Nothing to Be Frightened Of (20 page)

That penguin doesn’t have a would-you-rather. It is plunge or die—sometimes plunge and die. And some of our own would-you-rathers turn out to be equally hypothetical: ways of simplifying the unthinkable, pretending to control the uncontrollable. My mother considered quite seriously whether she would rather go deaf or go blind. Preferring one incapacity in advance seemed a superstitious method of ruling out the other. Except that, as it turned out, the “choice” never arose. Her stroke affected neither her hearing nor her sight—and yet she never did her nails again in what was left of her life.

My brother hopes for Grandpa’s death: felled by a stroke while gardening. (It was too early for Montaignean cabbage planting: he was trying to start his recalcitrant rotovator.) He fears the other family examples: Grandma’s long-drawn-out senility, Dad’s slow confinement and humiliation, Ma’s half-self-aware delusions. But there are so many other possibilities to choose from—or to have chosen for us; so many different doors, even if they are all marked Exit. In this respect, death is multiple-choice not would-you-rather, and prodigally democratic in its options.

Stravinsky said: “Gogol died screaming and Diaghilev died laughing, but Ravel died gradually. That is the worst.” He was right. There have been more violent artistic deaths, ones involving madness, terror, and banal absurdity (Webern shot dead by a GI after politely stepping on to the porch to light a cigar), but few as cruel as that of Ravel. Worse, it had a strange prefiguration—a musical pre-echo—in the death of a French composer of the previous generation. Emmanuel Chabrier had succumbed to tertiary syphilis in 1894, the year after the Paris premiere of his only attempt at serious opera,
Gwendoline.
This piece—perhaps the only opera to be set in eighth-century Britain—had taken ten years to be staged; by which time Chabrier’s disease was in its final phase, and his mind in never-never land. He sat in his box at the premiere, acknowledging the applause and smiling “almost without knowing why.” Sometimes, he would forget the opera was his, and murmur to a neighbour, “It’s good, it’s really very good.”

This story was well-known among the next generation of French composers. “Horrible, isn’t it?” Ravel used to say. “To go to a performance of
Gwendoline
and not recognize your own music!” I remember my friend Dodie Smith, in great age, being asked the tender, encouraging question, “Now, Dodie, you do remember that you used to be a famous playwright?” To which she replied, “Yes, I
think
so”—in rather the tone I imagine my father using when he said to my mother, “I think you’re my wife.” A milliner might not recognize her own hat, a labourer his own speed bump, a writer her words, a painter his canvas; this is poignant enough. But there is extra pain, for those who witness it, when a composer fails to recognize his own notes.

Ravel died gradually—it took five years—and it was the worst. At first his decline from Pick’s disease (a form of cerebral atrophy), though alarming, was non-specific. Words evaded him; motor skills went awry. He would grasp a fork by the wrong end; he became unable to sign his name; he forgot how to swim. When he went out to dinner, the housekeeper used to pin his address inside his coat as a precaution. But then the disease turned malignly particular and targeted Ravel the composer. He went to a recording of his string quartet, sat in the control room, offered various corrections and suggestions. After each movement had been recorded, he was asked if he wanted to listen through again, but declined. So the session went quickly, and the studio was pleased to have it all wrapped up in an afternoon. At the end, Ravel turned to the producer (and our guessing what he is going to say cannot lessen its impact): “That was really very good. Remind me of the composer’s name.” Another day, he went to a concert of his piano music. He sat through it with evident pleasure, but when the hall turned to acclaim him, he thought they were addressing the Italian colleague at his side, and so joined in their applause.

Ravel was taken to two leading French neurosurgeons. Another would-you-rather. The first judged his condition inoperable, and said that nature should be allowed to take its course. The second would have agreed had the patient been anyone but Ravel. However, if there were the slightest chance—for him a few more years, for us a little more music (which is “the best way of digesting time”) . . . And so the composer’s skull was opened up, and the damage seen to be extensive and irreparable. Ten days later, his head still turbanned with hospital windings, Ravel died.

Chapter 36

About twenty years ago I was asked if I would be interviewed for a book about death. I declined on writerly grounds: I didn’t want to talk away stuff which I might later need myself. I never read the book when it came out: perhaps from a superstitious—or rational—fear that one of its contributors might have better expressed what I was slowly working my way towards. Not long ago, I began cautiously browsing the first chapter, an interview with a certain “Thomas.” Except that it became instantly clear, after scarcely a page, that this “Thomas” was none other than my old death-friend and free-will eradicator G.

The primal would-you-rather about death (though again one in which we don’t have the choice) is: ignorance or knowledge? Would you prefer to receive
le réveil mortel
or to slumber on in quilted blindness? This might seem an easy one: if in doubt, opt for knowledge. But it’s the knowledge that causes the damage. As “Thomas”/G. puts it: “People who aren’t afraid, I think most of them just don’t know what death
means
. . . The standard theory of moral philosophy is that it’s a great evil for a person to be suddenly cut off [in the flower of life]; but it seems to me that the evil is knowing it’s going to happen. If it happened without your knowing, it wouldn’t matter.” Or at least, it would make us more akin to those penguins: the dupe who toddles to the water’s edge and is shouldered in by a non-gratuitous nudge may fear the seal but cannot conceptualize the eternal consequences of the seal.

G. has no difficulty understanding, or believing, that human beings, in all their complexity, simply disappear for ever. It is all part of “the profligacy of nature,” like the micro-engineering of a mosquito. “I think of it as nature sort of wildly over-shooting, splurging her gifts around; with human beings it’s just more of the same kind of profligacy. These extraordinary brains and sensibilities, produced in millions, and then just thrown away, disappearing into eternity. I don’t think man’s a special case, I think the theory of evolution explains it all. It’s a very beautiful theory, come to think of it, a marvellous and inspiring theory, though it has grim consequences for us.”

That’s my man! And perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we’ve got—or haven’t got—is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It’s everyone else who’s out of step. I think my sense of death—which appears exaggerated to some of my friends—is quite proportionate. For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever—including the jug—there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? My friend G. has a worse case of death, so I find his hauntedness excessive, not to say unhealthy (ah, the “healthy” attitude to it all—where is that to be found?).

For G. our only defence against death—or rather, against the danger of not being able to think about anything else—lies in “the acquisition of worthwhile short-term worries.” He also consolingly quotes a study showing that fear of death drops off after the age of sixty. Well, I have got there before him, and can report that I am still waiting for the benefit. Only a couple of nights ago, there came again that alarmed and alarming moment, of being pitchforked back into consciousness, awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting “Oh no Oh No OH NO” in an endless wail, the horror of the moment—the minutes—overwhelming what might, to an objective witness, appear a shocking display of exhibitionist self-pity. An inarticulate one, too: for what sometimes shames me is the extraordinary lack of descriptive, or responsive, words that come out of my mouth. For God’s sake, you’re a
writer
, I say to myself. You do
words.
Can’t you improve on that? Can’t you face down death—well, you won’t ever face it down, but can’t you at least protest against it—more interestingly than this? We know that extreme physical pain drives out language; it’s dispiriting to learn that mental pain does the same.

I once read that Zola was similarly startled from his bed like a projectile, launched from sleep into mortal terror. In my unpublished twenties, I used to think of him fraternally—and also with apprehension: if this stuff is still happening to a world-famous writer in his fifties, then there’s not much chance of it getting better for me with the years. The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard once told me that the three most death-haunted people she had ever known were her ex-husband Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Betjeman. Tempting to conclude that it might be a writer thing, even a male writer thing. Amis used to maintain—comically, given his biography—that men were more sensitive than women.

I very much doubt it—both the male thing, and the writer thing. I used to believe, when I was “just” a reader, that writers, because they wrote books where truth was found, because they described the world, because they saw into the human heart, because they grasped both the particular and the general and were able to re-create both in free yet structured forms, because they
understood
, must therefore be more sensitive—also less vain, less selfish—than other people. Then I became a writer, and started meeting other writers, and studied them, and concluded that the only difference between them and other people, the only, single way in which they were better, was that they were better writers. They might indeed be sensitive, perceptive, wise, generalizing, and particularizing—but only at their desks and in their books. When they venture out into the world, they regularly behave as if they have left all their comprehension of human behaviour stuck in their typescripts. It’s not just writers either. How wise are philosophers in their private lives?

“Not a whit wiser for being philosophers,” replies my brother. “Worse, in their semi-public lives, far less wise than many other species of academics.” I remember once laying down Bertrand Russell’s autobiography in a moment, not of disbelief, more a kind of appalled belief. This is how he describes the beginning of the end of his first marriage: “I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realized that I no longer loved Alys. I had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening.” The only logical response to this, to its implications and manner of expression, would be: keep philosophers off bicycles. Or perhaps, keep philosophers out of marriage. Save them for discussing truth with God. I would want Russell on my side for that.

Chapter 37

On my sixtieth birthday, I have lunch with T., one of my few religious friends. Or do I just mean faith-professing? Anyway, he is Catholic, wears a cross around his neck and, to the alarm of some past girlfriends, has a crucifix on the wall above his bed. Yes, that does sound more like religious than faith-professing, I know. T. is soon to marry R., who may or may not have the power to remove the crucifix. This being my birthday, I allow myself more interrogatory latitude, so ask why—apart from having been brought up as a Catholic—he believes in his God and his religion. He thinks for a while and replies, “I believe because I want to believe.” Sounding perhaps a little like my brother, I counter with, “If you said to me, ‘I love R. because I want to love R.,’ I wouldn’t be too impressed, and nor would she.” As it is my birthday, T. refrains from throwing his drink over me.