell to a thinned self. Whatever the writer’s aesthetic—from subjective and autobiographical to objective and author-concealing—the self must be strengthened and defined in order to produce the work. So you could say that by writing this sentence I am making it just a little harder for myself to die.
Or you could say: Oh, get on with it then—fuck off and die anyway, and take your noxious arty self with you. It is the last Christmas before my sixtieth birthday, and a few weeks ago the website belief.net (“Meet Christian singles in your area”; “Health and Happiness Tips Daily in Your Inbox”) has asked Richard Dawkins—or, as the site’s subscribers have nicknamed him, “Mister Meaninglessness”—about the despair aroused in some by the implications of Darwinism. He replies: “If it’s true that it causes people to feel despair, that’s tough. The universe doesn’t owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn’t owe us a nice warm feeling inside. If it’s true, it’s true, and you’d better live with it.” Fuck off and die, indeed. Of course, Dawkins is right in his argument. But Robespierre was also right: atheism is aristocratic. And the lordly tone recalls the punitive hardliners of old Christianity. The universe isn’t arranged by God for your comfort. You don’t like it? Tough. You—unbaptized soul—get off to limbo. You—blaspheming masturbator—straight to hell, do not pass Go, and no Get Out of Jail card for you, ever. You—Catholic husband—this way; you lot—apostate children and wife who lodged with the atheist Ayer—that way. Naught for your comfort. Jules Renard imagined just such a parade-ground God, who would keep reminding those who finally made it to heaven: “You aren’t here to have fun, you know.”
Grow up, says Dawkins. God is an imaginary friend. When you’re dead, you’re dead. If you want a sense of spiritual awe, get it from contemplating the Milky Way through a telescope. At the moment you’re holding a child’s kaleidoscope up to the light and pretending that those coloured lozenges were put there by God.
Grow up. On 17 July 1891, Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt went for a morning walk and discussed the minuscule chance of an afterlife. Much as he longed to see his dead, beloved brother Jules again, Edmond was sure that we are “totally annihilated at death,” being “ephemeral creatures lasting only a few days longer than those which live a single day.” He then produced an original argument, one from number, like Maugham’s e consensu gentium, yet with a contrary conclusion: even if there were a God, expecting the Deity to provide a second, post-death existence for each and every member of the human race is laying far too great a task of bookkeeping upon Him.
This is perhaps more witty than convincing. If we can conceive of a God in the first place, then the ability to bear in mind, tabulate, care for (and resurrect) every single one of us is, I’d have thought, pretty much the least we should expect as a job description. No, the more convincing argument springs not from God’s incapacity, but ours. As Maugham puts it, in his first entry for the year 1902, in A Writer’s Notebook: “Men, commonplace and ordinary, do not seem to me fit for the tremendous fact of eternal life. With their little passions, their little virtues and their little vices, they are well enough suited in the workaday world; but the conception of immortality is much too vast for beings cast on so small a scale.” Before becoming a writer, Maugham had trained as a doctor, and witnessed patients die both peacefully and tragically: “And never have I seen in their last moments anything to suggest that their spirit was everlasting. They die as a dog dies.”
Possible objections: 1. Dogs, too, are part of God’s creation (as well as being His anagram). 2. Why should a doctor, concentrating on the body, notice where the spirit is? 3. Why should the inadequacy of man preclude the possibility of a spiritual after-life? Who are we to decide that we are not worthy? Isn’t the whole point the hope of improvement, of rescue through grace? Sure we’re unimpressive, sure there’s a long way to go, but isn’t that the point—or what’s a heaven for? 4. Fallback Singerian position: “If survival has been arranged . . .”
But Maugham is right: we die as dogs die. Or rather—given medicine’s advances since 1902—we die as well-groomed, well-tranquillized dogs with good health insurance policies might die. But still caninely.
Chapter 26
During my inner-suburban childhood, we had a black-and-white Bakelite wireless, whose controls my brother and I were not allowed to touch. Dad would be in charge of turning the instrument on, tuning it, making sure it was properly warmed up in time. Then he might fiddle with his pipe, poking and tamping it before unleashing the scratchy flare of a Swan Vesta. Mum would get out her knitting or mending, and perhaps consult the Radio Times in its tooled-leather slipcover. Then the wireless would project the rounded opinions of the Any Questions? panel: glib MPs, worldly bishops, professional wise men like A.J. Ayer, and amateur, self-made sages. Mum would award them interjectory ticks—“Talks a lot of sense”—or crosses—anything from “Stupid fool!” up to “Ought to be shot.” On another day the wireless would disgorge The Critics, a band of suave aesthetic experts droning on about plays we would never see and books that never came into the house. My brother and I would listen with a kind of stunned boredom, which was not just of the present, but anticipatory: if such opinion-giving and -receiving was what adulthood contained, then it seemed not merely unattainable, but actively undesirable.
In my outer-suburban adolescence, the wireless acquired a rival: a vast television set, bought second-hand at auction. Swathed in walnut, with full-length double doors concealing its function, it was the size of a dwarf ’s armoire, and guzzled furniture polish. On top of it sat a family Bible, as outsize as the television, and just as deceptive. For it was the family Bible of someone else’s family, with their lineage not ours inscribed on the front endpaper. It too had been bought at auction, and was never opened except when Dad jovially consulted it for a crossword clue.
The chairs now pointed in a different direction, but the ritual was unchanged. The pipe would be lit and the sewing laid out, or perhaps the nail equipment: emery board, varnish remover, split-binding tape, undercoat, top coat. The smell of pear drops sometimes takes me back to making model aeroplanes, but more often to my mother doing her nails. And especially to an emblematic moment from my adolescence. My parents and I were watching an interview with John Gielgud—or rather, watching him effortlessly turn his interlocutor’s questions into pretexts for elaborate, self-mocking anecdotes. My parents enjoyed the theatre, from amateur dramatics to the West End, and would certainly have seen Gielgud from the gods a few times. His voice was for half a century one of the most beautiful instruments on the London stage: one not of rough power but of refined mobility, the sort my mother would admire on social as well as critical grounds. As Gielgud unfolded another of his urbane and slightly giggly reminiscences, I became aware of a quiet yet insistent noise, as if Dad was discreetly trying to light a Swan Vesta, but constantly failing. Dry scrape succeeded dry scrape, aural graffiti scratching on Gielgud’s voice. It was, of course, my mother filing her nails.
The dwarf ’s armoire was more fun than the wireless, as it contained Western serials: The Lone Ranger, naturally, but also Wells Fargo with Dale Robertson. My parents prefe
rred grown-up fighting, like Field Marshal Montgomery on Command in Battle, a six-parter in which the general explained how he had pursued the Germans from North Africa all across Europe until taking their surrender at Lüneberg Heath; or, as my brother recently remembered it, “Ghastly little Monty poncing around in black and white.” There was also The Brains Trust, like a post-graduate—i.e. even more stultifying—version of Any Questions?, and also starring A. J. Ayer. More unitedly, the family watched wildlife programmes: Armand and Michaela Denis, with their frolicsome Belgian accents and multipocketed desert suits; Captain Cousteau with his frog-feet; David Attenborough panting through the undergrowth. Viewers had to keep their wits about them in those days, as monochrome creatures moved in camouflage across a monochrome veldt, seabed, or jungle. Nowadays, we have it easy, pampered by colour and close-up, given a God’s-eye-view of all the intricacy and beauty of a God-free universe.
Emperor penguins have been in fashion lately, with cinematic and TV voiceovers urging us to anthropomorphism. How can we resist their loveably incompetent bipedalism? See how they rest lovingly on one another’s breasts, shuffle a precious egg between parental feet, share the food search just as we share supermarket duties. Watch how the whole group huddles together against the snowstorm, demonstrating social altruism. Aren’t these egg-devoted, chore-dividing, co-parenting, seasonally monogamous Emperors of the Antarctic strangely reminiscent of us? Perhaps; but only to the extent that we are unstrangely reminiscent of them. We are just as good as they are at passing for God-created while being smacked and wheedled by implacable evolutionary urges. And given that this is so, what—again—does this make of the proposal that wonder at the natural but empty universe is a full replacement for wonder at the works of an imaginary friend we have created for ourselves? Having come to evolutionary self-consciousness as a species, we cannot go back to being penguins, or anything else. Before, wonder was a sense of babbling gratitude for a creator’s munificence, or squittering terror at his ability to deliver shock and awe. Now, alone, we must consider what our Godless wonder might be for. It cannot be just itself, only purer and truer. It must have some function, some biological usefulness, some practical, life-saving, or life-prolonging purpose. Perhaps it is there to help us look for somewhere else to live against the day when we have irremediably trashed our own planet. But in any case, how can reductiveness not reduce?
A question, and a paradox. Our history has seen the gradual if bumpy rise of individualism: from the animal herd, from the slave society, from the mass of uneducated units bossed by priest and king, to looser groups in which the individual has greater rights and freedoms—the right to pursue happiness, private thought, self-fulfilment, self-indulgence. At the same time, as we throw off the rules of priest and king, as science helps us understand the truer terms and conditions on which we live, as our individualism expresses itself in grosser and more selfish ways (what is freedom for if not for that?), we also discover that this individuality, or illusion of individuality, is less than we imagined. We discover, to our surprise, that as Dawkins memorably puts it, we are “survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” The paradox is that individualism—the triumph of free-thinking artists and scientists—has led us to a state of self-awareness in which we can now view ourselves as units of genetic obedience. My adolescent notion of self-construction—that vaguely, Englishly, existentialist ego-hope of autonomy—could not have been further from the truth. I thought the burdensome process of growing up ended with a man standing by himself at last—homo erectus at full height, sapiens in full wisdom—a fellow now cracking the whip on his own account. This image (and I melodramatize it a little—such realizations and self-projections were always insecure and provisional) must be replaced by the sense that, far from having a whip to crack, I am the very tip of the whip itself, and that what is cracking me is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which cannot be shrugged or fought off. My “individuality” may still be felt, and genetically provable; but it may be the very opposite of the achievement I once took it for.
That is the paradox; here is the question. We grow up; we trade in our old sense of wonder for a new one—wonder at the blind and fortuitous process which has blindly and fortuitously produced us; we don’t feel depressed by this, as some might, but “elated” as Dawkins himself is; we enjoy the things which Dawkins lists as making life worth living—music, poetry, sex, love (and science)—while also perhaps practising the humorous resignation advocated by Somerset Maugham. We do all this, and do we get any better at dying? Will you die better, shall I die better, will Richard Dawkins die better than our genetic ancestors hundreds or thousands of years ago? Dawkins has expressed the hope that “When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.” Clear enough, if illegal; yet death has an obstinate way of denying us the solutions we imagine for ourselves.
From a medical point of view—and depending where we live on the planet—we may well die better, and less caninely. Factor that out. Also factor out those things we might confuse with dying well: for instance, having no regret or remorse. If we have enjoyed our time, made provision for our dependants, and have little to feel sadness over, then looking back on life will be more bearable. But that’s a different matter from looking forwards to what is immediately ahead: total extinction. Are we going to get any better at that?
I don’t see why we should. I don’t see why our cleverness or self-awareness should make things better rather than worse. Why should those genes in whose silent servitude we dwell spare us any terror? Why would it be in their interest? We presumably fear death not just for its own sake but because it is useful to us—or useful to our selfish genes, which will not get passed on if we fail to fear death enough, if we fall for that camouflaged-tiger trick as others used to, or eat that bitter plant which our taste buds have taught us (or rather, been taught themselves, by mortal trial and error) to avoid. What conceivable use or advantage might our deathbed comfort be to these new masters?
Chapter 27
“One must be equal to one’s destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it. By dint of saying ‘That is so! That is so!’ and of gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm.” Flaubert’s experience of pit-gazing began early. His father was a hospital surgeon; the family lived above the shop; Achille Flaubert would often come straight from his operating table to his dining table. The boy Gustave would climb a trellis and peer in at his father instructing medical students how to dissect corpses. He saw bodies covered in flies, and students casually resting their lit cigars on the limbs and trunks they were hacking away at. Achille would glance up, spot his son’s face at the window, and wave him away with his scalpel. A late-Romantic morbidity infected the adolescent Gustave; but he never lost the realist’s need, and demand, to look where others averted their gaze. It was a human duty as well as a writerly one.
In April 1848, when Flaubert was twenty-six, the literary friend of his youth, Alfred Le Poittevin, died. In a private memorandum which has only just come to light, Flaubert recorded how he looked at this death, and looked at himself looking at it. He kept a vigil over his dead friend for two consecutive nights; he cut a lock of hair for Le Poittevin’s young widow; he helped wrap the body in its shroud; he smelt the stink of decomposition. When the undertakers arrived with the coffin, he kissed his friend on the temple. A decade later, he still remembered that moment: “Once you have kissed a corpse on the forehead there always remains something on your lips, a distant bitterness, an aftertaste of the void that nothing will efface.”
This was not my experience after kissing my mother’s forehead; but I was by then twice Flaubert’s age, and perhaps the taste of bitterness was on my lips already. Twenty-one years after Le Poittevin’s death, Louis Bouilhet, the literary friend of Flaubert’s maturity, died; again, he composed a private memorandum describing his actions and react
ions. He was in Paris when he heard the news; he returned to Rouen; he went to Bouilhet’s house and embraced the dead poet’s common-law wife. You might think—if pit-gazing worked—that the previous experience would make this one more bearable. But Flaubert found that he could not bear to see, watch over, embrace, wrap, or kiss the friend who had been so close that he once called him “my left testicle.” He spent the night in the garden, sleeping a couple of hours on the ground; and he shunned his friend’s presence until the closed coffin was brought out of the house. In the memorandum, he specifically compared his ability to confront the two deaths: “I did not dare see him! I feel weaker than I did twenty years ago . . . I lack any internal toughness. I feel worn out.” Pit-gazing for Flaubert induced not calm, but nervous exhaustion.
Chapter 28
When I was translating Daudet’s notes on dying, two friends separately suggested that it must be depressing work. Not at all: I found this example of proper, adult pit-gazing—the exact glance, the exact word, the refusal either to aggrandize or to trivialize death—exhilarating. When, at the age of fifty-eight, I published a collection of short stories dealing with the less serene aspects of old age, I found myself being asked if I wasn’t being premature in addressing such matters. When I showed the first fifty pages of this book to my close (and close-reading) friend H., she asked, concernedly, “Does it help?”
Ah, the therapeuto-autobiographical fallacy. However well meant, it irritates me as much as a hypothetical want of the dead does my brother. Something bad happens in your life—or, in the case of death, is slated to happen; you write about it; and you feel better about that bad thing. In very small, local circumstances, I can imagine this applying. Jules Renard, Journal, 26 September 1903: “The beauty of literature. I lose a cow. I write about its death, and this brings me in enough to buy another cow.” But does it work in any wider sense? Perhaps with certain kinds of autobiography: you have a painful childhood, nobody loves you, you write about it, the book is a success, you make lots of money, and people love you. A tragedy with a happy ending! (Though for every such Hollywood moment, there must be a few which go: you have a painful childhood, nobody loves you, you write about it, the book is unpublishable, and still nobody loves you.) But with fiction, or any other transformative art? I don’t see why it should, or why the artist should want it to. Brahms described his late piano intermezzi as “the lullabies of all my tears.” But we don’t believe they worked for him as a handkerchief. Nor does writing about death either diminish or increase my fear of it. Though when I am roared awake in the enveloping and predictive darkness, I try to fool myself that there is at least one temporary advantage. This isn’t just another routine bout of timor mortis, I say to myself. This is research for your book.