by Nick Hornby
The letters are full of useful advice – advice that holds good even now. ‘Sleeping with a whore, breathing right in her mouth, endlessly listening to her pissing… where’s the sense in that? Civilized people don’t simply obey their baser instincts. They demand more from a woman than bed, horse sweat and the sound of pissing.’ He’s right, of course. There’s no sense in that, at all. But that pissing sound is sort of addictive after a few years, isn’t it? If you haven’t even started listening to it, then I can only urge you never to do so.
Apart from the peculiar obsession with the sound of pissing, there’s a modern writing life described here. There’s the money thing, of course, but there’s also gossip, and endless charitable activity, and fame. (Chekhov was recognized everywhere he went.) He’s also the only genius I’ve come across who had no recognition of, or interest in, the immensity of his own talent.
As a special bonus, you also get some of those bad biopic comedy moments thrown in. ‘I went to see Lev Tolstoy the day before yesterday,’he writes to Gorky. ‘He was full of praise for you, and said you were a “splendid writer”. He likes your “The Fair” and “In the Steppe”, but not “Malva”.’ You just know that there’s only three words in this letter Gorky would have registered, and that he spent the rest of the day too depressed to get out of bed.
This month, my bookshelves functioned exactly as they are supposed to. I’d just finished the Chekhov and dimly remembered buying Janet Malcom’s book when it was first published. And then I found it, and read it. And enjoyed it. You forget that the very best literary critics are capable of being very clever about people and life, as well as books: there’s a brilliant passage here where Malcolm, who is travelling around Russia visiting Chekhov’s houses, links her feelings over the return of a lost bag to her feelings about travel: ‘[Our homes] are where the action is; they are where the riches of experience are distributed… Only when faced with one of the inevitable minor hardships of travel do we break out of the trance of tourism and once again feel the sharp savor of the real.’ I can’t understand, though, why she thinks that the letters between Chekhov and Olga Knipper ‘make wonderful reading’. I’ve only read Chekhov’s side, but she seems to have reduced the man to mush: ‘My little doggie’, ‘my dear little dog’, ‘my darling doggie’, ‘Oh, doggie, doggie’, ‘my little dog’, ‘little ginger-haired doggie’, ‘my coltish little doggie’, ‘my lovely little mongrel doggie’, ‘my darling, my perch’, ‘my squiggly one’, ‘dearest little colt’, ‘my incomparable little horse’, ‘my dearest chaffinch’… For god’s sake, pull yourself together, man! You’re a major cultural figure!
Knipper and Chekhov were together only rarely in their short marriage (she was acting in St Petersburg, he was trying to keep warm in Yalta) and Malcolm seems to suggest rather sadly that famous men and women with more conventional relationships rob biographers of future source material, because they have no reason to write to each other. On the evidence here, all couples should be compelled by law to spend twenty-four hours a day together, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, just in case either partner is tempted to call the other a chaffinch, or a perch, or an aardvark, in writing.
Malcolm, however, is one of those people so sweetly devoted to her subject that she won’t recognize flaws as flaws, but as strengths – or, at least, as characteristics. There’s this pedestal – I don’t know anyone who’s even seen it, but it’s there – and once you’re up on it, people stop telling you that you can’t do this, or you’re useless at that, and start wondering why you have allowed something that looks like uselessness to appear in your work. Christopher Ricks did it in his recent book Dylan’s Visions of Sin: he becomes very troubled by a ropy rhyme (‘rob them’/‘problem’) in ‘Positively Fourth Street’, and then nags at it until the ropy rhyme becomes yet another example of Bob’s genius: ‘It must be granted that if these lines induce queasiness, they do make a point of saying “No, I do not feel that good.” So an unsettling rhyme such as problem/rob them might rightly be hard to stomach…’The notion that Dylan might have just thought, ‘Oh, fuck it, that’ll do’ never crosses Ricks’s mind for a moment.
Malcolm does her own, perhaps more self-aware version of this when talking about the troublingly ‘abrupt’ and ‘unmotivated’ changes of character in Chekhov’s stories: ‘after enough time goes by, a great writer’s innovations stop looking like mistakes’. See, I’m still at that early stage, where everything still looks like a mistake, so I would have liked Ms Malcolm to be a little more precise with the figures here. What’s ‘enough time’? Just, you know, roughly? Are we talking six months? Two years? I don’t really want to have to wait much longer than that.
I’ve known Roddy Doyle for a while now. I read him before I met him, and the Barrytown trilogy was an important source of inspiration for me when I was starting out: who knew that books written with such warmth and simplicity could be so complex and intelligent? On this side of the Atlantic, at least, Doyle single-handedly redefined what we mean by ‘literary’ fiction. Oh, Play That Thing is the second part of the trilogy that began with A Star Called Henry; it’s set in the United States during the twenties and thirties, and features Louis Armstrong as a central character, so I’ve been reading it while listening to Hot Fives and Sevens on my iPod.
Reading reviews and interviews with him over the last few weeks, one is reminded that there’s nothing critics like less than a writer producing something that he hasn’t done before – apart, that is, from a writer producing more of the same. One reviewer complained that Doyle used to write short books, and now they’ve gone fat; another that he used to write books set in Dublin, and he should have kept them there; another that he used to write with a child’s-eye view, and now he’s writing about adults. All of these criticisms, of course, could have been based on the catalogue copy, rather than on the book itself – a two-line synopsis and information about the number of pages would have received exactly the same treatment. You’re half-expecting someone to point out that back in the day he used to write books that sold for a tenner, and now they’ve gone up to seventeen quid.
What he’s doing, of course, is the only thing a writer can do: he’s writing the books that he wants, in the way he wants to. He wants to write about different things, and to add something to the natural talent that produced those early books. I wouldn’t want to read anyone who did anything else – apart from P. G. Wodehouse, who did exactly the same thing hundreds of times over. So where does that leave us? Pretty much back where we started, I suppose. That’s the beauty of this column, even if I do say it myself.
A selection from
A LIFE IN LETTERS
by ANTON CHEKHOV
You have only one fault. But in that fault lies the falseness of your position, your discontent and even the catarrh in your bowels. It is your complete lack of manners. Please forgive me, but veritas magis amicitiae… The fact of the matter is that there are certain rules in life… You will always feel uncomfortable among intelligent people, out of place and inadequate, unless you are equipped with the manners to cope… Your talent has opened the door for you into this milieu, you should be perfectly at home in it, but at the same time something pulls you away from it and you find yourself having to perform a kind of balancing act between these cultivated circles on the one hand and the people you live among on the other. That telltale lower-class flesh of yours is all too apparent, the result of growing up with the rod, next to the wine cellar, and subsisting on handouts. It is hard to rise above that, terribly hard!
Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria:
1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable… They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring some great benefit on you when they live with you, and they don’t make a scandal when they leave, saying ‘it’s impossible to live with you!’ They put up with noise and
cold, over-done meat, jokes, and the presence of strangers in the house…
2) They have compassion for other people besides beggars and cats. Their hearts suffer the pain of what is hidden to the naked eye. So for example, if Pyotr realized that his father and mother are turning grey from worry and depression and are lying awake at nights because they see him so seldom (and when they do, he’s the worse for drink), he hastens to see them and cuts out the vodka. Civilized people lie awake worrying about how to help the Polevayevs, to pay for their brothers to go through University, to see their mother decently clothed…
3) They respect other people’s property, and therefore pay their debts.
4) They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire. They don’t tell lies even in the most trivial matters. To lie to someone is to insult them, and the liar is diminished in the eyes of the person he lies to. Civilized people don’t put on airs; they behave in the street as they would do at home, they don’t show off to impress their juniors… They are discreet and don’t broadcast unsolicited confidences… They mostly keep silence, from respect for others’ ears.
5) They don’t run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don’t play on other people’s heartstrings to be sighed over and cosseted. They don’t say: ‘No one understands me!’ or ‘I’ve wasted my talents on trivial doodlings! I’m a whore!!’ because all that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it’s vulgar, old hat and false…
6) They are not vain. They don’t waste time with the fake jewellery of hobnobbing with celebrities, being permitted to shake the hand of a drunken Plevako, the exaggerated bonhomie of the first person they meet at the Salon, being the life and soul of the bar… They regard phrases like ‘I am a representative of the Press!!’ – the sort of thing one only hears from people like Rozdevich and Levenberg – as absurd. If they have done a brass farthing’s work they don’t pass it off as if it were 100 roubles’ by swanking about with their portfolios, and they don’t boast of being able to gain admission to places other people aren’t allowed in… True talent always sits in the shade, mingles with the crowd, avoids the limelight… As Krylov said, the empty barrel makes more noise than the full one…
7) If they do possess talent, they value it. They will sacrifice people of mind, women, wine, and the bustle and vanity of the world for it… They take pride in it. So they don’t go boozing with school teachers or with people who happen to have come to stay with Skvortsov; they know they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on them rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in their habits…
8) They work at developing their aesthetic sensibility. They do not allow themselves to sleep in their clothes, stare at the bedbugs in the cracks in the walls, breathe foul air, walk on a floor covered in spit, cook their food on a paraffin stove. As far as possible they try to control and elevate their sex drive… Sleeping with a whore, breathing right in her mouth, endlessly listening to her pissing, putting up with her stupidity and never moving a step away from her – where’s the sense in that? Civilized people don’t simply obey their baser instincts. They demand more from a woman than bed, horse sweat and the sound of pissing and more in the way of intelligence than an ability to swell up with a phantom pregnancy; artists above all need freshness, refinement, humanity, the capacity to be a mother, not just a hole… They don’t continually swill vodka, they’re aware they’re not pigs so they don’t root about sniffing in cupboards. They drink when they want to, as free men… For they require mens sana in corpore sano.
And so on. That’s what civilized people are like… Reading Pickwick and learning a speech from Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly civilized person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings. Taking a cab over to Yakimanka and then decamping a week later is not enough…
What you must do is work unceasingly, day and night, read constantly, study, exercise willpower… Every hour is precious…
Shuttling backwards and forwards to Yakimanka won’t help. You must roll up your sleeves and make a clean break, once and for all… Come back to us, smash the vodka bottle and settle down to read… even if it’s just Turgenev whom you’ve never read…
You’ve got to get over your fucking vanity, you’re not a child any more… you’ll soon be thirty! Time to grow up!
I’m expecting you… We all are…
Your
A. Chekhov
FEBRUARY 2005
BOOKS BOUGHT:
The Men Who Stare At Goats – Jon Ronson
I Am Charlotte Simmons – Tom Wolfe
Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood – Jennifer Traig
Palace Walk – Naguib Mahfouz
Just Enough Liebling – edited by David Remnick
BOOKS READ:
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul – Tony Hendra
Chronicles: Volume One – Bob Dylan
Little Children – Tom Perrotta
Soldiers of Salamis – Javier Cercas
The Book of Shadows – Don Paterson
The story so far: I have been writing a column in this magazine for the last fifteen months. And though I have had frequent battles with the Polysyllabic Spree – the fifty-five disturbingly rapturous and rapturously disturbing young men and women who edit the Believer – I honestly thought that things had got better recently. We seemed to have come to some kind of understanding, a truce. True, we still have our differences of opinion: they have never really approved of me reading anything about sport, and nor do they like me referring to books wherein people eat meat or farmed fish. (There are a whole host of other rules too ridiculous to mention – for example, you try finding ‘novels which express no negative and/or strong emotion, either directly or indirectly’ – but I won’t go into them here.) Anyway, I was stupid enough to try to accommodate their whims, and you can’t negotiate with moral terrorists. In my last column, I wrote a little about cricket, and I made a slightly off-colour joke about Chekhov, and that was it: I was banned from the magazine, sine die, which is why my column was mysteriously absent from the last issue and replaced by a whole load of pictures. Pictures! This is how they announce my death! It’s like a kind of happy-clappy North Korea round here.
I have no idea whether you’ll ever get to read these words, but my plan is this: not all the fifty-five members of the Spree are equally sharp, frankly speaking, and they’ve got this pretty dozy woman on sentry duty down at the Believer presses. (Sweet girl, loves her books, but you wouldn’t want her doing the Harold Bloom interview, if you know what I mean.) Anyway, we went out a couple of times, and I’ve told her that I’ve got the original, unedited, 600-page manuscript of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, her favourite novel. I’ve also told her she can have it if she leaves me unsupervised for thirty minutes while I work out a way of getting ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading’ into the magazine. If you’re reading these words, you’ll know it all came off. This is guerrilla column-writing, man. We’re in uncharted territory here.
They couldn’t have picked a worse time to ban me, because I read my ass off last month. Gravity’s Rainbow, Daniel Deronda, Barthes’s S/Z, an enormous biography of some poet or another that was lying around… It was insane, what I got through. And it was all for nothing. This month I read what I wanted to read, rather than what I thought the Spree might want me to read, and there was nothing I wanted to read more than Chronicles and The Plot Against America.
I’m not a Dylanologist – to me he’s your common-or-garden great artist, prone to the same peaks and troughs as anyone else and with nothing of any interest in his trash can. Even so, when I first heard about a forthcoming Dylan autobiography, I still found it hard to imagine what it would look like. Would it have a corny title – My Back Pages, say, or The Times, They Have A-Changed? Would it have photos with captions written by the author? You know the sort of thing: ‘The
eyeliner years. What was that all about?!!?’ Or, ‘Mary Tyler Moore and I, Malibu, 1973. Not many people know that our break-up inspired Blood On The Tracks.’Would he come clean about who those Five Believers really were, and what was so obvious about them? Even if you don’t have much time for the myth of Dylan, it’s still hard to imagine that he’d ever be able to make himself prosaic enough to write autobiographical prose.
Chronicles ends up managing to inform without damaging the mystique, which is some feat. In fact, after reading the book, you end up realizing that Dylan isn’t wilfully obtuse or artful in any way – it’s just who he is and how his mind works. And this realization in turn has the effect of contextualizing his genius – maybe even diminishing it, if you had a lot invested in his genius being the product of superhuman effort. He thinks in apocalyptic metaphors and ellipses, and clearly sees jokers and thieves and five (or more) believers everywhere he looks, so writing about them is, as far as he is concerned, no big deal. Here he is describing the difference a change in his technique made to him: ‘It was like parts of my psyche were being communicated to by angels. There was a big fire in the fireplace and the wind was making it roar. The veil had lifted. A tornado had come into the place at Christmastime, pushed away all the fake Santa Clauses aside and swept away the rubble…’ The boy can’t help it. (My favourite little enigmatic moment comes when Dylan tells us how he arrived at his new surname, an anecdote that includes a reference to ‘unexpectedly’ coming across a book of Dylan Thomas’s poems. Where did the element of surprise come in, do you think? Did it land on his head? Did he find it under his pillow one morning?)