[ilds] upmarket works of literature (Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet, Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet)

[slighcl]

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,,2261331,00.html
*
Colder but wiser*
*Julian Barnes buries his feelings as well as his parents in Nothing to 
Be Frightened of, says Hilary Spurling*
Hilary Spurling
Sunday March 2, 2008

Observer
Nothing to Be Frightened of
by Julian Barnes
Cape £16.99, pp256

The soft centre of this book is a sodden leather pouf belonging to 
Julian Barnes's parents, who stuffed it with their love letters and left 
it to rot at the bottom of their garden. Barnes gave it a good kick 
every so often as a boy and, metaphorically speaking, he's still kicking 
it half a century later at the age of 62.

He paints a Beckettian picture of his parents trapped by old age in 
their retirement bungalow, where his father, an ex-headmaster, dapper, 
stylish and a first-class raconteur in his prime, retreated into morose 
and shaky silence in self-defence against a wife who aimed to overrule, 
undermine and put him down in every sense. Barnes concedes that what he 
and his father felt for one another by this time was an admittedly tepid 
type of love: the two never touched, barely spoke and were apparently 
alone together only once on a brief car ride to the shops when Barnes Sr 
told his son what he thought of his first book (not all that much).

Barnes's mother inspired altogether livelier feelings of rage and 
resentment, tinged occasionally with reluctant respect. When she entered 
hospital for the last time, her son's attempt to soften the blow of the 
consultant's verdict was forestalled by a grim salute from the far side 
of the ward, where his mother raised her one good arm with its thumb 
turned down. 'It was the most shocking thing I ever saw her do; the most 
admirable too, and the one occasion when she tore at my heart.'

The sardonic Mrs Barnes seems to have passed on her deadpan style of 
delivery to her younger son, together with her love of the 
conversational pre-emptive strike and the ricocheting epigram. 'One of 
my sons writes books I can read but can't understand,' she said, 
disposing with a decisive left and right hook of both Julian and his 
elder brother (who is a philosopher), 'and the other writes books I can 
understand but can't read.'

Sulphurous whiffs of rivalry between the brothers still drift above what 
appears to be a discreet stand-off. The author treats his sibling as if 
he wasn't there - an offstage intellectual stooge with no personality or 
individual existence beyond a handful of basic facts, such as his age, 
geographical location and the characteristically Barnesian first words 
of his elder child ('Bertrand Russell is a silly old man'). The 
philosopher responds in kind: 'I know nothing about my brother,' is his 
standard reply to queries from journalists in search of the novelist.

The youngest in his family, nothing if not competitive, Julian who 
longed as a child to grow old enough to crack the whip himself has 
finally achieved a lonely and illusory autonomy: 'Far from having a whip 
to crack, I am the very tip of the whip myself ... what is cracking me 
is a long and inevitable plait of genetic material which can't be 
shrugged or fought off.'

In so far as this book is a family memoir, its personnel - parents, 
grandparents, only brother and a handful of all but anonymous friends - 
are, by definition, dry and two-dimensional. Like all good novelists, 
Barnes believes fictional characters to be intrinsically superior - 
sharper, clearer and more cohesive than their counterparts, with the 
added advantage that all there is to know about them can be confined 
within the pages of a book. The residue of mystery possessed by all real 
as opposed to invented human beings leaves him cold. Barnes's clinical 
approach tends to reduce other people - the genetic material that made 
him - to extensions of himself, figments not much more substantial than 
the waterlogged scraps of torn-up correspondence leaking through the 
gaping seams of his parents' disintegrating pouf.

Inanimate objects are more tenderly treated. Barnes writes poignantly 
about the clearance of his parents' bungalow, when each unwanted 
ornament, plant pot or set of moulded glasses made its transition from 
personal possession ('now, here for the last time, something that had 
been chosen, then lived with, wiped, dusted, polished, repaired, loved') 
to garbage destined for the bin liner and the skip. His mind runs on old 
age, mortality and extinction. Not a day passes but he thinks of death.

*One of his regular ploys, when young and terrified of flying, was 
selecting what he calls 'crash companions', upmarket works of literature 
(Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet, Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet), 
'something I felt appropriate to have found on my corpse'. *Nothing to 
Be Frightened of is his own contribution to the genre, not so much a 
memoir, more a modern equivalent of the mixed bags compiled by 
antiquarians in the past, a mordant, melancholy cross between Thomas 
Browne's Urn Burial and John Aubrey's Brief Lives

Like Browne and Aubrey, Barnes makes a hobby of visiting graves and 
deathbeds (once he lost his footing and found himself spreadeagled on a 
sort of stone chute leading from the bedroom where Montaigne may or may 
not have died). Like them, he collects the good and bad ends of his 
predecessors: Philip Larkin, who would have died gibbering with fear if 
not heavily sedated; Somerset Maugham, who expressed his feelings at the 
end by lowering his trousers and crapping behind the sofa; Maurice Ravel 
who lost his memory and inquired courteously, after attending the 
recording of one of his own works: 'Remind me of the composer's name.'

This book follows Flaubert's rule of thumb for remaining as impassive as 
destiny itself: 'By dint of saying, "That's so, that's so" and gazing 
down into the black pit at one's feet, one remains calm.' Barnes is 
master of this kind of cool. 'I fear the catheter and the stairlift, the 
oozing body and the wasting brain,' he writes, elegantly sidestepping a 
2,000-year tradition of perturbation and panic.

Christianity in his book has dwindled to the vestigial observances 
(scripture lessons at school, brief, secularised church services at 
social functions) of the attenuated Protestantism into which he was 
born. All believers, including fundamentalists, Christian or otherwise, 
are dismissed as 'credulous knee-benders'. The pick-and-mix philosophy 
of contemporary religiosity provokes an asperity worthy of Barnes's 
formidable mother: 'The notion of redefining the deity into something 
that works for you is grotesque.'

Barnes looks forward with Flaubertian impassivity to the plastic shrouds 
and sanitary rituals of an impersonal hospital death ('I expect my 
departure to have been preceded by severe pain, fear and exasperation at 
the imprecise or euphemistic use of language around me'). The closest he 
permits himself to go to the abyss is the recycling scenario observed at 
his brother's funeral by French writer Jules Renard, who watched a fat 
worm emerge briskly from the edge of the open grave: 'If a worm could 
strut, this one would be strutting.'

-- 
**********************
Charles L. Sligh
Department of English
Wake Forest University
slighcl at wfu.edu
**********************

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20080302/3c9da29c/attachment.html