Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  MY TRAVEL DIARY: 1936, by Paul Tillich, edited and with an introduction by Jerald C. Brauer, translated from the German by Maria Pelikan. 192 pp. Harper & Row, 1970.

  The late Professor Tillich, having fled Nazi Germany in 1933, returned to Europe three years later for a round of lectures and conferences, and he mailed his wife installments of the diary he kept from April to September. Now this affectionate record has been published, and while it is neither very amusing nor very enlightening, it is something of both. Tillich’s own generous and receptive nature shines through his notation of countless conversations, audiences, bottles of wine, beautiful vistas, nights of good or less good sleep. In Paris he visits night clubs featuring “very nude” girls; in Switzerland he climbs glaciers. In Scotland he is “seated at the Dean’s right, next to Patterson, an old systematic theologian”; in Holland he marvels at the Rembrandts. At all stops he counsels and consoles friends he may never see again—expatriated and polarized citizens of a Europe that was on the edge of the abyss and knew it, yet was still the immemorial Europe of good food, mountain views, well-mannered prostitutes, hikes, ideas, and rain showers that enliven rather than ruin an afternoon. Though Tillich visits Barth and gossips about Heidegger, he rarely reads a book or goes to church. In a way, this is everybody’s summer abroad, right down to the well-evoked days at sea, except that Hitler’s handwriting is now no longer a topic of analysis, and trips to Russia are not the latest thing among the intelligentsia. This charming memento of a vanished man and era has been indifferently served by its publishers: typographical errors abound, and where contemporary photographs of the scenery would have helped, there are quite superfluous pen-and-ink scribbles (by Alfonso Ossorio) of nothing in particular.

  DELIVERANCE TO THE CAPTIVES, by Karl Barth, translated from the German by Marguerite Wieser. 160 pp. Harper, 1961.

  This collection of recent sermons displays the grave, generous, and—often—genial humanity of “anti-humanist” theology’s living Olympian. Seekers of novelty and subtlety in philosophical accommodation should seek elsewhere; it has been Barth’s work to turn the Christian field with a resharpened plow, rather than to look for new pastures or draw new boundaries. The force of these sermons lies in that—minus a few topical references and with a few adjustments of emphasis—they might have been preached any time in the last two millennia, and, but for their exceptional compactness and pertinence of expression, by a conservative clergyman anywhere. Perhaps because they were for the most part delivered to inmates of the prison in Basel, their dominant note—an unusual one in contemporary Christian literature—is of hope, of joy in the Lord, of an ardor that can assert, concerning faith, that “no human being has ever prayed for this in vain.”

  How I CHANGED MY MIND, by Karl Barth, with an introduction and epilogue by John D. Godsey. 96 pp. John Knox Press, 1966.

  A bracing demi-autobiography, essentially composed of three self-descriptive articles Barth wrote for the Christian Century in 1938, 1948, and 1958 under the heading “How I Changed My Mind.” Actually, in the three decades considered, Barth changed his mind rather little, holding fast to his central vision of God’s otherness through all political and theological storms. The dominant impression these pages leave is of Barth’s heroic stubbornness, the reasoned yet pugnacious refusal to let others think for him: when political relativism was fashionable, he implacably opposed Hitler, and when political absolutism prevailed, he took a mediating attitude toward Communism. Though his theology, a virtual reinvention of Christian orthodoxy, must be described as conservative, it has been viewed by himself as a “restless” activity, a “process” in which he has been concerned “not to forfeit my freedom.” What also emerges from these essays, amplified by the editor’s description of a visit to Barth in 1965 and the theologian’s concluding letter, is an account of the aging process as it has been experienced, with rare good grace, by a man of firm health, normal worldliness, and enviable sense of vocation.

  DISCOURSE ON THINKING, by Martin Heidegger, translated from the German by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. 93 pp. Harper & Row, 1966.

  A small book, of which nearly half is occupied by a not very helpful introduction. The other half consists of a “Memorial Address” delivered by Heidegger in honor of the German composer Conradin Kreutzer, and a trialogue between a scientist, a scholar, and a teacher entitled “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking.” The address, with a certain donnish orotundity, lucidly sets forth the propositions that there are two kinds of thinking—calculative and meditative—and that amid the technological triumphs of calculative thinking man must survive as a meditative being. This he can do by saying both yes and no to technology, the yes being a “releasement toward things” and the no a continuing “openness to the mystery.” These concepts are developed into total obscurity by the “Conversation,” whose English version abounds in possibly precise but gritty equivalents like “re-present,” “autochthonic,” and “that-which-regions.” Meditative thinking is explained as “the coming-into-the-nearness of distance,” and our human position as a kind of holy “waiting”—“The relation to that-which-regions is waiting.” And “That-which-regions [die Gegnet in German] is an abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself, so that in it openness is halted and held, letting everything merge in its own resting.” What emerges is a humanism tied to a mysticism shorn of theology; the final coalescence of meaning is a metaphor of the night that, without seam or thread, binds the distant stars together in apparent nearness. The rarefied poetry of the discourse is made eerie by our knowledge that it was based on a conversation that really occurred, within Germany, in 1944–1945, when the anvils of Hitler’s hell were beating loudest.

  THE HEART PREPARED: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life, by Norman Pettit. 252 pp. Yale, 1966.

  This finely written and beautifully printed study of post-Reformation theological niceties doubles as an analysis of the infant American psyche. Zwingli and Calvin held that man in his utter depravity “could neither anticipate salvation nor look to the inner self for signs of regeneration.” The English founders of Puritanism tentatively qualified the severity of predestinarian doctrine with suggestions that the heart, however unworthy, might predispose or prepare itself for the invasion of saving grace. In the theocratic communities of New England, a proclaimed inner experience of conversion became a criterion for church membership, and the “grappling with the heart” developed, notably in the discourses of Thomas Hooker, of Hartford, into a veritable poetics of introspection. Preparationism, never without its opponents, eventually succumbed to a reasserted Calvinism and to the practical problems of church enrollment, but its experiential emphasis remains a feature of American religious revivals and perhaps accounts for a Pelagian bias in our spiritual heritage. Dr. Pettit, though he traces the image of the prepared heart down to its final diffusion in Emerson, leaves to implication the present relevance of his thesis. His approach is strikingly concrete and, dealing with quibbles that might seem quaint, convincingly serious. In a prose whose clarity belies the volumes of cobwebbed tracts he has suffered through, he renders penumbral nuances of theology distinct, gives personality to a dozen divines, and somewhat sweetens our impression of the Puritan tenets.

  DOSTOEVSKY

  A Raw Something

  THE ADOLESCENT, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew. 585 pp. Doubleday, 1971.

  Why a new translation? And, if a new translation, why of this novel? Written between The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov, The Adolescent (entitled A Raw Youth in the 1916 translation by Constance Garnett) possesses the greatness of neither. The novel, though it bears many marks of Dostoevsky’s devotion, and definitively enunciates some of the themes dearest to him, has that penetrating badness that casts doubt over even the peaks of an author’s accomplishment—as, say, Across the River and into the Trees drained magic from all of Hemingway’s headwaiters and undermined forever the consolations of café stoicism. In Th
e Adolescent the frequent feverishness of Dostoevsky’s characters appears compulsory and their willful, self-careless perversity seems merely automatic, an author’s trick he employs in scene after scene. For once, the elements of Dostoevsky’s fictional universe—the fantastically compressed action, the stunning tirades, the melodramatic welter of coincidences and encounters and incriminating documents and postponed revelations—fail to fuse into a fiery whole. Rather, a string of firecrackers goes off, some louder than others, and some so damply we turn back the pages to catch what we missed. Four novels, Dostoevsky once told his wife, fight for attention within the covers of this one; his original instinct, Mr. MacAndrew tells us in his lengthy and gossipy introduction, was to entitle the book “Disorder.”

  The hero is a young bastard, Arkady Dolgoruky. Unlike some of Dostoevsky’s first-person narrators, Arkady does not conveniently vanish when the action becomes heated, but wears out several pairs of boots rushing around St. Petersburg to keep eavesdropping appointments and wears out our ears with expostulations over the difficulties of maintaining a narrative so tangled. His voice and psyche, however, are the strongest thing in the novel: a “raw youth’s” passion for exploration and posturing and humiliation have rarely been more indulgently dramatized. Arkady aside, the characters seem inferior copies of characters met in the other novels—Versilov a more trivial Stavrogin, Katarina a feeble sister of The Idiot’s Nastasia, Makar a preliminary study for Father Zosima. The plot, on a circumstantial level, absurdly revolves around a slightly embarrassing letter that rides out six hundred pages in Arkady’s coat pocket; on a thematic level, it gropes toward secrets of parenthood and kinship that are firmly seized in the next novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

  Why this novel? Perhaps, though Mr. MacAndrew does not say so, he felt it to be especially appropriate to America’s present condition of self-doubt and generational estrangement. Here is the Russia of the 1870’s:

  All the better people are crazy … only the mediocrities, the unimaginative bystanders, are having a great time.… Selfishness displaces the old unifying principle, and the whole system breaks up into a multitude of individuals, each with a full set of civil rights.… whole batches of our best people are tearing themselves away from it and lightheartedly joining the roving packs of the disorderly and the envious.

  Sound familiar? Yes, but I doubt that a majority of Americans will embrace Dostoevsky’s solution: “any order as long as it is our native one.”

  And why a new translation? Presumably because the old one, by the tireless Mrs. Garnett, was judged to be improvable. I have compared passages of Garnett vs. MacAndrew, and read the last third of the novel in alternate chapters from each; and my impression is that more has been lost than has been gained. Mr. MacAndrew’s modern idiom does very well with the jerks and halts of interior monologue, and occasionally captures a precision where Mrs. Garnett either flunked the Russian or held to a Victorian middle style—“as though pouring his words through a funnel” betters “dropping out his words one by one”; “crush him until there’s only a wet spot left behind” outcruels “pound him to a jelly.” But more often the precision is on Garnett’s side: “worldwide compassion for all” pales to “universal concern”; “she was now evil” simpers as “she was not a nice person.” MacAndrew drops the patronymics, which may save some confusion but sacrifices a peculiar warmth of Russian novels, and when terms of endearment are employed he is almost helpless. Where Garnett’s phrasing is moving, his is often blank tin: “They rejoiced, like birds, did not feel their ruin, and their voices were like little bells” becomes in MacAndrew’s version, “They’re happy like little birds and their voices sound like jingle bells.” And surprisingly, the modern translator shows less feel for the philosophic checkpoints of the novel: the key concept that Garnett imaginatively renders as “seemliness” is blandly presented by MacAndrew as “beauty,” in quotation marks. The most famous sentence in A Raw Youth—

  It always has been a mystery, and I have marvelled a thousand times at that faculty in man (and in the Russian, I believe, more especially) of cherishing in his soul his loftiest ideal side by side with the most abject baseness, and all quite sincerely—

  comes out all muddled and adverbial in MacAndrew’s version—

  Yes, it has always been a mystery to me and thousands of times I’ve stopped and marveled at man’s capacity (especially a Russian’s, I believe) to cherish in himself some infinitely lofty ideal alongside something unspeakably base, and all this quite openly.

  Even the title feels wrong. MacAndrew has Arkady as nineteen, Garnett as twenty years old: either way, he is too old to be an “adolescent.” In general, two translators being more or less competent, the one closer in time to the original is apt to be better, more instinctively sharing the author’s universe. Manners and moral concerns become distant and take language with them. The characters in the Garnett translation behave bizarrely, but as foreigners do. In MacAndrew’s translation they are bizarre like figures in a dream.

  Polina and Aleksei and Anna and Losnitsky

  THE GAMBLER, by Fyodor Dostoevski, with Polina Suslova’s Diary, translated by Victor Terras. 366 pp. University of Chicago Press, 1972.

  The University of Chicago Press, which has issued, under the editorship of Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky’s notebooks for his five major novels, has extended this valuable series with a new, complexly augmented translation of the short novel The Gambler. The augmentations include: letters from Dostoevsky during the hectic period of his life when he was obsessed by gambling, debts, his dying wife, his dying brother, and Polina Suslova; the diary of this same Polina Suslova, who is described by the normally unemphatic Encyclopaedia Britannica as a “young woman of sensual, proud, and ‘demoniac’ character” and who is often cited by critics as a prototype for the perverse and taunting Dostoevsky heroines; and a short story by her about a love affair between “Losnitsky” and “Anna.” This bundle of interrelated materials is intelligently edited and fluently translated, though I blinked at the exclamation “Wow!!!”—the Garnett translation has “What!!!”—and regretted that the proofreaders allowed one doubled slug to slip through. And I would have been grateful for a little factual background to Polina’s diary, “published here in English for the first time.” Why does it begin and end so conveniently and abruptly, August 19, 1863, to November 6, 1865, in effect bracketing the European phase of her affair with Dostoevsky? Did she keep a diary only then? And the chronology of this affair is not set forward as clearly as it is in, say, Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s biography.

  Polina and Dostoevsky probably met, in Petersburg, before September of 1861, when a story of hers appeared in Vremya (Time), which he edited. He was forty; she was little more than half his age. They became friends and, by the time she was twenty-three, lovers. He kept the secret from his wife and made no offer to divorce her, which may have offended Polina. However, she went to Paris in the spring of 1863 with the understanding that Dostoevsky would join her there and that they would travel together in Italy. A tangle of business generated by the government’s suppression of his magazine held him in Petersburg until mid-August, and en route to his mistress he stopped off at Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden to gamble—first winning, then losing. By the time he arrived in Paris, Polina had been captivated, seduced, and abandoned by Salvador, a young South American medical student, who did not love her. Dostoevsky quickly adjusted to this new embarrassment and proposed that he and Polina travel to Italy anyway, not as lovers but “remaining like brother and sister.” Thus uneasily attached, they toured for two months; then Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg, to write Notes from the Underground and most of Crime and Punishment. He did not see Polina until nearly two years later, in the summer of 1865, in Wiesbaden. Though his wife (Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, a she-devil in her own right) had died in the interim, the affair did not prosper. In the few days he and Polina were together, Dostoevsky lost his last kopeck at roulette, and proved no luckier at love. The reunion didn�
��t rate a line in her diary, though it did elicit from him two frantic but amiable letters to her, postage due, begging for a hundred and fifty gulden. Their final encounters occurred that fall and winter, in Petersburg, to which Polina returned in November; “he has been offering me his hand and his heart,” Polina wrote, “and he only makes me angry doing so.” She departed three months later. He finished Crime and Punishment and in October of 1866 dictated The Gambler to a competent, patient, and smitten young stenographer, Anna Snitkina. Dostoevsky married Anna in February of 1867, and that spring, in response to a letter from Polina, informed her of his marriage and added, “Au revoir, my good friend forever!” He and Polina did not—if one discounts a romantic story Dostoevsky’s daughter tells of a “woman in black” who called on her father in the late seventies—meet again.