He certainly sounds more sanguine and practical than I was, when, in the crush of the morning Tube, some brute in a suit jammed his thigh between my legs as if there really was nowhere else to put it. Or when Edwards (as he was not called), an older boy with a pustular complexion, attempted what was more an assault than a seduction in a Southern Region compartment on the way back from rugby. I found it unwelcome and, if not repugnant, certainly alarming, and have always been able to remember the exact words I used when rebuffing his attention. “Don’t get sexy, Edwards,” I said (though it was not Edwards). The words worked, but I remembered them not so much for their effectiveness as because even so they felt not quite right. What he had done—a quick finger-slash at my trousered balls—was not remotely what I considered sexy (which involved breasts, for a start), and I felt my answer had suggested something not really the case.
Chapter 11
At Oxford, I read Montaigne for the first time. He is where our modern thinking about death begins; he is the link between the wise exemplars of the Ancient World and our attempt to find a modern, grown-up, non-religious acceptance of our inevitable end. Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir. To be a philosopher is to learn how to die. Montaigne is quoting Cicero, who is in turn referring to Socrates. His learned and famous pages on death are stoical, bookish, anecdotal, epigrammatic, and consoling (in purpose, anyway); they are also urgent. As my mother pointed out, people didn’t live half so long in the old days. Forty was doing very well, given pestilence and war, with the doctor as likely to kill as cure. To die from “a draining away of one’s strength caused by extreme old age” was in Montaigne’s day a “rare, singular and extraordinary death.” Nowadays we assume it as our right.
Philippe Ariès observed that when death really began to be feared, it ceased to be talked about. Increased longevity has compounded this: since the matter seems less immediately pressing, it has become morbidly bad manners to raise it. The way we strenuously put off thinking about death reminds me of a long-running advertisement for Pearl Insurance which my brother and I liked to quote to one another. Pensions, like false teeth and chiropodists, were something so far distant as to be largely comical. This was somehow confirmed by the naive line drawings of a man with an increasingly anxious face. At age twenty-five, the face is cheerily complacent: “They tell me the job is not pension-able.” By thirty-five, a little doubt has begun to set in: “Unfortunately, my work does not bear a pension.” And so on—with the word “pension” set each time amid an admonitory oblong of grey—until age sixty-five: “Without a pension I really don’t know what I shall do.” Yes, Montaigne would say, you certainly should have started thinking about death a little earlier.
In his day, the question was constantly in front of you—unless you took the remedy of the common people who, according to Montaigne, pretended that it did not exist. But philosophers, and the mentally curious, looked to history, and to the Ancients, in search of how best to die. Nowadays, our ambitions have grown more puny. “Courage,” Larkin wrote in “Aubade,” his great death-poem, “means not scaring others.” Not back then it didn’t. It meant a great deal more: showing others how to die honourably, wisely, and with constancy.
One of Montaigne’s key instances is the story of Pomponius Atticus, a correspondent of Cicero’s. When Atticus fell ill, and medical attempts to prolong his existence merely prolonged his pain, he decided that the best solution was to starve himself to death. No need to petition a court in those days, citing the terminal deterioration in your “quality of life”: Atticus, being a Free Ancient, merely informed his friends and family of his intention, then refused food and waited for the end. In this, he was much confounded. Miraculously, abstinence turned out to be the best cure for his (unnamed) condition; and soon, the sick man was undeniably on the mend. There was much rejoicing and feasting; perhaps the doctors even withdrew their bills. But Atticus interrupted the merriment. Since we all must die one day, he announced, and since I have already made such fine strides in that direction, I have no desire to turn around now, only to start again another time. And so, to the admiring dismay of those around him, Atticus continued to refuse food and went to his exemplary death.
Montaigne believed that, since we cannot defeat death, the best form of counterattack is to have it constantly in mind: to think of death whenever your horse stumbles or a tile falls from a roof. You should have the taste of death in your mouth and its name on your tongue. To anticipate death in this way is to release yourself from its servitude: further, if you teach someone how to die, then you teach them how to live. Such constant death-awareness does not make Montaigne melancholy; rather, it renders him prone to fanciful dreaming, to reverie. He hopes that death, his companion, his familiar, will make its final house-call when he is in the middle of doing something ordinary—like planting his cabbages.
Montaigne tells the instructive story of a Roman Caesar approached by an ancient and decrepit soldier. The man had once served under him, and is now seeking permission to rid himself of his burdensome life. Caesar looks the fellow up and down, then asks, with the rough wit generalship seems to inspire, “What makes you think the thing you have at the moment is life?” For Montaigne, the death of youth, which often takes place unnoticed, is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as “death” is no more than the death of old age (forty or so in his time, seventy and more in ours). The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth to crabbed and regretful age.
But Montaigne is a compendious writer, and if this argument fails to convince, he has many others. For instance: if you have lived well, used life to the full, then you will be happy to let it go; whereas if you have misused life and found it miserable, then you will not regret its passing. (A proposition which seems to me entirely reversible: those in the first category might want their happy lives to continue indefinitely, those in the second might hope for a change of luck.) Or: if you’ve truly lived for a single day, in the fullest sense, then you’ve seen everything. (No!) Well then, if you’ve lived like that for a whole year, you’ve seen everything. (Still no.) Anyway, you should make room on earth for others, just as others have made room for you. (Yes, but I didn’t ask them to.) And why complain of being taken, when all are taken? Think of how many others will die on the same day as you. (True, and some of them will be as pissed off as I am about it.) Further, and finally, what exactly are you asking for when you complain against death? Do you want an immortality spent on this earth, given the terms and conditions currently applicable? (I see the argument, but how about a bit of immortality? Half? OK, I’ll settle for a quarter.)
Chapter 12
My brother points out that the first joke about cellular renewal was made in the 5th century bc, and involved “a chap refusing to repay a debt on the grounds that he was no longer the chap who had been lent the money.” He further points out that I have misinterpreted Montaigne’s tag line philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir. What Cicero meant was not that thinking regularly about death makes you fear it less, but rather that the philosopher, when philosophizing, is practising for death—in the sense that he is spending time with his mind and ignoring the body which death will obliterate. For Platonists, after death you became a pure soul, liberated from corporeal impediment, and thus better able to think freely and clearly. So while alive, the philosopher had to prepare for this post-mortal state, by techniques such as fasting and self-flagellation. Platonists believed that, after death, things started looking up. Epicureans, on the other hand, believed that, after death, there was nothing. Cicero, apparently (I use “apparently” in the sense of “my brother also told me”), combined the two traditions into a cheery Antique either/or: “After death, either we feel better or we feel nothing.”
I ask what is supposed to happen to the very large population of non-philosophers in the Platonic afterworld. Apparently, all ensouled creatures, including animals and birds—and perha
ps even plants—are judged on their behaviour in the life they’ve just finished. Those who don’t make the grade return to earth for another corporeal round, perhaps going up or down a species (becoming, say, a fox or a goose) or just up or down within a species (being promoted, for instance from female to male). Philosophers, my brother explains, don’t automatically win disembodiment: you have to be a good chap as well for that. But if they do win, they then have a head start on the multitudes of non-philosophers—not to mention water lilies and dandelions. They also, of course, have a better go of things in this life, by their advance closeness to that ultimate ideal condition. “Yes,” he continues. “There are some questions you might want to raise (e.g. what’s the point of getting a head start in a race that goes on for ever?). But it’s not really worth the time thinking about the matter—it is (in technical philosophical jargon) a complete load of bollocks.”
I ask him to elaborate on his dismissal of the line “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him” as “soppy.” He admits that he isn’t really sure how to take my statement: “I suppose as a way of saying ‘I don’t believe there are any gods, but I wish there were (or perhaps: but I wish I did).’ I can see how someone might say something like that (try putting ‘dodos’ or ‘yetis’ for ‘gods’), tho’ for my part I’m quite content with the way things are.” You can tell he teaches philosophy, can’t you? I ask him about a specific matter, he breaks down the proposition logically, and supplies alternative nouns to display its absurdity, or weakness, or soppiness. But his answer seems just as strange to me as my question did to him. I hadn’t asked him what he thought about someone missing dodos or yetis (or even gods in the lowercase plural), but God.
I check whether he has ever had any religious feelings or yearnings. NO and NO is his reply—“Unless you count being moved by the Messiah, or Donne’s sacred sonnets.” I wonder if this certainty has been passed on to his two daughters, now in their thirties. Any religious sentiments/faith/supernatural longings, I ask. “No, never, not at all,” replies the younger. “Unless you count not walking on the lines on the pavement as a supernatural longing.” We agree that we don’t. Her sister admits to “a brief yearning to be religious when I was about eleven. But this was because my friends were, because I wanted to pray as a way of getting things, and because the Girl Guides pressured you to be Christian. This went away fairly quickly when my prayers went unanswered. I suppose I am agnostic or even atheist.”
I am glad she has maintained the family tradition of giving up religion on trivial grounds. My brother because he suspected George VI had not gone to heaven; me in order not to be distracted from masturbation; my niece because the stuff she prayed for wasn’t immediately delivered. But I suspect such breezy illogic is quite normal. Here, for instance, is the biologist Lewis Wolpert: “I was quite a religious child, saying my prayers each night and asking God for help on various occasions. It did not seem to help and I gave it all up around sixteen and have been an atheist ever since.” No subsequent reflection from any of us that perhaps God’s main business, were He to exist, might not be as an adolescent helpline, goods-provider or masturbation-scourge. No, out with Him once and for all.
A common response in surveys of religious attitudes is to say something like, “I don’t go to church, but I have my own personal idea of God.” This kind of statement makes me in turn react like a philosopher. Soppy, I cry. You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you? Because that’s what matters. Whether He’s an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky, or a life force, or a disinterested prime mover, or a clockmaker, or a woman, or a nebulous moral force, or Nothing At All, what counts is what He, She, It, or Nothing thinks of you rather than you of them. The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. It also doesn’t matter whether God is just or benevolent or even observant—of which there seems startlingly little proof—only that He exists.
The only old man with a white beard that I knew when growing up was my great-grandfather, my mother’s father’s father: Alfred Scoltock, a Yorkshireman and (inevitably) schoolmaster. There is a photo of my brother and me standing on either side of him in some now unidentifiable back garden. My brother is perhaps seven or eight, I am four or five, and Great-Grandpa is as old as the hills. His beard is not long and flowing as in cartoons of God, but short cut and bristly. (I don’t know if the scrape of it against my infant cheek actually happened, or is merely the memory of an apprehension.) My brother and I are smart and smiling—I more smiling than him—in short-sleeved shirts beautifully ironed by our mother; my shorts still have decent creases in them, though his are rather shockingly rumpled. Great-Grandpa is unsmiling, and to my eye looks faintly pained, as if aware that he is being recorded for a posterity he is on the very verge of. A friend, looking at this photo, dubbed him my “Chinese ancestor,” and there is something slightly Confucian about him.
Quite how wise he was, I have no idea. According to my mother, who favoured the males in her family, he was a highly intelligent autodidact. Two examples of this were ritually given: that he had taught himself chess, and was able to play to a high standard; and that when my mother, reading modern languages at Birmingham University, went on an exchange visit to Nancy, Great-Grandpa had taught himself French from a book so that he could converse with her pen pal when the two young women returned.
My brother met him several times, but his memories are less flattering, and perhaps explain why his smile in the photograph is more restrained than mine. The family’s Confucian “stank something horrible,” and was accompanied by “his daughter (Auntie Edie) who was unmarried, slightly soft in the head, and covered in eczema.” My brother recalls no chess playing or French speaking. In his memory, there is only an ability to do the Daily Mail crossword without filling in a single square. “He would doze after lunch, occasionally muttering aardvark or zebu.”
Chapter 13
“I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.” “God does not believe in our God.” “Yes, God exists, but He knows no more about it than we do.” The varying suppositions of Jules Renard, one of my dead, French, non-blood relatives. Born in 1864, he grew up in the Nièvre, a rustic and little-visited part of northern Burgundy. His father, François, was a builder who rose to be mayor of their village, Chitry-les-Mines. He was taciturn, anti-clerical and rigidly truthful. His mother, Anne-Rosa, was garrulous, bigoted and mendacious. The death of their firstborn child so embittered François that he barely concerned himself with the next three: Amélie, Maurice, and Jules. After the birth of the youngest, François stopped speaking to Anne-Rosa, and didn’t address her again for the remaining thirty years of his life. In this silent war Jules—whose sympathies lay with his father—was often used as go-between and porte parole: an unenviable role for a child, if an instructive one for a future writer.
Much of this upbringing finds its way into Renard’s best-known work, Poil de Carotte. In Chitry, many disliked this roman-à-clef: Jules, the red-headed village boy, had gone to Paris, become sophisticated, and written a book about a red-headed village boy which denounced his own mother. More importantly, Renard was denouncing, and helping put an end to, the whole sentimental, Hugolian image of childhood. Routine injustice and instinctive cruelty are the norms here; moments of pastoral sweetness the exception. Renard never indulges his child alter ego with retrospective self-pity, that emotion (normally arising in adolescence, though it may last for ever) which renders many reworkings of childhood fake. For Renard, a child was “a small, necessary animal, less human than a cat.” This remark comes from his masterpiece, the Journal he kept from 1887 until his death in 1910.
Despite metropolitan fame, he was rooted in the Nièvre. In Chitry, and the neighbouring village of Chaumot, where he lived as an adult, Renard knew peasants still living as they had done for centuries: “The peasant is the only species of human being who doesn’t like the country and n
ever looks at it.” There he studied birds, animals, insects, trees, and witnessed the arrival of the train and motor car which between them would change everything. In 1904, he was in turn elected Mayor of Chitry. He enjoyed his civic functions—handing out school prizes, performing marriages. “My speech made the women cry. The bride gave me her cheeks to kiss, and even her mouth; it cost me 20 francs.” His politics were socialist, Dreyfusard, anti-clerical. He wrote: “As a mayor, I am responsible for the upkeep of rural roads. As a poet, I would prefer to see them neglected.”
In Paris, he knew Rodin and Sarah Bernhardt, Edmond Rostand and Gide. Both Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec illustrated his Histoires naturelles, while Ravel set some of them to music. Once, he stood as second in a duel in which the opposing second was Gauguin. Yet he could be a sombre presence in such company, unforgiving and bearish. He once said to Daudet, who had been kind to him, “I don’t know whether I love you or loathe you, mon cher maître.” “Odi et amo,” replied Daudet, unfazed. Parisian society sometimes found him unfathomable. One sophisticate described him as a “rustic cryptogram”—like one of those secret marks tramps used to chalk on outbuildings, decipherable only by other tramps.
Renard came to writing prose at a time when it seemed the novel might be finished, when the great descriptive and analytical project of Flaubert, Maupassant, Goncourt, and Zola had used the world up and left nothing for fiction to do. The only way forward, Renard concluded, was through compression, annotation, pointillism. Sartre, in a grand and rather grudging tribute to the Journal, acclaimed Renard’s dilemma more than his solution to it: “He is at the origin of many more modern attempts to seize the essence of the single thing”; and “If he is where modern literature begins, it is because he had the vague sense of a domain which he forbade himself to enter.” Gide, whose own Journal overlaps for many years with Renard’s, complained (perhaps rivalrously) that the latter’s was “not a river but a distillery”; though he subsequently admitted reading it “with rapture.”