Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (17 page)

One of the most striking examples of this is an encounter between Alyosha and some practically nameless characters who have been humiliated by his brother Dmitri. (They do have names, but one can never remember them: that’s how minor they are, in the overall story.) It begins when Alyosha runs across a group of boys who are throwing rocks at each other. Their primary victim—whom he intervenes to save, and who bites him in return—is a boy that the other schoolboys relentlessly tease with the word “whiskbroom.” When Alyosha pursues the story, he learns that they are derisively referring to the broom-like beard worn by the boy’s father, an impoverished former captain in the Russian infantry (and, not incidentally, one of those embarrassing, ludicrously unrestrained figures in which Dostoyevsky’s fiction abounds). It was this beard, this whiskbroom of a beard, that Dmitri Karamazov grabbed in order to drag the captain out of a tavern into the public square, an insult that occurred just as all the schoolboys, including the man’s own son, were passing by. “When he saw me in such a state, sir,” the captain tells Alyosha, “he rushed up to me: ‘Papa!’ he cried, ‘papa!’ He caught hold of me, hugged me, tried to pull me away, crying to my offender: ‘Let go, let go, it’s my papa, my papa, forgive him’—that was what he cried: ‘Forgive him!’ And he took hold of him, too, with his little hands, and kissed his hand, that very hand, sir.”

Alyosha responds to this tale of terrible humiliation—the father’s humiliation by Dmitri, and the boy’s even more intense shame on his father’s behalf—by promising to obtain an apology from his brother. Then, as if in a separate gesture, but in recompense for the same deed, he offers the captain some financial assistance from Dmitri’s fiancée. The captain at first accepts the money in amazement (“Is this for me, sir, so much money, two hundred roubles? Good heavens! But I haven’t seen so much money for the past four years”) and goes on at great length about all the things he will now be able to do for his family that he could not afford to do before. But then, in that sudden way Dostoyevsky characters have of turning on a dime, he reverses himself and throws the money back at Alyosha.

“Report to those who sent you that the whiskbroom does not sell his honor!” he cried out, raising his hands in the air … “And what would I tell my boy, if I took money from you for our disgrace?” And having said this, he broke into a run, this time without turning around. Alyosha looked after him with inexpressible sadness. Oh, he understood that the captain had not known until the very last moment that he would crumple the bills and fling them down.

It has taken me a long time to convey the bare details of this scene, and yet I have left out all that was most important: in particular, the prolonged way in which the captain brought out the story of his humiliation, the verbosity of both his self-abasement and his gratitude when he first received the two hundred roubles, the detailed extremity of his actions when he threw them down. And behind all this lies Alyosha’s encounter with the boy himself (who bit him, it turns out, because he was Dmitri’s brother), so that the father’s speeches, foolish and embarrassing as they are, only intensify our sense of the boy’s own unspoken feelings, his own terrible victimization. It is all incredibly painful, and the whole encounter seems to occur at a pace slower than real time. Dostoyevsky lengthens every horrifying second, making us feel that the scene will never end, that we will never get away from this reflected, refracted pain. It is unendurable, and yet he forces us to endure it.

Why
do
we endure it? Well, some of us don’t; there are many people who can’t stomach Dostoyevsky, who argue that he wallows in emotional pain and overemphasizes the melodrama of life. I understand the position, but I can’t imagine sharing it. For me, the excesses of Dostoyevsky’s world
are
real life, more real than anything I usually encounter in my own routine existence, or at any rate more transparent. By combining grandeur and intimacy in precisely the way he does, Dostoyevsky somehow overcomes my resistance sufficiently to make me see life as it is. It is only there, on the page with him, that I can slow experience down enough to grasp it fully. It is only there that I can begin to perceive how many sides every personality has, or see how degradation and exaltation can be paired in a single human soul.

*   *   *

If Christianity was Dostoyevsky’s religion, art was Henry James’s. His prevailing attitude toward this source of grandeur was a very typical mixture (typical of him, I mean) of doubt and faith, and he tended to lend the same combination of dubiousness and hope to his more sentient characters. They have a habit, these Jamesian contemplatives, of overvaluing “the beautiful,” even as they also find themselves reconsidering its worth at every turn.

Here is a pertinent bit of conversation from
The Tragic Muse
, where James is relaying to us a discussion that takes place in Paris between Gabriel Nash, a writer and aesthete, and Nick Dormer, an aspiring painter. As the two of them talk, they wander together through the nighttime streets, so that eventually they come up against one of the city’s major monuments:

“Don’t you think your style is a little affected?” Nick asked, laughing, as they proceeded.

“That’s always the charge against a personal manner; if you have any at all people think you have too much. Perhaps, perhaps—who can say? Of course one isn’t perfect; but that’s the delightful thing about art, that there is always more to learn and more to do; one can polish and polish and refine and refine. No doubt I’m rough still, but I’m in the right direction: I make it my business to take for granted an interest in the beautiful.”

“Ah, the beautiful—there it stands, over there!” said Nick Dormer. “I am not so sure about yours—I don’t know what I’ve got hold of. But Notre Dame
is
solid; Notre Dame
is
wise; on Notre Dame the distracted mind can rest. Come over and look at her!”

It is the enduring aesthetic value of this architectural wonder, as opposed to the possibly temporary value of his own work and Gabriel’s, that compels Nick at this particular juncture, just as it is the building’s blessed impersonality that stands in such contrast to the suspect “personal manner.” The fact that Notre Dame is a great cathedral is not merely coincidental here, but nor does that function, its purely religious function, account for Nick’s attitude. He is responding to the building as a work of art, a beautiful thing on which his artist’s eye can rest, and the fact that its beauties were created in the service of God is not at the forefront of his “distracted” mind. His casual blasphemy, his perhaps-too-easy intimacy with that which is meant to resist intimacy, is most apparent in his use of the feminine pronoun in the phrase “Come over and look at her!” It is a pronoun that cannot be justified, at least in English, by the fact that Our Lady is female; the tone, in Nick’s wording, is what one might use of something smaller-scale than a cathedral, something like a portrait in a museum. In his very effort to praise the grand monumentality of the building, he is also reducing it to something closer to his own size.

The notion that a lasting and significant work of art can be a “she” carries special weight in a novel whose title,
The Tragic Muse
, refers to an actual woman, a young and talented actress named Miriam Rooth. This is a novel, moreover, in which the central characters spend a lot of time worrying over the question of whether the theater—that most ephemeral and personal of art forms, embodied as it is in the gestures and voices of individual actors—can truly be considered a transcendent art. The novel does not make up its mind (James’s novels rarely do), but it remains persistently interested in the apparent paradoxes raised by the pursuit of this question. Is it the personal that moves us and makes us susceptible to art, or does art have to be larger than the merely personal to be great? Does the actor’s art lean more toward grandeur or toward intimacy, or are they even separable, on the stage? Are portraits a low form of painting simply because they portray the human countenance, or does that give them the highest claim to our interest, both aesthetic and emotional? What about novels in this regard, specifically the novel we hold in our hands? Is
The Tragic Muse
aiming at the solidity and wisdom of Notre Dame, and if not, in what sense are we justified in calling it art? All this and more is encapsulated and foreshadowed in that little conversation between Gabriel Nash and Nick Dormer.

That Gabriel Nash does indeed have an affected style—as a person and, we presume, as an artist—definitely enters into the equation here. He may share his author’s profession and, it would seem, some of his professed attitudes, but he is also one of the more questionable figures in the book. Yet his affectation alone is not enough to damn him as an artist. The tragic muse herself is a bundle of affectations, but she knows better than anyone around her how to convey the appearance, the sensation of truth—which, on the stage,
is
truth. In the same way, Henry James’s style, affected as it may seem when excerpted elsewhere, creates within his own novels both a coherent world and a coherent worldview. Immersed in
The Tragic Muse
, one is likely to feel that
only
such a style, with all its quirky hesitations and exaggerations, is adequate to the complex truths that James finds himself repeatedly pursuing.

Part of James’s style, like part of Dostoyevsky’s, lies in the creation of a personal narrator, a figure who at times enters the tale and addresses us as an individual. James’s nearly invisible storyteller makes his presence felt mainly by interjecting phrases like “I hasten to add” into his sentences, or referring to one or another of the characters as “our friend.” At the end, though, he positively steps from behind the arras and announces:

These matters are highly recent however, as I say; so that in glancing about the little circle of the interests I have tried to evoke I am suddenly warned by a sharp sense of modernness. This renders it difficult for me, for example, in taking leave of our wonderful Miriam, to do much more than allude to the general impression that her remarkable career is even yet only in its early prime.

The tone is personal and individual, as in Dostoyevsky. But whereas Dostoyevsky’s intermittent narrator is a limited and somewhat humorless figure, James’s is much more like his author: witty, worldly, and generously polite, in that he presumes a fair measure of wit and worldliness in us. If he takes toward his characters a slightly amused, detached view, compounded of tolerance for their perceived foibles and affection for their evident charms, that is not so different from the view he takes of himself—or, for that matter, the rest of humanity, which we can assume includes us. His attitude toward his own omniscience is ambiguous. He professes an inability to tell us everything about which we might be curious, and at the same time admits he has special funds of knowledge that he can, on occasion, disperse. The intimacy of his voice suggests that he, we, and his characters all exist on the same plane, and yet the slight archness of his tone implies something else. It hints that there is some kind of collusion going on here—though whether the forces joined together are the fictional (his and the characters’) or the real (his and ours) remains impossible to tell.

*   *   *

In general, for a novelist to emerge from behind his curtain and speak to us in his own voice seems the most intimate of gestures. Presumably that’s why the “Dear Reader” approach was invented in the first place: to give the audience a sense that it was being personally spoken to, guided through the fictional maze by an understanding and intelligent friend. There are cases, though, in which the emergence of this voice has exactly the opposite effect. In those cases (and perhaps they are more frequent than I imagine), the palpable and self-confessed presence of an author is
itself
the signal of a move toward transcendence or grandeur. It is at such moments that the roof lifts off the novel, and we are suddenly rocketed up to the capacious heights of the author’s own viewpoint.

I’m thinking now of a passage that occurs in
The Family Mashber
, the marvelous Yiddish novel by the Russian-Jewish writer who called himself Der Nister. That pen name, which means “The Hidden One” in Yiddish, was the pseudonym adopted by the fiction writer, translator, journalist, and critic Pinhas Kahanovitch, who was born in the Ukraine in 1884 and who, as a young man, took part in the modernist movement that briefly flourished in Kiev in the 1920s.
The Family Mashber
, completed when he was fifty-five, is the only book of his I’ve read, and it’s a very strange novel indeed: a kind of massively elongated folktale, a seven-hundred-page shaggy dog story set in the Pale of Settlement and populated almost entirely by Jews. Landed aristocrats, Cossacks, and other Christians exist around the edges, but they barely function in the plot, which for the most part concerns the pettinesses and machinations, though also the occasional concessions and kindnesses, of one of the principal merchant families within a Jewish village.

For the first hundred or so pages, practically all you get is a mass of anthropological and folkloric detail. You keep reading because the detail is interesting and the emerging cast of characters is beginning to take shape, but you have no idea where, if anywhere, this is all going to take you. And then at a certain point, just after we’ve been introduced to Alter, the third Mashber brother—“more a misfortune than he was a brother,” with his simpleton’s smile and his strangely unnerving gaze—we are suddenly accosted by a previously indiscernible narrator. “And here we must interrupt our narrative,” he interjects,

in order to say a few words about Alter and his biography.

It may be that this is not the place for him, and it may be that generally speaking there ought not to be a place here for someone like him who does not—who cannot—take an active part in the narrative, and we might simply have passed him over or mentioned him only occasionally here and there. But we have not done that, and after much consideration we have introduced him here and we mean to occupy ourselves with him for a little while longer because, although he does not play an active role, still, it is a role, if only because he existed and because he existed in the household about which we have been speaking, and since blood is thicker than water, and because we have in mind the researcher who two or three generations from now may find in later members of the family a tiny kernel of that sickly inheritance which in the generation being discussed here was unhappily Alter’s portion.