Levels of Life (11 page)
Authors: Julian Barnes
Nearly thirty years ago, in a novel, I tried to imagine what it would be like for a man in his sixties to be widowed. I wrote:
When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.
Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. You expect something almost geological – vertigo in a shelving canyon – but it’s not like that; it’s just misery as regular as a job … [People say] you’ll come out of it … And you do come out of it, that’s true. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.
I read this passage at her funeral, October snow on the ground, my left hand touching her coffin, my right hand holding open the book (which was dedicated to her). My fictional widower had a different life – and love – from mine, and quite a different widowing. But I had to suppress just a few words in one sentence, and was surprised at what I took to be my accuracy. Only later did novelist’s self-doubt set in: perhaps, rather than inventing the correct grief for my fictional character, I had merely been predicting my own probable feelings – an easier job.
For three years and more I continued to dream about her in the same way, according to the same narrative. Then I had a kind of meta-dream, one which seemed to propose an end to this line of night-work. And, as with all good endings, I didn’t see it coming. In my dream we were together, doing things together, in some open space, being happy – all in the way I had become accustomed to – when suddenly
she
realised that this could not be true, and it all must be a dream, because
she
now knew that she was dead.
Should I be pleased with this dream? For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both? The ability to hold the lost love powerfully in mind, remembering without distorting? The ability to continue living as she would have wanted you to (though this is a tricky area, where the sorrowful can easily give themselves a free pass)? And afterwards? What happens to the heart – what does it need, and seek? Some form of self-sufficiency which avoids neutrality and indifference? Followed by some new relationship which will draw strength from the memory of the one who has been lost? This is like asking for the best of both worlds – though since you have just endured the worst of a single world, you might feel yourself entitled to it. But entitlement – the belief in some cosmic (or even animal) reward system – is another delusion, another vanity. Why should there be a pattern, here of all places?
There are moments which appear to indicate some kind of progress. When the tears – the daily, unavoidable tears – stop. When concentration returns, and a book can be read as before. When foyer-terror departs. When possessions can be disposed of (Orfeo, had things worked out differently, would have given that red frock to charity). And beyond this? What are you waiting for, looking for? The time when life turns back from opera into realist fiction. When that bridge you still drive under regularly becomes just another bridge again. When you retrospectively annul the results of that examination which some friends passed and others failed. When the temptation of suicide finally disappears – if it ever does. When cheerfulness and pleasure return, even while you recognise that cheerfulness has become more fragile, and present pleasure no match for past joy. When grief becomes ‘just’ the memory of grief – if it ever does. When the world reverts to being ‘just’ the world, and life feels once more as if it is taking place on the flat, on the level.
These may sound like clear markers, boxes awaiting a tick. But among any success there is much failure, much recidivism. Sometimes, you want to go on loving the pain. And then, beyond this, yet another question sharply outlines itself on the cloud: is ‘success’ at grief, at mourning, at sorrow, an achievement, or merely a new given condition? Because the notion of free will seems irrelevant here; the attribution of purpose and virtue – the idea of grief-work rewarded – feels misplaced. Perhaps, this time, the analogy with illness holds. Studies of cancer patients show that attitudes of mind have very little effect on clinical outcome. We may say we are fighting cancer, but cancer is merely fighting us; we may think we have beaten it, when it has only gone away to regroup. It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to. And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest. We did not make the clouds come in the first place, and have no power to disperse them. All that has happened is that from somewhere – or nowhere – an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again. But where are we being taken? To Essex? The German Ocean? Or, if that wind is a northerly, then, perhaps, with luck, to France.
J.B.
London, 20 October 2012
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781448180844
Published by Jonathan Cape 2013
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Copyright © Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Lines from ‘Exasperated Piety’ by Christopher Reid reproduced by kind permission of the poet.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Jonathan Cape
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