And, lunch over, we are giving him a lift home, but on the Strand he asks the cabbie to stop, bids us farewell, and disappears into a large bookstore waving that piece ofpaper with Coetzee's name on it. I worry how he'll get home; then I remember that London is his town more than mine.
And speaking of fragments, I remember how, in 1986, when the Challenger blew up in the air over Cape Canaveral, I heard either the ABC or the CNN voice reading Stephen's "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great," written fifty years ago.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are feted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
I think I told him of this episode a few years later, and I believe he smiled, with that famous smile of his that conveyed at once pleasure, a sense of general absurdity, his partial culpability for that absurdity, pure warmth. If I am tentative here, it's because I can't quite picture the surroundings. (For some reason a hospital room keeps popping up.) As for his reaction, it couldn't have been otherwise: "I Think Continually" is his most tired, most anthologized piece. Of all his lines—written, discarded, unwritten, half or fully forgotten, yet glowing inside him nevertheless. For the metier claims its own one way or another. Hence his radiance, which stays on my retina whether I shut my eyes or not. Hence, in any case, that smile.
XXV
People are what we remember about them. What we call life is in the end a patchwork of someone else's recollections. With death, it gets unstitched, and one ends up with random, disjointed fragments. With shards or, if you will, with snapshots. Filled with their unbearable laughter or equally unbearable smiles. Which are unbearable because they are one- dimensional. I should know; after all, I am a photographer's son. And I may even go as far as suggesting a link between picture taking and verse writing—well, insofar as the fragments are black-and-white. Or insofar as writing means retention. Yet one can't pretend that what one beholds goes beyond its blank reverse side. Also, once one realizes how much somebody's life is a hostage of one's own memory, one balks at the jaws of the past tense. Apart from anything, it's too much like talking behind somebody's back, or like belonging to some virtuous, triumphant majority. One's heart should try to be more honest—if it can't be smarter—than one's grammar. Or else one should keep a journal whose entries, simply by definition, would keep that tense at bay.
481 I In Memory of Stephen Spender XXVI
So now the last fragment. A journal entry, as it were: for July 20 to 21, 1995. Although I never kept a journal. Stephen, however, did.
Awfully hot night, worse than N.Y. D. [family friend] picks me up, and 45 minutes later we are at Loudoun Rd. Ah, how well I know this place's floors and basement! Natasha's first words: "Of all people, he was unlikeliest to die." I can't think of what the last four days were like for her, of what this night is going to be like. It's all in her eyes. The same goes for the children: for Matthew and Lizzie. Barry [Lizzie's husband] produces whiskey and treats my glass generously. No one is in good shape. Of all things, we are talking about Yugoslavia. I couldn't eat on the plane and still can't. More whiskey, then, and more Yugoslavia, and by now it's midnight for them. Matthew and Lizzie suggest that I stay either in Stephen's study or in Lizzie and Barry's attic. But M. booked a hotel for me, and they drive me there: it's a few blocks away.
In the morning D. drives us all to St. Mary's on Pad- dington Green. On account of my Russianness, Natasha arranges for me to see Stephen in an open coffin. He looks severe and settled for whatever it is ahead. I kiss him on his brow, saying, "Thank you for everything. Say hello to Wystan and my parents. Farewell." I remember his legs, in the hospital, protruding from the gown: bruised with burst blood vessels—exactly like my father's, who was older than Stephen by six years. No, it's not because I wasn't present at his death that I flew to London. Though that could be as good a reason as any. No, not because of that. Actually, after seeing Stephen in the open coffin, I feel much calmer. Presumably this custom has something to do with its therapeutic effect. This strikes me as a Wystan-like thought. He would be here if he could. So it might just as well be me. Even if I can't provide Natasha and the children with any comfort, I can be a distraction. Now Matthew screws the bolts into the coffin lid. He fights tears, but they are winning. One can't help him; nor do I think one should. This is a son's job.
XXVII
People begin to arrive for the service and stand outside in little groups. I recognize Valerie Eliot, and after some initial awkwardness we talk. She tells me this story: The day her husband died, the BBC broadcast a tribute to him over the wireless, read by Auden. "He was absolutely the right man," she says. "Still, I was somewhat surprised by his promptness." A little later, she says, he comes to London, calls on her, and tells her that when the BBC learned that Eliot was gravely ill, they telephoned and asked him to record an obituary. Wystan said that he refused to speak about T. S. Eliot in the past tense while he was alive. In that case, said the BBC, we'll go to somebody else. "So I had to grit my teeth and do it," said Auden. "And for that I beg your forgiveness."
Then the service begins. It i s as beautiful as an affair of this kind can be. The window behind the altar gives onto a wonderfully sunlit churchyard. Haydn and Schubert. Except that, as the quartet goes into a crescendo, I see in the side window a lift with construction workers climbing to the umpteenth floor of the adjacent high-rise. This strikes me as the kind of thing Stephen himself would notice and later remark about. And throughout the service, totally inappropriate lines from Wystan's poem about Mozart keep running through my mind:
How seemly then to celebrate the birth Of one who didn't do harm to our poor earth, Created masterpieces by the dozen, Indulged in toilet humor with his cousin And had a pauper funeral in the rain— The like of whom we'll never meet again.