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    Levels of Life: A Memoir
    Levels of Life: A Memoir
    Levels of Life: A Memoir
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    Levels of Life: A Memoir

    By Julian Barnes

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    About this ebook

    From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an elegant triptych of history, fiction, and memoir—a "wise, funny, and devastating ... discourse on love and sorrow" (The New York Times Book Review).

    In this “deeply stirring” book (The Boston Globe), Julian Barnes writes about ballooning and photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and tearing them apart; and enduring after the incomprehensible loss of a loved one. Powerfully rendered, exquisitely crafted in Barnes’s erudite style, this searing work confirms the author as an unparalleled magus of the heart.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateSep 24, 2013
    ISBN9780385350785
    Levels of Life: A Memoir
    Author

    Julian Barnes

    Julian Barnes (Leicester, 1946) se educó en Londres y Oxford. Está considerado como una de las mayores revelaciones de la narrativa inglesa de las últimas décadas. Entre muchos otros galardones, ha recibio el premio E.M. Forster de la American Academy of Arts and Letters, el William Shakespeare de la Fundación FvS de Hamburgo y es Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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      Book preview

      Levels of Life - Julian Barnes

      THE SIN OF HEIGHT

      You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn’t matter. The world has been changed nonetheless.

      Colonel Fred Burnaby of the Royal Horse Guards, member of the Council of the Aeronautical Society, took off from the Dover Gasworks on the 23rd of March 1882, and landed halfway between Dieppe and Neufchâtel.

      Sarah Bernhardt had taken off from the centre of Paris four years previously, and landed near Emerainville in the département of Seine-et-Marne.

      Félix Tournachon had taken off from the Champ de Mars in Paris on the 18th of October 1863; after being driven east by a gale for seventeen hours, he crash-landed close to a railway line near Hanover.

      Fred Burnaby travelled alone, in a red-and-yellow balloon called The Eclipse. Its basket was five feet long, three feet wide and three feet high. Burnaby weighed seventeen stone, wore a striped coat and a close skullcap, and to protect his neck from the sun made a puggaree of his handkerchief. He took with him two beef sandwiches, a bottle of Apollinaris mineral water, a barometer to measure altitude, a thermometer, compass, and a supply of cigars.

      Sarah Bernhardt travelled with her artist–lover Georges Clairin and a professional aeronaut in an orange balloon called Doña Sol, after her current role at the Comédie-Française. At six thirty in the evening, an hour into their flight, the actress played mother, preparing tartines de foie gras. The aeronaut opened a bottle of champagne, firing the cork into the sky; Bernhardt drank from a silver goblet. Then they ate oranges and tossed the empty bottle into the Lake of Vincennes. In their sudden superiority, they cheerfully dropped ballast on to the groundlings below: a family of English tourists on the balcony of the Bastille Column; later, a wedding party enjoying a rural picnic.

      Tournachon travelled with eight companions in an aerostat of his own boastful imagining: I shall make a balloon—the Ultimate Balloon—of extraordinarily gigantic proportions, twenty times bigger than the biggest. He called it The Giant. It made five flights between 1863 and 1867. Passengers on this second flight included Tournachon’s wife Ernestine, the aeronaut brothers Louis and Jules Godard, and a descendant of the primal ballooning family of Montgolfier. It is not reported what food they took with them.

      These were the balloon-going classes of the day: the enthusiastic English amateur, happy to be mocked as a balloonatic, and prepared to climb into anything about to become airborne; the most famous actress of her era, making a celebrity flight; and the professional balloonist who launched The Giant as a commercial venture. Two hundred thousand spectators watched its first ascent, for which thirteen passengers each paid one thousand francs; the aerostat’s cradle, which resembled a two-storey wicker cottage, contained a refreshment room, beds, a lavatory, a photographic department, and even a printing room to produce instant commemorative brochures.

      The Godard brothers were everywhere. They designed and built The Giant, and after its first two flights brought it to London for exhibition at the Crystal Palace. Shortly afterwards a third brother, Eugène Godard, brought over an even bigger fire balloon, which made two ascents from Cremorne Gardens. Its cubic capacity was twice that of The Giant, while its straw-fed furnace, together with chimney, weighed 980 lbs. On its first London flight, Eugène agreed to take one English passenger with him, at a charge of five pounds. That man was Fred Burnaby.

      These balloonists happily conformed to national stereotype. Becalmed above the English Channel, Burnaby, careless of the escaping gases, lights a cigar to help him think. When two French fishing boats signal for him to descend and be picked up from the water, he responds "by dropping a copy of The Times for their edification—hinting, presumably, that a practical English officer can manage perfectly well by himself, thank you, Mossoo. Sarah Bernhardt confesses that she is temperamentally drawn to ballooning because my dreamy nature would constantly transport me to the higher regions." On her short flight she is provided with the convenience of a plain, straw-seated chair. When publishing her account of the adventure, Bernhardt whimsically opts to tell it from the chair’s point of view.

      The aeronaut would descend from the heavens, look for a flat landing place, pull on the valve-line, throw out the grapnel, and often bounce forty or fifty feet back into the air before the flukes of the anchor took hold. Then the local population would come running. When Fred Burnaby landed near the Château de Montigny, an inquisitive rustic poked his head into the half-deflated gasbag, and nearly suffocated. The locals willingly helped collapse and fold the balloon; and Burnaby found these poor French labourers much kinder and more courteous than their English equivalents. He disbursed a half-sovereign in their direction, pedantically specifying the exchange rate at the time he had left Dover. A hospitable farmer, M. Barthélemy Delanray, offered to put the aeronaut up for the night. First, though, came Mme Delanray’s dinner: omelette aux oignons, sautéed pigeon with chestnuts, vegetables, Neufchâtel cheese, cider, a bottle of Bordeaux and coffee. Afterwards, the village doctor arrived, and the butcher with a bottle of champagne. Burnaby lit a fireside cigar and reflected that a balloon descent in Normandy was certainly preferable to one in Essex.

      Near Emerainville, the peasants who chased after the descending balloon marvelled to see that it contained a woman. Bernhardt was used to making entrances: did she ever make a grander one than this? She was, of course, recognised. The rustics duly entertained her with a drama of their own: the tale of a grisly murder recently committed just there, exactly where she sat (on her listening and narrating chair). Soon, it came on to rain; the actress, famous for her slimness, joked that she was too thin to get wet—she would simply slip between the drops. Then, after the ritual distribution of tips, the balloon and its crew were escorted to Emerainville station in time for the last train back to Paris.

      They knew it was dangerous. Fred Burnaby nearly collided with the gasworks chimney shortly after take-off. The Doña Sol nearly came down in a wood shortly before landing. When The Giant crashed close to the railway line, the experienced Godards prudently jumped out before the final impact; Tournachon broke a leg, and his wife suffered injuries to her neck and chest. A gas balloon might explode; a fire balloon, unsurprisingly, could catch fire. Every take-off and landing was hazardous. Nor did larger mean safer: it meant—as the case of The Giant proved—more at the mercy of the wind. Early cross-Channel aeronauts often wore cork buoyancy jackets in case they landed on water. And there were no parachutes. In August 1786—ballooning’s infancy—a young man had dropped to his death in Newcastle from a height of several hundred feet. He was one of those who held the balloon’s restraining ropes; when a gust of wind suddenly shifted the airbag, his companions let go, while he held on and was borne upwards. Then he fell back to earth. As one modern historian puts it: The impact drove his legs into a flower bed as far as his knees, and ruptured his internal organs, which burst out on to the ground.

      Aeronauts were the new Argonauts, their adventures instantly chronicled. A balloon flight linked town and country, England and France, France and Germany. Landing provoked pure excitement: a balloon brought no evil. By the Normandy fireside of M. Barthélemy Delanray, the village doctor proposed a toast to universal brotherhood. Burnaby and his new friends clinked glasses. At which point, being British, he explained to them the superiority of a monarchy over a republic. But then, the president of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was His Grace the Duke of Argyll, and its three vice presidents were His Grace the Duke of Sutherland, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Dufferin, and the Rt. Hon. Lord Richard Grosvenor MP. The equivalent French body,

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