Levels of Life Page 7
The gods impose terms and conditions on Orfeo when he goes down into the Underworld; he must agree to the deal. Death often brings out the bargainer in us. How many times have you read in books, or seen in films, or heard in the general narrative of life, about someone promising God – or whoever might be Up There – to behave in such-and-such a way if only He will spare them, or the one they love, or both of them? When it came to my turn – in those dread-filled thirty-seven days – I was never tempted to bargain because there was and is no one in my cosmos to bargain with. Would I give all my books for her life? Would I give my own life for hers? Facile to say yes: such questions were rhetorical, hypothetical, operatic. ‘Why?’ the child asks, ‘why?’ The unyielding parent answers simply, ‘Because.’ So, as I drove towards that railway bridge, I would doggedly repeat, ‘It’s just the universe doing its stuff.’ I said it to avoid being led astray by vain hopes and meaningless diversions.
I told one of the few Christians I know that she was seriously ill. He replied that he would pray for her. I didn’t object, but shockingly soon found myself informing him, not without bitterness, that his god didn’t seem to have been very effective. He replied, ‘Have you ever considered that she might have suffered more?’ Ah, I thought, so that’s the best your pale Galilean and his dad can do.
And that bridge I passed under was in the meantime coming to represent more than just a bridge. It had been built to carry the Eurostar into its new London terminus at St Pancras. The switch from Waterloo was more convenient, and I had often imagined us going on it together, to Paris, Brussels and beyond. But somehow, we never did, and now never would. And so this unoffending bridge came to stand for part of our lost future, for all the spurts and segments and divagations of life that we would now never share; but also for things undone in the past – for promises unkept, for carelessness and unkindness, times of falling short. I came to hate and fear that bridge, though never changed my route.
A year or so later, I saw Orfeo again, this time live, and in modern dress. The production began, atypically, by staging the death of Euridice. There is a cocktail party; all are having fun; we deduce that she is the cynosure in the red frock. Suddenly, she collapses to the floor. The guests surround her, Orfeo kneels to attend her, but she is losing height, fatally, falling slowly through a trapdoor in the boards. He clutches at her, trying to hold her back, but she slips away, out of his fingers and out of her frock, so that he is left on stage grasping just a swathe of emptied cloth.
In modern dress, the opera still worked its magic trick. And yet, in modern dress ourselves, we cannot be Orfeo, or Euridice. We have lost the old metaphors, and must find new ones. We can’t go down as he went down. So we must go down in a different way, bring her back in a different way. We can still go down in dreams. And we can go down in memory.
At first, improbably (but then where has probability gone in all of this?), dreams are more reliable, more secure, than memory. In dreams she arrives looking and acting very like herself. I always know it is her – she is calm, and amused, and happy, and sexy, and so, as a result, am I. The dream falls swiftly and regularly into a pattern. We are together, she is clearly in good health, so I think – or rather, since this is a dream, I know – that either she has been misdiagnosed, or she has made a miraculous recovery, or (at the very least) that death has somehow been postponed for several years and our life together can continue. This illusion lasts for a while. But then I think – or rather, since this is a dream, I know – that I must be inside a dream because, actually, she is dead. I wake happy at having had the illusion, yet dismayed at how truth has ended it; so I never try to re-enter that dream again.
Some nights, after turning out the light, I remind her that she hasn’t been in my dreams recently, and often she responds by coming to me (or rather, ‘she’ ‘responds’ by coming – I never think for a moment that all this is other than self-generated). Sometimes in these dreams we kiss; always there is a kind of laughing lightness to the scenario. She never reproaches or rebukes me, or makes me feel guilty or neglectful (though since I regard these dreams as self-generated, then I must also regard them as self-serving, even self-satisfied). Perhaps the dreams are as they are because there is enough regret and self-reproach in real, lived time. But they are always a source of comfort.
The more so because when I seek to go down in memory, I fail. For a long time I cannot remember back before the start of the year in which she died. All I can do is January to October: three weeks in Chile and Argentina, with my sixty-second birthday spent in a high forest of monkey-puzzle trees, full of cavorting Magellanic woodpeckers. Then normal life again, before a walking holiday in Sicily, and some of our last joint memories: giant fennel and a hillside of wild flowers, an Antonello da Messina and a stuffed porcupine, a fishing town filled with the putt-putt celebrants of World Vespa Weekend. But then, on our return, apprehension, rising fear, the sudden crash. I remember every detail of her decline, her time in hospital, return home, dying, burial. But I cannot get back beyond that January; my memory seems burnt away. A widowed colleague of hers assures me that this is not unusual, that my memories will return, but there are few certainties left in my life, and nothing follows a pattern, so I am sceptical. Why should anything happen when everything has happened? And so it feels as if she is slipping away from me a second time: first I lose her in the present, then I lose her in the past. Memory – the mind’s photographic archive – is failing.
And this is where the Silent Ones cause further offence. They do not understand (how could they?) that they have a new function in your life. You need your friends not just as friends, but also as corroborators. The chief witness to what has been your life is now silenced, and retrospective doubt is inevitable. So you need them to tell you, however glancingly, however unintendingly, that what you once were – the two of you – was seen. Not just known from within but seen from without: witnessed, corroborated, and remembered with an accuracy of which you are yourself currently incapable.
Though I remember, sharply, last things. The last book she read. The last play (and film, and concert, and opera, and art exhibition) that we went to together. The last wine she drank, the last clothes she bought. The last weekend away. The last bed we slept in that wasn’t ours. The last this, the last that. The last piece of my writing that made her laugh. The last words she wrote herself; the last time she signed her name. The last piece of music I played her when she came home. Her last complete sentence. Her last spoken word.
In 1960, an American friend of ours, then a young writer in London, found herself, after lunch at the Travellers’ Club, sharing a taxi home with Ivy Compton-Burnett. At first Compton-Burnett talked to our friend, in a normal conversational tone, about the club, their host, the food, and so on. Then, with a marginal shift of the head, but absolutely no shift of tone, she started talking to Margaret Jourdain, her companion of thirty years. The fact that Jourdain, far from being in the cab with them, had been dead since 1951 made no difference. That was who she wanted to talk to, and did so for the rest of the journey back to South Kensington.
This strikes me as quite normal. We are not surprised when children have imaginary friends. Why be surprised when adults have them too? Except that these friends are real as well.
Bonnard used to paint his model/mistress/wife Marthe as a young woman naked in the bath. He painted her like this when she was no longer young. He continued to paint her like this after she was dead. An art critic, reviewing a Bonnard show in London some ten or fifteen years ago, called this ‘morbid’. Even at the time it struck me as the opposite, and entirely normal.
Ivy Compton-Burnett missed Margaret Jourdain with ‘palpable, angry vehemence’. To one friend she wrote, ‘I wish you had met her, and so met more of me.’ After being made a Dame of the British Empire, she wrote: ‘The one I miss most, Margaret Jourdain, has now been dead sixteen years, and I still have to tell her things … I am not fully a Dame, as she does not know about it.’ This is
true, and defines the lostness of the griefstruck. You constantly report things, so that the loved one ‘knows’. You may be aware that you are fooling yourself (though, if aware, are at the same time not fooling yourself), yet you continue. And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.
As a former lexicographer, I am a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist. English always has been in a state of flux; there was no golden age when words and meanings matched, and the language stood firm and grand like mortarless walls: words are born, live, decay and die – it’s just the linguistic universe doing its stuff. However, as a writer, and as a normally prejudiced English-speaking citizen, I can growl and moan with the best of them: for example, when people think ‘decimate’ means ‘massacre’, or weaken the usefully separate meaning of ‘disinterested’. Nowadays, as with ‘to pass’ and ‘losing one’s wife to cancer’, I bridle at the misuse of the adjective ‘uxorious’. If we don’t look out, it will come to describe ‘a man who has many wives’, or even (that dubious phrase) ‘a lover of women’. It doesn’t mean this. It describes – and always will, whatever future dictionaries may permit – a man who loves his wife. A man like Odilon Redon, who for thirty years adored and painted his wife, Camille Falte. In 1869, he wrote:
You can tell the nature of a man from his companion or his wife. Every woman explains the man by whom she is loved, and vice versa: he explains her character. It is rare for an observer not to find between them a host of intimate and delicate connections. I believe that the greatest happiness will always result from the greatest harmony.
He wrote this not as a complacent husband, but as a solitary observer, nine years before he even met Camille. They married in 1880. Eighteen years later, looking back, he reflected:
I am convinced that the Yes I uttered on our wedding day was an expression of the most complete and the most unambiguous certainty that I have ever felt. A certainty more absolute than any I have felt about my vocation.
Ford Madox Ford said, ‘You marry to continue the conversation.’ Why allow death to interrupt it? The critic H. L. Mencken was married to his wife Sara for a period of four years and nine months. Then she died. Five years into widowerhood, he wrote:
It is a literal fact that I still think of Sara every day of my life and almost every hour of the day. Whenever I see anything she would have liked I find myself saying I’ll buy it and take it to her, and I am always thinking of things to tell her.
This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.
So I talk to her constantly. This feels as normal as it is necessary. I comment on what I am doing (or have done in the course of the day); I point out things to her while driving; I articulate her responses. I keep alive our lost private language. I tease her and she teases me back; we know the lines by heart. Her voice calms me and gives me courage. I look across at a small photograph on my desk in which she wears a slightly quizzical expression, and answer her quizzing, whatever it might be about. Banal domestic issues are lightened by a brief discussion: she confirms that the bath mat is a disgrace and should be thrown away. Outsiders might find this an eccentric, or ‘morbid’, or self-deceiving, habit; but outsiders are by definition those who have not known grief. I externalise her easily and naturally because by now I have internalised her. The paradox of grief: if I have survived what is now four years of her absence, it is because I have had four years of her presence. And her active continuance disproves what I earlier pessimistically asserted. Grief can, after all, in some ways, turn out to be a moral space.
Though she always answers when I talk to her, there are limits to my ventriloquism. I can remember – or imagine – what she will say about something that has happened before, or is being closely repeated. But I cannot voice her reaction to new events. Near the start of Year Five, the son of close friends, a gentle, brilliant boy, who grew into a gentle, troubled man, killed himself. Though grounded in grief, I found myself bewildered, unable for several days to react fully to this terrible death. Then I understood why: because I was unable to talk to her, hear her replies, revive and compare our shared memories. Among all the other categories of companion I had lost in her, here was another: my co-griever.
A friend gave me Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Maintains, a novel set in Lisbon in 1938 and much concerned with death and memory. Its main character is an uxorious journalist whose wife has died some years before of consumption. Pereira, now overweight and unhealthy, checks into a thalassotherapy clinic run by Dr Crodoso, the brusque and secular ‘wise man’ of the story, who advises his patient that he must slough off the past and learn to live in the present. ‘If you go on this way,’ Crodoso warns, ‘you’ll end up talking to your wife’s photograph.’ Pereira replies that he always has, and still does: ‘I tell it everything that happens to me and it’s as if the picture answered me.’ Crodoso is dismissive: ‘These are fantasies dictated by the superego.’ Pereira’s problem, the over-certain doctor insists, is that he ‘has not yet done his grief-work’.
Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera). And you have never done this kind of work before. It is unpaid, and yet not voluntary; it is rigorous, yet there is no overseer; it is skilled, yet there is no apprenticeship. And it is hard to tell whether you are making progress; or what would help you do so. Theme song for youth (sung by the Supremes): ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’. Theme song for age (arranged for any instrument): ‘You Can’t Hurry Grief’.
The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you. For many years we had a Congolese postman, Jean-Pierre, to whom I would often chat. A year or two before she died, he was switched to a new delivery route. I ran into him again at some point in Year Three. We exchanged politenesses, and then he asked, ‘Et comment va Madame?’ ‘Madame est morte,’ I found myself saying, and as I explained, and dealt with his shock, I was thinking, even as I was speaking: now I’m having to do it all again in French. A completely new pain. And such moments of being sideswiped continue. Towards the end of Year Four, I was coming home in a taxi late one evening, some time after eleven. I always miss her on such occasions – no companionable debriefing, no silent sleepy presence, no hand in mine. As we neared home, the cabbie began chatting. All was pleasant, and banal, until the cheerful enquiry, ‘Your wife, be asleep, will she?’ After a silent choke, I gave the only reply I could find. ‘I hope so.’
Not everyone values uxoriousness, of course. Some view it as timidity, others as possessiveness. And for the Ancients, Orpheus was far from the exemplar we have turned him into. They thought that if he missed his wife so much, he should have hurried up and joined her in the Underworld by the quick, conventional method of suicide. Plato dismissed him as a wimpy minstrel too cowardly to die for the sake of love: rightly did the gods have him torn to pieces by the maenads.
You need to establish where you are and how lies the ground beneath; but surveying from a balloon never did prove possible. Others helpfully – and hopefully – log your position for you. ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘you’re looking better.’ Even, ‘Much better.’ The language of illness, inevitably; and the diagnosis is simple – always the same. But the prognosis? You are not ill in any normal manner. At best you have one of those debilitating conditions which come in many forms, and which some people decline to admit actually exist. ‘Throw off your grief,’ such doubters imply, ‘and we can all go back to pretending that death doesn’t exist, or at least is comfortably far away.’ A journalist friend was once found weeping at her d
esk by her section editor. She explained what was already known – that her father had died six weeks previously. The editor replied, ‘I thought you’d be over it by now.’
When might you expect to be ‘over it’? The griefstruck themselves can hardly tell, since time is now so less measurable than it used to be. Four years on, some say to me, ‘You look happier’ – making the advance on ‘better’. The bolder then add, ‘Have you found someone?’ As if that were obviously and necessarily the solution. For some outsiders it is; for others not. Some kindly want to ‘solve’ you; others remain attached to that couple which no longer exists, and for them ‘finding someone’ would be almost offensive. ‘It would be like your dad getting married again,’ said a younger friend of mine. By contrast, a long-time American friend of my wife’s told me, within weeks of her death, that, statistically, those who have been happy in marriage remarry much sooner than those who have not: often within six months. She meant it encouragingly, but this fact, if it was one (perhaps it only applies in the States, where emotional optimism is a constitutional duty), shocked me. It seemed at the same time perfectly logical and perfectly illogical.
The same friend, four years later, said, ‘I resent the fact that she’s become part of the past.’ If this isn’t yet true for me, the grammar, like everything else, has begun to shift: she exists not really in the present, not wholly in the past, but in some intermediate tense, the past-present. Perhaps this is why I relish hearing even the slightest new thing about her: a previously unreported memory, a piece of advice she gave years ago, a flashback of her in ordinary animation. I take surrogate pleasure in her appearances in other people’s dreams – how she behaves and is dressed, what she eats, how close she is now to how she was then; also, whether I am there with her. Such fugitive moments excite me, because they briefly re-anchor her in the present, rescue her from the past-present, and delay a little longer that inevitable slippage into the past historic.