Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (31 page)

Probably, it needs both at the same time. We might try to pin it down by saying that grief is the state and mourning the process; yet to the person enduring one or both, things are rarely so clear, and the ‘process’ is one which involves much slipping-back into the paralysis of the ‘state’. There are various objective markers: the point at which tears – regular, daily tears – stop; the point when the brain returns to quasi-normal functioning; the point when possessions are disposed of; the point when memory of the lost one begins to return. But there can be no general rules, nor standard timescale. Those pesky neurons just can’t be relied upon.

What happens next, when the state and the process are, if by no means complete, at least established and recognisable? What happens to our heart? Again, there are those confident
surrounding voices (from ‘How could he/she ever marry again after living with her/him?’ to ‘They say the happily married tend to remarry quickly, often within six months’). A friend whose long-term lover had died of Aids told me, ‘There’s only one upside to this thing: you can do what you fucking well like.’ The trouble is, that when you are in sorrow, most notions of ‘what you like’ will contain the presence of your lost love and the impossible demand that the laws of the universe be repealed. And so: a hunkering-down, a closing-off, a retreat into the posthumous faithfulness of memory? Raymond Smith didn’t much like Dr Johnson, finding him too didactic, and preferring the Doctor of Boswell’s account to that of his own writings. But on sorrow, Johnson is not so much didactic as wise, clear and decisive:

So what constitutes ‘success’ in mourning? The ability to return to concentration and work; the ability to rediscover interest in life, and take pleasure in it, while recognising that present pleasure is far from past joy. The ability to hold the lost love successfully in mind, remembering without distorting. The ability to continue living as he or she would have wanted you to do (though this is a tricky area, where the sorrowful can often end up giving themselves a free pass). And then what? Some form of self-sufficiency which avoids neutrality
and indifference? Or a new relationship that will either supplant the lost one or, perhaps, draw strength from it?

There is another strange parallel between
The Year of Magical Thinking
and
A Widow’s Story
. By the time each book came out, many readers would know one additional key fact not covered by the text. In Didion’s case, the death of her daughter Quintana (which the author deals with in a subsequent edition); in Oates’s, her remarriage to a neuroscientist, whose existence is hinted at rather coyly on the last page. You could argue that those writing about grief make their own literary terms more than most; but even so, in Oates’s case there is something unhappy in the omission. She is writing about the twelve months that began on 18 February 2008; we know from her own mouth (in an interview with
The Times
) that she met her second husband in August 2008, they started going on walks and hikes in September, and were married in March 2009. If Didion posed ‘the question of self-pity’ in the first lines of her book, Oates, in a chapter called ‘Taboo’, similarly approaches the difficult heart of the matter:

But the theme is no sooner announced than set aside; indeed, when Oates comes back to the idea of ‘betraying’ her husband, it is in the much narrower context of disclosing to the reader secrets about Ray Smith’s family and upbringing. But she does this, she explains, because ‘There is no purpose to a memoir, if it isn’t honest. As there is no purpose to a declaration of
love, if it isn’t honest.’ Her book ends with a chapter headed ‘The Widow’s Handbook’ which reads in its entirety:

But if she is also thinking ‘I might be getting married in a few weeks’ time’, does this not change the nature of that statement? This isn’t a moral comment: Oates may quote Marianne Moore’s line that ‘the cure for loneliness is solitude’, but many people need to be married, and therefore, at times, remarried. However, some readers will feel they have a good case for breach of narrative promise. Was not Ray ‘the first man in my life, the last man, the only man’? And what about all those perennials she planted?

When Dr Johnson wrote ‘The Proper Means of Regulating Sorrow’ he was not yet widowed. That event was to occur two years later, when he was forty-three. Twenty-eight years afterwards, in a letter of consolation to Dr Thomas Lawrence, whose wife had recently died, Johnson wrote:

Original versions of these pieces appeared as follows:

BEFORE SHE MET ME

At the start of this novel, an English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery in a silly, low-budget movie she made years before she met him. But as he combs the theaters for other instances of his wife’s cinematic betrayal, the line between film and reality, past and present, love and mania becomes terrifyingly blurred.

Fiction/Literature/

CROSS CHANNEL

Between England and France lies a narrow body of water and a vast sea of prejudice and misapprehension. This is the distance that Julian Barnes’s English characters try to cross in these playfully ironic short stories. But what they discover alongside the rich food and barbarous sexual practices is their own ineradicable Englishness.

Fiction/Literature/

ENGLAND, ENGLAND

Imagine an England in which all the pubs are quaint, the Windsors behave themselves (mostly), and the cliffs of Dover are actually white, and where Robin Hood and his merry men really are merry. This is precisely what visionary tycoon Sir Jack Pitman seeks to accomplish on the Isle of Wight, a “destination” where tourists can find replicas of Big Ben (half size), Princess Di’s grave, and even Harrod’s.

Fiction/Literature/

FLAUBERT’S PARROT

An elegant work of literary imagination involving a cranky, erudite amateur scholar’s obsessive search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert,
Flaubert’s Parrot
also investigates the scholar himself, whose passion for the page is fed by personal bitterness—and whose life seems oddly to mirror those of Flaubert’s characters.

Fiction/Literature/

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10½ CHAPTERS

Beginning with a revisionist account of the voyage of Noah’s ark (narrated by one of its passengers) and ending with a sneak preview of heaven, Julian Barnes’s tour de force is a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world.

Fiction/Literature/

THE LEMON TABLE

In his acclaimed collection of stories, Barnes addresses what is perhaps the most poignant aspect of the human condition: growing old. The characters are facing the ends of their lives—some with bitter regret, others with resignation, and others still with defiant rage.

Fiction/Short Stories/

LETTERS FROM LONDON

Formidably articulate and outrageously funny,
Letters from London
is international voyeurism at its best—a peek into the British mindset from the vantage point of one of the most erudite and witty British minds.

Literature/Nonfiction/

LOVE, ETC.

After a decade in America, Stuart returns to London and looks up his ex-wife Gillian. Their relationship had ended years before when Stuart’s former best friend Oliver stole her away. But now Stuart finds that the intervening years have left both Oliver’s artistic ambitions and his relationship in ruins, and he suspects that he may be able to undo the results of their betrayal.

Fiction/Literature/

METROLAND

In this giddy comedy of sexual awakening in the sixties, Julian Barnes follows Chris and Toni from precocious adolescence in a stultifying London suburb, through Chris’s deflowering in Paris during the earth-shaking
événements
of 1968, and back to Metroland, where he finds himself breaking bread with the same classmates he once sneered at.

Fiction/Literature/

THE PORCUPINE

Stoyo Petkanov, the deposed Communist Party leader, is on trial for everything from corruption to political murder. His guilt would seem to be self-evident, but, as imagined by Barnes, his trial illuminates the shadowy frontier between the rusted myths of the Communist past and a capitalist future in which everything is up for grabs.

Fiction/Literature/

SOMETHING TO DECLARE

Essays on France and French Culture

Barnes’s appreciation extends from France’s vanishing peasantry to its hyper-literate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of
nouvelle vague
cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers. Here are the prolific and priapic Simenon, Baudelaire, Sand, and Sartre, and several dazzling excursions on the prickly genius of Flaubert.

Literature/Travel/

STARING AT THE SUN

Jean Serjeant, the heroine of this wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary disdain for received wisdom. And as we follow Jean from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, we are confronted with the fruits of her quietly relentless curiosity.

Fiction/Literature

TALKING IT OVER

Through the indelible voices of three narrators—stolid Stuart; glamorous, epigrammatic Oliver; and the cryptic beauty Gillian, who has the bad luck to love them both—Julian Barnes reimagines the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades.

Fiction/Literature