Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
`THINK about death?' ob- served Brendan Behan to me on one of his many death - beds. 'Bigod, I'd rather be dead than think about death.'I have printed this characteristic comment several times in various publications: mainly in the hope that my name will I suddenly realise, I had never taken death seri- t, nu*. Intellectually, I could appreciate the can- dottr, the courage, and that almost accidental wit- tiness which is peculiarly Irish. It was, I knew, an unpremeditated, unconscious reworking of one of 1) r. Johnson's less familiar sayings. When asked if the fear of death were not natural to man, he replied; `So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.' It is only now, in my forty-firs: year, that it occurs to me that both these remarks are not only pithy and admirable but also true. I am going to die. Not' lust Possibly die, or almost-certainly die, or if- 'ne-worst-comes-to-the-worst die. No, I am going to die and this is the most certain fact in this un- ,eertain universe, perhaps the only certain fact. 1,0W is it that I have been able to live so long Without admitting this to myself? I always used to feel about death the way many a bachelor feels about marriage. There was a general presumption that some day, like most Other people, I would be trapped into it. if it really were as frightening. irrevocable and damag- log as I obsctarely feared, then surely it would be against the, public interest for it to be allowed-- 9,nd or Harold Wilson or the Daily Mirror or "le Kremlin or the Master of the Zen Fox Hounds would expose it as a fraud and a scandal. Before It Was my turn, there would be bound to be a new unproved model, with a guarantee of absolute satisfaction or your life back. Though I put on a brave show of being realistic, I secretly comforted 41Yself with the unphrased conviction that, for me bnYWay, there would always be a choice. It would be too beastly unfair and inhuman to cut me off Just like that—without even a chance of carrying rfor another lifetime as some inferior creature. b'oPe I would be too proud to be reborn as any- °tie else, but at least I would have been asked. A „licAgun funeral seemed as unnatural as a shot- gun Wedding. Several of my friends and colleagues are amazed, irritated and vaguely envious of this half- 4:11fe's immunity to intimations of mortality. One , them told me, with something of ,the quiet Pride of a commando VC showing a Pay Corps ovate round the battlefield, that he could not ernenther a time when he did not think on his
end. 'I always had to keep the wireless on when I was doing my homework,' he said. 'Unless Arthur Askey filled in the gaps between problems, I knew I should start mourning my own extinc- tion.' I cast my mind back to my schooldays, so similar in general outline to his, and I see no- where even the shadow of the fear of death. I would as soon have worried about the possibility that I might change my sex.
I realised, of course, that, like Swift's deathless Struldbrugs, I could still die by accident or by the wilful hand of enemies. But so long psi survived the RAF and the traffic and cigarette smoking and teenage gangs with flick-knives and aeroplanes which turn back over the Atlantic and standing near the open windows of tall buildings at cocktail parties, I felt 1 would keep going forever. I was a fair-to-middling coward during the years when it showed : mainly because I thought it a poor bargain to lose my immortality simply in order to impress a few temporary neighbours in the same aircraft who would be approving of nuclear arms for the Germans within twenty years.
Looking round me everywhere, I wonder how many of us really do admit to ourselves that death is inevitable and that, as Sir Thomas Browne pointed out, it is only the long, settled habit of living which makes us indisposed to get used to this new custom of dying. Would we still carry on with graceless, pointless. monotonous jobs in which we take small pleasure and from which our fellows derive little advantage, if we really thought that each day was numbered and 'non- transferable? Are we not sustained and buoyed by the illusion that when we stop working at sixty-five we will inherit a golden sunset-land of dignified leisure and philosophical tranquillity in which we can at last be ourselves all the time? In the theatre, I have been a critical opponent of those pessimistic playwrights, such as lonesco
and Beckett, who present mankind as prisoners in a condemned cell, granted at best a stay of execution but never a reprieve. They have always seemed to me, to •be protesting against the one injustice which can never be righted, fighting the one battle that humanity can never win. But now I see that an acceptance of the universality and inevitability of death could be a revolutionary impulse.
Hamlet, that embodiment of every narcissistic adolescent's dream of his secret self, naturally got the point the wrong way round. He argued that we only bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay, the insolence of aloe because we are afraid of what would happen after we had taken our own lives. But our lives are going to be taken, sooner or later, whether we like it or not. We have open tickets for that undiscovered country on one flight or the next. So why not take arms against a sea of troubles, instead of wondering. feebly, which course is 'nobler in the mind.' Imagine a man with a life span of 500 years watching us froni the moon. How trivial would seem our fears of offending the neighbours, of breaches of taste, of embarrassment at speaking out. How pitiable our reluctance to face facts, to control and engineer change, to abandon self-pitying illusions. How sick our pathetic, infantile desire to be always loved, admired, noticed, encouraged even by those whose opinions on any other subject we despise. How laughable our conviction that of the millions who come and go like generations of ants, any single one can and shall and must be remembered and regretted by those who tread us down. Like Swift's Brobdingnagian monarch, might he not conclude that the bulk of tiS are 'the most per- nicious race of little odius vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth'?
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