Dr Johnson well understood the ‘tormenting and harassing want’ of grief; and he warned against isolationism and withdrawal. ‘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 it doesn’t. Nor do extreme measures, like the attempt to ‘drag [the heart] by force into scenes of merriment’; or its opposite, the attempt ‘to soothe it into tranquillity by making it acquainted with miseries more dreadful and afflictive’. For Johnson, only work and time mitigate grief. ‘Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away.’
Grief-workers are self-employed. I wonder if those who are actually self-employed do better at it than those who go to an office or a factory. Perhaps there are statistics for this too. But I think that grief is the place where statistics run out. ‘What instruments we have agree,’ wrote Auden on the death of Yeats, ‘the day of his death was a cold dark day.’ Instruments can tell us this much on the day itself. But afterwards, beyond? The needle goes off the dial; the thermometer fails to register; barometers burst. Life’s sonar is broken and you can no longer tell how far below the seabed lies.
We go down in dreams, and we go down in memory. And yes, it is true, the memory of earlier times does return, but in the meanwhile we have been made fearful, and I am not sure it is the same memory that returns. How could it be, because it can no longer be corroborated by the one who was there at the time. What we did, where we went, whom we met, how we felt. How we were together. All that. ‘We’ are now watered down to ‘I’. Binocular memory has become monocular. There is no longer the possibility of assembling from two uncertain memories of the same event a surer, single one, by triangulation, by aerial surveying. And so that memory, now in the first person-singular, changes. Less the memory of an event than the memory of a photograph of the event. And nowadays – having lost height, precision, focus – we are no longer sure we trust photography as we once did. Those old familiar snaps of happier times have come to seem less primal, less like photographs of life itself, more like photographs of photographs.
Or, to put it another way, your memory of your life – your previous life – resembles that ordinary miracle witnessed by Fred Burnaby, Captain Colvile and Mr Lucy somewhere near the Thames estuary. They were above the cloud, beneath the sun, and Burnaby had just been emboldened to take off his coat and sit complacently in his shirtsleeves. One of the three saw the phenomenon first and drew it to the attention of the others. The sun was projecting on to the bank of fleecy cloud below the image of their craft: the gasbag, the cradle and, clearly outlined, silhouettes of the three aeronauts. Burnaby compared it to a ‘colossal photograph’. And so it is with our life: so clear, so sure, until, for one reason or another – the balloon moves, the cloud disperses, the sun changes angle – the image is lost for ever, available only to memory, turned into anecdote.
There is a man in Venice I remember as clearly as if I had photographed him; or, perhaps, more clearly because I didn’t. It was some years ago, one late autumn or early winter. She and I were wandering in an untouristy part of the city, and she had gone ahead of me. I was starting to cross a small, banal bridge when I saw a man coming towards me. He was probably in his sixties, and dressed very correctly. I remember a smart black overcoat, black scarf, black shoes, perhaps a small moustache, and probably a hat – a black homburg. He might have been a Venetian avvocato, and he certainly wasn’t giving tourists a glance. But I gave him one, because at the bridge’s low zenith he took out a white handkerchief and wiped his eyes: not idly, not practically – it wasn’t, I’m sure, the cold – but in a slow, concentrated, familiar fashion. I found myself then, and later, trying to imagine his story; at times, I was half planning to write it. Now, I no longer need to, because I have assimilated his story to mine; he fits into my pattern.
There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence. I remember my first visit to Paris in 1964; I was eighteen. Each day I did my cultural duty – galleries, museums, churches; I even bought the cheapest seat available at the Opéra Comique (and remember the impossible heat up there, the impossible sightlines, and the impossible-to-comprehend opera). I was lonely in the Métro, on the streets, and in the public parks where I would sit on a bench by myself reading a Sartre novel, which was probably about existential isolation. I was lonely even among those who befriended me. Remembering those weeks now, I realise that I never went upwards – the Eiffel Tower seemed an absurd, and absurdly popular, structure – but I did go down. I went down exactly as Nadar and his camera had done a hundred years previously. I too visited the Paris sewers, entering from somewhere near the Pont de l’Alma for a guided boat tour; and from the Place Denfert-Rochereau I descended into the Catacombs, my candle lighting up the neat banks of femurs and solid cubes of skulls.
There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means ‘the longing for something’. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C. S. Lewis defined it as the ‘inconsolable longing’ in the human heart for ‘we know not what’. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something – or, in our case, for someone. Sehnsucht describes the first kind of loneliness. But the second kind comes from the opposite condition: the absence of a very specific someone. Not so much loneliness as her-lessness. It is this specificity which incites consoling plans with the warm bath and the Japanese carving knife. And though I am now equipped with a firm argument against suicide, the temptation remains: if I cannot hack it without her, I will hack at myself instead. But now, at least, I am more aware of wise voices to call on. ‘The cure for loneliness is solitude,’ Marianne Moore advises. While Peter Grimes (if not in all respects a role model) sings: ‘I live alone. The habit grows.’ There is a balance to such words, a comforting harmony.
‘It hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think.’ The second part of that sentence was what I stubbed my foot against: it struck me as unnecessarily masochistic. Now I know that it contains truth. And if the pain is not exactly relished, it no longer seems futile. Pain shows that you have not forgotten; pain enhances the flavour of memory; pain is a proof of love. ‘If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.’
But there are many traps and dangers in grief, and time does not diminish them. Self-pity, isolationism, world-scorn, an egotistical exceptionalism: all aspects of vanity. Look how much I suffer, how much others fail to understand: does this not prove how much I loved? Maybe, maybe not. I have seen people ‘doing grief’ at funerals, and there is no emptier sight. Mourning can also become competitive: look how much I loved her/him and with these my tears I prove it (and win the trophy). There is the temptation to feel, if not to say: I fell from a greater height than you – examine my ruptured organs. The griefstruck demand sympathy, yet, irked by any challenge to their primacy, underestimate the pain others are suffering over the same loss.
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 t
unnel, 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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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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Table of Contents
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DEDICATION
TITLE PAGE
THE SIN OF HEIGHT
ON THE LEVEL
THE LOSS OF DEPTH
COPYRIGHT
Levels of Life Page 8
