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

by Bloom, Harold

  This was the death I was reminded of by the crushed thistle in the midst of the plowed field.

  Perhaps I am mistaken by starting with this conclusion. It is one of the many strengths of Hadji Murat that you can begin anywhere and go around the circle again of the hero’s life and death. Tolstoy himself disrupts sequence by showing you the severed head of Hadji Murat before he gives you his hero’s last stand:

  “Ah, that’s good. I’ll still have time. I only need to see him for a minute.”

  “What, on business?” asked Butler.

  “Minor business.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “That depends! For us it’s good, but for somebody else it’s rather nasty.” And Kamenev laughed.

  Just then the walkers and Kamenev reached Ivan Matveevich’s house.

  “Chikhirev!” Kamenev called to a Cossack. “Come here.”

  A Don Cossack moved away from the others and rode up to them. He was wearing an ordinary Don Cossack uniform, boots, a greatcoat, and had saddlebags behind his saddle.

  “Well, take the thing out,” said Kamenev, getting off his horse.

  The Cossack also got off his horse and took a sack with something in it from his saddlebag. Kamenev took the sack from the Cossack’s hands and put his hand into it.

  “So, shall I show you our news? You won’t be frightened?” he turned to Marya Dmitrievna.

  “What’s there to be afraid of?” said Marya Dmitrievna.

  “Here it is,” said Kamenev, taking out a human head and holding it up in the moonlight. “Recognize him?”

  It was a head, shaved, with large projections of the skull over the eyes and a trimmed black beard and clipped mustache, with one eye open and the other half closed, the shaved skull split but not all the way through, the bloody nose clotted with black blood. The neck was wrapped in a bloody towel. Despite all the wounds to the head, the blue lips were formed into a kindly, childlike expression.

  Marya Dmitrievna looked and, without saying a word, turned and went quickly into the house.

  Butler could not take his eyes from the terrible head. It was the head of the same Hadji Murat with whom he had so recently spent evenings in such friendly conversation.

  “How can it be? Who killed him? Where?” he asked.

  “He tried to bolt and got caught,” said Kamenev, and he handed the head back to the Cossack and went into the house with Butler.

  “And he died a brave man,” said Kamenev.

  Butler, a gallant officer and fierce gambler, and Hadji Murat had spent many hours with one another, talking, listening to singing, and reminiscing. In their conversations we learn the heroic story of the Avar chieftain’s triumphs and sorrows. Tolstoy, with consummate art, stations his hero between two monstrous tyrants, Tsar Nicholas I and the Imam Shamil. Both men are vain, lustful, sadistic, in love only with power and their own selves. The tsar all but destroys Russia with the debacle of the Crimean War, and absurd economic policies. The Imam, after many victories against the Russians, sustained total defeat in 1859 and was sent into exile. He lived on until 1871, dying in Medina.

  Nicholas I died in 1855, during the Crimean War. He may have caught pneumonia, or it may have been suicide. Either way, his death was a blessing for his ruined country. Tolstoy wrote many versions of the longest chapter in his book, the one on Nicholas, attempting to get it right. He left it, in his judgment, incomplete, but it is difficult to see how it could be more devastating. Nicholas was very fond of sentencing relatively minor offenders to running the gauntlet, thus receiving thousands of lashes, inevitably a very painful death, though he continued to exult that Russia had no death penalty. Shamil traveled around with an executioner armed with an ax, and freely administered Sharia justice by whim, hands or heads sliced off for the glory of Allah. At least Shamil was personally courageous, whereas Nicholas was a coward pretending to be a warrior.

  Hadji Murat achieves perfection as personality, most heroic of warriors, wise and wary negotiator, loving son of his mother, devoted husband to his wives, and profoundly caring father of his eldest son, Yusuf, in particular. His mother, wives, and children are held captive by Shamil, who threatens either to execute or to blind Yusuf.

  Tolstoy creates Hadji Murat as the ultimate hero of epic, transcending Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Aeneas. The Avar warrior kills only when he has to; he does not rejoice in violence for its own sake. Achilles partly remains a child. He kills indiscriminately, as if to protest his own mortality. Hector, in his final battle against Achilles, is strangely passive. Odysseus is endlessly resourceful and sly and decidedly is not a truth teller. Hadji Murat surpasses him. Both long for their wife and son, but Odysseus dallies by the way, whereas Tolstoy’s hero remains faithful. Aeneas betrays Dido, decidedly is a prig, and butchers Turnus in an unequal contest, since Turnus has been driven desperate by the Dirae sent against him by Jupiter, after the high god’s reconciliation with Juno.

  Hadji Murat is the pure warrior, who inspires loyalty in his little knot of followers, and himself is loyal unto the death. His entire career has been a battle against dreadful odds:

  Hadji Murat paused and took a deep breath.

  “That was all very well,” he went on, “then it all went bad. Shamil stood in place of Hamzat. He sent envoys to me to tell me to go with him against the Russians; if I refused, he threatened to lay waste to Khunzakh and kill me. I said I wouldn’t go with him and wouldn’t let him come to me.”

  “Why didn’t you go to him?” asked Loris-Melikov.

  Hadji Murat frowned and did not answer at once.

  “It was impossible. There was the blood of my brother Osman and of Abununtsal Khan upon Shamil. I didn’t go to him. Rosen, the general, sent me an officer’s rank and told me to be the commander of Avaria. All would have been well, but earlier Rosen had appointed over Avaria, first, the khan of Kazikumykh, Mahomet Mirza, and then Akhmet Khan. That one hated me. He wanted to marry his son to the khansha’s daughter Saltanet. She was not given to him, and he thought it was my fault. He hated me and sent his nukers to kill me, but I escaped from them. Then he spoke against me to General Klugenau, said that I wouldn’t let the Avars give firewood to the soldiers. He also told him that I had put on the turban—this one,” said Hadji Murat, pointing to the turban over his papakha, “and that it meant I had gone over to Shamil. The general did not believe him and ordered him not to touch me. But when the general left for Tiflis, Akhmet Khan did it his way: he had me seized by a company of soldiers, put me in chains, and tied me to a cannon. They kept me like that for six days. On the seventh day they untied me and led me to Temir Khan Shura. I was led by forty soldiers with loaded muskets. My hands were bound, and they had orders to kill me if I tried to escape. I knew that. When we began to approach a place near Moksokh where the path was narrow and to the right there was a steep drop of about a hundred yards, I moved to the right of the soldier, to the edge of the cliff. The soldier wanted to stop me, but I jumped from the cliff and dragged the soldier with me. The soldier was battered to death, but I stayed alive. Ribs, head, arms, legs—everything was broken. I tried to crawl but couldn’t. My head whirled around and I fell asleep. I woke up soaked in blood. A shepherd saw me. He called people, they took me to the aoul. Ribs and head healed, the leg healed, too, only it came out short.”

  And Hadji Murat stretched out his crooked leg.

  “It serves me, and that’s good enough,” he said. “People found out and started coming to me. I recovered, moved to Tselmes. The Avars again invited me to rule over them,” Hadji Murat said with a calm, assured pride. “And I agreed.”

  It is almost as though Tolstoy is telling us that what can be broken should be broken if the hero is to achieve himself. Hadji Murat, fully achieved, goes on until he is stopped, and even then keeps going:

  Then he got out of the hole altogethe
r and, limping badly, walked straight ahead with his dagger to meet his enemies. Several shots rang out, he staggered and fell. Several militiamen, with a triumphant shriek, rushed to the fallen body. But what had seemed to them a dead body suddenly stirred. First the bloodied, shaven head, without a papakha, rose, then the body rose, and then, catching hold of a tree, he rose up entirely. He looked so terrible that the men running at him stopped. But he suddenly shuddered, staggered away from the tree, and, like a mowed-down thistle, fell full length on his face and no longer moved.

  This more than merits repeating. I think of Cuchulain, the Gaelic Achilles or Hadji Murat, in Yeats’s inevitably phrased death poem “Cuchulain Comforted”:

  A MAN that had six mortal wounds, a man

  Violent and famous, strode among the dead;

  Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

  Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head

  Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree

  As though to meditate on wounds and blood.

  The hero who had been with Yeats throughout his career begins his meditation but, like Hadji Murat, needs the tree. Cuchulain is placed by his poet in the afterlife, not with his peers, but with the cowards:

  “Now must we sing and sing the best we can,

  But first you must be told our character:

  Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain

  “Or driven from home and left to die in fear.”

  They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,

  Though all was done in common as before;

  They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.

  Yeats regarded this as a sequel to his late play The Death of Cuchulain, where the dying hero has a vision:

  There floats out there

  The shape that I shall take when I am dead,

  My soul’s first shape, a soft feathery shape,

  And is not that a strange shape for the soul

  Of a great fighting-man?

  And, to the Blind Man who is groping at his neck and asking if he is ready, he affirms:

  I say it is about to sing.

  Both poem and play deftly allude to Dante’s vision of his teacher Brunetto Latini in the Inferno, Canto XV, lines 118–24:

  “…A people comes with whom I may not be;

  Commended unto thee be my Tesoro,

  In which I still live, and no more I ask.”

  Then he turned round, and seemed to be of those

  Who at Verona run for the Green Mantle

  Across the plain; and seemed to be among them

  The one who wins, and not the one who loses.

  (trans. Longfellow)

  Why Dante places his revered teacher among the sodomites is an enigma. What matters, here as with Cuchulain and with Hadji Murat, is that the defeated transmute into the victorious. Tolstoy, who begins and ends with the crushed but still-resistant thistle (called “the Tartar”), does not mutate his hero into a supernatural bird but gives him the threnody of the nightingales:

  The nightingales, who had fallen silent during the shooting, again started trilling, first one close by and then others further off.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Return of the Native (1878)

  THOMAS HARDY

  I HAVE BEEN READING Thomas Hardy since I was about fifteen. The first two of his novels I sank into were The Return of the Native (1878) and The Woodlanders (1887). They are far from being the best of his fictions: those would have to include Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895), which was so viciously received that Hardy, in revulsion, turned back from writing novels to composing poetry, which had started his career. Hardy died in 1928, at the age of eighty-seven. There are not many English poets of the twentieth century who are Hardy’s equals: setting aside Yeats and Seamus Heaney as Irish, and Eliot as American, they might include D. H. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, the early W. H. Auden, Keith Douglas, and Geoffrey Hill.

  As a novelist Hardy was influenced by George Eliot, but his authentic precursor was the High Romantic lyric poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had a tragic vision of Eros. This prevails throughout Hardy and is felt particularly in his most vivid heroines: Bathsheba Everdene, Eustacia Vye, Marty South, Tess Durbeyfield, Sue Bridehead. In Shelley the shadow of selfhood always falls between desire and its fulfillment. For him love and the means of love, good and the means of good, were irreconcilable.

  Henry James dismissed Hardy as a tedious imitator of George Eliot, and in his After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934) called Thomas Hardy “a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs.”

  D. H. Lawrence, in his Study of Thomas Hardy (composed 1914–15, published posthumously, 1932–33), essentially wrote a Study of D. H. Lawrence since the book implicitly records his struggle to revise The Rainbow. However, it does manifest remarkable acuity in regard to Hardy.

  [The Return of the Native] is the first tragic and important novel. Eustacia, dark, wild, passionate, quite conscious of her desires and inheriting no tradition which would make her ashamed of them, since she is of a novelistic Italian birth, loves, first, the unstable Wildeve, who does not satisfy her, then casts him aside for the newly returned Clym, whom she marries. What does she want? She does not know, but it is evidently some form of self-realization; she wants to be herself, to attain herself. But she does not know how, by what means, so romantic imagination says, Paris and the beau monde. As if that would have stayed her unsatisfaction.

  * * *

  —

  What is the real stuff of tragedy in the book? It is the heath. It is the primitive, primal earth, where the instinctive life heaves up. There, in the deep, rude stirring of the instincts, there was the reality that worked the tragedy. Close to the body of things, there can be heard the stir that makes us and destroys us. The heath heaved with raw instinct. Egdon, whose dark soil was strong and crude and organic as the body of a beast. Out of the body of this crude earth are born Eustacia, Wildeve, Mistress Yeobright, Clym, and all the others. They are one year’s accidental crop. What matters if some are downed or dead, and others preaching or married: what matter, any more than the withering heath, the reddening berries, the seedy furze, and the dead fern of one autumn of Egdon? The heath persists. Its body is strong and fecund, it will bear many more crops besides this. Here is the somber, latent power that will go on producing no matter what happens to the product. Here is the deep, black source whence all these little contents of lives are drawn. And the contents of the small lives are spilled and wasted. There is savage satisfaction in it: for so much more remains to come, such black, powerful fecundity is working there, that what does it matter?

  * * *

  · · ·

  That is a constant revelation in Hardy’s novels: that there exists a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon it. Against the background of dark, passionate Egdon, of the leafy, sappy passion and sentiment of the woodlands, of the unfathomed stars, is drawn the lesser scheme of lives: The Return of the Native, The Woodlanders, or Two on a Tower. Upon the vast, incomprehensible pattern of some primal mortality greater than ever the human mind can grasp, is drawn the little, pathetic patter of man’s moral life and struggle, pathetic, almost ridiculous. The little fold of law and order, the little walled city within which man has to defend himself from the waste enormity of nature, becomes always too small, and the pioneers venturing out with the code of the walled city upon them die in the bonds of that code, free and yet unfree, preaching the walled city and looking to the waste.

  You can say that Lawrence is rather too ecstatic about Egdon Heath. He seems
to mix it up with Hardy’s Immanent Will, which stems from Schopenhauer’s Will to Live, just as Lawrence’s “leafy, sappy passion” derives from Nietzsche’s “Think of the Earth.” What Lawrence truly raises is the dark question of The Return of the Native: why cannot Eustacia Vye be fulfilled?

  When I have stayed away too long from Hardy, all I can remember about The Return of the Native are Eustacia, the red man Venn, and Egdon Heath. Clym is one of Hardy’s failures in characterization and comes close to ruining the novel. The great glory of the book is the sexually enchanting Eustacia Vye, who finally kills herself. I found and still find this dreadful, but Hardy suffered quite as much as any reader could. Here is the description of her that Hardy gives in the early chapter “Queen of Night”:

  She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow. It closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow.

  Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passing under one of the Egdon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught, as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large Ulex Europæus—which will act as a sort of hairbrush—she would go back a few steps, and pass against it a second time.

  She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries. Their light, as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller than it usually is with English women. This enabled her to indulge in reverie without seeming to do so: she might have been believed capable of sleeping without closing them up. Assuming that the souls of men and women were visible essences, you could fancy the colour of Eustacia’s soul to be flame-like. The sparks from it that rose into her dark pupils gave the same impression.