Julian Barnes and God

The French critic Roland Barthes once said that middle age begins, not at any particular chronological point in life, but exactly when, early or late, we begin to feel we are going to die — as distinct from abstractly knowing that fact. "This is a not a natural feeling," Barthes continued. "The natural one is to believe oneself immortal." Many of us can attest indeed to the naturalness of this feeling — and we do have Freud on our side, who asserted that "it is impossible to imagine our own death."



The novelist Julian Barnes will have none of this. He can imagine his own death and has been doing so since he was 13 or 14, or, as he puts it in his new memoir, "Nothing To Be Frightened Of" (Knopf, 244 pages, $24.95), "for most of my sentient life." It's not that Mr. Barnes doesn't believe that Barthes and the rest of us immortalists feel what we implausibly do feel. He just doesn't see how we can manage to sustain the self-delusion. He makes witty and scary play out of the word "nothing" in his title. It can mean, obviously, that there is no reason to be frightened. But it can also name the void he fears awaits us after death, the long nothing that may or may not be worse than something. We can certainly be afraid of that, and Mr. Barnes tells us, somewhat proudly, that he noted the double meaning of the phrase in his diary "twenty and more years ago."

"This is not, by the way, 'my autobiography,'" Mr. Barnes tells us early in the book, his "by the way" mimicking offhandedness and his quotation marks expressing a little quiver of distaste. But then what is it? It is in part, he goes on to say, an exploration of the afterlife of his parents, who died in 1992 and 1997; he is "trying to work out how dead they are." This is a fine, haunting phrase, and we know just what he means: Some of us start being our parents' children only when they are dead, and some of us take the opportunity to just start being them. And to ask how dead the dead are allows Mr. Barnes to come at the chief questions of the book — how to live with a fear of death, and which aspects of death are the source of our fear — through autobiography if not "autobiography."

Over the course of the book, he tells us a great deal about his childhood in suburban London; his family; his defeated, loved father (giving up hope was "the correct response of an intelligent man to an irrecoverable situation") and his bossy, dispiriting mother ("I couldn't face ... the sense of my vital spirits being drained away by her relentless solipsism"); his brother and nieces; his friends (usually identified only by an initial letter), and above all his tastes in music and writing. Some of the most moving pages have to do with Ravel's last years, when the composer was not able to identify his own work; and some of the most passionate pages have to do with Stendhal and Jules Renard, smart and skeptical Frenchmen who had enough wit to be scared of what they didn't understand. The book is rather meandering and very English, full of words such as "blokes" and "chums" and "rumbled" and "rowdy." Mr. Barnes tells us that when England "is abused, a dormant, not to say narcoleptic patriotism stirs," but his Englishness never sleeps. It produces real charm, but also a constant dimming of the lights, an ease of the intelligence that comes across as languid, as if Mr. Barnes likes to think about things but not too hard — he leaves that to his philosopher brother, who emerges as a regular foil.

"I don't believe in God, but I miss Him" is how the book opens; later Mr. Barnes tells us he used to be an atheist and now is an agnostic. Of course the God he misses is himself a sort of Englishman, or at least the kind of God any Englishman would feel comfortable with: "naturally the Christian God of Western Europe and non-fundamentalist America," as he puts it. Mr. Barnes is at his best when making jokes about this God — what if he condemns those who merely bet on his existence because he doesn't like gamblers? What if God is playing a vicious game by placing "immortal longings in an undeserving creature"? He's at his most convincing when he speaks about his actual night terrors ("I am roared awake in the enveloping and predictive darkness"), and the fact that he has never started a book without wondering whether he might die before he finished it. At other points, the work is often funny and always lucid, but a little tame, offering us nonurgent thoughts one after another. Perhaps this is what it means to be melancholic, as Mr. Barnes says he is: "I ... sometimes find life an overrated way of passing the time" (no mania there). Or perhaps it's simply that a novelist writing up his thoughts on death or any subject is not exactly at work; but closer to a state of morbid play.

At any rate the pleasures of "Nothing To Be Frightened" are in the writing rather than the thoughts — particularly in fine phrases such as "this rented world," "secular shriving," "any sort of decent dying time," or in the following definition of the practice of writing fiction, a formulation worthy of Henry James himself: "This is where we work, in the interstices of ignorance, the land of contradiction and silence, planning to convince you with the seemingly known, to resolve — or make usefully vivid — the contradiction, and to make the silence eloquent."

Mr. Barnes reports his philosopher brother saying that the idea of missing a God you don't believe in is "soppy," and it's hard not to agree with him, whether we take the believer's or the atheist's view. But then the novelist finds unexpected and unexplored support in an anecdote he tells about Bertrand Russell. What if the great lifelong atheist were to arrive in heaven and find he was wrong? What would he say to God? He would say, Russell promptly replied when asked, "You didn't give us enough evidence." A believer would say the lack of evidence was precisely the point, the grounds of true faith. But it isn't entirely soppy for an agnostic such as Mr. Barnes to mistrust both atheist and believer, to have his doubts about both hard evidence and ecstatic faith, and to wish for the milder regime of a less absolute God.

Mr. Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English at Princeton University and the author of "Literature and the Taste of Knowledge," among other books.