“Who is John Galt?” The answer is that he is Ayn Rand, and who cares. The titanic characters in this unendurable novel reminded me of the people in those idealized posters favored by the totalitarian Soviet and Chinese regimes: humorless, muscular, godlike, and always looking heroically into the far distance. And when the author is not contriving to have them speak in manifestoes, their actions and thoughts are described in stupefyingly cliched language. Not a character speaks any differently from any other (except that some are Good, others Bad) and in the course of a thousand pages no one changes in the slightest. Why bother even to mention the James Bond plot, except to say that it is the only reason why anyone could continue reading through the end. I haven’t read enough 20th Century fiction to say that this is the worst published, but how did this thing find a publisher?
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead --
The best that can be said for The Fountainhead is that it is better than Atlas Shrugged. It is a soap opera without the subtlety, full of comic strip characters and absurd dialogue. Not that it matters, but I guess that the models for the characters were Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Luce, and Clare Booth (with a dash of Katherine Hepburn).
Philip Roth, Goodby Columbus, and Other Stories --
Years ago I decided that talent, unlike genius, is probably distributed among us in the same relative proportions at all times. If, say, 5% of us today have a special facility in music, or acting, or athletics, etc., it seems likely the allocation has always been about the same.
Years ago I decided that talent, unlike genius, is probably distributed among us in the same relative proportions at all times. If, say, 5% of us today have a special facility in music, or acting, or athletics, etc., it seems likely the allocation has always been about the same.
Right or wrong, that was the reason why I chose to confine most of my leisure reading to novels at least 50 years old. The passage of time, I calculated, is a sifter of talent. A book still read and talked about after five decades may be sturdy enough to be read when a hundred others published the same year have been forgotten. The grim reaper waits by the library door and I don't want to spend what time is left with books that are just publishable.
There are two obvious — though contradictory — defects to this approach. First, is the self-inflicted error: this year's Lolita will never make it on to my shelf. Second, 50 years has shown itself to be too short a period: for every Alexandria Quartet, I have squandered far too much time with John DosPassos or Harriet Beecher Stowe. And so now and then I throw caution to the winds and take a chance — admittedly with the same mixed results that gave me evenings with Wuthering Heights or James Fenimore Cooper.
This brings me to Philip Roth, whom I have avoided throughout a 50+ year career which has given him Pulitzer Prizes, Man Booker Prizes, etc., etc. Clearly I was depriving myself based on my own artificial formula (though in that time I confess to having read Bellow, Updike, Walker Percy, Wallace Stegner, etc.). Maybe it was Roth's self-conscious he-man publicity photo, or what is rumored to be the crude subject matter of Portnoy's Complaint, but I wanted to avoid one more self-regarding ultra urban version of Norman Mailer or Leonard Bernstein.
Well the early novella Goodbye Columbus and the accompanying short stories I've just finished prove me neither right nor wrong. I will have to read more. The evidence here is that Roth is easily read, the way a storyteller should be. It is not surprising that he is completely comfortable in the contemporary Jewish idiom. What pretensions there are, are deliberate and generally funny. And the subject matter . . . well, it's not Shakespearean.
As I think about it, what was most pronounced in these pieces was the familiarity. That storytelling, that idiom, the situational humor were all . . . comfortable. This is not criticism, of course, but not high praise either. As for the rest — the uncomfortable incidents, the treatment of the unfamiliar — the things, in short, which show up unexpectedly in the better novels — these things were not exactly lacking, but no better than uncomfortable. And whether it was in Columbus or the short stories, apart from the O. Henry twist, the rest was not more than superficial. Sometimes the story's title — "Defender of the Faith," The Conversion of the Jews" —was the punch line.
But there is one other factor which was perfectly serious, though again not unique. It comes close to pleading, but it is not that. In these pieces, Roth seems to be speaking to the Gentiles even more than the Jews. "Understand this," he says; "understand us." It is not the sound of a proud, self-conscious, stiff-necked chosen people. It's the sound of bargaining. As I have said, it is certainly not Shakespearean.
Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run? –
This novel of the rise of an entertainment industry parvenu was first published in 1941. It was written by the scion of a major Hollywood studio head who makes use of much of the smart-aleckey dialogue that was in vogue in the movies of that time. Maybe people really talked like that in those days, but it certainly sounds unreal in the early 21st century. I should add that in the edition that I read, Mr. Schulberg had furnished an introduction, dated from the early 1950s, in which he recounts what the book has meant to him, how he wrote it, and its impact on modern America. I could wish that I had not read this piece before I had read the novel, because the simultaneous self-deprecatory/self-congratulatory tone left me with a bad taste as I started the novel. Not that the novel is any more subtle than Schulberg’s introduction. The story is told from a first-person perspective of Al Mannheim, a newspaper drama columnist, who records the brazen career moves of Sammy Glick, an office boy at Mannheim’s own newspaper. The plot is unimportant.
Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy --
Dickens's immediate predecessor was Walter Scott. But while Dickens more or less specialized in the England of his day, Scott was an historical novelist. Here, he tells a tale of Scotland in the time of James II (living then in France) and the complicated alliances and enmities of Northumbrian Catholics, English Protestants, Jacobite Scots, etc.
Rob Roy is Robert MacGregor, a highlands outlaw in the Robin Hood vein. But we are not even introduced to the character until about the mid-point in the book, by which time, if we have not become engrossed in the somewhat conventional plot of the narrator's journey from England to Scotland, we will not likely care too much. For that matter, Rob Roy chiefly serves the role of deus ex machina and is not a particularly well-developed character.
This can also be said of the villain, Rashleigh Osbaldistone, the narrator's cousin. Rashleigh is supposed to be some evil genius, insidious and persuasive. But the reader is obliged to take Scott's word for it, because Rashleigh is for the most part a cipher throughout the book and his crimes seem to be nothing more than convenient contrivances to keep the plot moving.
Scott does employ one device in the novel which anticipates Mark Twain's dialogue in Huckleberry Finn: he uses the heavy Scottish dialect liberally when recording the conversations of his characters. This makes for great authenticity, but very heavy going for the uninitiated, particularly since many of the plot features are conveyed in this impenetrable fashion. (I take pleasure in making the Scott-Twain comparison, since I believe Twain was at least critical enough of Scott to have blamed the American Civil War in part on his Romanticism.)
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
I remember as a pre-teen reading the titles which I would see on the library bookshelf of my best friend’s mother. One I particularly remember was “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” by Betty Smith.
What an odd title, I thought. Was it a story or maybe a science book?
Well, I was probably no more than nine years old then and it seems logical I would have forgotten such a trivial matter. And yet every 10 years or so there seems to have been a fleeting reference to this book so it never really passed out of my memory — and I likewise never gave a thought to following up. Now having just finished it many decades later, I think I can say it was a shame I didn’t get to it when I was about 14 or 15. In fact, I bet it was quite popular with in its time with teenaged girls.
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” will never rival “Madame Bovary” or “Anna Karenina,” but it stands up well in comparison with, say, “Catcher in the Rye.” I would call it an autobiographical novel with all of the virtues and flaws that description suggests. It’s the tale of Francie Nolan, born about 1901 in the ethnic slums of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As a personal history as lived, it is inevitably episodic, covering about eight years of her life from about 11 to 18.
Though she is the main character, Francie is not colorful or exceptionally brilliant. This is not “Little Women” and not Jane Austen. Francie is confident, sad, observant, and reflexively optimistic. She periodically doubts herself but falls back on an inner determination and reliable intelligence. She adores her father, who is a drunk, respects her soon-widowed mother even as they grow somewhat apart. Her younger teenaged brother Neeley is not the caricature one might expect, but a recognizable slum kid, basically decent, with no education to speak of, no apparent prospects, and no regrets.
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose --
Writing in the first person is a major challenge. In unsure hands, the point-of-view problem can become insurmountable (see Treasure Island). But all who begin know this, and part of the fun is to see how they square the circle. For pure sweetness, in my mind nothing surpasses David Copperfield. And the twentieth century masters have expanded the technique so well that they almost make it seem effortless (though there is otherwise nothing easy about Ulysses or The Sound and the Fury).
The shifting stream of consciousness used in those novels is not the only solution. For example, Durrell's answer in the Alexandria Quartet (diaries, "interlineations," books within a book, etc.) was entirely credible, though it borrowed much from Conrad. Stegner's method is to let his historian narrator tell his own first-person story interspersed with his grandparents' third-person history based on his grandmother's first person-letters. This is a three-card monte game which gives the author a good deal of latitude to transgress the form when the reader isn't alert. But Stegner is completely good natured about his cheating[1]. At one point, the narrator's housekeeper/nurse reads his manuscript and shrugs that he's "making it up" anyway. As I remember it, the narrator-historian rebels at the charge, but defends himself with the novelist's point: what I write is truer than any "history."
In any event, grandmother's story is that of a well-bred Eastern artist who marries a western mining engineer and submits to the rigors of life on the frontier in the 1870s and 1880s. The tension and eventual truce between America's east and west is the theme of grandmother's story as the tension and truce between the younger and older generations is the theme of the book's modern portion. This is an intelligent, plain, well-written piece which I would say is one of the better American novels of the mid-20th Century.
Endnotes
1. Speaking of cheating, there seems to be good evidence that Stegner lifted some of the grandmother’s story directly from another author.
Stendhal, (Marie-Henri Beyle) --The Red and the Black --
After three readings of this novel in the past 30 years I still cannot think of it with any of the passion that is at the heart of the story. Maybe French does not translate into English as well as Russian. Or maybe I’m just too old for it now – but then I never felt it in my early 20s either. After all, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, filled with many of the same Rousseauian themes, evokes in me all of the ardor the author obviously intended. I feel much the same way about Madame Bovary, although I like it much better than The Red and The Black. Indeed, the only French novels that have ever stirred my imagination are the rather garish offerings by Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris and Les Miserables. (The latter culminates in the same 1830 Revolt that is brewing in The Red and the Black.)
But this is not to say that The Red and the Black is not an outstanding novel. It follows the rise and fall of Julien Sorel, the callow, proud, calculating son of a Franche-Comte peasant, whose name, in literature at least, is still synonymous with ambition. In the French novels I am most familiar with, it is the heroine whose emotional state is the center of attention. But here, it is the young man alone who fills every page. If it is not ridiculous to recall Ayn Rand in this context, here is a somewhat uncharacteristic passage early in the novel, showing how the boy sees himself:
“Julien, erect upon his mighty rock, gazed at the sky, kindled to flame by an August sun. The grasshoppers were chirping in the patch of meadow beneath the rock; when they ceased everything around him was silence. Twenty leagues of country lay at his feet. From time to time a hawk, risen from the bare cliffs above his head, caught his eye as it wheeled silently in its vast circles. Julien’s eye followed mechanically the bird of prey. Its calm, powerful motion impressed him; he envied such strength, he envied such isolation. It was the destiny of Napoleon, was it one day to be his own?”
In fact, it is absurd for Julien to compare himself to Napoleon, which he does throughout the novel. Julien’s campaigns are confined to his own imagination and his intrigues in respect to the two women who are the poles of his life. The first half of the book is set in his home town, a provincial manufacturing village called Verrieres, in the late 1820s. Borrowing from Burke’s wonderful metaphor comparing French and British politics to their gardens, the author (who slips into the first person) cannot help but find it “barbarous” that the mayor of this pretty village insists that it must pollard its trees into “round, flattened heads, [whereas] they would like nothing better than to assume those magnificent forms which one sees them wear in England.” The author takes many pains to describe this town, which might as well be the French Gopher Prairie. “[S]oon the visitor from Paris is annoyed by a certain air of self-satisfaction and self-sufficiency mingled with a suggestion of limitations and want of originality.” There is a “tyranny” of public opinion “as fatuous . . . as it is in the United States of America.”[1]
In this stifling atmosphere, Julien, who is really unsuitable for work in his father’s sawmill, has been obliged to study for the priesthood. But he has no vocation and indeed his two secret loves, Napoleon and Rousseau, call him in entirely different directions. Thus when he is apprenticed as a tutor into the mayor’s household – a fine catch, Julien can recite the entirety of the Bible in Latin, beginning at any spot – his attention is not dominated by the children, but by their beautiful but naive mother, Madam de Rênal, 12 years his senior. It is central to the novel that their affair occur here and not in Paris, where “love is the child of the novels” which would have told them what to do. Here they are left to their own devices, everything happens “by degrees,” and they are unencumbered by the rituals of sophisticated society. (I am not aware that Nabokov ever commented on The Red and The Black, but I was delighted to notice that one of his butterflies flickers by in an early chapter.) Of course, the situation is perilous, possibly more than it would be in Paris where the danger would be stylized, and simultaneously comic, because it is always comic where there is a cuckolded husband.
At this point, I want to dwell for a moment on Julien’s character. He is, let us say, 19 years old as the novel begins. In most senses, he is unformed and thus, as with all young men of that age, the things that he says and the stances that he takes, which would be simply foolish in an older man, are forgivable and, at least at the distance of my advanced age, possibly lovable. He is neither a puppy nor an ardent lover. He is intelligent, unsophisticated, suspicious, imaginative, and aloof. The author says that he is a creature “for whom hypocrisy and the absence of all fellow feeling were the ordinary line of conduct.” At one point, remarking on the distasteful severity of his hero, the author observes – and this is not a compliment – that Julien has “the air of an Englishman.” Or perhaps it is that he is shy.
“What pity will not our provincial inspire in the young scholars of Paris, who at fifteen, have already learned how to enter a café with so distinguished an air! But these children, so stylish at fifteen, at eighteen begin to turn common. The passionate shyness which one meets in the provinces now and then overcomes itself, and then teaches its victim to desire.”
Of course, Julien does go to Paris, leaving behind Madame de Rênal and entering the household of the Marquis de La Mole. The latter is a Parisian grandee (and Franche-Conte landowner), who condescends to give Julien service as his secretary through the intervention and intrigue of the Jansenist abbot of the provincial monastery where Julien had been confined after leaving the home of Madame de Rênal.
And so the second half of the novel is set in Paris where to dispose of the plot is easily done. Julien is fascinated by his own contempt for the elaborate rituals of the de La Mole household where, “[d]espite good tone, perfect manners, [and] the desire to be agreeable, boredom was written upon every brow.” The Marquis is nobody’s fool and he quickly sizes up Julien as distinct from most provincials who, upon coming to Paris, admire everything, whereas Julien hates everything. Julien, meanwhile, is offended and insulted by the Marquis’s impossibly intelligent, haughty and beautiful daughter Mathilde, which naturally leads to a mutual seduction, estrangement, reunion, and pregnancy. (This surreptitious liaison between peasant and aristocrat would seem to me to be of the utmost significance to the novel’s theme of romance transcending class. It would be utterly impossible to duplicate in a modern novel set in times in which that battle has been completely won.) Mathilde, incidentally, is probably as well-read as Julien and indeed betrays an unexpected veneration for Rousseau, inspiring Julien to betray the thinker as “an upstart flunkey” for his alleged social manners.
Meantime, under pressure from Julien’s provincial rivals, Madame de Rênal has been tricked into writing a letter to the Marquis revealing her own entanglements with the boy. Julien is enraged, speeds back to the country, and impulsively assassinates her in the church, exposing the dual scandal for all to see. But the shot is botched. Madame is only modestly wounded and recovers. Although he now realizes that she is his true love (and the passion is reciprocal), Julien’s nobility of spirit continues to bewitch Mme. de La Mole. Earlier in the novel she had decided that there is “nothing but a sentence of death that distinguishes a man,” and so it is no surprise that she also comes to him in prison (where he has been condemned to the guillotine for the assault on Madame de Rênal).
At his death, faithful to the romantic memory of her ancestor of centuries before, Mathilde herself carries the martyred lover’s head on her lap to the burial and Madame de Rênal dies some months later “while embracing her children.” And so the story is a romance that could not and would not be written today. The treatment of love as the product of a distinct social environment is virtually unintelligible almost two centuries later. Yet is essential to the plot to see such emotions as expressed in the provinces and in the capital as distinct as red and black:
Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.
To put it another way, the novel’s differences with modern fiction are not entirely because of the plot elements. Rather, the features that I assume have kept the commentators enthralled are the novel’s use of 18th and 19th Century thinkers to build its narrative. I have already mentioned Julien’s embrace of Rousseau (he reads the Nouvelle Heloise) and the fact that he is also enamored of Napoleon (politically this was dangerous at that time). Early in the book, moreover, we learn that the author is a Liberal, which informs many of his expressions including the distaste at the tree-trimming, and there are certain scenes which are impossible to understand without some notion of the tension between Jansenists and Jesuits, Jacobins and Royalists. I was sent twice to the library to develop my notion of deMaistre (a papist) and of Archbishop Fenelon, and I recall that Mephistopheles darts across the pages at least twice. Quotations from Schiller introduce numerous chapters. Other references were completely lost on me.
As for humor, the only line that caused me to laugh out loud was Julien’s realization, after days and days of receiving first one lover then another in jail -- mingled with priests, family, and guards – that “the worst drawback of a prison is that one can never close one’s door.” But keeping in mind what high stakes the lovers are playing for, there is also situational humor, more evident to the middle-aged than the young, by which I mean the lovers’ inability to get on the same emotional page at the same time.
Finally, there is the title, which I have puzzled over each time I read the book. The obvious thought is that the reference is to life in the army or life in the church. But that is not this story, albeit that Julien is a cleric of sorts. (He also spends a few paragraphs as a lieutenant in a late chapter in the book.) Taking the “red” as the scarlet of higher ecclesiastical ranks is no better a solution. Alternatively, the idea that “rouge et noir” is a French card game leads me nowhere. Ultimately, I am inclined to settle on the metaphorical conclusion that the red suggests Napoleon himself, whose calculating flourishes were always informed by the internal artist. But Julien is not a soldier[2] and “[n]ever will he make a good priest or a great administrator. Souls that are moved thus are capable at most of producing an artist.” Alas, he is not an artist, either, the book’s one great gesture being supplied instead by Mathilde on the final page.
Endnotes
1. This is one of several not so generous references to American life and government.
2. Allan Bloom’s remark in Love and Friendship is perhaps as good an explanation as any: Whatever he does, Julien plots it out like a soldier. (I took care not to read Bloom's essay until I had completed this piece.)
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma — Early in The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel, still a young man trapped in the French provinces, stands on a mountain ledge and spies a hawk soaring triumphantly and free across the valley. It is his epiphany. That scene came back immediately to me in when, in The Charterhouse of Parma, another young man, Fabrizio del Dongo, at the age of 16 and living on the shores of Lake Como, hears of Napoleon's escape from Elba. He is set on fire.
"I turned towards the lake with no other aim but to hide the tears of joy with which my eyes were flooded. Suddenly, at an immense height and on my right I saw an eagle, Napoleon's bird; it was flying majestically in the direction of Switzerland, and consequently toward Paris. And I, too, told myself at that instant I shall cross Switzerland with the rapidity of the eagle, and go and offer that great man nothing very much but all anyway that I'm able to offer, the aid of my feeble arm."[1]
But from there The Charterhouse of Parma is nothing like the Red and the Black and not nearly so good. Unlike Julien Sorel, for example, Fabrizio is not a peasant, is not ambitious, and is actually rather genial. Moreover, notwithstanding his Jacobin reputation and admiration for Napoleon, he instinctively comports himself in aristocratic manner. Impulsively pious and certainly intelligent, he is prone to tears on some occasions and yet he has countless moments of reflection which only slightly border on self-examination. When the word "conscience" eventually appears, we are informed as readers that it is not exactly what is happening to the hero.
"This is a remarkable characteristic of the religion he owed to the teachings of the Jesuits in Milan. That religion takes away the courage to think about unaccustomed things and above all forbids self-examination as the most grievous of sins: it is a step in the direction of Protestantism." (Italics in original.)
As for the plot, the point here is that Fabrizio is a Lombard Italian of high birth and from a family loyal to Austria, the enemy of France. In a comparatively few number of pages, Stendhal gets him from northern Italy to Waterloo in disguise as a French soldier, where for such a young man he performs admirably. Also without much detail he then escapes back to his family home at Lake Como where he is betrayed as a Jacobin to the Austrians by his older brother. Meantime, it also seems that he is enormously attractive and becomes a love object for his own widowed aunt, Countess Pietranera, a beauty about 12 years his senior. He is still a boy and his no apprehension of this whatsoever.
The gathering story slowly reveals itself as a parody of Italian drama. Notwithstanding her love for Fabrizio, the countess is a sensible woman who, with eyes wide open, is in the meantime content to open a liaison with a substantial older man, also sensible, Count Mosca, who holds an important station as an official to the erratic prince of Parma. (Parma, a minor satellite of Milan, is a "land of secret measures" still immune to — but obviously doomed someday to be swallowed by — the larger republican forces at large on the continent.) In the amiable and semi-public fashion that seems to have been characteristic of that age, this woman and the count arrange that she will officially marry an even older man, Duke Sanseverina-Taxis, who will become an out-of-town ambassador for the prince. Mosca and the countess (who also thereby becomes a duchess) now live in Parma without interference or scandal. Indeed, the duchess becomes an immediate success at the prince's retrograde Parma court where the count also holds a position of influence.
Fabrizio too becomes a beneficiary of this arrangement. Since his bloodlines, if not his immediate fortune, are promising, his aunt, at her lover's suggestion, persuades him to enter the church on the prospect of becoming an archbishop as his uncles had been. He agrees reluctantly and promises not to betray his liberal leanings during the process. The project is a success. Four years later he returns from his studies in Naples irresistible to women — partly because he shows a mild indifference to them —"a diamond who had lost nothing by being polished."[2]
The chapter in which most of the developments of the past two paragraphs are given also quotes at much greater length than earlier the private thinking of the characters. Stendahl's technique here — one that I do not recall him using in the Red and The Black — is to elide from dialog to a character's internal thinking without using quotation marks or paragraphing. It is remarkably subtle, giving an immediacy to the reflection without the breathtaking and gaudy orthography of Faulkner or Conrad[3]. I had hopes that such innovations would rescue the novel, but they did not.
Stendhal wants to remind us that his hero is still quite young, credulous, and above all with an "Italian heart" — by which he means romantic[4]. Once in Parma and under the observation of the count and duchess, Fabrizio is made a very young adjutant archbishop through the intercession of the Count Mosca. But then, in one of several picaresque moments which do not help the novel, he is accosted by a ruffian whom he is obliged to kill in self-defense. Even in Parma this is a crime, and, having therefore been condemned by the prince, he is obliged to flee, apparently abandoning his holy orders. This entire incident provokes a series of political calculations by which the status of both the duchess and the count — each of whom must be very conscious of not offending the prince —is imperiled.
Too much intrigue follows, culminating in Fabrizio's arrest in the presence of Clelia, daughter of the general in charge, who was a girl whom he had met in similar circumstances near Lake Como when she was a mere 12 years old. She is now, of course, a beauty who has remembered (as has he) every particle of their earlier encounter five years before. And the girl's love is nothing compared to the torment suffered by the unrequited aunt/duchess. This woman, "forever passionate for something, forever active, never idle" — and intuiting Fabrizio's infatuation with Clelia — plunges into an internal monologue after the young man's imprisonment in the Farnese tower. It is perhaps the strongest piece of writing in the novel. She goes from despair to cold calculation to impossible fantasies.
An element in the unfolding plot is that Fabrizio's sentence has been reduced to writing, the custody of which later becomes important. Although he is ostensibly condemned to 10 years imprisonment, it is widely assumed throughout Parma that Fabrizio will soon be beheaded or possibly poisoned at the instigation of out-of-power faction at the court which has always detested him and his aunt. The story now begins to resemble the Count of Monte Cristo, with plots and counterplots, secret messages and nocturnal meetings, ropes and poison — the entire farrago involving Clelia, the duchess, the count, a smarmy prosecutor, and several suborned henchmen, including a convenient madman. Intentional or not, the tower escape, which covers about 20 pages or more, is told in such a rapid-fire, frantic detail, that it is more farcical than anything else[5].
Once in safe territory, Fabrizio, still longing for Clelia, is suddenly anxious to go back. Fortunately, in fact, the prince dies unexpectedly which would seem to be the ideal opportunity for him to make a lightening return and rescue Clelia from the arms of a very wealthy man who is about to marry her. But Fabrizio is still under sentence for the murder and the count must warn him off this course. The new prince, son of the dead one, is both immature and under the influence of the court party which would still be delighted to see Fabrizio dead. So Fabrizio returns in disguise. Then, while the duchess and the count maneuver feverishly behind the scenes to save him, he simply surrenders himself back to the tower so that he may see Clelia in her nearby chamber. (Her father is governor of the tower.)
And so it goes for another hundred pages, far beyond anything of genuine interest. Eventually there is an ending —even one roughly comparable to the strange and bitter close to The Red and the Black. But getting there was never worth the effort.
ENDNOTES
1. Stendhal later calls reflections like these Fabrizio's "half-belief in omens," and even something of a religion.
2. A page or two later, Fabrizio is given an audience with the prince who upon sizing him up says to himself that the young man is "a well-trained bird of prey."
3. This is not criticism; I am a devotee of both of them.
4. He also calls it a "failing." This is but one of several occasions when Stendhal calls attention to peculiar Italian mannerisms for his French readers.
5. Even Stendhal recognizes the Italian farce: "On the other hand, in America, in the republic, one has the day-long tedium of paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the street, and becoming as stupid as they are. And no opera there."
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island --
This is the best boys book that ever was. I read it as a youngster, saw the films, and most satisfying of all, I read it aloud to each of my sons when they were about five years old. (Thank God I can talk like a pirate and switch effortlessly to an English lord.) What could possibly be better than a stormy night at a seaside groghouse, a murder, a sailing adventure to a tropical island to find treasure, a mutiny, a marooned madman, and a pirate with a wooden leg who also does duty as a father figure? And all of this is told in the first person by the young teenaged Jim Hawkins without guile or self-consciousness. The book does have an unfortunate flaw right in the middle: for the purposes of plot, Jim has to turn a chapter of the narrative over to another. But if you're a boy, you won't care.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina --
For years I was so dazzled with this novel’s epigrammatic opening line about unhappiness, that it never occurred to me that the first chapter is almost a parody of the book’s entirely passionate theme: adultery. Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky, whom we soon learn is the brother of the heroine, has been caught out in a dalliance with his children’s hired governess and is definitely in trouble with his wife. But he’s a swell fellow and will only suffer at home for it. He is otherwise welcome throughout Russian society. We will soon learn that his sister will not be so fortunate.
But we do not meet Anna immediately. Once we are introduced to the affable Stepan Arkadyevitch, we must know of his childhood friend – and the hero of the novel – Konstantine Levin – an energetic, self-conscious, younger man who is awkwardly in love with Stepan Arkadyevitch’s sister-in-law, Kitty, who is 18 years old when the novel begins.
Throughout the novel, the love and eventual marriage of Levin and Kitty is the counterpoint of Anna’s doomed entanglement with Count Vronsky. Once they meet by chance, Anna and Vronsky almost have no control over their fates, even though neither of them has any reason to have been dissatisfied with life before they met. Anna is the married mother of an important government official in St. Petersburg and the mother of a young child whom she loves as life itself. For his part, Vronsky, rich, handsome and agreeable to all, is expected to marry Kitty, who actually rejected Levin on his behalf. At this point, fate (as I will discuss momentarily) puts Anna in the way and she and Vronsky are drawn into the vortex. Initially this seems at least an irony, because Anna has come to Moscow only for the purpose of comforting her brother’s wife and to effect a reconciliation in their marriage. She is entirely genuine in this and, though sophisticated and intelligent, finds herself telling the wife, Dolly, that she certainly “understands” the situation. In fact, how little she understands will in large part be the subtext of this novel.
Meantime, the attraction between Anna and Vronsky is so swift and unexpected – it catches fire at a Moscow ball where Kitty’s engagement to Vronsky was to have been made official – that the young Kitty is prostrated by her reversal of fortune and falls so ill that she is taken abroad by her parents. Here she undergoes a profound change in outlook, actually becoming Russian, as it were. (‘[B]esides the instinctive life . . . there is a spiritual life.”) By complete accident (though deliberately underscoring the plot), she causes a marital rift in the family of an older invalid man, whose wife becomes unjustly jealous of the poor girl who had simply tried to be a ministering angel to the two of them. For this was in the midst of Kitty’s religious awakening in the Tolstoian fashion.
I should say at this point that Anna Karenina is, if nothing else, not only peculiarly Russian, but even more, it is peculiarly Tolstoian. I am not situated to comment on Orthodoxy and Tolstoy’s version of it, but it is impossible to miss the emphasis the author puts on his views. And as for the mystique of Russia, it is everywhere when the author turns to Levin and his life in the country. Large segments of the novel are set at Levin’s estate where he lives alone, stoically believing that he must have been intended to be without the wife he had selected. There are rhapsodic scenes of the early spring, warm (but ambiguous) views of Levin’s camaraderie with the peasants, a hunting scene (where Tolstoy, always novel, actually gives a line of dialog to a dog), and a magnificent, almost patriotic, “blissful” description of Levin joining 40 of the peasants in mowing his fields from dawn to night with hand-held scythes. (Yes, Russia, it is you and not us; fully 20 years before this scene supposedly occurred, McCormick had patented his mechanical reaper for the American steppes.)
A graphic scene, almost as vivid as Raskolnikov’s dream of the peasants beating a horse to death in Crime and Punishment, is the one of Vronsky’s race accident where, owing to his mispositioning on a jump, he breaks the back of his favorite mare. I suppose the scene is not “symbolic” in any undergraduate sense, but like several other scenes in this novel it has an ominous foreshadowing quality to it. And it does in fact move the plot, for the accident becomes the catalyst for Anna, who witnesses it with horror, to tell her husband of her hatred for him and of her affair with Vronsky. She also reveals to him that she is pregnant. The subsequent episode of her confinement occurs in the context of Vronsky’s recently bungled suicide attempt (note the two profound failures of this seemingly perfect man) and Karenin’s rigid, conventional, and impossible willingness to effectuate a reconciliation with his wife. It is also the occasion of an important scene where Vronsky and Karenin meet each other at what they are certain will be her deathbed. Such scenes are one of Tolstoy’s greatest talents, and they can be protracted or just simple glimpses[1].
One that I found to be both inviting and revealing was that in which the genial Stephan Arkadyevitch, arriving home a bit late for the dinner party at which Levin and Kitty will be reunited, in five minutes breaks the ice among all of the guests, most of whom didn’t want to be there. As I have suggested, Stephan is an uncomplicated character whose individuality nevertheless plays a vital role in moving the novel forward. In this Tolstoy resembles Shakespeare, by which I mean that even his lesser characters all have distinct and interesting personalities. This being a Russian novel it would take forever to detail every one of them. But it is worthwhile to concentrate on certain of the characters. Karenin, for example, repairs to religion for solace in his humiliation. But he is frequently said by Tolstoy to be subject to a “mighty, brutal force” that rules his life. It is that predestination which appears to be the chief source of consternation to critics such as Irving Babbit. According to him, Tolstoy was a disciple of Rousseau and an enemy of Shakespeare. “At bottom,” he says, the quarrel with Shakespeare
is a quarrel between a humanist and a humanitarian fanatic. Tolstoy . . . would suppress entirely the principle of selection, and exalt in its place the principle of sympathy, the religion of human brotherhood[2]. What he cannot pardon in Shakespeare is that his wisdom is only for the few, that his view on life is on the whole selective and aristocratic.
Now I readily admit that Babbit is a superior to me as a reader. And if Anna Karenina is taken as nothing more than didacticism, there is much justification for this view. But foremost, it is a novel, and possibly the greatest novel ever written. Critics should read it with a critical eye, of course. But not all readers are critics on that level. From my own, semi-enlightened standpoint, the most I can say is that I think I perceive in Tolstoy much of the duality that Russia has shown for centuries: a mystic, Slavic religion mingled with a fascination for European science.
Ultimately, however, it is Tolstoy and his decided but idiosyncratic views of Russia and religion that guide the plot. Levin’s spirituality, for example, is revisited several times in the novel. He is an unbeliever, a stubbornly jealous man, and a reader of philosophers. He has an epiphany at the end which brings him to God on unexpectedly genial terms: there are things “more important than reason.”
God is not a part of the lives of Anna and Vronsky. Now openly committed to each other, they travel abroad where in Italy they meet a self-doubting but ebullient emigre painter, the description of whom echoes Levin and also sounds almost autobiographical of the author. This theme of self-doubt and inability of the characters to speak from the heart is played throughout the novel. A most poignant example occurs at Levin’s estate after he and Kitty have married. His older brother Sergey Ivanovitch[3] is a houseguest as is a woman Kitty had met when she was abroad. Everyone knows these two middle aged people are right for each other and that each would like to marry the other. The scene is set, the two are left alone, and yet neither is able to get the conversation on the right course, even though both of them know that is exactly what they are supposed to do and what they wish to do. And they also know that, having failed to do it when they should, they will never again have the opportunity. It is a sad and vaguely familiar moment, unnecessary to the plot but vital to understanding Tolstoy. (Elsewhere in the book, Levin considers that Sergey may be too committed to the public good and that he therefore lacks “vital force”.)
Having mentioned one of Levin’s brothers, Sergey, I must now mention the other, Nicolay Dmietrievitch, an irascible consumptive wastrel who lives with a prostitute, offends all, and loves his brother. Nicolay’s prolonged death at Levin’s home is an occasion for Kitty to again minister to a sick man, which she does so effectively that this outcast scold surprisingly begins to refer to her affectionately as “Katya” – and so suddenly does Tolstoy.
As the plot reverts to Anna and Vronsky, the inexorability of their dilemma of love continues to press on them. Though they love each other, they quarrel (during which “some strange force of evil would not permit her to surrender”). Superficially, this is because Vronsky can continue to move easily in society; Anna is unwelcome. She is not bitter and she is not regretful of her choice, because she does not see it as having been a choice. But she is terrified both at the narrow space she finds herself in and her growing delusions about Vronsky’s constancy. (He is not unconstant – recall the famous moment in the early part of the novel when each of them is seen to be weirdly bound to the other by their having separately shared the same disturbing dream – although his situation is by now less intensely fatal than hers.)
She takes opium and morphine to sleep. They cannot find a home: From Europe they return to Russia to live in Vronsky’s lavish county dacha (he is considerably richer than the other characters), whence they then return to Petersburg the better to persuade (unsuccessfully) Karenin to surrender up Anna’s son, and then determine again to decamp to the country. Anna becomes increasingly unstable. Like Madame Bovary, she now half-closes her beautiful eyes at unexpected intervals, not when thinking of love as Emma did, but in moments of mystic stress. And in her flight back to the country, having manufactured one of the innumerable petty quarrels with Vronsky who is away but prepared to come to her, she finds herself at the same railroad station where she had first met him in the opening of the novel. Things have come full circle. It is the same station; she sees an ominous peasant who reminds her of the dream; it is indeed the very place where a railroad worker had been crushed to death by the wheels of another train shortly before she met Vronsky. And so, in a stroke that suddenly seems inevitable, she destroys herself in the same way.
And yet this does not end the novel. The final segment returns to Levin whose struggles with his proper place in the world come eventually, as I have said, to his insight into God. But before that moment arrives, the battle becomes climactic and he even contemplates suicide. Thus by the novel’s end, Tolstoy has contrived to have all three of his main characters contemplate suicide, with different outcomes. Each case, of course, is particular to each character. And to the extent I have not already done so, I will recall here some of the important features of each of these players.
Vronsky, for instance, though he is the least interesting of the three, is hardly a vapid, pasteboard aristocrat– though Levin is prepared to regard him as a parvenu in comparison to his own lineage. Vronsky has a code of sorts (this helps him through his lack of imagination) and he prides himself on his honesty to others (though he is also honest to himself, an attractive feature – if one has the imagination to be otherwise). To his class, however, “the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else.” He is probably Anna’s age, perhaps a bit younger, but at least 10 years older than Kitty. Even at the outset of the novel he is beginning to go bald. When he is smitten by Anna, Vronsky’s face, “always so firm and independent,” is suddenly lit by “bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong.” And his destiny with Anna is foreordained and doomed. He is like “[a] sailor who sees by the compass that the direction in which he is swiftly moving is far from the right one, but that to arrest his motion is not in his power, that every instant is carrying him further and further away, and that to admit to himself his deviation from the right direction is the same as admitting his certain ruin.”
This suggestion of unsettling destiny is contrasted with a far more benign picture of Levin’s fate, seen most emphatically when he is at farm labor which leaves him feeling “as though some external force were moving him.” Levin is naive, inquisitive[4], intelligent, and largely humorless (though he is the cause of love and humor in others, particularly Kitty). Tolstoy gives him a lengthy meditation in defense of self-interest, a topic picked up again and again in the novel when Tolstoy suggests the artificiality of government and fine words as opposed to feelings, immersion in the countryside, the old ways, etc. Levin is also jealous of Kitty, even after they have married. This is also a contrast, this time with Anna. Levin’s jealousy is unattractive, even hypocritical, but it comes to nothing.
With Anna, however, her jealousy of Vronsky becomes so intense that by the middle of the novel she and Vronsky, in some sort of perverse lover’s pact, have agreed to refer to it as “the fiend,” further underscoring the direction of their lives together.
And so I turn to Anna. When she was a young girl about Kitty’s age, Anna’s wealthy aunt apparently contrived to get her married to Karenin by insinuating that he had compromised her. We learn this fairly late in the novel and it came as a bit of a surprise to me. It is not surprising, however, that Anna came to hate her husband, because, notwithstanding his bloodless effort to be correct and forgiving as her affair becomes public, women were “terrible and distasteful to him.” Her passionless life with him required her to be patient. Ironically, she is again called upon for the same virtue which she accepts with evident composure, although there is a disastrous moment when she chooses to go to the opera after her secret is out.
“Anyone who did not know her and her circle, who had not heard all the
utterances of the women expressive of commiseration, indignation, and amazement, that she should show herself in society, and show herself so conspicuously with her lace and her beauty, would have admired the serenity and loveliness of this woman without a suspicion that she was undergoing the sensations of a man in the stocks.”
Anna is brave and determined to live the life that has been given her. But unlike Levin, who expresses the same instincts, Anna’s life has a cloud over it. To the outside world, it is invisible for most of the novel, for she keeps her composure. This continues to make her a figure of some admiration to the other women she knows. Her sister-in-law Dolly, for instance, “not only excused [Anna’s] illicit love, she positively envied it.” With a “sweet, deep laugh, which was one of her greatest charms,” Anna is also arrestingly elegant.
“[N]ow seeing her in black, [Kitty] felt that she had not fully seen her charm. . . . Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, and that her charm was just that she always stood out against her attire, that her dress could never be noticeable on her; it was only the frame, and all that was seen was she – simple, natural, legant, and at the same time gay and eager.”
When describing her, Tolstoy never fails to mention her obviously unruly hair which is constantly getting caught, peeking out, hanging down, etc. She is admired not only by men but even the women. Unlike Emma Bovary, she dislikes to read, but paradoxically for the same reason that Emma would devour cheap novels. Anna found it distasteful
“to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man [a foreshadowing of Kitty and Nickolay?]; . . . if she read how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same.”
Although she is completely in sympathy with Kitty, there is a time late in the novel when Levin, to his great discomfort must meet Anna. Hardly without trying, she carries away his young married heart (this jealous husband), chiefly, it seems, just to keep in practice.
Endnotes
1. But meditations are one of his greater drawbacks– think of the endless rumination at the conclusion of War and Peace.
2. In Leo Strauss's interpretation of Rousseau, "[t]hrough love, man achieves a closer approximation to a state of nature on the level of humanity than he does through a life of citizenship or virtue." Natural Right and History.
3. Or rather he appears to be a half-brother. His full name is Sergey Ivanovitch Koznishev. Levin is Konstantin Dmietrievitch. At this point it may also be worthwhile to observe that both Levin and Vronsky appear to have had childhoods in which they both grew up without a conventional family.
4. In this, he is the opposite of Karenin who, on those questions of which he was “totally devoid of understanding, he had the most distinct and decided opinions.”
Anthony Trollope, The Warden --
Thinking of my favorite novels by 19th Century English authors – Jane Austen, say, or Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and even Thomas Hardy – it surprises me how many of them are put in motion by the idiosyncrasies of the English notions about property. By this I do not mean that the convention is not serious; indeed, I don’t even really think of it as a literary “convention,” since the forms by which property is held and transferred will normally define a society.
Like the remaindermen, the inheritances, and the primogenitures given to us by the others, Trollope gives us the will of John Hiram, inconveniently written several centuries before the events which give rise to the droll but wistful plot of The Warden. The “warden” in question is Septimus Harding, an older man (meaning, I think, my age) who holds the church-appointed sinecure created by the Hiram will, as shepherd to 12 pensioners from the community who are too old and impecunious to care for themselves. These “bedesmen” – and their predecessors for hundreds of years – are the intended beneficiaries of Hiram’s gift.
But before discussing the problem introduced by the author, I must first say that in a helpful forward to the Penguin edition of this novel which I read, I learned that the events which provoked Trollope to write The Warden – the first of his Barsetshire series – had been evidently widely published in the press of the day. Indeed, the novel makes explicit reference to the so-called “St. Cross” affair in the opening chapter, and were it not for the forward I would never have understood exactly what was being referred to. In short, in the 1850s The Times (which becomes The Jupiter in the novel) had seized upon and exposed a variant of simony supposedly flourishing in the Church of England by which the stipend associated with certain church offices was going too much into the pockets of the office holders and was not being more widely distributed among the poor for whom the bequest had originally been made. (And oh would this not be a sure-fire Pulitizer prize today.)
In the case of Mr. Harding, it seems that the rural pastures originally bequeathed under the Hiram will, have become over the years the locus of modern housing which throws off considerably more money than the charity ever expected. Thus after the 12 old souls in Mr. Harding’s care receive their appointed allotment, there is £800 annually left over and distributed by the church to the warden. This is not a princely sum, but it is sufficient to keep Mr. Harding and his second daughter living comfortably in the cathedral close, adjacent to the hospital which he administers for his charges.
To make a story of this, Trollope then gives us John Bold, a 24-year-old surgeon who has grown up in the neighborhood and as a child spent more than a little time at the good warden’s table. In fact, he is in love with the man’s daughter, Eleanor. But still in his eager youth, Mr. Bold is too dazzled by idealism and too energized by the St. Cross matter. He is certain that the same unmitigated justice which had been applied in that case also merits investigation of the Hiram bequest administered by his would-be father-in-law. Trollope’s view of this young man reflects the same rueful understanding and sympathy that Mr. Harding himself – and contrary to his own best interests – holds.
“Bold is thoroughly sincere in his patriotic endeavours to mend mankind, and there is something to be admired in the energy with which he devotes himself to remedying evil and stopping injustice; but I fear that he is too much imbued with the idea that he has a special mission for reforming. It would be well if one so young had a little more diffidence himself, and more trust in the honest purposes of others – if he could be brought to believe that old customs need not necessarily be evil, and that changes may possibly be dangerous . . . .”
Bold engineers a lawsuit pro bono publico. The story that then unfolds is not so much about the law’s abuses – this was Dickens’s territory – as it is a meditation on both the limits and the stakes of justice pursued through the laws of man. The motto, “Let justice prevail though the heavens may fall” – suitably rendered in Latin – gives the young doctor comfort in his position. But until he had stood up, everyone had already known that the wardenship had become a “snug sinecure,” and no one, least of all the sainted Mr. Harding, had been blamed for not questioning it. Indeed, Mr. Harding’s administration of the post, his kindness and personal regard for his charges, and his generosity to them is the accepted environment in which Trollope presents the conflict. But lawsuits do present conflict and debate and Trollope is at pains to show, not only the merits of the debate, but also just how much beside the point they can nevertheless be.
The legal problem itself would not be particularly novel to a judge: the Hiram Will simply failed to make explicit provision anticipating increase in the value of the property. And so who is to get it? The bedesmen are illiterate, naive, and infirm; after a bitter life of manual labor, in their declining years they have been providentially provided with a secure home, companionship, regular meals, and no material wants. And although each of them will soon die and be replaced by another, all but one betrays a feeble-minded greed when told of the situation. Is it sensible to bestow them with, as Bold has somehow calculated it, £100 annually?
“The bishop [Mr. Harding’s elderly father-in-law] had an indistinct idea that
[the shares] altered themselves by the lapse of years; that a kind of ecclesiastical statute of limitation barred the rights of the twelve bedesmen to any increase . . . . He said something about tradition.”
Indeed throughout the novel there is a steady theme about the value of tradition and the risks that Bold’s lawsuit pose to the comfortable, quirky Church of England.
“Who, without remorse, can batter down the dead branches of an old oak, now
useless, but ah! still so beautiful, or drag out the fragments of the ancient forest, without feeling that they sheltered the younger plants, to which they are now summoned to give way in a tone so peremptory and so harsh?”
Later, in describing the beautiful old Tudor cathedral where Mr. Harding has lived and worked, Trollope remarks,
“Though in gazing at such a structure, one knows by rule that the old priests who built it, built it wrong, one cannot bring oneself to wish that they should have made it other than it is.”
Trollope also makes it clear that there will be victims other than the church. For example, the 80-year-old Mr. Bunce, the only bedesman to understand the situation, lectures his colleagues: “Law! Did ye ever know a poor man yet was the better for law, or for a lawyer?”
But Mr. Harding, a benign and unpretentious man, has become faintly uncomfortable with the sound and “good natured” defenses put up for him by his friends. Here begins the true conflict which moves the story forward. Simply because tradition, or even law, would permit others to think Mr Harding to be in the right, “it failed to prove to him that he was truly so.” In short, his conscience has been called upon and as the story moves forward, Mr. Harding’s native righteousness takes him to a level quite a bit above the debates that unfold among the others. And yet those debates, adorned by some very funny scenes, animate the entire novel. Like the other novelists I have mentioned above, Trollope is a witty observer. He gives the title “Iphigenia” to the chapter in which, for her father (a most unlikely Agamemnon), the young Eleanor undertakes to sacrifice her aspirations for bliss with Mr. Bold. Elsewhere the author describes a party for the young people of the neighborhood: the musicians played feverishly and no one danced; they stopped and there was silence on both sides of the room:
“[H]ow is it at this moment the black-coated corps leave their retreat and begin
skirmishing? One by one they creep forth, and fire off little guns timidly, and without precision. Ah, my men, efforts such as these will take no cities, even though the enemy should never be so open to assault. At length a more deadly artillery is brought to bear; slowly, but with effect, the advance is made; the muslin ranks are broken, and fall into confusion; the formidable array of chairs gives way; the battle is no longer between opposing regiments, but hand to hand, and foot to foot with single combatants, as in the glorious days of old, when fighting was really noble. In corners, and under the shadow of curtains, behind sofas and half hidden by doors, in retiring windows, and sheltered by hanging tapestry, are blows given and returned, fatal, incurable, dealing death.”
To me the funniest touch – because it is so descriptive of Mr. Harding and so unlike anything else I have seen in a novel – is that the meek warden will unconsciously play “air cello” when he is under pressure. There is a scene, for example, in which Mr. Harding compels himself to travel to London to accost the church’s formidable attorney so that he may confess that regardless of the law, his conscience requires him to resign the wardenship. This is unintelligible to the great man and he resists. “Mr. Harding, seated in his chair, began to play a slow tune on an imaginary violincello.” Overlooking this, the lawyer continues with his remarks, but the warden plunges on. “‘I can resign,’ said Mr. Harding, slowly playing away with his right hand, as though the bow were beneath the chair in which he was sitting.” The lawyer stares in amazement, but makes another demurrer. Mr. Harding stands up bravely to answer, “but still playing away on his fiddle with his hand behind his back.” There is more conversation and then with an effort the unassuming cleric screws up his full courage and delivers his complete declaration -- a speech really -- to this famous man of the law.
“And, as he finished what he had to say, he played up such a tune as neverBut such passages disract me from the "debates" I mentioned. The debates are significant because each sidehas merit.
before had graced the chambers of any attorney-general. He was standing up, gallantly fronting Sir Abraham, and his right arm passed with bold and rapid sweeps before him, as though he were embracing some huge instrument which allowed him to stand thus erect; and with the fingers of his left hand he stopped, with preternatural velocity, a multitude of strings, which ranged from the top of his collar to the bottom of the lappet of his coat. Sir Abraham listened and looked in wonder.”
On the legal side, the church’s lawyer and Mr. Harding’s son-in-law point out that by having sued Mr. Harding, Mr. Bold and his supporters have sued the agent, not the principal. The case will be thrown out. Then these same parties become gleeful when they learn that Mr. Bold has abandoned the case -- this was Cupid’s work – meaning that not only will the warden remain untouched in his office but also that Mr. Bold will have to pay the costs.
On the other hand, the will specifically says that the bishop is required to “see that due justice is done.” This is the point that comes to dominate Mr. Harding’s reflections on his position. Regardless of where the law would take him, he feels that his station has been unjust and so this is why he resigns in the face of victory. (I should add that I don’t think it is wrong to propose that a secondary struggle has also been suggested by Trollope, by which I mean the contest between High Church and Low Church which had come to a boil in this period.)
The conclusion of the novel, which does not present an unexpected reversal of fortune or even a conventional conflict resolution. No, Mr. Harding does resign – and stays resigned – and yet the conclusion is not pathetic in any way. Indeed, it is a wonderful conclusion because, although those losses and risks which I said above were at stake are more or less realized, they eventually seem transitory and even unimportant. A good man’s life goes on. Mr.Bold does marry Eleanor. The foolish bedesmen, given a genuinely kind farewell by Mr. Harding[1], continue to die off as they would have anyway. Mr. Harding’s friend, the old bishop, simply chooses not to appoint a successor warden (or to name any more bedesmen). And most important, Mr. Harding and the old bishop remain each other’s friend.
Endnotes
1. This is a moment of symbolism, one of Trollope’s few gestures beyond the witty metaphors which he uses so well: “[E]very kind word from their master was a coal of fire burning on their heads.”
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons --
By far the best thing about this wistful novel, is its suggestive title. And yet, in justice, the title should have been reserved for Dickens in his far superior (and more interesting) effort which he called Barnaby Rudge.
Turgenev’s story begins in 1859, two years before the official liberation of the serfs, but obviously at a time of growing change. Young Arkady Kirsanov, fresh from the university, returns to his impoverished Russian country home where his feckless, doting father lives as the master among his peasants whose status is in flux. Although the father, Nikolai Kirsanov, is a widower, he awkwardly announces to his son at the train station – in what he sees as the way of “the relation of father and son” – that he is now living with a local girl, Fenitchka. (Indeed they have a child, though it takes a while to learn that.)
But Arkady, progressive in his own callow way, has an announcement of his own. He has brought with him an older fellow student and mentor from the university, the unkempt Yevgeny Vassilyitch Bazarov, whose story is the plot of the novel. Bazarov is an announced “nihilist” and the author says he has “the special faculty of inspiring confidence in people of a lower class, though he never tried to win them.” But what is a nihilist? To Arkady’s father,
“. . . the word must mean a man who . . . accepts nothing? “Say ‘respects nothing,’” put in Pavel Petrovich [Arkady’s uncle], and he set to work on the butter again. “Who regards everything from the critical point of view,” observed Arkady. “Isn’t that just the same thing?” inquired Pavel Petrovich. “No, it’s not the same thing. A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.” “Well, and is that good?” interrupted Pavel Petrovich. “That depends, uncle. Some people it will do good to, but some people will suffer for it.” “Indeed. Well, I see it’s not in our line. . . . .”
This uncle, Pavel Petrovich, is the natural foil to Bazarov. As a young man he had been exceptionally handsome officer, self-confident, and charming to the ladies. But a failed love affair with a married woman had eventually left him puzzled and dispirited and after 10 years in bachelor society, he had entered upon “that indefinite twilight period of regrets that are akin to hopes, and hopes that are akin to regrets, when youth is over, while old age has not yet come.” And so he has agreed to live as an elegant relic in the countryside with his widowed brother. He has a “dry and sensuous soul, with . . . [a] French tinge of cynicism . . . not capable of dreaming.”
For his part, Bazarov who – as the novel will proceed to show – is just as callow as Arkady, and a heedless egotist to boot. He dismisses Pavel Petrovich as an insignificant wretch and indifferently pursues his studies in entomology. But in fact they are natural competitors, and their competition begins almost immediately in respect to the master’s young mistress, Fenitschka.
While this contest between Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich is going on, Arkady’s father, Nikolai Kirsanov, broods over a remark he has overheard between the young people that his “time has passed.” This he partly believes, not necessarily because of the youth of his son and Bazarov, but that their superiority “consist[s] in there being fewer traces of the slave-owner in them than in us.” This theme, which emerges several times during the novel, is engaging but never fully developed. It is always secondary to the more comic, and eventually more poignant, theme of fiery youth falling back into the way of their fathers.
Some week or two after Arkady’s arrival with Bazarov, the latter abruptly suggests to Arkady that they visit a nearby town which is near Bazarov’s own father whom he feels an obligation to visit. And so they go. Here Bazarov (who appears to be a bit of a drinker) is introduced to a fascinating 29-year old widow, Madame Anna Odintsov, and is immediately (but reluctantly) smitten. He and Arkady accept her invitation to come and stay for a time at her dacha where Bazarov’s infatuation reveals him as less than the mysterious man of “nothing.” He has – not really to the reader’s surprise – feet of clay. He confides to Arkady that Madam Odintsov has a “magnificent body.” They extend their visit for two weeks and, things being as they are, a grudging and wary mutual attraction develops between the two while Arkady is thrown together with her younger 18-year-old sister Katya.
But his own natural human weakness grates on Bazarov. Indeed, it eventually forces him to declare his love directly and in anger to Madame Odintsov. The next day he beats a retreat to his father’s house, taking Arkady with him. Bazarov’s parents, though poor, own 22 serfs. His father is a retired country doctor and his grandfather had been no more than the village sexton. (Later we learn that his other grandfather had been “some second-major [who] served with Suvarov.”) The old doctor, rabbits on to Arkady about having served in the brigade under Arkady’s grandfather, no doubt to Bazarov’s stoic embarrassment, while his mother mostly weeps and gazes at him. But, the title of the book to the contrary notwithstanding, here is the best passage, devoted to Bazarov’s mother:
“She was very devout and emotional; she believed in fortune-telling, charms, dreams, and omens of every possible kind; she believed in the prophesies of crazy people, in house-spirits, in wood-spirits, in unlucky meetings, in the evil eye, in popular remedies, she ate specially prepared salt on Holy Thursday, and believed that the end of the world was at hand; she believed that if on Easter Sunday the lights did not go out at vespers, then there would be a good crop of buckwheat, and that a mushroom will not grow after it has been looked on by the eye of man; she believed that the devil likes to be where there is water, and that every Jew has a blood-stained patch on his breast; she was afraid of mice, of snakes, of frogs, of sparrows, of leeches, of thunder, of cold water, of drafts, of horses, of goats, of red-haired people, and black cats; and she regarded crickets and dogs as unclean beasts; she never ate veal, doves, crayfishes, cheese, asparagus, artichokes, hares, nor watermelons, because a cut watermelon suggested the head of John the Baptist, and of oysters she could not speak without a shudder; she was fond of eating – and fasted rigidly; she slept ten hours out of the twenty-four – and never went to bed at all if [her husband] had as much as a headache . . . . Arina Vlasyevna was very indhearted, and in her way not at all stupid. She knew that the world is divided into masters whose duty it is to command, and simple folk whose duty it is to serve them – and so
she felt no repugnance to servility and prostrations to the ground; but she treated those in subjection to her kindly and gently, never let a single beggar go away empty-handed, and never spoke ill of anyone, though she was fond of gossip. In her youth she had been pretty, played the clavichord, and spoken French a little; but in the course of many years’ wanderings with her husband, whom she had married against her will, she had grown stout, and forgotten music and French. Her son she loved and feared unutterably . . . . She was apprehensive, and constantly expecting some great misfortune, and began to weep directly she remembered any thing sorrowful. . . . . Such women are not common nowadays. God knows whether we ought to rejoice!”
The day after Arkady and Bazarov have arrived – and this is by far the longest chapter in the book – the two young men laze about on a sunny afternoon provoking each of them to give voice to his philosophy. Bazarov announces that unlike other young men he does not run away when the “summoned hen” comes to him (which, of course, he has just done). Then, like Hamlet, he says that he occupies an infinitely small and petty space which he sees as the essence of his, and everyone’s, nothingness. He expatiates (wrongly) on Pushkin and Arkady must correct him.
The conversation continues to reveal the differences between the two. Bazarov observes that a “real man” must be either obeyed or hated. Arkady hates no one. Bazarov – the would-be scientist and doctor – suddenly sounds like Rousseau, declaiming that everything depends on feelings. (He has told Arkady that he is fond of his parents, and no doubt he is, but he treats them just short of rudeness, though they idolize him.) Indeed, the next day, surprising Arkady and crushing his parents, Bazarov abruptly returns with the pliant Arkday to Nicholai Kirsanov’s estate. It is little more than an act of ego and when he has gone, his mother says to his father:
“A son is a separate piece cut off. He’s like the falcon that flies home and flies away at his pleasure; while you and I are like funguses in the hollow of a tree, we sit side by side, and don’t move from our place. Only I am left you unchanged forever, as you for me. “Vassily Ivanovich took his hands from his face and clasped his wife, his friend, as firmly as he had never clasped in youth; she comforted him in his grief.”
In fact the young men, though not so close as before, take a detour to make an unexpected – and awkward – stop at Madame Odintsov’s house where they are received cordially, but no more. Continuing on to Arkady’s home where weak management has left the agriculture in turmoil, they stay 10 days when Arkady suddenly makes his own bolt (without Bazarov) back to Madame Odintsov’s. He must see Katya.
While he is gone, Bazarov flirts with – and kisses – Fenitchka, secretly observed by the uncle, Pavel Petrovich, who then challenges Bazarov to a duel. The contest – “feudal” as Bazarov grudgingly acknowledges – comes off comically the following morning, with Pavel Petrovich shooting wide and Bazarov in turn hitting him in the thigh with a non-fatal wound. Now obliged to depart, Bazarov again repairs to Madame Odintsov’s house, where Arkady is slowly coming to understand his feelings for Katya. Once he has arrived, Bazarov and Madame Odintsov almost immediately come to a more mature understanding. “Flying fishes,” he tells her grandiloquently, “can hold out for a time in the air, but soon they must splash back into the water.” And so he announces another departure, though not before giving a backhanded acknowledgment to Arkady.
“You’re not made for our bitter, rough, lonely existence. There’s no dash, no hate in you, but you’ve the daring of youth and the fire of youth. Your sort, you gentry, can never get beyond refined submission or refined indignation, and that’s no good. You won’t fight – and yet you fancy yourselves gallant chaps – but we mean to fight. Oh well! Our dust would get into your eyes, our mud would bespatter you, but yet you’re not up to our level, you’re admiring yourselves unconsciously, you like to abuse yourselves; but we’re sick of that – we want something else! We want to smash other people!”
So the “bitter, rough, and lonely” Bazarov . . . returns to his parents. Yes, they are not “gentry” like Arkady and his family, but they do own serfs, the irony of which never entirely penetrates Bazarov. When he engages a local serf in conversation, the man assures him,“[W]e know there’s the master’s will; wherefore you are our fathers. And the stricter the master’s rule, the better for the peasant.”
"Alas! Bazarov shrugging his shoulders contemptuously, Bazarov, who knew how to talk to peasants . . . did not in his self-confidence even suspect that in their eyes he was all the while something of the nature of a buffooning clown.”
And yet Bazarov is never a fool and not a villain. With some scorn – and also noticeable skill – he begins assisting his father as doctor to the local peasants. But he presently contracts typhus from a patient and within days spirals toward death, to the horror of his uncomprehending parents. On his orders, his father sends notice to Madame Odintsov who appears within hours with a German doctor, and stands at the door looking at Bazarov with his inflamed, deathly face.
“She felt simply dismayed, with a sort of cold and suffocating dismay; the thought that she would not have felt like that if she had really loved him flashed instantaneously through her brain.”
In death, Bazarov makes a relatively good end, in character but with a minimum of bitterness. Thus the novel ends with the father losing the son. Seized by frenzy, he cries,
“I said I should rebel,’ he shrieked, ‘and I rebel, I rebel!’” . . . . But the heat of noonday passes, and evening comes and night, and then, too, the return to the kindly refuge, where sleep is sweet and the weary and heavy laden . . . .”
The final ellipsis is Turgenev’s.
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