In widowhood, she said to me, “I’ve had the best of life.” There would have been no point in the politeness of contradiction, of offering her a “Yes, but.” Some years before, she had said to me, in Dad’s presence, “Of course, your father’s always preferred dogs to humans,” to which my father, challenged, gave a sort of confirming nod which I took—perhaps wrongly—as a strike against her. (I also reflected that, despite knowing this, she would not have another dog in the forty or so years since the disappearance of Maxim: le chien.) And many, many years before that, when I was an adolescent, she said, “If I had my time again, I’d paddle my own canoe,” which I then took merely as a strike against my father, failing to consider that any such rescheduled paddling would have obliterated her children as well. Perhaps I am putting together quotes to which I am giving false coherence. And the fact that my mother did not die of grief, but was left for five years in her own canoe when least equipped to paddle it, does not signify either.
Some months after my father’s death, I was talking to my mother on the phone. I told her that friends were coming to supper, and it emerged that I was cooking one course and my wife the other. With something as close to wistfulness in her voice as I had ever heard, she said, “How nice it must be for the two of you to cook.” And then, adopting a much more typical tone, “I couldn’t even trust your father to lay the table.” “Really?” “No, he’d throw things down any old how. Just like his mother.” His mother! My father’s mother had died nearly half a century previously, while Dad was in India during the war. Granny Barnes was rarely mentioned in our household; my mother’s family, alive or dead, had primacy. “Oh,” I said, trying to keep the intense curiosity from my voice. “Was she like that?” “Yes,” my mother replied, disinterring a fifty-year-old snobbery, “she used to lay the knives the wrong way round.”
I imagine my brother’s mental life proceeding in a sequence of discrete and interconnected thoughts, whereas mine lollops from anecdote to anecdote. But then, he is a philosopher and I am a novelist, and even the most intricately structured novel must give the appearance of lolloping. Life lollops. And these anecdotes of mine should be treated with suspicion because they come from me. Another anecdotalist, recording my parents’ last years, might comment on how devotedly and efficiently my mother looked after my father, how coping with him wore her out, but how impressively she still managed the house and the garden all that time. And this would be true too, even if I could not help noticing a grammatical change in the way she ran the garden. During the final months Dad was in hospital, the tomatoes, the beans, and everything else in greenhouse and ground, were renamed “my tomatoes,” “my beans,” and so on, as if Dad had been dispossessed of them even before he was dead.
That other anecdotalist might complain how unfair this son is on his entirely crime-free mother by writing a short story in which he turns her into a battering wife. (Renard discovered an edition of Poil de Carotte being passed round Chitry-les-Mines with the anonymous inscription: “Copy found by chance in a bookshop. A book in which he speaks ill of his mother in order to take revenge on her.”) Further, how indecent it is for a son to describe his father’s physical decline; how this contradicts the affection he claims to feel; and how the son can only face unpleasant truths by looking for something undignified or risible, like the story of a confused old man trying to pee into his electric razor. And some of this might be true too. Though the business with the electric razor is more complicated, and I would like to defend my father’s behaviour here as almost rational. Throughout his life, he had shaved with razor and brush, the lather coming over the decades from bowl, stick, tube, and can. My mother never liked the mess he made in the basin—“Mucky pup” being the term of disapproval in our dogless household—so when electric razors came in, she kept trying to persuade Dad to get one. He always refused: this was one territory where he would not be ruled. I remember, during one of his first spells in hospital, my mother and I arriving to catch him in hopeless mid-shave: attempting, with weakened wrist, blunt blade, and inadequate foam, to spruce himself up for our visit. But at some point in his closing years, her campaign must have succeeded—perhaps because his legs failed and he could no longer stand at the basin. So I can imagine his resentment at this electric razor (which I also imagine her buying). It must have seemed both a reminder of his lost physique, and proof of a final defeat in a lengthy marital argument. Why would you not want to pee into it?
“I think you’re my wife.” Yes, remaining in character: this we hope for, this we cling to, as we look ahead to everything collapsing. So—and this has been a long way round to an answer—I doubt that when my time comes I shall look for the theoretical comfort of an illusion farewelling an illusion, a chance bundle unbundling itself. I shall want to remain in what I shall obstinately think of as my character. Francis Steegmuller, who had attended Stravinsky’s funeral in Venice, died at the same age as the composer. In the last weeks of his life, he asked his wife, the novelist Shirley Hazzard, how old he was. She told him he was eighty-eight. “Oh God,” he replied. “Eighty-eight. Did I know about this?” That sounds exactly like him—the “did” so different from a “do.”
Chapter 49
“If I were a scribbler,” wrote Montaigne—though whether he accounted himself more, or less, than one is not clear—“I would produce a compendium of the various ways in which men have died. (Anyone who taught men how to die would teach them how to live.) Dicearchus did write a book with such a title, but for another and less useful purpose.”
Dicearchus was a Peripatetic philosopher, and his book, The Perishing of Human Life, has, with complete appropriateness, failed to survive. The short version of Montaigne’s scribblerish anthology would be a collection of famous last words. Hegel, on his deathbed, said, “Only one man ever understood me,” then added, “and he didn’t understand me.” Emily Dickinson said, “I must go in. The fog is rising.” The grammarian Père Bouhours said: “Je vas, ou je vais mourir: l’un ou l’autre se dit.” (Loosely, “Soon I shall, or soon I will die: both are correct.”) Sometimes a last word might be a last gesture: Mozart’s was to mouth the sound of the timpani in his Requiem, whose unfinished score lay open on his bedspread.
Are such moments proof of dying in character? Or is there something inherently suspicious about them: something of the press release, the AP wire, the prepared impromptu? When I was sixteen or seventeen, our English master—not the one who later killed himself, but one with whom we studied King Lear and thus learnt that “Ripeness is all”—told the class, with more than a touch of self-satisfaction, that he had already scripted his own last words; or rather, word. He was planning to say, simply, “Damn!”
This master had always been sceptical about me. “I hope, Barnes,” he once challenged me, after an unsatisfactory lesson, “that you’re not one of those bloody back-row cynics.” Me, sir? Cynic, sir? Oh no—I believe in baa-lambs and hedgerow blossom and human goodness, sir. But even I thought this planned self-farewelling pretty stylish, as did Alex Brilliant. We were a) impressed by the wit; b) surprised that this old loser of a schoolmaster should have such self-knowledge; and c) determined that we wouldn’t live our own lives so that they came to the same verbal conclusion. I hope that Alex had forgotten this by the time he was killing himself, with pills, over a woman, a decade or so later.
At around the same time, by a strange social coincidence, I heard about the end of this master’s life. He had suffered a stroke which left him paralysed and speechless. Every so often he would be visited by an alcoholic friend who—believing, as alcoholics do, that everyone else is also much better with a drink inside them—used to smuggle a bottle of whisky into the residential home and pour it into the old schoolmaster’s mouth while the eyes goggled back at him. Had there been time for that last word before the stroke hit, or was he able to bring it to mind then, as he lay there, having booze slopped into him? It’s enough to make a bloody back-row cynic out of you.
Modern
medicine, by extending the period of dying, has rather done for famous last words, given that their utterance depends upon the speaker knowing it is time to deliver them. Those determined to go out on a phrase could, I suppose, pronounce it and then lapse into a deliberate, monastic silence until it is all over. But there was always something heroic about famous last words, and given that we no longer live in heroic times, their loss will not be much lamented. We should celebrate instead ungrandiose, yet still characterful, last words. Francis Steegmuller, a few hours before dying in a Naples hospital, said (presumably in Italian) to a male nurse who was cranking up his bed, “You have beautiful hands.” A last, admirable catching at a moment of pleasure in observing the world, even as you are leaving it. A. E. Housman’s last words were to the doctor giving him a final—and perhaps knowingly sufficient—morphine injection: “Beautifully done.” Nor need solemnity rule. Renard recorded in his Journal the death of Toulouse-Lautrec. The painter’s father, a known eccentric, came to visit his son and instead of concerning himself with the patient immediately started trying to catch the flies circulating in the sick room. The painter, from his bed, remarked, “You stupid old bugger!,” then fell back and died.
Chapter 50
Historically, the French state admitted only two kinds of human being on its territory: the living and the dead. Nothing in between. If you were alive, you were allowed to ambulate and pay taxes. If you were dead, you had to be either buried or cremated. You might think this a typically bureaucratic, not to say otiose, categorization. But about twenty years ago its legal truth became a matter of challenge in the courts.
The case arose when a woman in early middle age, about to die of cancer, was cryonically frozen and placed in a refrigeration plant by her husband. The French state, refusing to accept that she was anything other than dead, required him to bury her or burn her. The husband took the case through the courts, and was eventually granted permission to keep his wife in his cellar. A couple of decades later, he also not-quite-died, and was also cryonically frozen to await the marital reunion he profoundly anticipated.
To thanato-liberals, looking for a middle position between the free market use-it-then-junk-it approach to life, and the socialist utopia of eternity for all, cryonics might seem to offer an answer. You die, but you don’t die. Your blood is drained, your body frozen, and you are kept alive, or at least not totally dead, until such time as your disease has become curable, or life expectancy stretched so that you awake with many new, long years ahead. Technology reinterprets religion—and delivers man-made resurrection.
The French story ended recently in a grimly familiar way: some electric malfunction raised the temperature of the bodies to a level which made the return to life impossible, and the couple’s son was left with every freezer-owner’s nightmare. What struck me more than the story itself, however, was the newspaper photograph accompanying it. Taken in the cellar of the French house, it showed the husband—then a “widower” for many years—sitting beside the shabby unit containing his wife. On top of the freezer was a jug of flowers and a framed photograph of the woman in her glamorous prime. And there, next to this cabinet of absurd hopefulness, sat a haggard and depressed-looking old man.
It was never going to work, was it? And we should be grateful for them that it didn’t. Stop time? Rewind the clocks (or move the hands backwards—something my mother would never have allowed)? Imagine that you are a vibrant young woman, “dying” in your thirties; imagine waking up and discovering that your faithful husband has fulfilled his natural span before being frozen in his turn, and that you are now married to someone who has aged twenty, thirty, forty years in your absence. You then pick up where you left off? Imagine the best-case scenario: that you both “die” at more or less the same age, say in your fifties, and are resuscitated when there is a cure for your diseases. What exactly has happened? You have been brought back to life only to die all over again, without even re-experiencing youth this time round. You should have remembered, and followed, the example of Pomponius Atticus.
To have your youth again, to cheat not just your second death, but the first one as well—the one Montaigne judged the harder of the two: this is the real fantasy. To dwell in Tir-na-nog, the mythical Celtic land of the ever-young. Or to step into the fountain of youth: the medieval world’s popular, materialistic short cut to paradise. As you soaked in its waters your skin instantly pinkened, your bags lifted, and those chickeny bits grew taut. None of the bureaucracy of divine judgement and soul-weighing first. The technological magic of rejuvenating water, delivering youth where clunky cryonics can only deliver a delayed old age. Not that cryonophiles will give up: those currently being frozen will doubtless be counting on stem-cell technology to rewind the biological clock by the time they get their different kind of réveil mortel: “O rational creature / Who wishes for eternal life.”
I was too quick to judgement on Somerset Maugham. “The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.” Mine was a young man’s objection: yes, I love this person, and believe it will last, but even if it doesn’t there will be someone else for me, and for her. We shall both love again, and perhaps, schooled by unhappiness, do better next time. But Maugham was not denying this; he was looking beyond it. I remember a didactic story (perhaps from Sir Thomas Browne) of a man who followed a succession of his friends to the grave, each time feeling a little less sorrow, until the point where he could stare down into the grave with equanimity, and think of it as his own. The moral was not that pit-gazing works, that philosophizing will teach us how to die; the story was rather a lament for the loss of the ability to feel, first about your friends, then about yourself, and finally about even your own extinction.
This would indeed be our tragedy, from which death might well offer the only relief. I have always mistrusted the idea that old age brings serenity, suspecting that many of the old were just as emotionally tormented as the young, yet socially forbidden to acknowledge it. (This was the objective reason for awarding my father a septuagenarian affair in that story.) But what if I was wrong—doubly so—and this required appearance of serenity masked not a roil of feelings but its opposite: indifference? At sixty, I look around at my many friendships, and can recognize that some of them are not so much friendships any more as memories of friendships. (There is still pleasure in memory, but even so.) New friendships come, of course, but not so many as to deflect the fear that some terrible cooling-off—the emotional equivalent of planet death—might lie in wait. As your ears get bigger, and your fingernails split, your heart shrinks. So here’s another would-you-rather. Would you rather die in the pain of being wrenched away from those you have long loved, or would you rather die when your emotional life has run its course, when you gaze out at the world with indifference, both towards others and towards yourself? “No memory of having starred / Atones for later disregard / Or keeps the end from being hard.” Turgenev, having just turned sixty, wrote to Flaubert: “This is the start of the tail-end of life. A Spanish proverb says that the tail is the hardest part to flay . . . Life becomes completely self-centred—a defensive struggle with death; and this exaggeration of the personality means that it ceases to be of interest, even to the person in question.”
It is not just pit-gazing that is hard work, but life-gazing. It is difficult for us to contemplate, fixedly, the possibility, let alone the certainty, that life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species, as it has developed in all its frenzied and over-engineered complexity, will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us. This is what growing up means. And it is a frightening prospect for a race which has for so long relied upon its own invented gods for explanation and consolation. Here is a Catholic journalist rebuking Richard Dawkins for poisoning the hearts and minds of the young: “Intellectual monsters l
ike Hategod Dawkie spread their despairing gospel of nihilism, pointlessness, vacuity, the emptiness of life, the lack of significance anywhere at any time and, in case you don’t know this useful word, floccinaucinihilipilification.” (It means “estimating as worthless.”) Behind the excess, and the misrepresentation, of the attack, you can smell the fear. Believe in what I believe—believe in God, and purpose, and the promise of eternal life—because the alternative is fucking terrifying. You would be like those children walking fearfully through the Austrian forest at night. But instead of nice Herr Witters urging you to think only of God, there would be beastly Old Dawks the science master scaring you with tales of Bears and Death, and ordering you to take your mind off things by admiring the stars.
Chapter 51
Flaubert asked: “Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously?” He said we should have “the religion of despair” and be “equal to our destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it.” He knew what he thought about death: “Does the self survive? To say that it does seems to me a mere reflection of our presumptuousness and pride, a protest against the eternal order! Death has perhaps no more secrets to reveal to us than life.” But while he distrusted religions, he had a tenderness towards the spiritual impulse, and was suspicious of militant atheism. “Each dogma in itself is repulsive to me,” he wrote. “But I consider the feeling that engendered them to be the most natural and poetic expression of humanity. I don’t like those philosophers who have dismissed it as foolishness and humbug. What I find there is necessity and instinct. So I respect the black man kissing his fetish as much as I do the Catholic kneeling before the Sacred Heart.”