In the introduction to his 2002 translation of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain – a fragmented record of the French novelist’s syphilitic decline – Julian Barnes reflects on the notion that suffering, and the knowledge that one’s time is almost up, may lend urgency or authenticity to a writer’s last literary testament. The abyssal shuffle, notes Barnes, “may, or may not, concentrate the mind and encourage a final truthfulness; may or may not include the useful aide-mémoire of your life passing before your eyes; but it is unlikely to make you a better writer. Modest or jaunty, wise or vainglorious, literary or journalistic, you will write no better, no worse”. Barnes is sixty-two, and his days, happily, are not yet clearly numbered, nor eked out in the kind of agony that halted Daudet’s pen some months short of the end. But Nothing To Be Frightened Of – a memoir of sorts, an essay on this past life with digressions into the beyond – is nothing if not unsettled by the thought that death – “the one appalling fact which defines life” – might fail to up the writerly ante.

Because if not death then what, exactly? Is writing into the dark not, after all, the ultimate (if not quite plum) commission? If the thought of his impending demise – and the prospect of all our definitive full stops – does not rouse the writer to some feat of bleak eloquence or indelible rage, then the suspicion must be that his prior tinkering with such passing themes as love, ambition, violence and regret has been just so much stalling before this last test, which he has known he was bound to fail. Barnes knows this, and worries away constantly, just below the surface of his book, at the question of whether he is good enough to write about death. One suspects in the end that he is less afraid of death – which fear is the book’s ostensible theme – than he is of couching his dread in a clumsy phrase. This is both the proper literary response to the problem and the reason Nothing To Be Frightened Of is so elusive and even (despite its confessional depth and its breadth of reference) so curiously slight a volume.

It is not, Barnes tells us, an autobiography. It is rather an essay in the best sense: speculative and precise, intimate and metaphysical, capacious and democratic in the variety of voices, alive and dead, that are invited to counsel the author as he edges his way towards the void. (They are none of them, of course, the voices of experience – death is not, as Wittgenstein put it, an event in life.) For most of them, as for the author himself, the fear of death is inseparable from the problem of God and the possibility of an afterlife: few of us possess the assurance of Barnes’s brother, a philosopher for whom the end is the end, the dead are dead and God is just a soppy consolation. Barnes’s own lack of faith is not so bottomless. “I miss Him”, he writes in the book’s opening sentence – in the face of being cosmically stood up, this is a rather winsome alternative to Samuel Beckett’s robust response: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”. Nothing To Be Frightened Of is a reasonable, if ultimately somewhat shy, inquiry into what is to be done, in His absence, with the fact of finitude.

The ends in question include Barnes’s own – of which he tells us he is extremely frightened, and with which he is unusually preoccupied – and those of his parents. Regarding the latter, he is not exactly detached but tellingly understated, as when he writes of his father: “he died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final minutes by a nurse, months – indeed, years – after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive”. When it comes to Barnes’s own death, it seems to be this half-life that scares him most, the idea that his personality, or more precisely his written “I”, will fade before his body does. Literature at least promises to reverse the order:

do we create art in order to defeat, or at least defy, death? To transcend it, to put it in its place? You may take my body, you may take all the squidgy stuff inside my skull where lurks whatever lucidity and imagination I possess, but you cannot take away what I have done with them. Is that our subtext and our motivation?

The answers discovered in a lifetime’s reading vary greatly in logic, elegance and consoling power. Cicero is obscurely unhelpful: “after death, either we feel better, or we feel nothing”. Pascal’s celebrated wager seems to Barnes “a piece of self-interested position-taking worthy of the French diplomatic corps”. He remains equally unconvinced by Montaigne’s admonition to keep death firmly in focus so as to overcome one’s fear: advice proffered also by Sir Thomas Browne. (The logic was rarely so affectingly embodied, however, as by the ailing John Donne, shrouded for his portrait as the end approached; his “Death’s Duel” preaches already as if from beyond the grave.) A version of the same argument was later framed by Flaubert, with the crucial subtraction of God and the addition of a graveside swagger: “people like us should have the religion of despair. One must be equal to one’s destiny, that’s to say, impassive like it. By dint of saying ‘That is so! That is so!’ and of gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm”. Flaubert attended regular dinners with Daudet, Turgenev, Zola and Edmond de Goncourt: all of them competing at table for the most insouciant attitude in the face of death.

It is the novelist Jules Renard, however, who seems to Barnes the most sympathetic exemplar in his pantheon of (mostly French) ripostes to the reaper. Renard’s agnosticism – “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t”, he wrote – was the result of a series of bereavements that in their grisliness and absurdity would have tested the strongest faith. At first, following the suicide of his father in 1897, Renard still believed in a heroic, even artistic death. Three years later, his brother collapsed and died in his office after complaining that the central heating was killing him; at the graveside, Jules noticed a fat worm: “if a worm could strut, this one would be strutting”. In 1909, his mother fell backwards into a well and was drowned; Renard at last concluded that death was merely incomprehensible, impenetrable: “death is not an artist”. There is no such thing as a “good death”, but neither is there a meaningful death. Still, we persist in imagining that language can elide the reality: even Renard’s apparently cold-eyed aphorisms share in this fantasy.

Barnes’s own relation to the deaths of his parents is couched in exactly these terms. His philosopher brother, Jonathan Barnes, refuses to speak of what the deceased “would have wanted”: this is merely to invent a narrative voice where there is none any longer. The novelist is less certain, pointing out that he practises an art which “runs counter to the idea of a calm farewell to a thinned self”. Accordingly, he nurses certain fantasies regarding his own place in posterity, but knows that in the long run there is really no such thing:

"first, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the second-hand bookshop and dealer’s website. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much."

At length, “at some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet”, the last reader will turn the last page.

It is a more localized version of this doomed desire for posterity that in the end makes Nothing To Be Frightened Of a somewhat evasive book: Barnes’s very facility when it comes to writing about the idea of death starts to seem an avoidance of the main event. At times it seems as though what he is really spooked by is not death at all, but the possibility of his being taken seriously, of having his lubricious sentences stripped bare, and needing to commit to an actual argument or admit an unqualified emotion. But he simply cannot give up being Julian Barnes, staying resolutely in character, with all the apophthegmatic skill that that implies – “God might be dead, but Death is well alive” – and all consequent reticence at the level of the book’s otherwise politely chatty form. Nor can he allow his reflection on mortality to descend to the level of bodily abjection: apart from glancing references to his own partial deafness and the physical decline of a few friends, one would think that Julian Barnes, for all his professed fear of the end, was actually immortal. It is instructive that the most palpable symbol in the book is made of words: an Indian leather pouffe that his parents, unaccountably, filled with their shredded love letters. This is a book about death in which, despite the author’s eloquent efforts to face (or, understandably, flee from) the brute uncultured fact of dying, it is all more or less in the mind.

Julian Barnes
NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF
250pp. Cape. £17.99.
978 0 224 08523 6

Brian Dillon is the author of a memoir, In the Dark Room: A journey in memory, 2005, and the UK Editor of Cabinet, a quarterly of art and culture.

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