Occasional Prose (23 page)

Yet, whoever is right—Solzhenitsyn or Tolstoy—about the course of history and the sense or lack of sense it makes does not matter so much here as the fact that the novel, as opposed to the novelist, seems to be so often on Tolstoy’s side. On the plane of drama Samsonov achieves a grandeur of which Vorotyntsev, a model leader, is incapable. Samsonov’s capacity for suffering and endurance, his eventual passiveness, as of a massive natural object, all of which show him as the opposite of a “great man,” seem to be moving him to a supreme wisdom—the full acceptance of his fate. He bows to it, just as he takes off his cap to each of his demoralized soldiers, some of whom have served him badly. The marvelous realization of this character, though not in any way Tolstoyan (Tolstoy detested theatre), nevertheless supports Tolstoy’s view of what is important, finally, and what not. In creating Samsonov on the scale he does, Solzhenitsyn denies the ultimate interest of those cause-and-effect sequences he has been elaborating in order to pinpoint blame. It would be strange if he were not aware of this. Is the fact that Lenartovich is one of the men Samsonov lifts his cap to intended merely as an irony?

In using Vorotyntsev to draw the lesson of what ought to have been done to avert the Tannenberg disaster, it seems as though Solzhenitsyn has walked into a trap. To make this intelligent colonel effective he would have to write a different ending to the tale than the one history has provided. But if the colonel is not effective, then intelligence turns out to be a rather useless quality unless it is combined with power, which historically it rarely is—so that Vorotyntsev emerges more as a fantasy or dreamy wish fulfilment than an actual living possibility. We are left with the fleshly reality of Samsonov, one of the contributing causes, it could be said, of the Bolshevik Revolution. And whatever the novelist thinks about that, the novel disagrees. All the novel finds is the essential
Hercules furens
sitting on a tree-stump “throne” deep in reflection.

September 16, 1972

On Rereading a Favorite Book

R
EOPENING
ANNA KARENINA
AFTER
more than thirty years, I find that I know it virtually by heart. Every episode, just about every incident, every observation is as I remember it and
where
I remember it. Other favorite books suffer alteration during an interval of being unread. Coming back to them, you see that you have totally forgotten a whole sub-plot; secondary characters have become complete strangers—does the name Raffles in
Middlemarch
ring a bell? Or else episodes that have stuck in the memory do not seem to be there at all or have shrunk to a phrase or a paragraph—needles in a haystack. One’s feelings toward the main characters may have altered with the onset of “maturity”: now we prefer Pierre to Prince Andrei and Hector to Achilles. Recently I had the mortifying experience of meeting once again the wise youth Adrian (
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
), like a childhood crush grown unrecognizable—what could have been the attraction? The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one’s heart.

But in
Anna Karenina
, oddly, the only big thing I have forgotten is one I would expect to remember: that Levin’s older brother, the consumptive, is a Communist. Add to that a little thing: that Vronsky has whiskers and a moustache with tips that he twirls. Otherwise all is in its place: Anna’s swift resolute step, Karenin’s ears, Vronsky’s white, strong, even teeth, which, when we have our last sight of him near the end of the novel, after Anna has killed herself, are making his jaw twitch impatiently with an incessant gnawing toothache. Yes, it is in a train station, like Anna’s death and their first meeting, and he is going off to fight as a volunteer in the Serbian war against the Turks (taking along a whole squadron at his own expense), and there are ladies with bouquets to see the brave volunteers off. And whom does he meet at the first stop, on the platform, but Levin’s other brother, the writer, who commends him for his public spirit. And Vronsky tersely answers. “‘Yes, as a weapon I may be of some use. But as a man, I’m a wreck,’ he jerked out. He could hardly speak for the throbbing ache in his strong teeth, that were like rows of ivory in his mouth.” Then, on the station platform, a different sensation, “that set his whole being in anguish,” causes him for an instant to forget his toothache; the sight of a tender gliding smoothly along the rails has reminded him of Anna’s still-warm mangled body and lovely intact head as he had found her laid out on a table in the railway shed. Remorse overwhelms him, and his face works with sobs.

The somatology, the harsh reduction to bedrock, is pure Tolstoy. Yet it would be wrong to sense a sarcasm and think that Vronsky is “shown up” by having a toothache—the most untragical, because most everyday, of human ills—at such an inappropriate moment. Rather, the “lowly” origin of the agony he suffers raises him, as if on a cross. In that moment he is redeemed from his creator’s scorn. The reproach of Anna’s memory has been powerful enough to anesthetize the ache “for an instant,” which is as much as can be expected of a man. A bite of remorse that is sharper than the gnawing of a toothache is the mark of a strong nature. Indeed, as a man of feeling, Vronsky has passed a final exam here that many or most of us would fail. Tolstoy has judged him, ultimately, as a human animal, and, measured by that standard, Vronsky’s “points” stand out.

The inappropriate, in fact, the utterly inconsonant, is Tolstoy’s peculiar stamping-ground: Pierre’s white hat and green swallow-tail coat at the battle of Borodino; Levin’s search for a dress shirt on his wedding morning. The story of Levin and Kitty—and of Vronsky and Anna—has begun on that note, with the foolish, totally unsuitable smile on Anna’s brother’s face when his wife confronts him with proof of his adultery. Since that unforgivable smile Dolly has refused to see Stiva, which is why Anna has had to come from Petersburg to reconcile them. Stiva’s smile is both a dreadful giveaway and it is not. As with Vronsky’s aching big tooth, Stiva is not diminished by an irrepressible surfacing of his animal nature. On the contrary, that involuntary movement of the lips, a reflex as he tells himself, somehow bestows credit on him, where the appropriate gestures—denying everything, justifying himself, begging forgiveness—would not have. The smile is proof of both his “bestial” guilt and his bestial innocence, i.e., his simplicity. His inconsequence is a sign of the good in him, as, I think, it always is for Tolstoy. It is of the same family as Levin’s absurd remark—utterly out of keeping with his feelings, which are wholly bent on Kitty—toward the beginning of the novel when Stiva, who has invited him to lunch, asks him whether he likes turbot: “What? ... Turbot? Yes, I am
awfully
fond of turbot.” No doubt Levin, hearing himself, could have bitten off his tongue, and this too is a sign of election.

The two men—one in the raptures of undeclared love, one (when he remembers) in a state of marital apprehensive-ness—lunch on three dozen oysters, champagne, Parmesan, soup, turbot, chablis, roast of beef, capons, finishing off with a fruit salad. Even Levin, who would have preferred cabbage soup and
kasha
, does not lack appetite. This is a book of the body, and Stiva, though he is a procurer only of nourishment (perch brought live to the kitchen, asparagus, and a joint are what he gives Karenin for dinner), is a sort of Pandarus-by-example. Like Criseyde’s uncle, he is a joyful advertisement for the flesh and its claims—a sympathetic figure, more sympathetic, certainly, than he ought to be, given Tolstoy’s morality. Those three dozen oysters stick to him like a classical attribute or like the manner of his martyrdom (St. Lawrence’s gridiron, St. Apollonia’s teeth) to a pictured saint.

Meanwhile his incongruous friend and boyhood comrade, Constantine Levin, is trying to live for his soul, but his soul, having become incarnate in Kitty (Stiva’s wife’s sister), turns out to be obstinately practical, boiling raspberry jam on a charcoal stove on the terrace in the Shcherbatsky way (no water), matchmaking, knowing how to make people comfortable. The thing that astonishes him in Kitty, who is barely grown up, is her tranquil power of handling death, that strange, unnatural rupture with the body.

Sacramental moments, where the spiritual infuses the physical with an overpowering sweetness, are rare in this novel; I think chiefly of the Sunday scene where Dolly’s children, having taken Communion at the peasant church in their freshly washed and let-out best clothes, are then, as if to be cleansed a second time, piled into the wagonette to go mushrooming and have a bathing party naked in the river. Here, by a miracle, body and soul are not pulling apart, like an ill-matched team of horses. They can hardly be separated, and when the smallest child, after taking the sacrament, says in English “Please, some more,” she of course is right to ask for seconds, as though the Eucharist were a particularly nice dinner.

All this materiality helps account, no doubt, for the fact that
Anna
stays so unchanged in the memory. There is little in it that could be subject to erosion or blurring. Each scene says something clearly and distinctly, like an illustration to a child’s alphabet book; each figure has its emblem or emblems, which acts as a fixative. We get something of the kind in
War and Peace
(the Princess Marya’s heavy tread, Prince Andrei’s small white hands) but haphazardly by comparison with
Anna
, where not a sparrow can fall without a special providence. Karenin’s protruding ears, his habit of cracking his knuckles, and high shrill voice are truly damning details, condemning him in perpetuity.

No matter how old one gets, if one lives to be a hundred, one’s preferences among the people in this novel will never alter. Impossible to like Karenin, and, between honest-hearted Dolly and her unfaithful husband, one still cannot help siding with him, perhaps for being so incorrigible. This trait, seldom endearing in real life, is a prime virtue in a fictional character—Falstaff, Mr. Micawber. Like them, the delinquent Stiva wears well. He surprises in a predictable way, reminding you at once of himself. Of course there is another side to such figures: the pleasure we take in them is somebody else’s pain. Dolly’s children’s patched and gusseted clothes point a telling finger at their father’s wayward habits. And yet we do not mind too much on their behalf. Those let-out seams and pieced childish dresses are intrinsic (naturally!) to his spendthrift make-up; we are not judges in Children’s Court. As readers, we have other standards. Is it proof of false values if we prefer life-enhancing people (Stiva, the old Prince Shcherbatsky, Anna, Vronsky) to life-diminishing ones (Karenin, the Countess Lidia Ivanovna and her pious circle, Mme Stahl, even Kitty’s sacrificial friend, Varenka)? At any rate Tolstoy agrees. The most unpleasant characters in the novel are the paragons; in comparison, the triflers and worldlings are unoffending—they merely are what they are.

In fact, none of the characters in
Anna Karenina
is corrigible. The changes they go through, sometimes quite surprising, “utterly out of character,” like the metamorphosis of Karenin at Anna’s sickbed, in the end do not change anything. True, they bear witness to a capacity for change in human nature, and the glimpses we are given of that capacity make the pessimistic
Anna
far more exhilarating than the optimistic
Resurrection
, which succeeded it. Karenin
is
reborn at what he takes to be Anna’s deathbed; in the act of pardon he rises from the bureaucratic death-in-life that is his normal state of being. But these wonderful changes do not last. The character reverts to its previous “set.” There is no place in the world for a metamorphosed Karenin. Vronsky turned painter is still Vronsky in an artist’s hat and cloak. That is a fact; that is the way it is, and not exactly anybody’s fault. An inborn capacity for change is, as it were, corrected by the contrary force of inertia.

Nor does that always work out so badly. Take the chapter where Vronsky adds up his debts—does his
lessive
, as he calls it. The normal fictional expectation is that he will never be able to pay all those bills, especially with Anna on his hands (which we are sure she soon will be). Here is the gun hanging on the wall that must go off in the last chapter; only ruin can lie ahead for him. Yet to our relief and bewilderment this is the last we hear of the subject. Since he and Anna are soon traveling in Italy and then back in Russia living in great style while he plunges into costly farming experiments, we might assume that someone (his mother doubtless) has died and resolved his difficulties. But nothing of the sort; after Anna is dead, his mother is again in the station, to see him off for the Serbian war and ride part of the way in the compartment with him. In short (as happens with countries), his monetary crisis, which seemed so desperate, somehow does not come to a head. Life goes on as before. That is the way it is: we add up our debts, shove the heaps of bills we have no way of paying back into the drawer, and worry along pretty much as before. “Ruin” is just a word. The gun on the wall shoots blanks.

It is terrible that it should be so, almost as terrible as that Karenin is unable to taste for long the pure joy of forgiveness. Anna would seem to be the exception to that bleak rule; she is punished for her “sin,” and at least this
looks
like something decisive. It is clear that she kills herself to be free of the force of inertia at work in her circumstance. Nothing so very dreadful has happened: Vronsky has not left her; he has not even ceased to love her despite the provocation she gives him. The cruel alteration is not in him but in herself: the gradual coarsening of her face and body—allegoric, as always in Tolstoy. “She had broadened out all over.” Suicide for her is an act of rebellion against the indeterminateness, lack of clarity, imposed on her like a privation of freedom. By throwing herself at an oncoming train, shaking off the encumbering little red handbag, surely a symbol of her worldly position, she violently writes
Finis
—at last a definition.