My Reading Life

by Pat Conroy

  Nor can we feel anything but despair when Natasha becomes infatuated with the dashing, insincere scoundrel Anatole Kuragin, who steals her affections when Andrei disappears from her life while recuperating from wounds that almost killed him on the fields at Austerlitz. Kuragin offers convincing proof that Tolstoy also studied and understood the slackest and most corrosive instincts of mankind. Kuragin’s thoughtless villainy can still be found in any American fraternity house today. How many times in human history has the most exquisite girl in a city fallen for an unsavory man unworthy of her delectable charms? It has remained a classic theme of world literature since Eve listened to the entreaties of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and it continues to be a staple of both life and fiction in the present day. It is Tolstoy’s uncanny brilliance as an artist that Natasha’s betrayal of Prince Andrei causes the reader anguish, but I would wager that it also broke Tolstoy’s heart to write that scene. You feel the presiding majesty of the author on every page even as he takes great pains to conceal himself.

  Later, the compassion and humanity of the novelist assert themselves, and Tolstoy allows Natasha to redeem herself after Moscow has fallen into the hands of the French and the Rostov family is fleeing the burning city. Natasha discovers that one of the wagons in the flight from Moscow is carrying the mortally wounded Prince Andrei. The lovers are reconciled before Prince Andrei’s inevitable, unspeakable death. Tolstoy watches over the death of Prince Andrei with restraint and a harmonic dignity, and resorts to no histrionics or the use of a single writerly trick to make the prince’s death more dramatic or tragic. Three times in my life I have read about the death of Prince Andrei, and three times I have wept uncontrollably. “Uncontrollably” is not a word that Leo Tolstoy would use. But I am not Leo Tolstoy, and I want it known that I wept, which is my description of how it felt to lose this wonderful man still another time in my lifetime of devouring the great books.

  In War and Peace, we follow the destinies of five families as their lives are ripped asunder by the Napoleonic Wars. We attend stuffy balls in swank, sophisticated St. Petersburg with the Kuragins and the Drubetskoys where snobbishness is an art form and the workings of the court a quiet war of maneuvering and attrition. In Moscow, Tolstoy introduces us to the simpler pleasures of the Rostov family, who celebrate the name day of the two Natashas, mother and daughter. Moscow is more down-to-earth and a less self-conscious city than St. Petersburg. Tolstoy lets us in on this valuable secret because the aristocracy speaks Russian, not French, in Moscow. Later, we will travel to Bald Hills to meet Andrei’s formidable father, Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky, and his sister, Maria, in a country estate that sounds much like the one Tolstoy presided over at Yasnaya Polyana, a little over 124 miles southwest of Moscow that almost lay on a direct route of the French army.

  There is a calmness in presentation every time Tolstoy introduces us to a new character or setting. He takes no shortcuts or back roads, and there is not a single hurried line in the book. When he describes a new character, he does it with economy and concision, but absolutely no haste. The dialogue he places in the mouths of these characters illuminates their qualities with a perfection that is dazzling. The speaking voice of Andrei could never be mistaken for that of Pierre. Natasha’s distinctive voice could never lead you to believe it is Princess Maria speaking; their voices are individual, recognizable, and pitch-perfect. The language of Leo Tolstoy will seldom amaze you. He is not the kind of writer who makes you breathless with his hijinks or fancy footwork in the hothouse kingdom of words. Not a single time do you have to struggle to understand what he is saying or what he is trying to convey to you. There has never been a writer of his mastery who wrote with such clarity and ease. Never does he want to confuse or neglect you. When he takes you on a wolf hunt, you will know exactly how it feels to be on horseback in the pursuit of a wolf in the middle of Russia. If you accompany him to the battlefield of Borodino, you will know precisely how it felt to be a Russian general, an artillery officer, a rifleman on the front lines, a French drummer boy, a cavalry officer, or Pierre watching the battle from the knoll at Gorky. If Tolstoy takes you to a dance in Moscow, he will teach you how to act, and you get the feeling he would actually like to teach you how to dance. When Moscow burns, he makes you feel the heat of the fires, the chaos in the burning city, the greed on the faces of the looters, and the terror of a pretty but unnamed Armenian girl fearful about being raped by the rampaging French soldiers. Tolstoy can make you feel anything he wants you to feel, and his artfulness is of such a high order, you are unaware of his doing it. Though it seems impossible to me, Tolstoy writes about women as well as he does about the world and affairs of men. I think he writes about women as well as any of the great women novelists, such as Jane Austen or George Eliot, whose works I revere. He is as comfortable with women gossiping in a boudoir as he is describing the loading and firing of cannons by artillerymen at the Battle of Austerlitz. In the dispensation of the talents given to a novelist, Tolstoy seems to have gotten it all, equipped with every weapon in the arsenal. His sentences seem to spring out of the Russian earth. You cannot read War and Peace and not pause before launching an attack on a country that produces men such as Leo Tolstoy.

  As a graduate of The Citadel, I am astonished by Tolstoy’s absolute mastery at describing battles and military tactics. If I were teaching military history in any country in the world, I would make War and Peace required reading for anyone who held any ambition for advancement into the officer corps. It should be on the night table of the leader of every country who wishes to send troops into war. No writer has ever described the horror and anarchy of battle with more authority. It is one of the timeless lessons of War and Peace that no one—not Napoleon, nor the tsar, nor the Russian general Kutuzov—has any idea how a war is going to turn out once it is unleashed. Napoleon died believing that his French armies won the Battle of Borodino, yet Tolstoy is completely convincing when he states that this bloody and unnecessary battle marked the beginning of the dissolution of the Napoleonic era. It is Tolstoy’s strongly held conviction that no man knows the forces that may be set loose when an army enters the homeland of a proud enemy whose people speak a different language, dance to a different music, worship a sterner god, and do not take well to an invasion of the motherland by an arrogant enemy. If I have one certainty in the world, it is that Adolf Hitler did not read War and Peace before he sent the armies of the Third Reich into the heart of Russia. Leo Tolstoy had already written the outcome of that nightmarish scenario when this novel was published in 1869. It makes me wonder if Lyndon Johnson had read War and Peace before he escalated the Vietnam War after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, or if George W. Bush had paid the book some attention before the invasion of Iraq. Tolstoy does not provide all the answers to the problems of modern warfare, but he certainly can help you grasp some of the essential questions you should ask yourself before sending your soldiers across a border that is not your own. I think that War and Peace is the best book about war ever written, and that includes The Iliad. It is also the best book about peace ever written. Over the years, many critics have said that War and Peace is not even a novel, and they may be right. Whatever it is, there has never been anything close to touching it. It stands alone. A star in the east. Magnificent. One of a kind. It can be praised by the most sublime word in the language—it is Tolstoyan, worthy of the tortured, fabulous Russian Count Leo Tolstoy.

  I envy the young man or woman picking up this book for the first time more than any reader in the world. Our own great Henry James thought Tolstoy lacked craftsmanship, but I think the great Henry James could not have been more wrong. I smell the ordure of envy in that pronouncement. The eminent critic George Steiner, in his marvelous book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, praised the wizardry of both writers, but finally chose Dostoyevsky as the more important novelist because of his gift for darkness, and for identifying many of the psychological mysteries of the human spirit that would prove so relevant to the modern novel. Many Americ
an novelists have preferred the glorious Anna Karenina over War and Peace, and that includes William Faulkner, who, when asked about the greatest novel ever written, said, “Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina.” I will not argue with Mr. Faulkner only because Anna Karenina is the second-best novel I ever read. The suicide of Anna still ranks as one of the saddest moments in world fiction.

  Hundreds of people have written about War and Peace since its publication. Millions have read it. Tolstoy performs that rarest and most valuable of tasks, one that has all but disappeared from modern fiction. He wrestles with the philosophical issues of how people like you and me can manage to live praiseworthy and contributive lives. Reading Tolstoy makes us strive to be better people: better husbands and wives, children, and friends. He tries to teach us how to live by letting us participate in the brimming, storied experiences of his fictional world. Reading Leo Tolstoy, you will encounter a novelist who fell in love with his world and everything he saw and felt in it. His soul is a Russian soul, and he possesses the tireless generosity to give back to the world that made him vertiginous with a passion for life and nature—the gift that took the form of this miraculous, life-altering novel. Once you have read War and Peace, you will never be the same. That is my promise to you.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MY TEACHER, JAMES DICKEY

  Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. I will make a few critical remarks about him, but that is only because he is dead, and I don’t have to worry about him beating me up. It will also make me appear less sycophantic about Dickey’s achievement; few people have loved his writing as much as I do. But let me begin with a statement of my own passionate and indignant belief—I do not care one goddamned thing about how James Dickey conducted his personal life. I care everything about what this man wrote on blank sheets of paper when he sat alone probing the extremities of his imagination. I don’t care if James Dickey slept with a thousand women or the entire football team at Clemson or the marching band at Vanderbilt or every animal in the San Diego Zoo, including the duck-billed platypus, the Gaboon viper, or the last ivory-billed woodpecker on the planet. If Dickey had mated with a dozen lionesses on the Serengeti plain after they had killed a water buffalo, and a race of manticores had issued from the union, it would not make me love his writing less. Let us do the important thing—let us roar with laughter at his immense flaws as a man, but let us be sure not to forget his utter mastery of the English language as well as a literary gift as far-reaching and as prodigal as has ever appeared on the American scene.

  Let me tell you a story that illustrates what my relationship with James Dickey was. There is not much of a story to tell, yet my first immersion in his poetry changed forever how I thought about writing. This happened when my friend Tim Belk threw me a copy of Dickey’s Poems 1957–1967. Tim had attended a poetry reading in Savannah that Mr. Dickey had given the night before, and the poet had overpowered Tim with his mesmerizing, high-octane recital of his work. At the time, I was writing poetry that did small damage to the language, but added no glory to it whatsoever. I became intoxicated with the voice of James Dickey and said to myself, “I can’t write like this. I’ll never be able to write like this.” But I read on for days until I had read every poem in the book. When I put it down I said finally, “I can’t write. I just can’t write.”

  Yet an admission of an inability to write has never slowed down a certain American class of writer like me. To my surprise, I found out I couldn’t live with my own mediocrity as a poet, so I turned to prose as an act of both surrender and self-knowledge. James Dickey had issued my marching orders and drummed me out of the poetry-writing world. On my desk, then and now, I keep his book of poems close to me, and I still turn to them for inspiration for their transcendental clarity, for their limitless passion—I turn to them to know what the English language is capable of when shaped and pulled and handled by a man born to set the world on fire. His poetry brought me to my knees then. It does the same thing to me today. Here was the truly amazing thing, I thought. At that time, James Dickey was still alive and teaching in my state.

  In 1970 his novel Deliverance was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Every sentence sounded marvelous, distinct, and original, and it flowed as quickly as the river it celebrated. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of The Great Gatsby. Like his poetry, no line went in for showiness, no hint of laziness or inattention or loss of control. For me, Dickey had forged a palace of light for a white-water river of words. When I finished the book, I said again to myself, “I can’t write. I’ll never be able to write like this.”

  This was not long after I had gotten myself fired from my teaching job on Daufuskie Island and had begun writing The Water Is Wide, which would eventually be published by Houghton Mifflin. I took it as a sign from God that the publishers of Deliverance would also be the publishers of my book, and I then thought it possible I might one day actually meet Mr. Dickey, shake his hand, and tell him what his writing had meant to me. So emotional was I about his work, I had to issue commands to myself not to genuflect and kiss his hand if we ever met. I didn’t think he’d have liked it. After I met James Dickey, I think he might have assumed that the gesture was perfectly appropriate. At that time in my life, I did not know any writers, and I certainly did not consider myself one.

  Because I was intoxicated by Dickey’s work, I wrote a short story about cockfighting, one about a bombing raid over Hanoi, and one about a hunt for grizzly bears in Montana. I wrote three stories that brought shame and ridicule to the bright art of the short story and suddenly realized I had never been to a cockfight, never flown a plane over Hanoi, never been to Montana. I’d seen a grizzly bear only once, asleep at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Yet my entire writing career fueled itself with the mimicry of the great writers I loved the best, such as Thomas Wolfe, and I became skilled at grand larceny when it came to the theft of their ideas. I had no thoughts or style of my own when one of my best friends from high school, Jan Hryharrow, called to see if I wanted to take a canoe trip down the Chattooga River. I said yes in an instant, then realized I’d never been in a canoe. But in the full flower of my hero worship of James Dickey, I knew I must experience life lived on the edge, at its most dangerous extremes.

  In Beaufort, I went out looking for a hunting rifle to bring on my trip down the Chattooga. When my wife, Barbara, questioned my sanity as to why anyone would take a rifle in a canoe, I told her that in the North Carolina mountains I would meet many mountain men who would try to have their way with me. “It’s best to kill them with a bow and arrow,” I said, “but I’ve never shot a bow and arrow, so I’m bringing a rifle.”

  “I think that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard a man say,” Barbara responded.

  “You haven’t read Deliverance,” I said.

  “And that sure as hell doesn’t make me want to read it, either,” she said.

  When I remember this scene, it comes as no surprise that the marriage did not last.

  So I went down the Chattooga rifleless with Jan Hryharrow, who told me he could take a six-month-old child down the river and the infant would not even get wet. He had bought the canoe from a YMCA camp for ten dollars, but refused to buy life jackets, which he considered overpriced. Jan was a river rat in Beaufort and an outdoorsman of considerable gifts—I trusted him completely until we came to the first white-water rapids, and I heard the thunderous noise of a waterfall ahead.

  “Just keep stroking,” Jan said. “No problem.”

  As we slid down the chute of the waterfall, I heard a scream and looked up to see Jan flying out, airborne above me as the canoe somersaulted in the air and I found myself engulfed in the boiling rapids. I lost my Citadel ring in that first waterfall, and I suspect it is still somewhere near there today. I also lost all respect and confidence in Jan Hryharrow as an outdoorsman. We capsized going over every single waterfall we tried to navigate that day. Never, no
t once, were Jan and I still in the canoe after trying to knife our way down the furious waterfalls of the Chattooga. Finally, we paused and rested before one that looked to me like Victoria Falls. It was called Sock-em Dog, and our waterproof map said more canoeists had been killed here than in any other part of the river. With irritating confidence, Jan told me he figured out what we were doing wrong. He had developed a new move, through trial and error, that would get us through Sock-em Dog unharmed. As we headed at a fearful pace toward our rendezvous with the most treacherous stretch of water on the river, Jan executed his new move with flawless precision. The canoe turned sideways and got suspended up on boulders. We were in a position as perilous as I have ever been in.