Authors: Hortense Calisher
But I think I know now why the modern “historical” novel, no matter how exquisitely recreative of detail, usually sets my teeth on edge in some indefinable way. It is because this kind of novel is almost always an accessory to history—the era takes precedence over the people. Therefore the novelist, not being concerned primarily with his characters, cannot really imagine the truth about them as people—they remain lay figures, however beautifully reanimated and dressed. Such novels also violate those other tenets of which I have spoken. In them, the writer doesn’t venture to compose a world out of the flux close to him, but plumps for a world already long since composed for him. Thus he tends not to use freely his own sense of proportion; his canvas is at once enormously wide and tempting—think of all that wonderfully available material; how can one leave any of it out?—and at the same time his choices, set within limits not imposed by himself, do not have the tension of suspense—because, after all, history tells us things did turn out a certain way. Above all, he can’t use, except retrospectively, the superb struggle of values still under question. No, his era becomes his hero, either in itself or in some
post hoc
analogy with ours, and that is not enough for me. I am very prejudiced. I think novels should end up in the libraries, not begin in them. That’s why I look blank when someone says, “Ah, you’re researching, are you?”
Yet, nevertheless, all novels worthy of serious study are in their sense historical. In that respect, they attempt a number of daring things, although all of these may not be present in one novel. First, the novel attempts to write the story of a person or a group of persons. Whether it is their inner or their outer story, or some combination thereof, varies with the literary fashions and predilections of both the writer and his day. Sometimes a novel tries only to particularize these individuals, so that they live for us. At other times, it may also so generalize these individuals that, no matter what their “period” is, we identify with them—we recognize some continuity in the human psyche that we and they share. For isn’t it a peculiar fact that although we make many formal surface protestations over our inability to “change human nature,” at heart we love to see its very sameness explored? We love to see the old striations picked over again, reassembled in the light of another mind. The process entertains and instructs us with our own foibles, sometimes it comforts us—“there, but for the grace of God, go I,” and sometimes it inspires us—“there, in the grace of human beings, I go too.”
And, because no individual can be totally divorced from his situation in time and circumstance, the novel, sometimes inadvertently but more often not, gives a picture of his period. A great novel often does all three: the individual story, the human identification, the era. Parenthetically, the great subject of the novel in our day is the relationship of the individual
to
his time—to political time, dimensional or psychological time, to “no time left.” But no matter how the focus of the novel shifts, no matter what subject it prefers in one decade or another, it shares, with poetry and drama, the great advantage of all art over the assemblage of literal fact. It makes use of the fact, in any or all assemblages of them, but it dares beyond the fact. Like all art, the novel’s obligation to reality is obscure. It can therefore be more real than real.
Let me tell you briefly about four novels. I did not choose them because they are necessarily great ones, or because they clearly contain one or more of the elements of which I have spoken—any good novel does. In fact, I thought I had chosen them at random, out of the genial but practical impulse which leads us to press a book on a person, saying “Read this. You must read this”—and which has caused me to buy copies of these four rather often. Purposely, these are novels written well in the past. You know all about the others. These have settled down; they have perspective or in one case are ignored. They span almost exactly one hundred years. After I chose them I saw that, if taken chronologically, they do show certain changes in the focus of the novel. Since, also quite by accident, they happen to be respectively English, Russian, Italian and American, they show, by chance in a comparative sense, that enormous versatility which causes some to say that the novel is the art-form of the middle class, and causes others to question whether it can strictly be called a form at all. I cannot synopsize these books for you, because no good piece of fiction can be in any very useful way; I can only say what I perhaps might if I were lending you them.
There is a certain book that, if there were still any desert islands to be shipwrecked on, I would hope to have with me at the time. First, frankly, because of the company—it has so much of it. It has two heroines, one blond and gentle, of the pretty sort that dark women like to think of as ninnies, and one dark, fiery and
ve-ery
slightly masculine—of the type the gentle ones like to call “bluestocking.” Its heroes are two also—brothers, Robert, a mill-owner, tradesman, Whig, an unromantic man of action who “seems unconscious that his features are fine,” and Louis, the tutor, the seeming misanthrope, who really has a “quiet, out of the way humor”—one of the typical
hommes fatales
of nineteenth-century novels—those gentlemen whose attractive morbidity proceeds from the possession of qualities superior to their station in life. I leave it to you to guess which of the four marries who. In addition to these, the large cast includes three comic curates, three spinsters, two rectors, a country squire, a pompous baronet and a modest one, a mischievous scamp of fourteen and several other charming children, various supernumeraries drawn from village life, etc.
This is a novel full of that coziness which the psychological novel has lost, a novel truly crammed with the furniture of daily living. Reading it is like walking into a series of genre pictures, into parlors, salons, kitchens, schoolrooms, and yet, because it was written in 1849 and is set in three towns in the West Riding of Yorkshire, it is pervaded too by those great secondary characteristics of nineteenth century English romanticism—the wind and the weather. Its plot is of the period, an entirely un-selfconscious blend of melodrama and sociological observation in which there is a mystery of parentage for one heroine and the dread risk of hydrophobia for the other; yet, underlying these, one of the most solid representations we have of England at the time of the industrial revolution—the period when the woolen trade was suffering from the effects of the Orders in Council, the wars of 1812 and the riots of the workers over the introduction of new machinery. The novel has humor too, high comedy and low, that its author intended; second, for us, the unconscious humor that we now find in those stilted mores of the emotions that we have learned to call Victorian. It has everything.
It remains only to tell you what the name of the book is: it was written by a woman who was born in 1816 and died in 1855; it is of course Charlotte Bronte’s
Shirley
, to my mind a book grossly neglected in favor of
Jane Eyre
, and I send you off to it without further ado, stopping only to quote its first line—one of the most enchanting beginnings I know—“Of late years, an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England.”
We come now to one of the great novels of the world—as I say that, I always find myself thinking what a singular treasure one has when one is able to say such a thing almost without thinking, without question. Criticism is a defensive procedure, beset with the never quite submerged antics of the ego, for in judging we know full well that we judge ourselves. But on those occasions when we meet a truly great work of art and can subscribe to it fully, then judgment quite literally rests. By this I mean that such a meeting rests us—we find ourselves suddenly in that area which is below ego and above fashion, where, unutterably relieved, we can declare for the absolute. We are surprised by the lasting. We’ve been muddling along with the transitory; we are suddenly suspended in what is sure. It is no less difficult to talk about, however.
I first read Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
when I was about seventeen; I was reading it in the family living room where my father was also sitting quietly reading, and when I finished the next but last chapter, which tells of the death of the medical student Bazarov, in the house of his parents, I found myself crying hard, openly, in a way that I had never before cried over a book—and perhaps not since—and I sneaked out of the room so that my father would not see. At the time I no doubt cried partly because the death of the young and untried is peculiarly affecting to those who are the same, who perhaps have already imagined themselves on a similar bier. And partly, I suppose, because Bazarov, the nihilist who denied filial love even while he suffered from it, had something to say to me; although I did not see, as an older person might, that his nihilism was only that of the young, I recognized the suffering. No doubt I thought too that
I
would have loved and understood him, as Madame Odintsov, whom he loved, had not. I was later to see otherwise, that their tragedy was that they
had
understood each other, and had parted for this, not for the lack of it.
But, to return to that living room, I often wonder now, in the way that we like to rearrange the past, of what conversation would have ensued if my father had caught me sneaking away, and if I had handed him the book, saying: “Read it. And explain to me. Why am I crying?” For the simple and eternal subject of this book, set down with the Russian genius for depicting the concrete in the terms of the illimitable, is this: two generations, and the gaps and ties that lie between them—between the older, rebels passé, who have
settled
with life, and younger revolutionaries with the short future of revolutionaries, who think they will not settle. And how this has gone on, two by two, and will go on, two by two. And how, in Turgenev’s mind, it perhaps does not go on in vain.
About seventeen years later I re-read the book, and was shocked to see all I had missed in it. “I read too much too young,” I thought to myself. I think otherwise now. Such books should be read first when one is young enough to care without quite knowing why, and again during those smart years when one thinks one knows why one once
did
care, and again—and this I look forward to—when one is too old
not
to care, and
not
to know why. Meanwhile, every time I re-read
Fathers and Sons
—I did so again in order to be able to talk to you about it—I see something I missed before, and I do not expect ever to read it without doing so.
Let me tell you, briefly, what it concerns. Nicholas Petrovich is awaiting his son Arcadi, who has just graduated from the university and is bringing home for a visit his friend Bazarov, son of a retired doctor, and himself a medical student. Arcadi, a sweet and simple young man who “loved nature although he did not dare avow it” and is doomed by his admiration of Bazarov, the brilliant disciple of scientific materialism pushed to the nth, who believes, or thinks he believes this: “I do not believe it at all necessary to know each individual in particular. … Moral maladies spring from a bad education, from the absurd condition of our social law. Reform society and you will have no more of them … in a society well-organized it will be all the same whether a man is stupid or intelligent, bad or good.” “A good chemist is twenty times more useful than a good poet.”
Arcadi is ashamed to let his friend see the depth of his love for his own father. The two friends visit Bazarov’s parents, and there we see that Bazarov also has not been able to quench his family feelings—his tenderness toward the worth and the foibles of his father, his inability to be harsh to the simple, doting attentions of his mother. Meanwhile, we see the two fathers, good fellows, not really old—Nicholas P. is still in his middle forties—but both of them retired to those compromises that individual lives sooner or later make. Arcadi’s father, full of vague, well-intentioned efforts to manage his farm under the recent rulings which have freed the serfs, is abashed before the sweeping theories of the young men; Vasili, Bazarov’s father, retired from practice, but still doctoring, is outmoded in his son’s eyes. The sad timidity of the fathers before their critic sons, their sense of failure, of compromise, of not yet being, wholly negligible—and this complicated with an insistent love of their critics; opposite them the young men, bent on changing the world, despising their elders for their abdication from it, unaware that they themselves hold the ovum of compromise—and this all complicated with a love for those whom their theories teach them to despise—all this Turgenev does in the round, as the whole novel, separate its facets as we may, does. Do not think that I do it any sort of justice here.
The action of the novel occurs entirely in the series of visits paid by the young men; on one of these, to the house of Mme. Odintsov, Bazarov falls in love and “recognized with a sombre indignation that romanticism had gained on himself.” Mme. Odintsov, beautiful, rich, has, after certain difficulties, attained her defenses, and means to keep them; for her “tranquility is better than anything.” She is one of those subtle people who choose the expedient thing even while they are well aware of what they lose by doing so. In the account of their love affair, as in the account of the fathers and sons, we hear, with the same extra-sensory perception with which we hear it beneath the concrete action of all great fiction, the sound of the mills of the gods grinding. Here it is the sound of what people must give up, or will give up—in favor of what they cannot give up. But I am way ahead of myself. That happens to be what I saw in last week’s re-reading.
What I saw in the second reading was entirely different. It was then, say 1948; by then, a whole generation of students, locked like me in the ivory towers of literature had had to become “politically conscious.” And I saw with amazement that I had entirely missed seeing the extent to which this is a novel of political and social ideas. Perhaps I may be excused for this because, as with the “historical” novel, I had been trained by this time to think of the “political” novel as a separate entity, where the people were always pastiche to the ideas. Whereas, in the 19th century Russian novel, although the air is political, the garden is political, and social argument streams through the Russian temperament like arterial blood—man as a human animal underwrites it all.
Fathers and Sons
takes place during the era of reforms that began with the accession of Alexander, when the serfs were freed, the peasants allowed to pay for land and given courts of justice—you may remember the reference in the first paragraph of the book, to the domestic, “a servant of the new generation of progress.” Turgenev’s
Sportsman’s Sketches
played an important role in bringing about these reforms, for which he later was punished, and his portrait of Bazarov so outraged his friends that he went to live abroad. All his work is documentary in the narrow sense as well as the large. Yet I had been so interested in the people, it had all seemed so natural, that I had hardly noticed. As I have said, this is a great novel.