Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot

Her secret life stopped when the children came, and returned when they went to school. Sometimes, a temporary friend might take me on one side. Why do they think you want to know? Or rather, why do they think you don’t know already – why don’t they understand about love’s relentless curiosity? And why do these temporary friends never want to tip you off about the more important thing: the fact that you’re no longer loved? I became adept at turning the conversation, at saying how much more gregarious than me Ellen was, at hinting that the medical profession always attracts calumniators, at saying, Did you read about those terrible floods in Venezuela? On such occasions I always felt, perhaps wrongly, that I was being disloyal to Ellen.

We were happy enough; that’s what people say, isn’t it? How happy is happy enough? It sounds like a grammatical mistake – happy enough , like rather unique – but it answers the need for a phrase. And as I say, she didn’t run up bills. Both Madame Bovarys (people forget that Charles marries twice) are brought down by money; my wife was never like that. Nor, as far as I know, did she accept gifts.

We were happy; we were unhappy; we were happy enough. Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? I have it now; she had it earlier. After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.

I have to hypothesise a little. I have to fictionalise (though that’s not what I meant when I called this a pure story). We never talked about her secret life. So I have to invent my way to the truth. Ellen was about fifty when the mood began to come upon her. (No, not that: she was always healthy; her menopause was quick, almost careless.) She had had a husband, children, lovers, a job. The children had left home; the husband was always the same. She had friends, and what are called interests; though unlike me she didn’t have some rash devotion to a dead foreigner to sustain her. She had travelled enough. She didn’t have unfulfilled ambitions (though ‘ambition’, it seems to me, is mostly too strong a word for the impulse that makes people do things). She wasn’t religious. Why go on?

‘People like us must have the religion of despair. One must be equal to one’s destiny, that’s to say impassive like it. By dint of saying “That is so! That is so!” and of gazing down into the black pit at one’s feet, one remains calm.’ Ellen did not even have this religion. Why should she? For my sake? The despairing are always being urged to abstain from selfishness, to think of others first. This seems unfair. Why load them with responsibility for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down?

Perhaps there was something else as well. Some people, as they grow older, seem to become more convinced of their own significance. Others become less convinced. Is there any point to me? Isn’t my ordinary life summed up, enclosed, made pointless by someone else’s slightly less ordinary life? I’m not saying it’s our duty to negate ourselves in the face of those we judge more interesting. But life, in this respect, is a bit like reading. And as I said before: if all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours . Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours . But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Ellen’s secret life led her into despair. For God’s sake, her life is not a moral tale. No one’s is. All I’m saying is that both her secret life and her despair lay in the same inner chamber of her heart, inaccessible to me. I could touch the one no more than the other. Did I try? Of course I tried. But I was not surprised when the mood came upon her. ‘To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness – though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.’ My wife had only good health to offer.

Does life improve? On television the other night I watched the Poet Laureate asked that question. ‘The only thing I think is very good today is dentistry,’ he replied; nothing else came to mind. Mere antiquarian prejudice? I don’t think so. When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements – the invention of some new valve or sprocket – while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.

Does life improve? I’ll give you my answer, my equivalent of dentistry. The one thing that is very good in life today is death. There’s still room for improvement, it’s true. But I think of all those nineteenth-century deaths. The deaths of writers aren’t special deaths; they just happen to be described deaths. I think of Flaubert lying on his sofa, struck down – who can tell at this distance? – by epilepsy, apoplexy or syphilis, or perhaps some malign axis of the three. Yet Zola called it une belle mort – to be crushed like an insect beneath a giant finger. I think of Bouilhet in his final delirium, feverishly composing a new play in his head and declaring that it must be read to Gustave. I think of the slow decline of Jules de Goncourt: first stumbling over his consonants, the c’s turning to t’s in his mouth; then being unable to remember the titles of his own books; then the haggard mask of imbecility (his brother’s phrase) slipping over his face; then the deathbed visions and panics, and all night long the rasping breaths that sounded (his brother’s words again) like a saw cutting through wet wood. I think of Maupassant slowly disintegrating from the same disease, transported in a strait-jacket to the Passy sanatorium of Dr Blanche, who kept the Paris salons entertained with news of his celebrated client; Baudelaire dying just as inexorably, deprived of speech, arguing with Nadar about the existence of God by pointing mutely at the sunset; Rimbaud, his right leg amputated, slowly losing all feeling in the limbs that remained, and repudiating, amputating his own genius – ‘Merde pour la poésie’ ; Daudet ‘vaulting from forty-five to sixty-five’, his joints collapsing, able to become bright and witty for an evening by giving himself five morphine injections in a row, tempted by suicide – ‘But one doesn’t have the right.’

‘Is it splendid or stupid to take life seriously?’ (1855). Ellen lay with a tube in her throat and a tube in her padded forearm. The ventilator in its white oblong box provided regular spurts of life, and the monitor confirmed them. Of course the act was impulsive; she bolted, she bunked from it all. ‘But one doesn’t have the right’? She did. She didn’t even discuss it. The religion of despair held no interest for her. The ECG trace unrolled on the monitor; it was familiar handwriting. Her condition was stable, but hopeless. Nowadays we don’t put NTBR – Not To Be Resuscitated – on a patient’s notes; some people find it heartless. Instead we put ‘No 333’. A final euphemism.

I looked down at Ellen. She wasn’t corrupted. Hers is a pure story. I switched her off. They asked if I wanted them to do it; but I think she would have preferred me to. Naturally, we hadn’t discussed that either. It’s not complicated. You press a switch on the ventilator, and read off the final phrase of the ECG trace: the farewell signature that ends with a straight line. You unplug the tubes, then rearrange the hands and arms. You do it swiftly, as if trying not to be too much trouble to the patient.