by John Updike
Even if what Marx predicts were to happen, then the only thing that would happen would be that despotism would be transferred. Now the capitalists are in power, then the workers’ bosses would be in power.… The main misjudgement, the main error of Marx’s theory is the supposition that capital will pass out of the hands of private individuals into the hands of the government, and from the government, representing the people, into the hands of the workers.… It is a fiction, a deception, that the government represents the people.
Tolstoy saw that life without a religion amounts to death and darkness and Darwinian struggle; but he also saw orthodox Christianity as absurd and had great trouble maintaining even a minimal faith: “Sonya has gone to Kiev. An inner struggle. I don’t much believe in God.” His creed, when stated, is stripped-down Kant, a hypothetical “law”: “Does God exist? I don’t know. I know that there is a law governing my spiritual being. The source of, and the reason for that law I call God.” As a thinker, Tolstoy belongs not with the Victorian rediscoverers of faith like Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Newman, but with the eighteenth-century philosophes and Deists, and even with the cynical, reductionist court maximists like La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort. He seeks the underlying principle, the sweeping law, and at the end of War and Peace confounds the readers of his momentous panorama of human activity and moral search with the announcement that free will is as much an illusion as the stationariness of the earth. Nowhere is Tolstoy more powerful as a writer than when, with Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina, he sees through to the horror of things—a horror he then attempts to cancel with a flash of light: for Ivan Ilyich, “in place of death there was light,” and, as the train wheel crushes Anna, “the light … flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness.” May it prove so; but Tolstoy’s religiosity usually seems somewhat strained, and his theories advocating a “moral,” populist art self-woundingly reactionary and doctrinaire.
The journals contain many severe and downright dismissive comments on other writers. “I’ve been reading Shaw. His triviality amazes me.” “Read Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and his sister’s note about how he wrote it, and am absolutely convinced that he was completely mad when he wrote it.” “Read Boccaccio. The beginning of ruling-class immoral art.” “Read Dostoyevsky and was astonished at his slipshod manner, artificiality and fabrication.” Goncharov’s Oblomov provokes the exclamation “How paltry!” and a sampling of Walt Whitman is summarized as “Some stupid poems.” Writers he partially admires elicit rather subtler judgments. “We spoke about Chekhov.… It became clear to me that he, like Pushkin, has made an advance in form. And that’s a great service. But, like Pushkin, he hasn’t any content.” “Sat all evening alone, read Chekhov. He has the ability to love as far as artistic insight goes, but as yet no reason to.” “Have just read Chekhov’s story On the Cart. Excellent for its descriptiveness, but rhetorical as soon as he wants to give a meaning to the story.” “Read Coleridge. A writer very sympathetic to me—precise, clear, but unfortunately timid—an Englishman—the Church of England and redemption. Impossible …” When Tolstoy came, late in life, to express his literary opinions in print, he proved to be one of the great scolds in the history of criticism. He devoted pages of What Is Art? to condemning Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and other “decadents” as “incomprehensible.” He composed a lengthy, energetic essay in justification of the “insuperable repulsion and tedium” aroused in him by the works of Shakespeare; he troubled to read the original sources for Shakespeare’s plots (the old play King Leir, the Italian tale of Othello) and in every instance found them more logical and plausible than the contorted, ambiguous plays that Shakespeare scribbled and that Goethe and other Germans foisted off on the gullible nineteenth century as great works. Clarity and naturalness were Tolstoy’s touchstones; as his religious mission thickened, he demanded patent moral purpose and sobriety, even abstemiousness. In “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” he asserts that “Kant’s works would not have been written in such a curious and bad style had he not smoked so much.” He came to believe, in a chilling approach to the totalitarian view, that art must serve society with moral instruction, if it is to exist at all.
Yet, as his life draws to a close in a tumult of private quarrels and public causes and global celebrity, he wistfully notes in his diary a longing for “literary work”: “Yes, I would like some literary work. One can express everything and unburden oneself without condemning anyone” (10/21/09). A bit later, this man of eighty-one confides sadly, “I think I’m played out as a writer of literary works. I can’t concentrate on one thing. But there’s a lot I want to do.” A year before his death, he notes, “I’ve been reading through my books. I oughtn’t to write any more. I think in this respect I’ve done all I could. But I want to, I terribly want to …” (11/2/09). Most of the ideas he jots down after completing Resurrection never came to anything, as Mr. Christian’s notes faithfully inform us. But Hadji Murád, published posthumously, is as much a masterpiece as Billy Budd, and the one passage in these two volumes that for me came alive with the full Tolstoyan impetus, the racing pulse of truth, came very near the end, when the old sage and patriarch, already in failing health, at long last makes his escape from home, and sets out to be a pilgrim:
Everything was packed somehow or other before 6; I walked to the stables to tell them to harness the horses; Dusan, Sasha and Varya finished off the packing. The night was pitch black, I lost my way to the outhouse, found myself in a thicket, pricked myself, bumped into some trees, fell over, lost my cap, couldn’t find it, made my way out again with an effort, went back home, took another cap and with the aid of a lantern made my way to the stables and ordered the horses to be harnessed. Sasha, Dusan and Varya arrived. I trembled as I waited to be pursued. But then we were on our way. We waited an hour at Shchokino, and every minute I expected her [Sonya] to appear. But then we were in the carriage, the train started, and my fear passed, and pity for her rose up within me, but not doubt about having done what I had to do. Perhaps I’m mistaken in justifying myself, but I think it was not myself, not Lev Nikolayevich, that I was saving, but something that is sometimes, and if only to a very small extent, within me.
This rapid succession of clauses unfurls the nervous clarity and concreteness, even the comedy, of the mind and body shown in slightly discordant action, of sensations and emotions constantly subject to a critique delivered by a motionless, watchful, beautifully honest intelligence—the lucid partner in the Tolstoyan balancing act. Ten days later, Tolstoy was dead.
More threads than can be counted run through these journals. His remarks on art, for instance, range dramatically:
Literature is rubbish.
[12/27/52]
Art is the ability to depict what ought to be, what all people ought to strive towards, what gives people the greatest good.
[10/13/94]
Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.
[5/17/96]
Happiness, like art and women, belongs to the realm of temptation; yet he can never quite turn his back on it:
Unhappiness makes man virtuous—virtue makes him happy—happiness makes him vicious.
[March–May 1851]
Unhappiness is the best condition for improving oneself, for rising to a higher level; unhappiness is an indication of one’s imperfection.
[9/28/99]
There’s much to note down, above all the joyful, steadfast, serene, almost always loving state in which I find myself. The question is: where does it come from? Why, given my vile life, do I have so much happiness?
[12/13/04]
He preached asceticism but excelled in the portrayal of happiness; the concept figures in his work as prominently as that of truth, and seems to constitute the core of his genuinely religious, pantheistic intuitions; the hero of “Youth,” lying awake on a moonlit night, beside a pond, amid birches and d
ew-coated flowers and gleaming, leaping frogs, confides, “All this assumed a strange meaning to me, signifying an excess of beauty together with a sort of uncompleted happiness.”
It seems a sad paradox that the author who among male authors has given us unsurpassedly sympathetic and vital female characters, and whose literary career owed so much to the advice and secretarial labors of his wife and daughters, and who in “The Kreutzer Sonata” delivered a kind of feminist tract, should in his journals, under the stress of his struggles with Sonya, sink from casual chauvinism to dire misogyny:
Wenches have led me astray.
[6/23/53]
I want a woman terribly. A pretty one.
[6/27/57]
And it suddenly became clear to me what women’s strong points are: coldness—and something which they can’t be held responsible for because of their weak powers of thought—deceitfulness, cunning and flattery.
[8/31/84]
Yes, woman’s kingdom is a disaster. Nobody but women (she and her daughters) can do stupid and dirty things in a clean and even nice manner, and be completely satisfied.
[3/3/89]
So to regard women as what they are—weaker creatures spiritually—is not cruelty to women; to regard them as equals is cruelty.
[6/13/91]
Women are people with sexual organs over their hearts.
[6/2/94]
For seventy years I’ve been lowering my opinion of women more and more, and I need to lower it still further.
[11/20/99]
Clearly all disasters, or an enormous proportion of them, are due to the dissoluteness of women.
[12/19/1900]
Women lie like children, without noticing it.
[5/11/01]
For the existence of a reasonable, moral society, it is necessary for women to be under the influence of men.
[7/31/05]
These strictures relate, perhaps, to the unreality of his own mother and the reality, even as he approaches death, of his need for her: “I, an old man, wanted to become a child, to nestle up against a loving creature, to snuggle up, to complain, to be caressed and comforted. But who is this creature I could nestle up against and in whose arms I could weep and complain? Nobody now alive.” He never had a conversation with Marya Tolstoy; she was made into a silent immensity, a religious ideal:
Yes, yes, my dear mother whom I never called by that name, since I couldn’t talk. Yes, she is my highest conception of pure love—not a cold or divine, but a warm, earthly, maternal love. This is what attracts my better, weary soul. Mother dear, caress me.
All this is stupid, but it’s all true.
The words “true” and “truth” echo through these journals,a and the triumph of Tolstoy’s art is the impression of truth it makes upon us, even when tinged by a cranky and stringent ideology. We assimilate the imagery, dialogue, and psychologies of his fiction as if they were already our own; the air we breathe within the books seems our natural air as well. Seeing exposed, in the journals, the scathing critical sourness with which Tolstoy regarded his own work, the work of others, and much of the world itself, one can only deduce that a supreme art can be achieved through a process largely negative, with a hypertrophied critical faculty pitted against an irrepressible creative urge. He was a terrific reviser; War and Peace was copied over and over by his patient wife, and was corrected so extensively in proof that his publisher, Bartenyev, wrote him: “God alone knows what you are doing! If you go on like that we will be correcting and resetting forever. Anyone can tell you that half your changes are unnecessary.… For the love of God, stop scribbling!” But Tolstoy answered, “It is impossible for me not to scribble the way I scribble.” Very early in his career, at the age of twenty-four, he noted, “I must abandon for ever the idea of writing without revising.” He achieved the vital concreteness and directness of his prose as if sculpturally, through a series of self-critical blows, a succession of energetic corrections. James Joyce, arguing about Tolstoy with his brother Stanislaus in 1905, intuitively couched his praise in negatives: “Tolstoy is a magnificent writer. He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!”b Proust, the other modern novelist who approached Tolstoy’s grandeur of ambition, had this to say of him: “Every so-called stroke of observation is simply the clothing, the proof, the instance, of a law, a law of reason or of unreason, which the novelist has laid bare.… One feels oneself moving amid a throng of laws.… And for all that, in this apparently inexhaustible fund of creation it seems as though Tolstoi were repeating himself, as though he had no more than a few themes at his disposal, disguised and reshaped.… Might not the same memory have ‘sat’ for Kitty passing by in the carriage and Natasha in the carriage following the army?”c Indeed, part of Tolstoy’s truth is a stubborn fidelity, in his fiction, to what his heart has verified; he refused to leave a certain emotional base, defined by Yasnaya Polyana. The scowling, bearded prophet, pronouncing on “the all-round development of everything that exists,” looks out with the deepset live gray eyes of the overheated little boy, his cowlicks sticking up but the general expression “so lively, healthy and good-natured that I was pleased with myself.” The year of his death, he wrote in his diary a sentiment stemming from childhood and more than once echoed in his youth: “What a strange thing: I love myself, but nobody loves me.” Issued from the height of so long and victorious a life, the humble confession becomes epic.
Perhaps a word should be offered about this translation of the journals as an editorial production. Though admirable, it is not inviting and could have been, one suspects, nicer. Scribner’s has done no more than serve up the English edition—big grim gray pages, numerous typos,d and all. The two volumes are a bit large to be handy, and making one’s way from the index in the second, and back and forth to the footnotes in the back of each, is awkward. Mr. Christian has previously edited two volumes of Tolstoy’s letters, and his knowledge of the minutiae of Tolstoy’s life is impressively thorough. As in any selection, what was left out haunts what is in; triple dots swarm like mayflies, and a lot of the entries seem very snippety. As it happens, Professor Leon Stilman, of Columbia University, twenty-five years ago edited an edition of the diaries from Tolstoy’s last year, 1910, and this single dramatic year of uncut entries made compelling reading. The entry of April 13 appears in the Christian edition (ellipses and brackets his) as:
Today is 13 April Woke up at 5 and kept thinking how to escape, what to do. And I don’t know. I thought of writing. Yet it’s disgusting to write while continuing to live this sort of life. Should I speak to her? Go away? Change things gradually? […] I think the latter is all I can and will do. But still it’s depressing. […]
The Stilman edition carries the section after the first ellipsis to a startling outburst:
It seems that the last is all I can and will do. But it is oppressive all the same. Perhaps, even very likely, this is good. Help me, help me, He who is in me and in everything, and who is, and whom I pray to and love. Yes, love. Now I weep, as I love. Very much.
Of the ten passages that I had noted, in the back of the Stilman book, as especially shrewd or poignant, eight were omitted by Mr. Christian, including this valuable and typically Tolstoyan insight: “I am conscious of myself in exactly the same way now, at eighty-one, as I was conscious of myself, my ‘I,’ at five or six years of age.” If diaries are worth translating at all, an uncut version is perhaps best; it enables the reader to decide for himself what is important and to experience the drift of days somewhat as the writer did.
Mr. Christian’s edition seems inadequate as a scholarly resource, while still intimidating to the general reader. Thus continue the ragged, unsystematic fortunes of Tolstoy’s journals in English. The year 1917 saw published, by Dutton and Knopf respectively, two “first volumes” that turned out to be the last: The Diaries of Leo Tolstoy: Youth—1847 to 1852, translated by C. J. Hogarth and A. Sirnis, and The Journal of Leo Tolstoi: First Volume—1895 to 1899, trans
lated by Rose Strunsky. Ten years later, Doubleday brought out the journals from 1853 to 1857, as rendered into English by the veteran Tolstoy translators Louise and Aylmer Maude. None of these volumes (all out of print) had a sequel, though sequels were implied; all of them, it might be said, were pleasanter to hold and peruse than Mr. Christian’s big boxed pair. And all but Ms. Strunsky’s carried the footnotes at the bottom of the pages, where footnotes, as the very word suggests, should be.
The Heartless Man
BERNARD SHAW: Volume 1, 1856–1898, The Search for Love, by Michael Holroyd. 486 pp. Random House, 1988.
COLLECTED LETTERS 1926–1950, by Bernard Shaw, edited by Dan H. Laurence. 946 pp. Viking, 1988.
Bernard Shaw, as he preferred to be called, was for so long a globally famous writer that it comes as a surprise to realize what a slow bloomer, in the world’s gardens, he was. The third child and only son of an alcoholic Irish Protestant gentleman, George Carr Shaw, and a dedicated amateur singer, Lucinda Elizabeth “Bessie” Gurly Shaw, he was born into genteel poverty and raised in a curious ménage à trois rounded out by one George John Vandeleur Lee, his mother’s singing teacher, a musical pedagogue of some small fame in Dublin society, and possibly (a rumor never confirmed) George Bernard’s actual father. Sonny, as the boy was nicknamed, hated every school he attended, did poorly, and dropped out for good at the age of fifteen. The gawky, daydreaming youth then became an errand boy for a real-estate firm, rising to cashier and rent collector; in London, where he followed his mother and sisters and Vandeleur Lee at the age of twenty, he lived with his mother and sister Lucy, penned some music criticism under Lee’s name, worked for the Edison Telephone Company until the company was disbanded, spent his days in the British Museum reading Marx and writing novels no one would publish, became a vegetarian and a Socialist, taught himself shorthand and foreign languages, applied unsuccessfully for a variety of lowly jobs, boxed, sang, suffered severe monthly headaches, wore broken boots and mended clothes, and felt himself to be, he wrote in his journal, “a complete outsider.”