It is sometimes claimed that death allows you or others to draw a line under your life, and in doing so to grasp it as a totality. All the evidence is now in, nothing can be altered, and what is true of you is true for all time; so that one’s existence, incapable of growing by an inch or an ounce, is now laid up in eternity like that of Rastignac or Josef K. The use of the past tense in literary fiction achieves something like this effect of closure. Max Weber’s concept of a vocation involves just this sense of investing one’s existence with a definitive form. Yet every life is of course incomplete, not only because most relationships are a matter of unfinished business but because one dies with vast gaps in one’s knowledge: the capital of Burkina Faso, the cosmology of John Scotus Eriugena, whether Lawrence Durrell ever actually visited Alexandria, whether it is indeed six miles from Bangor to Donaghadee or whether the national basketball coach Joe Jagger bequeathed something of his physical agility to his son Michael. In any case, to draw a line under one’s life is not the same as viewing it as a whole. One would need to draw a border around it as well, and who knows where one’s edges are? Where would you need to be standing in order to do so? So it is that a life that cannot be totalized is followed by a death that cannot be experienced. Neither everything nor nothing can be captured by a concept.

One might claim that at death you become your admirers and detractors, no longer able to determine how you are judged. Yet this is also true for the most part while you are still alive, so that in this respect death is the consummation of your life as well as its conclusion. On this side of the grave, too, your identity lies in the keeping of the Other. It is an externality that one can never close one’s fist over, and death is the ultimate sign of this non-self-proprietorship. Yet the Other cannot pass definitive judgment on you, either. Solon’s advice to call no one happy until they are dead means that only when our lives are over can they be assessed as a whole; but though, being dead, we are ill-placed to make such appraisals ourselves, it is not clear that anyone else can, either. How can they view our lives in the round any more than we can? Once you are stowed in the ground, different friends and acquaintances will be in possession of different pieces of you, as they were while you were alive, and there is no guarantee that these snapshots will slot coherently together. Besides, as with the Heisenberg principle in quantum theory, other people’s interaction with you changes what you are, so that their perceptions of you may not tally.

You’re a long time dead, as the saying goes, though Lucretius argues in De rerum natura that however early or late you die you will be dead for the same length of time. Quite how long one is dead is in fact hard to say. You can live on in one person’s discourse but not another’s, so that your expiry may be an irregular, multilayered affair. For a while, one enjoys a crepuscular afterlife in the memory of others, and what they make of your life is part of its meaning. It is a fallacy to believe that one’s troubles or accomplishments will end with death. Some of them may actually begin there. There are people who lead a posthumous existence far more illustrious or bedeviled than anything that happened to them while they were alive. They haven’t really lived until they are dead. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living, as Auden reflects in his lament for Yeats. One might even become the subject of a biography, a prospect that, as Oscar Wilde observed, lends death a new terror. A handful of loyal friends or acolytes may act for a while as a life-support machine, helping to keep you ticking over; but as they, too, die off you will wither away with them. If history grinds to an apocalyptic halt, however, there will be nobody left not to remember you, which may be the source of some glum satisfaction.

Yet just as works of art may release new meanings long after they first appear, so that Clarissa thrived in its own day, died in the century that followed, and rose from derision and obscurity in our own time, so the same is true of some people. You may undergo the occasional resuscitation, like an aging heartthrob brought back by popular request. In fact, you can die and be resurrected several times over, which is more than Jesus could boast of. In this sense, though a corpse cannot mean, it can still signify—although while some do so plentifully, others, so to speak, are dead letters. Catullus is still in reasonably good shape, but the same cannot be said of Sophia Andreyevna Behrs, Leo Tolstoy’s partner, who was required not only to bear her husband thirteen children but to copy out much of his work, in some cases several times over. The two activities, copying and childbearing, are not unrelated. Those who complain about the length of War and Peace might spare her a thought.

All the same, it is true that once you are dead you are free to be defamed, in reality if not in law. Public figures with unpopular political views tend to be particularly vulnerable in this respect, though that, too, is an extension of what may happen to them on this side of the grave. I have heard, for example, that I died of AIDS in China some years ago. Indeed, I have heard this story so often, along with other more unsavory tales about myself, that I am convinced there must be something in it. A surprisingly large number of people have fond or embarrassing memories of me playing a guitar at my lectures, though I have never played a guitar in my life. It has been reported that I have three houses (I have the conventional one), that I own two Porsches (that was Stanley Fish), stay when in London at the upmarket Brown’s hotel (that was Edward Said), and insist that everything in my hotel room should be white (that was Luce Irigaray). It seems that I also conducted a long-term relationship in an overseas city, though I have never visited the city in question long enough to have to change my socks, let alone have a relationship. Even so, there is some foundation to this story, as I am not the only Terry Eagleton on the planet, and the activities of my namesake have sometimes been attributed to me. Perhaps he in turn has been berated for corrupting the youth with his Stalinist garbage.

To be well known, even in as small a pond as the intellectual life, can be gratifying, which need do no harm as long as one recalls those invisible ashes on one’s forehead. Like most other pleasures, however, it also has its problems. Some people you meet bristle with hostility from the outset because they expect you to behave like Naomi Campbell, while others make an aggressively exaggerated show of treating you as an ordinary guy, which they wouldn’t need to do if they really thought you were. Having some public standing can render you invisible, a blank screen on to which others may project their anxieties and resentments. You must be prepared to dispense advice on ungovernable teenagers or remedies for insomnia. The key difference between this and being a psychotherapist is that you don’t get paid for it. If all this is true of cultural theorists, whose writings are not the most pressing concern in the Mekong Delta or on the plains of Patagonia, one can imagine what it must be like to be Paul McCartney.

One curious aspect of the more scurrilous stories about oneself is that one hears much the same fables about other well-known figures on the political left. This would suggest either a robot-like uniformity of discreditable conduct among radicals or a certain paucity of imagination on the part of their critics. Those of us who are not serial philanderers are either incurable drunks, former members of the IRA, or both, which may explain why so many of the IRA’s operations were mercifully bungled. William Hazlitt, who knew that in a world like ours one cannot speak the truth uncontroversially, remarked that those who are unable to find a flaw in your reasoning will quickly do so in your reputation. Many left-wingers have had a taste of the vindictiveness of the established order when it feels under threat, though why it should feel so menaced by a minority is unclear.

Yet just as ideology generally has a nucleus of truth, so scandalous rumors may have some basis in fact. I have described in my memoir how my interview for an undergraduate place at Cambridge consisted in being told that my father had just died. A kindly, thoughtful man, one of ten children of Irish immigrants, he had left school at the age of fourteen and worked in an engineering factory at a job that he detested. The only book I ever saw him pick up was Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which he soon put down again because he spotted the murderer in the first two or three pages, despite never having read a thriller before. He was deeply self-conscious about his lack of education, and driven by it into shyness and silence. I inherited his shyness but not his inarticulacy. On the contrary, I became articulate partly to give him a tongue. Though he was a devout Catholic he was also a socialist, believing that socialism followed from the teaching of Christ. He had arrived at this position entirely on his own, in the teeth of the Catholic Church’s diatribes against atheistic communism. It was thus that he brought the faith he inherited from his Irish immigrant parents to bear on the hardship he saw around him.

Family legend had it that he had won a place at the local grammar school but was unable to take it up because his parents couldn’t afford the uniform. My own parents were able to buy my school uniform only because of a chance win of ten pounds in a church lottery. My pious mother attributed this to a personal intervention on the part of the Holy Spirit, who was clearly keeping a close eye on the economics of the garment industry. My father was dying when I left for my Cambridge interview. I told him that I was determined to win a place at the university for his sake, but I couldn’t be sure that he was conscious enough to take that in. Silence was my last memory of him. Then I walked to the bus stop with my suitcase, and a local woman who had six or seven children and seemed to be permanently pursued by debt collectors sent one of her brood across the street to give me a small object wrapped in newspaper. It was half a crown, thirty pence in the currency of the time and £1.25 today. She would have known where I was going and what was afoot at home.

I got into Cambridge but stumbled through my time there sick at heart. I suppose I was unconsciously convinced that I had killed my father in order to climb to the top of the very social order that had blighted his life. I had deserted him in the hour of his death, almost literally stepping over his dead body into a world that would scarcely have understood the way he spoke. Those were the days when Oxbridge seemed populated exclusively by the improbably tall sons of aristocrats (there were hardly any women), the offspring of centuries of fine breeding, who sprawled rather than sat, neighed rather than laughed, and brayed rather than spoke. I walked among them like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. Mine was the classic legend of the scholarship boy, though with a peculiarly dark twist. The scholarship boy typically feels that he has betrayed his parents, not that he has done away with them. Was I glad that my father was dead, as well as distraught? Was his end necessary so that I might begin? When I became a don I was the youngest fellow of my college since the eighteenth century, an era to which some of my colleagues seemed anxious to return. I had set my foot on the escalator that was to bear me up and away from the speechless man I had left on his deathbed. Then I moved to Oxford, uncertain whether I should reject the place in my father’s name or embrace it for just the same reason.

There is always a convenient resolution in Oxbridge to human unhappiness, known as alcohol. The college cellars are stacked high with anesthetics, laid on in particular for those dons who lead lives of quiet desperation. By the age of forty I was, in the words of Brendan Behan, a drinker with a writing problem. Death gradually became less of an abstract possibility and more of an everyday reality. I was clearly en route to an early grave. I was not, however, quite as wedded to the bottle as one of my colleagues, an economist of rare brilliance who was able to make astonishingly complex arithmetical calculations in his head while too drunk to stand up, and who would chair with brisk efficiency a series of committees whose members must have appeared to him as no more than a faint blur on his eyeballs. He once told me that he could only teach on a hangover, and that after several years of intensive political arguments between us I had never once seen him sober. He had raised faking sobriety to a fine art. Like the tango, it gets harder as you get older.

There was, however, the odd lapse. One morning he was found lying spread-eagled unconscious in the quad, but the college wisely decided to let sleeping dons lie, while the tourists politely negotiated a path around his body and occasionally took photos of him, perhaps in the belief that he was as permanent a feature of the university as the Bodleian Library. Few people in those years spoke of mental health, and there was certainly no question of raising such issues amidst the suave chitchat of High Table. So I turned instead to friends and unburdened myself of my troubles to a small number of students, partly on the grounds that young people are the least morally censorious section of the population.

Sharing my woes with a few sympathetic students placed an emotional demand on them to which they were inevitably unequal, leaving them both embarrassed and alarmed. So after a while I stopped confiding in students and retreated into myself, never in my case the most reliable of refuges. I was ill for twenty years, while trying to teach and publish as best I could. One friend was sufficiently impressed by my befuddled devotion to duty to call me a plastered saint. I also continued to lecture abroad, only to discover that my overseas travels were considered by some to be politically motivated. I was rumored to be visiting various foreign capitals on behalf of the IRA, even though the organization was not generally thought to be so short-staffed or dimwitted as to use Oxford dons as secret agents. I also had a play touring Ireland at the time, which was regarded as perfect cover for paramilitary networking.

In fact, my chief contribution to freeing Northern Ireland from colonial rule consisted not in plotting to blow up New Scotland Yard but in sending copies of my books to a political prisoner whom I knew to be falsely convicted, and who wanted to use my work for a seminar on political theory he was running behind bars. Northern Irish prisons in those days resounded with the names of Gramsci and Althusser, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, all from the mouths of men and women who probably hadn’t a single academic qualification to their names. I was not allowed to send hardbacks to my contact, however, since they were regarded as possible offensive weapons. Assaulting a prison officer with a volume of Das Kapital would no doubt count from a Marxist viewpoint as an exemplary unity of theory and practice.

Around this time, I was appointed to a newly created post in the university, which in Oxford involves a compulsory “migration” from one’s current college to the college to which the new post is attached. I was forced to follow the customary procedure in this respect only to hear whispers that I had been ejected from my former college for some unpardonable offense. The offense in question, depending on whom one was speaking to, was punching the college dean, being embroiled in a sexual scandal, or publicly declaring that I refused any longer to teach students from private schools. A few London journalists rushed to Oxford only to discover that the trespass in question was my conformity to an obscure university regulation. Since this was hardly headline news, spicier stories were rapidly concocted.

Then one of the tabloids featured a photograph of me on a picket line being jostled by police, not the conventional image of the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. One police officer, who I suppose was only doing his job, kicked me hard on the shin. A few days later I had to speak about socialism to the sixth formers of Eton College, being a firm believer in preaching to the unconverted, and entered the room limping. I told the boys that the reason for my lameness was that I had been kicked by a policeman, whereupon they laughed politely at what they took to be my little joke. Presumably they believed neither that the police would kick protesters nor that Oxford dons might hobnob with such riffraff.

My political proclivities did not pass unnoticed in the highest of social circles. During my time at Oxford, a group of Rhodes scholars were granted an audience at Clarence House with the present king, then a lowly Prince of Wales. “Who teaches you at Oxford?” he asked them. “Not that dreadful Terry Eagleton, I hope.” I was devastated on hearing this news. It shattered my faith that persons like himself were set above the political realm, impeccably even-handed in their treatment of Tories on the one hand and Trotskyists on the other. It is true that he had sent his sons to Eton, which seemed not without political implications, but I had assumed that this was because they might be roughed up a little if they attended their local comprehensive school, or perhaps because their parents were not aware of the existence of such places.

Whenever I was publicly involved in a political issue, two things would happen. Fresh rumors of my moral degeneracy would spring up, and the strange clicking sounds on my phone would increase in frequency. A short time after a left-wing colleague and I appeared in a newspaper photograph addressing a meeting of radical schoolteachers, my colleague was accused of being a drug pusher, which was false, while I was accused of being less than perfectly sober in the company of some students, which was true. That these things happened in the wake of the schoolteachers’ conference may have been purely coincidental, though the event was controversial enough for some of the participants to be hauled before their local educational authorities and ordered not to repeat the offense. By this time, the clicking sounds had begun to sound like a pair of mad castanets.

I have received a number of letters from people claiming to be distant cousins or even illegitimate children of mine, all of them sadly reporting that they were in financial distress. In fact, the slightest association with me seems to spell disaster for other people’s bank balances. Perhaps because of some family curse, remote relatives are afflicted with dire poverty and supposedly bastard children of mine prevented from working by some incurable medical condition. A benignant Nature, however, has so ordered human affairs that people who write these letters almost all have the same histrionic handwriting, so that the address on the envelope braces you for what you are about to uncover inside.

Stopping Iris Murdoch in the street one day, I treated her to a lengthy, garbled critique of her novels from the standpoint of historical materialism, while her eyes searched my face trying to decide whether this was the young don she had met once or twice before or some unusually well-read vagrant who bore a resemblance to him. My drinking, excessive though it was, rapidly assumed epic proportions in the popular imagination. I was rumored to have toppled out of a second-floor window in college and survived only by falling on a passing philosopher. The core of truth to this fiction was that I had climbed out of a first-floor college window to avoid having to ask a notoriously irascible night porter to open the gate for me. Similar mythologies were built around my sexual life. I made a few blundering, inebriated overtures to women, most of which were unsuccessful, only to find that I had acquired a reputation as what was then quaintly known as a ladies’ man. While my actual self was living in solitary confinement in a disheveled little flat, my mythological self, a charmingly loquacious rogue full of wit and blarney, was dancing attention on dark-eyed colleens in louche Dublin nightclubs. I was also accused of running a harem of adoring female students, a charge which afforded my actual women students some wry amusement. The harem in question was a seminar on cultural theory that I conducted for some years, which was flawed not by the fact that it was an academic front for an orgy but because sexuality was too little discussed there.

Meanwhile, the mysterious noises on the phone continued. I took to chatting occasionally to the unknown agent on the other end of the line, drawing their attention to certain humiliating failures of British overseas intelligence (not least the fact that it was run for some years by a Soviet spy), and hoping that they would take more care to protect us from socialist slavery in the future. I also asked out of boyish curiosity whether it was true that spies were trained to kill with a matchbox. These one-sided conversations were rather like prayer, addressed as they were to a formidably powerful, well-nigh omniscient being that had the power to torture you but that with any luck might not actually exist. A female eavesdropper resigned from the intelligence service rather than having to listen in on the emotionally fraught conversations between a well-known, recently divorced left-winger and his distressed seven-year-old daughter. Two members of the editorial board of New Left Review, who had regular phone conversations with each other about politics throughout the 1970s, but who some years later had only a dim memory of what they had said, considered asking MI5 for transcripts. Even when I was in my late seventies and had not held a placard or doled out a leaflet for some time, I rang a friend in Zurich only for her to hear the whole conversation played back as she put down the phone. Perhaps the most charitable explanation is that MI5 are trying to improve their vocabulary. In a rash moment of revelation, they acknowledged in a newspaper report some years ago that they hacked the phones of left-wing academics, so that sheer paranoia on my part, which being of a rational turn of mind I had speculated might be the cause of the sounds, no longer seemed a reasonable solution.

I finally got to meet a couple of spooks face to face, though probably not the ones who were bugging my phone. Two men claiming to be journalists turned up at my door and quizzed me about a left-wing group of which I was then a member. One of the two, a burly, slow-voiced type who looked more like a cop than a reporter, seemed remarkably well informed about Marxism, and when I congratulated him sarcastically on his erudition he told me that he had been studying the subject for twenty years—not, presumably, out of any personal enthusiasm for it. It was hard to see why someone who supposedly made a living by writing about Taylor Swift for a tabloid should be so knowledgeable about Bukharin’s dealings with Zinoviev in the early years of the Soviet Union. Before long the two of us had launched into a scholarly discussion of the feudal mode of production, complete with recondite allusions and elaborate digressions, while his companion stared glumly at his notebook and waited for it to stop. After a while I began to wonder whether this theoretically advanced arm of the petty bourgeoisie might not make a valuable recruit to our group. Should I ask him to call back later without his less well-informed friend? Recruiting a police officer would mean being infiltrated by the state, but this would be no problem at all, since we were infiltrated by the state already. One of the group’s members was faithfully reporting our activities to the authorities. It wasn’t that we didn’t know this, but that we didn’t know who it was.

All this happened almost forty years ago, and it would be overvaluing the capabilities of secret agents to blame them for all my misfortunes. In any case, full of remorse for alarming friends and distressing students ill-equipped to deal with such matters, I gave up alcohol and have not returned to it since. Some of my colleagues were admirably adept at concealing their dismay. Few acts of self-sacrifice can compare with sitting through Oxford High Table stone-cold sober for more than three decades. But I had looked death in the eye and decided that it wasn’t for me. More than forty years of abstinence isn’t a bad way of saying sorry, but it is not a lifelong commitment. When the doctors tell me that I have only one day to live, I shall sink a small glass of malt whiskey to help me on my way.

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