Death and Writing

Death is often something that we fear. It seems like an end, a stop. Though, I’m with Emily Dickinson and John Donne, it’s only a pause; “I finished knowing, then..” Still, it separates the living from the non-living and thus, people knowingly and consciously facing death can often feel a sharpness of mind and a desire to get things done. The London Times’ David Baddiel starts thinking about death, its affect on writers, and its marketability in the industry through a book by Julian Barnes:

I’M PRESENTLY READING Julian Barnes’s excellent new work, Nothing to be Frightened Of, which is a meditation on death. In fact, the word “meditation” doesn’t really describe it: an obsessive rumination, perhaps, or a horrifically fascinated working-through of anything anyone might ever think on the subject. It’s like when you get a song in your head and can’t get rid of it, only in Barnes’s case it’s a song written by the Grim Reaper himself, lyrically describing his own demise.

Martin Amis once said, about death, you get past 40 and you wonder how you ever thought about anything else: Barnes is 60, and indeed, if you multiply Amis’s idea by a factor of about 20, you might get near the state of mind of which this book is a tour. I make this clear because, as Jane Shilling pointed out in her review in these pages a fortnight ago, the publisher has not. On the back of the book, we are told that it is “many things” including “a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philospher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard.”

Let me rewrite that as it should be: it’s a family memoir, about how his parents DIED, and how he felt about their DEATH, a celebration of art about DEATH – and also THE AFTERLIFE and how he feels about that NOW HE KNOWS IT DOESN’T EXIST – an argument with and about God because God has created a world in which we DIE and also HE DOESN’T EXIST SO WE’RE HEADING TO OBLIVION and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard who is DEAD and wrote loads and loads about DEATH. Oh, and a meditation on mortality and the fear of death.

Clearly, someone at Jonathan Cape thought that this version wouldn’t sell, so instead tried to, as it were, bury the whole death thing: or at least, pretend that Barnes had written a sort of autobiography with maybe the odd bleak thought about what happens when autobiography ends. Thank goodness this editor isn’t responsible for any other important works of literature, otherwise we might soon be seeing a new edition of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice retitled as A Great Composer Has a Bit of a Thing for a Young Boy and Yes All Right He Dies in the End But You’d Hardly Notice in Fact You Could Actually Just Miss That Bit Out: In Venice.

I don’t quite understand the notion that a book about death is a sales turn-off. There are many words whose appearance on the back of a book might put me off – fun, shag, crazy, hunk, lad, girly, Zeitgeist, uplifting, light-hearted, golf, Finnish, Bridget Jones-esque (unless it’s actually by Helen Fielding), any adjectives that describe the writing as spare, clean or simple, and of course any combination of the words Jeffrey and Archer – but death is not one of them. There are only three things that I’ve ever really wanted to read about – sex, love and death – and as I get older, I find that it’s the last of these that most attracts my attention: which may be because as I get older, the first two become less relevant, or because as I get older, I’m more interested in how the first two turn out to be entirely informed by the third.

One of the joys of literature – and one of few good things about death – is watching great writers come to terms with it in their work. The reason that Philip Roth is working, some would say, at the height of his powers now, at 75, is that he’s clearly being driven by death: partly a need to say all that he can before he dies, and partly just, faced with its huge oncoming shadow, he’s doing the only thing he can: writing it out. In great writers – at least the ones who haven’t lost it completely from senility or mental exhaustion – death focuses the mind.

Perhaps Barnes, who in his book is continually searching rather fruitlessly for consolation in the face of death, can take comfort from that: perhaps, being so focused, he is yet to write his greatest novel, about death. Failing that he could remember that death does sell: it just depends on the context. If the publisher turns out to be correct and Nothing to be Frightened Of doesn’t hit the bestseller lists because of its grim subject matter it could always be repackaged as a piece of crime fiction – not a bad title for one, actually – by Barnes’s old alter-ego Dan Kavanagh. And then, presumably, they’d be entirely happy to splash big on the back with the word DEATH.