Nothing to Be Frightened Of (5 page)

If I called myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn’t because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance. How can we be sure that we know enough to know? As twenty-first-century neo-Darwinian materialists, convinced that the meaning and mechanism of life have only been fully clear since the year 1859, we hold ourselves categorically wiser than those credulous kneebenders who, a speck of time away, believed in divine purpose, an ordered world, resurrection and a Last Judgement. But although we are more informed, we are no more evolved, and certainly no more intelligent than them. What convinces us that our knowledge is so final?

My mother would have said, and did say, that it was “my age”—as if, now that the end was nearer, metaphysical caution and brute fear were weakening my resolve. But she would have been wrong. Awareness of death came early, when I was thirteen or fourteen. The French critic Charles du Bos, friend and translator of Edith Wharton, created a useful phrase for this moment:
le réveil mortel.
How best to translate it? “The wake-up call to mortality” sounds a bit like a hotel service. “Death-knowledge,” “death-awakening”?—rather too Germanic. “The awareness of death”?—but that suggests a state rather than a particular cosmic strike. In some ways, the (first) bad translation of du Bos’s phrase is the good one: it
is
like being in an unfamiliar hotel room, where the alarm clock has been left on the previous occupant’s setting, and at some ungodly hour you are suddenly pitched from sleep into darkness, panic, and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world.

My friend R. recently asked me how often I think about death, and in what circumstances. At least once each waking day, I replied; and then there are the intermittent nocturnal attacks. Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day’s hiking. A little more originally, perhaps, my wake-up call frequently shrills at the start of a sports event on television, especially, for some reason, during the Five (now Six) Nations rugby tournament. I told R. all this, apologizing for what might seem a self-indulgent dwelling on the subject. He replied: “Your death-thoughts seem HEALTHY. Not sicko like [our mutual friend] G. Mine are v. v. sicko. Always have been = DO IT NOW type. Shotgun-in-mouth. Much improved since Thames Valley Police came and removed my twelve-bore because they’d heard me on
Desert Island Discs.
Now have only [his son’s] airgun. No good. No blasto. So we WILL HAVE AN OLD AGE TOGETHER.”

People used to talk more readily about death: not death and the life to come, but death and extinction. In the 1920s, Sibelius would go to the Kämp restaurant in Helsinki and join the so-called “lemon table”: the lemon being the Chinese symbol of death. He and his fellow-diners—painters, industrialists, doctors, and lawyers—were not just permitted, but required to talk about death. In Paris, a few decades previously, the loose group of writers at the Magny dinners—Flaubert, Turgenev, Edmond de Goncourt, Daudet, and Zola—would discuss the matter in an orderly and companionable way. All were atheists, or serious agnostics; death-fearing but not death-avoiding. “People like us,” Flaubert wrote, “should have the religion of despair. 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.”

I have never wanted the taste of a shotgun in my mouth. Compared to that, my fear of death is low-level, reasonable, practical. And one problem with gathering some new lemon table or Magny dinner to discuss the matter might be that some of those present would turn competitive. Why should mortality be less a matter for male boasting than cars, income, women, cock size? “Night sweats, screaming—
Ha!
—that’s primary-school stuff. You wait till you get to . . .” And so our private anguish might be shown up as not just banal but under-powered. MY FEAR OF DEATH IS BIGGER THAN YOURS AND I CAN GET IT UP MORE OFTEN.

On the other hand, this would be one occasion when you would happily lose out in a male boasting session. One of the few comforts of death-awareness is that there is always—almost always—someone worse off than yourself. Not just R., but also our mutual friend G. He is the long-time holder of the thanatophobes’ gold medal for having been woken by
le réveil mortel
at the age of four (
four! you bastard!
). The news affected him so profoundly that he spent his childhood in the presence of eternal nonexistence and terrible infinity. In adulthood, he remains much more death-haunted than me; also, liable to much deeper depressions. There are nine basic criteria for a Major Depressive Episode (from Depressed Mood Most of the Day, via Insomnia and Feelings of Worthlessness, up to Recurrent Thoughts of Death and Recurrent Suicidal Ideation). Hosting any five over a two-week period is sufficient for a diagnosis of depression. About a decade ago, G. checked himself into hospital after managing to score a full nine out of nine. He told me this story without any competitive edge (I have long stopped competing with him), though with a certain sense of grim triumph.

Every thanatophobe needs the temporary comfort of a worstcase exemplar. I have G., he has Rachmaninov, a man both terrified of death, and terrified that there might be survival after it; a composer who worked the
Dies Irae
into his music more times than anyone else; a cinema-goer who ran gibbering from the hall during the opening graveyard scene of
Frankenstein.
Rachmaninov only surprised his friends when he
didn’t
want to talk about death. A typical occasion: in 1915, he went to visit the poet Marietta Shaginyan and her mother. First he asked the mother to tell his fortune at cards, in order (of course) to find out how much longer he had to live. Then he settled down to talk to the daughter about death: his chosen text that day being a short story by Artsybashev. There was a dish of salted pistachio nuts to hand. Rachmaninov ate a mouthful, talked about death, shifted his chair to get nearer the bowl, ate another mouthful, talked about death. Suddenly, he broke off and laughed. “The pistachio nuts have made my fear go away. Do you know where to?” Neither the poet nor her mother could answer this question; but when Rachmaninov left for Moscow, they gave him a whole sack of nuts for the journey “to cure his fear of death.”

If G. and I were playing Russian composers, I would match (or raise) his bet with Shostakovich, a greater composer and just as much of a brooder on death. “We should think more about it,” he said, “and accustom ourselves to the thought of death. We can’t allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. We have to make the fear familiar, and one way is to write about it. I don’t think writing and thinking about death is characteristic only of old men. I think that if people began thinking about death sooner, they’d make fewer foolish mistakes.”

He also said: “Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling.” These views were not publicly expressed. Shostakovich knew that death—unless it came in the form of heroic martyrdom—was not an appropriate subject for Soviet art, that it was “tantamount to wiping your nose on your sleeve in company.” He could not have the
Dies Irae
blaze from his scores; he had to be musically covert. But increasingly, the cautious composer found the courage to draw his sleeve across his nostrils, especially in his chamber music. His last works often contain long, slow, meditative invocations of mortality. The violist of the Beethoven Quartet was once given the following advice about the first movement of the fifteenth quartet by its composer: “Play it so that the flies drop dead in mid-air.”

When my friend R. talked about death on
Desert Island Discs
, the police took away his shotgun. When I did so, I received various letters pointing out that my fears would be cured if I looked within, opened myself up to faith, went to church, learnt to pray, and so on. The theological bowl of pistachio nuts. My correspondents weren’t exactly patronizing—some were soppy, some were stern—but they did seem to imply that this solution might come as news to me. As if I were a member of some rainforest tribe (not that I wouldn’t have had my own rituals and belief system in place if I were), rather than one speaking at a point when the Christian religion is approaching extinction in my country, partly because families like mine have been not believing it for a century and more.

Chapter 7

That century is about as far as I can trace my family back. I have become, by default, our archivist. In a shallow drawer, a few yards from where I am writing, sits the entire corpus of documentation: the certificates of birth and marriage and death; the wills and grants of probate; the professional qualifications, references, and testimonials; the passports, ration cards, identity cards (and
cartes d’identité
); the scrapbooks and notebooks and keepsakes. Here are the texts of patter songs my father wrote (to be performed in dinner jacket, leaning against the piano while a school or service colleague provided a languid nightclub accompaniment), his signed menus, theatre programmes and half-filled-in cricket scorecards. Here is my mother’s hostess book, her Christmas card lists and tabulations of stocks and shares. Here are the telegrams and wartime aerogrammes between them (but no letters). Here are their sons’ school reports and physical development cards, their prize-day programmes, swimming and athletics certificates—I see that in 1955 I came first in the long jump and third in the boot race, while my brother once came second in the wheelbarrow race with Dion Shirer—together with evidence of achievements long forgotten, like my certificate for Perfect Attendance during one primary-school term. Here too are Grandpa’s First World War medals—proofs of attendance in France, 1916–17, a time he would never talk about.

This shallow drawer is also big enough to contain the family’s photographic archive. Packets labelled “Us,” “The Boys,” and “Antiques” in my father’s handwriting. Here is Dad in schoolmaster’s gown and RAF uniform, black tie, hiking shorts and cricket whites, usually with cigarette in hand or pipe in mouth. Here is Mum in chic home-tailored clothes, unrevealing two-piece swimsuit, and swanky outfit for a Masonic dinner dance. Here is the French
assistant
who probably photographed
Maxim: le chien
and the later
assistant
who helped scatter my parents’ ashes on the west coast of France. Here are my brother and me in younger, blonder days, modelling a range of home knitwear, attended by dog, beach ball, and junior wheelbarrow; here we are athwart the same tricycle; here we are in multiple, scattershot polyphoto, and later cardboard-framed as Souvenirs of Nestlé’s Playland, Olympia 1950.

Here too is Grandpa’s photographic record, a red cloth-bound album titled “Scenes from Highways & Byways,” bought in Colwyn Bay in August 1913. It covers the period 1912 to 1917, after which, it seems, he laid down his camera. Here are Bert and his brother Percy, Bert and his fiancée Nell, then the two of them on their wedding day: 4th August 1914, the day the First World War broke out. Here, among the faded sepia prints of unidentifiable relations and chums, is a sudden defacement: the photograph of a woman in a white blouse, sitting in a deckchair, dated “Sept 1915.” Next to this date, a pencil marking—a name? a place?—has been more or less erased. The woman’s face has been venomously ripped and gouged until only her chin and her wiry, Weetabixy hair remain visible. I wonder who did that, and why, and to whom.

In my teens, I had my own photographic period, which included modest home processing: the plastic developing tank, orange darkroom light, and contact printing frame. At some point during this enthusiasm, I answered an advertisement in a magazine for an inexpensive yet magical product which promised to turn my humble black-and-white prints into rich and living colour. I can’t remember if I consulted my parents before sending away, or if I was disappointed when the promised kit turned out to consist of a small brush and some coloured oblongs of a paint which would adhere to photographic paper. But I set to work, and made the pictorial record of my family more vivid, if not more true. Here is Dad in bright yellow cords and green sweater against a monochrome garden; Grandpa in trousers of exactly the same green, Grandma in a watered-down green blouse. All three of them have hands and faces of a preternaturally hot-flush pink.

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as “petite and unopinionated.” My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes “short and bossy.” His mental album also contains more snaps than mine of a rare three-generational family outing to Lundy Island in the early 1950s. For Grandma it was almost certainly the only time she left the British landmass; for Grandpa, his first since returning from France in 1917. The sea was choppy that day, Grandma wretchedly sick, and when we reached Lundy we were told it was too rough for us to disembark. My memories of all this are faded sepia, my brother’s still lurid. He describes how Grandma spent the whole trip below deck, vomiting into a succession of plastic beakers, while Grandpa, flat cap pulled down over his eyebrows, doggedly received each filled receptacle. Instead of disposing of them, he lined all the beakers up on a shelf, as if to embarrass her. This is, I think, my brother’s favourite childhood memory.