his struggle and his shame - on karl ove knausgaard

"The smiles, the friendliness, the admiration I encounter when I sign books is unbearable, not because it isn't well meant or honest, but because it is on false premises. Deep down, I have to reject it." 

Early in the final volume of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his daughter Vanya going on a fun run.  He and another father run alongside their daughters and every time Vanya stops, her friend waits up.  But near the end of the run, the other little girl trips and falls, grazing her knee.

And instead of stopping to help, Vanja runs past, so that she can come in first.  “While she, the little girl who had stopped and waited for us along the way, sat bleeding on the ground!” writes Knausgaard.

           

The other father cannot believe it, and Karl Ove blushes with shame.  “They could understand a four-year-old not being able to show empathy with a friend her own age,” he writes.  “But the idea of a nearly forty-year-old man being equally incapable was naturally beyond their imagination.  I burned with shame as I laughed politely.”  

“On the way home I told Linda what had happened," he continues. "She laughed like she hadn’t laughed in months.  ‘We won, that’s the main thing!’ I said.”

This atrocious confession is only one of many such confessions in My Struggle.  But the tension between the audacity to write it, and the shame Knausgaard continues to feel even while confessing, somehow compels you to keep on reading. 

Volume 6, the longest and most ambitious of his books, is mostly about the fallout of having published Volumes 1 and 2. An uncle threatens a lawsuit. His wife Linda has a nervous breakdown. Having written in stark terms about their marriage in Volume 2, Knausgaard now goes on to inflict further damage in writing about her mental breakdown. And yes, he continues to be ashamed of himself. "To write these things you have to be free," he says, "and to be free you have to be inconsiderate to others.  It is an equation that doesn't work.  Truth equals freedom equals being inconsiderate ..."

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this. Maybe it's habit - that feeling that I was getting to the heart of something which I experienced while reading his earlier books.  Maybe if I keep on reading I can get to the heart of truth and the nature of shame. Or maybe Knaugaard’s act of writing, and my act of reading, is the act of questioning shame.

Over lunch with a couple of friends last week, we talked about this. One friend felt that Knausgaard's appropriation of Hitler's title was too loaded.  She said he demanded too much of his readers.  Rachel Cusk, she reasoned, has also written autofiction but hers was a mere trilogy in three slender volumes.

Another friend made a different observation.  She hadn't found it an effort to read My Struggle. In fact, she found Rachel Cusk heavier going, and although she initially thought she had read only three of  Knausgaard's six volumes, later she realized she had actually read more.  Because the writing moved so briskly and she had been engrossed, she hadn't realized how much of it she'd read.

Over these last several days, after finishing 3600 pages, I'm asking myself what has been so fascinating about all the exhaustive detail.  He writes about his children, feeding and bathing them, taking them to daycare. He writes about meal preparation.  He writes about books.  But while he does this, he connects you to his inner life.  In between all the exhaustive detail, he dives so deeply into his innermost thoughts and his shame. 

But in the middle of Volume 6 he switches up the mood, devoting several hundred pages to an extraordinary analysis of Hitler's early life. He juxtaposes passages of  Mein Kampf with passages from Jack London, Karl Marx, Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud as well as the memoirs of Hitler's one and only friend Kubizek.

His thoughts on the gap between Hitler's inner and outer selves are fascinating. Evidently Hitler was unable to recognize his mediocrity as a painter; he was so proud, so stubborn that he found it impossible to hold himself up to serious scrutiny. It was typical of Hitler to blame his teachers for his own weaknesses. When, for instance, he decided he wanted to play the piano, he scorned the finger exercises.  This was about art not about practice!

"Self-insight," writes Knausgaard, "is the ability to apply the outer perspective to the inner, it is the presence in the ego of the voice or gaze of the indefinite other, and if that is prevented, then the two will be unconnected, there will be no accommodation within the ego, which then will be left to its own devises, and this abandonment means that interaction with, and understanding of, others essentially becomes an external phenomenon, occurring outside the I, without empathy, without involvement of the inner self, which is empathy's first and to all intents and purposes only condition."

This analysis makes me wonder about Knausgaard himself, and his own capacity for empathy.  He has stripped his psyche bare for all to see. There is no mannerism.  There is no mask. He even lets us see him  when he does put on the mask - as he prepares to give a reading and tries on outfits in front of the mirror.  But loyalty to his wife Linda and protection of her privacy is also sacrificed. He lacks the moral instinct to put her privacy ahead of his writing.  Naturally he's full of shame. We always feel ashamed when we act out of selfishness rather than empathy.  It's an old fashioned quality empathy, but Knausgaard is missing it.

"What is living?" he asks. "It is doing things and being at the center of the world.  If you are deprived of that, of acting, doing , being at the center of the world, a distance develops between you and the world, you observe it but you are not part of it, and this estrangement is the start of death.  Living is being greedy for days, no matter whether they are good or bad.  Dying is being weary of days, when they no longer matter or cannot matter because you are no longer inside them, but on the outside."

When I first read that I thought to myself YES.  But since then I've had several conversations with colleagues at the bookstore and with my son - about compassion.  The compassionate narrator has not made an appearance in most books that have been published of late.  If I think about it - only Lincoln In the Bardo stands out as compassionate.  And after all, compassion is what makes you feel warm towards your characters.  It makes you feel warm towards the world because it allows you to feel empathy.

Knausgaard's hunger for life and truth is compelling. I'm no longer sure it is admirable. I'm trying to decide.  My bullshit detector tells me that yes, I am in the hands of a reliable narrator with him.  I love his lack of artifice. I want to trust that lack of artifice.

As Werner Herzog has it, "The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate [my dreams]. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or film making is about ... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are."

I love those words - the inner chronicle of what we are.

 But I return to the story of Vanya on her fun run.  The lack of empathy disturbs me. Yeah - he's won. Is that really the main thing?

free to a good home

This short story first appeared in Phoebe Magazine in spring 2003.  It was workshopped in an MFA class at George Mason University with book critic and author Alan Cheuse, who suggested I expand the story to let it have more breathing room. I took his advice, and the story turned into my 2014 novel I KNOW WHERE I AM WHEN I'M FALLING.  Interesting how I experimented with a different voice here. I was finding ways into the material I later explored in more depth in the novel. 

 

Manfred busses tables at a restaurant in Quincy Market.  After Nicky went to jail, I started going to Cityside after work, and Manfred would stare at me and smile while wiping down tables and filling a basin with dirty dishes.  So after a few months I found myself going past this restaurant on my way home from work, or walking Gnasher past the restaurant just in case I bumped into him.  Manfred would come out and pet the dog.  I thought he was a professional busboy, until one day he said, “I passed the bar exam this week.”

“You’re a lawyer?”

“Going to be,” he said, giving me that smile.

“Start with me,” I said. “I need a divorce.”

“You’re a pretty strong lady,” Manfred said, after my shortened down version of the Nicky story.

“Not strong enough,” I told him.

“You know what you’re doing,” he said one night, several months after this. “You’re making me fall madly in love with you.” So we walked Gnasher around Waterfront Park at the end of his shift, and there was nowhere but where we were touching.  Manfred had green eyes, beautiful teeth and silky hair.  He was fluid, and I knew he could effortlessly fill any space I gave him.

He said,” If you hadn’t been married, I’d have snapped you right up.  I’d never have waited all these months to kiss you.” My lips brushed his face, his wrists, oh the tenderness and strength in those wrists. “Why did you marry that guy?” he asked.

Back in my apartment he pushed up my shirt and kissed my breasts. He said he could come just looking at me. “This part of your body is really pretty.” I was soaking wet down there, not having done it since Nicky went to jail.  Then Manfred was inside me, pressing to the center of me, and even now when I remember the way it happened, the energy sinks to my crotch and my head gets light just thinking about him.

So I get home from work one day, and unlock my door, and Nicky is standing in the living room. “Hey Jules, I just got out of jail.”  He’s picking my things up, turning them over, and he must have been working out.  No one normal looks that substantial, like he’s in front of a painted back drop and the apartment is diluted compared with him.  Then I notice that Gnasher is missing.

“That was your dog?” he says. “I think he ran out when I came in.”

I haven’t seen Nicky for almost a year, but inside a minute I’m seething. “How did you get in? Wait a minute, how long have you been here?”

“Forget the dog,” he says, moving towards me with a flat-eyed grin. “Hey, I missed you.”

Don’t you hate the smell of alcohol breath when you yourself have not been drinking?  Well, that’s what I was thinking when Nicky got close and had his finger in a loop on my jeans.  Gnasher might be in the middle of city traffic, or ingesting rat poison from some dumpster.

“You’ve got a fucking nerve, breaking into my place like this.” And now I’m really angry. Whatever I feel for this guy it’s always extreme.  He jerks his head back, laughing, and part of me could almost laugh too. He moves like a boy with trouble to get into. Trouble looks so good on him, which is why I can’t imagine him without it.

“Come on, Jules. I thought you’d be happy.”

“We’re getting a divorce, remember?”

“So where did you expect me to go?”

I have to get out of here. I’ve got to get away from him and find my dog.

Red is slumped on the stoop downstairs with a paper-bagged bottle in his hand.  I’ve been letting him sleep in the hallway at night, which is fine by me because the building is empty except for some guy on the top floor. Our building is slated for demolition because it’s a neighborhood in transition.  Red and me will soon be transitioning out.  Red is like my doorman. No problem, sure, he says.  He’ll look out for the dog. In the street there’s a whiff of rotten garbage and exhaust fumes, but at least the sun is shining.

Beyond the overpass, a hundred yards away is the developed part of the neighborhood, the boutiques and outdoor cafes, and that’s where Manfred works.

So I search for Gnasher around Waterfront Park and head towards a triangle of crab grass near the tunnel. It’s where I sometimes walk him in the mornings, but now he’s nowhere in sight. And I really am pissed off. I waited for Nicky for two whole years before giving up.  I really gave him the chance to clean up his act.  Weekend afternoons I sat on a plastic chair in the visitor’s room at MCI Norfolk.  Is that what girls do in their early twenties?  But he fucked up again.  He managed to order all this weird equipment and have them send the bill to me.  He phoned from the jail and billed it to my house, all kinds of crap like that.  That’s when I finally gave up.  The stupid part is, I might have waited forever.  Which means the good part would have been breaking into my place and letting my dog out.

I’m thinking about Manfred the Good and Slick Nick the Bad. I’m crying and looking for Gnasher.  That’s when I step off the curb, and there’s a car with a gleaming hood shooting up from the Callahan Tunnel.  I guess I’ll never know what I looked like, flying over traffic and landing on my head.

Suddenly my ears are screaming and I’m hot and greasy like blood and motor oil mixed up together.  It’s not like the next thing you know.  It’s more like life ends here and a new reel of film begins in a bright ambulance, my neck in a brace and a paramedic checking vital signs.

“Where’s Gnasher?”

“Gnasher?”

“My dog.”

“You had a dog with you?”

I got Gnasher in Harvard Square.  Someone had him on a rope with a sign saying “Free to a good home.” He looked so intelligent sitting there with his paws crossed.  It was the crossed paws that did it.  I’ve always had a weakness for German Shepherds, and with Nicky in jail, I figured I could use the protection.

I stopped to admire him.  A girl had rescued him from the pound because he was about to be put to sleep.  “Do you want him?” and I said, “I guess so.” I thought, if I didn’t take him, who would? The girl goes, “This dog is super intelligent, but he doesn’t know who he belongs to. Don’t let him off the rope whatever you do, or you’ll never get him back.”

With Gnasher it was his crossed paws.  With Nicky, his black curly hair and the way that he kissed.  It felt like I was floating. I remember him buying me a pair of gloves at Saks Fifth Avenue.  We sat on stools at the glove counter with these stupid grins on our faces because we were so in love, and the salesgirl was going, “This pair is really her.” I don’t think Nicky even looked at them because he was too busy getting a kick out of me.  All my memories of Nicky have this big fault line through them.  They’re built on stolen money.

I’ve been hit by a car and the technician is holding my hand and they trundle me out of the ambulance and they’re wheeling me down a hall and I feel like I’m at the end of a telescope. I feel them turn me from side to side. Something cold on my face.  And nurses talking.

It feels like I’m tilted, so that most of me is spilled into the side of my face.  They don’t want me looking in the mirror.  I can only see through one eye anyway.  At some point, Manfred appears with a bunch of Black Eyed Susans. He’s bobbing around in the background, earning his right to be loved by me.

Manfred drives me back from the hospital in his second hand Pontiac with the worn out shocks, but he has to pull over on the way so that I can throw up.  But in my head I’m slipping, sleeping, running away in one of those dreams where you want to run but your legs don’t work.

I’m lying on a sofa, Manfred’s sofa, I guess.  The air is light and fragrant.  Gnasher’s wet nose hits my cheek.  I hear the tail thump.  He’s panting, and I can tell that if a dog could smile, Gnasher would be smiling. Manfred goes,” Red found him trotting down Milk Street in the financial district, and when you didn’t come back, he brought him to the restaurant.  That’s how I knew something was wrong.” Good old Red. Damaged yes, but he has a heart.  Most people think that damage is a bad thing.  But I can’t decide that it’s totally bad. At least, not all the time.

Manfred wants us to move to Plymouth, thirty miles from town.  He thinks it will be good for me to get away from Boston.  Summer convalescence by the ocean.  He’s got it all planned.  You can live pretty cheaply in Plymouth, he says, and he’s found a job at a living museum where you dress up like pilgrims in a village, pretending that history stopped in 1620. He’ll chop wood and thatch while conversing with tourists in pilgrim dialect.  The job pays as much as bussing tables, only without the tips, and I can work as a waitress at the Inn for all Seasons.  The last stupid jobs of our lives, because everything will change when he starts to practice law, and the first thing he’s going to do is get me my divorce.

So we rent a three room cottage on Billington Sea Road.  You walk past a lopsided row of mailboxes and up a dirt lane beside the lake.  There’s a deck in the back surrounded by scrubby trees.  The air smells like pine. I string up fairy lights and Japanese lanterns.  I do it in stages because I still don’t have much energy.  My face throbs.  There’s a scar from my lip to my nose, a lump on my cheekbone.

In Plymouth, they have herbal shops with names like Sun and Moon. In the checkout line with my aromatherapy candles and vitamin E (for my scar), I feel people staring, but they look away suddenly and don’t ask any questions.  When Manfred is with me, he gets dirty looks because they think I got the scar from him beating me up.

“Hey Julie, do you want to know how this lake got its name?” Manfred is showing off because now he’s an expert in pilgrim matters. “One of the first settlers, a guy named Billington, thought he’d found the coast.  But what he’d actually found was a lake. He was very short sighted.” While Manfred talks, he looks at my mouth and then back up to my eyes and smiles as if we have an inside joke that goes beyond the story.  “So the pilgrims teased him, by naming the lake Billington Sea.” We’re sitting on a big rock overlooking the water.  Manfred pulls off his boots and woolen pilgrim socks. We’re twenty-five years old, but me, I feel like a hundred.  He wants to make me happy.  Happy, I think? I forgot about happy.

“Come on Julie, let’s go for a swim.” So we take off all our clothes and Manfred swims to the middle, and when he’s nothing but a little head bobbing on the water, he nods to Gnasher, and Gnasher bounds out and paddles towards him with his tongue lolling out.

I’m swimming and the trees around us reflect on the water.  Gnasher trots off into the beach plums, but now he always comes back. At night he barks beneath our bedroom window. “Hey guys, let me in.”

Every day I walk him down a woodchip path and worry about Nicky.  He’s just too intelligent to go to waste.  I thought I could save him and all he needed was a good home. I made an unusual connection with him, and I thought I’d get something unusual back.  But being fucked over is sometimes the price you pay for unusual. Unusual is good. At least, this is what I think as I walk past an Indian totem pole, down a path that comes out at the cranberry bogs.

My face is almost completely better and I decide to telephone Nicky, just to see how he is. He took over my apartment and I’m hoping it got him started on the right foot. He lets the phone ring for a good long time, and who knows why, but my heart is thumping.  Then the ringing stops and it’s silent. “Nicky?”

“Jules?” He sounds half asleep. “Hey.” Then, “You really let this place go. The apartment was filthy.  And that old bum who slept in the hallway? I mean, what the fuck, Jules.”

“You mean Red?” I say. “He was like a doorman to me.”

“Not anymore,” Nicky answers. I think he hung up, because it goes so quiet and then I hear him crying.

“What’s wrong, Nicky?”

“I’m scared.”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“I don’t know what to do, Julie.  I fucked up big time.”

“Not again.”

“What am I going to do?”

The screen door bangs and Manfred walks in from work, wearing this stupid pilgrim hat, which looks terrible on him.  He blows me a kiss and reaches into the refrigerator for a six-pack.  I’m listening to the silence between Nicky and me, and now Manfred’s out on the deck under the lanterns and fairy lights, socializing with a bunch of pilgrims from the plantation. “I don’t know, Nicky,” I say at last. “I don’t know what you should do. One thing right, I guess. Just one thing right after another.”

And that is our last conversation.

enabling the clown - fear by bob woodward

By now, everyone knows the choicest tidbits from Bob Woodward's Fear. But the relentless chaos and nightmare of Trump's administration only really comes across when you read the whole book.  I finished this weekend, and Steve Bannon's observation really sticks in my mind. "He doesn't like professors.  He doesn't like intellectuals.  Trump was a guy who never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never took a note. Never went to a lecture. The night before the final he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C.  And that's good enough. He's going to be a billionaire."

So now he's won - he's king of the castle.  And the experts, the thinkers, those who have spent their lives in public service have to pretend that he's in charge.  And guess what -  he IS in charge - in charge of dismantling everything they stand for and everything they've done.

Damage control is all they can hope for now. They must scramble every minute to avert disaster, recover from random tweets or some improvised insult inserted by Trump into his official talking points. And even after he's walked it back, it's useless. In the case of Charlottesville, Trump calls the correction (you can't even characterize it as apology) the worst mistake of his presidency.

Mattis and Gary Cohn have frequent hushed conversations about  The Big Problem:  "The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military its economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments."  But not only does he not understand them, he repeatedly sets out to undermine and dismantle these alliances.

"Trade is bad" he writes across the page at one point.

It would be one thing if Trump knew he was ignorant and thus relied on the expertise of others.  But only flattery and 100% loyalty matter to him. In spite of the evidence - on the importance of trade for instance, repeatedly put before him, Trump's mantra is "if you disagree with me you're wrong." And why wouldn't he think that? He's their boss - king of the castle. He's got the big prize and you work for him. He is president.  He reminds me of Yertle the Turtle.

The big takeaway from this stunning book: Trump is not only ignorant, but he believes that his strength lies in ignorance. Woodward writes "He acted like doing too much advance preparation would diminish his skills in improvising.  He did not want to be derailed by forethought.  As if a plan would take away his power, his sixth sense."

So the real question is why everybody continues to enable him.  When you give your notes to the class clown you do it for a reason.  There's some kind of self preservation or warped logic behind it. Usually it's because the clown is also a bully or has some kind of persuasive charm - and you don't want to get on his bad side.  Since he's full of bluster he can make life unpleasant, and you don't want his scorn turned in your direction.  But actually in giving him your notes, you undermine your own integrity.  The work you did, the things you know may go unseen to the casual observer.  The so called prize - that degree or accolade that comes at the end - is actually not the prize at all.  It is only an outward indicator of success.  Real success comes from integrity and what goes on inside.  In letting the slacker off, in covering up for him and enabling him, you have undermined  not just yourself, but what your institution or country stands for.

Wish I felt that when Mueller issues his subpoena for Trump to testify this will all come to an end.   But the last chapter of Fear throws this hope into question.  Trump is a liar and a loser and everybody knows it. But his lawyers are working day and night to protect him (not us) from this truth.

finishing war and peace: on love and death

There are so many layers to Tolstoy's descriptions of love throughout War and Peace - and this is why his writing stands the test of time.  I've written about earlier episodes already,  about the young love between Sonya and Nikolai and about Natasha's early love for Andrei.  But as the characters mature, so do their expectations and needs in love.

When Nikolai Rostov falls in love with Princess Maria, he recognizes that he should not have been in such a hurry to solidify his young love with Sonya.  It's only down to Tolstoy's understanding of character that we never are tempted to pity Sonya.  By the end of the novel, Sonya has become too virtuous to be relatable.  She is good, but she's also untouched by passion.  Natasha describes her as "a barren flower."

Sonya's simplicity as a girl, when Rostov himself was also young, naturally made them fall in love.   But when he is older and more complex there is less to explore between them. By the time Rostov meets Princess Maria, she has had many deep struggles. Throughout the book she has struggled to be good, but without reward, looking after her difficult father Nikolai. She has done all this without the benefit of charm on her side because she isn't beautiful.  By the time Rostov encounters her, she has faced the loss of her father and his transformation in death,  but her efforts to help the peasantry on their estate have backfired.

But Nikolai Rostov falls in love with her, and when he does, Tolstoy gives us this remarkable insight. He "had long ago pictured to himself the future with Sonya and it was all simple and clear just because it had been thought out and he knew all about Sonya; but it was impossible to picture a future with Princess Maria, because he did not understand her but only loved her."

 Tolstoy knows it is difficult to imagine what we do not understand. But with his skillful use of point of view here, as in the passage with Pierre at the Battle of Borodino, he enables us to both imagine and understand.

Much is always made of the tragic life and death of the most noble and upstanding character, Prince Andrei - and I've resisted reading other critics and commentaries, because I'm just putting down ideas here before I forget them - mostly so that I'll have something to refer to when we have our book discussion this month.

Andrei has had premonitions of the end all along. There's the episode moving his battalion through familiar terrain, where he finds himself close to his estate at Bald Hills and decides to make a detour.  But his estate is abandoned, overgrown and in disrepair.  He encounters a few familiar peasants, one sitting on a family bench weaving a sandal,  but his home has been destroyed. It has become a place of the past.

When he later encounters Pierre out of place at the battle scene, he cannot disguise his irritation with Pierre's cluelessness. Their perspectives are so different. When they part, Pierre feels (correctly) this has been their final meeting. But Andrei has tasted the knowledge of good and evil and already seen too much.  He has the seeds of tragedy planted within him. He's had them all along - right from the first, with his first marriage and death of his first wife.

Now, when he meets Denisov, he has painful recollections of Natasha. "This recollection at once sweet and bitter carried him back to those painful sensations over which he had not lingered lately but which still found place in his soul..."  And here, Tolstoy gives us a contrast to Rostov's love for Maria, which is without understanding.  Andrei's love for Natasha includes understanding.

When Prince Andrei compares his love of Natasha to Anatole's love for her,  he thinks "Not only did I understand her but it was just that inner spiritual force. That sincerity that ingenuousness - the very soul of her which seemed to be pinioned by her body - it was that soul I loved in her - loved so intensely, so happily -"  while Antatole cared nothing for this - he only saw a pretty girl he wanted to seduce.

But then, later when Andrei is wounded, Tolstoy shows us what it feels like to encounter death. It feels like an abrupt confrontation with the profound,  in the center of triviality.  He does the same in  his novella The Death of Ivan Illych.   Only a few moments before he is struck down, Prince Andrei had been idly noticing the dust on his boots and walking the fence line.  Now, mortally wounded and in the clinic, there is a man dying on the cot next to his. It turns out to be Anatole - the one who seduced Natasha and destroyed their love.

In his heart, Andrei can now forgive Anatole. He can even love him.  In his extremity Andrei sympathizes with Anatole as his brother and is filled with love for those who hate. All that matters to him now is the love "God preached on earth".

It is also sadly poignant that he and Natasha can only really have each other when Prince Andrei is dying. Maybe some loves are like this. It is only when he is dying - and before he finally goes beyond feeling altogether, that Natasha and he can love each other.

reading war and peace - war and pierre's transformation

"Have you got to the Battle of Borodino yet?" one of my bookstore colleagues asked. I was again in the break room reading War and Peace, and as he began to talk about Napoleon - whose grey horse was called Marengo, my mind wandered. I'd been glossing over Tolstoy's insights into the Napoleonic Wars while I read.  Tolstoy goes on and on about military strategy, the characters of Napoleon and Czar Alexander, and how historians have misrepresented events. But as far as I'm concerned, nothing would have been lost if those pages had been cut.*

It's really through his characters that Tolstoy gives us the war.  At one point he uses an extraordinary device, by putting Pierre in the heart of the battle. The bumbling Pierre, who knows nothing about military strategy, decides to satisfy his curiosity by riding into the most hotly contested piece of land in the Battle of Borodino.  He's not a combatant but an observer, fearless and unaware and in this way, the reader becomes Pierre - an observer who doesn't belong there, who can't comprehend what's happening.  This is how Tolstoy gives us inside access, letting us imagine the battle we don't understand.

And from this point on, Pierre plays many parts. He dreams on a pile of blankets in the back of a cart;  he disguises himself and flees Moscow. Later, after rescuing a child from a fire, he's captured by the French as a prisoner of war.  Only once is he briefly recognized, when everybody is packing up and leaving Moscow. Natasha Rostov identifies him as he hurries across the square.  I doubt it's a coincidence that Tolstoy gives Natasha this role, since she is the most transparent character in War and Peace, never disguising any of her feelings, even when disguise might be expedient (as in her interview with Prince Andrei's father Nikolai and Princess Maria).

Tolstoy writes extensively about the destruction of Moscow. Sometimes he goes on too long, like a man at the head of the table, pontificating after a dinner party.  But I love his description of Napoleon entering Moscow. The sight of the city's strange architecture, Tolstoy writes, must have filled him with  "the rather envious and uneasy curiosity men feel when they contemplate an alien form of life which ignores their presence."

Tolstoy develops this theme.  Napoleon's declarations and proclamations are powerless, since he can do nothing to stop the looting and pillaging of Moscow.  "[He] was like a child holding onto the straps inside a carriage and imagining that he is driving it."

So Moscow is empty - "in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty. In a queenless hive no life is left, though to a superficial glance it seems as much alive as other hives".

Again, it is Pierre's journey and Pierre's transformation that matters to us most. He gradually becomes less clumsy, more at ease with himself and at peace with the world.  He witnesses executions, traveling with the French as a prisoner of war. He sees how at the point of death people were "incredulous because they alone knew what their life meant to them and so they could not understand, could not believe that it could be taken from them."  Finally Pierre begins to understand that God IS.  That love is.  This is all that matters. And he comes to understand that being financially ruined has made him spiritually richer.

It's a remarkable journey to read this book - through war, through life and love and death and most of all, through Pierre's transformation.   Without Pierre's transformation there could be no resolution after the war - and no love between himself and Natasha.  She is never anything other than herself, although her character also grows. There is never any pretense about her, even as she nurses Andrei on his deathbed.  And although at times she might be annoyingly at the mercy of every emotion she feels, Natasha gives so much of herself to everybody around her, that we always want her to come out on top.

Tolstoy describes the tender reunion of Princess Maria, Natasha and Pierre after the end of the war. In their loss, the three talk deeply into the night and early morning, revealing their true selves, so that when Pierre leaves for St Petersburg, Natasha's parting words I shall look forward very much to your return   "are the source of all joy, so many interpretations of feeling and exquisite day dreams over the next several months.  'Oh how happy I am? What is happening. How can I be so happy,' said Pierre to himself."

Pierre's happiness is described as a form of insanity  Only, it isn't insanity. It's the truth. When he looks back on these days, he realizes he was so happy and in love, that he never tried to find a reason for loving others or seeing the good in them. "I was not so mad as I seemed," he thinks. "On the contrary. I was wiser and had more insight than at any other time; and I understood all that is worth understanding in life... because I was so happy."

My son Alex standing on one of Napoleon's canons at the Kremlin in 1993

*Tolstoy tells us that the Battle of Borodino did nothing but bring Moscow closer to destruction and the French closer to the destruction of their army - outcomes dreaded by the Russians and French above all else.  But they were caught up in it - and it was destined to play out and there was no going back once it had begun.

 In the last pages he pontificates about history - the causes of historical events the nature of power  and the collective will of the masses vested in one person.   "On what condition is the will of the people delegated to one person?" he writes.  "On condition that that person expresses the will of the whole people.  That is, power is power.  That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand."  He also he talks about collective consciousness, about the laws of necessity and free will.  I will leave this analysis to others, because for me the novel ended pretty much with the marriage of Pierre and Natasha.

mercy - a short story about euthanasia

 After dinner with a good friend this evening,  we discussed the impossibly complicated question of euthanasia.  So for her,  I decided to repost my short story Mercy which first appeared in  So To Speak Literary Magazine in 2002. Here's to you, my friend.

MERCY

Almost every day, two women walked a dog through the Foret de Soignes on the outskirts of Brussels.  Angelique was a bottled blonde with a stale, warm and stuffy kind of atmosphere, and she was shaped like an aubergine, with a raincoat belt delineating where her waist once was. Her companion Enid was grey-haired and thin, with glasses and sharp features. They met between the French and Flemish line, Angelique coming from one direction, Enid from the other.

But this day Angelique was more upset than usual. “I left my husband in the sitting room staring into space,” she said. “It just isn’t normal.” They continued on towards the Rouge Cloitre, a fourteenth century abbey near the fishing pond. “Last evening, he wanted to know who the woman was preparing our supper,” Angelique went on. “It was me, of course. There were only the two of us there.” Enid pressed on down the path, her spaniel trotting ahead. Angelique drew a tissue from her raincoat pocket. “It is just so silly,” she said.

            “Hard to believe that it’s all on account of his stroke,” Enid answered carefully. She had seen cases like this before, when she worked in the hospital, all those years ago. It never ended easily. But she decided it was best to switch the conversation to something less difficult. After all, these walks were her way of getting Angelique out of the house, and away from her problems for a while. A new hair salon had just opened near the Transvaal cemetery. She told Angelique all about it as they passed the Rouge Cloitre, and walked around the pond. Old men sat before their fishing lines under a cold gray sky. A crane stood in the reeds on paper-thin legs, like a figment of imagination. Further along there were stables, ateliers now, belonging to local artists, and behind them a muddy field of horses with shaggy fetlocks.

The cloister had been converted into a tearoom, but now it was closed on account of renovations. So instead of stopping they continued down the Chemin de Watermaal in the Flemish part of the forest. A dog had to be on the lead here, while in the French part, a dog was allowed to go free. Trees arched overhead, and paths for walking and riding horses knotted through the bracken, through the glades, and into the low lying valley, which in winter, glistened with icy streams.

But something was jolting in the path, jolting and rustling on the ground. The dog pointed his nose at it, sprung back quickly, barked and poked it with his nose again. It was a wounded bird, a spasm of flutters with twig feet curled against the body. “Leave it be,” said Enid, pulling the lead up short.

            Angelique peered down. There was a gash on the head, and under one wing gaped a big red hole. Enid briefly considered removing her Wellington boot and hitting it over the head. But a fine drizzle had started up, and the inconvenience of taking her boot off, here where the dirt was soft, turned her thoughts to less dramatic measures. She walked the dog up the path, watching from a distance. “I think it fell,” Angelique called out.

“Let’s put it out of its misery. I’ll get a rock or something.” Enid tied the dog to a tree, where he continued barking in short quick yelps. She pushed up her sleeves with the appearance of getting down to business.

Meanwhile Angelique inspected the bird more closely. The body was round, the chest feathers fluffed up. But the wings were fully formed and the damaged one kept fanning out. She noticed a second, pink wound near the tail feathers. “It’s only a baby,” she said. Then, “Should we wring its neck?”

             Enid shook her head. “You couldn’t possibly. It would be much better to drop something on it.”

            Angelique knelt to scoop the bird into her hands. They were pale hands, with liver spots on the back, hands that had done a lot of caring in their day but not hands that were themselves well cared for. Tenderness washed over her. Its body was warm. The beady eye shuttered and the wing was still. Then a dark red trickle ran from the beak to her hand.

Enid winced. “Pot ver dekke! Put it down, zulle. If you’re going to kill it, do it quickly.”

But Angelique had lost her color, along with her nerve. “I can’t,” she cried. “I can’t. Look, it’s still alive!”

            “Ja, zulle! You have to twist until it snaps,” said Enid, sounding sure. “I thought

everybody knew that. You have to do it without thinking.”

            The bird seemed to stare with infinite patience. Angelique felt its warm palpitations against her palms, as she headed towards a clearing in the trees, hands cupped.

“Where are you going now?” Enid challenged. Ferns crackled underfoot. No answer. “You know, Angelique, if you put it down for a minute, maybe the mother will return. I can hear them in the trees over here. And there’s a nest,” she added hopefully.

There was an agitated flapping from the treetops. Angelique was walking in her clodhopper boots with ludicrously dainty steps, as if the bird were an offering, a sacred vessel demanding ceremonious behavior. “Is it very high?”

“It’s too high to put the bird in. Anyway, it won’t be able to feed itself,” Enid said, with growing impatience. The drizzle was steady and the dog was becoming a nuisance.

But Angelique would go on. “I just realized something,” she said. “Now that I’ve touched it, the mother won’t come. It has my smell on it. I think I’ll take it home and nurse it back to health.” Her hair was dotted with rain, her face bright with new hope.

The trouble with her friend, Enid reflected, was that she’d never learned to turn her back on a problem, and that was why the problem got worse. If a thing made you vulnerable, it made you weak, and this was sign to let it go.

            “You have enough to worry about,” Enid reminded her. “Without this bird on your hands. Besides, the last thing this country needs is another pigeon. Shooting them was a popular sport in the old days, you’ll remember.” Her glasses were lopsided. From this angle, Angelique couldn’t see her eyes. Her mouth had become a very thin line.

            “Then maybe the school children at St. Hubert would take it,” said Angelique. “I mean to say, as an opportunity to learn about nature. They might feed it bread and water with an eye-dropper!” Angelique had seen this done, she remembered now, on one of those English vet programs they sometimes showed on television.  One couple kept a pigeon, thinking it was a male until it became egg bound. Then the vet came, a man with a beard and very gentle eyes, and when the bird recovered, the owners cried right there on television. “Oh Pigeon,” they sobbed. “You did have us worried!”

“This pigeon wont survive,” Enid said, feeling the usual resignation drop inside her chest. “This one is different,” Enid said. But Angelique stayed in her holding pattern, hoping for the best. She could see a wound was gaping under its wing, and as she placed the bird back down, she was careful to lay it on its side so that it didn’t rustle so much. When you didn’t witness the pain, the pain appeared not to exist.

            “I’ll untie the dog,” Enid said at last.

“No!” her friend cried. “You can’t. You’re evil to do that, evil to think it--”

“Don’t take it out on me,” Enid said. These things can’t be helped. A life has its span--”

“That’s not for us to decide.” Angelique’s cherubic face seemed at once grotesque and pitiful. She had become a wall, a great big bundle of reproach.

“Sometimes it is,” Enid retorted.

“What is?”

“Sometimes it is for us to decide. We kill chickens to eat them, and even in the hospital sometimes, I remember—“ her voice trailed off.

Angelique stared at her friend as the rain dripped around them. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing surprising. Just that sometimes a child would be born in the maternity ward, years ago, when I was a nurse starting out. A child would be born, whose prospects, let’s say, were clearly limited—“ she looked at the ground, the expression on her face suddenly conflicted.

“You killed it?” Angelique trembled like the bird.

“Not me,” said Enid. “I would never kill a baby. But sometimes an accident might happen. And I would agree, you had to agree, that it was simply for the best.”

            Angelique turned in disbelief. Looking down at her hands, she saw the bird’s blood. She faced the bracken stretching under the tees. Rain misted the landscape. The fir trees arched, cathedral-like, overhead, and beyond them the white sky, endlessly far away. She stumbled as she moved towards a clearing, sick and conflicted, all but sobbing.

            “Pull yourself together,” said Enid steadily. “It’s only a bird, after all.” She bent towards the earth, staring at the bird.

            Angelique was breathing in shudders, hard jagged breaths of hurt and burden. “You are saying that you put people out of their misery?”

“I can’t talk about this.” Enid’s voice was almost inaudible. Her back was stooped, no room for anyone but her in that thin, ungenerous body.  Then at last she stood, brushed her hands together and placed them on her hips. Her face burned with shame. “I could have told you it wouldn’t be easy. The more you delay the harder it becomes. You have to take the bird’s neck and twist it sharply until it snaps. The head goes in one direction and the body goes in the other.”

Angelique blinked. She looked all damp and patchy. “So did you? You put people out of their misery? Is death preferable to pain, in your opinion?”

            “How should I know? I’m not the expert.”

            The rain let up, and light glinted through the wet trees. The two women turned and headed down the path, Enid at one with nothing but her dog. But the bird remained. At least, Angelique thought she could feel its tiny life as a very thin thread spinning out, thinning out the further they got away.

            They left the forest and passed the neat brick houses of Avenue des Heros. Tidy gardens bloomed with daffodils and dark red tulips, like little cups of blood on stems. The green scent of newly cut grass floated on the air, and somewhere from the hedgerow a blackbird was singing.

Her husband was still in the living room chair, when Angelique returned. His head was tilted back, his mouth open, and he was asleep. He was dressed in his pale blue cardigan. His knees and thighs seemed shrunken in their twill trousers. She noticed the vulnerability of his feet, turned slightly towards each other. His shoes were beautifully polished, Angelique always made sure of that; and the laces were perfectly tied.

            But his complexion was sallow. The skin seemed to stretch across the bone these days, particularly over the nose, and he snorted in his sleep, as if disturbed by dreams.

            I’ve smothered you before, she thought; smothered you with love when you did not want it. Nothing new there.

            She went to the kitchen and put on the kettle. She washed the bird blood off her hands. Then she returned, still in her raincoat, and stood before her husband. Her face was gleaming. It would only take as long as it took to boil the kettle.

            On the sofa was a small, embroidered cushion with silken tassels. It was a fussy non-functional cushion, but it shouldn’t be hard to place the cushion over his face. She would only have to press down, as if imprinting his image on the cloth. She had made such a movement dozens of times, packing linens into an overstuffed trunk, for instance. But she was thinking too much. She would have to do it without thinking.

            The hallway clock ticked the morning forwards. Angelique was conscious of the rose smelling soap on her hands, as well as her own heavy breathing. Deliver us, she thought. Then, at last came the high-pitched whistle of the kettle. It sang out.

love and disguise in war and peace - book 2

folk art painting of a troika ride - hanging in my sister Stephanie's home

One of the things Tolstoy explores so beautifully in Book 2 of War and Peace, is the theme of love and disguise.  While some characters disguise their true feelings for financial or sexual advantage, others disguise themselves in costumes, which reveal hidden aspects of their personalities.  Then there is Natasha Rostov, who disguises nothing.  Natasha feels everything fully, for the world to see.  There is no disguise about her and that's what makes her so alive. But Natasha undergoes the biggest change in this portion of the book - from early blossom to the first signs of blight.  We also experience two sharply contrasting troika rides - one exemplifying innocence, the other moral corruption.

Natasha is bored and listless at home. She has been daydreaming about her fiance Prince Andrei and she's impatient for him to come back.  Then Tolstoy beautifully gives us Natasha's relationship with her cousin Sonya and brother Nikolai, sitting in the corner for one of their intimate conversations.  Nikolai and Natasha recall their childhood exploits.  "And do you remember," Natasha asks, "how we rolled hard-boiled eggs in the ballroom, and all of a sudden two little old women appeared and began spinning round on the carpet? Was that real or not? Do you remember what fun it was?"

Soon after this,  a party of mummers enters the ballroom in their costumes and entertains the family, and then some of the Rostovs dress up in costumes of their own, made out of dressing gowns and sashes, and go on a wonderful troika ride, to surprise their friends at the Melyokov estate.

We don't see much of Natasha's costume - perhaps because nothing can really disguise her, so forthright is her nature.  But Nikolai dresses as an old lady in a farthingale, and Sonya, who is usually much quieter and often in her cousin's shadow,  has the best costume of all - with a mustache and eyebrows made of burnt cork. "Her moustaches and eyebrows were extraordinarily becoming to her," Tolstoy writes. "Everyone said how pretty she looked, and she was keyed up to an unusual pitch of energy and excitement."  

Their troika ride is so evocative in the moonlit snow, that you feel you are living through one of the most beautiful of their childhood memories. What could be more enchanting than Sonya and Nikolai dressed in their costumes sliding and squeaking across the snowy path for a stolen kiss? "He was different from the Nikolai she had known and always slightly feared.  He was in women's dress with tousled hair and a blissful smile new to Sonya."   As she runs towards him, "She's quite different and yet exactly the same, thought Nikolai, looking at her face all lit up by moonlight."

The adventure is more poignant for being the last truly innocent excursion for Natasha. She is about to be introduced to and corrupted by the pretensions of Moscow high society.

But Tolstoy breaks us in slowly - first giving us the self seeking Boris and plain, powdered Julie and their courtship.  Boris is a bit like Pierre was, when he didn't want to propose to Helene. But Julie is so rich that he must follow through, if he wants to get access to her estates.  You cannot feel too sorry for Julie, who "noticed Boris's hesitation and sometimes the thought occurred to her that he had an aversion for her; but her feminine vanity quickly restored her confidence and she would assure herself that it was merely love that made him bashful."

Next, Natasha is snubbed and humiliated by Prince Andrei's father and has an uncomfortable meeting with his sister Maria.  But worse is to come ....  with Pierre's wife Countess Bezahov and her indolent brother Anatole! They are both vulgar, shallow and hedonistic. But "Countess Bezahov had some right to her reputation of being a fascinating woman," Tolstoy tells us. "She could say what she did not think - flattery, especially with perfect simplicity and naturalness."
 
Natasha catches their eye at the opera.  I love how Tolstoy describes the performance in terms of its absurdity - utterly at face value, just as Natasha sees it.  This hints at her inability to see beyond pretense - she  simply cannot comprehend that people are not exactly as they appear to be.  "One extremely fat girl in a white silk dress was sitting apart on a low bench, to the back of which a piece of green cardboard was glued.  They were all singing something.  When they had finished their chorus the girl in white advanced towards the prompter's box and a man with stout legs encased in silk tights, a plume in his cap and a dagger at his waist, went up to her and began to sing and wave his arms about."

But while she is reading every thing at face value,  Natasha begins to  "pass into a state of intoxication she had not experienced for a long time."  She is agitated and stimulated all at once and Anatole steps right in.  He knows exactly how to exploit her sexual longings and flirt with her.   Natasha is uneasy, frightened, pleased and flattered  all at once.  But all her feelings are exactly themselves - conflicted and undisguised.  And since she feels everything strongly and never questions the veracity of her feelings, she falls completely under his influence.    Of course for him the seduction is a game. We then get his wickedly conceived troika ride - so different from the Rostovs earlier ride in their funny costumes.

The only other character who is less capable of insincerity than Natasha is the bumbling and foolish seeming Pierre.   But is he such a bumbler? He's the one who steps forward to protect Natasha.  It's no wonder that in their guilelessness these two,  Natasha and Pierre,  are the characters we love the most.

I'm up to page 721.  I'll check in later!