In My Good Books Page 7
He has enthusiasm; and believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality of our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to anyone who will wake us up and warm us…. He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people’s expense, not like a swindler, but like a child….
(Herzen had said almost these very words of Bakunin).
Who has the right to say that he has not been of use? That his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom nature has denied, as she has to him, power for action and the faculty of carrying out their ideas?
This is all very nice, and Bassistoff, for the younger generation, cries out, “Bravo!” But is it nature that has denied Rudin the power for action? We come nearer truth (and nearer to-day) as Lezhnyov proceeds:
Rudin’s misfortune is that he does not understand Russia, and that, certainly, is a great misfortune. Russia can do without every one of us, but not one of us can do without her. Woe to him who thinks he can, and woe two-fold to him who actually does do without her! Cosmopolitanism is all twaddle, the cosmopolitan is a nonentity; without nationality is no art, nor truth, nor life, nor anything…. It would take us too far if we tried to trace Rudin’s origin among us.
It was not Rudin’s fault that 1848 was not 1917. It was to his credit that he half-killed himself and his wretched companion when they went “up to the river in the province of K.”, with the hare-brained scheme of making it navigable, several generations before the Five Year Plan gave intelligent men something to do. Rudin not only sowed the seed, but with some courage he accepted the knowledge of foredoomed failure, the destiny and the ridicule that watches over the sower who cannot hope to reap. Mean in his egoism, he was not mean in his imagination.
Turgenev considered the figure of Rudin from an uneasy seat on the liberal fence. By nature timid and hesitant, he resisted the notion of dramatic choice. And we must remember, too, that he wrote of Rudin when there was no flush of belief in Europe. He was writing in 1855, seven years after the “Viennese shooter” had taken aim, in the lethargy of disillusion. When Herzen’s conversion to communism was complete Turgenev broke with him.
Faits Divers
I Have been reading Dostoevski again: The Possessed. You know the sensation. You are sitting by the fire reflecting that one of the things which reconciles you to life, even at its most tragic, is the low clear daily monotone of its voice. Suddenly comes a knock at the door, there are. cries. A man has been murdered at a house down the street. Dostoevski again. Dostoevski, “the great sinner”, the great literary murderer. You put on your thickest coat and go out. What a fog! What a melodramatic fog. You can see nothing. Such is the impression as one turns to those tortured novels again. But there’s obviously a crowd somewhere down the road, you can hear voices, people go rushing by. Who is it this time? Shatov, you hear, the student, the ex-radical, the believer in the Russian Christ. Good heavens! There was no one more serious, more honest, more likeable than Shatov; rather difficult in argument because he had never got over a sort of angry awkwardness about his class. He was tongue-tied and shy one moment, violently angry the next. His anger soon passed, however, and then he smiled repentantly. There was absolutely no malice in Shatov. You hurry down the street, still seeing nothing. Shapes move about. They may be human. You call to them and they gesticulate but you can’t hear what they’re saying. Presently you make a disconcerting discovery, that you are in something like one of Kafka’s nightmares; you are walking and yet making no progress. You begin to wonder which street you’re in. People bump into you and don’t answer questions. No one in Dostoevski ever answers questions. You just detect a scowling face which shouts at you. This one (he says he’s an engineer), shouts that he is going to commit suicide. It is necessary to commit suicide to show that he has overcome fear of pain and the beyond. When he has done this he will be God, the Man-God, the superman. He vanishes. A girl shape stands dumbly in front of you; she desires, you gather, to suffer. Which way to the murder? you ask. No answer. Terrible complications. The air full of the sounds of people talking. A drunken Captain is beating his daughter and quoting poetry. You turn a corner and there is a young nobleman, handsome, cultivated, thoughtful, and what is he doing? He’s biting the Governor’s ear. And still, as in one of those anxiety dreams, your feet stick to the pavement, you make enormous, concentrated efforts of will, and you move about an inch instead of a yard. The fog chokes. “Russia, the god-fearing nation,” someone shouts. “Let us start an illegal printing press,” a girl says. “Destroy everything”, come other voices, “and then a new man will be born, a new society, harmonious, communistic, brotherly.” Or “Russia’s mission is to save the world”. And another voice, “Russia must save Germany first from the catastrophe which is coming inevitably in the West.” And what is the catastrophe? “Socialism! Socialism is the despotism of materialism, the ally of the Roman Catholic Church in the destruction of the soul.” You struggle towards that voice only to be pulled in the opposite direction by another. “Christianity, communism, through the People and the purification of the heart.” At this moment you very nearly fall over a man who is on his knees before a woman, abased, weak and weeping; she is pulling his hair out. “Love-hate,” they are murmuring. “Who”, you ask, “are all these people, all these voices?” A moan comes from the man: “Relations,” he says, “everyone has brought his relations.”
And then, the tension of the nightmare slackens, the fog clears and along come a middle-aged couple and you laugh for the first time. The humour in Dostoevski always clears the fog. They are quarrelling, of course. The man is talking all the time. “Chère amie,” he says, as she gives him a violent push to make him shut up. Scholarly, noble-looking, vague and slopping a glass of champagne, Stepan Trofimovitch is straying and tottering along, pouring out epigrams, tag ends of French and cultural chit-chat. He will stop to make a speech about his dangerous political past and is alarmed the moment afterwards lest a spy has heard him or, worse still, in case someone lets on that he has no political past whatever and certainly no political future. And behind him comes Varvara Petrovna, twenty years his protector and his “amie” but only in the sense that he used to smoke a cigar under the lilac tree with her in the evenings. A female rolling-pin, a torment and manager, dusting him, cleaning him up, mocking his feebleness, rating him about his gambling debts, but paying them, awed by his brains. For the last twenty years he has talked of beginning his great book. But there are the club, his cards, the perpetual apprehension of what Varvara Petrovna will do next. He must leave her; he can’t leave her. Varvara Petrovna is another Madame de Staël whacking into her pet, Benjamin Constant. She pushes her tame intellectual and toy liberal along.
Man was born free, but not necessarily born with will or cash. What does man achieve? Nothing, except habits. On top of everything, Stepan has been married so many times. It is years since he has seen his son. How terrible the separation of father and son—and yet, just as well, for Stepan Trofimovitch has never been quite straight about money. So he goes on, speaking French, weeping, evading, making noble gestures, cheating, scenting his handkerchief, making “final stands” about the intrigues of Varvara Petrovna—though not in her presence—while she, the masterful intrigante, frankly tells him he’s a fool and that she’s going to send a servant round to clean up, and then marry him off.
The nightmare, of course, again intercepts that comic intrigue. The fog comes down once more. But you have been distracted from the suicides, ear-biters, daughter-beaters and ideological murderers. As you grope once more it is the figure of Stepan Trofimovitch you seek, the bold voice of Varvara Petrovna you long to hear. He is in love and hates her, but with them the love-hate is nostalgia and comedy. And then the nightmare affects Stepan Trofimovitch, too. He does, to his own astonishment, make a “last stand”. He walks out of the house. He is like that. He will take to the road. They said he had not
the will to do anything for an idea! That his idealism was a fraud! He goes forth as exalted as Don Quixote (though far more rattled) follows a cow which is following some peasants, flabbergasts them by talking French, picks up with a Bible-seller, and rambles away, tragically, comically, but far from ignobly, to his death. Vanity is a friend to him to the end; it enables him to humbug on the very brink of eternity (this time about the Sacrament) and prevents him from realising he is dying. It is he who explains the whole nightmare to you, all that fog, talk, intrigue, violence; who all these people are. They are “The Possessed”, “the devils”, and with the detachment of a well-stocked intellect he announces half-nobly, half-cynically, that “he and everyone else in Russian politics are the Gadarene swine of Russia which must all be cleared out and driven to the sea, so that the wonderful new future may be born”.
The Possessed is a novel which contains one of the great comic characters of all literature; and the first 150 pages contain the best writing in Dostoevski’s surprising comic vein. Lytton Strachey was the first to point out the individuality and importance of Dostoevski’s humour. It steadies those toppling and seemingly intoxicated monuments. Critics usually refer to this gift as satirical, but as Lytton Strachey said, the humour is not cruel. If it begins cruelly it grows, deepens and broadens into the humour of loving-kindness. But there are other reasons for reading The Possessed. It is a political novel which—though many of its premises are derived from inaccurate information—deals prophetically with some of the political issues of our time. Tolstoy, not very sensitive in his old age, once said to Gorky that Dostoevski ought to have been a Buddhist; and Gorky said of Dostoevski that “you could tell a petit-bourgeois as surely as you could tell a goat”. These are amusing examples of a criticism which seems to be passing out of fashion now that the fanatical Freudians and the narrower kind of Marxist have discovered that they were not really interested in literature. The only proper general political criticism of Dostoevski is, as a recent American critic, Mr. Ernest Simmons, has said, that he expresses the confusion in Russian middle-class thought at the time, its ideals, its apprehension, its practice. We see the psychological discoveries of Dostoevski in better perspective when we remember that Constant and many others had written more precisely about the ambivalence of human character. We cool down when we reflect that the Self-Willed Man, the meek and the famous “doubles of Dostoevski, are the fruits of the romantic movement which came to Russia late.
From the letters, diaries and notes of Dostoevski which have been made available in Russia since the revolution, the curious reader may discover that the fog he had been groping through is nothing to the personal fog in which Dostoevski worked. (I recommend anyone interested in the intimate processes of literary creation to read Ernest Simmon’s Dostoevski: The Making of a Novelist1). The main character types are repeated with growing emphasis from novel to novel, but they emerge from a nightmare of rough drafts and notes. Dostoevski worked in the greatest uncertainty and indecision. He was one of those writers who, having for a long time no clear and fixed idea of his intention, was obliged to lash himself into action by pious ejaculations. He worked, so to speak, on a stage, before an audience, delightfully unaware that there was something comic in his vociferations.
“I am planning” (when was he not “planning”?) “a huge novel” (they were always going to be “huge” and transcendental) “to be called Atheism—for God’s sake between ourselves.”
The touch of persecution mania is part of the show. Then: “the hero falls to the very depths of self-abasement and in the end he returns to find both Christ and the Russian soul. For God’s sake do not tell anyone.” Tortured as the reader of the novels may be, lost in the wilderness of a dialogue which has eliminated none of the drooling and rambling of humanity’s eternal tongue-wagging, worried by the involutions of the plot and the fact that no character seems to be able to appear without half his family and without at least one family skeleton, he is nevertheless far more certain than Dostoevski himself was as he struggled at his desk. He chops and changes his characters and events. He has constantly to write down the theme of his novel again in order to remind himself of what he is doing; and the theme is always drifting off its course. The change has been noted in Crime and Punishment’. Raskolnikoff was intended to suicide. Ivan was thought of as the murderer of Karamozov. If Dostoevski’s life was a search for God, his novels are a search for a method. The higher synthesis which he laboured after and retreated from in religion, only to labour after it again, plagued him too in the art of writing. The thing that strikes one in Dostoevski’s novels is how, both in their ideas and their method of presentation, they convey the struggle, the search for something to be born, the longing to assume a shape. But perhaps it is not a longing for form. Perhaps the profound longing of Dostoevski is to decide nothing for himself, but to be dominated. It is significant that a formal Westernised writer like Turgenev is hated, and that when Dostoevski looks beyond Russia, his eye stops at Germany. That domineering race has attractive wastes of primitive myth behind the façade of its culture; and when the great catastrophe comes Russia, he says, will save Germany from the West and Germany and Russia will save the world. It is curious that the Nazis did not make use of Dostoevski’s mysticism, though it goes really far beyond nationalism into mysticism. The race myth is there:
“If a great people [Shatov cries in The Possessed] does not believe that the truth is to be found in it alone (in itself alone and exclusively in itself), if it does not believe that it alone is fit and destined to raise up and save all by its truth, it at once ceases to be a great nation, and at once turns into ethnographical material and not into a great people. A truly great people can never reconcile itself with a secondary rôle in humanity or even with the first, but without fail must exclusively play the first rôle. A nation which loses this belief ceases to be a nation.
The Russians are, in fact—God-bearing!
It is useless to try and disentangle the confusions from the subtleties of Dostoevski’s thought. The great prophets are always playing for both sides. And then Dostoevski is a Victorian journalist. There is always a less exalted strain of compromise running through Dostoevski’s life, a sort of left-handed self-interest such as makes the comedy of Stepan Trofimovitch’s character. There is frequently something disconcertingly practical if not disingenuous about the mystics. Ideologically, Dostoevski is often in a panic. Yet, there are two perennial kinds of revolutionary thought; there is the political revolutionary who arises to change man by changing society, the religious who arises to change society by changing man. Dostoevski is brought nearer to us also because the catastrophe has come, the problem of suffering has become real; and if we cannot believe in the absolute value of suffering, any more than Dostoevski entirely did, it is arresting when we cry out egotistically against injustice to be reminded, as Zosima reminded Ivan Karamazov, of guilt.
Dostoevski was a spiritual sensationalist, a man of God somewhat stained with the printing ink of the late night final. He lives at first in the upper air as he plans his novels, and gradually comes down to earth, still undetermined until he is pulled up—by what? “Ordinary” life? No, a newspaper cutting. What a passion he has for the newspapers! What significance things had once they were in headlines! The report of the Nechaev affair clinches The Possessed, a cause célèbre sets the idea of The Idiot in motion. These court cases pinned down his restless mind. Early in The Possessed Liza asks Shatov to help her compile an annual collection of newspaper cuttings of all the court cases, trials, speeches, incidents and so on, the child-beatings, thefts, accidents, will-suits, etc., which would serve to give a real picture of the Russian situation year by year. Dostoevski must often have longed for a book like that on his desk. For ordinary people were lost in an anonymity which thwarted the romantic temperament. In the faits divers they were transformed; give him the evidence and the process of mystification could begin. The faits divers could become the faits universels.
The Clown
For the civilised reader the psychological novel has been a most fascinating and flattering mirror, and egoism the delightful subject par excellence. But from Constant to Joyce and Proust the analysis of motive or of sensation has suffered from scientific priggishness and preciosity. Humour, in the sense of forgiveness, has not been the dominant trait. There is excellent humorous writing in Proust and Joyce, but the sustained note of those writers does not come from the dry, skipping, fiddle-strings of the comedians and buffoons. On the contrary, pitiless diagnosis is the note of Proust; and Joyce is driven on, not by laughter, but by a dishevelled hatred of the root of life. Disappointment and frustration seem to be inherent in the psychological approach, no doubt, because the assumption that we stand alone is fallacious. And in the novelists who have isolated themselves or their subjects, we cannot but observe that the analysis of character or sensation tends to degenerate into the desiccation of character; the surgery upon motives turns into a medical search for the diseased and monstrous ones.
To those who are in danger of reacting too violently against the great botanists of our hidden flora, I recommend the cure offered by the works of Italo Svevo. Here is laughter at last. Here Hamlet raises a smile, Œdipus is teased away from his fate like some figure of light opera, the malade imaginaire of the fag-end of the Romantic movement is made to get out of bed and run about in his pyjamas. The absurdities of life rescue us from the illusions of the intellect, from the grim stepmother-dom of our egoism and our brains. I do not mean that Svevo is a mere joker. He is far from that. He is no less sensitive or subtle in the elucidation of our feelings than the great botanists. The advantage of his laughter is that it makes his science humane and prevents his intelligence from dragging up our moral roots. And this is a point of huge importance to the development of the psychological novel. Over and over again we feel in such novels that the novelist is too knowingly superior to his people, his intelligence is too penetrating for the muddle of human nature. We suspect the sin of pride. That sin is entirely absent from the work of Svevo. He is the first of the psychological novelists to be beatified by a spirit of humility which recalls the battered but serene humility of Don Quixote, the humility of the comic tradition.