From
March
16, 2008
Here
are five things we didn't know about the novelist Julian Barnes. He was a
“zealous and unflagging” masturbator in his youth. He has never been to a normal
church service. He is deaf in his left ear. His father never said “I love you”
to him. And he fears death so acutely that he wakes in the night beating his
pillow and screaming, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh no!”
We
know these now because, at the age of 62, Barnes has written a new book,
Nothing to Be Frightened Of, a dazzling memoir-cum-essay crammed with black humour, quotations from French writers and personal
reminiscence. He calls it “my death book” and he's been thinking about it for
20 years.
Barnes
once worked out a best-case death scenario for himself, in which his doctor
tells him, “I'm afraid there's good news and bad news.” Barnes promptly demands
to know the truth. “How long?” The doctor replies: “How long? I'd say about 200
pages, 250 pages if you are lucky or work fast.” The new book has precisely 250
pages - and many contain jokes like this, the kind which prompt uneasy laughter
and unseemly curiosity. (What is the matter with the man?)
We
meet in his local pub to talk it over: God, death, identity, memory,
immortality, death, nature, nurture, death ... have I forgotten anything?
“Art,” he says, drily. “You know, that three-letter word.” Anything else? “I
covered love and stuff in my earlier books. This one's about death. And death
brings in God, and how you spend the period before death brings in art. And
then there's how you got here, which is family.”
His
family are given walk-on parts that are rarely flattering. Both parents were
teachers, whose conversation reduced Julian and his brother Jonathan to “a sort
of stunned boredom” as children. Barnes remembers having only one talk à deux with his father, a kind but bottled-up man who had
Hodgkin's disease for 20 years before dying at the age of
His
mother, who scolded him once for “too much imagination”, was very proud of her
perfect nails and talked mainly of herself. She criticised
his first novel as a “bombardment” of filth and would show her friends the
cover but not allow them to look inside. He is shockingly honest about his
feelings on visiting her in old age: “I couldn't face the sense of my vital
spirits being drained away by her relentless solipsism and the feeling that
time was being sucked from my life, time that I would never get back, before or
after life.” She became interesting to Barnes only on her deathbed, raving from
dementia. “I kept wondering where all this stuff was coming from.”
Barnes
stresses in the early pages that this is not an autobiography, nor is he “in
search of my parents”. The warnings are necessary because by far the most vivid
episodes showcase his reaction to “the decent dullness of my family”: his
amused discovery, for example, that a discarded leather pouffe
on which he used to sit was stuffed with torn-up fragments of his parents' love
letters. This doesn't seem dull in the least, but chilling. Barnes disagrees:
“Given that most love letters don't survive for children to read, they are
presumably destroyed. And after a certain point, what do you do with them? Do
you keep them or reread them? There can be a great gap between what you felt
then and what you feel now. Do you want anyone else reading your love letters?
Probably not. Are you embarrassed by them? You could put them in the dustbin. That's
the worst option. Or burn them? That's terrible. But using them for a practical
purpose, now, that's rather good.” What has he done with his own love letters?
“I'm not telling!” he says, mock-indignantly.
He
is quick to rebut any suggestion that he has been disloyal to his parents'
memory. “When you are writing the book, the moral responsibility is to the
truth and the truth of the book. That may sound harsh but that's the case.”
He
warms to his theme: “Look, it's not as if children haven't written about
parents before. I didn't think that I was breaking any taboos. These were my
examples, they were my parents. They were generally very good parents, but I
was writing about death and dying and theirs was the example in front of me.
One of the writer's general motives is to say of life, it's not like that, it's
like this. And we don't talk easily, let alone enough, about dying and being
dead.”
Actually,
Barnes and his friends seem to discuss little else, exchanging e-mails about
how “sicko” their thoughts are and vying to be the
most death-obsessed. One friend, the writer Redmond O'Hanlon - thinly disguised
as R in the book - had his shotgun confiscated by the police after he'd aired
his suicidal thoughts on Desert Island Discs. Another friend, P, or the writer
Piers Paul Read, stunned a lunch party by worrying that he, a devout Catholic,
would probably be separated from his non-believing wife and children in the
afterlife. I note that neither Barnes nor the other guests - agnostics and
atheists to a man - mocked Read for his faith. “We're all knocking on a bit now
and are slightly kinder and wiser.”
Barnes,
who opens the book with the line, “I don't believe in God, but I miss him”, is
rather a half-hearted agnostic-going-on-atheist. He talks sympathetically about
the religious impulse and the inspiration and comfort offered by religion, like
a cold child pressing his nose against the window of a warm and brightly lit
house. He has enjoyed Richard Dawkins's anti-God polemic, but there is, he
says, “an arrogance and contempt for others in certain forms of atheism” that
he doesn't share. “As a writer, you are alive to as many human impulses as
there are, that's the game.”
His
sense of himself “as a writer” is never far from the surface. There's a jokey
riff towards the book's end in which he starts to thank his very last reader -
the final eyes to examine “this book, this page, this line”. And then he
screeches into reverse, because his last reader is, by definition, someone who
doesn't recommend his books to anyone else. “You really are so mean-spirited,
so idle-minded, so lacking in critical judgment? Then you don't deserve me. Go
on, fuck off and die. Yes, you.”
Although
Barnes insists this is a joke - “Oh, yes, you are meant to laugh at it” - its
hysterical edge suggests extreme anxiety. In the absence of the consolations of
religion, is art, that three-letter word, his best route to immortality? “I
don't want to know when the last of my books goes out of print. If I died
today, I assume some of them would last 20 years, 40 years maybe. Maybe not,
maybe more. It doesn't interest me.”
Does
it not? “It interests me but there's nothing I can do about it. It would put me
off the book I was writing if I thought: ‘Ah, this one will last.'”
What
about achieving immortality through founding a dynasty, then? It's an intrusive
question, because Barnes and his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, are childless, but he takes it as a writer. “The
only dynasties I am interested in are dynasties of writers and artists and
being a distant cousin to some of them. In
In
the book, he writes that he has “failed - or rather declined” to pass on his
genes. Is this a fancy way of saying he simply didn't want children? Barnes
falls quiet. “I've never passionately wanted children but, you know, in those
alternative lives that you didn't lead, obviously one would be with children.
And it depends upon the hazards of who you are with. And, by the way, I don't
not have children because I'm a writer. I'd just like to correct that in case
that's what you're thinking. It's come up in the past, I've read stuff about:
‘Oh, here is a man so coldly devoted to his art that he refuses to have
children.' And that's just ... bollocks.”
In
the awkward silence that follows, I bring the conversation back to more solid
ground. Do you know where you want to be buried? He looks startled. “No, I
probably should have thought about it more. I don't like the idea of Highgate cemetery: they bury people in tiers there so you
might not be six feet under but
©
2008 Times Newspaper Ltd
URL: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3533651.ece
Biography
of Julian Barnes [1] [2] [3] [4]
Articles
[1] [2] [3] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]
Página creada y actualizada por
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Para cualquier
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© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Tirca Mihaela
Universitat de València
Press
Creada: 28/10/2008 Última
Actualización: 28/10/2008
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