The fact is that he was vexed by the small cares and petty rows of domestic life, those scrapes and annoyances from which he seems to have imagined that he, alone among the generality of husbands, would be exempted. He could only dimly comprehend the significance his bride attached to the management of the household. A month before, Sofya Andreyevna had inhabited a little room in the Kremlin, where her father practiced as a physician. Now she was a Countess, and the mistress of a vast domain. But her domestic empire, she soon discovered, though extensive, was phlegmatic. Yasnaya Polyana was mired in sloth and vodka. There was a small army of servants, a chambermaid, a laundress, a coachman, a seamstress, a charwoman; yet they were all extraordinarily lazy. The house was perpetually in disorder; the cook was drunk; the housekeeping régime was in disarray. Tolstoy himself had no regular bed linen, but rather slept, like a peasant, rolled up in a blanket. Agatha Mikhailovna, the housekeeper, appeared to be more concerned with canines than clean beds. A tall, spare woman, unbent by age, she was revered by Tolstoy, and had the care of his dogs. These she ministered to in a dirty room strewn with her own clothes, which constituted the dogs’ bedding. When a puppy took sick, she would commend it to the care of Saint Nicholas, before whose icon she would light a candle.
Tolstoy, for his part, was startled, not only by the way in which his bride exalted the trivialities of housekeeping into problems of the first rank, but also by the strength of purpose she displayed in resolving them. Sofya Andreyevna threw herself unstintingly into the work of a chatelaine. She pulled the bell rope furiously, gave peremptory orders, rearranged the rooms, reorganized the linens. Her willpower was masculine in its intensity “I can only say,” Tolstoy wrote to a friend, “that her most striking feature is that of a ‘man of integrity’—I mean what I say: both ‘integrity’ and ‘man.’” But if the masculine element in Sofya Andreyevna’s makeup was strong, her feminine instincts were stronger. Tolstoy was baffled by them. His wife longed to be fussed over, worshipped, caressed; and she sulked when the man to whom she had united her soul failed to offer up a sufficiently tender devotion. “My husband is ill and out of sorts and doesn’t love me,” she complained a fortnight after their wedding. “It is terrible to live with him.” “He grows colder and colder to me every day, while I go on loving him more and more. His coldness will soon become unbearable.” There was “something wrong” in their relations, and “sooner or later we will drift apart in a spiritual sense.” She went about Yasnaya Polyana in a fog, a daze, a melancholy dream. If only she could rouse herself. “If I woke up, I should be a different person. . . . He would then see how much I love him, I should know how to tell him of my love; I should be able, as in the past, to look clearly into his soul and to realize how I could make him happy. I simply must wake up.”
But she could not; and her exertions in the laundry and the linen closet contrasted markedly with the drowsy apathy of her more intimate performances. For it was not only the difficulty of joining of their souls that perplexed the newlyweds in those early days. Sofya Andreyevna’s awakening on the wedding night, in the garish room in the inn, had been a rude one. A “bad dream,” Tolstoy wrote afterwards in his diary. “She knows all.” Her terror was “morbid.” She eventually got used to the transactions of the marriage bed, but she liked them no better. “All this commerce of the flesh” was, she said, “repellent.” She found no pleasure in having her naked body “crushed” to her husband’s. “The physical side of love plays a very big rôle for him, and none at all for me.” Her disdain for her spouse’s passionate nature was heightened by the knowledge that he had adored other flesh besides her own. “When he kisses me, I think to myself, ‘Well, I’m not the first woman.’”
She could not forget the diaries. Whether from a desire to put her affections to the test, or from the hope of more perfectly uniting their souls, Tolstoy had, shortly before their wedding, given Sofya Andreyevna his diaries to read. A prudent lover might seek to cast over his youthful follies a decent veil; but Tolstoy could not be content with so deceitful an expedient. Sofya Andreyevna must see his soul entire. She had taken the books from him; opened them; read. The black confessions, the brutish lusts, the numerous debaucheries, shocked her.
Her shock was closely proportioned to her naïveté. In Russia, at that time, young ladies lived a sheltered existence. Peter the Great had abolished the Eastern practice of relegating the women of the household to an apartment known as the terem, in order that their modesty might never be violated by the profane eye of a stranger; the habits of Oriental sequestration had died away. But the well-bred Russian girl still grew up behind a variety of screens and veils, and as a result she entered womanhood almost entirely ignorant of the less delicate aspects of relations between the sexes. Sofya Andreyevna was unprepared, at eighteen, for the revelation of her lover’s erotic nature. During a sleepless night she was constantly in tears. Tolstoy’s past, she wrote, “is so dreadful that I don’t think I will ever be able to accept it.” When, blear-eyed and pale, she greeted him the next morning, she made a show of cheerfulness; she forgave, or pretended to forgive, his transient amours. But in her soul a seed of doubt had been planted.
It now brought forth a bitter fruit. Love may be patient, but jealousy is turbulent. It “hurts me,” she said, “that this love of mine, my first and last, should not be enough for him.” “I, too, have been interested in men,” she admitted, “but only in my imagination.” At Yasnaya Polyana she was surrounded by mementoes of Tolstoy’s lust. There was Askinia, the peasant girl with whom he had once lived intimately. Many years later, when he was an old man, Tolstoy spoke of the joy it gave him “to think that Askinia is still alive.” And there was Askinia’s son, Timofei, the spitting image of the lord of the manor himself. One night Sofya Andreyevna dreamt of an immense garden in which all the women of Yasnaya Polyana were gathered. Among them was Askinia, dressed in black silk; she had with her the little boy. Sofya dreamt that she seized her husband’s natural child and tore it limb from limb. Yet before the snows of the winter came, something happened which threw a new light on the marriage. She discovered that she was herself with child.
Tolstoy’s family was growing, and the sometime public man prepared to become a thorough family man. He was scarcely the only wellborn Russian to exchange public duties for domestic cares. The Tsar’s reforms had briefly roused many educated Russians to a new sense of civic virtue. But their enthusiasm faded, and they sank back into apathy and indifference. Alexander had failed to persuade the best and brightest of his subjects that his revolution mattered.
Columbia and Camden, South Carolina, March 1862-September 1862
BISMARCK’S COUNTER-REVOLUTION against the free state might succeed, though it threw the dirt of the Dark Ages in the face of parliaments and progress; but in America the romantic vision of the Fire Eaters was breaking down. In the New World feudalism was a failure. Yet the realization that their order was doomed came slowly to the grandees of the South. The war had at first been for them a parlor game, an excuse for patriotic invective. But as 1862 wore on it came closer, and ceased to be a subject of rhetorical extravagance.
“It has come home to us,” Mary Chesnut said. “Half the people that we know in the world are under the enemy’s guns.” One by one the men donned their military cloaks and departed for the front. Her friend Laurence Keitt went off with his regiment, the 20th South Carolina, closely followed by another friend, John Hugh Means. Mary Chesnut was walking to the Prestons’ house when she caught sight of Governor Means driving to the depot. She loved the Governor; he differed from the “cold, formal, solemn, overly polite creatures” who figured so largely in her Columbia existence. He loved life and did not scruple to conceal it. From his passing carriage he kissed both hands to her—a “whole-souled greeting, as the saying is.” “And I returned it with my whole heart, too. ‘Goodbye,’ he cried—and I answered, ‘Goodbye.’” She cried as she watched him drive out of sight. Two months later he was dead.
Old men died—and so, too, did younger ones, in far greater numbers. Mary Chesnut lost count of the men of eighteen or twenty who were “washed away, literally, in a tide of blood.” There was “nothing to show they ever were on the earth.” But the Southern mind was strong in adversity. It approached its perfection in adopting an heroic attitude towards the evils of life. Mary Chesnut was astonished by the self-control exhibited by mothers caught up in the catastrophe of blood. It was positively Spartan. When young Edward Cheves, an only son, was killed, his sister was naturally hysterical. “Oh, mother,” she cried, “what shall we do—Edward is killed.” But Mrs. Cheves “sat dead still, white as a sheet, never uttering a word or shedding a tear.”
With the riptide of death a new strain of pessimism entered into the life of the planter aristocracy. The Union armies, Mary Chesnut said, were “three to one against us,” and the Northern states had “hardly begun to put out their strength.” Conversations were laconic now, shorn of the bravado of an earlier day. “Men,” one officer told her, “can find honorable graves—we do not see what is to become of the women and children.” Another said, “I want my wife and children out of this slaughter pen.” Mary Chesnut’s own husband on one occasion almost displayed emotion. He “had to own a breakdown (or nearly),” Mary Chesnut wrote. He received a letter from a mother begging him for a travel permit, one that would allow her to go to Virginia to tend her wounded son. James Chesnut began to read the letter aloud to the Governor’s Council, but he broke down in the attempt. “He was awfully ashamed of his weakness,” Mary Chesnut said.
James Chesnut was, if anything, too finely bred. He had as a young man read deeply in the works of Sir Walter Scott, and in middle age his soul was hardened in the stiff mold of the Waverley novels. He went about visibly impaired by the weight of his hereditary traditions, the burden of the ancestors whose faces stared down on him in oil from the walls of Mulberry. When, in one of his seigneurial moods, James Chesnut fell to contemplating his ideal—“behavior worthy of the Chivalry, as they call us”—his wife could not easily reach him. At such moments he was remote from her, cherishing, in some dim mental sanctuary, the lares et penates of the Chesnuts.
The marriage had its limitations, but it was not the principal cause of Mary Chesnut’s dissatisfactions. She was still without children. Colonel Preston had once been brazen enough to touch on her sterile curse. He was anxious over a sick child. “And now, Madame,” he admonished Mary Chesnut, “go home and thank God on your knees that you have no children to break your heart. Mrs. Preston and I spent the first ten years of our married life in mortal agony over ill and dying children.”
“I won’t do anything of the kind,” Mary Chesnut replied. “Those lovely girls I see around you now—they make your happiness. They are something to thank God for—far more than anything I have not.”
Whatever the interior sources of her sadness, its outward form was an invalidism which, though it might at first have been an affectation, was steadily becoming habitual. It was a remarkable event if Mary Chesnut were called upon to undertake any purely mechanical labor. The work of cleaning, washing, sewing, and cooking was performed by others. She did not dress herself; her slave Molly undertook that task. Such was the “automatic noiseless perfection” of the house servants that she rarely had occasion even to ask for anything; the carefully trained domestics anticipated her desires. The servants “think for you,” she wrote, “they know your ways and your wants. . . . Eben the butler at Mulberry would be miserable and feel himself a ridiculous failure, were I ever forced to ask him for anything.”
Invalidism offered an escape from every form of laborious activity but its chief attraction lay, not in its invitation to truancy, but in the social and theatrical possibilities it created. Her ongoing sickness gave Mary Chesnut an excuse to stay in the Prestons’ house, where in addition to being treated with much tenderness and solicitude she was the central figure in the melodrama of the sickroom. The nineteenth-century sickroom was a shrine. Its rituals were shot through with hysterical romance. Buck’s sister, Mary Preston, was appointed to hold vigil over the sickbed. Once, when Mary Chesnut experienced one of her “nervous fainting fits,” the poor girl went flying downstairs to find her mother.
“Come, come,” she exclaimed on finding her mother in the garden. “Mrs. Chesnut is dying, if not dead.”
“Who is with her?” Caroline Preston asked.
“Nobody.”
“Did you leave her alone?” Mrs. Preston cried as she raced to the sickroom.
“Surely, mama,” replied the girl, “you would not have me stay there to see her die. I could not—she looked too awful.”
If Mary Chesnut’s invalidism was in part spectacular and histrionic, it was also faintly religious: a form of Victorian devotion, the Protestant equivalent of secluding one’s self in a convent. Her body atrophied, together with the active elements of her mind, yet in taking the veil of the sickroom her contemplative and reflective faculties grew stronger. In her sequestered hours books—she read Dickens, Trollope, Disraeli, and Balzac—ministered to her as effectually as more conventional medicines. But invalidism rapidly breaks down the moral fiber, and in her despondency Mary Chesnut turned to stimulants stronger than literature. She acquired the habit of soothing her “wildly excited nerves” with opium, and during one low period she credited “D.T.’s opium” with keeping her alive.
Yet she understood her predicament perfectly. The Fire Eaters’ belief that slavery left the highest spirits free to perfect their souls was a fairy tale. On the contrary, Mary Chesnut retorted, slave-bought freedom destroyed the will. The seventeenth-century men who settled the tidewater were, in the earliest phases of their history, figures of virtù and immense constructive power—else, she said, “they would not have been here.” But “two or three generations of gentlemen planters— how changed the blood became! Of late all the active-minded men who spring to the front in our government were the immediate descendants of Scotch, or Scotch-Irish.” The tidewater magnates no longer ruled the South as absolutely as they once had, nor had they, in surrendering the higher realms of public life to leaders with a more democratic style, succeeded in creating a flourishing literary or artistic culture. Her own experience was, she knew, a feminine variation on the historic pattern. The most promising males of her caste became, with few exceptions, triflers or dilettantes. The most intelligent females became invalids.
War accelerated the processes of collapse. Mulberry, the bedrock of the Chesnut fortune, was coming apart. The family fortune was daily dwindling. The old Colonel had lost half a million in railroad bonds, bank stock, and notes of hand. His “old man’s croak” resounded through the rooms. “We can’t fight all the world—two and two only make four—it can’t make a thousand—numbers will tell. ...” “Bad times, worse coming.”
Washington, Saint Petersburg, and Berlin, October-November 1862
LINCOLN READ WITH DISMAY the accounts of Mr. Gladstone’s speech at Newcastle. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued; Lee had been beaten at Antietam. Yet Queen Victoria’s Chancellor of the Exchequer insisted that the President’s revolution was a failure. The people of the Northern states, Mr. Gladstone asserted in the Town Hall at Newcastle, had “not yet drunk of the cup—they are still trying to hold it far from their lips—which all the rest of the world see they nevertheless must drink of.” For there was no doubt in Mr. Gladstone’s mind “that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation. ...”
The Chancellor’s words provoked gasps in the Town Hall, followed by loud applause.
The President’s trump card, it appeared, had failed to force the English Cabinet to fold its hand. Certainly the Emancipation Proclamation had not deterred Mr. Gladstone; and it was everywhere assumed that the Chancellor’s panegyric upon the statesmanship of Jefferson Davis was a prelude to British recognition of the South.
Nor had the Emancipation Proclamation solved the problem of General McClellan. The commander of the Army of the Potomac remained at Antietam, unwilling, or so it appeared, to fight for a government intent on freeing the slaves.
Lincoln urged McClellan to pursue more vigorously the weary army of Lee; but the General contrived new excuses for delay. His horses, he said, were “broken down from fatigue and want of flesh.” “Will you pardon me for asking,” Lincoln replied, “what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”
The Army of the Potomac continued to be implicated in a rumor of treachery and disaffection. It was whispered that the seditious soldiers had not given up the idea of marching on Washington. McClellan himself bitterly resented Lincoln’s criticism of his generalship. It is true that he spoke, at times, of the need to acquiesce in the supremacy of the civil authorities, however stupid and perverse they might be. “The good of the country requires me to submit to all this from men whom I know to be my inferior!” he told his wife. “There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the ‘Gorilla.’” But at other times McClellan was impatient of the yoke of the civilians. “The only safety for the country & for me,” he said, “is to get rid of the lot of them.”
Lincoln went to ascertain for himself the fidelity of the army. He boarded an armed train in Washington, and on a hot day in October he reached McClellan’s camp at Antietam Creek. He inspected the battle-field, and afterwards he mounted a coal-black horse, specially selected, it was said, on account of its fiery nature by McClellan’s staff, who sought to test the skill of the commander-in-chief in the manage of a spirited steed. Lincoln seized the bridle and, to the chagrin of the General’s suite, rode off without difficulty. Drums sounded; guns thundered; battle-standards dipped. To the strains of “Hail to the Chief,” the President rode through the lines to take the salute of the troops. Lincoln slept under canvas; and the next morning, waking before dawn, he sought his friend Ozias Hatch, an Illinois politician who had traveled with him to Antietam. “Come, Hatch,” the President said, “I want you to walk with me.” They left the sleeping camp and, after climbing one of the nearby hills, watched the sun rise over a panoply of tents and standards. The President waved his hat towards the scene and turned to his friend. “Hatch—Hatch,” he asked, “what is all this?”
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