DEATH OF A VETERAN
Morton, Brian
One night last October my father came home late from a meeting, talked with my mother for a few minutes in the living room, and went up to bed. She says he looked as beautiful as ever. When she...
...Many of the books and ideas that were important to me seem utterly trivial now...
...If you see your life's work as part of a collective effort spanning generations, the fact that your life ends is of little importance...
...In his last book, written when he was 82, Herbert Marcuse put it well...
...So all the old commitments must be renewed, or at any rate reexamined...
...To the day he died, his vigor was unimpaired, his mind was blazing...
...A minus sign will be placed before each total in any case...
...From him and from my mother, I took the conviction that almost anything is possible when people work together...
...Even in a society without masters, in which each is freely working for the good of all, each life, year by year, will be more and more eclipsed by suffering...
...0 At the heart of socialism is the idea that men and women transform themselves as they transform the world...
...Man makes himself, but not completely...
...In anticipating my father's death, I had known that my grief would be deep...
...I remembered these words, and I thought, So what...
...What was terrible doesn't need to be explained...
...They couldn't have...
...We can make life better...
...It seemed a repudiation of everything he'd lived for...
...I regret my condescension...
...Stored in his mind was 67 years of experience...
...to both of us, the bond was clear...
...But I regret my tone: the brisk, confident tone of someone who regards death as hardly more than a distraction...
...He didn't die in pain or fear or paralysis...
...The last time I'd looked at my books, they'd reflected a life in which I could still touch him...
...for a few short years an influence stirs...
...I was ashamed of myself for thinking this way...
...Are you sure you have the strength...
...He's also among the most humane and thoughtful of socialists, which makes his example doubly instructive...
...0 Throughout his adult life, my father was a trade unionist and a radical...
...Somewhere around dawn, he died...
...In his novel The Fight for Manod, a radical, hospitalized after his second heart attack, has told a visitor that he intends to continue with his political work: Robert Lane sighed...
...You might call it the tone of a very young man...
...Implicit in my sorrow is my love...
...These are things to be thankful for, but they don't touch the brute fact that he died...
...After he died I found that all my years of worrying had been useless...
...but there are some things one simply can't imagine...
...He found his calling early and he stayed with it...
...He had the love of his family and the respect of his colleagues, and he managed to move the world a bit...
...That the modern novel has lost the respect for death that characterized it in the age of Tolstoy is a subject for another occasion...
...He smoked three packs a day...
...None of this is any reason to stop fighting...
...I exist—I shall die" seems absolute, within this experience, but Camus sometimes recognized, at the limits of his strength, that "we exist" is a permanent alternative proposition, and if this is so, then "we exist—we shall not die" is in fact a resolution, and one which many men have in practice attained...
...For years I'd tried to brace myself against my father's death...
...then all is dark...
...If each life ends in extinction for the individual and unspeakable misery for those who loved him, what point could there possibly be...
...ultimately unreal...
...We may have disagreed about the historical importance of the Solidarity movement or the literary stature of Dickens, but his interests were my interests...
...344...
...He never attained what he used to call "Popdom": that state of amiable irrelevance in which anything you say is met with an indulgent smile and a reply like, "Absolutely, Pop...
...Somewhere near dawn, in the course of a few minutes, all of it was erased...
...At times this seems justified, as when we see conservatives taking recourse in the idea of an unalterable human nature to defend some social inequity...
...The socialist emphasis on self-creation, admirable within limits, can blind...
...but as the basis of an exclusive emphasis, it won't do...
...Though each of us will die, I informed her, humanity goes on...
...He was lucky in more than his death...
...For a long fight, yes...
...I still think we can improve upon a world "where wealth accumulates and men decay...
...Sometimes, sitting with my fam341 ily, I toyed with the childish idea that if I could only embrace the moment fiercely enough, I might stop time, I might keep him alive forever...
...Now it seemed that there was no reason to be interested in them anymore...
...You can't grieve unceasingly...
...Not his accomplishments or his influence...
...The world was not made for the sake of the human being, and it has not become more human...
...When you look at your possessions, they seem to reflect your life...
...So did my father's...
...0 When, after a week or so, I came back to my own home, the sight of my bookshelves set my tears loose again...
...In my parochial self-satisfaction, I was speaking as the authentic representative of a parochial and self-satisfied tradition...
...Some years ago, soon after I left college, I had an argument with a friend...
...I think it should also be dampened by the tragedy of the happiest life: the mere fact that each of us ends up at zero...
...It will be a lot of work, Matthew...
...That wasn't what I was asking...
...Edward Thompson has written that the nuclear destruction of our civilization would mean that "a balance-sheet of the last two millennia would be drawn, in every field of endeavor and of culture, and a minus sign would be placed before each total...
...Though I've returned to my old interests since my father died, something has changed...
...and when I was with him I would treasure the moment as profoundly as I could, because I could never forget that he wouldn't be with me forever...
...Yes, we do...
...But it would be a mistake to blame it solely on my youth...
...Some of what he knew had been passed on...
...Every socialist learns with his ABCs that so great a thinker as Aristotle, generalizing falsely, thought slavery an ineradicable feature of human society...
...The idea that death means less if one has made the world a little better seemed a pathetic evasion, "a bow tie around a throat cancer...
...0 I don't say that the horror of life is unrelieved...
...He never had to endure chemotherapy, by-pass surgery, strokes...
...She maintained that the fact that we all die makes our personal projects of questionable importance...
...But not enough, not enough...
...He left no writings...
...If you don't decide to commit suicide, you must decide how you wish to live...
...On that first night back at home, it seemed to me, when I looked at my books, that the only reason for my interest in either of these subjects was that it enriched my conversations with my father...
...but where in this long and formidable tradition is their measure adequately taken...
...Raymond Williams is one of the few socialists who has written about death at all...
...But visions of a happy future disgust me...
...Well-meaning friends have told us that he was lucky to have died in his sleep...
...I'm only saying that we can't make it good...
...We grow old, we grow weak, we die...
...As the shock tapered off into an everyday sorrow, the reasons reemerged...
...You must eat, sleep, work, plan, whether you want it that way or not...
...I look through his favorite books, but you can never really find someone in the books he read...
...not his love of my mother my sister and me...
...With a professorial irritation, I told her that her view was tainted by the ideology of narrow individualism...
...Nothing makes up for his death...
...I resent it when they say this, but I have to admit they're right...
...To come home was to meet his death anew...
...This is the most we can ask of life: that it be of a terrible beauty...
...It often seems as if socialists have dispensed with the idea of human nature entirely...
...No, but it's still the answer...
...but privately I didn't see how the prevention of nuclear war mattered...
...We smirk at his presumption: we'll never make that kind of mistake...
...What was beautiful was the vividness of my awareness, in my sorrow, of how much he had given me...
...in book or deed a spark Lingers, then that, too, fades...
...Socialism seems to regard death much as Hegel regarded evil: as a matter of appearance only...
...Not, at least, when you're looking as hard as I am...
...When she came to bed an hour or so later, he was asleep...
...Each of us will die in turn, and finally the human race will become extinct...
...On the night of October 31st, Richard Morton went to sleep...
...For the socialist," wrote Marx, "the . . . history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor...
...In the days after he died, a few stray lines of 343 poetry drifted through my mind...
...He was as lucky as a man can hope to be...
...Simple facts...
...In Modern Tragedy, in his chapter on Camus and Sartre, he writes: The life-death contradiction is limited, in fact, to the kind of individual consciousness especially characteristic of bourgeois philosophy...
...I'm still a socialist...
...To the point here is that the entire socialist tradition is marked by a lack of sobriety about death—a dismissiveness forgivable in a 20-year-old, but not 342 in a body of thought that seeks a sovereign understanding of the whole of our existence...
...Among them was, "A terrible beauty is born...
...My mother and sister and I had asked that contributions in my father's memory be made to the nuclear freeze movement...
...I'd had no idea how deep...
...They can't be simply sloughed off...
...During the last five or ten years, I found myself terrified whenever the phone rang at an unusual hour...
...every morning his coughing rocked the house...
...I haven't come to agree with her: I don't believe that my father's death diminishes the value of his life...
...In the weeks after he died, these beliefs seemed pointless...
...A few of the speakers at his memorial said that his influence would give him a kind of immortality...
...What I had not even vaguely foreseen was that all my plans and all my beliefs would disintegrate...
...Many of the writers around Dissent have argued that the tragedies of the 20th century should dampen the optimism of any socialist...
...From the time I reached the age of reason, my life has been guided by an idea of solidarity: by the idea that the best vocation is to work against the wolfishness of the world...
...Most of my books fall into one of two categories: literature and politics...
...that the thread of my life would be cut...
...They hadn't prepared me...
...Couldn't agree with you more...
...I still find this passage beautiful...
...But in the grip of the shock of his death, I couldn't think my way beyond it...
...A book of socialist anthropology is titled Man Makes Himself...
...John Masefield's view seemed more accurate...
...He was nearly 40 when I was born—a generation older than the parents of most of my friends—so almost from the beginning, I thought of him as an old man...
...I walk through my parents' house looking at his clothes, his books, his papers, and the monstrousness of it appalls me...
...Then that, too, fades...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
