Levels of Life
Julian Barnes
2013
Alfred A. Knopf
If you haven’t read any of Julian Barnes’ work yet, why not?
This incredibly talented and readable author has been lauded in many ways, most
notably by being awarded England’s prestigious (and usually controversial and
disputed) Man Booker Prize in 2011. My favorites of his works include the
novels “Metroland,” “Flaubert’s Parrot,” and “Arthur & George.”
His most recent work is a meditation on the death of his
wife, literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who passed away in 2008. “Levels of Life” is
a powerful and unflinching examination of the after-life of the author as the
survivor of a loved one.
Barnes’ approach to his subject is circuitous, taking an
oblique route first through stories about early ballooning, photography, and
Sarah Bernhardt. This is an approach Barnes has used before, and although it
seems quite counterintuitive at face value, it is astonishingly effective. The
writing, three interconnected essays titled “The Sin of Height,” “On the Level,”
and “The Loss of Depth,” has been criticized by some as being not sufficiently
to the point, to which I can simply respond, well blow it out your fundament then,
write your own damn book about mourning.
Patient and intelligent readers will be drawn in by the
disparate threads that Barnes deftly gathers as he goes, weaving them into a
deeply moving self-portrait. I see the writer’s seeming diffidence as the only
effective way to circle in and name painful truths, sparing himself absolutely
nothing on the way.
Neither does he spare the well-intentioned around him, whose
blundering attempts to assuage his feelings are accurately analyzed as a distaste
for the discomfort his loss causes them. Case in point:
Someone I had only met twice wrote to
tell me that a few months previously he had ‘lost his wife to cancer’ (another
phrase that jarred: compare “We lost our dog to gypsies,” or “He lost his wife
to a commercial traveler”). He reassured me that one does survive the grief; moreover,
one emerges a “stronger,” and in some ways a “better,” person. This struck me
as outrageous and self-praising (as well as too quickly decided). How could I
possibly be a better person without her than with her? Later, I thought: but he
is just echoing Nietzsche’s line about what doesn’t kill us making us stronger.
And as it happens, I have long considered this epigram particularly specious.
There are many things that fail to kill us but weaken us for ever. Ask anyone
who deals with victims of torture. Ask rape counsellors and those who handle
domestic violence. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary
life.”
Barnes conveys his fluctuating inner state with a dry
compassion that neither kids himself nor discounts the depth, confusion, and
profusion of thoughts and feelings attendant on the death of his wife. The
honesty and accuracy here is brave, and intensely comforting.
When I am at my desk, I am frequently writing simply to find
out what is on my mind – thinking with my fingers (and scraping up a buck or
two in the process – two missions that sometimes cohere). Barnes’ words have
the effortless flow of free association, but multiple readings reveal a
meticulous arrangement and honing of the text, which in itself a reward or
those who seek good writing. We are long past the time when “meta” in
literature was a novelty; Barnes is such a master of it that it draws no
attention to itself.
In the end, Barnes gives us no neat conclusions, but he does
ties his metaphors together. The crude and pilotless pioneer air journeys
resemble marriage itself; early photography mirrors his attempts to redefine
the landscape of his solitaire life. The act of writing affirms the act of
living.
Perhaps grief, which destroys all
patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any pattern exists. But we
cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to
find, or re-erect, a pattern. Writers believe in the patterns their words make,
which they hope and trust add up to ideas, to stories, to truths. This is
always their salvation, whether griefless or griefstruck.