The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  Olga herself had a daughter by her first marriage. The husband committed suicide: her second husband died. When Olga and Pasternak met, the marriage with Zinaida was a “mess”—but it had that paradoxical quality of marriages in being a solid mess. Ivinskaya’s habit is to put memories of conversations uttered long ago into direct quotations and, thus, dialogue of a doleful reduction sounds throughout her account. She quotes Paternak on the state of things: “It was just my fate . . . and I realized my mistake during my first year together with Zinaida Nikolayevna. The fact is that it was not her I really liked, but Garrik [Neigaus] because I was so captivated by the way he played the piano. At first he wanted to kill me, the strange fellow, after she left him. But later on he was very grateful to me!” He explains that “in this hell” he had been living for ten years—and so on and so on.

  Pasternak did not leave Zinaida and in a deep hidden way that fact is the occasion for this book. Ivinskaya’s love-haunted spirit wanders in the shades without rest, needing always proof of love from him and proof offered to the world. This is a curiosity since she is a good deal better known to the world than the wife and even appears in the 1975 Columbia Encyclopedia as an “intimate friend and collaborator,” in the entry on Pasternak. She was an openly acknowledged, beloved mistress.

  Still the memory of his hesitations troubled. From the beginning she reports her mother’s nagging: “They were always harping on the need for BL [Pasternak] to make a clean break and leave his family, if he really loved me.” Her mother rang up, made scenes, which Pasternak tried to “fend off,” assuring everyone that he loved Olga more than life, but that one couldn’t change things so quickly. Even when Olga is in the prison camp her mother renews the theme in a letter to her: “He lives in a fantastic world which he says consists entirely of you—yet he imagines this need not mean any upheaval in his family life, or in anything else. Then what does he think it means?” (There may be something Russian in all this. A marvelous scene in Madame Mandelstam’s book: Mandelstam for a time also had his Olga. At one point her mother came to the house and in the wife’s presence urged Mandelstam to take the daughter off to the Crimea. When Nadia objected, the mother told her to shut up, that “she was here to talk business with her old friend Mandelstam.”)

  Of the fourteen years with Pasternak, Olga spent four in a prison camp, entering in 1949 and coming out in 1953. The caprice of Stalin’s imprisonments and murders leaves each one under a question mark of motivation. To look for provocation, however insignificant, is to imagine a lingering legality, or appearance of legality, even in the heart of the most anarchic criminal whim. The immediate prelude to her arrest had to do with dealings about her desperate need for an apartment where she could meet with Pasternak. The woman involved in this turned out to be engaged in dishonest bribes and was arrested. Ivinskaya’s arrest followed immediately. However, in so far as one can tell, the true reason for the arrest was her relation to Pasternak. In a letter written some years later he says: “She was put in jail on my account, as the person considered by the secret police closest to me, and they hoped that by means of grueling interrogation and threat they could extract enough evidence from her to put me on trial. I owe my life and the fact that they did not touch me in these years to her heroism and endurance.”

  The strangeness of Olga’s arrest to inform on Pasternak is equaled by the caprice of Pasternak’s escape from arrest during the most brutal years of Stalinism. Everyone who writes about him ponders his lucky fate, just as the ill fate of so many was the subject of tragic speculation. “Do not touch this cloud dweller,” Stalin is rumored to have said when Pasternak’s name came up for arrest. But that is only a rumor, a suggestion of some benign fascination with Pasternak on the part of Stalin—a peculiar quirk that may have been true in fact.

  Ilya Ehrenburg wrote, “I can see no logic in it,” and wondered why “Stalin did not touch Pasternak, who maintained his independence, while he destroyed Koltsov, who dutifully did everything he was asked to do.” In his introduction to Alexander Gladkov’s Meetings with Pasternak, Max Hayward recounts various complicated hypotheses for the relative immunity of the free-spirited Pasternak. Perhaps Stalin did not want the squalor of the Mandelstam case repeated; or it has been noted that Pasternak’s refusal to sign the abominable hyperbole of the letter sent to Stalin on the death of his wife, whom some think he murdered and others believe committed suicide, while sending instead a courteous, reserved note of his own, may have moved Stalin by its “sincerity.” The most appalling theory of all is Gladkov’s bitter view that they had decided to “make do with Meyerhold and Babel,” both of whom lost their lives.

  Pasternak was indeed persecuted in the literary and spiritual sense, and in spending most of the 1930s doing translations experienced an “inner migration”—the refuge of gifted writers. He was expelled from the Writers Union, harassed and denounced over the Nobel Prize, and yet he kept his treasured house in Peredelkino and his work, with the exception of Doctor Zhivago and some of the religious poems, is not only published but “canonized.”

  During Olga’s prison years Pasternak supported her family, who otherwise would have starved. In 1950, he had his first heart attack, soon after her arrest; in 1952, he had a second attack, a year before she was released in 1953. At this time he wrote to Olga’s mother, saying that his wife had saved him. “I owe my life to her. All this, and everything else as well—everything I have seen and gone through—is so good and simple. How great are life and death and how insignificant the man who does not know it.”

  Just before Olga’s release he seemed to fall into a kind of panic, perhaps a dream of retreat. A message was sent to her daughter, saying that perhaps “change might come about in our relationship,” meaning that it would not fall back into the previous fixed and settled intimacy. As always, Olga, writing in retrospect, skates around this rock as if it were a pebble. And indeed she must, having set for herself two mind-numbing conditions: first, an idealized human being, Pasternak, and second, an idealized love, without pause, for herself. His hesitation on the doorstep of reunion is described as “candor, guileless charm and undeniable heartlessness.” Olga’s words, in moments of distress, always war with each other, although it is a rhetorical slaughter between dummies on horseback. And always the nouns and adjectives of a sunny armistice prevail. They reunite: “In short, our life, after being torn apart by sudden separation, all at once bestowed an unexpected gift on him—so once more nothing mattered except the ‘living sorcery of hot embraces,’ the triumph of two people alone in the bacchanalia of the world.” Bacchanalia?

  There is nothing she will not write. “While I was with him it was not given to him to grow old.” She presses us to read between the lines to find any of the reality of this now ill man, with the desperate personal and financial conditions of his life, with his devotion above all to finding peace in which to work, with his past, his age, his love for her which like any love, especially an additional one, brings along the moonbeams of guilt and confusion with its happiness. Other tarred statements of his on the subject of his wife offered in direct quotations: “Let us not look ahead, or complicate matters, or hurt other people’s feelings. . . . Would you want to be in the place of that unfortunate woman?” Indeed, yes, she would.

  He reassures: “For years now we have been deaf to each other . . . and of course she is only to be pitied—she has been deaf all her life—the dove tapped at her window in vain . . . And now she is angry because something real has come to me—but so late in life!” Olga’s own thoughts sum up: “Happy as I felt at being his chosen one, I had to listen to narrow-minded reproaches and expressions of sympathy, and this upset me. . . . I suppose I longed for recognition and wanted people to envy me.”

  Ivinskaya speaks of her book as one he wanted her to write. Pasternak, with the miraculous purity and lyricism of his own style in poems and in prose, with his brilliant portrait in Safe Conduct of Mayakovsky and the “black velvet” of his talent, and th
e magical sweep of Doctor Zhivago (“her book”), did not catch her ear. As a reminder of his own way with a sliver of imagined speech, his thoughts on the suicide of the gifted, corrupt Fadeyev, head of the Writers Union:

  And it seems to me that Fadeyev, with that guilty smile which he managed to preserve through all the cunning intricacies of politics, could bid farewell to himself at the last moment before pulling the trigger with, I should imagine, words like these: “Well, it’s all over! Goodbye, Sasha!”

  (I Remember)

  Olga’s jealousy of Mrs. Pasternak is not mitigated by her own reports of Pasternak’s discreditable animadversions on Zinaida, who died in 1966 and thus was not an impediment to discourteous description. A meeting between the two women is left for “history” by Olga and here she admits that she was ill and perhaps hasn’t got it quite straight. “I no longer remember exactly what passed between me and this heavily built, strong-minded woman, who kept repeating how she didn’t give a damn for our love and that, although she no longer loved BL herself, she would not allow her family to be broken up.” There is no reason this scene should be credited literally, especially since the notion that a rival does not love, but is instead moved only by the slyest attention to self-interest, is a provincial vulgarity.

  Zinaida Pasternak does not get a good “press” from any account readily at hand, unless it may be considered that Pasternak’s legal, “semi”-fidelity is a sort of remote credit. In Hope Abandoned, Madame Mandelstam tells of a visit to Peredelkino: “He told us he thought his wife was baking a cake down in the kitchen. He went to tell of our arrival, but came back looking glum; she clearly wanted to have nothing to do with us.” A few years later, during a time of their great suffering, Zinaida said on the telephone to the Mandelstams: “Please don’t come out here to Peredelkino.” Worst of all, the scandal of the wife of Pasternak saying, “My children love Stalin most of all, and me only second.”

  A scene for which research turned up two versions: Toward the end of his life, Pasternak went with his wife for a visit to the Caucasus: as Olga puts it, Zinaida “took him off to Tiflis with her.” Olga was wounded and angry and Pasternak begs her not to talk like a bad novel. She went off to Leningrad and refused to answer his sad, lonely letters—but of course soon she is remorseful. “To this very day the misery of this last quarrel in our life still gnaws at me.”

  An account of the visit is given in the introduction Lydia Pasternak wrote for her translation of an English selection of her brother’s poems. “This short visit to the Caucasus had a wonderful effect on my brother. The wild majestic scenery, the universal love and admiration for him of the Georgians, the freedom and the recollections of the happy days they had both spent in the same surroundings in the thirties, before their marriage—all of this gave Pasternak new strength and a feeling of peace and fulfillment. He returned to Peredelkino happy and rejuvenated. . . .” Who can say? Sisters often incline toward the status quo.

  Lara in Doctor Zhivago—when a friend from abroad meets Olga: “She said we were exactly as she had imagined us—BL and me.” Pasternak wrote in a letter to a Swedish correspondent: “Lara, the heroine of the novel, is someone in real life. She is a woman very close to me.” Zinaida is also, he says, somewhere in the conception of Tonia, Zhivago’s wife. In a letter Pasternak wrote of “my wife’s passionate love of work, her eager skill in everything—in washing, cooking, cleaning, bringing up the children—has created domestic comfort, a garden, a way of life and daily routine, the calm and quiet needed for work.”

  In A Captive of Time, the dilemmas of Pasternak’s career are examined with the fullest compassion: his survival, his leanings toward Christianity, the famous telephone conversation with Stalin when Mandelstam was arrested, his response to the desperation of Tsvetaeva just before her suicide, the cringing letter to Khrushchev renouncing the Nobel Prize, a letter Ivinskaya says she wrote herself and urged upon Pasternak. There is much of interest in all of this even if it comes, also, under the disaster of Ivinskaya’s style and the hallucinated folly of the transformation of life and history into questions of their love.

  What is the intention of her book and to whom is it addressed? All we know is that it has been sent out to the West, to us, and in some odd fashion sent back to herself, her memories. “My love! I now come to the end of the book you wanted me to write. . . . The greater part of my conscious life has been devoted to you—and what is left of it will also be devoted to you.” What is the meaning of conscious?

  After Pasternak’s death, Ivinskaya and her daughter were arrested on the claim, or pretext, of dealing with rubles smuggled into the country by way of the Feltrinelli firm, Italian publishers of Doctor Zhivago. She served another four years. The misery of this life seemed to have no ending. It must be said of Ivinskaya that she can take a cold, icy bullet into her flesh, pull it out with a wince, sugar it and offer it to the world, to herself mostly, as a marshmallow. Out of prison once more, she speaks of the “total lack of sympathy for me in influential Soviet circles.” Here she is not speaking only of party hacks, but of the hostility of such persons as the courageous novelist, Lydia Chukovskaya, who even at this moment is being persecuted in the Soviet Union as a defender of human rights. Another puzzle.

  Ivinskaya is now old, poor, and bereft. Pasternak’s death certainly left her quite undefended, without, as she says somewhere, “the protection of his name.” She has occupied herself with this book, a success in the West. There is much awry in her character and understanding, and thus Pasternak, one of the great writers of the century and a man who seemed to have no enemies, is much reduced. But that is the turn of the wheel of history for him. Her own apotheosis, so beautifully accomplished in Pasternak’s poems to her and in the novel, in the many hundreds of letters in her keeping, might better have been left to stand alone.

  At the end of Hope Abandoned, Madame Mandelstam prints a letter she wrote to Mandelstam just before she learned of his death. It was never sent, was put away, retrieved thirty years later. She speaks of her love in a way that her quirky, thorny nature might not have allowed years before. It is one of the most beautiful letters we have:

  You came to me every night in my sleep, and I kept asking what had happened, but you did not reply. In my last dream I was buying food for you in a filthy hotel restaurant. . . . When I had bought it, I realized I did not know where to take it, because I do not know where you are. When I woke up, I said to Shura, “Osia is dead.”

  The letter ends: “It’s me, Nadia. Where are you? Farewell.”

  POSTSCRIPT: HUSBANDS

  From Close to Colette by Maurice Goudeket:

  There is great temptation to consider that the intimate hours of a person or a couple, whatever their public position may be, belong to themselves alone. But when a wave of fervor such as has rarely been seen irradiated the last years of Colette . . .would it be fair not to offer in exchange the most precious thing one has kept?

  Mmmmm. So, a modest memoir, not very interesting. Houses, gardens, animals, food, journeys in motor cars, holidays on handsome yachts, writing, the German occupation, death. “Suddenly there was silence and Colette’s head bent slowly to one side, with a movement of infinite grace.”

  Katherine Mansfield, Letters and Journals, edited by C. K. Stead. From the introduction by Stead:

  Murry’s promotion of his wife’s literary remains brought him royalties and opprobrium and increased her fame. The good and the bad seem inextricably mixed in his work on her behalf. He transcribed, edited, and wrote commentaries tirelessly but in a way which encouraged a sentimental, and sometimes a falsely mystical interest in her talent. He could not keep himself out of the picture either, seeing the development of her art always in relation to the development of her feeling for him.

  1978

  [1] The quotations from the Tolstoys are from Henri Troyat’s biography, Tolstoy (New York: Doubleday, 1967).

  UNKNOWN FAULKNER

  THIS IS a daunting enterprise: 677 pages
of unpublished or previously uncollected works of short fiction by William Faulkner, along with interesting notes that tell of the circuitous, tireless creation of the Faulkner canon. They tell, also, of the need for money along the way, the need that turns visions into “submitted manuscripts,” pieces of paper chugging along—to the eyes of George P. Lorimer at The Saturday Evening Post, to the desk at Collier’s, and to the editorial scrutiny of other magazines.

  This publication is offered to advance, perhaps to complete, the record. An industrious writer of the first rank leaves his inventory, which breeds a sort of marsupial industry of its own, one often endowed with a larger capitalization than the original source. The multiplication of texts, the expropriation, if that is a suitable word, by Faulkner of previous work to be renewed for later work, the absorption of single stories and episodes into large designs: all of this is happy grounding for books, articles, and advanced degrees. Most of the work offered in the Uncollected Stories has long been available to scholars working with the various depositories of Faulkner material. Now, divided into stories revised for later books, uncollected stories, and unpublished manuscripts, the work is offered to the general reader.

  It is a question whether Faulkner has ever had a general reader, unless the term may be thought to describe those who give their time throughout life to literature without the spur of the classroom or the project. His original union of high classical style and vocabulary with the most daring and unaccommodating experiments with form, fractured methods of narration, shifting, shadowy centers of memory and documentation makes an art that was very demanding in his lifetime and not less so now. Perhaps it is more difficult now if the reader must also place upon his mind the inhibiting genealogies, the mythical, unpronounceable kingdom that begins with a Y—all of the learning and sorting out that, like all learning and sorting, gives knowledge of a kind. Such knowledge is inevitable without being necessary. What are necessary are the magical, unique texts themselves with their passions that ask everything of the receiving mind, ask that the sensibility submit to a profound saturation. These are not stops for the passer-by. Indeed, not one of the novels will reveal even its form, its story, without submersion again and again.