Levels of life

Julian Barnes

Book - 2013

This is the author's essay on grief and love for his late wife, Pat. He discusses ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things and two people together, and about tearing them apart.

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

824.914/Barnes
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 824.914/Barnes Checked In
Subjects
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2013.
Language
English
Main Author
Julian Barnes (-)
Edition
First American edition
Physical Description
128 pages
ISBN
9780385350778
9780345806581
  • The sin of height
  • On the level
  • The loss of depth.
Review by New York Times Review

Julian barnes has disregarded the conventional boundaries between literary genres for as long as he's been publishing books. So it should come as no surprise that "Levels of Life," a putative grief memoir about the loss of his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, is part history, part meditative essay and part fictionalized biography. The pieces combine to form a fascinating discourse on love and sorrow. Each of the three essays - "The Sin of Height," "On the Level" and "The Loss of Depth" - begins with the same concept: that of putting together "two things that have not been put together before." In the first essay, the 19th-century photographer and inventor Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, later known simply as Nadar, combines photography and aeronautics as the first aerial photographer. In the second essay, Barnes narrates an imaginary affair between the actress Sarah Bernhardt and Fred Burnaby, an English traveler and adventurer. In the third essay, love unites Barnes and his wife - and persists even after Kavanagh's death. A series of coincidences links the three essays: Burnaby and Bernhardt also rode in balloons; Nadar photographed Bernhardt several times; Nadar was a devoted husband despite his many affairs, and he nursed his wife in her last illness, as Barnes nursed his. Elements from the book's first two sections reappear as metaphors in the third: "You feel absurd, like one of those dressed mannequins, surrounded by skulls, that Nadar photographed in the Catacombs. Or like that boa constrictor," belonging to Bernhardt, "which took to swallowing sofa cushions and had to be shot dead." But the facts of Barnes's life without Kavanagh don't need metaphors. "I look at my key ring (which used to be hers): it holds only two keys, one to the front door of the house and one to the back gate of the cemetery," he writes. "I used to rub oil into her back because her skin dried easily; now I rub oil into the drying oak of her grave marker." Kavanagh doesn't appear until the last of the three essays. She casts a shadow over the playful and digressive preliminary chapters, and in this new, lower light they seem a defense against grief's identity-warping madness - as if Barnes worried that writing about the death of the beloved might kill her all over again, this time in prose. The third essay, bracingly precise, is the emotional center of the book. Barnes here is simultaneously wise, funny and devastating: "When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you." When he sees his Congolese postman, moved to a new route, for the first time after Kavanagh's death and must explain that she is gone, he observes, "I was thinking, even as I was speaking : now I'm having to do it all again in French." During a late-night cab ride home, Barnes's driver asks: '"Your wife, be asleep, will she?' After a silent choke, I gave the only reply I could find. 'I hope so."' Memoir is often accused of being the most indulgent literary genre, and the first two essays, intellectually and imaginatively rigorous, provide a kind of apology for the third. But despite all expectations, those two are the ones that occasionally wax sentimental; the dialogue between Burnaby and Bernhardt can blush somewhat purple. In the third essay, Barnes refers to the dangerous lure of grief's "self-pity, isolationism, world-scorn, an egotistical exceptionalism: all aspects of vanity." His articulation of his anguish is well served by his leeriness, as the book's last section is one of the least indulgent accounts of mourning I have ever read. I almost wish "Levels of Life" consisted only of its 56 shattering pages. SARAH MANGUSO is the author, most recently, of the memoir "The Guardians."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 6, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review

Barnes, who won the Man Booker Prize for his most recent novel, The Sense of an Ending (2011), is a stealthy essayist. His tone is urbane and wry, his style pared and sure, but his emotions are stormy. As in his previous essay collection, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008), death is Barnes' theme. Though one wouldn't think so at the outset as he describes three nineteenth-century balloon flights in England and France enjoyed by three intriguing, eventually interconnected balloonatics. There's rascally Colonel Fred Burnaby; Felix Tournachon, better known as Nadar, the pioneering aerial and portrait photographer; and the Divine Sarah Bernhardt. Barnes muses on why being airborne is exhilarating, in spite of one's being at the mercy of wind and weather. The profound metaphorical resonance of Barnes' fascination with ballooning emerges as he addresses the sudden death of his wife of 30 years and his painful plunge into mourning. This bright wand of a book is testimony to Barnes' commanding artistry, delving intelligence, and high imagination as he writes of being griefstruck with stunningly vital and tonic perception.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

British novelist Barnes (The Sense of an Ending) offers a delicately oblique, emotionally tricky geography of grief, which he has constructed from his experience since the sudden death in 2008 of his beloved wife of 30 years, literary agent Pat Kavanagh. The "levels" of the title-a high, even, and deep "moral space"-play out in the juxtaposition of two subjects that are seemingly incongruous but potentially marvelous and sublime together, as Barnes delineates through his requisite and always fascinating historical examples: the 19th-century French photographer Nadar's attempts to unite the evolving science of aeronautics ("the sin of height") with the art of photography for the first astounding aerial views of Earth; and English traveler and avid balloonist Colonel Fred Burnaby's passion for the bold, adventurist French actress Sarah Bernhardt. The shocking death of Barnes's wife left him feeling flattened and suicidal. In his grieving turmoil, he questions assumptions about death and mourning, loss and memory, and he grapples eloquently with the ultimate moral conundrum: how to live? (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

British novelist, essayist, and Man Booker Prize-winning author Barnes (The Sense of an Ending) stitches together three very different essays into a meditation on love, death, grief, and survival. The first piece is a collage about ballooning and photography and establishes the metaphorical motifs that will frame the work as a whole. Indeed, ballooning aptly describes this book's arrangement: Barnes opens with an objective, bird's-eye account of three famous aeronauts and then begins his descent, first toward the ground and then, finally, into his interior thoughts. By the end, his narrative closes completely the psychic distance between the reader and himself. Barnes's wife, Pat Kavanagh, to whom he had been married for 30 years, died suddenly of cancer in 2008. He describes his grief as aimless, disorienting, and unending-as if being carried by the wind, in a balloon. Truly dedicated "To Pat," these essays recall Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which is also about the bereavement for a spouse. Yet Barnes offers a work that is more universal, illustrating how desire expands and elevates the human condition and yet, paradoxically and necessarily, also promises suffering. Verdict This book will resonate most with those who have suffered the death of a loved one, but readers who have deeply loved-and therefore deeply grieved-will also understand and appreciate it.-Meagan Lacy, Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ. Indianapolis Libs. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A book about the death of a spouse that is unlike any other--book or spouse--and thus illuminates the singularity as well as the commonality of grieving. Having provocatively addressed the matter of mortality (Nothing To Be Frightened Of, 2008), the award-winning British novelist brings a different perspective to the death of his wife. There is actually little about his long marriage to literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who was successful, respected and private. "Grief, like death, is banal and unique," he writes, with the sort of matter-of-fact precision that gives this book its power. In the two early sections, on ballooning, photography and love, Barnes employs an almost mannered, incantatory tone that seems more like a repression of emotion than an expression of it, making readers wonder how these meditations on perspective might ultimately cohere. "You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not," he writes about a doomed love affair between a famous actress and balloon adventurer. "They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves." Just as it took five years for Barnes to address his wife's death in print, it takes two sections of establishing tone and perspective before he writes of his mourning directly, though of course, he has been writing about it from the start of the book. "I mourn her uncomplicatedly, and absolutely," he writes. Ultimately, he finds some resonance in opera, which had never interested him before, as he discovers that "song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word--both higher and deeper." The perspectives of height and depth tie the first two sections to the third, where love and death can't ever be resolved but rather, somehow survived. Barnes' reticence is as eloquent as it is soul-shuddering.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

ON THE LEVEL You put together two things that have not been put together before; and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Pilâtre de Rozier, the first man to ascend in a fire balloon, also planned to be the first to fly the Channel from France to England. To this end he constructed a new kind of aerostat, with a hydrogen balloon on top, to give greater lift, and a fire balloon beneath, to give better control. He put these two things together, and on the 15th of June 1785, when the winds seemed favourable, he made his ascent from the Pas-de-Calais. The brave new contraption rose swiftly, but before it had even reached the coastline, flame appeared at the top of the hydrogen balloon, and the whole, hopeful aerostat, now looking to one observer like a heavenly gas lamp, fell to earth, killing both pilot and co-pilot. You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not. They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves. Together, they see further, and they see more clearly. Of course, love may not be evenly matched; perhaps it rarely is. To put it another way: how did those besieged Parisians of 1870-71 get replies to their letters? You can fly a balloon out from the Place St.-Pierre and assume it will land somewhere useful; but you can hardly expect the winds, however patriotic, to blow it back to Montmartre on a return flight. Various stratagems were proposed: for example, placing the return correspondence in large metal globes and floating them downstream into the city, there to be caught in nets. Pigeon post was a more obvious idea, and a Batignolles pigeon fancier put his dovecote at the authorities' disposal: a basket of birds might be flown out with each siege balloon, and return bearing letters. But compare the freight capacity of a balloon and a pigeon, and imagine the weight of disappointment. According to Nadar, the solution came from an engineer who worked in sugar manufacture. Letters intended for Paris were to be written in a clear hand, on one side of the paper, with the recipient's address at the top. Then, at the collecting station, hundreds of them would be laid side by side on a large screen and photographed. The image would be micrographically reduced, flown into Paris by carrier pigeon, and enlarged back to readable size. The revived letters were then put into envelopes and delivered to their addressees. It was better than nothing; indeed, it was a technical triumph. But imagine a pair of lovers, one able to write privately and at length on both sides of the page, and hide the tenderest words in an envelope; the other constrained by brevity and the knowledge that private feelings might be publicly inspected by photographers and postmen. Although--isn't that how love sometimes feels, and works? Sarah Bernhardt was photographed by Nadar--first the father, later the son--throughout her life. Her first session took place when she was about twenty, at the time Félix Tournachon was also involved in another tumultuous, if briefer, career: that of The Giant . Sarah is not yet Divine--she is unknown, aspiring; yet the portraits already show her a star. She is simply posed, wrapped in a velvet cloak, or an enveloping shawl. Her shoulders are bare; she wears no jewellery except a small pair of cameo earrings; her hair is virtually undressed. So is she: there is more than a hint that she wears little beneath that cloak, that shawl. Her expression is withholding, and thus alluring. She is, of course, very beautiful, perhaps more so to the modern eye than at the time. She seems to embody truthfulness, theatricality and mystery--and make those abstractions compatible. Nadar also took a nude photograph which some claim is of her. It shows a woman, naked to the waist, peek-a-booing with one eye from behind a spread fan. Whatever the case, the portraits of Sarah cloaked and shawled are decidedly more erotic. Scarcely five feet tall, she was not considered the right size for an actress; also, too pale and too thin. She seemed impulsive and natural in both life and art; she broke theatrical rules, often turning upstage to deliver a speech. She slept with all her leading men. She loved fame and self-publicity--or, as Henry James silkily put it, she was "a figure so admirably suited for conspicuity." One critic compared her successively to a Russian princess, a Byzantine empress and a Muscat begum, before concluding: "Above all, she is as Slav as one can be. She is much more Slav than all the Slavs I have ever met." In her early twenties she had an illegitimate son, whom she took everywhere with her, heedless of disapproval. She was Jewish in a largely anti-Semitic France, while in Catholic Montreal they stoned her carriage. She was brave and doughty. Naturally, she had enemies. Her success, her sex, her racial origin and her bohemian extravagance reminded the puritanical why actors used to be buried in unhallowed ground. And over the decades her acting style, once so original, inevitably dated, since naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel. If the magic always worked for some--Ellen Terry called her "transparent as an azalea" and compared her stage presence to "smoke from a burning paper"--others were less kind. Turgenev, though a Francophile and himself a dramatist, found her "false, cold, affected," and condemned her "repulsive Parisian chic." Fred Burnaby was often described as bohemian. His official biographer wrote that he lived "entirely aloof, absolutely regardless of conventionalities." And he had known the exoticism which Bernhardt merely appropriated. A traveller might bring reports back to Paris from afar; a playwright would pillage them for themes and effects; then a designer and costumier would perfect the illusion around her. Burnaby had been that traveller: he had gone deep into Russia, across Asia Minor and the Middle East, up the Nile. He had crossed Fashoda country, where both sexes went naked and dyed their hair bright yellow. Stories that adhered to him often featured Circassian girls, gypsy dancers and pretty Kirghiz widows. He claimed descent from Edward I, the king known as Longshanks, and displayed virtues of courage and truth-speaking which the English imagine unique to themselves. Yet there was something unsettling about him. His father was said to be "melancholy as the padge-owl that hooted in his park," and Fred, though vigorous and extrovert, inherited this trait. He was enormously strong, yet frequently ill, tormented by liver and stomach pains; "gastric catarrh" once drove him to a foreign spa. And though "very popular in London and Paris," and a member of the Prince of Wales's circle, he was described by the Dictionary of National Biography as living "much alone." The conventional accept and are frequently charmed by a certain unconventionality; Burnaby seems to have exceeded that limit. One of his devoted friends called him "the most slovenly rascal that ever lived," who sat "like a sack of corn on a horse." He was held to be foreign-looking, with "oriental features" and a Mephistophelean smile. The DNB called his looks "Jewish and Italian," noting that his "unEnglish" appearance "led him to resist attempts to procure portraits of him." We live on the flat, on the level, and yet--and so-- we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracturing force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both. So why do we constantly aspire to love? Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning. Excerpted from Levels of Life by Julian Barnes All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.