Perfectionism and self-sabotage: Gogol had always been prone to both. When he was just eighteen years old he had published a long poem in a small provincial magazine, and when confronted with negative critical reactions to it had bought up every copy of the magazine he could lay his hands on and burnt the lot.
In the case of Dead Souls, however, not only were there no negative reactions from any of the critics whose opinions he respected – on the contrary, too many expectations had been raised about what was to come next. He decided to take stock, and to bide his time.
He began to travel in Europe, above all in Germany and in Italy, writing and discarding what he had written as he went; writing and rewriting as if everything that came from his pen could never be completely satisfactory. The five surviving chapters are the result of a confusion of different drafts which somehow escaped another emancipatory bonfire of papers lit by Gogol around 1845, and which it is impossible for me and difficult even for the most informed scholars to reconstruct. Though some maintain there never was such a fire, and that the chapters actually come from a ledger that had simply been forgotten by their author.
In any case, even if the Russian writer was never satisfied with what he had committed to paper, there can be no doubt that he was in fact writing. We have from 1849, for instance, a testimony that at the house of one Alexandra Smirnova certain chapters of a new draft of the second part of the novel had been read. Or rather, of the poem, as Gogol was now calling it with Russian peculiarity, just as Pushkin called his poem Eugene Onegin a novel.
In short, in the midst of the enormous confusion generated by multiple drafts and by the continuous travelling that must have contributed to his fluctuating physical and mental health, the only certain thing is that at some point the second volume of Dead Souls disappeared.
We are in Moscow, on the evening between the eleventh and twelfth of February, 1852, ten days before the death of the author. (According, that is, to the Orthodox calendar, which at the time diverged by ten days from our own, so that the outbreak of the October Revolution actually occurred in our November.) Gogol is a guest at the house of a friend: one Count Tolstoy, but not the writer of the same name. The only account of what now takes place is given by his manservant – an actual manservant this time, rather than the kind invented by Franco Buffoni in order to testify to the lost work of Byron – a young man called Semyon who was barely thirteen years old at the time.
The account given by Semyon, if we decide to believe it, is excruciating. Gogol asks for a folder to be brought to him, and takes from it a bundle of around five hundred pages tied together with a ribbon. In front of his manservant he opens the door of the stove (or was it a fireplace?) and throws the bundle of papers into the fire. ‘Master!’, Semyon cries, ‘What are you doing? Stop!’ Gogol responds curtly: ‘It’s none of your business. Pray instead!’ But the pages tightly bound by the ribbon do not burn. So Gogol retrieves them from the stove or fireplace, unties the ribbon and begins to feed them in a few at a time, lighting them with the flame from a candle. Now they burn readily. When they have all been consumed by the fire, Gogol stretches himself out on the bed and begins to weep.
Serena Vitale, an extraordinary scholar of all things Russian to whom I am indebted for much of the information I have about this case, including about what took place in that room in Moscow in 1852, has told me that ‘This is the first of many bonfires that punctuate the history of Russian literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, due to authorial dissatisfaction or for reasons of censorship: Dostoyevsky (with the first draft of The Idiot), Pasternak, Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova.’
And then she cites something by Marina Tsvetaeva which gives a markedly symbolic reading of this particular literary conflagration:
The poet? A sleeper. One who has woken up. The man with the aquiline nose and the waxen features who burns a manuscript in the fireplace of a house in Seremetev. The second part of Dead Souls. […] That half-hour of Gogol’s at the fireplace has done more in favour of good, and against evil, than all Tolstoy’s many years of preaching.
In favour of good and against evil (that is to say, art), because that fire had a great deal to do with a mystical and religious crisis, almost an overwhelming neurosis that had afflicted Gogol, and that together with his literary dissatisfaction had been the reason for a self-loathing accompanied by ascetic rituals and fasting under the guidance of a severe archpriest called Matvej Konstantinowski, one of the many tutelary figures of the powerful and of artists that punctuate the life of Russia, culminating in the rise of Rasputin under the last Tsar.
And so the picture clarifies: at the root of his decision to destroy the second part of Dead Souls was not only his enormous literary ambition, the idea that this was to be an immortal masterpiece of Russian literature, but also the desire to edify, to construct a grand cathedral dedicated to nothing less than the moral reconstruction of the Russian people.
And this takes us to the heart of Gogol’s problem: for if with his grotesque realism he had been able to depict an inferno of mediocrity, how could he use the same literary means in order to construct both a purgatory and a paradise of the steppes?
It appears, moreover, that Konstantinowski had repeatedly urged him to renounce his art, to abandon that corrupt and imperfect literary world, that sublime malady that was antithetical to the fulsome health of faith. And perhaps, in the end, Gogol had acquiesced.
In moving towards such a decision, the circle of Slavophiles surrounding Gogol also played a significant role: Slavophiles with their commitment to the triad of Orthodoxy, Tsarism and Autocracy. A circle of reactionary admirers who guided him onto a terrain – politics – that turned out to be far from his proper one, and led him to become the author of embarrassing political articles.
The destruction of the missing parts of Dead Souls may well have had its origins in his crisis of faith, and an infatuation with anti-Western European ideology (even as he found himself to be so much better off in Rome…).
But there are other theories regarding its loss. That he had burnt it, for instance, according to one Russian source (and this is what happens when you accumulate too many drafts!) by simply confusing a subsequent version with an earlier one he wanted to get rid of. A scarcely credible hypothesis, however much his failing health might have affected his actions. After the fire he will live on for another ten days, but only in a kind of prolonged agony, without ever wanting to touch food again, tormented by the useless cures of the doctors (plunged into cold baths, festooned with leeches, etc.), in a state of utter despair.
Others maintain that no such bonfire occurred because there was in truth no manuscript to burn in it, and that the whole episode had simply been invented by his servant. Others still, in the Russian tradition that sees conspiracies everywhere, contend that the manuscript was removed by his enemies. Which ones? And why? Perhaps it was taken by those reactionary Slavophiles who did not want his conversion to be sullied by a text that was at odds with and even contradicted it? Or perhaps by the perfidious democrats, who would have destroyed this hymn to rural and Orthodox Russia, this paean to the enemy of the secularized West?
If this were the case (and it is not the first time I have encountered similar theories in relation to my lost books), then perhaps the manuscript may still exist somewhere: hidden away but liable, sooner or later, to come to light again.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Serena Vitale tells me. ‘But if the day should come when it does,’ she adds, laughing, ‘even if it’s after I’m gone, I’ll come back from the other side to read it.’
One question remains. Was it completed, or was it still unfinished?
Maybe where Gogol is concerned – with his maniacal perfectionism, his continuous corrections and doubts about what he had achieved, his constant rewriting and revisions – nothing was ever really concluded. It is hardly surprising that testimonies regarding his public readings refer only to the first few chapters, with which he was reasonably sati
sfied. And yet I am convinced by the theory that a second volume was substantially there at the time of his death; that it was almost finished.
And so perhaps, beyond the religious crises and political intrigue, the real motive for destroying the book, and the one most in keeping with Gogol’s innermost character, is that the author failed to find a way of bringing to redemption his engaging anti-hero, the scoundrel Chichikov; that he failed to find a way of giving verisimilitude to ‘good’ characters, of making them convincing. The more extraordinarily deft his touch in depicting irredeemable fraudsters, in exposing the mediocrity of the provincial landowners, the little monsters of great Russia, the weaker it became when dealing with the ways of the upright and the just. It was as if he was lost for words when faced with describing such rectitude – even if he aspired to it himself – just as Chichikov becomes speechless in the novel when faced by the wise and capable squire Kostanzoglo.
Is it not therefore, in the end, the same problem Dostoyevsky will experience, with his own difficulty in matching his great sinners with equally compelling descriptions of good men? The same problem which, with its earnest desire to be edifying, socialist realism will not be able to solve?
Perhaps Tolstoy was right after all when he wrote in a diary entry of 28 August 1857: ‘I have read the second part of Dead Souls; it’s half-baked.’ He was clearly referring to the first five chapters, the only text we have to assess how Gogol was attempting to resolve the problem, and I still feel humbly disinclined to concur with such a thoroughgoing dismissal as Tolstoy’s.
This was the draft that Gogol himself deemed to have been superseded, even though it turned out to be the only one to survive his compulsive perfectionism.
If I may be permitted an attempt to summarize the situation in which Gogol found himself: it was his religious ideals that pulled the work towards a Dantesque conception of redemption after the fall; it was loyalty to his art that pushed him to destroy everything that did not achieve the high standards he set for himself.
So we could reply to Tsvetaeva: in the fire that consumed Dead Souls what prevailed, perhaps, was art. Even if, knowing Gogol, it is probable that from those lost pages, despite everything, the traces of a tremendous talent would nevertheless have emerged.
Tsvetaeva also writes:
Perhaps the second part of Dead Souls would not have convinced us. But it would surely have given us joy.
British Columbia, 1944:
It Isn’t Easy Living in a Cabin
THE PAR ADIGM OF THE poète maudit is difficult to dislodge. Many continue to believe that a disordered life full of excess and adventure forms the basis on which the talented can construct who knows what marvels. We only need to think of musicians – jazz musicians in particular, but also those rock stars of the sixties and seventies – so many of whom were convinced that dropping out was inherently more interesting than leading a bourgeois life, and that drink and drugs would have a positive effect on their creativity, only to discover that the exact opposite was the case: after an initial period of euphoria and apparent expansion of their powers of invention, there followed depression, stupefaction, physical decline. How many stories of this kind could be told: from Bix Beiderbecke to Charlie Parker, and from Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix.
The same goes for writers, since often the tale of their tumultuous lives has ended up diminishing their literary talent. Or, because of those lives they have achieved a dubious fame.
Lived outside of the usual boundaries, these disordered and chaotic lives often enough had destructive consequences for the works of those who led them: not only because of the difficulty of establishing productive working routines, or of completing work once it had been started, but because of the relative ease with which it could be damaged or lost amidst such confusion. A tendency towards self-destructiveness hardly inspires a desire to conserve the things we have created.
Into this category of doomed or damned artists Malcolm Lowry might be conscripted, due to his now legendary consumption of alcohol, and the fact that by some it has even been intimately connected with his very style of writing. As far as I’m concerned, however, I remain convinced that Lowry himself never subscribed to the idea that dependence on alcohol enabled him to write better. On the contrary, all that drinking was the result of an existential malaise he had struggled with since adolescence (he had started to drink to excess at the age of fourteen), and the act of writing constituted a daily battle against that terrible and unquenchable dependence. That said, there was unquestionably in his difficult existence a destructive tendency directed both towards himself and towards his own writings.
We have only two books that were published in Lowry’s lifetime: Ultramarine, and the novel unanimously considered to be his best work and an absolute masterpiece: Under the Volcano. Some other works have been published posthumously, put together from unfinished material and first drafts, which were always intended to be followed by others. But another novel, reputedly of over a thousand pages in length and called In Ballast to the White Sea, seems to have been definitively lost, though I will account for that ‘seems’ in my conclusion to what follows.
Lowry was born in 1909, the son of a rich cotton merchant. From the outset his life seems to have oscillated between trying to gratify his family – at fifteen he won a junior National Golf Championship, subsequently went to Cambridge University in accordance with his mother’s wishes, and did not resist his father’s determination to make him join the family firm – and a longing for independence and detachment which caused him to go to sea as an ordinary seaman on a merchant ship. It was in Oslo during one of his journeys that he met the poet Nordahl Grieg, a peculiar Norwegian Stalinist who became the inspiration for his first novel, Ultramarine. There are those who maintain that this book was plagiarized from the writings of Grieg, as Lowry himself partially admitted in a letter to the Scandinavian author:
Much in Ultramarine is a paraphrase, a plagiarism, or a parody of what you have written.
Between one drinking bout and another Lowry had managed to lose even this first novel. Or rather someone had stolen it together with the suitcase that had been flung onto the back seat of his publisher’s convertible, parked in front of a bar. As luck would have it, a friend who had typed up the final version of the novel, and clearly knew who he was dealing with, was able to supply a carbon copy he had retrieved from a bin in Lowry’s home.
After having returned to England and concluded his studies at Cambridge, Lowry escaped again, this time to continental Europe; in Spain he met the writer Jan Gabrial and married her in Paris in 1934 before travelling with her to Mexico and the United States. These continuous displacements were the outward, visible signs of his incurable restlessness.
Though they loved each other deeply, Gabrial eventually decided to leave him, explaining later that life with Lowry was impossible unless you were a cross between a mother and a nurse – neither role she considered herself cut out for. Theirs proved to be a brief enough story, already over by 1937. And yet Lowry would never recover from the sense of bereavement he felt at losing her: as is clearly evident when reading Under the Volcano, she was the love of his life.
In 1938, having remained there alone after Jan had abandoned him for someone else, Lowry left Mexico (or to be more precise, was expelled) and went to Los Angeles, still tormented by the demons of writing and alcoholism. He lived there in a hotel which his father had begun to pay for directly after discovering that the money he sent to his son was being spent on drink. It was in Los Angeles that he met his second wife, Margerie Bonner, an aspiring writer who had been a silent film actress as a child and who would take care of him for the rest of his life, with the kind of single-minded devotedness that Gabrial had been understandably unwilling to give.
From Los Angeles they moved to Vancouver (where Margerie joined him with the typescript of Under the Volcano which Lowry, true to form, had left behind in California), and from there to Dollarton, a village in British Columbia
where they lived from 1940 to 1954, in a kind of squatter’s cabin without electricity or running water.
This was the cabin that was to burn down in 1944, destroying the only copy of In Ballast to the White Sea – the book Lowry had worked on for nine years. It had been an undertaking requiring such effort and dedication that he could not begin to think of starting it over again.
The grand idea that he had been working on was of composing a kind of drunken Divine Comedy, a trilogy of novels entitled The Voyage that Never Ends.
If Under the Volcano was his Inferno (and what could be more infernal, after all, than the smoking summit of Popocatepetl), then In Ballast to the White Sea was his Paradise, with water representing the element of purification and liberation, in contrast to the fires of Volcano. The Purgatory was meant to be a third novel, published posthumously in 1968 in an incomplete draft form entitled Lunar Caustic, and more recently under the title Swinging the Maelstrom.
Lowry’s Paradise is a marine one, as the very title of In Ballast indicates. The term ‘in ballast’ refers to a ship travelling without cargo, carrying only the weights necessary to stabilize it, on its voyage towards the White Sea. The White Sea is a southern inlet of the glacial waters of the Barents Sea; the territories surrounding it are all Russian, and on its shore rises the city of Archangelsk. And this, together with information in letters and from other sources, alerts us to the fact that forming the basis of the novel is the same politico-existential mythology that Lowry had derived from his contact with Nordahl Grieg, and that fascinated him during the writing of Ultramarine.
In Search of Lost Books Page 5