In My Good Books Read online

  The pleasure of Gil Blas is that it just goes on and on in that clear, exact, flowing style which assimilates the sordid, the worldly, or the fantastic romance with easy precision, unstrained and unperturbed. It is the pleasure of the perfect echo, the echo of a whole literature and of a period. You are usually smiling, sometimes you even laugh out loud; then boredom comes as one incident clutches the heels of another and drags it down. No one can read the novel of adventure for adventure’s sake to the end; and yet, put Gil Blas down for a while, and you take it up again. It is like a drug. Self-interest, the dry eye, the low opinion, the changing scene, the ingenuity of success, the hard grin of the man of the world—those touch something in our natures which, for all our romanticism and our idealism, have a weakness for the modus vivendi. The puritan and the rogue join hands.

  A Russian Byron

  Mikhail Yurevich Lermontoff was born in the year before Waterloo and was killed in a duel twenty-seven years later, a year after the publication of the novel which brought him fame throughout Europe. The extraordinary duel in the last chapter but one of A Hero of Our Own Times is said to have been exactly prophetic of the manner of his death. Lermontoff had declared through his chief character that life was a bad imitation of a book; and the episode, if true, looks like some carefully planned Byronic legend.

  A Hero of Our Own Times belongs to that small and elect group of novels which portray a great typical character who resumes the fashion and idiosyncrasy of a generation. Pechorin, the “hero”, is consciously a Russian Byron. He is cold, sensual, egoistical, elegant. He is neurotic, bored and doomed. Only one passion is unexhausted—and this is the making of him—the passion for personal freedom. He is the cold, experimental amorist celebrated by Pushkin (I quote from Oliver Elton’s translation of Eugeny Onegin):

  Men once extolled cold-blooded raking

  As the true science of love-making:

  Your own trump everywhere you blew …

  Such grave and serious recreation

  Beseemed old monkeys, of those days….

  Pechorin becomes the slave of perpetual travel, and finally fulfils himself not in love but in action. Byron goes to Greece. Pechorin becomes the soldier of the Caucasus who plays with life and death. He drives himself to the limit, whether it is in the duel on the edge of the precipice down which his absurd rival in love is thrown; or in the dramatic bet with Vulich where he draws a revolver and puts sixty roubles on the doctrine of predestination; or in the final episode when he goes in alone to collar the Cossack who has run amok. In its greater actors the Byronic pose of weariness is balanced by love of living dangerously in action, and here it is interesting to contrast the character of Constant’s Adolphe with a man like Pechorin. Adolphe also is the imaginative man who loves from the head and then revenges himself secretively and cruelly upon the strong-minded woman who is devouring him and with whom he is afraid to break: Pechorin, more histrionic and less sensitive (more Byronic, in short), loves from the head also but takes special care to avoid strong-minded women. He possesses, but is not possessed. He prefers the weak and yielding who respond at once to cruelty and whom he can abandon quickly. Faced with the strong-minded, Pechorin becomes a man of action and makes his getaway. Readers of A Hero of Our Own Times will remember how Pechorin dealt with the determined duplicity of Taman, the smuggler’s girl, when she took him out in her boat on a moonlight night. He threw her into the sea. What would not Adolphe have given for such decisiveness? What would he not have given for that Byronic ruthlessness in action, who knew only the cool vacillations of the mind? Of the two characters, Pechorin’s is the more arrested and adolescent. He has not Adolphe’s sensibility to the tragedy of the imagination. He does not suffer. Pechorin is sometimes a 17-year-old sentimentalist who blames the world:

  I have entered upon this life when I have already lived it in imagination, with the result that it has become tedious and vile to me. I am like a man who has been reading the bad imitation of a book with which he has been long familiar.

  But perhaps the main difference between these lovers of freedom is merely one of age after all. Pechorin-Lermontoff is young: Adolphe is the creation of an older man. Pechorin says:

  Now I only want to be loved, and that by a very few women. Sometimes (terrible thought) I feel as if a lasting tie would satisfy me.

  Adolphe would have been incapable of this naïve Byronic jauntiness; but he would have raised a sympathetic eyebrow at that first hint of nostalgia for respectable marriage.

  This was not a solution which Russian literature was yet to permit its Pechorins. Press on to the middle of the century and we find Turgenev’s Rudin, all Byronism spent, and with no exciting war of Russian Imperialism to occupy him, conducting an affair as heartless and disgraceful as Pechorin’s affair with Princess Mary and very similar to it. But Rudin is reduced to the condition of an unheroic, rootless talker with no corresponding performance. Byronism with its roots in the Napoleonic wars, was a fashion which fortunately could give the best of its followers something to do. For the maladjusted and the doomed there were duels; even better there was always a war and the cause of Liberty. The poseur of Venice attained some dignity at Missolonghi: and the sentimentalist of the Caucasus, reviving new trouble with an old mistress, and in the midst of the old trouble with a new one, could feel the heady contagion of that half-savage passion for freedom with which his enemies, the Tartar tribesmen, were imbued.

  Travel is one of the great rivals of women. The officers and visitors at the garrison town of Narzan spend their time drinking the waters, making love, scandal-mongering and playing cards; and into this gossiping frontier outpost Pechorin brings something like the preposterous coldness, austerity and violence of the mountain scene outside the town. The coach arrives, he yawns, stays a night, throws his diaries to a friend in lieu of a renewal of friendship and drives on, another Childe Harold on an eternal Grand Tour of the battle fronts. The Hero is not one of the calculated, constructed, and balanced books of maturity; its virtues and defects are all of youth. The book appears to pour out of the Caucasus itself. It is one of those Romantic novels in which a place and not a woman has suddenly crystallised a writer’s experience and called out all his gifts. “I was posting from Tiflis”—that opening sentence of Lermontoff’s classically nonchalant prose, takes the heart a stride forward at once. Like the traveller, we step out of ourselves into a new world. True, it is the fashionable step back to Rousseau, for the Hero is nothing if not modish; but who does not feel again with Lermontoff, as he gazes at the ravines, breathes the rare, crisp, savage air and sees the golden dawn on the upper snows, who does not feel the force of the Romantic emotion? “When we get close to Nature the soul sheds all that it has artificially acquired to be what it was in its prime and probably will be again some day.” One is captivated by such a nostalgia, by its youthful and natural idealism and by the artifice of its youthful melancholy.

  The structure of the book is both ingenious and careless. Later novelists would have been tempted to a full-length portrait of Pechorin. Lermontoff is episodic yet tells us all we need to know in a handful of exciting short stories. We first hear of Pechorin at two removes. The narrator meets a curt, humdrum officer who has known him and who tells the first story of Pechorin’s capture and abandonment of Bela, the Tartar girl. Passion has ended in boredom. In the next episode, when Pechorin meets again the officer who had helped him fight the girl’s murderers, one sees the Byronic mask go up at the mere hint of the “incident”. After that Pechorin himself describes his adventures in his diaries. They tell, with sadistic detachment, of how he is playing with the despair of an old mistress while planning to convert another woman’s fear and hatred of him to love. He succeeds. Which is all Pechorin wants—a victory for his vanity. He explains this quite candidly to her. And he is candid not because he is an honest man but because, of course, he is interested only in himself. Equally coolly, he plans that the duel he fights with her lover shall take place on the famo
us precipice.

  Pechorin’s notions are not merely the melodramatic. He is the enemy of simple, highfalutin romanticism; his taste is for the reserved, the complex and mysterious. The precipice is chosen, for example, as a masterpiece of vengeance, because he has discovered that his opponent intends to fool him with blank cartridges. The opposing faction at Narzan has perceived that Pechorin’s vulnerable point is his pride; knock the Byronic mask off his face and there will stand an empty actor. Lermontoff is an expert in subtleties like this. In the final episode, when Vulich, the gambler, proposes to discover whether he is or is not fated to die that day, by putting a revolver to his head and pulling the trigger, the suicide is abortive. But Vulich does die that day, and in a most unexpected manner. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination in Byron’s Aberdeen has become the almost exotic Oriental Kismet in Lermontoff’s Caucasus.

  To the modern novelist, tired of the many and overdone conventions of the novel, the apparently loose and unconnected construction of A Hero of Our Times offers a suggestion. Lermontoff’s method is to thread together a string of short stories about a central character, using an inside and an outside point of view. But before he did this Lermontoff had decided what were the important things in Pechorin’s character They were, as it happened, all aspects of Byronism. Mr. Desmond MacCarthy has said in an essay on Pushkin, that from Byron and Pushkin “men caught the infection of being defiantly themselves”; in so planning, however, they became other than themselves. They invented a simplified persona. It is this simplification of Pechorin’s character which is exciting. The detailed realism of the modern novel tells us far too much, without defining the little that it is absolutely essential to know. In what modern novels are the main traits of a hero of our own times delineated? It is the measure of the failure of modern novelists that they have not observed and defined a characteristic man of these years; and the explanation of the failure is our lack of moral and political perceptiveness. Our novels would be shorter, more readable and more important if we had one or two more ideas about our times and far fewer characters.

  A Comic Novel

  The modern novel has reached such a pitch of competence and shapeliness, that we are shocked at the disorderliness of the masterpieces. In the modern novel we are looking at a neatly barbered suburban garden; in the standard works how often do we have the impression of bowling through the magnificent gateway of a demesne only to find the house and gardens are unfinished or are patched up anyhow, as if the owner had tired of his money in the first few weeks and after that had passed his life in a daydream of projects for ever put off. We feel the force of a great power which is never entirely spent, but which cannot be bothered to fulfil itself. In short, we are up against the carelessness, the lethargy, the enormous bad taste of genius, its liability to accident, its slovenly and majestic conceit that anything will do. Don Quixote falls in half, the Chartreuse and Le Rouge et le Noir go shockingly to pieces, Tolstoy stuffs a history book into War and Peace, Fielding and Dickens pad and Dostoevski wanders into ideological journalism. And then there is Dead Souls. You reach the second part of that masterpiece to find the editor’s maddening note over and over again in the text: “Here a hiatus occurs in the manuscript.” Worse, you discover that Gogol burned the manuscript of the last part and that the full story of Chichikov, the swindler, will never be known.

  Perhaps it is as well that Gogol could not pull himself together for this second plunge. The remorse of comedians is painful, and it is pitiable to see an artist rounding upon his art or mistaking his ethical impulses for his artistic ones. The kind of virtue which has been successfully fought off until middle age is apt at that time to have its dull, industrious revenge if it has been fought too hard in youth. Given the choice, it would, ideally, be better for an artist to let his egotism drive him to madness as Goya’s did, than for it to become apostolic. For all we know, therefore, we should be grateful that the second part of Dead Souls was not completed. The loss may mean something on the same noble level as the second part of Quixote, but we know that Gogol was worried about his humour and that he was planning to put everything right by following the model of the Divine Comedy! We could perhaps pin some hope on the fabulous medieval and heroic side to Gogol’s genius—the tremendous story of Taras Bulba is the preeminent example of this vein; but knowing the curious guilt which ate into the latter part of Gogol’s life and the peculiarities of his conversion at the hands of a contemporary Rasputin it looks as though the starch of religiosity was stiffening him

  “Dead Souls—no, I’ll never allow such a thing”, said the Russian censor, “our soul is immortal; there is no dead soul; the author rises against immortality.” (See Janko Lavrin’s useful little book on Gogol published fifteen years ago.) The title is misleading. We have had a good deal of the Russian soul in our time and the idea of a dead Russian soul is doubly sombre. I wonder how many people have put the book back on the library shelf without realising that they were rejecting one of the world’s great comic novels. Chichikov is not, I think, a comic character to be compared with Pickwick or Don Quixote—he belongs rather to the line of Gil Blas, to those whose antics spring from self-interest and not from the follies of the heart. But Chichikov is a superb comic device. The originality and farce of the idea which animates him take the breath away. One is paralysed by humorous expectation. Chichikov is any carpet-bagger, any bucket-shop proprietor, any prosaic commercial traveller of distressingly commonplace ambitions, whose gift of the gab is given an extra flight by Gogol’s gift of fantasy. As a fraud Chichikov is mousey, but he understands the lower side of human nature and that one of the quickest ways to the human heart is to offer it something for nothing.

  It is pleasant to roll his simple scheme over the tongue again. Since the previous census in which every landowner had to give a list of the serfs or “Souls” on his estate and on whom he had to pay head tax, a number would have died. The landowner still had to pay the tax until the next census. Why not therefore (Chichikov argued) offer to buy these dead names—for that is all they were—pay the taxes himself, and then, taking the title deeds to a bank, pose as the owner of so many thousand serfs, raise a large mortgage on an apparently thriving estate, and make a rich marriage? For a novelist one cannot imagine a more useful device for collecting a variety of human character, for farcical interviews, for spying into strange interiors and the uncovering of stranger motives. Chichikov’s scheme was a passport to the whole of Russia. As a servant, Gil Blas became an expert on the habits of the Spanish aristocracy and the demi-monde; as a buffoon and victim Pickwick travelled through England; as a disinterested lunatic and comic martyr Don Quixote travelled Spain. They are all the tools of circumstance, clowns who get slapped and come to grief. But Chichikov succeeds or almost succeeds. In chapter after chapter, he is the master of every situation. The clowns are his victims. Even when disaster temporarily singes him at N—where he has triumphed for so long, we know that he will soon cook up something new. Puzzled at first by his dimness as a person, we perceive that his deadly seriousness and touchy anxiety about his scheme are in themselves comical. He is astonished when people hesitate to take the bait. The bluffer believes in his own bluff. He has, what we often observe, the fundamental stupidity of the over-ingenious and too original mind.

  Novels which have been fitted to an idea, usually run to the artifices of the theatre, and there is more than a note or two from the Molière farces in Gogol’s situations. In his work as a playwright Gogol in fact followed Molière, and scene after scene in Dead Souls would have been pounced upon by the dramatist. Take the interview with Sobakevitch, the great hairy, cunning, and bear-like man who haggles over kopecks as if he were in an Eastern souk. Sobakevitch seeks to put up the price of his dead serfs by saying what a wonderful blacksmith or what a brilliant saddler, poor So-and-so was. He must be worth an extra five roubles because he was a good workman. The unexpected capping of one absurd situation with another in this fashion is pure theatre. The inter
view with the stupid widow who is eager to sell but who suspects all the time she is being swindled and tries hard to palm off lard or corn instead, has the same theatrical quality. Gogol has seized upon the stage value of a character who is so obstinate and suspicious that she can only go on repeating the same fixed idea. Her “What troubles me is the fact that they are dead” is another: “Mais qu’est ce qu’il fait dans cette galère?”

  “In everything the will of God, madam,” said Chichikov with a sigh. “Against the divine wisdom it is not for us to rebel. Pray hand them over to me, Natasia Petrovna.”

  “Hand over whom?”

  “The dead peasants.”

  “But how could I do that?”

  “Quite simply. Sell them to me, and I will give you some money in exchange.”

  “But how am I to sell them to you? I scarcely understand what you mean. Am I to dig them up again from the ground?”

  Chichikov perceived that the old lady was altogether at sea, and that he must explain the matter; wherefore in a few words he informed her that the transfer or purchase of the souls in question would take place merely on paper—that the said souls would be listed as still alive.

  “And what good would they be to you?” asked his hostess, staring at him with her eyes distended.

  “That is my affair.”

  “But they are dead souls.”

  “Who said they were not? The mere fact of their being dead entails upon you a loss as dead as the souls, for you have to continue paying the tax upon them, whereas my plan is to relieve you both of the tax and of the resultant trouble. Now do you understand? And I will not only do as I say but also hand you over fifteen roubles per soul. Is that clear enough?”