reading war and peace - book 1

Me and baby Elliot at Yasnaya Polyana 1993

When you're reading War and Peace it's impossible to think of it as something in the background; it becomes something you are doing with your life. My classic book discussion group has decided to make this a project, and while I have a thousand pages to go, I think I'll jot down some thoughts. Otherwise, I'm sure my initial impressions will be lost and superseded along this epic journey.

I’m reading the Rosemary Edmonds translation, which is probably read by most people in English, being the Penguin Classic. This is in spite of a new much touted and more contemporary translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. But whatever translation you embark on, this project will have a slow start. You've got this doorstep of a book on your lap and it isn't until the first, say 300 pages, that you find yourself moving along with confidence. 

I'm now a little past page 500, and what emerges so far is the psychological development of these characters. Even as Tolstoy's characters grow and their perspectives change with time, they remain completely themselves.  This is only possible because Tolstoy has such a handle on his characters and knows them inside out. 

Pierre is, for me, the most interesting character. He starts off as a self absorbed, hedonistic and befuddled person who in the early chapters inherits a massive fortune. Now everybody wants something from him.  His isolated state is exemplified in the party where he is expected to propose marriage to Helene.  Nobody looks in his direction, even though he is the focus of the party. A battle is going on inside him as he resists the pressure to propose. But he lacks the inner conviction to oppose the proceedings.  Pierre, we are told, “was one of those people who in spite of an appearance of what is called weak character, do not seek a confidant in their troubles. He worked through his trouble alone.” And so, after a series of missteps, which include his marriage and later, a duel, he stumbles upon a new way of being in the world, among the brethren of Freemasons. 

Pierre's character stands in contrast to that of Prince Andrei, a cynical self important personality who is more than capable of fulfilling his role as a great man.  "All the projects Pierre had attempted on his estates – and continually switching from one thing to another and never carried through – had been brought to fruition by Prince Andrei quietly and with no noticeable exertion,” we learn on page 490!

Andrei is a man of consequence who in military matters always seeks ways to distinguish himself.  But there's a poignant moment in the middle of a battle when he is wounded and finds himself looking up at the sky -- “the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty with grey clouds creeping softly across it.  How quiet, peaceful and solemn! 'Quite different from when I was running,' thought Prince Andrei. 'Quite different from us running and chanting and fighting….'"   And you as a reader are right there with him - gazing at the sky and its immense distance from the battle waging around.

Later, when Andrei encounters Napoleon, he muses on the unimportance of greatness.  “The unimportance of life which no one could understand and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no man alive could understand or explain.”

When he meets his old friend Pierre at Bald Hills and they go on an excursion by ferry and have a long conversation, his psychological state takes a turn. Pierre is struck by the change in his friend – by the lack of light in his eyes and how much he has aged, and  they have a conversation about their views of life and the reign of goodness and truth on earth.  Pierre has been transformed by new ideas he’s encountered with the Freemasons.  And although Andrei appears unmoved by their conversation, inwardly he is awoken with a new sense of joy and possibility.  “Though outwardly he continued to live in the same way,” Tolstoy writes, “inwardly he began a new existence."

Then, of course there is the charming young Nikolai Rostov, beloved son of Count Rostov, brother of Natasha and first love of his cousin Sonya.  What happens when he doesn't have the courage to be a man, and stand up to the enemy?  When under attack he simply cannot believe it. “Who are they? Are they coming at me? Can they be running at me? And why? To kill me - me whom everyone is so fond of? He thought of his mother’s love for him, of his family’s and his friends and the enemy’s intention of killing him seemed impossible.”

It's a classic moment and you feel for him.  And his youthful cowardice and charm are challenged even more when he goes to the hospital in search of his disgraced friend Denisov and tries to intervene on his behalf, with the idea of extracting a pardon from the emperor.  The hospital alters his perspective again. 

 Later, Rostov witnesses the emperor pinning a medal to the jacket of one of his compatriots. “His brain was seething in an agonizing confusion which he could not work out to any conclusion.  Horrible doubles were stirring in his soul.  He thought of Denisov and the change that had come over him, and his surrender, and the whole hospital with those amputated legs and arms, and its dirt and disease.  So vividly did he recall that hospital stench of putrefaction that he looked round to see where the smell was coming from. Then he thought of the self satisfied Bonaparte with his little white hand, who was now an emperor, liked and respected by Alexander.  For what, then, those severed arms and legs, why those dead men?”

But what does he do with all this confusion? Poor Nikolai has already disgraced himself in gambling, and is losing a grip on his boyish charms.  Now he simply gets drunk and spouts off incoherently in a way that seems completely irrelevant to his listeners.

 Even while we follow the individual paths and psychological arcs of these characters  (and there are many more),  Tolstoy captures the collective consciousness  – the Russian army as a whole – “the whole body of men marching in step…"  He captures most notably, what moves them inwardly.  “‘It has begun! Here it is! Terrible but glorious,’ said the face of every private and officer".  We experience the collective sensibility - Russian soldiers and cavalry officers advancing through the mist on the hillside, encountering death and bloodshed,  living in dugout huts where they find camaraderie after returning from home leave.

I can't help thinking about Tolstoy’s wife Sonya, who transcribed the entire work, slogging away through many drafts.  Tolstoy's handwriting was evidently indecipherable in places – but in spite of the tedium,  she knew his work was great. Her effort was in service to his achievement.  She was transcribing, as Rosemary Edmonds calls War and Peace in her introduction, “ a hymn to life, the Iliad and the Odyssey of Russia.”

Well, that's all for now. I must get back to the next thousand pages...

my little family in St Petersburg, 1993

better know a bookseller

This week, a few of my staff picks are featured on a display at Politics and Prose.  I was urged to include my own book, and I also included Stevie Smith's Collected Poems, a couple of which I posted on this blog for National Poetry Month.  I also included Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, which I wrote up last week, and I have described a few of the others in more detail below.

The Giacometti book featured above is a gorgeous catalog of the Guggenheim's current exhibit, which I was fortunate enough to see a few weeks back.  If you can go, you must. If you can't go, this book is the next best thing.

My Struggle - Boyhood Book 3 by Karl Ove Knausgaard    If you’re interested in getting a taste of Knausgaard but don’t fancy committing to 3,600 pages, Boyhood is the perfect choice. It’s the most lyrical of the volumes thus far and easily stands alone. The descriptions of Knausgaard’s Norwegian childhood and his visits to his grandparents in the fiords are nothing short of transporting. Reading this novel is the closest I have ever been to becoming someone else. How does Knausgaard do it? You will also find some gut-wrenching backstory here about his relationship with his father, which inspired this stunning multi-volume contemporary classic.

This Close To Happy by Daphne Merkin    Many experience depression as a mood of joylessness, disconnection and boredom which eventually passes. But what Daphne Merkin describes here is more akin to a permanent state of despair. From early childhood she experienced crying jags, feelings of abandonment and emotional impoverishment. She was later institutionalized. Many questions emerge. Why did her parents have so many children, when they clearly had so little time for them? Why were the children put into the care of such a sadistic nanny? And where does depression take root in the psyche? This memoir is insightful, intelligent and ruthlessly honest.

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig    This novel is one of my all-time favorites.  An Austrian cavalry officer makes a faut pas at a party by inviting a crippled girl to dance.  Trying to make amends, he gets involved in her family. Then he can’t extract himself. Set before World War I, the story demonstrates how bad judgment and the inability to make firm decisions changes the course of a life. The unwieldy nature of this book is part of its charm. Wes Anderson referenced Zweig and the opening of this novel in Grand Budapest Hotel.  It’s an unsung classic, which will utterly capture your heart.

 

 

on death, love and great fires

Love affairs with a significant age gap have featured in several recent novels.  There was The Only Story by Julian Barnes, then Asymmetry,  an extraordinary debut by Lisa Halliday- about which I need to think more.   But what's on my mind right now is Shirley Hazzard's exquisite novel The Great Fire, which I just reread for my Winner Is... book group.

 The fire in the title might refer to Hiroshima, for the novel begins in 1947 Japan where Aldred Leith, a war hero, is writing about the atrocities.  Only, what he writes, as well as most of his wartime experience, is left out of the narrative.  The fire at the center of this novel must therefore be the love story between Leith and Helen Driscoll.  He is thirty two and she seventeen when they meet. "Having expected repeatedly to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him," Hazzard writes, "he had discovered a desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her."

Helen is "a changeling" who seems out of reach because of her age and circumstances. She's the close companion to a dying brother Benedict, and daughter of angry tyrannical parents. Leith seeks out their company in the rooms where Helen reads to Benedict, and the friendship that blossoms between these three is full of books and deep conversation.

But loss and longing are threaded through the novel and sometimes indistinguishable. Benedict is dying of a rare disease. Many others have already died in the war.  Significant separations are also imposed in a world connected by telegrams, weeks'  long ship passages and long distance phone calls that take place only when booked ahead.

The interconnection of life and death, fertility and deterioration is palpable in the Japanese setting, and in the green smell which they mistake for freshness and soon recognize as decay -  "everywhere, the breath of mould."  In London the bombed ruins have all been cleared away, leaving enormous gaps in the cityscape. While in Hiroshima a layer of the earth has been stripped off to reveal something worse, festering beneath.
 
The Great Fire is spare and poetic, still and distilled, with incidental sentences that stop you in your tracks. As Aldred Leith climbs down an overgrown path towards a Japanese temple,  "his foot slid on toadstools - digital, clothy, yellowed as fingers stained with nicotine."  I am in awe of such writing.  And what to make of this description of his father - "not a great man, but interesting and singular.  Not loving, but seized, even grandly, with the phenomenon of love."

In a post war world of love and loss there are also "so many Penelopes" - that is, women left behind. There's Aurora in London, Mrs and Miss Fry in Wellington and, of course, Helen herself.  I love the description of Miss Fry who lost her lover to the war in France, she for whom "beauty long since drained of erotic appeal had remained a habit." Her home is impeccably cared for, with its carpets and china, its upholstered chairs. When Helen visits, the tea tray is carried in...

Reading this, I recalled my mother's aunts in London - elderly sisters living together, inviting us over for afternoon tea.  Their husbands were long since dead.  But they had survived the Blitz lost a beloved nephew (my mother's brother Bob) to the war and though they were beautiful, strong survivors, loss hung over their generation.  The war.  There was always, always reference to the war.

So, the awakening love between Aldred Leith and Helen Driscoll  is infused with restraint and a sense of impending death. There's the imminent death of her brother. Also, the possible death of love itself. Helen writes in the early stages "We fear to weary you with our high feelings, but they don't change."  Later she refers to "the cold process of what men call coming to their senses."

 The aftermath of war and Benedict's illness remind us that things must somehow go on, even after death.  The mundane survives even (and particularly) after the momentous has passed.   "We're told that possessions are ephemeral," Leith says, "yet my God how they outlast us, the clock on the beside table, the cough drops, the diary with appointments for that very day. And the meaning ebbing out of them visibly." I'm reminded here of  W H Auden's Musee Des Beaux Arts and Jorge Luis Borges' Cosas.

Leith recalls boxing up his things before the war, and how unpacking them he realized,  "the owner of those oddments was dead, I was my own survivor."

There's a passage where Helen reads aloud to her brother. The excerpt is too affecting for her, and being moved, she stops. "I'll take it up again when I've hardened my heart," she says.

How does Shirley Hazzard write like this? How does she focus so tenderly on incidental moments and incidental objects while still suggesting the vastness of a world in recovery?  The world must move beyond war, beyond the immediate moment. Hazzard's frequent use of the passive voice lends a sense of quiet, stillness and distillation to her writing.  It balances her aphorisms, lending them dignity. "Good fortune is a prodigy whose occasion one must rise to," she writes. "Fate has no sense of timing, or good taste."   And, powerfully,  heartbreakingly... "In their thoughts, most men are conquerors."   Yes, even those who are gone.

The character of Helen Driscoll is said to be closely autobiographical.  In photographs, Shirley Hazzard is small, spare and delicately proportioned, just like Helen.  In her later years she lived in Naples. A more chaotic or passionate city you couldn't hope to find. She was living there when Ben and I were living in Rome. At a reception for a New York Times  Best Travel Writing from Italy  one of the editors told me he'd just returned from visiting her in Naples.  "How is Shirley?" I asked rather cheekily - I, who had just read The Great Fire for the first time.  "She's fine," he said with surprise.  "Do you know her?"  "No," I said.

Through her book, though.

Shirley Hazzard died two years ago.  I wonder how her own marriage to a man much older than herself panned out? We don't know at the end of The Great Fire how Aldred Leith and Helen Driscoll pan out. We leave them before they consummate their relationship.  It's the most passionate and intense moment of the book, and that's a good thing.  After all, the poor girl will soon have to move to Norfolk and live in an old stone house with an aging husband. Leith's mother points out that when he is 42 she will be 28, and might perhaps look elsewhere.  But we are left at the end of this novel, with the feeling that love has saved them - for now.   "Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet."

It's the yet that moves me to tears.