CHANGING MY MIND, by Julian Barnes
In an essay from his collection “The Dyer’s Hand,” W.H. Auden describes his personal Eden: an “absolute monarchy, elected for life by lot,” a place without automobiles, airplanes, newspapers, movies, radio or television, whose economy depends on lead mining, coal mining, chemical factories and sheep farming and whose public statues are “confined to famous defunct chefs.”
In “Changing My Mind,” a slender new book-length essay that has the misfortune to share a title with a 2009 collection by Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, the novelist and all-around man of letters, envisions a far less idiosyncratic utopia, which he calls, tongue-in-cheekily, B.B.R. (Barnes’s Benign Republic). I’d gladly live in B.B.R. — its attractions include separation of church and state, nuclear disarmament, and restoration of arts and humanities courses at schools and universities — while I wouldn’t last a day in Auden’s zany Ruritania. But which is more fun to read about?
“Changing My Mind” can’t make up its mind about whether it’s a single piece or, as it appears to be, a loosely connected series of ruminations on the topics of “Memories,” “Words,” “Politics,” “Books” and “Age and Time.” The back cover of the handsome Notting Hill Editions paperback calls it “an engaging and erudite essay,” but, in fact, the copyright page tells us that “versions of these essays were first broadcast on BBC Radio 3” … in 2016. The book’s origins may account for otherwise baffling concluding lines, in which Barnes, now 79, confronts mortality. (As he did, more affectingly, in his 2013 memoir “Levels of Life.”) “Who knows, perhaps a friendly radio producer with a microphone will come along to my bedside and ask the right questions. If so, I’ll be able to let you know.”
Barnes begins the book by pointing out what an odd expression “I changed my mind” is: “Where is this ‘I’ that is changing this ‘mind,’ like some rider controlling a horse with their knees?” he asks. “This ‘I’ we feel so confident about isn’t something beyond and separate from the mind” that “you might as well say ‘My mind changed me.’”
In fact, Barnes doesn’t seem to have changed his mind about much except the novels of Georges Simenon (who he now believes should have received the Nobel Prize) and E.M. Forster, whom he considered “fusty, musty, dusty,” most likely because “I hadn’t known enough about life to appreciate him.”
Because “the pleasure of being proved wrong can be a genuine pleasure,” he anticipates perhaps having to revise his (apparently low) opinion of such writers as Saul Bellow and D.H. Lawrence. Though not just yet.
As the limning of his Benign Republic suggests, Barnes hasn’t joined some of his coevals in “the familiar soft-shoe shuffle to the right” — a conversion to conservatism brought on by “exposure to the realities of life,” or by getting rich, or simply because old people “don’t want any more change in their lives, thank you very much.” He still seems defensive about “the single time I voted Conservative” — this was in 1974 — when Edward Heath “was a liberal, pro-European, un-posh Tory” and Labour’s Harold Wilson, “even by the standards of politics, seemed to me — and still does — less than scrupulous.”
He insists that he’s never really changed his mind about politics: “By staying still, someone of my political beliefs has found himself moving further to the left as the center moved away from him.” Not that it matters much. He always “believed that the personal life and the artistic life were far more important than politics. Well, I still do believe that, just as strongly.”
Aside from his rethinkings of Forster and Simenon, Barnes seems to have had his most significant change of mind just out of university (he graduated in 1968) when he worked as an editorial assistant on a new supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary and had the unsurprising revelation that the English language is in perpetual evolution. “If I went in as an unthinking conservative prescriptivist, I came out a liberal descriptivist.”
Nowadays, he notes, the distinction between “disinterested” and “uninterested” is commonly lost, along with the original sense of “the lovely word ‘uxorious’” and “that lovely, precise old verb ‘to decimate.’”
Like Barnes’s political opinions — and his literary judgments — this is perfectly reasonable. I’d much rather he’d let that grumpy citizen do some loudly intemperate repining (speaking of lovely old words) but Barnes is the writer he is, and he shouldn’t have to impersonate a crank or an Audenesque eccentric for my entertainment.
To its credit, “Changing My Mind” never soars into Cloud Cuckoo Land. And to its detriment.
CHANGING MY MIND | By Julian Barnes | New York Review Books/Notting Hill | 64 pp. | Paperback, $14.95