Nothing to Be Frightened Of (22 page)

My grandfather said that remorse was the worst emotion life could contain. My mother did not understand the remark, and I do not know what events to attach it to.

Death and Remorse 1. When François Renard, ignoring his son’s advice to take an enema, took a shotgun instead, and used a walking stick to fire both barrels and produce a “dark place above the waist, like a small extinguished fire,” Jules wrote: “I do not reproach myself for not having loved him enough. I reproach myself for not having understood him.”

Death and Remorse 2. Ever since I first read it, I have remained haunted by a line from Edmund Wilson’s journals. Wilson died in 1972; the events referred to happened in 1932; I read about them in 1980, the year
The Thirties
was published.

At the beginning of that decade, Wilson had married, as his second wife, one Margaret Canby. She was a stocky, humorous-faced, upper-class woman with “champagne tastes”: Wilson was the first man she had known who had worked for a living. In the previous volume of his journals,
The Twenties
, Wilson had called her “the best woman drinking companion I had ever known.” There he noted his first intention of marrying her, and also his sensible hesitation: “Well though we got along, we did not have enough in common.” But marry they did, into an alcoholic companionship marked from the first by infidelity and temporary separations. If Wilson had his doubts about Canby, she had even stronger reservations about him. “You’re a cold fishy leprous person, Bunny Wilson,” she once told him—a remark which Wilson, with typical unsparingness, confided to his diary.

In September 1932 the couple, then married two years, were having one of their separations. Margaret Canby was in California, Wilson in New York. She went to a party in Santa Barbara wearing high heels. As she left, she tripped, fell down a flight of stone steps, broke her skull, and died. The event produced, in Wilson’s journal, forty-five pages of the most honest and self-flagellant mourning ever written. Wilson starts taking notes as his plane slowly hedge-hops west, as if the enforced literary act will help block off emotion. Over the next days, these jottings open out into an extraordinary monologue of homage, erotic remembrance, remorse, and despair. “A horrible night but even that seemed sweet in recollection,” he notes at one point. In California, Canby’s mother urges him: “You must believe in immortality, Bunny, you must!” But he doesn’t and can’t: Margaret is dead and unreturning.

Wilson spares himself, and his putative reader, nothing. He preserves every impaling rebuke Canby delivered. She once told her critical, complaining husband that the epitaph on his tomb-stone should read: “You’d better go and fix yourself up.” He also celebrates her: in bed, in drink, in tears, in confusion. He remembers fighting off the flies when they made love on a beach, and iconizes her “cunning” body with its small limbs. (“Don’t say that!” she would protest. “It makes me sound like a turtle.”) He calls to mind the ignorances that charmed him—“I’ve found out what that thing over the door is—it’s a lentil”—and places them alongside her running complaints: “I’ll crash someday! Why don’t you do something about me?” She accused him of treating her as just another luxury item, like Guerlain scent: “You’d be charmed if I were dead, you know you would.”

The fact that Wilson treated his wife badly, both before and after marriage, and that his grief was contaminated by justified guilt, is what gives this stream of mourning consciousness its power. The animating paradox of Wilson’s condition is that he has been released into feeling by the death of the person who accused him of lack of feeling. And the line that has never left my memory is this: “After she was dead, I loved her.”

It doesn’t matter that Bunny Wilson was a cold, fishy, leprous person. It doesn’t matter that their relationship was a mistake and their marriage a disaster. It only matters that Wilson was telling the truth, and that the authentic voice of remorse is sounded in those words: “After she was dead, I loved her.”

Chapter 41

We may always choose knowledge over ignorance; we may wish to be conscious of our dying; we may hope for a best-case scenario in which a calm mind observes a gradual decline, perhaps with a Voltairean finger on the ebbing pulse. We may get all this; but even so, we should consider the evidence of Arthur Koestler. In
Dialogue with Death
he recorded his experiences in the Francoist prisons of Malaga and Seville during the Spanish Civil War. Admittedly, there is a difference between young men facing immediate execution by political opponents, and older men and women, most of their lives behind them, contemplating quieter extinctions. But Koestler observed many of those about to die—including, as he was assured, himself—and came to the following conclusions. First, that no one, even in the condemned cell, even hearing the sound of their friends and comrades being shot, can ever truly believe in his own death; indeed, Koestler thought this fact could be expressed quasi-mathematically—“One’s disbelief in death grows in proportion to its approach.” Secondly, the mind has recourse to various tricks when it finds itself in the presence of death: it produces “merciful narcotics or ecstatic stimulants” to deceive us. In particular, Koestler thought, it is capable of splitting consciousness in two, so that one half is examining coolly what the other half is experiencing. In this way, “the consciousness sees to it that its complete annihilation is never experienced.” Two decades previously, in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud had written: “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.”

Koestler also casts doubt on the authenticity of deathbed self-observation, however apparently lucid and rational the mind. “I don’t believe that since the world began a human being has ever died
consciously.
When Socrates, sitting in the midst of his pupils, reached out for the goblet of hemlock, he must have been at least half convinced that he was merely showing off . . . Of course he knew that theoretically the draining of the goblet would prove fatal; but he must have had a feeling that the whole thing was quite different from what his perfervid, humourless pupils imagined it; that there was some clever dodge behind it all known only to himself.”

Koestler ends
Dialogue with Death
with a scene so cinematic, so neat and so implausible that he cannot possibly have made it up. He has been released from prison in exchange for the wife of a Francoist fighter ace, who is given the job of flying Koestler to the rendezvous. As their plane hovers over a vast white plateau, the black-shirted pilot takes his hand off the joystick and engages his political enemy in a shouted conversation about life and death, Left and Right, courage and cowardice. “Before we were alive,” the writer bellows at the aviator at one point, “we were all dead.” The pilot agrees, and asks, “But why, then, is one afraid of death?” “I have never been afraid of death,” Koestler replies, “but only of dying.” “With me, it’s exactly the opposite,” shouts back the man in the black shirt.

Except that they were, presumably, shouting in Spanish. Fear of death or fear of dying, would you rather? Are you with the Communist or the Fascist, the writer or the flyer? Almost everyone fears one to the exclusion of the other; it’s as if there isn’t enough room for the mind to contain both. If you fear death, you don’t fear dying; if you fear dying, you don’t fear death. But there’s no logical reason why one should block out the other; no reason why the mind, with a little training, cannot stretch to encompass both. As one who wouldn’t mind dying as long as I didn’t end up dead afterwards, I can certainly make a start on elaborating what my fears about dying might be. I fear being my father as he sat in a chair by his hospital bed and with quite uncharacteristic irateness rebuked me—“You said you were coming
yesterday
”—before working out from my embarrassment that it was he who had got things confused. I fear being my mother imagining that she still played tennis. I fear being the friend who, longing for death, would repeatedly confide that he had managed to acquire and swallow enough pills to kill himself, but was now seethingly anxious that his actions might get a nurse into trouble. I fear being the innately courteous literary man I knew who, as senility took hold, began spouting at his wife the most extreme sexual fantasies, as if they were what he had always secretly wanted to do to her. I fear being the octogenarian Somerset Maugham, dropping his trousers behind the sofa and shitting on the rug (even if the moment might happily recall my childhood). I fear being the elderly friend, a man of both refinement and squeamishness, whose eyes showed animal panic when the nurse in the residential home announced in front of visitors that it was time to change his nappy. I fear the nervous laugh I shall give when I don’t quite get an allusion or have forgotten a shared memory, or a familiar face, and then begin to mistrust much of what I think I know, and finally mistrust all of it. I fear the catheter and the stairlift, the oozing body and the wasting brain. I fear the Chabrier/Ravel fate of not knowing who I have been and what I have made. Perhaps Stravinsky, in extreme old age, had their endings in mind when he used to call out from his room for his wife or a member of the household. “What is it you need?” they would ask. “To be reassured of my own existence,” he would reply. And the confirmation might come in the form of a handclasp, a kiss, or the playing of a favourite record.

Arthur Koestler, in old age, was proud of a conundrum he had formulated: “Is it better for a writer to be forgotten before he dies, or to die before he is forgotten?” (Jules Renard knew his answer: “Poil de Carotte and I live together, and I hope that I die before him.”) But it is a would-you-rather porous enough to allow a third possibility to sneak in: the writer, before dying, may have lost all memory of having been a writer.

When Dodie Smith was asked if she remembered having been a famous playwright, and replied, “Yes, I
think
so,” she said it in exactly the same way—with a kind of frowning concentration, morally conscious that truth was required—as I had seen her answer dozens of questions over the years. In other words, she at least remained in character. Beyond those nearer fears of mental and physical slippage, this is what we hope and hold to for ourselves. We want people to say, “He was himself right to the end, you know, even if he couldn’t speak/see/hear.” Though science and self-knowledge have led us to doubt what our individuality consists of, we still want to remain in that character which we have perhaps deceived ourselves into believing is ours, and ours alone.

Memory is identity. I have believed this since—oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death. I once spent many years failing to save a friend from a long alcoholic decline. I watched her, from close at hand, lose her short-term memory, and then her long-term, and with them most of everything in between. It was a terrifying example of what Lawrence Durrell in a poem called “the slow disgracing of the mind”: the mind’s fall from grace. And with that fall—the loss of specific and general memories being patched over by absurd feats of fabulation, as the mind reassured itself and her but no one else—there was a comparable fall for those who knew and loved her. We were trying to hold on to our memories of her—and thus, quite simply, to her—telling ourselves that “she” was still there, clouded over but occasionally visible in sudden moments of truth and clarity. Protestingly, I would repeat, in an attempt to convince myself as much as those I was addressing, “She’s just the same underneath.” Later I realized that I had always been fooling myself, and the “underneath” was being—had been—destroyed at the same rate as the visible surface. She had gone, was off in a world that convinced only herself—except that, from her panic, it was clear that such conviction was only occasional. Identity is memory, I told myself; memory is identity.

Chapter 42