Nothing to Be Frightened Of (21 page)

When I return home, I find a small package pushed through the door. My first response is one of mild irritation, as I have specifically requested No Presents, and this particular friend, known for her giftliness, has been warned more than once on the subject. The package contains a lapel badge, battery driven, which flashes “60 TODAY” in blue and red points. What makes it not just acceptable, but the perfect present, turning my irritation into immediate good humour, are the manufacturer’s words printed on the cardboard backing: “WARNING: May Cause Interference With Pacemakers.”

One of the (possibly) “worthwhile short-term worries” that follows my birthday is an American book tour. The arrival into New York—the transit from airport to city—involves passing one of the vastest cemeteries I have ever seen. I always half-enjoy this ritual memento mori, probably because I have never come to love New York. All the bustle in that most ever-bustling and narcissistic of cities will come to this; Manhattan mocked by the packed verticality of the headstones. In the past, I have merely noted the extent of the graveyards and the arithmetic of mortality (a job for the Accountancy God in whom Edmond de Goncourt couldn’t believe). Now, for the first time, something else strikes me: that there is no one in them. These cemeteries are like the modern countryside: hectares of emptiness extending in every direction. And while you hardly expect a yokel with a scythe, a hedger-and-ditcher or a drystone-waller, the utter absence of human activity that agribusiness has brought to the former meadows and pastureland and hedgerowed fields is another kind of death: as if the pesticides have killed off all the farm workers as well. Similarly, in these Queens cemeteries, not a body—not a soul—stirs. Of course, it makes sense: the dead ex-bustlers are unvisited because the city’s new replacement bustlers are much too busy bustling. But if there is anything more melancholy than a graveyard, it is an unvisited graveyard.

A few days later, on the train down to Washington, somewhere south of Trenton, I pass another cemetery. Though equally empty of the living, this one seems less grim: it straggles companionably alongside the tracks, and doesn’t have the same feel of stained finality, of dead-and-doneness. Here, it seems, the dead are not so dead that they are forgotten, not so dead that they will not welcome new neighbours. And there, at the southern end of this unmenacing strip, is a cheery American moment: a sign proclaiming BRISTOL CEMETERY—LOTS AVAILABLE. It reads as if the pun on “lots” is intended: come and join us, we have much more space than our rivals.

Lots available. Advertise, even in death—it’s the American way. Whereas in Western Europe the old religion is in terminal decline, America remains a Christian country, and it makes sense that the creed still flourishes there. Christianity, which cleared up the old Jewish doctrinal dispute about whether or not there was life after death, which centralized personal immortality as a theological selling-point, is well suited to this can-do, reward-driven society. And since in America all tendencies are taken to the extreme, they have currently installed Extreme Christianity. Old Europe took a more leisurely approach to the final arrival of the Kingdom of Heaven—a long mouldering in the grave before resurrection and judgement, all in God’s good time. America, and Extreme Christianity, likes to hurry things along. Why shouldn’t product delivery follow promised order sooner rather than later? Hence such fantasies as The Rapture, in which the righteous, while going about their daily business, are instantly taken up into Heaven, there to watch Jesus and the Antichrist duke it out down below on the battleground of planet Earth. The action-man, X-rated, disaster-movie version of the world’s end.

Death followed by resurrection: the ultimate “tragedy with a happy ending.” That phrase is routinely credited to one of those Hollywood directors who are assumed to be the source of all witticism; though I first came across it in Edith Wharton’s autobiography
A Backward Glance.
There she ascribes the quip to her friend the novelist William Dean Howells, who offered it her as consolation after a first-night audience had failed to appreciate a theatrical adaptation of
The House of Mirth.
This would take the phrase back to 1906, before all those movie directors had started making wisecracks.

Wharton’s success as a novelist is the more surprising—and the more admirable—given how little her view of life accorded with American hopefulness. She saw small evidence of redemption. She thought life a tragedy—or at best a grim comedy—with a tragic ending. Or, sometimes, just a drama with a dramatic ending. (Her friend Henry James defined life as “a predicament before death.” And
his
friend Turgenev believed that “the most interesting part of life is death.”)

Nor was Wharton seduced by the notion that life, whether tragic, comic, or dramatic, is necessarily original. Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our—to us—ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, “People tell me it’s a cliché. But it doesn’t feel like a cliché to me.” Yet it was, and is. As all our lives would prove, if we could see them from a greater distance—from the viewpoint, say, of that higher creature imagined by Einstein.

A biographer friend once suggested she take the slightly longer view and write my life. Her husband argued satirically that this would make a very short work as all my days were the same. “Got up,” his version went. “Wrote book. Went out, bought bottle of wine. Came home, cooked dinner. Drank wine.” I immediately endorsed this Brief Life. That will do as well as any other; as true, or as untrue as anything longer. Faulkner said that a writer’s obituary should read: “He wrote books, then he died.”

Chapter 38

Shostakovich knew that making art from and about death was “tantamount to wiping your sleeve on your nose.” When the sculptor Ilya Slonim did a portrait bust of him, the result failed to please the chairman of the Soviet Committee for the Arts. “What we need,” the apparatchik told the sculptor (and by extension the composer) “is an optimistic Shostakovich.” The composer loved repeating this oxymoron.

Apart from being a great brooder on death, he was also—in private, necessarily—a mocker of false hopes, state propaganda, and artistic dross. One favourite target was a hit play of the 1930s by the long-forgotten regime creep Vsevolod Vishnevsky, of whom a Russian theatre scholar recently wrote: “Even by the standards of our literary herbarium, this author was a very poisonous specimen.” Vishnevsky’s play was set on board ship during the Bolshevik Revolution, and admirably portrayed the world as the authorities pretended it was. A young female commissar arrives to explain, and impose, the party line on a crew of anarchist sailors and old-school Russian officers. She is met with indifference, scepticism, and even assault: one of the sailors tries to rape her, whereupon she shoots him dead. Such an example of communist vigour and instant justice helps win over the sailors, who are soon moulded into an effective fighting unit. Deployed against the warmongering, God-worshipping, capitalistic Germans, they are somehow taken prisoner; but rise up heroically against their captors. During the struggle the inspirational commissar is killed, and dies urging the now fully Sovietized sailors, “Always uphold . . . the high traditions . . . of the Red Fleet.” Curtain.

It wasn’t the cartoonishly obedient plot of Vishnevsky’s play that appealed to Shostakovich’s sense of humour, but its title:
An Optimistic Tragedy.
Soviet Communism, Hollywood, and organized religion were all closer than they knew, dream factories cranking out the same fantasy. “Tragedy is tragedy,” Shostakovich liked to repeat, “and optimism has nothing to do with it.”

Chapter 39

I have seen two dead people, and touched one of them; but I’ve never seen anyone die, and may never do so, unless and until I see myself die. If death ceased to be talked about when it first really began to be feared, and then more so when we started to live longer, it has also gone off the agenda because it has ceased to be there, with us, in the house. Nowadays we make death as invisible as possible, and part of a process—from doctor to hospital to undertaker to crematorium—in which professionals and bureaucrats tell us what to do, up to the point where we are left to ourselves, survivors standing with a glass in our hands, amateurs learning how to mourn. But not so long ago the dying would have spent their final illness at home, expired among family, been washed and laid out by local women, watched over companionably for a night or two, then coffined up by the local undertaker. Like Jules Renard, we would have set off on foot behind a swaying, horse-drawn hearse for the cemetery, there to watch the coffin being lowered and a fat worm strutting at the grave’s edge. We would have been more attending and more attentive. Better for them (though my brother will refer me to hypothetical wants of the dead), and probably better for us. The old system made for a statelier progressing from being alive to being dead—and from being dead to being lost from sight. The modern, rushing way is doubtless truer to how we see death nowadays—one minute you’re alive, the next you’re dead, and truly dead, so let’s jump in the car and get it over with. (Whose car shall we take? Not the one she would have wanted.)

Stravinsky went to see Ravel’s body before it was placed in the coffin. It was lying on a table draped in black. Everything was black and white: black suit, white gloves, white hospital turban still encircling the head, black wrinkles on a very pale face, which had “an expression of great majesty.” And there the grandeur of death ended. “I went to the interment,” Stravinsky recorded. “A lugubrious experience, these civil burials where everything is banned except protocol.” That was Paris, 1937. When Stravinsky’s turn came, thirty-four years later, his body was flown from New York to Rome, then driven to Venice, where black and purple proclamations were posted up everywhere: THE CITY OF VENICE DOES HOMAGE TO THE REMAINS OF THE GREAT MUSICIAN IGOR STRAVINSKY, WHO IN A GESTURE OF EXQUISITE FRIENDSHIP ASKED TO BE BURIED IN THE CITY WHICH HE LOVED ABOVE ALL OTHERS. The Archimandrite of Venice conducted the Greek Orthodox service in the church of SS. Giovanni et Paolo, then the coffin was carried past the Colleoni statue, and rowed by four gondoliers in a water-hearse out to the cemetery island of San Michele. There the Archimandrite and Stravinsky’s widow dropped earth from their hands on to the coffin as it was lowered into the vault. Francis Steegmuller, the great Flaubert scholar, followed the day’s events. He said that as the cortège processed from church to canal, with Venetians hanging from every window, the scene resembled “one of Carpaccio’s pageants.” More, much more than protocol.

Unless and until I see myself die.
Would you rather be conscious of your dying, or unconscious of it? (There is a third—and highly popular—option: being deluded into the belief that you are on the way to recovery.) But be careful what you wish for. Roy Porter wanted to be fully conscious: “Because, you know, you’d just be missing out on something otherwise.” He went on: “Clearly, one doesn’t want excruciating pain and all the rest of it. But I think one would want to be with the people who mattered to one.” That is what Porter hoped for, and this is what he got. He was fifty-five, had recently taken early retirement, moved to Sussex with his fifth wife, and begun a life of freelance writing. He was bicycling home from his allotment (hard not to imagine the kind of country lane where Bertrand Russell had his marital aperçu) when he was suddenly blasted out by a heart attack, and died alone on the verge. Did he have any time to watch himself die? Did he know he was dying? Was his last thought an expectation that he would wake up in hospital? His final morning had been spent planting peas (perhaps the nearest we shall get to those French cabbages). And he was taking home a bunch of flowers, which were in a moment transformed into his own roadside tribute.

Chapter 40