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

by Bloom, Harold

  Rereading this again on June 12, 2018, a month away from my eighty-eighth birthday, I pause to remember the beloved dead. There are so many of them. My mother and father, my four older siblings, former students who died far too young, friends of my youth who died in battle, and almost all of my peers in my own generation: poets, novelists, scholars now gone forever. Teaching, reading, and writing have become ghost-haunted. Proust helps to heal me. Partly because of my friend Roger Shattuck’s influence upon me, I tend to associate In Search of Lost Time with Eastern speculations. I read Proust and turn to the Bhagavad Gita, which offers me three states of being: dark inertia, passion, lucidity. What Proust does is to lead me from dark inertia through passion to his lucidity, which I can only barely share. However good a reader, how shall she surmount all the obstacles on the winding path to lucidity?

  Freud warned that mourning, too long prolonged, transmutes into melancholia. What he called “the work of mourning” has to be performed but then to some degree relinquished. Proust does not warn us of anything. He shows us how his narrator recaptured the past and achieved lucidity. I wonder if any other novelist has accomplished that.

  CHAPTER 39

  The Master and Margarita (1928–40)

  MIKHAIL BULGAKOV

  MIKHAIL BULGAKOV’S APOCALYPSE was not published until 1966; he was still working on it when he died in 1940 at the age of forty-eight. There are a number of useful translations into English. I will rely here mostly on the one by Michael Glenny (1967) but will sometimes contrast it with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s (2001).

  That Bulgakov survived at all was because of a vagary of the monstrous Joseph Stalin, who had attended the writer’s play The Days of the Turbins, perhaps fifteen times, and who appointed Bulgakov to direct the Moscow Art Theater. When Bulgakov encountered political difficulties again, he wrote a letter to Stalin requesting that he be allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Stalin phoned and asked if he really wanted to leave. Bulgakov replied that a Russian writer had to stay in Russia, and thus received further patronage from the dictator.

  The Master and Margarita is certainly great fun, but it is very uncanny and mystifying fun. I reread it and cannot keep the kaleidoscope from rotating away. That is as it should be: it is the way of a kaleidoscope. One does not expect a novel to be primarily a magic show. Here is an early encounter between Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, head of the Soviet “literary” bureaucracy MASSOLIT, and the mysterious stranger Professor Woland (Satan) who has arrived in Moscow with an incredible entourage. His band consists first of Koroviev or Fagotto, a fallen angel once master of the heavenly choir, a great illusionist whose name means “bassoon” in Russian and who can translate all languages. Fagotto has forsworn violence and has no sense of humor. Next is a giant cat, Behemoth, who together with Leviathan, was employed by God’s voice out of the whirlwind in order to frighten Job into submission. In Hebrew, “Behemoth” means “beasts”; in Russian, a hippopotamus. Aside from his nasty sneering, he is as large as a hog, walks on two feet, can assume human shape, guzzles vodka and food incessantly, likes to wave a pistol and play chess. My favorite is Hella, a gorgeous redhead vampire and succubus who delights in going about naked. Last comes Azazello, the most repellent, whose name recalls Azazel, who, in the Book of Enoch, teaches seductive women to wear jewelry and makeup and men to make weapons. Azazello is cross-eyed, possesses fangs, and is Woland’s hitman.

  We can begin listening to Bulgakov’s voice in the exchange between Berlioz and Satan:

  “A brick is neither here nor there,” the stranger interrupted persuasively. “A brick never falls on anyone’s head. You in particular, I assure you, are in no danger from that. Your death will be different.”

  “Perhaps you know exactly how I am going to die?” inquired Berlioz with understandable sarcasm at the ridiculous turn that the conversation seemed to be taking. “Would you like to tell me?”

  “Certainly,” rejoined the stranger. He looked Berlioz up and down as though he were measuring him for a suit and muttered through his teeth something that sounded like: “One, two…Mercury in the second house…the moon waning…six—accident…evening—seven,” then announced loudly and cheerfully, “Your head will be cut off!”

  Bezdomny turned to the stranger with a wild, furious stare, and Berlioz asked with a sardonic grin, “By whom? Enemies? Foreign spies?”

  “No,” replied their companion, “by a Russian woman, a member of the Komsomol.”

  “Hm,” grunted Berlioz, upset by the foreigner’s little joke. “That, if you don’t mind my saying so, is most improbable.”

  “I beg your pardon,” replied the foreigner, “but it is so. Oh yes, I was going to ask you—what are you doing this evening, if it’s not a secret?”

  “It’s no secret. From here I’m going home, and then at ten o’clock this evening there’s a meeting at the MASSOLIT and I shall be in the chair.”

  “No, that is absolutely impossible,” said the stranger firmly.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” replied the foreigner and frowned up at the sky where, sensing the oncoming cool of the evening, the birds were flying to roost, “Anna has already bought the sunflower oil; in fact, she has not only bought it but has already spilled it. So that meeting will not take place.”

  With this, as one might imagine, there was silence beneath the lime trees.

  “Excuse me,” said Berlioz after a pause, with a glance at the stranger’s jaunty beret, “but what on earth has sunflower-seed oil got to do with it…and who is Anna?”

  “I’ll tell you what sunflower oil’s got to do with it,” said Bezdomny suddenly, having obviously decided to declare war on their uninvited companion. “Have you, comrade, ever had to spend any time in a mental hospital?”

  “Ivan!” hissed Mikhail Alexandrovich.

  But the stranger was not in the least offended and gave a cheerful laugh. “Yes, I have, I have, and more than once!” he exclaimed laughing, though the stare that he gave the poet was mirthless. “Where haven’t I been! My only regret is that I didn’t stay long enough to ask the professor what schizophrenia was. But you are going to find that out from him yourself, Ivan Nikolayich!”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “My dear fellow, who doesn’t know you?” With this the foreigner pulled the previous day’s issue of The Literary Gazette out of his pocket, and Ivan Nikolayich saw his own picture on the front page above some of his own verse. Suddenly what had delighted him yesterday as proof of his fame and popularity no longer gave the poet any pleasure at all.

  The youthful, doubtless bad poet Ivan Nikolayich, who employs “Bezdomny” (“homeless” in Russian) as a pen name, performs a hapless role until the very end of the novel, when he transforms himself into a historian who yet sees visions at the full moon. His vicissitudes include shock, fright, near drowning, confinement in a mental hospital, and an encounter there with the Master, Bulgakov’s surrogate. He, Berlioz, and an editor share bafflement in confronting Satan/Professor Woland:

  The two men were embarrassed. “Hell, he overheard us,” thought Berlioz, indicating with a polite gesture that there was no need for this show of documents. While the stranger was offering them to the editor, the poet managed to catch a glimpse of the visiting card. On it in foreign lettering was the word “Professor” and the initial letter of a surname which began with a “W.”

  “Delighted,” muttered the editor awkwardly as the foreigner put his papers back into his pocket.

  Good relations having been re-established, all three sat down again on the bench.

  “So you’ve been invited here as a consultant, have you, Professor?” asked Berlioz.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Are you German?” inquired Bezdomny.

  “I?” rejoined the professor and thought for a moment. “Y
es, I suppose I am German,” he said.

  “You speak excellent Russian,” remarked Bezdomny.

  “Oh, I’m something of a polyglot. I know a great number of languages,” replied the professor.

  “And what is your particular field of work?” asked Berlioz.

  “I specialize in black magic.”

  “Like hell you do!” thought Mikhail Alexandrovich. “And…and you’ve been invited here to give advice on that?” he asked with a gulp.

  “Yes,” the professor assured him, and went on: “Apparently your National Library has unearthed some original manuscripts of the ninth-century necromancer Herbert Aurilachs. I have been asked to decipher them. I am the only specialist in the world.”

  Woland is German because of Goethe’s Faust, where he is called Mephistopheles. The Master appears there as Faust, and Margarita as Gretchen. Herbert Aurilachs was Herbert Aurochs, a necromancer of the ninth century. Necromancy is the art of resurrecting the dead in order to hold converse with them. It has always been widespread throughout the world in every era. Prospero in The Tempest is the major literary representation of such a magus.

  Poor Ivan Nikolayich will be cured of composing verse by observing the decapitation of Berlioz:

  Without stopping to listen to the choirmaster’s begging and whining, Berlioz ran to the turnstile and pushed it. Having passed through, he was just about to step off the pavement and cross the trolley tracks when a white and red light flashed in his face and the pedestrian signal lit up with the words “Stop! Trolley!” A streetcar rolled into view, rocking slightly along the newly laid track that ran down Yermolayevsky Street and into Bronnaya. As it turned to join the main line, it suddenly switched its inside lights on, hooted and accelerated.

  Although he was standing in safety, the cautious Berlioz decided to retreat behind the railing. He put his hand on the turnstile and took a step backward. He missed his grip and his foot slipped on the cobbles as inexorably as though on ice. As it slid toward the tramlines his other leg gave way and Berlioz was thrown across the track. Grabbing wildly, Berlioz fell prone. He struck his head violently on the cobblestones and the gilded moon flashed hazily across his vision. He had just time to turn on his back, drawing his legs up to his stomach with a frenzied movement, and as he turned over he saw the woman trolley driver’s face, white with horror above her red necktie, as she bore down on him with irresistible force and speed. Berlioz made no sound, but all around him the street rang with the desperate shrieks of women’s voices. The driver grabbed the electric brake, the car pitched forward, jumping the rails, and with a tinkling crash the glass broke in all its windows. At this moment Berlioz heard a despairing voice: “Oh, no…!’ Once more and for the last time the moon flashed before his eyes, but it split into fragments and then went black.

  Berlioz vanished from sight under the streetcar, and a round, dark object rolled across the cobbles, over the curbstone and bounced along the sidewalk.

  It was a severed head.

  Decapitation is almost routine in The Master and Margarita. For readers who have no Russian, the problem of Mikhail Bulgakov’s tone is virtually insoluble. Pevear and Volokhonsky are supposedly closer to the original, but I get more sense—however illusory—of tonality from Glenny than I do from that devoted duo. What is to be done? Against a sea of troubles, I have to assert the power of the reader’s mind over a universe of death. The ironies of Soviet Russia (1928–40) may or may not be those of Russia after December 25, 1991, when Gorbachev resigned and Yeltsin took over. Now, in 2018, we have Putin, who has been tsar since 1999. If Mikhail Bulgakov were alive now, seventy-eight years after his departure, doubtless he would shrug and emulate Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in The Leopard, saying that if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. His hilarity endures and guarantees the continued life of his masterwork. Where I am puzzled is the question of what to make of his religiosity.

  I call upon my personal authority in regard to Russian high literature, David M. Bethea, who has also become a friend. I admire his commentary and find it helpful, except that the antinomy between romping and spirituality remains, to me, inexplicable:

  Yeshua’s concern is ethical—human perfectibility—and that is why, comforting Pilate, he continues up the path. But if Homeless is a victim of the past and Yeshua and Pilate have their sights on a vision of the distant future, where does this leave the Master and Margarita? They are left in a timeless present, a benign limbo that is both free from the pain of the past and the promise of the future, but from which, with the gift of imaginative empathy, the past can be recaptured and the future anticipated. Such a promised land for the artist cannot of course be imagined in this world, especially in the Soviet Union, but were it to exist, it would look like the little home, with its Venetian window and climbing vine, given to the Master and Margarita. Until God, the final author hovering beyond the final text, brings history and religious mystery together in this world, we must rely on Bulgakov’s version of a poet ex machina to make things right. With the New Jerusalem still distant, only art can free Pilate, write history from actuality back into possibility.

  I will postpone Pontius Pilate for now. How anyone could be happy with the Master’s rehabilitation of the Roman strongman escapes me. The final author is Shakespeare or Homer or Dante or Cervantes or Montaigne or Tolstoy: man, not God. My namesake Poldy rejoices in the New Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future. Having lived, taught, and returned to lecture in Jerusalem, I prefer ordinary evenings in New Haven.

  Venerating David Bethea, I return to him here:

  What Bulgakov is suggesting, in this ending that continues what has already ended, is that Homeless, the faithful disciple, must undergo his own spiritual death each Easter season in order to be reborn, if only for an oneiric instant, into that state beyond history where the Master and Margarita now reside. Only at this point in the text, and not in the preceding chapter, does Yeshua swear to Pilate that the execution never happened. Suddenly we have returned to the vicious circle of history to discover how, through Homeless’s experience of periodic death-in-life, the circle is to be opened. Homeless perceives that endings can be happy after all. As he asks the Master—

  “So that is how it [the story of Pilate] ended [konchilos’]?”

  “That’s how it ended [konchilos’], my disciple…”

  and as Margarita concludes—

  “Yes, of course [konecho], that’s how it did. Everything has ended [konchilos’], and everything ends [konchaestia]…And I shall kiss you on the forehead and all will be with you as it should…”

  With many other readers, it would delight me to be kissed on the forehead by the charming Margarita. She and the devil redeem the book together. They are capricious, wry, humorous, well intentioned (bar a couple of beheadings at the devil’s instigation).

  Little wonder, then, that Homeless wakes after his dream feeling calm and healthy. Together with the Master and Margarita, the author, the reader, and perhaps even Pilate himself, he can adjust, knowing that he is free of “the cruel fifth Procurator of Judea, the horseman Pontius Pilate,” to this ending.

  Bethea is an immensely learned disciple of the great Yuri Lotman (1922–93), who cheered me up at the Turin Book Fair in 1987, where we spent some hours dining together and conversing only in Yiddish. Lotman shrewdly noted that Moscow in The Master and Margarita turns into magic, whereas Jerusalem is transformed into the grime of reductive realism. Bethea follows Lotman in crediting Bulgakov with reconciling the two modes in the conclusion. Yes and no. No and yes. I see the attempt at reconciliation, or at least retrievement, but nothing is retrieved. Magical realism is an imposture, even when practiced by Bulgakov or Juan Rulfo or García Márquez.

  During the last few weeks, I have been rereading and absorbing David Bentley Hart’s marvelous literal translation, The New Testament
(2017). Hart is a scholar immersed in the study of Eastern Orthodoxy. It could be wished that all who now call themselves Christian might ponder Hart’s version and his observations:

  What perhaps did impress itself upon me with an entirely unexpected force was a new sense of the utter strangeness of the Christian vision of life in its first dawning—by which I mean, precisely, its strangeness in respect to the Christianity of later centuries. When one truly ventures into the world of the first Christians, one enters a company of “radicals” (for want of a better word), an association of men and women guided by faith in a world-altering revelation, and hence in values almost absolutely inverse to the recognized social, political, economic, and religious truths not only of their own age, but of almost every age of human culture. The first Christians certainly bore very little resemblance to the faithful of our day, or to any generation of Christians that has felt quite at home in the world, securely sheltered within the available social stations of its time, complacently comfortable with material possessions and national loyalties and civic conventions. In truth, I suspect that very few of us, in even our wildest imaginings, could ever desire to be the kind of persons that the New Testament describes as fitting the pattern of life in Christ. And I do not mean merely that most of us would find the moral requirements laid out in Christian scripture a little onerous—though of course we do. Therein lies the perennial appeal of the venerable early modern theological fantasy that the Apostle Paul inveighed against something called “works-righteousness” in favor of a purely extrinsic “justification” by grace—which, alas, he did not. He rejected only the notion that one might be “shown righteous” by “works” of the Mosaic Law—that is, ritual “observances” like circumcision or keeping kosher—but he also quite clearly insisted, as did Christ, that all will be judged in the end according to their deeds (Romans 2:1–16 and 4:10–12; 1 Corinthians 3:12–15; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Philippians 2:16; and so on). Rather, I mean that most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament mold fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent. Or, if not that, we would at least be bemused by the sheer, unembellished, unremitting otherworldliness of their understanding of the gospel.