Like the rest of the British Media, I’m interrupting the regular programming in order to mark the passing of a monarch. Comments on Will Alexander’s Refractive Africa and my essay on Nietzsche and academic ‘quitlit’ will have to wait.
In my case, however, the monarch in question is the king of Redonda, Javier Marias. He died on Sunday, of pneumonia, at the age of 70. Too young. Younger than the new King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Marias has been one of the most important writers to my own sense of what novels can and should do. He was— sad to say was—probably the living novelist I admired the most. I seem to think that I first discovered him by reading an interview conducted by the (great) poet Oli Hazzard, in 2013, but I’m not sure. These things get hazy over time. I’ll spare you the autobiography through reading; lots of people pick up books at different times in their lives, lured by the conscious wiles of a bookshop employee who puts a book face out; or by an endorsement from Roberto Bolano; or by the resonances of a title, which seems to be a quotation you ought to remember, and as you pick it up, trying to think if it’s Shakespeare or not, the relationship has already begun; and soon you’re smiling indulgently, in conversation with someone on whom you had foisted the works of Javier Marias, defending your longstanding favourite author’s smug columnist persona, his slightly creepy interest in describing women’s legs, the suspect sexual politics of his books generally, by pointing out that none of that seems to matter much once you start reading and lose yourself in the haze of his novels.
There was nothing particularly personal about my discovery of Marias. He was reissued in the Penguin Modern Classics series about that time, and, more importantly, he is one of the presiding spirits of contemporary fiction. Perhaps it’s for another time, but it seems to me that Marias and WG Sebald separately pioneered many of the routes that interesting Anglo-American writers took through the novel last decade, but that Marias was less namechecked.
What was, and still is maybe more fun about Marias than his Anglo-German peer is the presence of miraculously old-fashioned satisfactions. These ought not to be there, in novels which have this extremely purified form—they tend to be meditative, rather than tightly plotted, sparse in their settings and focused much more on the mental world than the physical. But they somehow still do the things you want stories to do when you are first discovering the pleasures of stories.
Some of his books have the satisfactions of detective and spy fiction, but more important than the way he can effortlessly create specific genre ‘vibes’ without doing genre is the capacity he had for specificity itself. None of his novels’ narrators seem particularly individuated in personality, and yet the novels always leave you with this profound sensation of the particularity of life, even as it was abstracted into thought by another cerebral translator lost in his own introspection. It’s extremely rare for such artful novels to let so much life in, and where perhaps other writers seem driven by research into a kind of essayistic mode, Marias stands, or stood, out in the loose improvisatory way that he brings, or brought, the meditative and digressive into contact with actual life and passions, partly by turning them back into the stuff of narrative itself. You get the sense reading him that all of life is evaporating into narrative, but we come away from the books feeling all of life’s heat and agitation.
I’m going to try to justify my point by way of a little examination of a fitting and perfect paragraph from Tomorrow in the Battle, Think on Me, translated beautifully by Margaret Jull Costa. The first one:
No one ever expects anybody to die at the least opportune of moments, even though this happens all the time, nor does it ever occur to us that someone entirely unforeseen might die beside us. The facts or the circumstances of a death are often concealed: it is common for both the living and the dying – assuming that they have time to realize they are dying – to feel embarrassed by the form and appearance of that death, embarrassed too by its cause. Seafood poisoning, a cigarette lit as the person is drifting off to sleep and that sets fire to the sheets or, worse, to a woollen blanket; a slip in the shower – the back of the head – the bathroom door locked; a lightning bolt that splits in two a tree planted in a broad avenue, a tree which, as it falls, crushes or slices off the head of a passer-by, possibly a foreigner; dying in your socks, or at the barber’s, still wearing a voluminous smock, or in a whorehouse or at the dentist’s; or eating fish and getting a bone stuck in your throat, choking to death like a child whose mother isn’t there to save him by sticking a finger down his throat; or dying in the middle of shaving, with one cheek still covered in foam, half-shaven for all eternity, unless someone notices and finishes the job off out of aesthetic pity; not to mention life’s most ignoble, hidden moments that people seldom mention once they are out of adolescence, simply because they no longer have an excuse to do so, although, of course, there are always those who insist on making jokes about them, never very funny jokes. What a terrible way to die, people say about certain deaths; what a ridiculous way to die, people say, amidst loud laughter. The laughter surfaces because we are talking about an enemy at last deceased or about some remote figure, someone who once insulted us or who has long since inhabited the past, a Roman emperor, a great-grandfather, or even some powerful person in whose grotesque death one sees only the still-vital, still-human justice which, deep down, we hope will be dealt out to everyone, including ourselves. How that death gladdens me, saddens me, pleases me. Sometimes the trigger for hilarity is merely the fact that it is a stranger’s death, about whose inevitably risible misfortune we read in the newspapers, poor thing, people say, laughing, death as a performance or a show to be reviewed, all the stories that we read or hear or are told as if they were mere theatre, there is always a degree of unreality about the things other people tell us, it’s as if nothing ever really happened, not even the things that happen to us, things we cannot forget. No, not even what we cannot forget.
I’ve begun with the second sentence, just so that you might read this paragraph, for a moment, as a broader meditation on death. But the first sentence is narratively crucial. ‘No one ever expects that they might some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms, a woman whose face they will never see again, but whose name they will remember.’ That is the story of the novel, which is narrated by Victor, a man who is conducting an affair with a married woman named Marta and has gone back to her house to have sex with her for the first time when she suddenly falls ill and dies. This triggers a kind of contagious mania for investigation and retelling as Victor tries to learn more about the family on whose tragedy his, thankfully unnoticed, presence was an embarrassing blemish.
With that in mind we can go back to the second sentence; the aphoristic quality of it is changed, of course, when we know that Victor is about to tell us the story of someone dying at the inopportune moment. In the Spanish version the verb is pensar, to think, rather than to expect, but I think ‘expect’ ( a legitimate literal translation of this sense of pensar, I think, which also contains shades of intent, I’m thinking of doing x) captures most of what we need there, the motion of thought from concrete to abstract situation and back that gives us the sense, common to all Marias’ novels, that time does not exactly exist—that it cannot be measured, that it is only truly totted up when the final bill is due—instead, there is the forward and backward motion of thought, which returns endlessly from its end in death. Until it doesn’t.
It’s sort of amazing that in this passage that recites a litany of possible and fairly banal deaths, we end up being confronted with the actual unthinkability of death. I find myself picturing the cigarette Marias mentions ‘lit as the person is drifting off to sleep and that sets fire to the sheets or, worse, to a woollen blanket’, burning a bright hole through the photomosaic of Marias’ accreted clauses. At the end, all of the pictures will go.
But in the mean time, it is worth dwelling on the difference between a linen sheet and a woollen blanket. These scenes, even though they are thought, are the stuff of life itself. They also return us to Victor and his own embarrassing situation. All of these unfinished activities ‘half-shaven for all eternity’, might remind us of his own unconsummated fatal encounter. On the one hand, there is the great abstract void of death, the unthinkable, and on the other there is the concrete, frustrated individual thinker in his own personal situation. Victor himself reminds us of this push and pull when he imagines people laughing at the deaths of their enemies:
The laughter surfaces because we are talking about an enemy at last deceased or about some remote figure, someone who once insulted us or who has long since inhabited the past, a Roman emperor, a great-grandfather, or even some powerful person in whose grotesque death one sees only the still-vital, still-human justice which, deep down, we hope will be dealt out to everyone, including ourselves.
From the point of view of death, what is the difference between our personal enemies and the roman emperor, what is the difference between a dead monarch who presided over a suffering people two thousand years ago and one week ago? I love that the salvific hope here is pointedly ‘still-vital, still human’ (la justicia aún vital, aún humana). These things cannot be abstract or impersonal, or at least we cannot conceive them as other than ourselves. I love, too, that ‘who has long-since inhabited the past’. There’s an insistence on the presence of this departed person in that ‘has’ (it’s even more present to my limited senses in the Spanish: habita en el pasado desde much tiempo—this is a present tense construction for discussing the past). Death is kind of pushed outside the possibilities of the language for a moment as we try to imagine dead people. Here, ‘inhabited the past’ is obviously a kind of mock-pompous euphemism, but even in its ironies, in the kind of person we picture saying it, what we pick up is the vitality of language itself, when in the right hands.
That’s why stories matter. Even when they don’t matter. The good ones somehow remind us that we are really alive, that everything that is death is outside of us. Even when the story is about the disappointments and deceptions of storytelling, the impossibility of staving off death. I am reminded of a poem by John Ashbery, another writer I miss, and who was translated by Marias into Spanish, which, now that I think about it, may be how I found out about Marias. In ‘Scheherazade’, Ashbery offers a similar glimpse of an unfinished and unfinishable story, the way that death itself is not something we can confront or ease through literature, because it is outside literature, giving it shape:
So each found himself caught in a net
As a fashion, and all efforts to wriggle free
Involved him further, inexorably, since all
Existed there to be told, shot through
From border to border. Here were stones
That read as patches of sunlight, there was the story
Of the grandparents, of the vigorous young champion
(The lines once given to another, now
Restored to the new speaker), dinners and assemblies,
The light in the old home, the secret way
The rooms fed into each other, but all
The wariness of time watching itself
For nothing in the complex story grew outside:
The greatness in the moment of telling stayed unresolved
Until its wealth of incident, pain mixed with pleasure,
Faded in the precise moment of bursting
Into bloom, its growth a static lament.
The poem mourns death, finds it implicit in the very nature of narrative, every unfolding will eventually be an undoing.
But Ashbery points to a kind of magic implicit in death’s unthinkability, as we consider the fate of heroes from stories and of stories and their readers':
It is seen
At the end that the kind and good are rewarded,
That the unjust one is doomed to burn forever
Around his error, sadder and wiser anyway.
Between these extremes the others muddle through
Like us, uncertain but wearing artlessly
Their function of minor characters who must
Be kept in mind. It is we who make this
Jungle and call it space, naming each root,
Each serpent, for the sound of the name
As it clinks dully against our pleasure,
Indifference that is pleasure. And what would they be
Without an audience to restrict the innumerable
Passes and swipes, restored to good humor as it issues
Into the impervious evening air? So in some way
Although the arithmetic is incorrect
The balance is restored because it
Balances, knowing it prevails,
And the man who made the same mistake twice is exonerated.
The great heroes pass away to a final end. But we do not, because we cannot live in the end. Only heroes can do that. Characters from romance, not us minor characters in ordinary private fictions. To me Ashbery’s framing of this is somehow redemptive. We keep making the same mistakes as we go on living; failing to think death; having our small love affairs and family disputes, convinced that they matter. I find the case that Marias made for this same truth beautiful and convincing. We cannot face what ‘really happened’. We escape from it through stories. I never knew Javier Marias and I will never forget him.