Gradus Vitae

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

A little book like no other, this 'sort-of' memoir from Julian Barnes is the story of his own closely-observed grief at the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh.  When she died.......

"Nothing had prepared him: not his parents' deaths, nor all the thinking about death that went into his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, published just a few months before. And very little helped him cope.

Certain things that were said, or not said, only made it worse: the friends who suggest he get away while they look after his house and their dog has the run of the garden (this while his wife is not yet dead); the ones who pretend not to hear when he mentions her name; the ones who ask – convinced he is looking better – "Have you found someone?" The griefstruck rarely know what they want, he says, so these offences are lightly noted, not raged over. What do they matter, after all – what does anything matter – when the worst has already happened?

One by one, the classic consolations offered to the bereaved are considered and repudiated: that suffering makes you stronger; that things get easier after the first year, through repetition ("why should repetition mean less pain?"); that the two of you will be reunited in the next life (which no atheist can believe). He owns up to thoughts of suicide and explains the reason for resisting: he is his wife's chief rememberer, and if he kills himself he will be killing her too.

One grief throws no light upon another, he says, quoting EM Forster. But some aspects of grief are universal, or can be made so through the honesty and precision with which they are articulated. Denying himself woolly comforts, Barnes scorns the euphemisms of "passed" or "lost to cancer" (the linguistic equivalent of averting one's eyes). Even actions that others might find strange – his habit of talking to his wife, though she is dead – have their own irresistible logic: "the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist."
Pat Kavanagh was my agent for 30 years; it is hard for me to be objective. But this is not a book written for people who knew her. Nor is it "Before She Left Me", a story of her life and last weeks. Candid about his own grief, Barnes remains protective of her privacy; though her photo is on the back cover, her name doesn't appear in the text. Distressed by how many memories of her have gone, as if she is slipping away a second time, he lists the things he does remember – the last book she read, the last wine she drank, the last clothes she bought. But he doesn't disclose what they were.
"Let me tell you something about her," he wrote of his wife in the half-chapter of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, while giving away very little. Levels of Life, similarly, is a book that levels with us only up to a point. Its resonance comes from all it doesn't say, as well as what it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief. Even this essay is only one panel of a triptych – a form arrived at to "give sorrow words" when it might have been a mere stubbed-toe cry.

Review from the Guardian by Blake Morrison, 10th April 2013.