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uk/books/2013/mar/30/julian-barnes-sense-of-another-ending

Julian Barnes: The sense of another ending

Julian Barnes' new book is part essay, part short story, part memoir but, above all, it's a love story dedicated to and about Pat Kavanagh, his wife, who died in 2008. Interview by Emma Brockes
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Emma Brockes The Guardian, Saturday 30 March 2013 It is almost five years since Pat Kavanagh, the literary agent, died of a brain tumour. In that time, Julian Barnes, her husband of 30 years, has published three books: a collection of short stories, a collection of essayson the influence of other writers and a novel, The Sense of an Ending, which won th Booker prize in 2011

His new book, Levels of Life, is another hybrid; part essay, part short story and part memoir, the latter of which will generate by far the most interest, as memoirs of the well known in turmoil will do. But it is a mistake to see the book as anything other than whole: an effort by Barnes, using everything he has, to look down on the landscape of loss. Barnes is at his home in north London. "Grief," he says, "seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists." This changes with the altitude of years. So now here is the pattern and it is extraordinary. It is important to understand what Levels of Lifeis not, as well as what it is: it is not a book about the author's late wife (Pat was my good friend and agent for 10 years), an intensely private person who hated to see her name in print so much so that Barnes, in the section describing his own grief, never uses her name. She appears, more resonantly, in the dedication and there's a picture of her on the back of the jacket, next to one of her husband. Neither is it a grief memoir in what has become its conventional form, most notably with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates' A Widow's Story: that is, a diary of the first year, written very much from inside the blast zone. Barnes did keep a journal during those months in 2008, amounting to hundreds of thousands of words, which he got down hastily every day during the onslaught. Reprising them was not the

book he wanted to write. "Just because the emotion is extreme and you're in a state of extreme turmoil, doesn't necessarily mean it's more truthful than when things are calmer." Instead, he sought the clarifying distance of time and the liberating apparatus of metaphor. Levels of Life is a hard book to describe; no summary will capture the experience of reading it the way in which, as the slim volume progresses, something not quite central to your vision builds, so that by the end you are blindsided by a quiet devastation. The first two sections are concerned with late 19th-century France and feature Sarah Bernhardt, the actress, an awkward British cavalry soldier named Fred Burnaby, and Gaspard-Flix Tournachon, known as Nadar, the adventurer, photographer and what links all three enthusiastic balloonist. The book's guiding metaphor is Nadar's feat of being the first man to take an aerial photograph, from a balloon over northern Paris, and in that moment to experience a sort of existential freefall that finds its echo in the last third of the book.

The actor Sarah Bernhardt photographed by Gaspard-Flix Tournachon, also known as Nadar, both feature in Levels of Life. Photograph courtesy: Time Life Pictures "At the time," says Barnes, "Nadar's photos were as disturbing as they were beautiful; and they remain so today. To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock." It is similar to the shock one gets from grief; that moment of seeing oneself suddenly, appallingly out of context, the co-ordinates as off as in a drawing by Escher. Thus are the figurative planes set for the book's final third, in which Barnes confronts his own grief with a directness the more brutal for its contrast with the first two thirds. It was, he says, a necessary shift in approach. "I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind. But at a certain point I thought, no, I have to do that straight rather than through myth. And I don't want to do it in fiction. I have to do it absolutely straight and head on. So the development process was both organic and slightly mysterious, in the way that it sometimes is." After his wife's death, nothing seemed to add up and Barnes means this quite literally. "What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there," he writes. "This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible." Pat Kavanagh came from South Africa to England in 1964 and joined AD Peters, later PFD, as a literary agent in 1968. She had trained as an actor and you could hear it in her voice: low, reassuring, with a touch, always, of irony. One of the last times I spoke to her, she had rung to ask whether her reputation for being scary was justified; she had heard herself described so and

was annoyed and amused. It was and it wasn't; Pat could certainly be scary, but it was good scary, and I told her as much. She was supposed to be scary. That is how she got you to finish your book, when you were months over deadline and hopelessly faffing. "Just finish it," she said to me once with a finality that still makes the hair on my neck stand up. I finished it. Precision was the thing with Pat, from her couture to the punctuation of her emails and so too with Barnes. You can analyse the metaphorical underwire of Levels of Life; you can marvel at the structure of a book so well balanced. Make no mistake, however, it is a love story. "I was 32 when we met," he writes, "62 when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart." There is no conventional account of their life together nor of her illness and death. But through the outline of Barnes's grief, she is in the book's every page. "You put together two things that have not been put together before," he writes in the opening lines. "And the world is changed." Like death, grief, writes Barnes, is both banal and unique. It has its universal elements, and a theme or rather, a grammatical tense first touched on in Nothing to be Frightened of, his meditation on death, resurfaces in Levels of Life. In the months after Pat's death, Barnes finds himself at a loss as to whether to go on living. And if he does, how? The answer comes to him: "I must live as she would have wanted me to." It is an echo of the discussion he had with his brother over what to do in the wake of their mother's death, during which, wrote Barnes, he said they should do what she would have wanted. "And my brother said, 'we can't do what she would have wanted, we can only do what we want.' And we had a quasi-philosophical argument about it. Now what is the name of that tense? It's a sort of past future conditional, if that makes any sense. It's a past conditional about the future. I still maintain that that's a true tense and that it can and should guide action." However to begin with, after Pat's death, he was not interested in action. Every action brought pain, as did all previous enthusiasms. On the bus, in the street, he would look at other people and be appalled at them for their indifference to his suffering. But he also judged harshly those of his friends who pressed him insistently for details on how he was feeling. He started to avoid things he had latterly relished. "I wanted to watch sport in which I had almost no emotional involvement at all," he writes. "I would enjoy though that verb is too strong to describe a kind of listless attending football matches between, say, Middlesbrough and Slovan Bratislava (ideally the second leg of a tie whose first leg I had missed), in some low-level European tournament which mostly excited those in Middlesbrough and Bratislava. I wanted to watch sport to which I would normally be indifferent. Because now I could only be indifferent; I had no emotions left to lend." Into this came the question of suicide, "early, and quite logically". He thought around how he might do it. "A hot bath, a glass of wine by the taps, and an exceptionally sharp Japanese carving knife." Given the hysteria that attends confessions of this kind, did he hesitate to write about it? "No. Once I embarked on the subject of grief, there seemed to be no point not to say exactly what it was like and what happened. When you're writing, you're thinking of yourself, the subject matter, the reader, and the book. You're not thinking, 'Is someone going to say, oh, is he in favour of suicide?' That all comes along later. I can't remember how quickly the idea presented itself to me, but within weeks, I'm sure. And it seems to me completely normal and rational. Foolish to act immediately, but it's a useful out. But then, I've always thought suicide was a moral right anyway, for a grown-up individual."

He got along by talking to Pat, summoning her imagined responses to things, evoking her whenever he could, which is why he was enraged by those of his friends who stopped mentioning her name. "The Silent Ones," he calls them in the book, worse than those badgering him for an account of himself. (He could, he writes, have given them a conventional answer: "'A bit up and down.' That would have been a proper, prim and English answer. Except that the griefstruck rarely feel either proper, prim, or even English.") There were other offences; one friend encouraged him to get a dog. (Barnes replied, sarcastically, that "this did not seem much of a substitute for a wife.") Another suggested he leave his house and decamp for a while to the Caribbean; she offered to house-sit. There were those whose behaviour seemed to imply: "Your grief is an embarrassment. We're just waiting for it to pass. And, by the way, you're less interesting without her." Barnes takes a certain selflacerating pleasure in the last one: "This is true, I do feel less interesting without her." The best response was in a letter from a friend: "The thing is," she wrote, "nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter." It is a line he himself now uses, "whenever, as I seem to have to do a lot nowadays, I write letters of condolence. It's not overtly a consoling line; but it is true. A truth like that is more consoling than 'I'm sure she's looking down on us from above' or whatever." Barnes's belief in the finality of death is unwavering; he does not believe he will see her again. But in most situations, he is able to conjure his wife's reaction to things most comically, to the terrible state of the bath mat (he went to the airing cupboard and replaced it). He knows this is entirely self-generated; he calls it "ventriloquism". But it is not meaningless. Pat's voice in his head is a necessary prop to his own identity. In those first days and weeks, Barnes writes, he found himself, "missing what it was in her that made me more myself". It's the question set up in the first two thirds of the book: how to elucidate the self, or rather, the self in relation to others. Here the two historical characters step in; Sarah Bernhardt, with her fleeting enthusiasm for ballooning and Fred Burnaby, a member of the Council of the Aeronautical Society, who in the fictional second part of the book, Barnes manipulates into a love affair. Everything the actress does is a triumph of artifice she is like a walking metaphor while Burnaby is doggedly literal, so that, at some level, their interplay describes opposing efforts to put life into language. Barnes got to Bernhardt through his old friend Flaubert, whose publisher, he read, was going to put out a special Christmas edition of one of his books: "I think it was The Temptation of Saint Anthony. And at the last minute, they pulled it, in order to publish Sarah Bernhardt's brief memoir, told from the point of view of a cane-seated chair, of her three-hour balloon attempt. And there's a letter of rage from Flaubert about this, and of course they didn't do his book the next Christmas either. So I thought it was very strange that my hero lost out to the equivalent of an instant book." Reading of the actress's brief adventures in ballooning echoed Barnes's reading of Nadar, and the thoughts it had triggered about identity. "Nadar," he writes, "recalled that Balzac had a theory of the self, according to which a person's essence was made up of a nearinfinite series of spectral layers, one superimposed on the next." We are all palimpsests. Some will call this approach willfully obscure. Fred Burnaby, with his stout resistance to metaphor, stands in, rather cheekily one imagines, for those among Barnes's critics who will say, well, after all, what is all this? There's an analogy with opera, which Barnes used to think "deeply implausible" until after Pat's death, when he found himself understanding it intuitively; that which had seemed like a flourish, now struck him as the more primal mode of

communication: people singing to each other in heightened emotional states. What other state was there? "Opera cuts to the chase, as death does." So it goes with the book. "There will be people who say it doesn't hang together." he says. "And there will be people who say it absolutely hangs together. And as long as it does in my mind, and in the minds of the best readers of the book, that's all that matters. Unless you write a completely conventional book, there's always going to be someone who says: why isn't it more conventional?" The book's conventional last third is effective precisely because of what comes before it; the feeling of disorientation is alive in the reader's mind from being in the balloon as Barnes says, "not knowing if you're going up or down, or if you're in horizontal motion at all, either." And then, with a sudden, shattering lurch, the figurative is made real. In life, there are limitations to what the imagination can do. The trick of summoning Pat's opinion only works, says Barnes, on tried and tested scenarios, that which has precedent in their life together. Others have found this, too. "I remember two women friends of hers, one of whom was in emotional trouble, got together and said, 'We tried to channel Pat, but it didn't work.' And that's because it's a new situation." It happened to Barnes himself when the son of friends died. "And I was just bewildered. Even though I know too much about grief, I didn't know how to react and I realised it was because this was a young man whom we'd known for 30 years, and we would naturally have found a way of talking about it and making what sense we could of it, together. And that's another thing that's gone. Even four and a half years on, you're still caught amidship by things like that." Did his sense of bewilderment in the case of his friend's son's death make him more sympathetic to the Silent Ones in his own case? "Yes. I'd like to say I'm perfectly rounded and well balanced about it all now, but of course I'm not. What I can do is think about how I responded 10 or 20 years ago when people died, and realise that, I wasn't often very good with it either. So the Silent Ones have largely been forgiven." He laughs. What about the indifferent sods on the bus? He has softened in his attitude towards them, too: "Four or five years on, I think, well, maybe some of those people sitting on the bus, in that strangely illuminated, Hopper-esque profile they're in perhaps some of them were going back to deal with exactly the same thing I was dealing with. And it never crossed my mind at the time, because there's an egotistical exceptionalism about grief. You think it's only happening to you, whereas of course, even during our conversation, how many people will have died in the world? Thousands. And thousands more will be grieving for them." In the months after Pat's death, Barnes felt as if his memory from before she was ill had "burned away". It came back, eventually, but: "You ask yourself, is it the same memory? And the answer is, well how can it be? Because your memory is now monocular not binocular. And memory, when it does come back, seems to come back in the way of old photographs; you're not sure whether they relate to events; they're almost like photographs of photographs. It does come back, but I don't think it's restored as it once was." His memory of the last weeks of Pat's life was aided by a decision, "never to look away, always to face it; and a kind of crazy lucidity resulted." Still, for the sake of thoroughness, after writing the book he returned to his contemporaneous notes for a fact-check. "I had to do it in a very coldly analytical way. And I tried not to read it too carefully." There was a small amount of

forgotten detail and a single correction; a line he had remembered a friend saying, about the only upside to bereavement: "You can do what you fucking well like." It was a tiny error: "I was convinced that's what he would have said because he's a Scot and he swears a lot. In fact, when I went and checked it, he actually said, 'You can do what you like.'" The question of precision. In a mere 118 pages, Levels of Life would seem to pull off the impossible: to recreate, on the page, what it is like to be alive in the world, a feat equal in achievement to heavier-than-air flight. Every love story is a potential grief story, writes Barnes. The one could not exist without the other. "I knew I was writing very firmly about grief, postdeath. But that it would evoke her grief as the negative image of love." There are the unanswerable questions, among them what Pat would have thought of the book. "I can't answer what she would have wanted. But I think she might have been surprised. I hope she would have thought it worked. But then, these are the paradoxes you find it's the one book she can't give me her opinion of." Barnes calls himself Pat's principal rememberer and this is a memorial to her, a book that may, in outline, look complex but is at some level incredibly simple. "In so far as I have successfully evoked or described grief," he says, "I would be describing my love for her." She Left me the Gun by Emma Brockes is published by Faber