Julian Barnes the Sense of Another Ending

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/30/julian-barnes-sense-of-another-ending

Julian Barnes: The sense of another endingJulian 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 byEmma Brockes

o

Emma Brockes

o The Guardian, Saturday 30 March 2013

It is almost five years sincePat 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 shortstories, a collection ofessayson 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 whatLevels 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 privateperson who hated to see her name in printso 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 apicture 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 withJoanDidion's The Year of Magical ThinkingandJoyce 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 ofwords, which he got down hastily every day during the onslaught. Reprising them was not the
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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 Lifeis 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 areconcerned with late 19th-century France and feature Sarah Bernhardt, the actress, an awkward

British cavalry soldier named Fred Burnaby, andGaspard-Flix Tournachon, known as Nadar,

the adventurer, photographer and what links all three enthusiastic balloonist. The book'sguiding 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-FlixTournachon, 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 theyremain 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, anecessary 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 itabsolutely 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 andBarnes 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 aliterary 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
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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 saidto 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 ofLevels of Life; you can marvel atthe 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 outlineof 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 inNothing to be Frightened of, hismeditation on death, resurfaces inLevels 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 theirmother'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 broughtpain, 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 attendingfootball matches between, say, Middlesbrough and SlovanBratislava (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; Ihad no emotions left to lend."

Into this came the question of suicide, "early, and quite logically". He thought around how hemight 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 exactlywhat 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 presenteditself 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."
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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 badgeringhim 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 werethose 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 self-

lacerating 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 lotnowadays, 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 hishead 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, theself 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 alove 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 briefmemoir, 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 readingof 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 near-

infinite 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


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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 moreconventional?"

The book's conventional last third is effective precisely because of what comes before it; thefeeling of disorientation is alive in the reader's mind from being in the balloonas 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 whomwas 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 oftalking 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 verycoldly analytical way. And I tried not to read it too carefully." There was a small amount of


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forgotten detail and a single correction; a line he had remembered a friend saying, about the only

upside tobereavement: "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 Iwent 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 inachievement 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, post-

death. 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 Gunby Emma Brockes is published by Faber
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Julian Barnes the Sense of Another Ending

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