Why Read the Classics? (23 page)

In
The Legend of St Julien the Hospitaller
the visual world is that of a tapestry or a miniature in a manuscript or stained-glass window in a cathedral, but we experience it
from the inside
as if we too were figures that had been embroidered, illuminated or composed of coloured glass. The tale is dominated by a profusion of animals of every kind, typical of Gothic art. Stags, deer, falcons, wood grouse, storks: Julien the hunter is pushed towards the animal world by a bloody instinct and the tale treads the tenuous line between cruelty and compassion, until we finally seem to have entered the very heart of this zoomorphous world. In an extraordinary passage Julien finds himself suffocated by everything that is feathery, hairy or scaly, the forest all around him turns into a crowded, tangled bestiary of all fauna, including the most exotic (there are even parrots, as though in distant homage to old Félicité). At that point the animals are no longer the privileged targets of our sight, rather it is we ourselves who are captured by the animals’ gaze, by that firmament of eyes staring at us: we feel as if we are crossing to the other side and seem to see the human world through the round, impassive eyes of an owl.

Félicité’s eye, the owl’s eye, Flaubert’s eye. We realise that the real
theme of this man who was so apparently closed up in himself was the identification with the Other. In the sensual embrace of Saint Julien and the leper we can discern the difficult goal towards which Flaubert’s asceticism tends, emblematic of his programme for life and for relating to the world. Perhaps
Trois Contes
is the testimony of one of the most extraordinary spiritual journeys ever accomplished outside any religion.

[1980]

It is not easy to understand how Tolstoy constructs his narratives. What other fiction writers make explicit — symmetrical patterns, supporting structures, counterbalances, link sequences — all remain hidden in Tolstoy. But hidden does not mean non-existent: the impression Tolstoy conveys of transferring ‘life’ just as it is on to the page (‘life’, that mysterious entity to define which we have to start from the written page) is actually merely the result of his artistry, that is to say an artifice that is more sophisticated and complex than many others.

One of the texts in which Tolstoyan ‘construction’ is most visible is
Two Hussars
, and since this is one of his most characteristic tales — at least of the early, more direct Tolstoy — as well as being one of the most beautiful, by observing how it is made we can learn something about the way the author worked.

Written and published in 1856,
Dva Gusara
appears to be a reevocation of what was by then a bygone age, the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its main theme is that of vitality, a thrusting, unrestrained vitality which is seen as something distant, lost, mythical. The inns where the officers on a new posting wait for a change of horses for the sledges, and fleece each other at cards, the balls given by the local provincial nobility, the wild nights ‘with the gypsies’: it is in the upper classes that Tolstoy represents and mythicises this violent, vital energy, as though it were the natural, but now lost, foundation beneath Russian military feudalism.

The entire story hinges on a hero for whom vitality is the sole reason for success, popularity and power, a vitality that finds in itself, in its very disregard for rules, in excesses, its own morality and consistency. The
character of Count Turbin, the Hussar officer who is also a great drinker, gambler, womaniser and dueller, is simply the concentration within the one character of the vital energy spread throughout society. His power as a mythical hero consists in his achieving positive outcomes for that force which in society displays only its destructive potential: for this is a world of cheats, despoilers of the public purse, drunkards, boasters, scroungers, libertines, but also one in which a warm, reciprocal tolerance turns all conflicts into games and festivity. This genteel civility barely masks a brutality worthy of the barbarian hordes; for the Tolstoy who wrote
Two Hussars
barbarism was the immediate predecessor of aristocratic Russia, and in this barbarity lay its truth and health. A good illustration is the apprehension with which, at the ball held by the aristocrats of K., the entrance of Count Turbin is viewed by the hostess of the ball.

However, Turbin combines within himself both violence and lightness: Tolstoy always makes him do things which he should not do, but endows his every movement with a miraculous lightness. Turbin is capable of borrowing money from a snob with no intention of giving it back, in fact he insults and maltreats him; he can seduce in a twinkling a poor widow (his creditor’s sister) hiding himself in her carriage, and casually compromising her by parading around wearing her late husband’s fur coat. But he can also perform acts of selfless gallantry, such as coming back from his sledge-ride to give her a kiss as she sleeps and then leaving again. Turbin is capable of telling everyone to their face what they deserve: he calls a cheat a cheat, then forcibly strips him of his ill-gotten gains and returns them to the poor fool who had allowed him to defraud him in the first place, and donates the money that is left over to the gypsy women.

But this is only half the story, the first eight chapters out of sixteen. In chapter 9 there is a jump of twenty years: we are now in 1848, Turbin has died some time before in a duel, and his son is in his turn now an officer in the Hussars. He too reaches K., on his march to the front, and meets some of the characters from the earlier story: the foolish cavalryman, the poor widow, now an elderly matron resigned to her fate, as well as her young daughter, to make the young generation symmetrical to the old. The second part of the tale, we immediately notice, is a mirror image of the first, only everything is inverted: instead of a winter of snow, sledges and vodka, we have a mild spring with gardens in the moonlight; as opposed to the wild early years of the century with their orgies in the caravanserai at the staging posts, we are in mid-nineteenth century, a settled epoch of knitting
and peaceful ennui in the calm of the family (for Tolstoy this was the present, but it is difficult for us to put ourselves in his perspective).

The new Turbin is part of a more civilised world, and is ashamed of the wild reputation his father left behind. Whereas his father had beaten and maltreated his servant but had established a sort of bond and trust with him, the son does nothing but grumble and complain about his servant: he too oppresses him but in a strident, effeminate manner. There is also a card game in this half, but played in the family home for just a few roubles, and the young Turbin with his petty calculations has no scruples about taking money off his landlady, while at the same time playing footsie with her daughter. He is as mean-spirited as his father had been overbearing and generous, but above all he is vague and incompetent. His courting of the girl is a series of misunderstandings, his nocturnal seduction is nothing but a clumsy advance which leaves him looking ridiculous, and even the duel which this is about to cause dies away as daily routine prevails.

In this story about military ethos written by the greatest writer of open warfare, one has to admit that the great absentee is war itself. And yet it is a war story: of the two Turbin generations, the aristocratic and the militaristic, the first was the one that defeated Napoleon, the second the one that suppressed the revolutions in Poland and Hungary. The verses that Tolstoy places as the epigraph to the tale take on a polemical overtone, attacking History with a capital H, which usually only takes account of battles and tactics, ignoring the substance of which human existences are made. This is already the polemic that Tolstoy will develop ten years later in
War and Peace
. Even though here we never leave the officers’ world, it will be his development of this same subject that will lead Tolstoy to set up as the real protagonists of History the masses of peasants turned ordinary soldiers as opposed to the great military leaders.

Tolstoy is not, then, so much interested in exalting the Russia of Alexander I over that of Nicolai I as in seeking out the ‘Vodka’ of the story (see the story’s epigraph), the human fuel. The opening of the second half (chapter 9) — which acts as a parallel to the introduction, and its nostalgic, rather clichéd, flashbacks — is not inspired by a generic lament for times past, but by a complex philosophy of history, and a weighing up of the cost of progress. ‘Of the old world much that was beautiful and much that was ugly had disappeared, and in the new world much that was beautiful had developed. But much, much more that was monstrous and immature had surfaced under the sun in the new world.’

That fullness of life which is so much praised in Tolstoy by experts on the author is in fact — in this tale as much as in the rest of his oeuvre — the acknowledgement of an absence. As in the most abstract of narrators, what counts in Tolstoy is what is not visible, not articulated, what could exist but does not.

[1973]

Mark Twain was not just well aware of his role as a writer of popular entertainment but also proud of it. ‘I have never tried in even one single instance to help cultivate the cultivated classes,’ he writes in 1889, in a letter to Andrew Lang. ‘I was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game — the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but have done my best to entertain them. To simply amuse them would have satisfied my dearest ambition at any time.’

As a statement of the writer’s social ethic, Twain’s remarks here at least have the merit of being sincere and verifiable, much more so than many other statements whose didactic pretensions and ambitions first obtained but subsequently lost credit over the last hundred years. He was genuinely a man of the people, and the idea of having to lower himself to their level from any pedestal in order to address his public is completely foreign to him. Today recognising his status as the folk-writer, or storyteller of his tribe — that enormously extended tribe which provincial America was in his youth — means that we acknowledge his achievement as a writer who not only entertained but also amassed a stock of material for constructing the myths and folktales of the United States, a whole battery of narrative instruments which the nation needed to develop an image of itself.

However, as a statement of aesthetics, it is more difficult to deny its overt anti-intellectualism. Even the critics who have raised Mark Twain to the position he deserves in the American literary pantheon start from the premiss that the one thing that his spontaneous and rather ungainly talent lacked was an interest in form. And yet, Twain’s great and lasting success
was a stylistic one, and a success, in fact, of historical importance: the entry into literature of the spoken language of America, with the strident, narrating voice of Huckleberry Finn. Was this an unconscious achievement, a purely chance discovery? His whole oeuvre, despite its uneven, undisciplined quality, points in the opposite direction, as can be clearly seen today, now that the various forms of verbal and conceptual humour — from clever replies to ‘nonsense’ — are being seriously studied as basic elements in the creative act. The humorist Mark Twain stands before us as a tireless experimenter and manipulator of linguistic and rhetorical tricks. At the age of twenty, when he had not yet chosen the pseudonym that was to enjoy such fame and was writing for a small Iowa paper, his first success had been the language full of grammatical and spelling howlers contained in the letters of a character who was a complete caricature.

Precisely because he had to write continually on demand for newspapers, Mark Twain was always searching for new stylistic inventions which would allow him to derive humorous effects from any subject, and the upshot is that although today we are not impressed by his tale
The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
, when he retranslates the story from a French version this time it does amuse us.

He was a trickster in writing, not out of any intellectual need but through his vocation to be an entertainer of a public that was anything but sophisticated (and let us not forget that apart from writing he was also an extremely busy lecturer and itinerant public talker, always ready to gauge the effects of his gags against the instant reactions of his listeners). Twain follows procedures that are after all not so different from those of avant-garde writers who make literature out of literature: give him any written text and he will start to play around with it until another story emerges. But it has to be a text that has nothing to do with literature: a report to the Ministry on the supplies of canned meat sent to General Sherman, the letters of a Nevada senator replying to his voters, the local polemics in Tennessee newspapers, the regular features in a farming weekly, a German manual of instructions for avoiding thunderbolts, even an income tax return.

Conditioning everything is his choice of the prosaic over the poetic: by staying faithful to this principle, he was the first to give a voice and a shape to the dense materiality of American daily life — particularly in the masterpieces of his river saga,
Huckleberry Finn
and
Life on the Mississippi
— yet on the other hand he tends, in many of his short stories, to turn this
quotidian heaviness into an abstract linearity, a mechanical game, a geometric shape. (A similar stylisation will be found, thirty or forty years later, translated into the silent language of mime, in Buster Keaton’s gags.)

The stories whose main theme is money are the best examples of this two-way tendency: they represent a world which only thinks in economic terms, in which the dollar is the sole
deus ex machina
at work, and at the same time they prove that money is something abstract, a mere cipher for a calculation which exists only on paper, something to gauge a value that is in itself unattainable, a linguistic convention which does not refer to any palpable reality. In
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
(1899), the mirage of a bag of gold coins tips an austere provincial town down the slope of moral degradation; in
The $30,000 Bequest
(1904) a non-existent legacy is spent in people’s imagination; in
The £1,000,000 Bank-Note
(1893), a banknote of this excessive denomination attracts wealth without needing to be invested or even changed. Money had played an important role in nineteenth-century fiction: the motive force of Balzac’s narrative, the true test of feeling in Dickens; but in Mark Twain money is a game of mirrors, causing vertigo over a void.