by Zadie Smith
At this point you can’t help but feel, flicking through pages of Stalinist mass murder, that we seem to have drifted some distance from our original subject, immortality—unless you accept Gray’s proposal that all this murder of individual men is committed for the future benefit of eternal man. Matters grow Grayer still when a final metaphorical link is made between occultism and espionage, which seems, again, too loose to hold: “They attract those who look for a concealed pattern in events.” What is the purpose of this strange book? The answer comes in a brief but devastating final section. It’s entitled “Sweet Mortality.” Here we learn that “this confusion of science with magic is not an ailment of a kind that has a remedy.” You find it today in scientists who think they can solve global warming (“They cannot stop the climate shift they have set in motion”); in the Dawkins crowd, who believe science can magically subvert belief in God (“No form of human behavior is more religious than the attempt to convert the world to unbelief, and none is more irrational, for belief has no particular importance in either science or religion”). This is the first time Dawkins is mentioned, but it’s possible to read the whole book as a subtle anti-Dawkins enterprise, an attempt to shift the argument away from the familiar Punch and Judy fight—science versus religion—and toward a fuller comprehension of the shared delusions of both. Gray wants scientists to admit (as philosophers long ago conceded) that their theories are only so many tools “we use to tinker with the world,” which always sounds conceptually good to literary types like your reviewer, though I wonder what a real scientist would make of Gray’s assertion that there are no “Laws of Nature,” only “regularities.” Even to me it seems sophistical: I can’t know with absolute certainty that an apple will fall every time I drop it, but it is my very strong expectation that it will, and it is on such contingent forms of certainty—drawn from abundant experiential evidence of natural “regularities”—that science, surely, performs its business (and wouldn’t most scientists freely admit this mild form of contingency?). Still, if you object to Dawkins’s elevation of science at the expense of religion, as many do, you will find appealing Gray’s sober view of its limits (“Reality is exhausted by what is and what happens. Beyond this there is nothing”), even while you raise an eyebrow as Gray himself overreaches: “The resurrection of the dead at the end of time is not as incredible as the idea that humanity, equipped with growing knowledge, is marching toward a better world.”
Personally, I get a contact thrill from this kind of rhetoric, without ever being able to quite dismiss my inner Dawkins, who sits, persistent, in a corner of my brain comparing the Law of Gravity with the Second Coming, asking me baldly which I’d stake my life upon. Then again, Gray’s target isn’t really the reality status of religion. Unlike Dawkins, he does not waste energy confronting readers of Genesis with the paleontological record (“The heart of all religions is practice—ritual and meditation. Practice comes with myths, but myths are not theories in need of rational development”). Gray’s target is science itself. For Gray, scientific naturalism and religious fundamentalism both refuse to accept that “there is no hidden order in things,” that the world is “riddled with chaos” and human will in the face of it “finally powerless.” Darwinism always has been a uniquely bitter pill, not much easier for men of science than for men of God—even Darwin gagged on it. Gray ends on a Kafka note: “All things may be possible, but not for us.”
• • •
Speaking of attempts at immortality, did you know the Duchess of Devonshire is ninety-one this month?* In the past decade she seems to have performed a little voodoo of her own: magically extending her life by continually writing about it. This one is called Wait for Me! and should feel overfamiliar, but like Chatsworth itself (the four-hundred-year-old seat where she was chatelaine), the Duchess’s life is so voluminous she is forever finding enough material for another memoir in some nook or cranny of it, like the time she found a Van Dyck sketchbook at the back of an old cupboard. No matter how many memoirs she writes she will never meet demand: no amount of Mitford will satisfy admirers of that eccentric clan. You can read all Nancy’s novels, the letters and biographies, and you will still want to hear more about these seven siblings and their irresistible, monstrous, Communist, Nazi, absurdly posh ways. The Duchess (“Debo,” to Mitfordiacs) understands this, and sprinkles Mitford manna on the fans with her opening “Note on Family Names,” three whole pages long, from which I can quote only a representative paragraph:
Muv and Farve called Nancy Koko . . . Pam and Diana called her Nuance and to me she was the Ancient Dame of France, the French Lady Writer, or just Lady. Pam was Woman to us all, with variations thereof. Tom was Tuddemy to Unity and Jessica (“Tom” in Boudledidge, their private language) and this was taken up by the rest of us. Diana was Dayna to Muv and Farve, Deerling to Nancy, and Honks to me . . . Unity was Bobo, but Birdie or Bird to me. Jessica called her Boud (“Bobo” in Boudledidge). Jessica was Little D to Muv, Stea-ake to Pam and Hen or Henderson to me, but she was Decca universally—and remains so in this book.
For your reviewer this book was a great and guilty pleasure, my own relationship with the Mitfords being somewhat agonized. In a manner that the Duchess makes clear she finds banal and bourgeois, I am repelled by various individual Mitfords’ anti-Semitism, unlimited sense of entitlement, affection for Oswald Mosley, Hitler and Stalin, and calm certainty that “a man who [has] spent all his life in politics or public affairs was more likely to have a son capable of following in his footsteps than a man who has never paid attention to either.” I don’t believe that, nor do I believe that decolonization, like the nationalization of coal, was a lot of pointless show, nor that the next best person to clean one’s house is the son or daughter of the person who has been cleaning it for forty years. My own grandmother was in service in a great house: thank God the war broke this natural law of inheritance. But! I can’t resist the Mitford comedy. Love that Farv read only one book in his life—White Fang—and considered it so good he didn’t want to spoil matters by reading another. Love older sister Nancy torturing Debo at bedtime: “As soon as you’ve gone I shall do the joy dance.” Love Nancy disguising herself as a tramp and accosting her terrified sisters in public places, leering “Give us a kiss.”
You tend to think of Nancy as the engine of comedy in the Mitford house because she transcribed it so well, but reading Debo’s account your respect shifts to Farv, whose comic capacity was as enormous as it was unintended. Upon finding a lot of Nancy’s smart Oxford friends at the breakfast table he inquires of Muv (very loudly): “Have these people no homes of their own?” Here he is answering the phone to Peter Watson, a beau of Nancy: “Nancy, that hog Watson wants to speak to you.” When Muv tries to remedy Farv’s illiteracy by reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles aloud, she is surprised to find him moved by Tess’s fate: “Oh, darling, don’t cry, It’s only a story.” Farv: “WHAT. Do you mean to say the damn feller made it up?”
As for class consciousness, you can’t hope for that from the Mitfords. They felt themselves to be the natural ruling class the same way they knew buttercups appeared in spring. Churchill was “Cousin Winston” to them, and Macmillan “Uncle Harold”; Jack Kennedy was a cute boy who turned up at a few balls the year Debo came out. They had nicknames for the royal family, for Christ’s sake (Prince Charles was “Friend,” the Queen Mother “Cake”). Educational achievement of any kind was considered irredeemably vulgar and the English seasons marked not by meteorological change but mass alighting from different train stations: Ascot, Glyndebourne, Henley. I have a fairly high tolerance for this sort of thing, but also a limit. When an American friend (Bunny Mellon) decides to send Debo’s mother-in-law, who runs an East End women’s charity, a consignment of clothes, Debo and the girls are shocked to find the boxes, when they arrive, full of Balenciaga. They intercept the gowns, and send the women instead “decent, unworn clothes of our own that satisfied my mother-in-law’s purposes.” Mea
nwhile the Mitfords step out in their new couture. Debo: “No-one could have appreciated them more.” Where to begin?
Class is a cocoon—it takes genius to think your way out of it. Debo is no genius, as she’d be the first to admit. But she is a funny, honest and unpretentious writer, with a winning mix of naivety and wisdom. Her social experiences may have been narrow (aren’t all our social experiences, whether on the top or the bottom, narrow?), but her domestic experience was broad and often sad, and serves as a reminder that there exist human troubles from which no amount of money or class will protect you. Debo had six pregnancies: three babies who died at birth, three survivors. This dark period—and her husband’s lifelong alcoholism—she dispatches in only a few pages, demonstrating those once-general British qualities, discretion and stoicism, whose disappearance she elsewhere laments, along with elbow-length gloves and that bit in Harrods where a fellow could leave his country hounds while he went to his club.
Édouard Levé and Peter Stamm
On 15 October 2007, ten days after handing in the manuscript for a novel called Suicide, the Parisian writer and photographer Édouard Levé killed himself, aged forty-two. Levé’s suicide is the de-centered center of Suicide, as he must have known it would be. A conceptual artist, Levé was fond of the “deferred” term, which exists outside a structure and yet informs every part of it—a strategy once considered Derridean until ubiquity rendered it simply French. In Oeuvres (2002), Levé described 533 of his own works that did not, at that point, exist. His photographic project Homonymes is a series of portraits of “ordinary” people who share names with the famous. He used a variation on the same concept in Amérique (2006), a visual record of “three months in the United States traveling only to cities that share a name with a city in another country.” Many of these photographs are a bit run-of-the-mill: slovenly Americans, tract housing, desolate highways. The irony is straight out of Urban Outfitters. I don’t say that just to be smart—the adolescent aesthetic is at the core of Levé’s art, for good and for bad. Pêcheur de Bagdad et sa fille, a sneering portrait of an obese father and (in fact) his son fishing in Bagdad, Florida, is a neat example of the impenetrable superiority that makes teenagers (and Parisians) so frequently annoying. Elsewhere, specifically in a shot called Jeune femme de Paris, Levé finds exactly the right teenage girl in the right white jeans: her sullen beauty would not look out of place on the Champs-Élysées. Levé’s prose is like this, too, veering between the banal and the sublime. Take the opening lines of Autoportrait, his penultimate, paragraph-free novel, consisting solely of authorial assertions:
As an adolescent I believed that [Perec’s] Life A User’s Manual would help me to live, and that [Claude Guillon and Yves le Bonniec’s] Suicide A User’s Manual would help me to die. I don’t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don’t like. I look down dead-end streets. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life. I am slow to realize when someone mistreats me, it is always so surprising: evil is somehow unreal.
That mixture of thoughtfulness and self-regard, honest interrogation and mere posing—if I were fifteen, Autoportrait would be my bible. As an adult, I still find Levé hard to resist, perhaps because his adolescent aesthetic reminds us of the kind of writing that got us reading in the first place. Tales like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” another suicide narrative and one of the most adolescent, and beautiful, stories in American literature. As adults we know the dilemma Salinger sets up for Seymour is heavily freighted, unfair. (Basically: If you can’t live with the authenticity of a child, why live at all?) But to read “Bananafish” is to be taken back to a time when simply overhearing a phoney conversation could make you want to kill yourself. I think we dutifully admire the Shakespearean writer, able to capture the seven ages of man from mewling infant to second childishness, but we reserve our special adoration for writers who get—how to put it?—stuck at this intense, imbalanced and unforgiving age. (“Art that unfolds over time,” writes Levé, “gives me less pleasure than art that stops it.”) It’s no coincidence that writers who stop time in this way tend to remember their own adolescence as the time of their lives:
The best conversations I had date from adolescence, with a friend at whose place we drank cocktails that were made by mixing up his mother’s liquor at random, we would talk until sunrise . . . in the course of those nights, I delivered speeches on love, politics, God, and death of which I retain not one word, even though I came up with some of them doubled over in laughter; years later, this friend told his wife that he had forgotten something in the house just as they were going out to play tennis, he went down to the basement and put a bullet in his head with the gun he had left there beforehand.
And that shocking little addendum, tucked nonchalantly (just as a teenager would!) into Autoportrait, leads directly to the opening lines of Suicide:
One Saturday in the month of August, you leave your home wearing your tennis gear, accompanied by your wife. In the middle of the garden you point out to her that you’ve forgotten your racket in the house . . . you head down into the basement. Your wife doesn’t notice this . . . A few moments later she hears a gunshot.
From the narcissistic claustrophobia of Autoportrait to the narrative power of Suicide it’s only a little leap—from je to tu—but it’s the difference that makes all the différence. It is a book balanced thrillingly between monologue and biography. But what kind of a guy is this tu? Well, he’s you. You’re too pure for this world. Also too brilliant. You’re like Seymour Glass and Young Werther. You find social experience inauthentic: “One evening you were invited to dine at a friend’s house with other guests . . . you couldn’t make yourself lie in response to the simple question, ‘How are you doing?’” You are very pure. You are like Wittgenstein, or Christ: “[Y]ou were told that you had been accepted. Your speech about death had received one of the highest grades. You refused to enter the school.” You are alienated from yourself: “You approached the mirror; you recognized your physiognomy, but it seemed to belong to someone else.” You are very easy to read about (I couldn’t put you down!), even if Levé’s ideas about you are not always wildly original. That Levé is able to think of you with such affection—in his own moment of extremity—lends great emotional heft to this simple list of facts about you. What else? Sometimes your story is interrupted by theoretical proselytizing:
A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived . . . If events follow each other, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary, time doesn’t exist: ABC is neither more nor less chronological than BCA. To portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.
There was some of this in Autoportrait, too (“I prefer a ruin to a monument”; “I write fragments”). Parisian writers seem convinced that the rest of the world thinks life is like a chronological novel. But your character survives the argument that character cannot be made: “Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability.” And beyond these abstractions of your personality, there is the un-philosophical revelation that antidepressants can rob you of your selfhood entirely: “Suddenly, you no longer had a brain. Or rather, it was another person’s brain. You sat like this for two hours, asking yourself if you were yourself.” “Was a little bit of fake happiness worth losing your free will?”
Now, is all of this about you—or Levé? Does the difference matter? It is as if Levé has found an existential way to depict a friendship: two souls intermingled in a pronoun. The sadness of this book is overwhelming. Yet at the same time it’s a cause for happiness, because it’s the final record of a writer who f
ound, in the end, the correct vessel for his talents. In Suicide Levé’s fragments become wonderfully sharp, conjuring tragedy in a few sentences: “You kept a tape of the messages left on your answering machine by mistake. One of them went: ‘We’ve arrived fine. We’ve arrived fine. We’ve arrived fine.’ Uttered slowly by an old lady in despair.”