An attempt to preserve life in a state of neutrality and indifference is unreasonable and vain. If by excluding joy we could shut out grief, the scheme would deserve very serious attention. But since, however we may debar ourselves from happiness, misery will find its way at many inlets, and the assaults of pain will force our regard, though we may withhold it from the invitations of pleasure, we may surely endeavour to raise life above the middle point of apathy at one time, since it will be necessary to sink below it at another.
So what constitutes ‘success’ in mourning? The ability to return to concentration and work; the ability to rediscover interest in life, and take pleasure in it, while recognising that present pleasure is far from past joy. The ability to hold the lost love successfully in mind, remembering without distorting. The ability to continue living as he or she would have wanted you to do (though this is a tricky area, where the sorrowful can often end up giving themselves a free pass). And then what? Some form of self-sufficiency which avoids neutrality and indifference? Or a new relationship that will either supplant the lost one or, perhaps, draw strength from it?
There is another strange parallel between The Year of Magical Thinking and A Widow’s Story. By the time each book came out, many readers would know one additional key fact not covered by the text. In Didion’s case, the death of her daughter Quintana (which the author deals with in a subsequent edition); in Oates’s, her remarriage to a neuroscientist, whose existence is hinted at rather coyly on the last page. You could argue that those writing about grief make their own literary terms more than most; but even so, in Oates’s case there is something unhappy in the omission. She is writing about the twelve months that began on 18 February 2008; we know from her own mouth (in an interview with The Times) that she met her second husband in August 2008, they started going on walks and hikes in September, and were married in March 2009. If Didion posed ‘the question of self-pity’ in the first lines of her book, Oates, in a chapter called ‘Taboo’, similarly approaches the difficult heart of the matter:
It’s a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living – we who have survived – understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices. You will not forget me – will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.
But the theme is no sooner announced than set aside; indeed, when Oates comes back to the idea of ‘betraying’ her husband, it is in the much narrower context of disclosing to the reader secrets about Ray Smith’s family and upbringing. But she does this, she explains, because ‘There is no purpose to a memoir, if it isn’t honest. As there is no purpose to a declaration of love, if it isn’t honest.’ Her book ends with a chapter headed ‘The Widow’s Handbook’ which reads in its entirety:
Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
But if she is also thinking ‘I might be getting married in a few weeks’ time’, does this not change the nature of that statement? This isn’t a moral comment: Oates may quote Marianne Moore’s line that ‘the cure for loneliness is solitude’, but many people need to be married, and therefore, at times, remarried. However, some readers will feel they have a good case for breach of narrative promise. Was not Ray ‘the first man in my life, the last man, the only man’? And what about all those perennials she planted?
When Dr Johnson wrote ‘The Proper Means of Regulating Sorrow’ he was not yet widowed. That event was to occur two years later, when he was forty-three. Twenty-eight years afterwards, in a letter of consolation to Dr Thomas Lawrence, whose wife had recently died, Johnson wrote:
He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past, or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Original versions of these pieces appeared as follows:
Fitzgerald: Guardian, 26 July 2008.
Clough: Persephone Books, 2009.
Orwell: New York Review of Books, 12 March 2009.
Ford and The Good Soldier: New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997.
Ford in Provence: Guardian, 21 August 2010.
Parade’s End: Penguin Books, 2012.
Kipling’s France: Guardian, 11 November 2003.
France’s Kipling: Guardian, 5 November 2005.
Chamfort: Guardian, 4 October 2003.
Mérimée: Guardian, 7 July 2007.
Fénéon: London Review of Books, 4 October 2007.
Houellebecq: New Yorker, 7 July 2003.
Translating Madame Bovary: London Review of Books, 18 November 2010.
Wharton: Everyman’s Library, 1996.
Hemingway: New Yorker, 4 July 2011.
Moore: New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998.
Updike: New York Review of Books, 11 June 2009; Guardian, 17 October 2009.
Oates: New York Review of Books, 7 April 2011.
ALSO BY JULIAN BARNES
BEFORE SHE MET ME
At the start of this novel, an English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery in a silly, low-budget movie she made years before she met him. But as he combs the theaters for other instances of his wife’s cinematic betrayal, the line between film and reality, past and present, love and mania becomes terrifyingly blurred.
Fiction/Literature/
CROSS CHANNEL
Between England and France lies a narrow body of water and a vast sea of prejudice and misapprehension. This is the distance that Julian Barnes’s English characters try to cross in these playfully ironic short stories. But what they discover alongside the rich food and barbarous sexual practices is their own ineradicable Englishness.
Fiction/Literature/
ENGLAND, ENGLAND
Imagine an England in which all the pubs are quaint, the Windsors behave themselves (mostly), and the cliffs of Dover are actually white, and where Robin Hood and his merry men really are merry. This is precisely what visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman seeks to accomplish on the Isle of Wight, a “destination” where tourists can find replicas of Big Ben (half size), Princess Di’s grave, and even Harrod’s.
Fiction/Literature/
FLAUBERT’S PARROT
An elegant work of literary imagination involving a cranky, erudite amateur scholar’s obsessive search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert’s Parrot also investigates the scholar himself, whose passion for the page is fed by personal bitterness—and whose life seems oddly to mirror those of Flaubert’s characters.
Fiction/Literature/
A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10½ CHAPTERS
Beginning with a revisionist account of the voyage of Noah’s ark (narrated by one of its passengers) and ending with a sneak preview of heaven, Julian Barnes’s tour de force is a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world.
Fiction/Literature/
THE LEMON TABLE
In his acclaimed collection of stories, Barnes addresses what is perhaps the most poignant aspect of the human condition: growing old. The characters are facing the ends of their lives—some with bitter regret, others with resignation, and others still with defiant rage.
Fiction/Short Stories/
LETTERS FROM LONDON
Formidably articulate and outrageously funny, Letters from London is international voyeurism at its best—a peek into the British mindset from the vantage point of one of the most erudite and witty British minds.
Literature/Nonfiction/
LOVE, ETC.
Af
ter a decade in America, Stuart returns to London and looks up his ex-wife Gillian. Their relationship had ended years before when Stuart’s former best friend Oliver stole her away. But now Stuart finds that the intervening years have left both Oliver’s artistic ambitions and his relationship in ruins, and he suspects that he may be able to undo the results of their betrayal.
Fiction/Literature/
METROLAND
In this giddy comedy of sexual awakening in the sixties, Julian Barnes follows Chris and Toni from precocious adolescence in a stultifying London suburb, through Chris’s deflowering in Paris during the earth-shaking événements of 1968, and back to Metroland, where he finds himself breaking bread with the same classmates he once sneered at.
Fiction/Literature/
THE PORCUPINE
Stoyo Petkanov, the deposed Communist Party leader, is on trial for everything from corruption to political murder. His guilt would seem to be self-evident, but, as imagined by Barnes, his trial illuminates the shadowy frontier between the rusted myths of the Communist past and a capitalist future in which everything is up for grabs.
Fiction/Literature/
SOMETHING TO DECLARE
Essays on France and French Culture
Barnes’s appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyper-literate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers. Here are the prolific and priapic Simenon, Baudelaire, Sand, and Sartre, and several dazzling excursions on the prickly genius of Flaubert.
Literature/Travel/
STARING AT THE SUN
Jean Serjeant, the heroine of this wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary disdain for received wisdom. And as we follow Jean from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, we are confronted with the fruits of her quietly relentless curiosity.
Fiction/Literature
TALKING IT OVER
Through the indelible voices of three narrators—stolid Stuart; glamorous, epigrammatic Oliver; and the cryptic beauty Gillian, who has the bad luck to love them both—Julian Barnes reimagines the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades.
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VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story Page 24
