The book was wide-ranging and digressive, and the writing had much of Christopher’s personal charm. One moment he was comparing the relative intimacy of chamber music to the pomp of orchestral music, the next he was detailing his experience as a teenager frequenting various London nightclubs. He wrote about the music of the Third Reich, about the acoustics at the Gewandhaus, he went to King’s College chapel to listen to Handel’s cantatas (he had attended King’s as an undergraduate, I assumed the act, accompanied by the music and then the writing, was a recuperation of sorts).
True, the book was not especially well researched—the few critical reviews had pointed out some glaring errors and elisions, but by and large these dissenting voices could be comfortably categorized as such. After all, he was not an academic and the book had been written for a general readership. Christopher himself was something of a generalist. What he was good at—what the book had achieved with impressive and seeming ease—was drawing connections between an array of disparate sources, and making the material cohere in the prose.
I didn’t know Christopher at the time of the book’s publication. When I met him he was occupying the relatively comfortable life that is made available to relatively successful authors. He was invited to give lectures, to write reviews for various newspapers, his book had been translated into several languages. He was offered a teaching position at some university, which he declined—he didn’t need the money, he was writing a second book, which was under contract to his publisher, and which he was already late in delivering.
He was working on it when we met. A procrastinator, he was prone to talking about the project at length, almost making a little performance of it, and I soon realized that he preferred talking about the book to writing it. He described it as a study of mourning rituals around the world, a work of cultural and political science that would encompass both secular and religious ceremonies, delineating—I think that was the word he used—a landscape of cultural and historical difference.
It was a strange project for a man who had hitherto lost nothing of significance, whose life was intact in all its key particulars. If he had cause for grief, it was only in the abstract. But he was drawn to people who were in a state of loss. This gave people the mistaken impression that he was a sympathetic man. His sympathy lasted as long as his curiosity, once that had gone he suddenly withdrew, making himself unavailable, or at least less available than people might reasonably have expected, given the sudden and violent intimacy he had forced upon them in the first place.
But that was his manner, his way of being. He was a gifted writer but something of a dilettante in his approach to his career—in the five years we had been married, I had never known him to go to a library, even during the extended periods when he was preoccupied with his research. No doubt this was why Isabella sneered at his work; despite its relative success, she did not take it seriously, she would have preferred for him to have a career in law, finance, even politics, she liked to say that he had the wiles and charisma for it.
Still, as I have said, Christopher could speak on his subject with great authority. And although there is nothing essentially frivolous about mourning, he was able to talk about particular rituals and traditions in a manner that was wholly entertaining, his own interest in the subject matter was infectious. Christopher had almost certainly come to Greece in order to study its professional mourners, the women who were paid to issue lamentations at funerals. I had known this the moment Isabella told me he had gone to Greece, it was a matter of considerable interest to him, and was going to figure strongly in the book he was writing.
The ancient practice, he had explained to me, was rapidly dying out. There were only a few parts of rural Greece where it was still practiced, the southern Peloponnese, a region called Mani, was one of them. There, every village had a few mourners—weepers or wailers, as they were sometimes called—women who performed the funeral dirge at a village burial. What intrigued him about the practice was its externalization of grief: the fact that a body other than the body of the bereaved expressed its woe.
Literally an out-of-body experience, he had said. You, the bereaved, are completely liberated from the need to emote. All the pressures of the funeral, the expectation that you will perform your grief for the assembled crowd—imagine that you are a widow, burying your husband, people expect a good show. But the nature of grief is incompatible with this demand, people say that when you are grieving, when you have experienced a profound loss, you are impaled beneath it, hardly in a condition to express your sorrow.