Here are five things we didn't know about the novelist Julian Barnes. He was a
“zealous and unflagging” masturbator in his youth. He has never been to a
normal church service. He is deaf in his left ear. His father never said “I
love you” to him. And he fears death so acutely that he wakes in the night
beating his pillow and screaming, “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh no!”
We know these now because, at the age of 62, Barnes has written a new book,
Nothing to Be Frightened Of, a dazzling memoir-cum-essay crammed with black
humour, quotations from French writers and personal reminiscence. He calls
it “my death book” and he's been thinking about it for 20 years.
Barnes once worked out a best-case death scenario for himself, in which his
doctor tells him, “I'm afraid there's good news and bad news.” Barnes
promptly demands to know the truth. “How long?” The doctor replies: “How
long? I'd say about 200 pages, 250 pages if you are lucky or work fast.” The
new book has precisely 250 pages - and many contain jokes like this, the
kind which prompt uneasy laughter and unseemly curiosity. (What is the
matter with the man?)
We meet in his local pub to talk it over: God, death, identity, memory,
immortality, death, nature, nurture, death ... have I forgotten anything?
“Art,” he says, drily. “You know, that three-letter word.” Anything else? “I
covered love and stuff in my earlier books. This one's about death. And
death brings in God, and how you spend the period before death brings in
art. And then there's how you got here, which is family.”
His family are given walk-on parts that are rarely flattering. Both parents
were teachers, whose conversation reduced Julian and his brother Jonathan to
“a sort of stunned boredom” as children. Barnes remembers having only one
talk à deux with his father, a kind but bottled-up man who had Hodgkin's
disease for 20 years before dying at the age of 82, in his son's words, of
“being exhausted and giving up hope”.
His mother, who scolded him once for “too much imagination”, was very proud of
her perfect nails and talked mainly of herself. She criticised his first
novel as a “bombardment” of filth and would show her friends the cover but
not allow them to look inside. He is shockingly honest about his feelings on
visiting her in old age: “I couldn't face the sense of my vital spirits
being drained away by her relentless solipsism and the feeling that time was
being sucked from my life, time that I would never get back, before or after
life.” She became interesting to Barnes only on her deathbed, raving from
dementia. “I kept wondering where all this stuff was coming from.”
Barnes stresses in the early pages that this is not an autobiography, nor is
he “in search of my parents”. The warnings are necessary because by far the
most vivid episodes showcase his reaction to “the decent dullness of my
family”: his amused discovery, for example, that a discarded leather pouffe
on which he used to sit was stuffed with torn-up fragments of his parents'
love letters. This doesn't seem dull in the least, but chilling. Barnes
disagrees: “Given that most love letters don't survive for children to read,
they are presumably destroyed. And after a certain point, what do you do
with them? Do you keep them or reread them? There can be a great gap between
what you felt then and what you feel now. Do you want anyone else reading
your love letters? Probably not. Are you embarrassed by them? You could put
them in the dustbin. That's the worst option. Or burn them? That's terrible.
But using them for a practical purpose, now, that's rather good.” What has
he done with his own love letters? “I'm not telling!” he says,
mock-indignantly.
He is quick to rebut any suggestion that he has been disloyal to his parents'
memory. “When you are writing the book, the moral responsibility is to the
truth and the truth of the book. That may sound harsh but that's the case.”
He warms to his theme: “Look, it's not as if children haven't written about
parents before. I didn't think that I was breaking any taboos. These were my
examples, they were my parents. They were generally very good parents, but I
was writing about death and dying and theirs was the example in front of me.
One of the writer's general motives is to say of life, it's not like that,
it's like this. And we don't talk easily, let alone enough, about dying and
being dead.”
Actually, Barnes and his friends seem to discuss little else, exchanging
e-mails about how “sicko” their thoughts are and vying to be the most
death-obsessed. One friend, the writer Redmond O'Hanlon - thinly disguised
as R in the book - had his shotgun confiscated by the police after he'd
aired his suicidal thoughts on Desert Island Discs. Another friend, P, or
the writer Piers Paul Read, stunned a lunch party by worrying that he, a
devout Catholic, would probably be separated from his non-believing wife and
children in the afterlife. I note that neither Barnes nor the other guests -
agnostics and atheists to a man - mocked Read for his faith. “We're all
knocking on a bit now and are slightly kinder and wiser.”
Barnes, who opens the book with the line, “I don't believe in God, but I miss
him”, is rather a half-hearted agnostic-going-on-atheist. He talks
sympathetically about the religious impulse and the inspiration and comfort
offered by religion, like a cold child pressing his nose against the window
of a warm and brightly lit house. He has enjoyed Richard Dawkins's anti-God
polemic, but there is, he says, “an arrogance and contempt for others in
certain forms of atheism” that he doesn't share. “As a writer, you are alive
to as many human impulses as there are, that's the game.”
His sense of himself “as a writer” is never far from the surface. There's a
jokey riff towards the book's end in which he starts to thank his very last
reader - the final eyes to examine “this book, this page, this line”. And
then he screeches into reverse, because his last reader is, by definition,
someone who doesn't recommend his books to anyone else. “You really are so
mean-spirited, so idle-minded, so lacking in critical judgment? Then you
don't deserve me. Go on, fuck off and die. Yes, you.”
Although Barnes insists this is a joke - “Oh, yes, you are meant to laugh at
it” - its hysterical edge suggests extreme anxiety. In the absence of the
consolations of religion, is art, that three-letter word, his best route to
immortality? “I don't want to know when the last of my books goes out of
print. If I died today, I assume some of them would last 20 years, 40 years
maybe. Maybe not, maybe more. It doesn't interest me.”
Does it not? “It interests me but there's nothing I can do about it. It would
put me off the book I was writing if I thought: ‘Ah, this one will
last.'”
What about achieving immortality through founding a dynasty, then? It's an
intrusive question, because Barnes and his wife, the literary agent Pat
Kavanagh, are childless, but he takes it as a writer. “The only dynasties I
am interested in are dynasties of writers and artists and being a distant
cousin to some of them. In Buenos Aires recently, I was asked, ‘What
contemporary writers do you read?' And I replied Cervantes and Shakespeare.
I think of the writers who speak to me as my coevals. Or not as my coevals,
but as my elders and betters. I don't think of them as being as dead as
other people.”
In the book, he writes that he has “failed - or rather declined” to pass on
his genes. Is this a fancy way of saying he simply didn't want children?
Barnes falls quiet. “I've never passionately wanted children but, you know,
in those alternative lives that you didn't lead, obviously one would be with
children. And it depends upon the hazards of who you are with. And, by the
way, I don't not have children because I'm a writer. I'd just like to
correct that in case that's what you're thinking. It's come up in the past,
I've read stuff about: ‘Oh, here is a man so coldly devoted to his art
that he refuses to have children.' And that's just ... bollocks.”
In the awkward silence that follows, I bring the conversation back to more
solid ground. Do you know where you want to be buried? He looks startled.
“No, I probably should have thought about it more. I don't like the idea of
Highgate cemetery: they bury people in tiers there so you might not be six
feet under but 12 feet under. You look very dead 12 feet under. I'd much
rather be buried than cremated, but I don't know. I've done most of the
thinking, but not that.” Presumably, you have time, though, to consider all
the options, I say gently, trying very hard not to sound like a funeral
director. “Oh yes,” he says, back on track again, a slightly forced smile on
his lips. “You see, I'm not going to die any time soon. At least, I'm not
planning to.”
Nothing to Be Frightened Of is published by Cape at £16.99, and is
available at the Books First price of £15.29 (inc p&p) on 0870 165
8585
