See you, then ... one of Mr Blair's earlier exits. Photograph: Dan Chung
"Well sir," says Gutman, the Fat Man of The Maltese Falcon, at the end of John Huston's 1941 screenplay of the Dashiel Hammett novel, "the shortest farewells are the best. Adieu." That most of us don't subscribe at all to this philosophy could be read in the pumping throat muscles of Tony Blair as he surrendered the Labour Party leadership to the heir apparent at the party's weekend conference in Manchester. Sometimes only a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar will do.
Blair suggested recently that, when the day came, he would probably have to be dragged, tear-stained and howling, from the door of Number 10. Now that moment is upon us. Lady Thatcher staged an exit something like this in 1990, with pinking eyes and crumpling chin indicating that this was very much not a time of her own choosing. Blair may ostensibly have set his own agenda, but he set it under duress, in an initiative designed to secure the party's third, and much more modest, election victory. "Vote for us, and the PM gets it."
Farewells, whether to life, love or companions on the journey, should be among the great moments of our lives. We should get to stage-manage them as surely as Colonel Kurtz calls down his own last scene in Heart of Darkness. Especially where the close of a longue durée demands a blaze of glory, a Norma Desmond moment on life's final staircase seems the least we deserve.
The reported death of Falstaff in Henry V, told among his lowliest friends outside a London tavern, is of a troubled but reconciled valediction to a world run out of temptations. Not sack nor women, nor the God to whom he cries out, quite comfort the old hellraiser after "the King hath kill'd his heart". Nonetheless, there is a celebrated dignity in his passing, a dignity only enhanced by the fact that Shakespeare spares us the sight of it.
To Kerouac in On The Road, the motif of the dwindling, waving figure you leave behind as the freight train you've hitched another ride on speeds away is one of the informing images of life's transience. Emotional connections too securely fixed now are only an investment in future desolation, as is asserted by the piece of classical wisdom that insisted that the happiest option would be never to have been born at all. Forlorn though such advice is to the living, it appears to recommend an attitude of clinical chill when it comes to the actual business of parting. "The second best's a gay goodnight," offers Yeats, "and quickly turn away".
Does anybody really believe this? Doesn't the end of some mighty era, whether it be a political career or an intense amour, cry out for fireworks, streamers and sweeping strings? Or at least the glass of champagne that saw Anton Chekhov on his way, its effervescence a moment of unbidden nostalgia on the very threshold of consumptive demise? "Everything on earth must come to an end," one of the characters in The Cherry Orchard remarks, with a stoicism the dramatist himself demonstrated. At his own demise, according to Olga, his wife, "there was only beauty, peace and the grandeur of death".
Thus it is that I for one hope Blair doesn't go gently into that good night, and that we might, at the least, be offered the twinkle of a tear, a final career-defining, tremolo payoff. It will satisfy those who feel a pang at the departure, and allow a proper measure of schadenfreude to all who can't forgive him.
