Flaubert died in 1880, the same year as Zola’s mother. Uncoincidentally, this proved to be the year in which Zola received le réveil mortel. He was then forty (so in this respect I can pull rank on him). In memory, I had always pictured him being catapulted, like me, from sleep into wailing fear. But this was a proprietorial assimilation. In fact, he would be awake at the time: he and his wife Alexandrine, each unable to sleep from mortal terror, and each too embarrassed to confess it, would lie there side by side, with the flicker of a night light keeping utter darkness at bay. Then Zola would find himself projected from the bed—and the deadlock would be broken.
The novelist also developed an obsession with a particular window in his house at Medan. When his mother died, the staircase had proved too narrow and twisty for her coffin, so the undertakers had been obliged to lower her out through the window. Zola would now stare at it every time he passed, wondering whose corpse would be the next to travel by this route—his own or his wife’s.
Zola confessed these effects of le réveil mortel on Monday 6 March 1882, when he dined with Daudet, Turgenev, and Edmond de Goncourt, who wrote it all down. That evening the four of them—reduced from the original Dîner des Cinq by the loss of Flaubert—talked about death. Daudet started them off by admitting that for him death had become a kind of persecution, a poisoning of his life, to such an extent that he could no longer move into a new apartment without his eyes automatically seeking out the place where they would stand his coffin. Zola made his confessions, and then it was Turgenev’s turn. The suave Muscovite was as familiar with the thought of death as the rest of them, but had a technique for dealing with it: he would brush it away like this—and he demonstrated a little gesture of the hand. Russians, he explained, knew how to make things disappear into a “Slav mist,” which they summoned up to protect themselves from logical yet unpleasant trains of thought. Thus, if you were caught in a blinding snowstorm, you would deliberately not think about the cold, otherwise you would freeze to death. The same method could be successfully applied to the larger subject: you avoided it like this.
Twenty years later, Zola died. He did not achieve the belle mort he had once lauded—that of being suddenly crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. Instead he showed that, for a writer, “dying in character” contains an extra option. You may die in your personal character, or in your literary character. Some man-age to do both, as Hemingway proved when he pushed two shells into his favourite Boss shotgun (made in England, bought at Abercrombie & Fitch), then placed the barrels into his mouth.
Zola died in literary character, in a scene of psycho-melodrama worthy of his early fiction. He and Alexandrine had returned to Paris from the house with the threatening window. It was a chilly day in late September, so they ordered a fire to be lit in their bedroom. While they were away, work had been done on the roof of the apartment building, and here the narrative offers the reader a choice of interpretations. The chimney leading from their bedroom had been blocked, either by incompetent artisans or—so the conspiracy theory runs—by murderous anti-Dreyfusards. The Zolas retired to bed, locking the door as was their superstitious habit; the smokeless fuel in the grate gave off carbon monoxide. In the morning, when servants broke down the door, they found the writer dead on the floor, and Alexandrine—spared the killing concentration of fumes by a few extra feet—unconscious on the bed.
Zola’s body was still warm, so the doctors tried reviving him with the procedure employed five years previously on Daudet: rhythmic traction of the tongue. If this made slightly more sense in Zola’s case—the technique had been developed for victims of poisoning by sewer-gas—it was no more effective. Alexandrine, when she recovered, told of how the couple had woken in the night, troubled by what they took to be indigestion. She had wanted to call the servants, but he overruled her with what turned out to be his (modern, unheroic) last words: “We shall feel better in the morning.”
Zola was sixty-two when he died, exactly the same age as I shall be when this book is published. So let’s start again. LONDON MAN DIES: NOT MANY HURT. A London man, aged anything from sixty-two upwards, died yesterday. For most of his life, he enjoyed good health, and had never spent a night in hospital until his final illness. After a slow and impecunious professional start, he achieved more success than he had expected. After a slow and precarious emotional start, he achieved as much happiness as his nature permitted (“Mine has been a happy life, tinged with despair”). Despite the selfishness of his genes, he failed—or rather, declined—to hand them on, further believing that this refusal constituted an act of free will in the face of biological determinism. He wrote books, then he died. Though a satirical friend thought his life was divided between literature and the kitchen (and the wine bottle), there were other aspects to it: love, friendship, music, art, society, travel, sport, jokes. He was happy in his own company as long as he knew when that solitude would end. He loved his wife and feared death.
That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? The world throws up far worse lives and (I am guessing here) far worse deaths, so why the fuss about his departure? Why the fuss from him, that is? Surely this is committing the cardinal English sin of drawing attention to oneself. And does he not imagine that others fear death just as much as he does?
Well, he—no, let’s go back to I—I know many people who don’t think about it as much. And not thinking about it is the surest way of not fearing it—until it comes along. “The evil is knowing it’s going to happen.” My friend H., who occasionally rebukes me for morbidity, admits: “I know that everybody else is going to die, but I never think I am going to die.” Which generalizes into the commonplace: “We know we must die but we think we’re immortal.” Do people really hold such heaving contradictions in their heads? They must, and Freud thought it normal: “Our unconscious, then, does not believe in our own death; it behaves as if it were immortal.” So my friend H. has merely promoted her unconscious to take charge of her conscious.
Somewhere, between such useful, tactical turning away and my appalled pit-gazing there lies—there must lie—a rational, mature, scientific, liberal, middle position. So here it is, enunciated by Dr. Sherwin Nuland, American thanatologist and author of How We Die: “A realistic expectation also demands our acceptance that one’s allotted time on earth must be limited to an allowance consistent with the continuity of our species . . . We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions and trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died—in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.”
All of which is not just reasonable but wise, of course, and rooted in Montaigne (“Make room for others, as others have made room for you”); yet to me quite unpersuasive. There is no logical reason why the continuity of our species should depend upon my death, or yours, or anybody else ’s. The planet may be getting a bit fullish, but the universe is empty—LOTS AVAILABLE, as the cemetery placard reminds us. If we didn’t die, the world wouldn’t die—on the contrary, more of it would still be alive. As for the trillions and trillions of living things that “in a sense”—a phrase of giveaway weakness—died for us: I’m sorry, I don’t even buy the notion that my grandfather died “in a sense” that I might live, let alone my “Chinese” great-grandfather, forgotten forebears, ancestral apes, slimy amphibia, and primitive swimming items. Nor do I accept that I die in order that others may live. Nor that ongoing life is a triumph. A triumph? That’s far too self-congratulatory, a bit of sentimentalism designed to soften the blow. If any doctor tells me, as I lie in my hospital bed, that my death will not only help others to live, but be symptomatic of the triumph of humanity, I shall watch him very carefully when next he adjusts my drip.
Sherwin Nuland, whose sympathetic good sense I am declining to accept, comes from a profession that is—to this lay person’s surprise—even more
death-fearing than my own. Studies indicate that “of all the professions, medicine is the one most likely to attract people with high personal anxieties about dying.” This is good news in one major sense—Doctors are Against Death; less good in that they may unwittingly transfer their own fears on to their patients, over-insist on curability, and shun death as failure. My friend D. studied at one of the London teaching hospitals, which traditionally double as rugby-playing institutions. Some years previously, there had been a student who, despite regularly failing his exams, had been allowed to stay on and on because of his prowess on the pitch. Eventually, this skill began to decline and he was told—yes, we must make way for others—to leave both desk and training field. So instead of becoming a doctor, he made a career switch too implausible for any novel, and became a gravedigger. More years passed, and he returned to the hospital, this time as a cancer patient. D. told me how he was put in a room at the top of the hospital, and no one would go near him. It was not just the appalling stink from the necrotic flesh of his pharyngeal cancer; it was the wider stink of failure.
“Do not go gentle into that good night,” Dylan Thomas instructed his dying father (and us); then, repeating his point, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” These popular lines speak more of youthful grief (and poetic self-congratulation) than wisdom based on clinical knowledge. Nuland states plainly that “No matter the degree to which a man thinks he has convinced himself that the process of dying is not to be dreaded, he will yet approach his final illness with dread.” Gentleness—and serenity—are unlikely to be options. Further, there are “over-whelming odds” against death occurring as we hope (the cabbage-planting scenario): the manner, the place, the company will all disappoint us. Further still, and in contradiction to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous five-step theory—according to which the dying pass successively through Denial, Anger, Bargaining, and Depression to final Acceptance—Nuland observes that in his experience, and that of every clinician he knows, “Some patients never, at least overtly, progress beyond denial.”
Maybe all this Montaignery, this pit-gazing, this attempt to make death, if not your friend, at least your familiar enemy—to make death boring, even to bore death itself with your attention—maybe this is not the right approach after all. Perhaps we would do better to ignore death while we live, and then go into strict denial as life approaches its end; this might help us, in Eugene O’Kelly’s grotesque phrase, to “‘succeed’ at death.” Though of course by “do better,” I mean “help our lives pass more easily” rather than “discover as much truth about this world before we leave it.” Which is the more useful to us? Pit-gazers may well end up feeling like Anita Brookner heroines—those dutiful, melancholy truth-adherents perpetually losing out to jaunty vulgarians who not only extract more brash pleasure from life but rarely end up paying for their self-delusions.
Chapter 52
I understand (I think) that life depends on death. That we cannot have a planet in the first place without the previous deaths of collapsing stars; further, that in order for complex organisms like you and me to inhabit this planet, for there to be self-conscious and self-replicating life, an enormous sequence of evolutionary mutations has had to be tried out and discarded. I can see this, and when I ask “Why is death happening to me?” I can applaud the theologian John Bowker’s crisp reply: “Because the universe is happening to you.” But my understanding of all this has not evolved in its turn: towards, say, acceptance, let alone comfort. And I don’t remember putting in to have the universe happen to me.
Non-death-fearing friends with children occasionally suggest that I might feel differently were I a parent myself. Perhaps; and I can see how well children function as “worthwhile short-term worries” (and long-term ones) of the kind recommended by my friend G. On the other hand, my awareness of death struck long before children were a consideration in my life; nor did having them help Zola, Daudet, my father, or the thanatophobic G., who has produced twice his demographic quota. In some cases, children can even make things worse: for instance, mothers may feel their mortality more acutely when the children leave home—their biological function has been fulfilled, and all that the universe now needs of them is to die.
The main argument, however, is that your children “carry you on” after your death: you will not be entirely extinguished, and foreknowledge of this brings consolation at a conscious or sub-conscious level. But do my brother and I carry on our parents? Is this what we think we’re doing—and if so, is it in a fashion remotely close to “what they would have wanted”? No doubt we are bad examples. So let’s assume that the proposed intergenerational portage occurs in a manner satisfactory to all, that you are part of a rare stack of reciprocally loving generations, each seeking to perpetuate its predecessor’s memory, virtue, and genes. How far does such “carrying on” go? One generation, two, three? What happens when you reach the first generation born after you are dead, the one with no possible memory of you, and for whom you are mere folklore? Will you be carried on by them, and will they know that this is what they are doing? As the great Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor put it: folklore “can never get anything right.”
Did my mother question the manner in which I might carry her on when I published the “bombardment” of filth that was my first novel? I doubt it. My next book was a pseudonymous thriller of significantly higher filth-content, so I advised my parents against reading it. But my mother was undeterrable, and duly reported back that parts of it “made my eyes stand out like chapel hatpegs.” I reminded her of the health warning. “Well,” she replied, “you can’t just leave a book on a shelf.”
I doubt she viewed her two sons as the future hod-carriers of family memory. She herself preferred retrospection. She liked us best—as she did most children—between the ages of about three and ten. Old enough not to be “mucky pups,” but still to acquire the insolent complications of adolescence, let alone the equality and then surpassingness of adulthood. There was nothing, of course, that my brother and I could do—short of a tragic early death—to prevent ourselves committing the banal sin of growing up.
Chapter 53
On the radio, I heard a specialist in consciousness explain how there is no centre to the brain—no location of self—either physically or computationally; and that our notion of a soul or spirit must be replaced by the notion of a “distributed neuronal process.” She further explained that our sense of morality comes from belonging to a species which has developed reciprocal altruism; that the concept of free will, as in “making conscious decisions from a little self inside” must be discarded; that we are machines for copying and handing on bits of culture; and that the consequences of accepting all this are “really weird.” To begin with it means, as she put it, that “these words coming out of this mouth at this moment, are not emanating from a little me in here, they are emanating from the entire universe just doing its stuff.”
Camus thought that life was pointless—“absurd” was indeed the better word to choose, richer in characterization of our lonely position as beings “without a reasonable reason for being.” But he believed that nonetheless we must, while here, invent rules for ourselves. He further said that “what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport”—specifically to football, and his time as a goalkeeper for Racing Universitaire in Algiers. Life as a game of football, its rules arbitrary yet necessary, since without them the game simply couldn’t be played, and we would never have those moments of beauty and joy which football—and life—can bring.
When I first discovered this comparison, I applauded it like a fan from the terraces. I was also, like Camus, a goalkeeper, if a less distinguished one. My last ever game was for the New Statesman against the Slough Labour Party. The weather was miserable, the goalmouth a mudpatch, and I lacked proper boots. After letting in five goals I was too ashamed to return to the dressing room, so drove, sodden and dispirited, straight back to my flat. What I learnt that aft
ernoon about social and moral behaviour in a godless universe came from two small boys who wandered round behind my goal and briefly studied my flailing attempts to keep the Slough Labour Party at bay. After a few minutes, one observed cuttingly, “Must be a stand-in goalie.” Sometimes we are not just amateurs in our own lives, but made to feel like substitutes.
Nowadays, Camus’ metaphor is outdated (and not just because sport has become a zone of increasing dishonesty and dishonour). The air has been let out of the tyres of free will, and the joy we find in the beautiful game of life is a mere example of cultural copying. No longer: out there is a godless and absurd universe, so let’s mark out the pitch and pump up the ball. Instead: there is no separation between “us” and the universe, and the notion that we are responding to it as a separate entity is a delusion. If this is indeed the case, then the only comfort I can extract from it all is that I shouldn’t have felt so bad about letting in five goals against the Slough Labour Party. It was just the universe doing its stuff.
The expert in consciousness was also asked how she viewed her own death. This was her reply: “I would view it with equanimity, as just another step, you know. ‘Oh, here’s this—I’m in this radio studio with you—what a wonderful place to be. Oh, here I am on my deathbed—this is where I am . . .’ Acceptance I would say is the best that could come out of this way of thinking about things. Live life fully now, here—do the best you can, and if you ask me why I should do that—I don’t know. That’s where you hit the question of ultimate morality—but still, that’s what this thing does. And I expect it to do it on its deathbed.”