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Sharing in life's
impermanence
MORRIS WEST looks back at how he confronted mortality both personally and in his writing.
EVERY summer for five years,
my family and I cruised the
Mediterranean in our own
vessel, the Salamandra D'Oro,
(the Golden Salamander). The Sala-
mander had always had a special sig-
nificance for me. It was a mythical
beast that had the power to survive
unscathed in the hottest fire.
I had myself survived a few disas-
trous fires: a failed career as a Chris-
tian Brother, a failed marriage, a
breakdown that forced me to abandon
my career as a minor mogul in the ra-
dio business and seek simpler employ-
ment as a free-lance writer. To cap it
off, an unexpected claim from the Tax-
ation department against the sale of
my business forced me to try to raise
supplementary income by the riskiest
and least profitable of all ventures, the
writing of a novel.
In short, after some 35 years on the
planet, I was haunted, on the one
hand, by a history of personal failures
and plagued, on the other, by the
need to restore my economic and
emotional stability.
Turning one's life about is rather
like turning a small ship in a bad sea.
Do it too fast and you will broach.
The wind and the waves will lay you
over on your beam ends and you will
sink. The Mediterranean in mid-sum-
mer serves up high northerly winds
and nasty short seas. So, in spite of
the sunshine and the sparkle on the
water, you learn to be wary and to
count the cost of foolish mistakes.
My life did, in fact, turn itself
about but when it did — thank God
— costly experience had prepared me
for the change. The first turning point
was, the publication of Children of the
Sun, the true story of Don Mario
Borrelli, the urchin priest of Naples
who lived on the streets with the lost
children of the city and finally, like
the Pied Piper, led them to an aban-
doned church where they lived a
come-and-go existence and found a
refuge from the cruelties of the teem-
ing city. The book made Borrelli's
work known to the world. It brought
a flood of donations and continuing
support from Europe, America and
the Commonwealth. Suddenly I was
"a well-known writer". Suddenly —
quite suddenly in fact — I realised,
that 1 had both a talent to move peo-
ple and the responsibility to use it for
good and not for evil.
It was a very sobering thought. I
had failed so often, I could not believe
that this venture, born out of a new
love and the need to make a new life,
had succeeded not only for me, but
for many other people.
Children of the Sun was published in
1957. Two years later in 1959, I pub-
lished The Devil's Advocate, which be-
came, in the jargon of the market
place, a blockbuster. It was published
in many languages. It won many
prizes. It earned several million dollars
and it is still selling today. I was liv-
ing in California, and I was involved
in weekly discussions on the play ver-
sion of the book, which later came to
Broadway and on the film that Warn-
er Bros were proposing to make. In
short, I was the perfect model of the
successful author. My mistakes and
my failures were buried in the ava-
lanche of praise.
Then, one fine day, I found myself
in hospital. The X-rays showed I had
some extraordinary kind of pneumonic
infection. I was tested for everything,
TB, psittachosis, Q-fever, desert fever,
you name it, I was tested for it. One
final test remained . . . for what was
then called lymphangitic cancer. If I
had it, I was a dead man. If I didn't
have it, if it were some atypical pneu-
monia, then I would get better. I
could either have the biopsy or wait
out a couple of weeks. I elected to do
just that. They sent me home with an
oxygen bottle, and the doctor, who
was my near neighbour, came to see
me every day. This waiting in hope
and in fear was the second turning
point in my life.
The heady vapors of success dissi-
pated very quickly, like mist on the
morning sea. Whatever I had won
might soon be taken away from me. It
would be a legacy to others but cer-
tainly no profit to me. Resentments
vanished, too. There was no room for
them in what might remain of my life.
Every day brought me the most unex-
pected charities in the form of letters
from readers who had heard of my ill-
ness through the Press and were eager
to tell me of what I had given to
them through what I had written.
The most important of these letters
was one nearly 30 pages long, written
by a young Jewish woman who told
me the strange story of her own life
as a refugee child, of the conflicts
within herself that brought her several
times to the edge of suicide and of the
strange moment where, in the pit of a
deep depression, she picked up The
Devil's Advocate and began to read it.
Her letter gave me an extraordinary
consciousness of continuity. I, too,
was facing a possible termination but
what I had written was continuing to
animate the lives of other people
whom I had never met and never
would meet.
SOME years later, I wrote to this
woman and asked her permis-
sion to incorporate part of the
story she had told me into the book I
was then writing, The Shoes of the
Fisherman. She gave me the permis-
sion and she is enshrined in the novel
in the character of Ruth Lewin. When
the book was published in America, I
went back there for the launch. As I
was signing copies in Farmers Market,
Los Angeles, a woman asked me to
autograph the copy she had just
bought. I asked the standard question:
"How would you like it inscribed?"
The name she gave me brought me
half out of my chair. She laid a hand
on my shoulder and forced me to sit
again. She said: "Don't get up, don't
say anything. I just wanted to thank
you in person." Then she walked
away and was lost in the crowd.
Last year, I announced my retire-
ment as a novelist. Friends and ac-
quaintances were shocked. "Why?"
they asked. "How?" they asked. How
could I possibly terminate the activity
of half a life-time? The answer for me
was very simple. The veil of fiction
that separated my inner life from the
scrutiny of my readers was wearing
thin. It was like the muslin drapes in
old-fashioned drawing rooms —
washed and laundered so much that
they were almost transparent.
I found myself much more interest-
ed in the spoken word — that direct
communication with living audience.
Beside all that, I wanted to learn
again to draw and paint. I felt I had
earned the right to indulge myself.
Several years ago, I had bypass sur-
gery from which, thank. God, I made
a good recovery. However, one of the
common consequences of this surgical
intervention is a curious personality
change. One becomes enormously
grateful for the continuing gift of life.
At the same time, one is calmly con-
scious of its fragility and its imperma-
nence.
One's emotions lie very close to the
surface and one is no longer disposed
to inhibit them. Laughter and tears
and the expressions of love and affec-
tion come very readily. At the same
time, strangely enough, fear is no lon-
ger a dominating emotion in one's life.
Once one has made acquaintance with
death, he is no longer a frightening
personage. Once one has accepted and
loved and enjoyed the gift of life, one
is disposed, when the time comes, to
return it with whatever grace and
whatever thanks one can muster. We
are all uneasy about the manner of
our passing. We hope it will not be
messy. We hope it will not be too
painful, but the exit itself is not a mo-
ment to be feared.
One of the sadnesses of modern so-
ciety is that the ceremonies of mourn-
ing are being lost to us. We are being
fed an illusion that somehosv we can
be made by medicine immortal beings.
Psychiatrists will tell you that they are
having to teach people how to grieve
and how neccssary it is to share the
grieving.
As one who has come to terms with
mortality, I have been privileged to
share, in that curative process. People
recognise that when I speak or write,
I have nothing to lose and nothing to
gain. I accept to be wrong. I am not
too puffed up if I happen to be right.
The importance is in the sharing of
experience and, even more, in the
sharing of the love we truly have to
bear to one another because we are all
involved in the same mysteries of liv-
ing and dying.
IN ALL this, however, there is still
no certainty, no permanence. None
of us can foresee the ending or the
manner of it. Sometimes we feel that
we are left all alone by the roadside,
bereft, unable to move any more. That
experience, too, has to be endured and
shared. Years ago, in The Ambassador,
I described the manner of the sharing
by the dialogue between the ambassa-
dor and his Zen counsellor, Muso So-
seki.
". . . Our traveller cannot go back:
there is nothing to urge him forward.
But, without desire, he continues
walking. By the side of the road he
sees an image of the Buddha, of the
Goddess Kuan Yin, of Rai-jin the
thunder god, a fumiejesu
perhaps, or even the
Great Bear of the Ainu
people. It is a dead
thing of wood or stone
or baked clay which for
our traveller has no
meaning. But because he
is a man, he knows the
image has a meaning for
other men: an expression
of their need and their
desire for enlightenment,
harmony and elevation above the self.
He stops by the image which has no
meaning for him. He recites a prayer
in whose efficacy he does not believe:
'If there be forgiveness, forgive. If
there be tomorrow, grant me a hope
in it: and if there be these things, but
not for me, give me the patience to
endure the not having.' "
"And how will I know if the prayer
is answered?"
"When you have the courage to live
without an answer."
"But if I have no courage?"
"Then you will walk just a little
further along the road and you will
come to a habitation of men."
"How can I be sure of that?"
"Because where there are images,
there are always men."
"And then?"
"THEN you will see what the Lord
Buddha saw: an old man, a sick man,
a dead man and a man with a shaven
head who has no home. And then you
will say 'None of these is more fortu-
nate than I, so why should I com-
plain?' And then you will either accept
to live again in the habitation of men
or you will join the homeless one and
continue on the road. And so, either
way, your prayer will be answered and
there will be a beginning of light and
a desire for more light."
"And forgiveness? Who forgives me
for what I have done?"
"The dead man whom you bury,
the sick man whom you succour, the
old man whom you support, the
homeless one whose loneliness you
share."
"And the image?"
"Is still an image of the Unknown
and the Unknowable who may one
day choose to enlighten you — for the
All Enlightened One has pity on Man-
kind."
Morris West is the award-winning author
of 24 novels. His last novel was The
Lovers (William Heinemann Australia,
$32.95). He is presently living in
Canberra on a ANU-University of
Canberra-Australian Defence Force
Academy writing fellowship.
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