Nothing to Be Frightened Of (32 page)

Chapter 59

“We shall probably die in hospital, you and I.” A foolish thing to write, however statistically probable. The pace, as well as the place, of our dying is fortunately hidden from us. Expect one thing and you will likely get another. On 21 February 1908, Renard wrote: “Tomorrow I shall be forty-four. It’s not much of an age. Forty-five is when you have to start thinking. Forty-four is a year lived upon velvet.” On his actual birthday, he was a little more sombre: “Forty-four—the sort of age at which you must give up hope of ever doubling your years.”

To admit that you might not make it to eighty-eight seems a modest calculation rather than a declaration of defiance. Even so, by the following year, Renard’s health had declined so sharply that he was unable to walk from one end of the Tuileries to the other without sitting down for a chat with the old women selling lilies of the valley. “I shall have to start taking notes on my old age,” he concluded, and wrote ruefully to a friend, “I’m forty-five—that wouldn’t be old if I were a tree.” Once, he had asked God not to let him die too quickly, as he wouldn’t mind observing the process. How much observation did he now think he would need? He made it to forty-six and three months.

When his mother fell backwards into the well, creating “the soft eddy familiar to those who have drowned an animal,” Renard commented, “Death is not an artist.” Its virtues are at best artisanal: diligence, stubborn application, and a sense of contradictoriness which at times rises to the level of irony; but it doesn’t have enough subtlety, or ambiguity, and is more repetitive than a Bruckner symphony. True, it has complete flexibility of location, and a pretty array of encircling customs and superstitions—though these are our doing, rather than its. Renard noted one detail certainly unknown to my folklorically impoverished family: “As death approaches, one smells of fish.” Now that’s something to look out for.

Though why should Death care if we join Renard in snootily excluding it from the guild of artists? When has it ever looked for Art’s approval? With its co-worker Time, it just goes about its business, a cheerless commissar reliably fulfilling a quota of 100 per cent. Most artists keep a wary eye on death. Some see it as a hurry-up call; some optimistically trust that posterity’s hindsight will bring their vindication (though “Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?”); for others, death is the best career move. Shostakovich, noting that the fear of death is probably the deepest feeling we have, went on: “The irony lies in the fact that under the influence of that fear people create poetry, prose and music; that is, they try to strengthen their ties with the living and increase their influence on them.”

Do we create art in order to defeat, or at least defy, death? To transcend it, to put it in its place? You may take my body, you may take all the squidgy stuff inside my skull where lurks whatever lucidity and imagination I possess, but you cannot take away what I have done with them. Is that our subtext and our motivation? Most probably—though
sub specie aeternitatis
(or even the view of a millennium or two) it’s pretty daft. Those proud lines of Gautier’s I was once so attached to—everything passes, except art in its robustness; kings die, but sovereign poetry lasts longer than bronze—now read as adolescent consolation. Tastes change; truths become clichés; whole art forms disappear. Even the greatest art’s triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers—two or three if lucky—which may feel like a scorning of death; but it’s really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too.

Chapter 60

We may allow Death, like God, to be an occasional ironist, but shouldn’t nevertheless confuse them. The essential difference remains: God might be dead, but Death is well alive.

Death as ironist: the
locus classicus
is the 1,000-year-old story I first came across when reading Somerset Maugham. A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant out to buy provisions. In the market the man is jostled by a woman; turning, he recognizes her as Death. He runs home pale and trembling, and pleads for the loan of his master’s horse: he must go at once to Samarra and hide where Death will never find him. The master agrees; the servant rides off. The master himself then goes down to the market, accosts Death, and rebukes her for threatening his servant. Oh, replies Death, but I made no threatening gesture—that was just surprise. I was startled to see the fellow in Baghdad this morning, given that I have an appointment with him in Samarra tonight.

And here is a more modern story. Pavel Apostolov was a musicologist, composer for brass band, and lifelong persecutor of Shostakovich. During the Great Patriotic War he had been a colonel commanding a regiment; afterwards, he became a key member of the Central Committee’s music section. Shostakovich said of him: “He rode in on a white horse, and did away with music.” In 1948, Apostolov’s committee forced the composer to recant his musical sins, and drove him close to suicide.

Twenty years later, Shostakovich’s death-haunted 14th Symphony was given a “closed premiere” in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. This was in effect a private vetting by Soviet musical experts, with no danger of the new work infecting the greater public. Before the concert Shostakovich addressed the audience. The violinist Mark Lubotsky remembered him saying: “Death is terrifying, there is nothing beyond it. I don’t believe in life beyond the grave.” Then he asked the audience to be as quiet as possible because the performance was being recorded.

Lubotsky was sitting next to a female administrator of the Composers’ House; beyond her was an elderly, bald man. The symphony had reached its intensely quiet fifth movement when the man jumped up, banged his seat loudly, and rushed out of the hall. The administrator whispered, “What a bastard! He tried to destroy Shostakovich in 1948, but failed. He still hasn’t given up, and he’s gone and wrecked the recording on purpose.” It was, of course, Apostolov. What those present didn’t realize, however, was that the wrecker was himself being wrecked—by a heart attack which was to prove fatal. The “sinister symphony of death,” as Lubotsky called it, was in fact grimly playing him out.

The Samarra story shows how we used to think of death: as a stalker on the prowl, watching and waiting to strike; a blackclad figure with scythe and hourglass; something out there, personifiable. The Moscow story shows death as it normally is: what we bear within us all the time, in some piece of potentially berserk genetic material, in some flawed organ, in the time-stamped machinery of which we are made up. When we lie on that deathbed, we may well go back to personifying death, and think we are fighting illness as if it were an invader; but we shall really just be fighting ourselves, the bits of us that want to kill the rest of us. Towards the end—if we live long enough—there is often a competition among our declining and decaying parts as to which will get top billing on our death certificate. As Flaubert put it, “No sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start dropping off.”

The bit of Jules Renard that did for him was his heart. He was diagnosed with emphysema and arteriosclerosis, and began his last year
au lit et au lait
(bed and milk—two and a half litres a day). He said: “Now that I am ill, I find I want to make some profound and historic utterances, which my friends will subsequently repeat; but then I get too over-excited.” He teasingly gave his sister responsibility for having his bust erected in the little square in Chitry-les-Mines. He said that writers had a better, truer sense of reality than doctors. He felt his heart was behaving like a buried miner, knocking at irregular intervals to signal that it was still alive. He felt that parts of his brain were being blown away like a dandelion clock. He said: “Don’t worry! Those of us who fear death always try to die as stylishly as possible.” He said: “Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it.” The end came in Paris, on 22 May 1910; he was buried at Chitry four days later, without benefit of clergy, like his father and brother before him. At his writerly request, no words were spoken over his body.

Too many French deaths? Very well, here’s a good old British death, that of our national connoisseur of mortal terror, Philip Larkin. In the first decades of his life, Larkin could sometimes persuade himself that extinction, when it eventually came, might prove a mercy. But by his fifties, his biographer tells us, “The dread of oblivion darkened everything”—and then, “As he entered his sixties his fears grew rapidly.” So much for my friend G.’s reassurance that things get better after sixty. In the year that was to contain his death, Larkin wrote to a fellow poet, “I don’t think about death
all
the time, though I don’t see why one shouldn’t, just as you might expect a man in a condemned cell to think about the drop all the time. Why aren’t I screaming?” he wondered, referring back to his poem “The Old Fools.”

Larkin died in hospital in Hull. A friend, visiting him the day before, said, “If Philip hadn’t been drugged, he would have been raving. He was that frightened.” At 1:24 a.m., a typical deathing hour, he said his last words, to a nurse holding his hand: “I am going to the inevitable.” Larkin was hardly a Francophile (though more cosmopolitan than he affected); but you could, if you wished, take this as an allusion to, and correction of, Rabelais’ supposed deathbed utterance; “I am going to seek a Great Perhaps.”

Larkin’s death can do nothing but chill. Pit-gazing led not to calm, but to increased terror; and though he feared death, he did not die stylishly. Did Renard? Given the discretion of French biography, there are no specific details; however, one friend, Daudet’s son Léon, wrote that he showed “wonderful courage” in his last illness. Daudet concluded: “Good writers, like good soldiers, know how to die, whereas politicians and doctors are afraid of death. Everyone can corroborate this remark by looking around them. Though there are, of course, exceptions.”

Here is the old argument, as phrased by Renard when he was young and in good health: “Death is sweet; it delivers us from the fear of death.” Is this not a comfort? No, it is a sophistry. Or rather, further proof that it will take more than logic, and rational argument, to defeat death and its terrors.

Chapter 61

After we die, the hair and the fingernails continue spookily to grow for a while. We all know that. I’ve always believed it, or half-believed it, or half-assumed there must be “something in it”: not that we turn into shock-heads with vampiric fingernails as we lie in our coffins, but, well, perhaps a millimetre or two of hair and nail. Yet what “we all know” is usually wrong, in part if not whole. As my friendly thanatologist Sherwin Nuland points out, the matter is simple and incontrovertible. When we die, we stop breathing; no air, no blood; no blood, no possible growth. There might be a brief flicker of brain activity after the heart ceases to beat; but that’s all. Perhaps this particular myth springs from our fear of live burial. Or perhaps it’s based on honest misobservation. If the body appears to shrink—indeed, does shrink—after death, then the flesh of the fingers might pull back, giving the illusion of nail growth; while if the face looks smaller, this might have the effect of giving you bigger hair.