There’s another flaw in that “best-case” death scenario I was describing. Let’s assume the doctor says you will live long enough and lucidly enough to complete your final book. Who wouldn’t drag the work out as long as possible? Scheherazade never ran out of stories. “Morphine drip?” “Oh no, still quite a few chapters to go. The fact is, there’s a lot more to say about death than I’d imagined . . .” And so your selfish wish to survive would act to the structural detriment of the book.
Some years ago, a British journalist, John Diamond, was diagnosed with cancer, and turned his condition into a weekly column. Rightly, he maintained the same perky tone that characterized the rest of his work; rightly, he admitted cowardice and panic alongside curiosity and occasional courage. His account sounded completely authentic: this was what living with cancer entailed; nor did being ill make you a different person, or stop you having rows with your wife. Like many other readers, I used to quietly urge him on from week to week. But after a year and more . . . well, a certain narrative expectation inevitably built up. Hey, miracle cure! Hey, I was just having you on! No, neither of those would work as endings. Diamond had to die; and he duly, correctly (in narrative terms) did. Though—how can I put this?—a stern literary critic might complain that his story lacked compactness towards the end.
I may be dead by the time you are reading this sentence. In which case, any complaints about the book will not be answered. On the other hand, we may both be alive now (you by definition so), but you could die before me. Had you thought of that? Sorry to bring it up, but it is a possibility, at least for a few more years. In which case, my condolences to your nearest and dearest. And as the Friday lunchers were saying—or rather, never saying, though perhaps occasionally thinking—in that Hungarian restaurant: either I’ll be going to your funeral, or you’ll be coming to mine. Such has always been the case, of course; but this grimly unshiftable either/or takes on sharper definition in later years. In the matter of you and me—assuming I’m not already, definitively dead by the time you’re reading this—you’re more likely, actuarially, to see me out than the other way round. And there’s still that other possibility—that I might die in the middle of writing this book. Which would be unsatisfactory for both of us—unless you were about to give up anyway, at exactly the point where the narrative breaks off. I might die in the middle of a sentence, even. Perhaps right in the middle of a wo
Just kidding. Though not entirely so. I’ve never written a book, except my first, without at some point considering that I might die before it was completed. This is all part of the superstition, the folklore, the mania of the business, the fetishistic fuss. The right pencils, felt-tips, biros, notebooks, paper, typewriter: necessities which are also objective correlatives for the proper state of mind. This is created by putting aside all that might harmfully impinge, narrowing the focus until only what’s important remains: me, you, the world, and the book—and how to make it as good as it can possibly be. Reminding myself of mortality (or, more truthfully, mortality reminding me of itself ) is a useful and necessary prod.
So is advice from those who have been there before. Instructions, epigrams, dicta pinned up either literally or metaphorically. Both William Styron and Philip Roth have worked beneath the Flaubertian self-reminder: “Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Perhaps you need to free your mind from the distraction of future critical response? Sibelius would be a help here—“Always remember that there is no city in Europe which contains a statue to a critic”—though my favourite comes from Ford Madox Ford: “It is an easy job to say that an elephant, however good, is not a good warthog; for most criticism comes to that.” Many writers could benefit from that line of Jules Renard’s: “One could say of almost all works of literature that they are too long.” Further, and finally, they should expect to be misunderstood. On this, Sibelius again, with the gnomic and ironic instruction: “Misunderstand me correctly.”
When I first began to write, I laid down for myself the rule—as part of the head-clearing, the focusing, the psychological primping and tamping—that I should write as if my parents were dead. This was not because I specifically wanted either to use or abuse them; rather, I didn’t want to catch myself thinking of what might possibly offend or please them. (And in this, they were not just themselves, they were also standing for friends, colleagues, lovers, let alone warthog-describers.) The strange thing is, that though my parents are many years dead, I now need this rule more than ever.
Dying in the middle of a wo, or three-fifths of the way through a nov. My friend the nov ist Brian Moore used to fear this as well, though for an extra reason: “Because some bastard will come along and finish it for you.” Here is a novelist’s would-you-rather. Would you rather die in the middle of a book, and have some bastard finish it for you, or leave behind a work in progress that not a single bastard in the whole world was remotely interested in finishing? Moore died while at work on a novel about Rimbaud. An irony there: Rimbaud was one writer who made sure he wouldn’t die in the middle of a stanza, two-thirds of the way through a mo, by abandoning literature half a lifetime before he died.
Chapter 32
My mother, an only child who became the only woman in a household whose male members had little instinct for dominance, developed a solipsism which did not decrease with age. In widowhood, she became even more of a monologuist than in the days when some polite, loving, and occasionally wry response could be elicited from the Parker Knoll. Inevitably, she became more of a repetitionist too. I was sitting with her one afternoon, my mind half elsewhere, when she took me aback with a new thought. She had been reflecting, she said, on the various forms of decrepitude that might await her, and wondering if she would rather go deaf or go blind. For a moment—naively—I imagined that she was asking my opinion, but she needed no extra input: deafness, she told me, would be her choice. An expression of solidarity with her father and her two sons? Not a bit of it. This was how she had argued the matter to herself: “If I were blind, how would I do my nails?”
Death and dying generate a whole questionnaire of such would-you-rathers. For a start, would you rather know you were dying, or not know? Would you rather watch, or not watch? Aged thirty-eight, Jules Renard noted: “Please, God, don’t make me die too quickly! I shouldn’t mind seeing how I die.” He wrote this on 24 January 1902, the second anniversary of the day he had travelled from Paris to Chitry to bury his brother Maurice—a brother transformed in a few silent minutes from a clerk of works complaining about the central heating system to a corpse with his head on a Paris telephone directory. A century later, the medical historian Roy Porter was asked to reflect on death: “You know, I think it will be interesting to be conscious as one dies, because one must undergo the most extraordinary changes. Thinking, I’m dying now . . . I think I’d like to be fully conscious of it all. Because, you know, you’d just be missing out on something otherwise.” Such terminal curiosity is in a fine tradition. In 1777, the Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller was attended on his deathbed by a brother physician. Haller monitored his own pulse as it weakened, and died in character with the last words: “My friend, the artery ceases to beat.” The year previously, Voltaire had similarly clung to his own pulse until the moment he slowly shook his head and, a few minutes later, died. An admirable death—with not a priest in sight—worthy of Montaigne ’s catalogue. Not that it impressed everyone. Mozart, then in Paris, wrote to his father, “You probably already know that that godless arch-rogue Voltaire has died like a dog, like a beast—that’s his reward!” Like a dog, indeed.
Would you rather fear death or not fear it? That sounds an easy one. But how about this: what if you never gave death a thought, lived your life as if there were no tomorrow (there isn’t, by the way), took your pleasure, did your work, loved your family, and then, as you were finally obliged to admit your own mortality, discovered that this new awareness of the full stop at the e
nd of the sentence meant that the whole preceding story now made no sense at all? That if you’d fully realized to begin with that you were going to die, and what that meant, you would have lived according to quite different principles?
And then there is the other way round, perhaps my own: what if you lived to sixty or seventy with half an eye on the ever-filling pit, and then, as death approached, you found that there was, after all, nothing to be frightened of? What if you began to feel contentedly part of the great cycle of nature (please, take my carbon atoms)? What if those easeful metaphors suddenly, or even gradually, began to convince? The Anglo-Saxon poet compared human life to a bird flying from darkness into a brightly lit banqueting hall, and then flying out into the dark on the farther side: perhaps this image will calm one’s pang at being human and being mortal. I can’t say it works for me yet. It’s pretty enough, but the pedantic side of me keeps wanting to point out that any right-thinking bird flying into a warm banqueting hall would perch on the rafters as long as it bloody well could, rather than head straight out again. Moreover, the bird, in its pre-and post-existence on either side of the carousing hall, is at least still flying, which is more than can or will be said for us.
When I first came to mortal awareness, it was simple: you were alive, then you were dead, and bid the Deity farewell: Godbye. But who can tell how age will affect us? When I was a young journalist, I interviewed the novelist William Gerhardie. He was then in his eighties, frail and bed-bound; death was not far away. At one point he picked up from his bedside table an anthology about immortality, and showed me a heavily underlined account of an out-of-body experience. This, he explained, was identical to one he had himself undergone as a soldier in the First World War. “I believe in resurrection,” he said simply. “I believe in immortality. Do you believe in immortality?” I was awkwardly silent (and failed to remember my own out-of-body experience as a schoolboy). “No, well, nor did I at your age,” he went on sympathetically. “But I do now.”
So perhaps I shall change my mind (though I doubt it). What’s more likely is that the choice ahead will blur. Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. What you—I—will be clinging on to is not a few more minutes in a warm baronial hall with the smell of roast chicken and the cheery noise of fife and drum, not a few more days and hours of real living, but a few more days and hours of breathing decrepitude, mind gone, muscles wasted, bladder leaking. “What makes you think the thing you have at the moment is life?” as the hard-hearted Caesar said to his former legionary. And yet—and worse—imagine this failing body now even more fearful of oblivion than when it was healthy and strong and could divert itself from contemplation of that oblivion by physical and mental activity, by social usefulness and the company of friends. A body, the compartments of whose mind now begin shutting down one by one, lucidity gone, speech gone, recognition of friends gone, memory gone, replaced by a fantasy world of proper monkeys and unreliable tennis partners. All that is left—the last bit of the engine still with stoking power—is the compartment that makes us fear death. Yes, that little bit of brain activity will keep going strong, puffing out the panic, sending the chill and the terror coursing through the system. They will give you morphine for your pain—and then, perhaps, a little more than you actually need, and then the necessary excess—but there is nothing they can give you to stop this grim cluster of brain cells scaring you shitless (or, perhaps, the opposite) until the very end. Then we might find ourselves regretting that we ever thought, with Renard, “Please, God, don’t make me die too quickly.”
The writer and director Jonathan Miller trained as a doctor. Despite having dissected the rigid and handled the waxily pliable from whom the breath of life had only just departed, he was in his forties before, as he put it, “I began to think, well, hang on—this is something which I’m going to be doing some time.” Interviewed in his mid-fifties, he professed himself still unalarmed by the long-term consequences: “The fear of just not existing—no, I don’t have that at all.” What he admitted to instead was a fear of the deathbed, and what goes with it: agony, delirium, torturing hallucinations, and the lamenting family preparing for his departure. That seems a pretty fair line-up to me, though not as an alternative, merely as an add-on to the proper, grown-up fear of “just not existing.”
Miller follows Freud in that he “cannot actually conceive, can’t make sense of the notion of total annihilation.” And so, it seems, his capacity for terror is transferred first on to the process and humiliations of dying, and secondly on to various possible states of semi-being or almost-being which might occur around or after death. He fears “this residual consciousness which is not quite snuffed out,” and imagines an out-of-body experience in which he is watching his own funeral: “or, in fact, not watching it, but being immobilized inside the coffin.” I can picture this new tweak on that old fear of being buried alive, but fail to find it especially sinister. If there were a residual consciousness watching our own funeral and rippling around inside our coffin, why should it necessarily be one that fears enclosure?
Most of us have thought, or said, of death, “Well, we shall find out”—while recognizing the near certainty that we shall never “find out” the negative we expect. A lingering consciousness might be there to give us the answer. It might be a gentle way of saying No. It might hoveringly watch the burial or cremation, farewell this pesky body of ours and the life that has been in it, and (assuming that it is still somehow attached to or representative of the self) allow “us” to feel that what is happening is appropriate. It might produce a calming sensation, a laying-to-rest, a consolation, a sweet goodnight, an ontological nightcap.
I have a Swedish friend, K., who once, very gently and considerately, whispered to a mutual friend who had been too long dying of cancer, “It’s time to let go.” I have always teased her that I shall know things are really bad for me when I hear this lightly inflected voice in my ear, and those much-rehearsed words of advice. Perhaps the residual consciousness that Miller fears will turn out to be something useful and benevolent, a settling of accounts delivered in a soft Swedish accent.
Chapter 33
That medieval bird flies from darkness into a lighted hall and back out again. One of the oh-so-sensible arguments against death-anxiety goes like this: if we don’t fear and hate the eternity of time leading up to our brief moment of illuminated life, why therefore should we feel differently about the second spell of darkness? Because, of course, during that first spell of darkness, the universe—or at least, a very, very insignificant part of it—was leading up to the creation of something of decided interest, plaiting its genes appropriately and working its way through a succession of apelike, growling, tool-handling ancestors until such time as it gathered itself and spat out the three generations of school-teachers who then made . . . me. So that darkness had some purpose—at least, from my solipsistic point of view; whereas the second darkness has absolutely nothing to be said for it.
It could, I suppose, be worse. It almost always can—which is some mild consolation. We might fear the prenatal abyss as well as the post-mortal one. Odd, but not impossible. Nabokov in his autobiography describes a “chronophobiac” who experienced panic on being shown home movies of the world in the months before he was born: the house he would inhabit, his mother-to-be leaning out of a window, an empty pram awaiting its occupant. Most of us would be unalarmed, indeed cheered, by all this; the chronophobiac saw only a world in which he did not exist, an acreage of himlessness. Nor was it any consolation that such an absence was mobilizing itself irresistibly to produce his future presence. Whether this phobia reduced his level of post-mortal anxiety, or on the other hand doubled it, Nabokov does not relate.
A more sophisticated version of the bird-in-hall argument comes from Richard Dawkins. We are indeed all going to die, and death is absolute and God a delusion, but even so, that makes us the lucky ones. Most “people”—the vast majority of potential people—don’
t even get born, and their numbers are greater than all the grains of sand in all the deserts of Araby. “The set of possible people allowed by our DNA . . . massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” Why do I find this such thin consolation? No, worse than that, such a disconsolation? Because look at all the evolutionary work, all the unrecorded pieces of cosmic luck, all the decision-making, all the generations of family care, all the thissing-and-thatting which have ended up producing me and my uniqueness. My ordinariness, too, and yours, and that of Richard Dawkins, yet a unique ordinariness, a staggeringly against-the-odds ordinariness. This makes it harder, not easier, to give a shrug and say philosophically, Oh well, might never have been here anyway, so may as well get on enjoying this little window of opportunity not granted to others. But then it’s also hard, unless you’re a biologist, to think of those trillions of unborn, genetically hypothetical others as “potential people.” I have no difficulty imagining a stillborn or aborted baby as a potential person, but all those possible combinations that never came to pass? My human sympathy can only go so far, I’m afraid—the sands of Araby are beyond me.
So I cannot be philosophical. Are philosophers philosophical? Were the Laconians truly laconic, the Spartans really spartan? Just in comparative terms, I expect. Apart from my brother, the only philosopher I know well is my death-haunted friend G., who as a four-year-old beat me to mortal awareness by a decade. He and I once had a long exchange about free will. Like everyone, I have always—an amateur in and of my own life—assumed that I had free will, and always, to my own mind, behaved as if I did. Professionally, G. explained to me my delusion. He pointed out that though we might think we are free in acting as we want, we cannot determine what it is that we want (and if we deliberately decide to “want to want” something, there is the usual problem of regression to a primal “want”). At some point your wants must just be givens: the result of inheritance and upbringing. Therefore, the idea of anyone having true and ultimate responsibility for their acts is untenable; at most we can have a temporary, surface responsibility—and even that, with time, will be shown to be mistaken. G. might well have quoted to me Einstein’s conclusion that “a Being endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, would smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.”