N.Q.
Why did you instruct your publisher to withdraw a novel of yours from the shortlist of the English ‘Orange Prize’ for women writers?
N.A.
I don’t think the sex of a writer is any criterion for literature. We are heterogeneous in our imagination, I believe. Writers black, female, gay, lesbian do the cause of recognition of their talents disservice in measuring their achievements particularly, exclusively, against themselves. Oh – you’ll note that, as far as I know, there is no category of prizes for males only, or whites, or for heterosexuals only.
N.Q.
You’re seventy-nine years old – when are you going to write your autobiography?
N.A.
Autobiography? Never. I am much too jealous of my privacy. Secretive, if you like. It’s all one has, in the end. Whereas anyone’s biographer has to make do with what’s somehow accessible, by hook or by crook.
N.Q.
Do you think people will still be reading books – printed on paper, bound – in the future?
N.A.
No. I think a hundred years or less from now, the image of words projected on screens of limitless kinds and flowing directly as sound into ears – even beyond what technological means exist at present – will have made the book like a stone tablet dug up by archaeologists. I’m shudderingly relieved to know I won’t be around to be so deprived.
Well: I can now draw my own conclusions about the character of the individual I was interviewing … It would be interesting to hear from other interviewee victims, what questions they – thankfully? – are never asked.
2003
‘To You I Can’
Gustave Flaubert’s November
November. ‘When the trees have shed their leaves, when the sky still keeps in twilight the russet tint that gilds the faded grass, it is sweet to see extinguishing itself all that not long ago still burned in you.’
Autumn. And it is with a man’s recall of that season of life that there begins the most beautiful, unsparing, shaming and unashamed, emotionally and morally pitiless evocation of its antithesis, the season of fires ignited. Flaubert’s novella is an unsurpassed testament of adolescence.
Gustave Flaubert was barely twenty years old when he completed it in 1842. He was the one burning. ‘The puberty of the heart precedes that of the body.’ As a schoolboy aged fifteen he fell worshipfully in love with somebody’s wife. On his first travels beyond Rouen, where he was born, and still a virgin at eighteen despite tortuous sexual desires, he was made love to by the daughter of the proprietor of the hotel where he lodged in Marseille. He did not forget either conquest the women made of him, soul or body; they were transposed into one, the woman Marie, in this book.
This I learn from reading the many biographies of the author. Flaubert, more than any other fiction writer I can cite, including Marcel Proust, has been subjected to the process of taking the writer’s creation as a kind of documentary basis for what is more interesting to explore: his/her life. It’s not what you write, it’s who you are. This guesswork on the processes of the imagination is surely a denigration, if scholarly unconscious, of literature: the act of creation itself. Fiction cannot be ‘explained’ by autobiography; it remains, like the composition of music, a profound mystery while a source of human understanding only the arts can offer.
I give the hotel-keeper’s daughter simply as an example of the still fashionable literary methodology – not outdated along with the psychological novel but somehow reinforced by post-modern theory that anything pertinent to the author, even childhood snaps reproduced in the text, belongs in his/her fiction. I don’t care, and frankly, I think Flaubert’s reader won’t care whether or not the transporting experience of this book is really that of the author’s young life. All that counts is that it is a work of genius written by a twenty-year-old. Genius: as always on that extremely rare level of mind and spirit, the exploration of human motivation, action and feeling remains relevant, becomes again and again astonishingly contemporary in generations long after that within which it was conceived.
The years on which the narrator looks back from his November were the reign of King Louis Philippe, 1830–1848, years of post-Napoleonic disillusion, when revolutionary change as an agent to bring about justice, end privilege and corruption, create values to replace those shabbily glittering, seemed impossible. There was nothing to believe in, secular or religious, that was not a sham in relation to deep needs. Nothing to aspire to beyond materialism; and if resigned to this, no youth had the chance of access without sponsorship in high places. There are many countries in our twenty-first century where young people today experience the same frustration, malaise, updating the nineteenth-century escape to absinthe and opium by whatever alcoholic concoction at hand, and shooting up heroin.
Flaubert’s reluctant law student, from a provincial bourgeois family with unrealised Voltairean ideas, has no name as narrator, drawing one without intermediary breath-to-breath into his life. He dispenses with his study assignments summarily in favour of poetry, unlikely ambitions in the arts, and fantasies: ‘I would go as far as I could into my thought, revolve it in all its aspects, penetrate to its farthest depths … I built myself palaces and dwelt in them as an emperor, plundered the mines of all their diamonds and strewed them in bucketsful over the road I was to traverse.’
The awakening of the imagination comes through the evocative power of words, and so does the sexual awakening. ‘Woman, mistress especially … bowled me over … the magic of the name alone’ threw the adolescent ‘into long ecstasies’. This is the genesis of an erotic narrative, an achievement that has nothing to do with pornography and everything to do with acknowledgement of the sexual drive in symbiosis with the spirit and intellect.
The ‘mystery of woman’ obsesses him in the streets with small details enchantingly described, from which he creates for himself the whole woman, tries to attach to each passing foot ‘a body, a body to an idea, all these movements to their purposes, and I asked myself where all these steps were going’. Out of unsatisfied desires comes the revenge of rejection of what’s denied. He’s taken pleasure in watching prostitutes and seeing rich beauties in their carriages. This turns to savage disgust for them all, and extends to both levels of society they represent. The rebel without a cause, an empty heart, wants to lose himself in crowds. ‘What is this restless pain, that one is proud of … and that one hides like a love?’ (We’d diagnose depression, today.) His desperate plunges into commune with nature are no consolation; forces as erotic as sexual fantasies are what he enjoys there, only reinforcing his sexual frustration.
‘Nothing but a great love could have extricated me.’
Unable to act, suffocated by youthful arrogance and fantasy – the young man not only has not realised the love, sexual and ideal, he places at the centre of being; he still looks for the sign that will beckon him to it. Seeking distraction, he responds to a sign that would seem to have no relation to this depth of need; he accepts the invitation in the eyes of a prostitute. If he has no name of his own he cares to give the reader, she has called herself Marie. Relieved of his virginity with a voluptuousness beyond the conceptions of his fantasies, he goes home with self-repulsion and returns with renewed desire. What would be described too inadequately as an affair, begins. She is older than him, in every way, years and breadth of experiences; a beauty in whom we recognise some of the characteristics of the unapproachable women he has idealised. The complexity of what we glibly term sexual satisfaction is conveyed subtly, marvellously, as something that truly can be read. Hyperbole has to be revaluated, in this prose. The professionally uncalled-for passion that has come about between her and this young initiate bonds the paradox of the situation into a communion of melancholy and sensuality. Love?
He has not known love. She has been used by many men but not known love; both despair of ever knowing it yet while doubting its existence within the morals and mores of their time, continue tortuously to see
k it. From her, the woman who belongs to every man, he hears ‘the first words of love I had heard in my life’. With her body lying upon him, in exquisitely described awareness of her physicality he is led to receive her in her whole being, not a means, a substitute for the unattainable. ‘Contemplating this woman so sad in pleasure … I divined a thousand terrible passions that must have riven her … to judge from the traces left, and then I thought I would enjoy hearing her tell her life, since what I sought in human existence was its vibrant pulsating side.’ He begs her for her story. Marie is aware that a prostitute’s life outside the bed is not a story clients want to be reminded of. But as often throughout this book the flow of intimacy, irony, contemplation and self-scrutiny is suddenly stoppered: there’s a curt statement that switches your mind to a new possibility of revelation.
‘To you I can.’
And in her four words there’s unspoken nuance on the strange nature of their closeness. Why ‘to him’?
She begins a soliloquy that could be lifted out of the book as a novella in itself. Flaubert complained in his early writings that language is inadequate to depths of feeling. This is over whelmingly disproved by himself in Marie’s telling of her story. One might doubt whether a woman of her brutally humble background could have such a command of words to embody feelings. What can’t be questioned, only received with amazement, is how a male writer could enter identity with a woman out of his class and kind, so utterly. This is the writer’s clairvoyance, that all writers share to a certain extent, which this time is beyond what inevitably comes to mind in comparison – James Joyce’s creation of inner musings of Molly Bloom. The twenty-year-old Flaubert achieved close to the great Hungarian writer-critic Georg Lukács’s definition of the fiction writer’s unachievable ultimate aim: wholeness; how to express all. Flaubert’s narrator says he is ‘like a bee gathering everything to nourish me and give me life’. Flaubert, creating him and the woman Marie, attains this – for his work. The brief novel, with its hurtingly fresh evocation of passion for nature and sexual love as two fused expressions of the same primal source, its implicit social critique, linking individuals to their time, is shocking, yes – not in the sense of offensive but of awakening as you read, areas of thought evaded, hidden. I leave it to you, the reader, to reach The End – at what point the author puts aside his account of his narrator’s life, turns away to begin the novels of his celebrated maturity, including Madame Bovary.
Gustave Flaubert’s famously cryptic remark of that period: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ Madame Bovary is myself. In this early novel, all the manifestations of life revealed are somewhere buried in all of us. We were or are young. C’est nous. It’s us.
2004
Leo Tolstoy and The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Tolstoy plunges the reader directly into his stories; no ponderous scene-setting used by other nineteenth-century writers. War and Peace begins with the broadside announcement by a St Petersburg socialite, Napoleon has taken Genoa and Lucca – the era of the Napoleonic wars is instantly stage-set. The opening of Anna Karenina is a calm bombshell: ‘Everything had gone wrong in the Oblonsky household.’ The Death of Ivan Ilyich thrusts the reader into the office of the court among lawyers to hear ‘Gentlemen! Ivan Ilyich has died.’
The story begins at its end. But this is not just a familiar novelistic device, followed by a rewind of a life. The intention is to shock – and in an unconventional way. It succeeds. These are Ilyich’s lawyer colleagues and friends; and their unspoken reaction to the sad news is, ‘What about that, he’s dead; but I’m not.’ His intimate colleague Pyotr Ivanovich is anxious to be done with the obligatory visit to pay respects to the corpse lying in the deceased’s home and get away to his game of cards. To make up for this irreverence he crosses himself repeatedly until the formula seems excessive as he gazes at the dead man’s face; he sees there a ‘reproach or a reminder to the living’ but it has ‘no relevance’ to him. So tolls an ominous note that resounds throughout the story: no one wants to face the mystery of death as inevitable in his or her own person. The note resonates with a prevailing materialism that makes a brassy travesty of life’s final event. Praskovya Fyodorovna, Ivan’s wife, weeps while she enquires ‘most thoroughly’ about the price of the burial plot and whether she could not somehow extract more compensation money for her husband’s demise from the government in which he had a prestigious position as a member of the Chamber of Justice. Only the peasant servant Gerasim, handing Pyotr Ivanovich his fur coat, remarks innocently, ‘It’ll be the same for all of us.’
What did Ivan Ilyich die of? – the gentlemen asked.
Will it be the same for all? Tolstoy has a devastating diagnosis which will be revealed through his unflinching genius in this short novel which encompasses such great themes.
Ivan Ilyich was the son of a civil servant who ‘made the sort of career … that gets people to a position in which … though it proves clear they are unfit to do any real job, nonetheless, due to their … rank, they … are given fabricated, fictitious posts and non-fictitious thousands …’ of roubles. Ivan consequently ‘assimilated … their ways, their outlooks on life, and established friendly relations with them’. His acquired characteristics Tolstoy lists as sensuality, vanity and – somewhat misplaced, it would seem, in the same category as something reprehensible? – liberalism. But that may be explained when the reader comes to understand that the story is being told in the context of the writer’s convictions when he wrote it in 1886.
After law school, Ivan is provided by his father with a post as an officer in a provincial government for which he is kitted out materially from the most luxurious shops. He is urbane, suitably obsequious to the Governor, popular with the men and has amorous liaisons in accordance with what is manly and fashionable. I’m tempted to quote directly from Tolstoy time and again, since his castigation in the form of wry wit makes his observations so succinct in comparison with any lame attempt at paraphrase. ‘Everything took place with clean hands, in clean shirts, with French words … in the very highest society.’ Five years later, Ilyich’s career takes off with the new judicial initiatives put in place as a result of the freeing of the serfs in 1861. He becomes examining magistrate in a different province. The higher post brings within him a sense of the power of the ruling class. He doesn’t directly abuse this power; more subtly, its seduction lies in trying to ‘emolliate its manifestations’: the classic ethos of liberalism exposed by Tolstoy, as when Ilyich dismisses ‘from his mind all circumstances’ (my italics) relating to a case; but Tolstoy’s infallible skill implants in the reader’s subconscious what will be recalled when exposition comes later, as one realises that Tolstoy is accusing society of creating criminals out of unjust social conditions. The implication follows that in accordance with the general hypocrisy of his way of life Ilyich was not dispensing justice.
Outward form is what he follows in everything.
‘Indeed, why on earth shouldn’t I get married?’ He marries an attractive, intelligent girl of the right class. Not a great love. But suitable. Marriage in that milieu is, like death, a matter of accoutrements. ‘Conjugal caresses’ are simply an adjunct to the right furnishings and objects d’art to keep up with the Tsarist high society Joneses. But with pregnancy and the advent of crying babies, the suitable wife becomes fractious and there are vulgar scenes between the couple. The pleasant decorum of bourgeois life seems to be unfairly disrupted by primal reality. To escape it – though Ilyich does not or will not see this as a retreat from reality – he devotes himself obsessively to his work. There, too, there is no satisfaction, only an insufficient salary and, after seventeen years at middle-level posts, the evidence that he has been passed over for advancement to a presiding judgeship. The angry single purpose of his life, now, is to ‘get a post with a salary of five thousand roubles’. Again, as his father managed for him when he was a youth, he finds such a post through knowing the right people. Pride and pocket rejoice: ‘Ivan Ilyich was completely
happy.’ This is expressed the only way he knows how. He sets about furnishing the finest house he’s ever had with the luxuries which will surely please his wife and cushion the hell he has found in marriage. Supervising the interior decorating himself, he falls while adjusting the drape of a curtain and hurts his side, but, in the general euphoria, ignores the mishap as trivial.
Where does moral downfall begin in our lives? What is trivial in the distortion of human values? Tolstoy, the self-accusatory moralist who was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church for rejection of what he declared distortion of Christ’s original teachings, has the genius of dramatising, through his individual characters in apparently trivial actions, how we become what we are. Ivan Ilyich’s slow death begins soon in the splendid new house, and in his struggle to fulfil the duties of the five-thousand-plus-fringe-benefits post, while suffering an illness which doctors quarrel over attempting to diagnose. It is a new source of shrill reproaches from his wife: illness is his fault, as everything that affects her adversely always is. The only individual who waits upon the suffering man and does not resent his infirmity as deliberately spoiling a pleasant personal life is that servant Gerasim whom we overheard saying of death in the opening pages of the story, ‘It’ll be the same for all of us.’ Yes – the creative mastery of Tolstoy, in which every detail has significance, nothing occurs just to be forgotten, brings this man back into the story. He empties the bedpan without revulsion and it is he who quite naturally takes the burden of Ilyich’s legs up on his strong shoulders to ease pain. Of course, Tolstoy is glorifying the human values he saw in the peasants who had been – and despite the abolition of serfdom still were – despised by the privileged class who betrayed these values flamboyantly, destructive of humanity both in themselves and towards others. Isn’t the peasant behaving as the powerless vassal subservient to a master? Yet the passages in which Ilyich and Gerasim are alone together are so moving that they seem, and perhaps intentionally are, an underlying theme in the overall disillusion of this book; it is possible that people could become truly human in their relations to one another, despite the contrary evidence of history, of race, economic and social class, the material accoutrements of division that have been allowed by Ivan Ilyich to determine his life. Whether it is so or not, he believes his terminal illness was caused by his forgotten mishap when he fell trying to adjust the drape of a curtain – a symbol of privilege gained and stolen by injustice: the private ownership of vast lands, the indiscriminate exile to Siberia of the desperately poor turned to petty crime, and the blessing of the church over all this.
Telling Times Page 73