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

by Bloom, Harold

  Hardy’s Eustacia may owe something to Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, published five years before The Return of the Native, since in some ways she makes a third with Pater’s evocations of the Botticelli Venus and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, visions of antithetical female sexuality. Eustacia’s flame-like quality precisely recalls Pater’s ecstasy of passion in the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, and the epigraph to The Return of the Native could well have been: “This at least of flame-like our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.”

  This at least of flame-like Eustacia’s life has, that the concurrence of forces parts sooner rather than later. But, then, this most beautiful of Hardy’s women is also the most doom-eager, the color of her soul being flame-like. The heath brings her only Wildeve and Clym, but Paris doubtless would have brought her scarce better, since as Queen of Night she attracts the constancy and the kindness of sorrow.

  At fifteen I fell in love with Eustacia Vye, and at eighty-eight the passion returns. Both of Thomas Hardy’s marriages had equivocal elements, including childlessness. And yet, for a while, he was fiercely in love with his first wife. When he writes of Eustacia he catches fire. Across more than seventy years, I remember my first wonder at Hardy’s description of Eustacia’s conduct when her wild hair was stroked down, even when common gorse performed the caress:

  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.

  Who can resist a woman who lives at so high a frequency that she backtracks to have the gorse stroke her again? Hardy’s women enlarge and attune his imagination. His men, except for Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, never quite come alive. Yet so marvelous are his women that the reader scarcely cares. I find no flaws in Eustacia Vye; her tragedy stems from context and circumstance. Her husband and her lover, Clym and Wildeve, are hopelessly inadequate to her sexual intensity and splendor. In a preface to The Return of the Native, Hardy takes care to tell us that Shakespeare’s King Lear suffered his agonies on Egdon Heath. Eustacia suffers less expressively, Hardy not being Shakespeare, but she is hated by most of the natives of the heath, who regard her as a witch. She had an Italian father from Corfu, yet much more than her exotic beauty stimulates the hatred. In a minimized world, she is as isolated in her sexual strength as Hester Prynne is in the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Alas, she lacks Hester Prynne’s stubborn strength of endurance, enhanced by Hester’s need to nurture her natural daughter, Pearl. Hester and Pearl survive. Eustacia suffers death by water, probably with deliberation. Wildeve also drowns, vainly attempting to save her. Clym, wifeless and motherless, becomes a lay preacher speaking to whoever will listen.

  Sometimes I wish that Hardy had titled the novel Queen of Night, since it is Eustacia’s book and not Clym’s. It may be that Hardy loved her as Flaubert loved Emma Bovary or Tolstoy invested so heavily in Anna Karenina. Flaubert wept as he murdered Emma through her suicide. Tolstoy must have grieved for his wonderful Anna. All three women were great losses. Hardy, despite his primeval power, is not of course the artist that Flaubert was, and only Tolstoy can give us the sense that through him the earth cries out.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

  FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

  I HAVE WRITTEN about Dostoevsky’s final and greatest work before, but I no longer agree with my earlier critique. My father refused to speak Russian after he left Odessa, and I grew up speaking only Yiddish. I studied other languages at Cornell and Yale, and since then, during my teaching years, I have mastered others. It is one of my regrets that I never learned Russian. That means my reading of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, Goncharov, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, and the other classic authors of nineteenth-century Russia has been enslaved to translations. The earlier ones by Constance Garnett that I read in my youth were a heroic enterprise yet stilted in diction and, I gather, inaccurate and particularly poor in conveying tone.

  However, since 1990, the remarkable married team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated many of the Russian classics into persuasive English versions, and I am among their thousands of grateful debtors. Several rereadings of their The Brothers Karamazov have not made me love that overpowering novel, but I begin to understand it better, and to clarify my ambivalences concerning Dostoevsky.

  Sainte-Beuve, to me the most interesting of French critics except for Paul Valéry, taught us to ask a crucial question of any writer whom we read deeply: what would the author think of us? Dostoevsky’s reaction to me would intensify my lifelong gratitude to my late father for getting out of Odessa and thus giving me a chance to live a good life. Though Dostoevsky sometimes denied he was an anti-Semite, let him testify for himself:

  It is not for nothing that over there [in Europe] the Jews rule all the stock-exchanges; it is not for nothing that they control capital, that they are the masters of credit, and it is not for nothing—I repeat—that they are also the masters of international politics, and what is going to happen in the future is known to the Jews themselves: their reign, their complete reign is approaching! What is coming is the complete triumph of ideas before which sentiments of humanity, the thirst for truth, Christian feelings, the national and popular pride of European peoples, must bow.

  I sometimes imagine: what if there were not three million Jews, but three million Russians in Russia, and there were eighty million Jews? Well, how would they treat Russians, and how would they lord it over them? What rights would Jews give Russians?…Wouldn’t they slaughter them to the last man, to the point of complete extermination, as they used to do with alien peoples in ancient times?

  I repeat: it is impossible to conceive of a Jew without God. Moreover, I do not believe in the existence of atheists even among educated Jews: they are all of the same essence….They are all…undeviatingly awaiting the Messiah, all of them, from the very lowest Kike to the highest and most learned philosopher and rabbi-Kabalist: they all believe that the Messiah will again unite them in Jerusalem and bring by his sword all nations to their feet.

  (Diary of a Writer)

  When I read this, my initial response is to remember the Talmudic adage: If someone seeks to take your life, rise up and slay him first. Still, I am now a very old man, and not the involuntary Bronx street-fighter of my early youth. Dostoevsky has a coven of stalwart defenders who brush his hatreds aside. Some of them, now departed, were my good friends. Nothing diminishes the aesthetic power of The Brothers Karamazov, but I am uneasy when the novel is praised for its insights into morality and religion. One can be pardoned for preferring Leo Tolstoy:

  The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illuminated with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions. The Jew is the pioneer of liberty….The Jew is the pioneer of civilization….The Jew is the emblem of eternity.

  Lacking Russian, I myself cannot give Tolstoy the aesthetic preference over Dostoevsky. But the greatest Russian critics speak of Tolstoy as being of the eminence of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Reading Tolstoy rendered by Pevear and Volokhonsky, I am persuaded. Dostoevsky, even in The Demons and The Brothers Karamazov, is of another order.

  There are many strengths in Dostoevsky’s culminating novel, but I find Dostoevsky’s almost Shakespearean invention of characters most appealing: the three Karamazov brothers, Alyosha, Mitya, Ivan. Alyosha, who is just ninetee
n, and Ivan are full brothers; the oldest, Mitya, is their half-brother. Their father is the rancid, lustful, gluttonous drunkard Fyodor, who is fifty-five. Smerdyakov, the bastard son of Fyodor, is a surly and resentful cook.

  Alyosha is a kind of saint: cheerful, loving, deeply religious. For Dostoevsky, Alyosha is the book’s hero. Actually, it is Mitya’s novel: he is passionate, spendthrift, an impulsive man of action, yet capable of compassion, restraint, generosity of spirit, and a potential believer in the Russian earth. Doubtless because of my own peculiarities, I prefer Ivan: enormously intelligent, skeptical, tragically caught between a Western regard for cognition and his own Russian soul, whatever that is. Smerdyakov is a beast, but an interesting one.

  Grushenka and Katerina are the principal women characters. Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky seems to me uneasy in representing women. Grushenka is beautiful, proud, flirtatious, in no way promiscuous, and is pursued with equal ferocity by old Karamazov and Mitya. She is gentled by a friendship with Alyosha. Katerina is even prouder, essentially withdrawn, and, though betrothed to Mitya, is abandoned by him for Grushenka. What Freud once called moral masochism is her weakness, and she remains loyal to Mitya even after the reader begins to surmise that she and Ivan have fallen in love.

  Zosima, a senior monk, is Alyosha’s moral and religious guide, and, like Alyosha, represents the Dostoevskian ideal. He preaches forgiveness, and reverence for the earth, which he kisses and waters with his tears, and is endowed with a clairvoyant understanding of every soul he encounters.

  The admirers of The Brothers Karamazov include Einstein, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Joyce, Kafka, and Cormac McCarthy. They also include Vladimir Putin and Joseph Stalin. Sigmund Freud considered it the greatest novel ever written, but, after all, he wrote an essay on Dostoevsky and parricide. His own fantasy Totem and Taboo (1913) is a lurid version of Dostoevsky’s phantasmagoria. In Freud, the tribal father insists on possessing all women for himself, and then is murdered by the horde of enemy brothers, who devour the totem father. Stalin and Putin join Tsar Alexander II, who was assassinated the year after The Brothers Karamazov was published. Some historians believe Stalin was poisoned at the order of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s Himmler, himself executed in 1953. Putin, alas, is still very much with us.

  * * *

  —

  After this uneasy excursus, I return to the Karamazov family and their entanglements with women who are very different from one another, yet each difficult to love or to avoid loving.

  One has to begin with old Karamazov, and remember that he is just fifty-five:

  “Don’t be angry with my brother! Stop hurting him,” Alyosha all of a sudden said insistently.

  “Well, well, maybe I will. Oof, what a headache! Take away the cognac, Ivan, it’s the third time I’m telling you.” He lapsed into thought and suddenly smiled a long and cunning smile: “Don’t be angry with an old runt like me, Ivan. I know you don’t love me, but still don’t be angry. There’s nothing to love me for. You go to Chermashnya, and I’ll visit you there, I’ll bring presents. I’ll show you a young wench there, I’ve had my eye on her for a long time. She’s still barefoot. Don’t be afraid of the barefoot ones, don’t despise them, they’re pearls…!”

  And he kissed his hand with a smack.

  “For me,” he suddenly became all animated, as if sobering up for a moment, once he hit on his favorite subject, “for me…Ah, you children! My babes, my little piglets, for me…even in the whole of my life there has never been an ugly woman, that’s my rule! Can you understand that? But how could you understand it? You’ve still got milk in your veins instead of blood, you’re not hatched yet! According to my rule, one can damn well find something extremely interesting in every woman, something that’s not to be found in any other—one just has to know how to find it, that’s the trick!…”

  Old Karamazov loves no one except himself. He and Mitya despise one another. He needs Alyosha’s love, which he has, but understands neither the need nor Alyosha. At bottom he fears Ivan and desperately wants Alyosha not to love his full brother, which is impossible. A miser and a shrewd speculator in land, he will leave behind him an estate of a hundred thousand rubles when he is murdered. His vitalism, unlike that of Falstaff, is mindless, without wit, and blind. He might as well be an eating, drinking, sleeping, and whoring machine, which doubtless artificial intelligence will yet bring to us.

  For many reasons, some of them quite personal, I have many reservations about Nabokov, both as person and as author. I find it odd that I should cite him on Dostoevsky, whom he regarded as a bad imitator of Gogol. Here, from the lectures I once walked out upon, are his reflections on Dostoevsky:

  In the light of the historical development of artistic vision, Dostoevski is a very fascinating phenomenon. If you examine closely any of his works, say The Brothers Karamazov, you will note that the natural background and all things relevant to the perception of the senses hardly exist. What landscape there is is a landscape of ideas, a moral landscape. The weather does not exist in his world, so it does not much matter how people dress. Dostoevski characterizes his people through situation, through ethical matters, their psychological reactions, their inside ripples. After describing the looks of a character, he uses the old-fashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance any more in the scenes with him. This is not the way of an artist, say Tolstoy, who sees his character in his mind all the time and knows exactly the specific gesture he will employ at this or that moment. But there is something more striking still about Dostoevski. He seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels. The novel The Brothers Karamazov has always seemed to me a straggling play, with just that amount of furniture and other implements needed for the various actors: a round table with the wet, round trace of a glass, a window painted yellow to make it look as if there were sunlight outside, or a shrub hastily brought in and plumped down by a stagehand….

  Let us always remember that basically Dostoevski is a writer of mystery stories where every character, once introduced to us, remains the same to the bitter end, complete with his special features and personal habits, and that they all are treated throughout the book they happen to be in like chessmen in a complicated chess problem. Being an intricate plotter, Dostoevski succeeds in holding the reader’s attention; he builds up his climaxes and keeps up his suspenses with consummate mastery. But if you re-read a book of his you have already read once so that you are familiar with the surprises and complications of the plot, you will at once realize that the suspense you experienced during the first reading is simply not there any more….

  The misadventures of human dignity which form Dostoevski’s favorite theme are as much allied to the farce as to the drama. In indulging this farcical side and being at the same time deprived of any real sense of humor, Dostoevski is sometimes dangerously near to sinking into garrulous and vulgar nonsense….

  It is, as in all Dostoevski’s novels, a rush and tumble of words with endless repetitions, mutterings aside, a verbal overflow which shocks the reader after, say, Lermontov’s transparent and beautifully poised prose. Dostoevski as we know is a great seeker after truth, a genius of spiritual morbidity, but as we also know he is not a great writer in the sense Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov are. And, I repeat, not because the world he creates is unreal—all the worlds of writers are unreal—but because it is created too hastily without any sense of that harmony and economy which the most irrational masterpiece is bound to comply with (in order to be a masterpiece). Indeed, in a sense Dostoevski is much too rational in his crude methods, and though his facts are but spiritual facts and his characters mere ideas in the likeness of people, their interplay and development are actuated by the mechanical methods of the earthbound and conventional novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.


  If all this were to be accepted, The Brothers Karamazov would vaporize upon rereading. Nabokov, despite his preciosity, could be a great literary artist, as in Pale Fire. And most certainly he knew and loved the Russian language. Yet this is caricature, not criticism. Mitya, Ivan, and Alyosha undergo authentic change as the novel proceeds. Old Karamazov, Grushenka, Katerina do not. Perhaps Smerdyakov changes for the worse, though he had not far to go. Grushenka and Katerina keep changing their minds and then changing back again, but, then, I do not think that anyone extols Dostoevsky as a psychologist in regard to women, or indeed even to men. Nabokov may have been acute in suggesting that Dostoevsky should have been a playwright.

  Dostoevsky’s youngest son, Alyosha, had died at the age of three in 1878. Had Dostoevsky lived, there would have been a second volume of the novel, centering almost wholly upon the fully mature Alyosha. I am by no means certain that I would have wanted to read it, as I weary of Alyosha from time to time. He can also be disconcerting, as in this exchange between the saintly hero and his beloved Liza:

  “I’ll always come to see you, all my life,” Alyosha answered firmly.

  “I tell this to you alone,” Liza began again. “Only to myself, and also to you. You alone in the whole world. And rather to you than to myself. And I’m not at all ashamed with you. Alyosha, why am I not at all ashamed with you, not at all? Alyosha, is it true that Jews steal children on Passover and kill them?”