Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

The final wail in his head was about his life as well as his art. It was this: at what point does pessimism become desolation? His last chamber works articulated that question. He told the violist Fyodor Druzhinin that the first movement of his Fifteenth Quartet should be played ‘so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom’.

All his life he had relied on irony. He imagined that the trait had been born in the usual place: in the gap between how we imagine, or suppose, or hope life will turn out, and the way it actually does. So irony becomes a defence of the self and the soul; it lets you breathe on a day-to-day basis. You write in a letter that someone is ‘a marvellous person’ and the recipient knows to conclude the opposite. Irony allows you to parrot the jargon of Power, to read out meaningless speeches written in your name, to gravely lament the absence of Stalin’s portrait in your study while behind a half-open door your wife is holding herself in against forbidden laughter. You welcome the appointment of a new Minister of Culture by commenting that there will be especial rejoicing in progressive musical circles, which have always placed their greatest hopes in him. You write a final movement to your Fifth Symphony which is the equivalent of painting a clown’s grin on a corpse, then listen with a straight face to Power’s response: ‘Look, you can see he died happy, certain of the righteous and inevitable triumph of the Revolution.’ And part of you believed that as long as you could rely on irony, you would be able to survive.

For instance, in the year in which he joined the Party, he wrote his Eighth Quartet. He told his friends that in his mind the work was dedicated ‘to the memory of the composer’. Which would clearly have been regarded by the musical authorities as unacceptably egotistical and pessimistic. And so the dedication on the published score eventually read: ‘To the Victims of Fascism and War’. This would no doubt have been viewed as a great improvement. But all he had really done was turn a singular into a plural.

However, he was no longer so sure. There could be a smugness to irony, as there could be a complacency to protest. A farm boy throws an apple core at a passing, chauffeur-driven car. A drunken beggar pulls down his trousers and bares his bottom to respectable folk. A distinguished Soviet composer inserts subtle mockery into a symphony or a string quartet. Was there a difference, either in motive, or in effect?

Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered any more, whether anyone noticed. You imagined you were issuing a beam of ultraviolet light, but what if it failed to register because it was off the spectrum known to everyone else? He had inserted into his first cello concerto a reference to ‘Suliko’, Stalin’s favourite song. But Rostropovich had played straight over it without noticing. If the allusion had to be pointed out to Slava, who else in the world would ever spot it?

And irony had its limits. For instance, you could not be an ironic torturer; or an ironic victim of torture. Equally, you couldn’t join the Party ironically. You could join the Party honestly, or you could join it cynically: those were the only two possibilities. And to an outsider, it might not matter which was the case, because both might seem contemptible. His younger self, by the side of the road, would see in the back of that car some wizened old sunflower, no longer turning towards the sun of Stalin’s constitution, but still heliotropic, still drawn to the light-source of Power.

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.

Beneath the glass of his desktop at the dacha in Zhukhova was an enormous photograph of Mussorgsky looking ursine and disapproving: it urged him to throw away inferior work. Beneath the glass of his desktop at his Moscow apartment was an enormous photograph of Stravinsky, the greatest composer of the century: it urged him to write the best music he could. And always, on his bedside table, was that postcard he had brought back from Dresden: of Titian’s The Tribute Money .

The Pharisees had tried to trick Jesus by asking him if the Jews ought to pay taxes to Caesar. As Power, throughout history, always tried to dupe and subvert those it felt threatened by. He himself had tried not to fall for Power’s tricks, but he was not Jesus Christ, only Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich. And while Jesus’s reply to the Pharisee who showed him Caesar’s golden image was in fact usefully ambiguous — he did not specify what exactly belonged to God and what to Caesar — this was not a line he could repeat himself. ‘Render unto art that which is art’s?’ Such was the creed of art for art’s sake, of formalism, egocentric pessimism, revisionism, and all the other — isms thrown at him down the years. And Power’s reply would always be the same: ‘Repeat after me,’ it would say, ‘ART BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE — V. I. LENIN. ART BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE — V. I. LENIN.’

And so, he would die soon, probably during the next leap year. Then, one by one, they would all die: his friends and enemies; those who understood the complexities of life under tyranny, and those who would have preferred him to be a martyr; those who knew and loved his music, and a few old men who still whistled ‘The Song of the Counterplan’ without even knowing who had written it. All would die — except, perhaps, Khrennikov.

During his last years, he increasingly used the marking morendo in his string quartets: ‘dying away’, ‘as if dying’. It was how he marked his own life too. Well, few lives ended fortissimo and in the major. And no one died at the right time. Mussorgsky, Pushkin, Lermontov — they had all died too soon. Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Gogol — they all should have died earlier; perhaps Beethoven as well. It was, of course, not just a problem for famous writers and composers, but for ordinary people too: the problem of living beyond your best span, beyond that point where life can no longer bring joy, instead only disappointment and dreadful happenings.

So, he had lived long enough to be dismayed by himself. This was often the way with artists: either they succumbed to vanity, thinking themselves greater than they were, or else to disappointment. Nowadays, he was often inclined to think of himself as a dull, mediocre composer. The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.

And beyond death? He felt like raising a silent glass with the toast, ‘Here’s hoping it doesn’t get any better than this!’ If death would come as a relief from life, with its fur-lined humiliations, he did not expect things would become less complicated. Look what had happened to poor Prokofiev. Five years after his death, just as the memorial plaques were being installed across Moscow, his first wife was instructing lawyers to get the composer’s second marriage annulled. And on what grounds! The grounds being that ever since his return to Russia in 1936, Sergei Sergeyevich had been impotent. Therefore his second marriage couldn’t have been consummated; therefore she, the first wife, was his only legal wife, and his only legal heir. She was even demanding an affidavit from the doctor who had examined Sergei Sergeyevich two decades previously that his incapacity had been established as an irrefutable fact.