Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  Enjolras is the leader of the small group of revolutionaries who rise up in Paris on June 5, 1832, and who hope to lead a national insurrection against the bourgeois regime of King Louis-Philippe. Their hope is vain. All of them die, and with them dies the most charming person in Les Misérables, the street urchin Gavroche. Enjolras, after executing a murderous police spy, Le Cabuc, delivers a prophetic oracle marked by the infinite sadness of idealistic self-sacrifice:

  ‘Citizens,’ said Enjolras, ‘what that man did was abominable and what I have done is horrible. He killed, and that is why I killed. I was obliged to do it, for this rebellion must be disciplined. Murder is an even greater crime here than elsewhere. We are under the eyes of the revolution, priests of the republic, the tokens of a cause, and our actions must not be subject to calumny. Therefore I judged this man and condemned him to death. But at the same time, compelled to do what I did but also abhorring it, I have passed judgement on myself, and you will learn in due course what my sentence is.’

  A quiver ran through his audience.

  ‘We will share your fate,’ cried Combeferre.

  ‘It may be,’ said Enjolras. ‘I have more to say. In executing that man I bowed to necessity. But the necessity was a monster conceived in the old world, and its name is fatality. By the law of progress, this fatality must give way to fraternity. This is a bad moment for speaking the word “love”; nevertheless I do speak it, and glory in it. Love is the future. I have had resort to death, but I hate it. In the future, citizens, there will be no darkness or lightnings, no savage ignorance or blood-feuds. Since there will be no Satan there will be no Michael. No man will kill his fellow, the earth will be radiant, mankind will be moved by love. That time will come, citizens, the time of peace, light, and harmony, of joy and life. It will come. And the purpose of our death is to hasten its coming.’

  This high rhetoric is justified by its occasion and by the character of its speaker. Victor Hugo above all was a poet, and Les Misérables is a vast prose poem. Enjolras cries out from the top of the barricade:

  ‘Yes, education! Light!—light—all things are born of light and all things return to it! Citizens, our nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy. Nothing in it will resemble ancient history. Today’s fears will all have been abolished—war and conquest, the clash of armed nations, the course of civilization dependent on royal marriages, the birth of hereditary tyrannies, nations partitioned by a congress or the collapse of a dynasty, religions beating their heads together like rams in the wilderness of the infinite. Men will no longer fear famine or exploitation, prostitution from want, destitution born of unemployment—or the scaffold, or the sword, or any other malic of chance in the tangle of events. One might almost say, indeed, that there will be no more events. Men will be happy. Mankind will fulfill its own laws as does the terrestrial globe, and harmony will be restored between the human souls and the heavens. The souls will circle about the Truth as the planets circle round the sun. I am speaking to you, friends, in a dark hour; but this is the hard price that must be paid for the future. A revolution is a toll-gate. But mankind will be liberated, uplifted and consoled. We here affirm it, on this barricade. Whence should the cry of love proceed, if not from the sacrificial altar? Brothers, this is the meeting place of those who reflect and those who suffer. This barricade is not a matter of rubble and paving-stone; it is built of two components, of ideas and of suffering. Here wretchedness and idealism come together. Day embraces night and says to her, “I shall die with you and you will be reborn with me.” It is of the embraces of despair that faith is born. Suffering brings death, but the idea brings immortality. That agony and immortality will be mingled and merged in one death. Brothers, we who die here will die in the radiance of the future. We go to a tomb flooded with the light of dawn.’

  On March 7, 2018, this prophecy is a sorrow. Victor Hugo, who thought he was a god, speaks through Enjolras, who knows he is only a man about to die. Yet Enjolras in his rapture moves us. Is it possible to die in the radiance of the future? I have known men and women who at the end thought so. When my time comes, in only a few years, doubtless I will think about those I have loved, yet the idea will bring no intimation of immortality. Without Enjolras, Les Misérables might not hold me. Jean Valjean is more myth than man. Javert is a man who goes to suicide by knowing only the law. Victor Hugo projected himself as Marius and thus marred his masterwork by sentimentality. I am not sure this matters. Les Misérables is more a tidal wave than a book. Baudelaire, a great poet unable to evade Victor Hugo’s influence, joked that the Ocean and Hugo deserved one another. Fighting the waves is an idle pastime.

  And yet, and yet, Les Misérables will live forever. Why? Is it the urchin Gavroche singing even as the bullets strike him? Is it Jean Valjean growing into a reluctant Prometheus? It has to be Victor Hugo, who was his own poem. This is how he concludes his cavalcade of watching and hoping:

  Nevertheless, those who study the health of society must now and then shake their heads. Even the strongest-minded and most clear-thinking must have their moments of misgiving. Will the future ever arrive? The question seems almost justified when one considers the shadows looming ahead, the somber confrontation of egoists and outcasts. On the side of the egoists, prejudice—that darkness of a rich education—appetite that grows with intoxication, the bemusement of prosperity which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which in some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakeable complacency, the ego so inflated that it stifles the soul; and on the side of the outcasts, greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human animal in search of personal fulfilment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.

  Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.

  CHAPTER 19

  A Sportsman’s Notebook (1852)

  IVAN TURGENEV

  ERNEST RENAN was the celebrated author of the absurd Life of Jesus (1863), a work that asserted Yeshua was not a Jew but an Aryan. Sometimes I have the impression that Renan read only the Gospel of John. Nevertheless, Renan was eloquent and spoke at Turgenev’s funeral in Paris in 1883. Henry James later quoted and approved Renan’s remarks:

  “Turgenev,” said M. Renan, “received by the mysterious decree which marks out human vocations the gift which is noble beyond all others: he was born essentially impersonal.” The passage is so eloquent that one must repeat the whole of it. “His conscience was not that of an individual to whom nature had been more or less generous: it was in some sort the conscience of a people. Before he was born he had lived for thousands of years; infinite successions of reveries had amassed themselves in the depths of his heart. No man has been as much as he the incarnation of a whole race: generations of ancestors, lost in the sleep of centuries, speechless, came through him to life and utterance.”

  (James, “Ivan Turgenev”)

  The late Randall Jarrell, whom I met only a few times but admired, published The Anchor Book of Stories in 1958, where I first encountered Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook. After sixty years I remember my pleasure in Turgenev’s stories. They were indeed “essentially impersonal.” “Bezhin Meadow” stayed in my mind, particularly its conclusion:

  ‘D’you remember Vasily?’ added Kostya suddenly.

  ‘What Vasily?’ asked Fedya.

  ‘The one who was drowned,’ answered Kostya. ‘In this very same river. What a fine chap he was! Oh, what a fine chap! His mother, Feklista, how she loved him! It was as if she felt, Feklista did, that his death would come by water. Vasily used to come with us in summer
to bathe in the river—and she’d get all in a fluster. The other mothers didn’t care a bit, they’d walk past with their washpails, they’d waddle by, but Feklista would put her pail down and start calling him. “Come back, come back,” she’d say, “come back, light of my eyes! Oh, come back, my little eagle!” And how he came to drown, Lord alone knows. He was playing on the bank, and his mother was there too, raking hay, and suddenly she heard what sounded like someone blowing bubbles under water—she looked, and there was only Vasily’s cap floating in the water. Well, since then, Feklista, too, hasn’t been right in the head. She comes and lies at the place where he drowned; there she lies, boys, and starts to sing—d’you remember, Vasily always used to sing a song—well that’s the one she sings, too, and cries and cries, and complains bitterly to God.

  ‘Here comes Pavel’ said Fedya.

  Pavel came up to the fire with a full pot in his hand.

  ‘Well, boys,’ he began after a silence, ‘there’s something bad.’

  ‘What?’ asked Kostya hurriedly.

  ‘I heard Vasily’s voice.’

  Everyone shuddered.

  ‘What’s that you say?’ whispered Kostya.

  ‘So help me God. I’d just begun to bend down to the water, and suddenly I heard my name being called, in Vasily’s voice, like it was from under the water: “Pavel, Pavel, come here!” I went away. I got the water, though.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ said the boys, crossing themselves.

  ‘That was a water-goblin calling you, Pavel,’ added Fedya. ‘And we were just talking about Vasily.’

  ‘Oh, that’s an evil sign,’ said Ilyusha, with deliberation.

  ‘Well, never mind, forget about it!’ said Pavel resolutely, and sat down again. ‘You can’t escape your fate.’ The boys became quieter. It was clear that Pavel’s story had made a deep impression on them. They began to settle down in front of the fire, as if preparing for sleep.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Kostya suddenly, lifting his head.

  Pavel listened intently.

  ‘That’s curlews flying past and whistling.’

  ‘Where are they flying to?’

  ‘To the country where there’s supposed to be no winter.’

  ‘Is there really such a country?’

  ‘Yes, there is.’

  ‘Far away?’

  ‘Far, far away, beyond the warm seas.’

  Kostya sighed and closed his eyes.

  (trans. Charles and Natasha Hepburn)

  Here Turgenev the hunter and narrator has vanished. He and the boys fall asleep. The narrator’s waking is rendered exquisitely, almost without affect:

  A flood of freshness coursed over my face. I opened my eyes—the day was breaking. There was still no flush of dawn, but a growing pallor in the East. I could vaguely make out my surroundings. The pale-grey sky was growing light, and cold, and blue; the stars twinkled feebly or went out; the earth had grown damp, the leaves dripped, from somewhere came sounds of life, and voices, and the damp breath of dawn was already abroad, hovering above the earth. My body answered it with a faint thrill of exhilaration. I rose quickly and went across to the boys. They were all sleeping like the dead around the dying fire; only Pavel half-raised himself and stared fixedly at me. I nodded to him and went my way along the steaming river. I had not gone two versts when, around me in the broad water-meadow and ahead on the deepening green of the hills, from wood to wood, and behind me over the long dusty track, over the flushed sparkling bushes, and along the river, which was of a timid blue below the thinning mist—flowed scarlet, then red, then golden torrents of youthful, blazing light…The world began to rustle, awoke, began to sing, to murmur, to speak. On all sides the heavy dewdrops flashed into blazing diamonds; to meet me, pure and clear, as if they too had been washed in the coolness of morning, came the sounds of a church bell, and suddenly, driven by my friends the boys, the herd of horses, fresh from sleep, galloped past me…

  With sorrow I must add that Pavel died before the year was out. He was not drowned, but killed by a fall from a horse. A pity, he was a splendid lad!

  The flight of the curlews to a faraway land with no winter is prologue to obsequies performed for Vasily and Pavel, both of them splendid lads. And that is all.

  Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.

  (Samuel Johnson, March 22, 1750, The Rambler, Number 2)

  That famous apothegm might have been Turgenev’s. I read Turgenev with deep sympathy, but I do not know what to make of Turgenev the person. Dostoevsky loathed Turgenev and ridiculed him as Karmazinov in Demons. Since Dostoevsky is one of those major writers whom I abominate, and Demons is hysterical, I would prefer to think better of Turgenev the man. As his bitterly nostalgic novella First Love traces, his parental background was difficult. His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Turgenev, who was to die at only forty-one, was a cavalry colonel who served in the war against Napoleon. His mother, Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva, married Sergei in 1816. Older than her husband, who had married her for her wealth, Varvara was increasingly embittered by his philandering, and became harsh and tyrannical toward their three sons, one of whom died early.

  Ivan Turgenev never married, unless you can count his endless relationship with Pauline Viardot, a famous French mezzo-soprano—a ménage à trois in which he shared her with her husband Louis, a journalist twenty-one years older than Pauline. Turgenev and Louis Viardot always remained friends, and Turgenev’s illegitimate daughter, fathered upon a serf seamstress, was absorbed into the Viardot household.

  There seems to have been only one discreditable incident in Turgenev’s life. In 1838, the nineteen-year-old writer, bound for Berlin to study, was on a steamer that caught fire and was incinerated. According to his translator and biographer Leonard Schapiro:

  On the third day out the steamer, then about a mile away from Travemünde, caught fire, and was completely destroyed. The great majority of the passengers escaped without injury. Turgenev’s behaviour during the fire excited a great deal of talk. According to stories that circulated in Moscow and St Petersburg he had completely lost his head, loudly lamented his approaching end, tried to push his way into the lifeboat, brutally shoving aside women and children, and finally, in full sight of the entire company, seized a sailor by the arm and offered him ten thousand roubles in his mother’s name if he would save him, saying that he was the only son of a rich widow and could not bear to die so young.

  Leonard Schapiro, a jovial historian of Russia, may have been a fan of the Marx Brothers, as I am, since there is a flavor of Groucho in this paragraph. Varvara castigated her unfortunate son for cowardice, lamenting its effect upon her rather minimal social life.

  Turgenev died a slow, painful, rather heroic death, thinking as always of others. He wrote a letter to Tolstoy, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship, urging the great writer of the Russian land to come back to composing fiction rather than moral tracts.

  Granted that his childhood had been difficult, with an uncaring father and a sadistic mother who flogged her serfs, Turgenev is a miracle of human goodness and of aesthetic sensibility, somewhat limited in its range. His sketches, stories, fragments, novellas are stronger than his more ambitious novels. Perhaps an impersonal stance cannot sustain a long fiction, unless you are Gustave Flaubert.

  I return to A Sportsman’s Notebook and the lovely vision of the dwarf Kasyan from Fair Springs. Kasyan condemns all letting of blood: bird, beast, human. In the midst of his exchange with the sportsman, there is a visitation of what William Blake called “the human form divine”: