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

by Bloom, Harold

  Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant

  From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,

  Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent

  On master-work of intellect or hand,

  No honour leave its mighty monument,

  Has but one comfort left: all triumph would

  But break upon his ghostly solitude.

  But is there any comfort to be found?

  Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

  What more is there to say? That country round

  None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,

  Incendiary or bigot could be found

  To burn that stump on the Acropolis,

  Or break in bits the famous ivories

  Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.

  I hear a final sadness akin to The Cossacks in Yeats at his most memorable:

  Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

  What more is there to say?

  CHAPTER 22

  War and Peace (1869)

  LEO TOLSTOY

  IT SEEMS JUST TO ASSERT that the two most powerful narrative ancient writers in Western tradition are the Homer of the Iliad, and the Yahwist, who first told the tales of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, in what we now call Genesis and Exodus.

  I find little in common between the Iliad and the J writer. They are morally and cognitively incompatible. Achilles is the son of the sea nymph Thetis and of Peleus, a warrior king who accompanies Heracles and Jason in the quest for the Golden Fleece. Thetis dips the infant Achilles in the Styx so as to make him immortal, but since she holds him by one heel, that becomes his vulnerability. He survives the Iliad but in later poetic legends is slain by a poisoned arrow in that heel.

  Jacob wrestles with the Angel of Death and wins the new name Israel, which appears to mean “El (God) struggles.” But since the stubborn Jacob, wily even in the womb, held on tight to his twin brother’s (Esau’s) heel, the Hebrew name might mean “overreach” or “heel” or “to follow.”

  Except for this curious interplay on “heel,” no two literary characters share less than Achilles and Jacob/Israel. Achilles is the best of the Achaeans in courage, appearance, strength, skill in battle. Jacob is cunning, endlessly resourceful, patient, wise, and knows that he bears the blessing of Yahweh.

  Tolstoy, as befits the writer since Shakespeare who most has the art of the actual, combines in his representational praxis the incompatible powers of Homer and the Yahwist. Notoriously, Tolstoy loathed William Shakespeare. Surely no other reader of Shakespeare ever has found Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear tedious and offensive. Why Tolstoy could accept the Iliad’s morality, and not Hamlet’s, is a profound puzzle, since Hamlet has more in common with Joseph or with the David of 2 Samuel than he does with Achilles or Hector. I surmise that Tolstoy, despite himself, owed too much to Shakespearean representation, and could not bear to acknowledge the inevitable debt. Prince Andrei has more of Hotspur than of Lord Byron in him, and even Pierre, in his comic aspects, reflects the Shakespearean rather than Homeric or Biblical naturalism. If your characters change less because of experience than by listening to themselves reflect upon their relation to experience, then you are another heir of Shakespeare’s innovations in mimesis, even if you insist passionately that your sense of reality is morally centered whereas Shakespeare’s was not.

  Shakespeare and Tolstoy had the Bible rather than the Iliad in common, and the Shakespearean drama that should have offended Tolstoy most was Troilus and Cressida. Alas, King Lear achieved that bad eminence, and only Falstaff, rather surprisingly, convinced Tolstoy. But, then, the effect of the greatest writers upon one another can be very odd. Writing in 1908, Henry James associated War and Peace with Thackeray’s The Newcomes and Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, since all these were “large loose baggy monsters, with…queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary.” Twenty years earlier, James had a vision of Tolstoy as “a monster harnessed to his great subject—all human life!—as an elephant might be harnessed, for purposes of traction, not to a carriage, but to a coach-house.”

  James’s demand for “an absolutely premeditated art” might seem to collide with Tolstoy’s notorious polemic, What Is Art? (1897), but that is an illusion. Tolstoy is clearly a writer who transcends James as an artist, even as Homer overgoes Virgil and Shakespeare dwarfs Ben Jonson. The representation of persons in War and Peace has the authority and the mastery of what we are compelled to call the real that Tolstoy shares with only a few: Homer, the Bible, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, perhaps Proust. Philip Rahv remarked memorably upon “the critic’s euphoria in the Tolstoyan weather.” The best word there is “weather.” War and Peace, like our cosmos, has weather, but no one would want to say that Tolstoy, like the High Romantics or Dostoevsky, had created a heterocosm. You suffer and die, or joy and live, on our earth in Tolstoy, and not in a visionary realm.

  The Marxist critic Lukács reluctantly conceded that in certain moments Tolstoy broke through to “a clearly differentiated, concrete and existent world, which, if it could spread out into a totality, would be completely inaccessible to the categories of the novel and would require a new form of artistic creation: the form of the renewed epic.” Lukács denied that Tolstoy could accomplish this as a totality, but his ideology made him less than generous toward Tolstoy. A short novel like Hadji Murad certainly is such a totality, but the more than twelve hundred pages of War and Peace, granted the impossibility of an absolute totality at such a length, also gives us “a clearly differentiated, concrete and existent world.” Tolstoy does what a nineteenth-century novelist ought not to be able to do: he reveals aspects of our ordinary reality that we could never see if he had not seen them first. Dickens and Balzac render an extraordinary phantasmagoria that we are eager to absorb into reality, but Tolstoy, more like Shakespeare than he could bear to know, persuades us that the imitation of what seems to be essential nature is more than enough.

  Shakespeare is inexhaustible to analysis, partly because his rhetorical art is nearly infinite. Tolstoy scarcely yields to analysis at all, because his rhetoric evidently also gives the effect of the natural. You have to brood on the balance of determinism and free will in Tolstoy’s personages because he insists that this is your proper work, but you are too carried along by the force of his narrative and the inevitability of his characters’ modes of speaking and thinking to question either the structure of plot or the individual images of voice that inhabit the story. If James and Flaubert and Joyce, the three together, are to be considered archetypes of the novelist, then Tolstoy seems something else, larger and more vital, for which we may lack a name, since Lukács was doubtless correct when he insisted that “the great epic is a form bound to the historical moment,” and that moment was neither Tolstoy’s nor ours.

  W. Gareth Jones emphasizes that War and Peace is not so much a single narrative related by Tolstoy as a network of many narratives, addressed to us as though each of us were Prince Andrei, receptive and dispassionate. Perhaps that is Andrei’s prime function in the novel, to serve as an ideal model for the Tolstoyan reader, even as Pierre perhaps becomes at last the ideal Tolstoyan storyteller. Isaiah Berlin and Martin Price both have illuminated the way that Tolstoy’s heroes win through to serenity by coming to accept “the permanent relationships of things and the universal texture of human life,” as Berlin phrases it. How can a critic convey either the cognitive wisdom or the restrained yet overwhelming pathos that is manifested in Tolstoy’s account of the meeting between Pierre and Natasha at Princess Marya’s when Pierre returns to Moscow after his liberation and imprisonment, and subsequent illness and recovery? It is difficult to conceive of an art that is subtler than the one Tolstoy exercises in Pierre’s realization that Princess Marya’s mourning companion is Natasha, and that he is in love with Natasha:

 
In a room with a low ceiling, lit by one candle, sat the princess and with her someone else in a black dress. Pierre recalled that the princess always had lady companions, but who and what sort these companions were, Pierre did not know and did not recall. “It’s one of her companions,” he thought, glancing at the lady in the black dress.

  The princess rose quickly to meet him and gave him her hand.

  “Yes,” she said, looking intently into his changed face after he had kissed her hand, “so this is how you and I meet. During the last days, he often spoke of you,” she said, shifting her gaze from Pierre to the companion with a shyness that struck him for a moment.

  “I was so glad to learn that you had been saved. It was the only joyful news we had received for a long time.” Again, still more uneasily, the princess glanced at her companion and was about to say something, but Pierre interrupted her.

  “Can you imagine, I knew nothing about him,” he said. “I counted him as killed. All I knew, I knew from other people, at third hand. I know only that he ended up with the Rostovs…What a fate!”

  Pierre was speaking quickly, animatedly. He glanced once at the face of the companion, saw an attentively tender, curious gaze directed at him, and, as often happens during a conversation, felt for some reason that this companion in the black dress was a sweet, kind, nice being, who would not hinder his heart-to-heart talk with Princess Marya.

  But when he said the last words about the Rostovs, the perplexity on Princess Marya’s face showed still more strongly. She again shifted her gaze from Pierre’s face to the face of the lady in the black dress and said:

  “Don’t you recognize her?”

  Pierre glanced once more at the pale, fine face of the companion, with its dark eyes and strange mouth. Something dear, long forgotten, and more than sweet looked at him from those attentive eyes.

  “But no, it can’t be,” he thought. “This stern, thin, pale, aged face? It can’t be her. It’s only a reminiscence of that one.” But just then Princess Marya said: “Natasha.” And the face, with its attentive eyes, with difficulty, with effort, like a rusty door opening—smiled, and from that open door there suddenly breathed and poured out upon Pierre that long-forgotten happiness of which, especially now, he was not even thinking. It breathed out, enveloped, and swallowed him whole. When she smiled, there could no longer be any doubt: it was Natasha, and he loved her.

  (trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

  Massively simple, direct, realistic, as this is, it is also, in its full context, with the strength of the vast novel behind it, an absolutely premeditated art. Henry James is not one of the great literary critics, despite the idolatry of his admirers. Tolstoy, Dickens, and Walt Whitman bear not the slightest resemblance to what James saw them as being, though the old James repented on the question of Whitman. If the highest art after all catches us unaware, even as we and Pierre together learn the secret and meaning of his life in this central moment, then no novelistic art, not even that of Proust, can surpass Tolstoy’s. “Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.” That rugged Tolstoyan principle is certainly supported by this moment, but we cannot forget that Lear and Gloucester’s conversing, one mad and the other blind, is not accessible and comprehensible to everyone, and touches the limits of art as even Tolstoy does not. It is a sadness that Tolstoy could not or would not accommodate the transcendental and extraordinary in King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet, and yet did not resist the Biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, or the strife of Achilles and Hector. The Tolstoyan rejection of Shakespeare may be, however twisted askew, the most formidable tribute that Shakespeare’s powers of representation have ever received.

  Tolstoy was furious at Shakespeare’s pragmatic freedom from Christianity. I am not at all clear as to just what even Tolstoy’s rationalized Christianity has to do with War and Peace, or with Anna Karenina. What matters most in Tolstoy is his altogether Shakespearean gift for individualizing even his minor characters. Shakespeare remains, after four centuries, the greatest of all psychologists, and where else but in Shakespeare could Tolstoy learn his own depth as a psychologist? It is weirdly appropriate that the first sketches of War and Peace were entitled All’s Well That Ends Well. Rereading War and Peace, with its effective, almost theatrical alternation of scenes, I also begin to ask: where, but from Shakespeare, did Tolstoy acquire his sense of scene-shifting as a further index to the clash of personalities?

  Thomas Mann got it right when he ascribed Tolstoy’s hatred of Shakespeare to “antagonism against that universal and all-accepting nature: in the jealousy which a man enduring moral torment was bound to feel in face of the blithe irony of an absolutely creative genius.” I wonder if Mann does not give us another clue as to why the philosopher Wittgenstein, who was so fiercely devoted to Tolstoy, was also distrustful of Shakespeare. Wittgenstein insisted, “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words.” Incessantly rereading Shakespeare, I doubt Wittgenstein, as there is nothing that Shakespeare cannot get into his more than thirty-five thousand words, seventeen hundred of which he had coined for himself.

  Viktor Shklovsky famously called attention to Tolstoy’s art of “making it strange,” of “refusing to recognize an object, of describing it as if it were seen for the first time.” Tolstoy sought and achieved originality in object representation, but his modes of portraying personality and character at their best recall Shakespeare’s, an observation that would have infuriated Tolstoy. The extraordinary changes in Pierre, in War and Peace, follow the Shakespearean paradigm of surprise through involuntary self-overhearing. Tolstoy, who feared his own nihilism, and who secretly had identified God with death, accurately saw that Shakespeare was free of dogmatic shadows, and that Lear’s tragedy, and Macbeth’s, reflected Shakespeare’s pragmatic nihilism. Shakespeare was perhaps the least solipsistic of all great writers; Tolstoy, the most. Tolstoy’s resentment of Shakespeare was genius recognizing its antagonist in an opposed genius.

  Of all Shakespearean roles, Tolstoy most resented Lear’s, as he accurately perceived that King Lear was a pagan play directed to a Christian audience. In 1910, at eighty-two, Tolstoy fled his wife and family, to die at a railway station. The image of Lear’s death was not in Tolstoy’s mind, but it is difficult to keep it away from ours as we contemplate Tolstoy’s desperate end.

  I have read several of the biographies of Tolstoy: Aylmer Maude, A. N. Wilson, Anthony Briggs, Rosamund Bartlett. In different ways, they are all of considerable use. But I am left puzzled about why and how someone who was both a great writer and a towering moralist failed to love a marvelous wife, Sophia Behrs, who became Countess Sophia Tolstaya, and who gave him thirteen children, eight of whom survived childhood, and devoted her life to him, and to his work as a writer. Except for his daughter Alexandra, Tolstoy quarreled with all of his children, and would have disinherited them if he could.

  There was authentic sexual passion between Tolstoy and Sophia, who was sixteen years younger, yet he manifested only the slightest interest in her welfare, and compelled her to break off an innocent friendship with a benign musician. The publication of her diaries in English (2010) was reviewed by my old acquaintance Michael Dirda with a pungency that rendered her belated justice:

  On one page of her husband’s diaries, devoted copyist Sofia comes across this sentence: “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” She acidly comments: “I only wish I had read that 29 years ago, then I would never have married him.”…

  In 1910, just a month before the 82-year-old Tolstoy fled Yasnaya Polyana on the trip that would lead to his death in a railway station far from his home, Sofia—now in her late 60s—celebrates her “name day,” which is also the day that Tolstoy proposed to her. She asks herself: “What did he do to that eighteen-year-old Sonechka Behrs, who gave
him her whole life, her love and her trust?” She sums up the 48 years of their life together: “He has tortured me with his coldness, his cruelty and his extreme egotism.”

  Devoted women readers of Tolstoy can be grateful for his astonishing achievement, but, women and men alike, we owe something also to Sonechka Behrs, and we have to be convinced by her testimony as to his human flaws. Some of the greatest writers have been monsters of egoism. In addition to Tolstoy we can think of Dante, Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth, Victor Hugo, Ibsen, Yeats, Thomas Mann, and in a gentler way Proust and Joyce. From what we know of Cervantes, Montaigne, Molière, Shakespeare, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and in our time Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, literary greatness and humane splendor can coexist.

  Recently, I have taken to reading Lydia Ginzburg’s On Psychological Prose (1971; translated by Judson Rosengrant, 1991) for her insights into personality in Tolstoy’s novels. I do not know much of her other work, but I’m surprised that she discusses Montaigne yet does not mention Shakespeare and Cervantes, who with Montaigne invented the literary representation of personality as we know it. Still, her thoughts on Tolstoy stimulate me:

  The two types of interior monologue reflect one of the most basic and productive contradictions in Tolstoi’s point of view. The zealous analyst in him required “ratiocination” [rassuditel’stvo] as a reliable tool of analysis. Connected with this were his “archaistic” enthusiasms, especially his taste for the literature of eighteenth-century rationalism. Tolstoi’s world-view, however, was antirationalistic. Using rational, analytical means, including a pointedly logical and sometimes even pedantic syntax, Tolstoi broke through the rational veneer of life, delving into what he regarded as its innate, natural essence. Tolstoi was, in the unique quality of this combination, quite close to his favorite thinker, Rousseau.