“Every death I’ve ever seen in my work . . . are all for me casualties on a single front.”
[F]or me the front is the street, and I am forced to see it every day.
I see it, eat it, sleep and dream the street, am the street. I groan in its violent dreams, see it under the rain and in the sun, the hurrying people on it, killers as well as victims, flying past absorbed as if they were praying. The way I am, I sense tears as well as hear them. . . . Where’s the justice in it? That’s what I want to know.
As in He Died with His Eyes Open, I Was Dora Suarez concludes with the identification of a particularly sick, sadomasochistic killer, himself afflicted with AIDS, for whom the detective expresses a perverse sympathy: “Pain is inflicted by those who have no idea what it means . . . because they inflict pain on themselves.” The novel ends in an outburst of retributive gunfire and the detective’s terse notation: “I felt nothing.” Of this curious hybrid of a novel the author notes in his autobiography The Hidden Files [1992] that he was attempting here something of “the same message as Christ. . . . It was my atonement for fifty years’ indifference to the miserable state of this world; it was a terrible journey through my own guilt, and through the guilt of others.”
OF LITERARY GENRES, the mystery-detective novel is the most addictive, as it is the genre that dramatizes the obsessive, monomaniacal quest for the “solution” to a puzzle. (Crime fiction is as likely to be addictive for the writer as for the reader, with the result that virtually all mystery writers are highly prolific. See, for instance, such practitioners as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Rex Stout, P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Ed McBain, Michael Connelly, et al., and most notably the hyper-prolific Simenon with an estimated two hundred titles.) When Edmund Wilson asked irritably, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” (New Yorker, 1944), he was bringing to bear the expectations of serious literature in an examination of mystery novels by Christie, Stout, Dorothy Sayers, among others, and finding them wanting; particularly, Wilson objected to the formulaic nature of mystery plots, the flatness of character, the general contrivance and mediocrity of the writer’s vision and the banality of the “denouement.” (A. Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Wilson excluded from his censure, for their “wit and fairytale poetry” and for the originality of the character of the detective Holmes.) An additional damning point is that mystery fans don’t seem to read mystery novels very carefully; interest fades with the final chapter, and the reader-addict turns to the next mystery. Wilson complained of a reading experience analogous to having to unpack large crates by “swallowing the excelsior in order to find at the bottom a few bent and rusty nails.” In his more illuminating analytical and appreciative essay on the detective novel, “The Guilty Vicarage,” (1948) W. H. Auden argues that the detective novel offers readers a kind of magic by which “grace” is restored to a social setting and guilt is dispelled; even as Auden identifies himself as a detective-novel addict, he admits that he forgets a mystery novel as soon as he finishes it, and has no interest in reading it again. Auden differentiates between the novel of detection and the novel that is “art”—the latter category including fiction by Raymond Chandler as well as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. With references to Christian tradition, Auden perceives in crime fiction the underlying archetype of sin, salvation, and redemption, of which the secular-minded Wilson seems oblivious. In crime fiction evil is isolated by being identified, pursued, brought under control and rendered harmless; at least temporarily, evil is eradicated. As no religious ritual is absolute and for all time, so the eradication of evil is only temporary, and has to be repeated, and repeated. It’s the perennial cycle of crime/sin, investigation, revelation and “justice” that provides the template for works of mystery/detection from Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: the restoration of “grace” in the social community, often at enormous cost to a sacrificial figure. The detective is this figure, frequently an outlaw-savior who must commit crimes and suffer punishment in order to achieve justice. Or, like Sophocles’s Oedipus, he must identify himself as the loathed criminal, the violator of taboo; he must exorcise himself, to achieve a bitter and ironic justice. And often this is vigilante justice, as in much of contemporary crime fiction, for the law is notoriously compromised. (The corruption of high police officials and courts is taken for granted in Raymond’s bleakly realist “Factory” novels as in Raymond Chandler’s more romantic L.A.-noir novels. Virtually anyone who works in the public sector is synonymous with duplicity and graft while only the “private detective” or the outlaw police detective, is left to pursue justice.) The allegiance of the crime novel isn’t to maintaining the stability of law, but achieving, if but piecemeal, and surreptitiously, something like the blessing of justice. Few detectives go so far as Raymond’s Detective Sergeant, who falls in love with murder victims because they have been wrongfully killed, and there is no one but the Detective Sergeant to avenge them. Edmund Wilson could not have dismissed Derek Raymond’s “Factory” novels as below the radar of serious literary consideration, and W. H. Auden would surely have been impressed with their stark originality, though Raymond’s vision is wholly secular and fatalist and there is little sense of redemption in these blood-drenched pages.
I said out into the night: “We’ll get our dignity back; whether alive or dead, we shall all be as we used to be.” I found I absolutely had to state those words out loud because, through the deaths of [the murder victims] I found myself suddenly in a state of great doubt, despair, and in a testing time, not only because of the way the two women had left us but because of the fury I felt on account of it. I found my own life set on the scales as though it were theirs. . . . I only know that [the murder victims] must, by our forces, be put to rest; because until that is done, the new future will never come, and so none of us can ever be at rest.
Here is the detective as sacrificial visionary. He has literally lost his own, personal life in the service of the impersonal quest for justice, that may seem to us, readers at a distance, a kind of madness. For certainly there is something deranged in so vast and so passionate a quest, in such debased circumstances—this faith in a “new future.” It isn’t a coincidence that Derek Raymond’s knightly detective is also, in temperament, an artist, a poet, and a philosopher for whom “words sometimes take the place of tears.”
He Died with His Eyes Open
By Derek Raymond
I Was Dora Suarez
By Derek Raymond
“CATASTROPHE INTO ART”:
JULIAN BARNES
“How do you turn catastrophe into art?”—this bold question, posed by Julian Barnes in a fabulist exegesis of Gericault’s great painting The Raft of the Medusa, in one of the chapters of Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), might be said to be answered by Barnes’s new book, Levels of Life, a memoir written in the aftermath of the death of Barnes’s wife of thirty years, Pat Kavanagh, who died of a brain tumor in 2008. With few of the playful stratagems and indirections of style typical in Barnes’s fiction, but something of the baffled elegiac tone of Barnes’s Booker Award-winning short novel The Sense of an Ending (2011), Levels of Life conveys an air of stunned candor: “I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart.” The end came swiftly and terribly: “Thirty-seven days from diagnosis to death.”
The resulting memoir, a precisely composed, often deeply moving hybrid of nonfiction, “fabulation,” and straightforward reminiscence and contemplation, is a gifted writer’s response to the incomprehensible in a secular culture in which “we are bad at dealing with death, that banal, unique thing; we can no longer make it part of a wider pattern.” With approval Barnes quotes E. M. Forster: “One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another”—yet, Levels of Life suggests that a singular death, if examined from a singular perspective, may throw a good deal of light upon the universal experiences of loss, grie
f, mourning, and what Barnes calls “the question of loneliness.”
Levels of Life is a not quite adequate title for this highly personal and at times richly detailed book, implying an air of lofty and cerebral contemplation from which the vividness of actual life has departed. For here it would seem that “catastrophe” does result in “art”—the death of Barnes’s wife is the genesis for the book, which would not have been written otherwise. “I already know that only the old words would do: death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak. Nothing modernly evasive or medicalising. Grief is a human, not a medical, condition.” The epiphany—or rather one of the epiphanies, for Levels of Life is comprised of striking, insightful aphorisms, far too many to note—toward which the memoir moves is the remark of a bereaved friend: “Nature is so exact, it hurts as exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. . . . If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.” In the more intimate passages of Levels of Life Barnes would seem to be making the tacit point that the creation of art itself is inadequate to compensate such loss, for it is a virtually ontological, near-physical loss experienced by the survivor in an intensely felt emotional relationship, not unlike a bodily wound. How better to articulate this ineffable loss as a loss of “depth” (or altitude):
You put together two people who have not been put together before. . . . Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
Like Barnes’s characteristic works of fiction, in which postmodernist experimentation is a prism through which ethically provocative narratives can be adroitly told, Levels of Life is unorthodox in structure and perspective. That it is a widower’s memoir is not even evident until page 68 of 118 pages, in a section titled “Loss of Depth” in which the author speaks for the first time of his grief for his deceased wife, which has scarcely abated in the several years since her death. Preceding this section are two shorter, self-contained prose pieces evoking the ebullient era of hot-air ballooning that suggest, in retrospect, something of the airy elation, transcendence and terrible risk that falling in love entails for the survivor of such an adventure.
The first section, titled “The Sin of Height,” might be subtitled “A Very Brief History of Hot-Air Ballooning,” presented in a sequence of sparkily wrought vignettes about such nineteenth-century ballooning enthusiasts as Colonel Fred Burnaby (circa 1882), Felix Tournacho /“Nadar” (circa 1863), the Godard brothers (circa 1863), and the renowned actress Sarah Bernhardt (circa 1882) whose connection with ballooning is relatively slight and opportunist. Barnes writes of these extravagantly fearless balloonists with the panache of the affably omniscient narrator of Flaubert’s Parrot and of the quasi-historian of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, condensing what is surely a complex, heterogeneous history into fewer than seventy pages. “Aeronauts were the new Argonauts, their adventures instantly chronicled” in this dazzling new era in which ballooning represented “freedom” as well as danger, and an unexpected sort of “universal brotherhood” as, it was believed, at least at the time, “a balloon brought no evil.” Naturally, there is a reverse sentiment, that flying violates a natural law and is therefore a sin: “To mess with flight was to mess with God. It was to prove a long struggle, full of instructive lessons”—most notably the legend of Icarus.
Barnes has researched the history of hot-air ballooning, with an eye for the poetic and the exemplary, and it is only upon a second reading of Levels of Life that much in the early sections acquires a symbolic significance. There are beautifully appropriate passages taken from balloonists’ memoirs, for instance the remarks of the physicist Dr. J.A.C. Charles (the first person to ascend in a hydrogen balloon, 1783): “When I felt myself escaping from the earth, my reaction was not pleasure but happiness . . . I could hear myself living, so to speak.” The flamboyant Colonel Burnaby is moved to a “moral feeling.” The Divine Sarah sees ballooning as a natural equivalent to her “dreamy nature”; she discovers that above the clouds there is “not silence, but the shadow of silence . . . (The balloon) is the emblem of uttermost freedom.” Nadar, one of the great photographers of his time, as well as a pioneering balloonist, describes “the silent immensities of welcoming and beneficent space, where man cannot be reached by any human force or by any power of evil, and where he feels himself alive as if for the first time.” Yet there is always the possibility—if one persists, the probability—of catastrophe and sudden death: one young balloonist (1786) dies in a fall to earth so powerful that “the impact drove his legs into a flower bed as far as his knees, and ruptured his internal organs, which burst out on to the ground.” So horrific is this vision, the memoirist Julian Barnes appropriates it for himself, as an expression of the pain that is “exactly what it is worth.”
The second section of Levels of Life is aptly titled “On the Level”: “We live on the flat, on the level, and yet—and so—we aspire. . . . Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. . . . Every love story is a potential grief story.”
Here is an imagined three-month romance between two radically unlike individuals: Colonel Burnaby and the Divine Sarah. Though begun in innocent fascination on both sides, it’s a cruelly uneven romance between a celebrated actress notorious for sleeping with her leading men and a physically awkward, heavyset man. Burnaby falls in love with the petite, ethereal Sarah “hook, line and sinker.” A conventional Brit of his class, Burnaby proposes marriage, and Sarah responds languidly, “I am made for sensation, for pleasure, for the moment. I am constantly in search of new sensations, new emotions. . . . My heart desires more excitement than anyone—any one person—can give.” Burnaby is devastated, but survives; quasi-suicidal, he enters into a short-lived marriage with another, presumably less enchanting woman, returns to ballooning, and is killed in an illicit expedition at Khartoum in 1885. The reader comes to see belatedly that the fictitious romance between Burnaby and Sarah Bernhardt is analogous to the romance of Julian Barnes and his wife Pat Kavanagh; Burnaby doesn’t outlive Sarah Bernhardt, but his loss of her is traumatic as a widower’s loss: “The pain was to last several years. He eased it by traveling and skirmishing. He never talked about it. If someone inquired into his black mood, he would reply that the melancholy of the padge-owl was afflicting him.”
It would seem to be with some relief, and a good deal of feeling, that Julian Barnes finally speaks in his own voice in the third section of the memoir. Here, the puppet-master/ventriloquist throws aside his stratagems and speaks plainly, as if helplessly; it’s as if a master stylist like Nabokov had finally decided yes, let’s speak openly, just for once.
Grief is the great human leveler: “You have suddenly come down in the freezing German Ocean, equipped with only an absurd cork overjacket that is supposed to keep you alive.”
The remainder of Levels of Love is a journal of a kind, not so much of the events of a life as of its interior contours. Barnes identifies himself as a former lexicographer, a “descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist” whose subject in this case is himself. (Levels of Love is notable as a memoir of loss in which there is no portrait of the deceased.) Barnes is relentless in self-analysis, exacting to the point of obsession in exposing the raw nature of his grief. “We grieve in character. That . . . seems obvious, but this is a time when nothing seems or feels obvious.” The reader senses a conflict between the memoirist’s passion to speak and a stoic reticence in the effort of what he calls “grief-work.” “There is the question of anger. Some (of the widowed) are angry with the person who has died, who has abandoned them, betrayed them by losing life. . . . Few die willingly, not even most suicides.” Well-intentioned friends suggest to the grief-stricken Barnes that he acquire a dog—“I would reply sarcastically that this did not seem much of a substitute for a wife.” A couple suggests that Barnes rent a flat in Paris for six mo
nths, or a beach cabin in Guadeloupe; conveniently, the couple could look after Barnes’s house in his absence, and “We’d have a garden for Freddie.” (Freddie is the couple’s dog.) Barnes is eloquent on the myopia of grief—the “solipsism of grief”—noting his anger at the reactions of others: “Since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and offence-taking are common. Some friends are as scared of grief as they are of death; they avoid you as if they fear infection. Some, without knowing it, half expect you to do their mourning for them.” There is the bright, asinine query, a scant week after the funeral: “So, what are you up to? Are you going on walking holidays?” Others shy away from even speaking of Pat Kavanagh, though they had been friends of hers for years. The Silent Ones he calls them: “I remember a dinner conversation in a restaurant with three married friends. . . . Each had known her for many years. . . . I mentioned her name; no one picked it up. I did it again, and again nothing. Perhaps the third time I was deliberately trying to provoke. . . . Afraid to touch her name, they denied her thrice, and I thought the worst of them for it.” Barnes imagines that these individuals might be wanting to say: “Your grief is an embarrassment. We’re just waiting for it to pass. And, by the way, you’re less interesting without her.” Another widower infuriates Barnes by remarking infelicitously that he’d “lost his wife to cancer”—(“another phrase that jarred: compare ‘“We lost our dog to gypsies’”)—and reassuring Barnes that one does survive grief and emerge as a “‘stronger,’ and in some ways a ‘better,’ person. . . . This struck me as outrageous and self-praising.” Naturally, after a while well-intentioned individuals begin to suggest that Barnes find another woman companion, remarry: “Have you found someone?” Barnes notes that, statistically, “those who have been happy in marriage remarry much sooner than those who have not: often within six months”—a fact, if it is a fact, that “shocks” the widower with its perfect synthesis of logic and illogic. “Perhaps [this] only applies in the States, where emotional optimism is a constitutional duty.” It may be one of the smaller satisfactions of “art” to repay petty hurts with petty hurts, but it is a satisfaction nonetheless, and good to note here that, even in the eloquence of grief, Julian Barnes doesn’t present himself as refined of such fully human predilections.
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