Nothing to Be Frightened Of (16 page)

“One must be equal to one’s destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it. By dint of saying ‘That is so! That is so!’ and of gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm.” Flaubert’s experience of pit-gazing began early. His father was a hospital surgeon; the family lived above the shop; Achille Flaubert would often come straight from his operating table to his dining table. The boy Gustave would climb a trellis and peer in at his father instructing medical students how to dissect corpses. He saw bodies covered in flies, and students casually resting their lit cigars on the limbs and trunks they were hacking away at. Achille would glance up, spot his son’s face at the window, and wave him away with his scalpel. A late-Romantic morbidity infected the adolescent Gustave; but he never lost the realist’s need, and demand, to look where others averted their gaze. It was a human duty as well as a writerly one.

In April 1848, when Flaubert was twenty-six, the literary friend of his youth, Alfred Le Poittevin, died. In a private memorandum which has only just come to light, Flaubert recorded how he looked at this death, and looked at himself looking at it. He kept a vigil over his dead friend for two consecutive nights; he cut a lock of hair for Le Poittevin’s young widow; he helped wrap the body in its shroud; he smelt the stink of decomposition. When the undertakers arrived with the coffin, he kissed his friend on the temple. A decade later, he still remembered that moment: “Once you have kissed a corpse on the forehead there always remains something on your lips, a distant bitterness, an aftertaste of the void that nothing will efface.”

This was not my experience after kissing my mother’s forehead; but I was by then twice Flaubert’s age, and perhaps the taste of bitterness was on my lips already. Twenty-one years after Le Poittevin’s death, Louis Bouilhet, the literary friend of Flaubert’s maturity, died; again, he composed a private memorandum describing his actions and reactions. He was in Paris when he heard the news; he returned to Rouen; he went to Bouilhet’s house and embraced the dead poet’s common-law wife. You might think—if pit-gazing worked—that the previous experience would make this one more bearable. But Flaubert found that he could not bear to see, watch over, embrace, wrap, or kiss the friend who had been so close that he once called him “my left testicle.” He spent the night in the garden, sleeping a couple of hours on the ground; and he shunned his friend’s presence until the closed coffin was brought out of the house. In the memorandum, he specifically compared his ability to confront the two deaths: “I did not dare see him! I feel weaker than I did twenty years ago . . . I lack any internal toughness. I feel
worn out.
” Pit-gazing for Flaubert induced not calm, but nervous exhaustion.

Chapter 28

When I was translating Daudet’s notes on dying, two friends separately suggested that it must be depressing work. Not at all: I found this example of proper, adult pit-gazing—the exact glance, the exact word, the refusal either to aggrandize or to trivialize death—exhilarating. When, at the age of fifty-eight, I published a collection of short stories dealing with the less serene aspects of old age, I found myself being asked if I wasn’t being premature in addressing such matters. When I showed the first fifty pages of this book to my close (and close-reading) friend H., she asked, concernedly, “Does it help?”

Ah, the therapeuto-autobiographical fallacy. However well meant, it irritates me as much as a hypothetical want of the dead does my brother. Something bad happens in your life—or, in the case of death, is slated to happen; you write about it; and you feel better about that bad thing. In very small, local circumstances, I can imagine this applying. Jules Renard,
Journal
, 26 September 1903: “The beauty of literature. I lose a cow. I write about its death, and this brings me in enough to buy another cow.” But does it work in any wider sense? Perhaps with certain kinds of autobiography: you have a painful childhood, nobody loves you, you write about it, the book is a success, you make lots of money, and people love you. A tragedy with a happy ending! (Though for every such Hollywood moment, there must be a few which go: you have a painful childhood, nobody loves you, you write about it, the book is unpublishable, and still nobody loves you.) But with fiction, or any other transformative art? I don’t see why it should, or why the artist should want it to. Brahms described his late piano intermezzi as “the lullabies of all my tears.” But we don’t believe they worked for him as a handkerchief. Nor does writing about death either diminish or increase my fear of it. Though when I am roared awake in the enveloping and predictive darkness, I try to fool myself that there is at least one temporary advantage. This isn’t just another routine bout of
timor mortis,
I say to myself. This is research for your book.

Flaubert said: “Everything must be learned, from reading to dying.” But we don’t get much practice at the latter. We have also become more sceptical about exemplary deaths of the kind Montaigne enumerated: scenes in which dignity, courage, and concern for others are displayed, consoling last words uttered, and the sombre action unfolds without farcical interruption. Daudet, for instance, died at his own dinner table, surrounded by his family. He took a few spoonfuls of soup, and was chatting away happily about the play he was working on, when the death rattle was heard and he fell back in his chair. That was the official version, and it sounds close to his friend Zola’s definition of
une belle mort
—to be crushed suddenly, like an insect beneath a giant finger. And it is true as far as it goes. But the obituarists did not record what happened immediately afterwards. Two doctors had been summoned, and for an hour and a half—
an hour and a half
—they attempted artificial respiration by the then fashionable method of rhythmical traction of the tongue. When this unsurprisingly failed to work, they switched, with no greater success, to a primitive form of electrical defibrillation.

I suppose there is some rough professional irony here—the
langue
being what made Daudet’s name, and the
langue
being what the doctors yanked on when attempting to save him. Perhaps he might (just) have appreciated it. I suppose that up to the moment he died, it was a good death—apart from having been preceded by the torments of tertiary syphilis, of course. George Sand died simply, lucidly, encouragingly, in the pastoral peace of her house at Nohant, while looking out over trees she had planted herself many years previously. That was a good death, too—apart from its being preceded by the pain of incurable cancer. I am more inclined to believe in the good death of Georges Braque, mainly because it sounds as his art looks (though this might be a sentimentalism). His dying was characterized by “a calm achieved through self-mastery rather than apathy.” Towards the end, as he was slipping in and out of consciousness, he called for his palette; and he died “without suffering, calmly, his gaze fixed until the last moment on the trees in his garden, the highest branches of which were visible from the great windows of his studio.”

I do not expect such luck, or such calmness. Looking out at trees you have planted yourself? I have only planted a fig and a gooseberry bush, neither of which is visible from the bedroom window. Calling for your palette? I trust that I shall be disobeyed if, in my last moments, I ask for my electric typewriter, an IBM 196c of such weight that I doubt my wife could lift it. I imagine I shall die rather as my father did, in hospital, in the middle of the night. I expect that a nurse or doctor will say that I just “slipped away,” and that someone was with me at the end, whether or not this will have been the case. I expect my departure to have been preceded by severe pain, fear, and exasperation at the imprecise or euphemistic use of language around me. I hope that whoever is offered the binliner of my clothes does not discover in it a pair of unworn, brown, Velcro-fastened slippers. Perhaps my trousers will inhabit some park bench or grim hostel for a season or two after my death.

I find this in my diary, written twenty and more years ago:

People say of death, “There’s nothing to be frightened of.” They say it quickly, casually. Now let’s say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. “There’s NOTHING to be frightened of.” Jules Renard: “The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word ‘nothing.’”

Chapter 29

When we let the mind roam to the circumstances of our own death, there is usually a magnetic pull towards the worst case or the best case. My worst imaginings usually involve enclosure, water, and a period of time in which to endure the certainty of coming extinction. There is, for instance, the overturned-ferry scenario: the air pocket, darkness, slowly rising water, screaming fellow mortals, and the competition for breath. Then there is the solitary version of this: bundled into the boot of a car (perhaps your own) while your captors drive from one cashpoint to another, and then, when your credit card is finally refused, the giddying lurch from river bank or sea cliff, the splash, and the greedy glug of water coming for you. Or the analogous, if more improbable, wildlife version of this: being taken by a crocodile, dragged under water, losing consciousness, and then regaining it on a shelf above the waterline in the croc’s lair, and realizing that you have just become the waiting contents of the beast’s larder. (And such things happen, in case you doubt.)

The best case, in my fantasizing, used to turn on a medical diagnosis which left me just enough time, and just enough lucidity, in which to write that last book—the one which would contain all my thoughts about death. Although I didn’t know if it was going to be fiction or nonfiction, I had the first line planned and noted many years ago: “Let’s get this death thing straight.” But what kind of doctor is going to give you the diagnosis that suits your literary requirements? “I’m afraid there’s good news and bad news.” “Tell me straight, Doc, I need to know. How long?” “How long? I’d say about 200 pages, 250 if you’re lucky, or work fast.”

No, it isn’t going to happen like that, so it’s best to get the book done before the diagnosis. Of course, there is a third possibility (which I have been entertaining since page one): you start the book, you are nearly halfway through—just about here, for instance—and then you get the diagnosis! Maybe the narrative is flagging a bit by this stage, so enter the chest pain, the fainting fit, the X-rays, the CAT scan . . . Would that, I wonder, look a little contrived? (The readers’ group confers. “Oh, I always thought he was going to die at the end—well, after the end, didn’t you?” “No, I thought he might be bluffing. I wasn’t sure he was even ill. I thought it might be, what do you call it, metafiction?”)

It probably isn’t going to happen this way either. When we imagine our own dying, whether best or worst case, we tend to imagine dying lucidly, dying while aware (all too aware) of what is going on, able to express ourselves and understand others. How successfully can we imagine dying—and the long lead-up to the event itself—in a state of incoherence and misunderstanding? With the same original pain and fear, of course, but now with an added layer of confusion. Not knowing quite who anybody is, not knowing who is alive or dead, not knowing where you are. (But just as shit-scared anyway.) I remember visiting an elderly and demented friend in hospital. She would turn to me, and in her soft, rather genteel voice which I had once much loved, would say things like, “I do think you will be remembered as one of the worst criminals in history.” Then a nurse might walk past, and her mood change swiftly. “Of course,” she would assure me, “the maids here are frightfully good.” Sometimes I would let such remarks pass (for her sake, for my sake), sometimes (for her sake, for my sake) correct them. “Actually, they’re nurses.” My friend would give a cunning look expressing surprise at my naivety. “Some of them are,” she conceded. “But
most
of them are maids.”

My father had a series of strokes which reduced him, over the years, from an erect man of my height, first to a figure hunched over a Zimmer, his head cocked in that awkward angled lift the frame compels, and then to the half-humiliated occupant of a wheelchair. When the social services came to assess his level of incapacity, they explained that he would need, and they would pay for, a handrail to help him from bed to door. My mother overrode the suggestion: “Not having that ugly thing in the room.” She maintained that it would spoil the bungalow’s decor; but her refusal was, I now suspect, an oblique way of denying what had happened—and what might await her too. One thing she did allow—to my surprise—was an alteration to Dad’s armchair. This was the sturdy green high-backed Parker Knoll in which Grandpa used to read his
Daily Express
, and mistake Grandma’s stomach for the telephone. Now, its legs were extended with metal sheaths, so that Dad could get in and out more easily.