Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 16 Sep 2018

Grief is the thing…

Sometimes the route from one book to another seems to be subliminal, our brains recognising hidden connections far before we are fully conscious of them.

This happened to me yet again in just the past week when I found myself reading two utterly different books about grief. Grief is not a comfortable subject to read about, but oddly to do so can be comforting – it helps make the unthinkable more approachable.

The first of the two books I read was Max Porter’s highly acclaimed novella from 2015, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, published by Faber. At the time this came out I ignored it simply because it seemed to be receiving such widespread uncritical praise. This made me think – contrary, I know – that it couldn’t possibly be any good; certainly, that it couldn’t be as good as every reviewer seemed to suggest.

One of the reasons this book received so much attention is its experimental nature. It is a sort of hybrid – a novel, a collection of monologues, a series of poems in different voices, and here and there an almost abstract sound-scape. It concerns a young father, a writer whose book about the poet Ted Hughes is about to be published, his two young children, and the sudden death of his wife. When the book opens father and children are desolately trying, in their different ways, to come to terms with their loss. This in itself is an audacious beginning, but it scarcely prepares the reader for what follows. The mourning family is joined by a version of one of Ted Hughes’s greatest creations, the garrulous, foul-mouthed crow, chronicled by Hughes in his magnificent 1970 collection, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, written in the years immediately after Sylvia Plath’s suicide. Porter’s crow arrives with “a rich smell of decay, a sweet furry stink of just-beyond-edible food, and moss, and leather, and yeast” and serves as commentator, counsellor, comfort and critic – nudging, advising, suggesting and occasionally engaging in scabrous rants.

It is probably the case that to fully appreciate Porter’s book one needs some familiarity with Ted Hughes’s poetry and especially with Crow. As Hughes experimented with form during his own grief – one critic has described this period in Hughes’s work as a turning away from direct engagement with the natural world to mythical narratives – so Porter experiments in his.

Viewed rationally, Porter’s book is such a strange undertaking that none of it should quite work, and I think it’s true that some parts are more successful than others, but nonetheless the book is astonishing for two reasons: the audacity of its imagining, and its extraordinary emotional power. There is no right or wrong way to write about grief, and Porter’s book illustrates this with great panache and style. (It reminds me that another great, unflinching, clear-eyed confrontation with grief, Simone de Beauvoir’s wonderful book about her mother, A Very Easy Death, was considered by many to be cruel when it was published in 1964. It isn’t – it is a short, devastating masterpiece.)

And then I found myself picking up a recently purchased copy of Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life. I have struggled to read Barnes’s work over the years. A couple of his novels are magnificent – I’m thinking of Arthur & George, his reimagining of Arthur Conan Doyle and his friendship with a persecuted Indian solicitor; and his wonderful short novel about Shostakovich and Stalinist oppression, The Noise of Time – but most of the others I have tried have left me cold. I have also read several of his non-fiction titles but generally have found them similarly unengaging.

Levels of Life, however, his memoir about bereavement and loss, is another matter entirely. It considers the death of his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, and in it – in ways that are quieter but no less extraordinary than those adopted by Porter – Barnes gradually feels his way towards a method whereby grief can be confronted and written about. And astonishingly, he does this by considering the reckless mavericks of nineteenth century ballooning – the compulsive inventor Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who became better known as the pioneering photographer Nadar and more or less invented aerial photography; Colonel Frederick Burnaby who smoked cigars as he sailed through the skies but was to die with a spear through his neck aged just 42 at the Battle of Abu Klea; the scandalous French actress Sarah Bernhardt (she flew over Paris in a balloon emblazoned with the name of a character she was playing at the Comédie Française); and Odilon Redon, who witnessed Tournachon’s mammoth balloon, The Giant, and painted it as a sinister all-seeing airborne eye…

In the first two sections of this short book one feels Barnes circling ever closer to his real subject – the death of his wife. What he seems to be saying is that whether we understand it at the time or not, the conjunction of previously separate things or events or people – balloons and the Victorian plate camera, for example – can change the world in unimaginably rich and strange ways… Just as surely as loss – the separation of people – can reduce the world. And so in some ways, love – the joining of oneself with another – requires as much courage as the early balloonists, a similar disregard for danger, and a certain fearlessness regarding death. Shortly before her death, Pat Kavanagh left Barnes a message. She wrote: “The thing is – 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.” The pain of loss is an index of the enduring nature of love, she seems to be saying, and one cannot exist without the other.

While Porter’s book is intense and incandescent, Barnes’s memoir is more slow-burning, its emotional depths perhaps requiring greater effort to plumb. Porter has a fantastic immediacy; Barnes will tell you things you almost certainly didn’t know and I think it’s also the case that his mastery of his materials is greater. But rest assured, both are books that will burn brightly in your imagination long after one might have thought them extinguished and they make an unlikely but perfect pairing.

 

Alun Severn

September 2018

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