At a certain point, I admitted that I had lost the argument, though carried on behaving in exactly the same way (which, on reflection, might have been a useful proof of G.’s point). G. consoled me by remarking that though, in his philosophical opinion, we cannot possibly have free will, such knowledge doesn’t make the slightest practical difference to how we do, or even should, behave. And so I have continued to rely on this delusionary mental construct to help me along the mortal path to that place where no will of mine, free or fettered, will ever operate again.
There is What We Know (or think we know) To Be The Case, there is What We Believe To Be The Case (on the assurance of others whom we trust), and then there is How We Behave. Christian morality still loosely governs Britain, though congregations dwindle and church buildings make their inexorable transition to historic monuments—setting off in some “a hunger to be serious”—and loft apartments. That sway extends to me too: my sense of morality is influenced by Christian teaching (or, more exactly, pre-Christian tribal behaviour codified by the religion); and the God I don’t believe in yet miss is naturally the Christian God of Western Europe and non-fundamentalist America. I don’t miss Allah or Buddha, any more than I miss Odin or Zeus. And I miss the New Testament God rather than the Old Testament one. I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm. I also realize that this God I am missing, this inspirer of artworks, will seem to some just as much an irrelevant self-indulgence as the much-claimed “own personal idea of God” I was deriding a while ago. Further, if any God did exist, He might very well find such decorative celebration of His existence both trivial and vainglorious, a matter for divine indifference if not retribution. He might think Fra Angelico cutesy, and Gothic cathedrals blustering attempts to impress Him by a creation which had quite failed to guess how He preferred to be worshipped.
Chapter 34
My agnostic and atheistic friends are indistinguishable from my professedly religious ones in honesty, generosity, integrity and fidelity—or their opposites. Is this a victory for them, I wonder, or for us? When we are young, we think we are inventing the world as we are inventing ourselves; later, we discover how much the past holds us, and always did. I escaped what seemed to me the decent dullness of my family, only to find, as I grow older, that my resemblance to my dead father strikes me more and more. There is the angle I sit at a table, the hang of my jaw, the incipient baldness pattern, and a particular kind of polite laugh I emit when not really amused: these (and doubtless much else that I fail to pick up) are genetic replicas and definitely not expressions of free will. My brother finds the same: he talks more and more like our father, using the same slang and half-finished sentences—he catches himself “sounding just like him, and even shuffling in my slippers the way he used to.” He has also started to dream about Dad—after sixty years in which neither parent intruded upon his sleep.
Grandma, in her dementia, believed my mother was a sister of hers who had been dead for fifty years. My mother, in turn, welcomed back all the relatives she had known in childhood, come to express concern for her. In time, our family will come for my brother and for me (only please don’t send my mother). But did the past ever really relax its grasp? We live broadly according to the tenets of a religion we no longer believe in. We live as if we are creatures of pure free will when philosophers and evolutionary biologists tell us this is largely a fiction. We live as if the memory were a well-built and efficiently staffed left-luggage office. We live as if the soul—or spirit, or individuality, or personality—were an identifiable and locatable entity rather than a story the brain tells itself. We live as if nature and nurture were equal parents when the evidence suggests that nature has both the whip hand and the whip.
Will such knowledge sink in? How long will it take? Some scientists think we shall never entirely decipher the mysteries of consciousness because all we can use to understand the brain is the brain itself. Perhaps we shall never abandon the illusion of free will because it would take an act of the free will we don’t have to abandon our belief in it. We shall go on living as if we are the full arbiters of our every decision. (The various adjustments of grammar and sense that I made to that last sentence, both immediately in the writing and after subsequent time and thought—how can “I” not believe that “I” made them? How can I believe that those words, and this parenthesis which follows them, and every elaboration I make within it, and the occasional misytpings, and the next word, whether completed or abandoned-halfway-through-as-I-have-second-thoughts-about-it and left as a wo, are not emanations of a coherent self making literary decisions by a process of free will? I cannot get my head round this not being the case.)
Perhaps it will be easier for you, or if not you, the generations born after you are dead. Perhaps I—and you—will seem to them like the “old-type natural fouled-up guys” (and gals) of Larkin’s poem. Perhaps they will regard as quaint and complacent the half-assumed, half-worked-out morality by which you and I seem to think we live. When religion first began to collapse in Europe—when “godless arch-rogues” like Voltaire were at work—there was a natural apprehension about where morality was to come from. In a dangerously ungoverned world, every village might produce its Casanova, its Marquis de Sade, its Bluebeard. There were philosophers who, while refuting Christianity to their own satisfaction and that of their intellectual circle, believed that the knowledge should be kept from peasant and potboy, lest the social structure collapse and the servant problem get completely out of hand.
But Europe stumbled on nonetheless. And if the dilemma now seems to pose itself in an even sharper form—what is the meaning of my actions in an empty universe where even more certainties have been undermined? why behave well? why not be selfish and greedy and blame it all on DNA?—the anthropologists and evolutionary biologists are able to offer comfort (if not to the faithful). Whatever religions may claim, we are set up—genetically programmed—to operate as social beings. Altruism is evolutionarily useful (ah!—there’s your virtue—another illusion—gone); so whether or not there is a preacher with a promise of heaven and a threat of hellfire, individuals living in societies generally act in much the same way. Religion no more makes people behave better than it makes them behave worse—which might be a disappointment to the aristocratic atheist as much as to the believer.
Chapter 35
When I was first studying French literature, I was puzzled by the concept of the acte gratuit. As I understood it, the notion went like this: in order to assert that we are now in charge of the universe, we must perform a spontaneous action for which there is no apparent motive or justification, and which lies outside conventional morality. The example that I recall, from Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican, consisted of the gratuitous actor pushing a complete stranger out of a moving train. Pure act, you see (and also, I now realize, a supposed proof of free will). I didn’t see—or not enough. I found myself thinking about the unfortunate fellow dashed to death in the middle of the French countryside. Murder—or, perhaps, what bourgeois minds still mired in Christianity chose to call murder—as a means of demonstrating a philosophical point seemed too . . . too theoretical, too French, too repellent. Though my friend G. would say that the gratuitous actor would have been fooling himself (merely “wanting to want” something). And I suppose that if his assertion of pure free will was a delusion, then so too was my reaction.
Are we like those Antarctic penguins, or are they like us? We go to the supermarket, they slither and wobble across miles of ice to the open sea in search of food. But here is one detail the wildlife programmes omit. When the penguins approach the water’s edge, they begin to dawdle and loiter. They have reached food, but also danger; the sea contains fish, but also seals. Their long journey might result not in eating but getting eaten—in which case their offspring back in the penguin-huddle will
starve to death and their own gene pool be terminated. So this is what the penguins do: they wait until one of their number, either more hungry or more anxious, gets to where the ice runs out, and is gazing down into the nutritious yet deadly ocean, and then, like a gang of commuters on a station platform, they nudge the imprudent bird into the sea. Hey, just testing! This is what those loveable, anthropomorphizable penguins are “really like.” And if we are shocked, they are at least behaving more rationally—more usefully, even more altruistically—than the gratuitous actor of our own species pushing a man from a train.
That penguin doesn’t have a would-you-rather. It is plunge or die—sometimes plunge and die. And some of our own would-you-rathers turn out to be equally hypothetical: ways of simplifying the unthinkable, pretending to control the uncontrollable. My mother considered quite seriously whether she would rather go deaf or go blind. Preferring one incapacity in advance seemed a superstitious method of ruling out the other. Except that, as it turned out, the “choice” never arose. Her stroke affected neither her hearing nor her sight—and yet she never did her nails again in what was left of her life.
My brother hopes for Grandpa’s death: felled by a stroke while gardening. (It was too early for Montaignean cabbage planting: he was trying to start his recalcitrant rotovator.) He fears the other family examples: Grandma’s long-drawn-out senility, Dad’s slow confinement and humiliation, Ma’s half-self-aware delusions. But there are so many other possibilities to choose from—or to have chosen for us; so many different doors, even if they are all marked Exit. In this respect, death is multiple-choice not would-you-rather, and prodigally democratic in its options.
Stravinsky said: “Gogol died screaming and Diaghilev died laughing, but Ravel died gradually. That is the worst.” He was right. There have been more violent artistic deaths, ones involving madness, terror, and banal absurdity (Webern shot dead by a GI after politely stepping on to the porch to light a cigar), but few as cruel as that of Ravel. Worse, it had a strange prefiguration—a musical pre-echo—in the death of a French composer of the previous generation. Emmanuel Chabrier had succumbed to tertiary syphilis in 1894, the year after the Paris premiere of his only attempt at serious opera, Gwendoline. This piece—perhaps the only opera to be set in eighth-century Britain—had taken ten years to be staged; by which time Chabrier’s disease was in its final phase, and his mind in never-never land. He sat in his box at the premiere, acknowledging the applause and smiling “almost without knowing why.” Sometimes, he would forget the opera was his, and murmur to a neighbour, “It’s good, it’s really very good.”
This story was well-known among the next generation of French composers. “Horrible, isn’t it?” Ravel used to say. “To go to a performance of Gwendoline and not recognize your own music!” I remember my friend Dodie Smith, in great age, being asked the tender, encouraging question, “Now, Dodie, you do remember that you used to be a famous playwright?” To which she replied, “Yes, I think so”—in rather the tone I imagine my father using when he said to my mother, “I think you’re my wife.” A milliner might not recognize her own hat, a labourer his own speed bump, a writer her words, a painter his canvas; this is poignant enough. But there is extra pain, for those who witness it, when a composer fails to recognize his own notes.
Ravel died gradually—it took five years—and it was the worst. At first his decline from Pick’s disease (a form of cerebral atrophy), though alarming, was non-specific. Words evaded him; motor skills went awry. He would grasp a fork by the wrong end; he became unable to sign his name; he forgot how to swim. When he went out to dinner, the housekeeper used to pin his address inside his coat as a precaution. But then the disease turned malignly particular and targeted Ravel the composer. He went to a recording of his string quartet, sat in the control room, offered various corrections and suggestions. After each movement had been recorded, he was asked if he wanted to listen through again, but declined. So the session went quickly, and the studio was pleased to have it all wrapped up in an afternoon. At the end, Ravel turned to the producer (and our guessing what he is going to say cannot lessen its impact): “That was really very good. Remind me of the composer’s name.” Another day, he went to a concert of his piano music. He sat through it with evident pleasure, but when the hall turned to acclaim him, he thought they were addressing the Italian colleague at his side, and so joined in their applause.
Ravel was taken to two leading French neurosurgeons. Another would-you-rather. The first judged his condition inoperable, and said that nature should be allowed to take its course. The second would have agreed had the patient been anyone but Ravel. However, if there were the slightest chance—for him a few more years, for us a little more music (which is “the best way of digesting time”) . . . And so the composer’s skull was opened up, and the damage seen to be extensive and irreparable. Ten days later, his head still turbanned with hospital windings, Ravel died.
Chapter 36
About twenty years ago I was asked if I would be interviewed for a book about death. I declined on writerly grounds: I didn’t want to talk away stuff which I might later need myself. I never read the book when it came out: perhaps from a superstitious—or rational—fear that one of its contributors might have better expressed what I was slowly working my way towards. Not long ago, I began cautiously browsing the first chapter, an interview with a certain “Thomas.” Except that it became instantly clear, after scarcely a page, that this “Thomas” was none other than my old death-friend and free-will eradicator G.
The primal would-you-rather about death (though again one in which we don’t have the choice) is: ignorance or knowledge? Would you prefer to receive le réveil mortel or to slumber on in quilted blindness? This might seem an easy one: if in doubt, opt for knowledge. But it’s the knowledge that causes the damage. As “Thomas”/G. puts it: “People who aren’t afraid, I think most of them just don’t know what death means . . . The standard theory of moral philosophy is that it’s a great evil for a person to be suddenly cut off [in the flower of life]; but it seems to me that the evil is knowing it’s going to happen. If it happened without your knowing, it wouldn’t matter.” Or at least, it would make us more akin to those penguins: the dupe who toddles to the water’s edge and is shouldered in by a non-gratuitous nudge may fear the seal but cannot conceptualize the eternal consequences of the seal.
G. has no difficulty understanding, or believing, that human beings, in all their complexity, simply disappear for ever. It is all part of “the profligacy of nature,” like the micro-engineering of a mosquito. “I think of it as nature sort of wildly over-shooting, splurging her gifts around; with human beings it’s just more of the same kind of profligacy. These extraordinary brains and sensibilities, produced in millions, and then just thrown away, disappearing into eternity. I don’t think man’s a special case, I think the theory of evolution explains it all. It’s a very beautiful theory, come to think of it, a marvellous and inspiring theory, though it has grim consequences for us.”
That’s my man! And perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we’ve got—or haven’t got—is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It’s everyone else who’s out of step. I think my sense of death—which appears exaggerated to some of my friends—is quite proportionate. For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever—including the jug—there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? My friend G. has a worse case of death, so I find his hauntedness excessive, not to say unhealthy (ah, the “healthy” attitude to it all—where is that to be found?).
For G. our only defence against death—or rather, ag
ainst the danger of not being able to think about anything else—lies in “the acquisition of worthwhile short-term worries.” He also consolingly quotes a study showing that fear of death drops off after the age of sixty. Well, I have got there before him, and can report that I am still waiting for the benefit. Only a couple of nights ago, there came again that alarmed and alarming moment, of being pitchforked back into consciousness, awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting “Oh no Oh No OH NO” in an endless wail, the horror of the moment—the minutes—overwhelming what might, to an objective witness, appear a shocking display of exhibitionist self-pity. An inarticulate one, too: for what sometimes shames me is the extraordinary lack of descriptive, or responsive, words that come out of my mouth. For God’s sake, you’re a writer, I say to myself. You do words. Can’t you improve on that? Can’t you face down death—well, you won’t ever face it down, but can’t you at least protest against it—more interestingly than this? We know that extreme physical pain drives out language; it’s dispiriting to learn that mental pain does the same.
I once read that Zola was similarly startled from his bed like a projectile, launched from sleep into mortal terror. In my unpublished twenties, I used to think of him fraternally—and also with apprehension: if this stuff is still happening to a world-famous writer in his fifties, then there’s not much chance of it getting better for me with the years. The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard once told me that the three most death-haunted people she had ever known were her ex-husband Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Betjeman. Tempting to conclude that it might be a writer thing, even a male writer thing. Amis used to maintain—comically, given his biography—that men were more sensitive than women.