Extract from
Julian Barnes´s ´Nothing To Be Frightened Of´
While I was at university, I spent a year in
Some of the priests were intelligent and sophisticated, others stupid
and credulous; some evidently pious, others sceptical to the point of
blasphemy. I remember the shock around the refectory table when the subversive Père Marais started baiting the Druidical Père Calvard about which of their
home villages got a better quality of Holy Ghost coming down at Pentecost. It
was also here that I saw my first dead body: that of Père
Roussel, a young teaching priest. His corpse was laid
out in an anteroom by the school’s front entrance; boys and staff were
encouraged to visit him. I did no more than gaze through the glass of the double
doors, telling myself that this was tact; whereas in all probability it was
only fear.
The priests treated me in a kindly way, a little teasing, a little incomprehending. 'Ah,' they would say, stopping me in the corridor,
touching my arm and offering a shy smile, 'La perfide
De Goësbriand had just celebrated 25 years as
a priest, and took his faith very straightforwardly. He was shocked when,
listening in on my conversation with Père Marais, he
discovered that I hadn’t been baptised. Pauvre Hubert
became immediately concerned on my behalf, and spelled out to me the dire
theological consequences: that without baptism I had no chance of getting to
heaven. Perhaps because of my outcast status, he would sometimes admit to me
the frustrations and restrictions of the priestly life. One day, he cautiously
confided, 'You don't think I'd go through all this unless there was heaven at
the end of it, do you?'
At the time, I was half impressed by such practical thinking,
half appalled at a life wasted in vain hope. But Père
de Goësbriand’s calculation had a distinguished
history, and I might have recognised it as a workaday version of Pascal’s
famous wager. The Pascalian bet sounds simple enough.
If you believe, and God turns out to exist, you win. If you believe, and God
turns out not to exist, you lose, but not half as badly as you would if you chose
not to believe, only to find out after death that God does exist. It is,
perhaps, not so much an argument as a piece of self-interested position-taking
worthy of the French diplomatic corps; though the primary wager, on God's
existence, does depend on a second and simultaneous wager, on God’s nature.
What if God is not as imagined? What, for instance, if He disapproves of
gamblers, especially those whose purported belief in Him is dependent on some
acorn-beneath-the-cup mentality? And who decides who wins? Not us: God might
prefer the honest doubter to the sycophantic chancer.
The Pascalian bet echoes down the centuries,
always finding takers. Here is an extreme, action-man version. In June 2006, at
the
If I called myself an atheist at 20, and an
agnostic at 50 and 60, it isn't because I have acquired more knowledge in the
meantime: just more awareness of ignorance. How can we be sure that we know
enough to know? As 21st-century neo-Darwinian materialists, convinced that the
meaning and mechanism of life have only been fully clear since the year 1859,
we hold ourselves categorically wiser than those credulous knee-benders who, a
speck of time away, believed in divine purpose, an ordered world, resurrection
and a Last Judgement. But although we are more informed, we are no more
evolved, and certainly no more intelligent than them. What convinces us that
our knowledge is so final?
My mother would have said, and did say, that it was 'my age' – as if,
now that the end was nearer, metaphysical caution and brute fear were weakening
my resolve. But she would have been wrong. Awareness of death came early, when
I was 13 or 14. The French critic Charles du Bos,
friend and translator of Edith Wharton, created a useful phrase for this
moment: le reveil mortel.
How best to translate it? 'The wake-up call to mortality' sounds a bit like a
hotel service. 'Death-knowledge', 'death-awakening'? –
rather too Germanic. 'The awareness
of death'? – but that suggests a state rather
than a particular cosmic strike. In some ways, the (first) bad translation of
du Bos's phrase is the good one: it is like being in
an unfamiliar hotel room, where the alarm clock has been left on the previous
occupant's setting, and at some ungodly hour you are suddenly pitched from
sleep into darkness, panic, and a vicious awareness that this is a rented
world.
My
friend R recently asked me how often I think about death, and in what
circumstances. At least once each waking day, I replied; and then there are the
intermittent nocturnal attacks. Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness
when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the
days shorten, or towards the end of a long day’s hiking. A little more
originally, perhaps, my wake-up call frequently shrills at the start of a
sports event on television, especially, for some reason, during the Five (now
Six) Nations rugby tournament. I told R all this, apologising for what might
seem a self-indulgent dwelling on the subject. He replied: 'Your death-thoughts
seem HEALTHY. Not sicko like [our mutual friend] G.
Mine are v v sicko. Always
have been = DO IT NOW type. Shotgun-in-mouth. Much
improved since Thames Valley Police came and removed my 12-bore because they'd
heard me on Desert Island Discs. Now have only [his son's] airgun. No good. No blasto. So we WILL HAVE AN OLD AGE TOGETHER.'
People
used to talk more readily about death: not death and the life to come, but
death and extinction. In the 1920s, Sibelius would go to the Kämp restaurant in
I
have never wanted the taste of a shotgun in my mouth. Compared to that, my fear
of death is low-level, reasonable, practical. And one
problem with gathering some new lemon table or Magny
dinner to discuss the matter might be that some of those present would turn
competitive. Why should mortality be less a matter for male boasting than cars,
income, women, cock size? 'Night sweats, screaming –
Ha! – that’s primary-school stuff. You wait till you
get to...' And so our private anguish might be shown up as not just banal but
under-powered. MY FEAR OF DEATH IS BIGGER THAN YOURS AND I CAN GET IT UP MORE
OFTEN.
When
my friend R talked about death on Desert Island Discs, the police took away his
shotgun. When I did so, I received various letters pointing out that my fears
would be cured if I looked within, opened myself up to faith, went to church,
learnt to pray, and so on. My correspondents weren’t exactly patronising – some
were soppy, some were stern – but they did seem to imply that this solution
might come as news to me. As if I were a member of some rainforest tribe (not
that I wouldn’t have had my own rituals and belief system in place if I were),
rather than one speaking at a point when the Christian religion is approaching
extinction in my country, partly because families like mine have been not
believing it for a century and more.
That
century is about as far as I can trace my family back. I have become, by
default, our archivist. In a shallow drawer, a few yards from where I am
writing, sits the entire corpus of documentation: the certificates of birth and
marriage and death; the wills and grants of probate; the professional
qualifications, references and testimonials; the passports, ration cards,
identity cards; the scrapbooks and notebooks and keepsakes. Here are the texts
of patter songs my father wrote (to be performed in dinner jacket, leaning
against the piano while a school or service colleague provided a languid
nightclub accompaniment), his signed menus, theatre
programmes and half-filled-in cricket scorecards. Here is my mother's hostess
book, her Christmas card lists and tabulations of stocks and shares. Here are
the telegrams and wartime aerogrammes between them
(but no letters). Here are their sons' school reports and physical development
cards, their prize-day programmes, swimming and athletics certificates – I see
that in 1955 I came first in the long jump and third in the boot race, while my
brother once came second in the wheelbarrow race with Dion Shirer – together
with evidence of achievements long forgotten, like my certificate for Perfect
Attendance during one primary-school term. Here too are Grandpa’s First World
War medals – proofs of attendance in
This
shallow drawer is also big enough to contain the family’s photographic archive.
Packets labelled 'Us', 'The Boys' and 'Antiques' in my father’s handwriting.
Here is Dad in schoolmaster’s gown and RAF uniform, black tie, hiking shorts
and cricket whites, usually with cigarette in hand or pipe in mouth.
Here
is Mum in chic home-tailored clothes, unrevealing two-piece swimsuit, and
swanky outfit for a Masonic dinner dance. Here are various French assistants,
including the one who helped scatter my parents' ashes on the west coast of
Here
too is Grandpa's photographic record, a red cloth-bound album titled 'Scenes
from Highways & Byways', bought in
In
my teens, I had my own photographic period, which included modest home
processing: the plastic developing tank, orange darkroom light and contact
printing frame. At some point during this enthusiasm, I answered an
advertisement in a magazine for an inexpensive yet magical product which
promised to turn my humble black-and-white prints into rich and living colour.
I can’t remember if I consulted my parents before sending away, or if I was
disappointed when the promised kit turned out to consist of a small brush and
some coloured oblongs of a paint which would adhere to photographic paper. But
I set to work, and made the pictorial record of my family more vivid, if not
more true. Here is Dad in bright yellow cords and green sweater against a
monochrome garden; Grandpa in trousers of exactly the same green, Grandma in a
watered-down green blouse. All three of them have hands and faces of a
preternaturally hot-flush pink.
My
brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour
them in. We each have our own cheap mail-order paintbox,
and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma as 'petite and unopinionated'. My brother, when consulted, takes out his
paintbrush and counterproposes 'short and bossy'. His
mental album also contains more snaps than mine of a rare three-generational
family outing to
Petite or merely short, unopinionated or
bossy? Our differing adjectives reflect scrappy memories of
half-forgotten feelings. I have no way of working out why I preferred Grandma,
or she me. Did I fear Grandpa’s authoritarianism and find his example of
masculinity more coarse-grained than Dad's? Was I simply drawn to Grandma as a
female presence, of which there were few enough in our family? Though my
brother and I knew her for 20 years, we can barely remember anything she said.
The two examples he can provide are both of occasions when she enraged our
mother; so her words may have adhered more for their delighting effect than
their intrinsic content. The first was on a winter's evening, with our mother
warming herself by the fire. Grandma advised: 'Don't sit so close,
you'll spoil your legs.' The second took place almost a whole generation later.
My brother's daughter C, then aged about two, was offered a piece of cake, and
accepted it without acknowledgement. 'Say "Ta", dear,' her
great-grandmother suggested – at which 'our mother blew her top that such a
vulgarism should have been uttered'.
Do
such scraps say more about Grandma, our mother or my brother? Are they
indicators of bossiness? My own evidence for her 'unopinionatedness'
is, I realise, actually non-existent; but then perhaps it might be, by
definition. And though I search my memory, I cannot find a single direct quote
from this woman whom I think I loved when a child; only an indirect one. Long
after Grandma was dead, Ma passed on to me a piece of her received wisdom. 'She
used to say, "There would be no bad men in the world if there were no bad
women."' Grandma’s endorsement of the sin of Eve was retailed to me with
considerable scorn.
When
I was clearing out my parents' bungalow, I found a small stack of postcards
dating from the 1930s to the 1980s. All had been sent from abroad; clearly
those posted from within
I
can't date the earliest postcards, the stamps having been steamed off –
doubtless for my collection – and with them the postmarks. But I note the
varying ways my father signs off to his mother: 'Leonard', 'Yours as ever,
Leonard', up to 'Love, Leonard' and even 'Love and kisses, Leonard'. On cards
to my mother he is 'Pip', 'Your Pip', 'As ever, Pip', 'Lots of love, Pip' and
'All my love, Pip': rising gradations from the unreachable days of the
courtship which led to my existence. I follow my father through his trail of
changing names. He was christened Albert Leonard, and known to his parents and
siblings as Leonard. When he became a schoolmaster the Albert took over, and in
common rooms he was known for 40 years as 'Albie' or
'Albie Boy' – though this might have been derived
from his initials, ALB – and occasionally, in satirical mode, as 'Wally', after
the Arsenal full back Wally Barnes. My mother disliked both given names
(doubtless Wally, too), and decided to call him Pip. After
Great Expectations? But he was hardly Philip Pirrip,
any more than she was Estella. During the war, when he was in
He
brought home various artefacts from
They
stuffed it with the letters of their courtship and early married years. I was
an idealistic adolescent, who swerved easily into cynicism when confronted with
life's realities; this was one such moment. How could they have taken their
love letters (doubtless kept in ribboned bundles),
torn them into tiny pieces, and then watched other people's fat arses hunker down
on top? 'They': I meant, of course, my mother, since such practical recycling
fitted my reading of her, rather than what I judged to be my father's more
sentimental nature. How to imagine that decision, and that scene? Did they tear
the letters up together, or did she do it while he was at work? Did they argue,
did they agree, did one of them secretly resent it? And even supposing they
agreed, how did they then go about it? Here's a haunting would-you-rather.
Would you rather tear up your own expressions of love, or the ones you had
received?
In
company, I would now lower myself gently on to the pouffe;
alone, I would drop heavily, so that its exhalation might jet out a scrap of
blue airmail paper bearing one or other of my parents' youthful hands. If this
were a novel, I would have discovered some family secret – but no one will know
the child isn’t yours, or they will never find the knife now, or I always
wanted J to be a girl – and my life would have been changed for ever.
(Actually, my mother did want me to be a girl, and had the name Josephine
waiting, so that would have been no secret.) Or – on the other hand – I might
have discovered only the best words my parents' hearts could find for one
another, their tenderest expressions of devotion and
truth. And no mystery.
The
collapsing pouffe was at some point chucked out. But
instead of being put in the dustbin, it was dumped at the bottom of the garden,
where it became heavy, rain-sodden and increasingly discoloured. I would kick
it occasionally as I passed, my wellington ejecting a few more blue scraps, the
ink now running, the likelihood of legible secrets being divulged even less. My
kicks were those of a disheartened Romantic. So this is what it all comes to?
Thirty-five
years later, I was faced with the final leavings of my parents' lives. My
brother and I each wanted a few things; my nieces had their pick; then the
house-clearer came in. He was a decent, knowledgeable fellow, who talked to the
items as he handled them. I presume the habit must have started as a way of
gently preparing the customer for disappointment, but it had turned into a kind
of conversation between himself and the object in his hand. He also recognised
that what would soon be haggled over coldly in his shop was now, here, for the
last time, something which had once been chosen, then lived with, wiped,
dusted, polished, repaired, loved. So he found praise where he could: 'This is
nice – not valuable, but nice'; or 'Victorian moulded glass – this is getting
rarer – it’s not valuable, but it's getting rarer.' Scrupulously polite to
these now ownerless things, he avoided criticism or dislike, preferring either
regret or long-term hope. Of some 1920s Melba glasses (horrible, I thought):
'Ten years ago these were very fashionable; now no one wants them.' Of a basic Heal's green-and-white checkerboard plant holder: 'We need
to wait another 40 years for this.'
He
took what was saleable and departed in a peel of £50 notes. Then it was a
matter of filling the back of the car and making several trips to the local
recycling centre. Being my mother’s son, I had bought a number of heavy green
plastic sacks for the job. I carried the first of them to the rim of the big
yellow skip and realised – now even more my mother's son – that they were far too
useful to throw away. And so, instead of leaving the final remnants of my
parents' lives confidentially bagged, I poured the house-clearer's rejects into
the skip and kept the sacks. (Is this what my mother would have wanted?) One of
the last items was a stupid metal cowbell that Dad had bought in Champéry, on that trip from which my brother reported a
disappointing ham sandwich; it ding-donged
clonkily down into the skip. I looked at the spread
of stuff below me and, though there was nothing incriminating or even
indiscreet, felt slightly cheap: as if I had buried my parents in a paper bag
rather than a proper coffin.
© Telegraph Media Group 2008
This extract is taken out from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/01/sm_julianbarnes201.xml&page=3
Biografy of Julian Barnes
[1] [2] [3] [4]
Books written by
Julian Barnes [1] [2]
Articles about
Julian Barnes [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
[9] [10]
[11]
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