Writing War and Peace was a happy time for Tolstoy. You can feel it in the prose, in the ineffable lift of some of the book’s 125 scenes. He was already a bit of a literary star when he started it in 1862. Youth and The Cossacks, both novellas, had already come out in literary journals and made quite the splash. People wondered, Who is this guy? And unlike his contemporary Dostoevsky, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (pronounced by Russian speakers with the emphasis on the second vowel) didn’t have any money worries; he was an independently wealthy aristocrat who lived on an inherited four-thousand-acre estate with a woman who, at that point anyway, adored him and believed ardently in his gifts. Writing in her diary, Sofia confided, “Not one person in a million, I dare say, is as happy as we are . . . Nothing affects me as strongly as his ideas and his talent.” Sofia also, and this seems almost unimaginable today, copied out most of the 1,500-page W&P manuscript at least seven times. “Have I changed,” she wrote, “or is the book really very good?” Tolstoy was never so joyful again and, for my money, never wrote so well again.
One morning I zoomed into the hotel restaurant and spotted an inordinately good-looking young man sitting at a table, having coffee. I had just finished the section where Rostov takes a nighttime sleigh ride with the young Sonya, the moon hanging in the sky, bells on the horses jingling. It was a scene which had so exhilarated me, so excited my faith in romantic love, the notion that all things were still possible, even for me, that I had been unable to sit still and had finally shot out of the room. And now, look, a human being! Tanned, with a Roman nose, perfect teeth, he looked like a movie star. When he opened his mouth to return my greeting, I heard a soft Australian accent. I plied him with questions. He was a musician, taking a holiday. That’s nice. And is your band doing well? Quite well. Do you play at dances and stuff? No, we play stadiums. Stadiums? “I’m with Midnight Oil,” he said, and rather shyly, too.
He stayed for three days; we had breakfast together each morning, on one of which I read him the passage about Natasha and the starry night. I never saw him again after that, but I’ve always remembered his fresh good looks, his patient interest in Tolstoy. Years and years later I interviewed the lead singer for Midnight Oil—I forget his name, the bald guy—and I asked him about the young man in Jamaica, the bass guitarist, and I heard he’d quit the band after only a year or two, hadn’t liked the life and had gone off and opened up a surf shop somewhere on the Queensland coast, which made me like him even more.
One afternoon, as I flopped soft-tummied and sweating in a beach chair not fifty feet from the Italians (“Ciao! Mia, ciao!”), a pair of big-toothed California girls (they stayed at an all-inclusive, miles down the beach) struck up a conversation with me. Seeing that I was reading Tolstoy, one of them said, “What do you do?”
“I’m a model,” I said. And they stayed; they stayed the whole afternoon, and when they left they invited me to meet them later that evening. What excitement. Company! Conversation! (I had taken to eating my lunch in front of the mirror.) But when I turned up later that night, fluffy-haired and chirpy, at a cliff-side restaurant, I saw them stealing their way across the patio. (It irritates me to this day.) The one in the lead caught sight of me; her fingers reached guiltily for an earlobe, an involuntary gesture Tolstoy would have enjoyed, and told me, get this, that they had already eaten. Already eaten? Embarrassed, shocked, speechless and then enraged, I said, “I’m going over there for a drink,” and hurried to the empty bar. I drank several ice-cold Red Stripes so fast they made my eyes burn. I felt like I was putting out a fire.
I walked home that night under a beautiful moon. On the main floor of the hotel, behind a metal grille and curtains, I could make out the blue glare of a television set. The owner, that big ex-cop, was watching Scarface with Al Pacino. I coughed into my hand, then again with the vague hope that he might call me in for a visit—his wife was teaching school in Kingston—but no luck. I heard a murmur of confidential laughter. The girl who did the housecleaning was in there.
Later that night, Tolstoy just about finished me off. (Never get too comfortable with a Russian writer.) Natasha—my Natasha—is being seduced by a worthless playboy at the opera.
When she was not looking at him, she felt that he was looking at her shoulders, and she could not help trying to catch his eyes that he might rather look in her face. But as she looked into his eyes, she felt with horror that, between him and her, there was not that barrier of modest reserve she had always been conscious of between herself and other men. In five minutes she felt—she did not see how—that she had come fearfully close to this man.
News gets back to her fiancé, Prince Andrei, and the marriage is off.
I turned off the bedside lamp. A double disaster in paradise.
Jump ahead now to 2004, almost twenty years after that night in Jamaica. I sat on the porch with my nineteen-year-old son on a fall evening in Kensington Market in Toronto. His young face wore a look of controlled horror and I dared barely glance at him. A summertime romance, white-hot, had come to an unexpected end a few weeks before. First the dreadful premonitions, then panicky long-distance calls (she went to university in another city), one of which found the young lady in a bar. To his question, “Are you breaking up with me?” (how courageous, the nakedness of it!), she replied offhandedly, “Yes.”
So there we were, he and I, sitting side by side, staring at the damp street. “You know that thing I was afraid of happening?” he said.
I was almost unable to catch my breath. “Yes.”
“Well, it happened,” he said. Someone had informed him by phone. His girlfriend had gone to bed with an old lover. He couldn’t stop smoking cigarettes and he couldn’t stop imagining the things you should never imagine but always do. You could see it playing out on his pale, childlike features: She does this to him, he does that to her. We’ve all done it, but you’d step in front of a car to spare your own son doing it.
“I think she’s making a terrible mistake,” I said, uselessly. In the long silence (puff, puff), I found myself thinking about Natasha and her betrayal of Prince Andrei.
“I’ll never take her back,” my son said.
Then, miraculously (but not surprisingly), a few months later, just after Christmas, his girlfriend suffered a change of heart. It started with an emissary (“She really misses you”), then a “surprise” encounter at a party (“If you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to have to kiss you”). Where did she learn to speak like that? Had she read War and Peace too?
So there we were again, bundled in coats on the porch. Snowflakes, some large, some small, settled indecisively on the front lawn. I knew what he was thinking. Recriminations and brutal quizzes lay just ahead for both of them. “What if she does it again?” he said.
“You know what Tolstoy says.”
“What?”
I said, “Tolstoy says a woman can never hurt you the same way twice.”
“You think that’s true, Dad?”
“Yes,” I said finally, “I believe it is.”
With a swift but circumspect movement, Natasha came nearer; still kneeling, and carefully taking his hand, she bent her face over it and began kissing it, softly touching it with her lips.
“Forgive me,” she said in a whisper, lifting her head and glancing at him. “Forgive me.”
“I love you,” said Prince Andrei.
Writers sleep better if they trick themselves into believing that the great masterpieces of literature were written in old-age homes—by the grey and the venerable, in other words. Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day) confessed to a reporter that he’d ruined an afternoon for himself (possibly his life, he joked) when, on one imprudent occasion, he did some elementary math and discovered how old his favourite writers had been when they produced their chefs-d’oeuvre. I did the same thing myself a while ago and I now share his dismay: Virginia Woolf, only forty-two when she wrote Mrs. Dalloway; Scott Fitzgerald, an unforgivable twenty-nine with The Great Gatsby. Joyce’s U
lysses (punishingly dull but nevertheless—), thirty-nine. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was forty-one when he finished War and Peace, arguably the greatest novel ever written, after which, instead of taking a Caribbean vacation, he launched into an obsessive study of ancient Greek and then took up the bicycle. (Russ Meyer, by the way, was the same age when he finished Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!)
When I finished War and Peace, I had a hell of a tan and I wanted (a lifetime bad habit) to keep the party going. I came back to Toronto and one of the first things I did was to buy a no-nonsense hardback of Anna Karenina. But it didn’t work this time. Something was different; I couldn’t engage; the novel didn’t block out the dozen worries that nibbled at my attention. I thought it was the book. It was as if—and I’m not convinced this isn’t the truth—Tolstoy had used all his favourite characters in W&P and was now working through the B-list. After a hundred or so pages, I put the book aside. And that’s where it stayed for seven years, until 1992.
I was greyer, fatter, and witnessing, with escalating upset, the death of a love affair. Another love affair. (Love, I’ve learned, is a living creature and when it’s dying, like an animal too weak to care who feeds it, the signs are unmistakable.) Molly Wentworth and I spoke to each other with excessive caution, the way people speak who have lost their natural ease with each other, a mother tongue that somehow the two of you have forgotten.
There are ways, of course, to put lipstick on the corpse, to get it up and dancing, however grotesquely. Get married, buy a house, have a baby, that’s what some couples do. But there’s a fourth, less binding option: take a holiday together. And that’s what we did. At five-thirty on a black, snowy morning in Toronto, a limousine picked up me and Molly and my old hardback of Anna Karenina and drove us to oblivion.
By the time we got to the hotel in Bangkok, it was as if I had taken two hits of old-fashioned blotter acid. The world shimmered—all those hours on the plane. (She had slept like a child, her long, beautiful eyelashes twitching. What was she dreaming about? Beside her, like the troll under the bridge, I glared at six consecutive films, one after the other.)
It was a lovely hotel, the river winding below our window. At night you could see long boats moving on the water. But nothing could save us, not sex or gin or Santa Claus.
“Is anything wrong?”
“No. You?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Ugh.
(Anna Karenina, in four lines.)
I stayed in the hotel room, the city a smoggy, uninteresting blur outside, and started Anna K. for the second time. Molly walked through the city, visited the university, I’m not sure what else. There’s a way you read when you travel; it is, in itself, a kind of transport, the purity with which you pay attention. You never read like that at home. In fact, as the years have gone by and with them a dozen other trips, it has occurred to me that reading, all on its own, may well be the best reason to travel. This time out, I was so entranced with Anna Karenina, the story of an unfaithful woman getting fed, however beautifully, into Tolstoy’s lawn mower, that the events in the book became more real to me, more important to me, than Bangkok’s foul air, my girlfriend’s unreachable unhappiness, or the bar upstairs where one evening I encountered an old friend from university, a professional traveller who, like many professional travellers, had no curiosity about anything he encountered and talked about himself with an almost autistic insistence.
I hurried back to my room downstairs—back to Tolstoy, back to Levin’s unhappy thwarting at the hands of young Dolly. Tolstoy had such excitement about romantic love (at least for a while). You can feel him purr during his great love scenes. He adored the red-light, green-light nature of it, its democratic stranglehold. You’re never too rich, too beautiful, too stupid, too broke, too anything to resist its crooking finger. Unlike Chekhov, whose unhappy characters tend to stay unhappy, Tolstoy believed (once again, for a while) that romantic, sexualized love had the power to transform people, to make them happy. It lured Prince Andrei from a pit of malignant self-absorption; made Pierre Bezuhov into an adult; thrilled Anna Karenina for the only time in her life. Eventually it ripened and completed Levin as a man.
One morning Molly and I were having breakfast in the upstairs bar. I was spooning honeyed yogurt into my mouth with a greedy urgency.
“I don’t mean to be insulting,” Molly said with a strained smile, “but you’re making quite a racket over there.”
That, for those who don’t recognize it, is the sound of a woman who no longer wants you. It reminded me— with the suddenness of someone smashing a hammer on the table—of a scene that I had read only days before, where Anna views her husband’s ears (they stick out) with revulsion.
A few days later, the sun was setting over the river. Such a melancholy time, the boats with little bow lanterns, like fireflies, drifting downstream with the current. I was caught midway in that famous scene where Anna, having fled her family, sneaks back to her former house to visit her nine-year-old son. Her husband is asleep downstairs. She bribes a servant, she starts up the stairs—I knew that this was a one-time moment in literature, that I would never again get to experience the unfolding of this scene without knowing its outcome. Would she get to see the little boy or not? It felt as urgent as a crisis in my own life and I feared, I actually feared, that Molly with her blond hair and sharp features, those beautiful eyelashes, would wander into the room at the very second and spoil everything. I leapt up from the bed and locked the door to the room.
The end of a love affair comes in different ways. For Molly, it was the spectacle of me wolfing down a dish of yogurt (as if someone might steal it); for me, it was the moment I decided to shut her out of the room and all the things inside it.
Pretty much everything Tolstoy wrote after Anna K. is so top-heavy with pedantry or moral instruction that you can’t finish it. The danger signs were there even in the divine War and Peace: that dull section where Pierre joins the Freemasons; or the novel’s last, dreadful chapter. (Surely the real ending comes forty pages earlier, with Prince Andrei’s son eavesdropping on a favourite uncle downstairs.) There’s trouble brewing here and there in Anna Karenina too, in Levin’s tiresome reflections on rural agriculture. How I long to stop strangers when I see these books under their arms, to implore them to skip those sections so they won’t leave such magnificent works on a note of anticlimax.
From 1881 onwards, Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis that was characterized by great, some would say insane, extremes, a disgust with sex, a disdain for literature, an abandonment of secular pleasures, even riding his bicycle. (“Daddy loves giving things up,” one of his daughters wrote snidely in her diary.) This unforgiving embrace of Christianity (with a few suggestions for its improvement, naturally) made him a kind of holy figure in Russia and attracted devotees and lunatics from all over the country, many of whom stayed at the house, much to the fury of Madame Tolstoy. But even when he was out in the barn dressed like a peasant, making his own boots and calling his wife a whore, there remained a few dazzling literary turns in the, by now, old coot. It was as if every so often Tolstoy couldn’t stop being Tolstoy, couldn’t stand in the way of his own nagging genius.
People know The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), but for some reason almost no one I’ve talked to has read the extraordinary novella Master and Man, which he wrote when he was seventy-two years old. I came across it by accident years after I thought I knew all the Tolstoy hits, when, out of a nostalgia for a more excitable time in my life (literature leaves fainter traces as the years go by), I sat in on an undergraduate course in the nineteenth-century Russian novel at the University of Toronto. (I had time as well as nostalgia on my hands.) Master and Man, I discovered, is the great Tolstoy buried treasure. It’s a very simple story indeed. A peasant, Nikita, and his master, a lumber merchant, set off on a winter afternoon to conclude a deal in a neighbouring village. A storm comes up; they lose their way; night falls. As the two drift through a zone of lunar frigidity (“
It sometimes seemed that the sledge was standing still and the countryside was rolling away behind them”), what the reader experiences may well be the best description of winter in literature.
Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, who looked after the business end of things, was away when Tolstoy finished Master and Man. In her absence he sold it to a magazine for next to nothing. Big trouble when she came back. Raging through the house (the servants cringing behind the furniture), she accused him of sleeping with the editor and raised such a row that Tolstoy declared the marriage over and went to his room to pack. Not to be outdone, Sofia ran outside into the Russian winter clad in only a nightdress and a dressing gown. Wearing underwear and a vest, with no shirt, Tolstoy chased after her. Once rescued, the distraught wife took to her bed. Unable to endure her unhappiness, Tolstoy relented and cancelled the magazine deal. But two days after the rights were formally returned, their seven-year-old son, Vanichka, a gifted, sweet-natured boy, developed scarlet fever and died. His parents, the quarrel over the manuscript forgotten, sat together on the sofa, “almost unconscious with grief.”
A word to the wise, if I may, about Master and Man in particular and about Tolstoy in general. Be careful. Tolstoy is not afraid to hurt you. When the timber merchant realizes that Nikita is freezing to death, he does something so astonishing—and then not astonishing—that you have the feeling of someone sticking a hand into your chest. I won’t ruin the story for you but, in a word, this is not the guy to read before your afternoon nap.
Which brings us happily and finally to the present. Late fall in Havana, Cuba. Not the end but nearing the final chapters of my life with Tolstoy. I didn’t bring him with me this time, but then again, he is somebody you never quite leave behind. Once infected, never cured. And, like Proust, Tolstoy changes not just the way you see the world but occasionally even the way you experience it. Sometimes, in fact, I feel I’ve come to lean on Tolstoy rather too much; have seen him in too many of my own life’s events (Oh! Just like that moment in—); have quoted him too often (as I do with the Beatles when I try to inspire my son’s sporadically deflated musical aspirations). I remember once, when I was working in television, a producer raised her head in indignation from a script I’d written about a Manitoba violinist and snapped, “No more Tolstoy, okay!”
The Perfect Order of Things Page 8