Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  The truth is that, in this respect, Turgenev was a divided man, or perhaps he had to seek forgiveness for this duplicity from his close friends on both sides of the divide: in his letters to Slav friends he would revile the Western world, rejecting in particular the beliefs and conventions of the French; in letters he wrote to Flaubert, Maupassant, Merimée or Henry James, he would complain bitterly about what Russians have always complained about, that is, all things Russian. In Paris, he could almost pass for a French author, although there was an aristocratic air about him that betrayed him as a foreigner; in that sense, it was no different when he was staying at his property in Spasskoye or in St Petersburg, where he was viewed as a foreigner by serfs and by other writers, so much so that, on one occasion, when he arrived in Spasskoye accompanied by Ralston, his English translator, a highly significant confusion ensued. Ralston looked physically very much like Turgenev, for he too was a giant of a man, with very white hair and beard. When the serfs saw their master appear in the company of a kind of foreign double who, nonetheless, knew Russian, and who, even more alarmingly, devoted himself to visiting every house and every shack, asking detailed questions and noting down all manner of facts and words in a notebook, they thought this must portend some sinister, malign and even supernatural purpose. They finally persuaded themselves that the mysterious visitor presaged some kind of punishment and many of them packed up all their belongings and formed a line along the road with their rickety carts, waiting for the order to leave, for they had reached the conclusion that they were being deported to England along with their master’s satanic double, and that their places would be taken by a more submissive population, possibly brought, in some strange form of barter, from England itself.

  Although Turgenev was a moderate and humane master, it is not so very strange, given the family tradition, that his serfs should have been capable of imagining the most bizarre reprisals. The mother, Varvara Petrovna, did not lag far behind the grandmother in cruelty: she referred to her serfs as “subjects” and treated them far worse than if they were. For example, and so as not to recount too many atrocities, she forbade her servants from having children because this would have meant they had to neglect their duties, and the few offspring who, despite everything and by some mishap chanced to arrive in this world, were immediately abandoned, with newborn babies being drowned in a pond. Varvara Petrovna did not treat her own children (Nikolai and Ivan) very much better—she continued to beat them until they were almost grown men—nor her grandchildren either, taking advantage of Turgenev’s continual travelling to torment, in particular, the illegitimate daughter born to Ivan and a seamstress employed in the house, amusing herself by occasionally dressing the child up as a young lady in order to show her to her guests; when she asked who the girl looked like and the unanimous response came—her son Ivan Sergeivich—she would immediately have the girl stripped of all her finery and sent back to pine away in the kitchen, where she spent most of her time. Ivan was, nevertheless, her favourite, as shown by the fact that, after another huge argument with him, Varvara Petrovna trampled underfoot a youthful portrait of her offending son, but would not allow the maid to retrieve it from among the broken glass for a whole year.

  Turgenev’s relationships with women seem, then, never to have been very easy, but it would be facile to think that, hating his mother as he did, he had no option but to reproduce the same model of domination and violence. The great love of his life was the singer Pauline Viardot, also known as “La García”, which was doubtless her real name, bearing in mind that she was a Spanish gipsy (or imitation thereof). She was married to a M. Viardot, twenty years her senior and whom she never left, not even during the decade she spent spurning Turgenev’s advances nor when she finally accepted them. More than that, it was Turgenev who had to adapt to the situation. He apparently spent long periods living with the couple, on “fraternal” terms with M. Viardot and on more or less “conjugal” terms with “La García”. She was an ugly woman with a magnetic personality, a very strong character, and considerable talent, and there exists a pen portrait of her by the poet Heine, in which his passionate admiration verges on the horrific when one considers that, unlike Heine or the painter Delacroix, Turgenev did not restrict himself to admiring her merely on stage: “There are moments during her impassioned performances,” says Heine enthusiastically, “especially when she opens her vast mouth to reveal her dazzling white teeth and smiles with such cruel sweetness and delicious ferocity that one has the feeling that all the monstrous plants and animals of India and Africa are about to appear.” In the end, La Viardot or La García was unfaithful to Turgenev with a painter, and their relationship was broken off, but not, by any means, for good: towards the end of his life, the novelist was writing libretti for the operettas she composed and performed, not only that, he appeared in them too, dragging himself across the stage, surrounded by odalisques and disguised as a Turkish sultan. The Empress Victoria, who attended one of these family productions, enjoyed it greatly, but expressed her doubts about whether this behaviour was “dignified” in such a great man.

  Her doubts were shared by Tolstoy after seeing Turgenev dance the cancan with a twelve-year-old girl during a particularly animated birthday party. Count Tolstoy noted severely in his diary that night: “Turgenev … the cancan. Sad.” Naturally there were a number of differences and a degree of friendship between the two men. These differences reached their peak when Tolstoy challenged him to a duel after a bitter argument about whether or not Russia should become Westernised, and so that the whole thing would not end in a few scratches and some champagne toasts, he demanded that the weapon of choice should be a shotgun. Turgenev apologised, but when he heard that Tolstoy had subsequently been going around calling him a coward, he was the one to issue a challenge, postponing the encounter, however, until after his return from an imminent trip abroad. It was then Tolstoy’s turn to apologise, and so seventeen years passed, at the end of which they stopped postponing the duel, cancelled it altogether and were, at last, reconciled. Both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky turned to Turgenev when, while travelling in the West, they lost everything at the gambling tables (Dostoyevsky even lost his watch). Turgenev lent them money, which did not, however, prevent Dostoyevsky from launching frequent attacks on him, not to mention taking nine years to return the loan. Dostoyevsky was an epileptic and so Turgenev forgave him and treated him as if he were an invalid, that is, with a mixture of contempt and tolerance.

  It is clear that Turgenev felt more at ease with his French colleagues, who venerated him. When he visited Merimée or Flaubert, they would sit up all night talking. Certain Englishmen were less warm in their welcome: Carlyle burst out laughing when Turgenev was telling him an anecdote which he judged to be extremely sad, as did that coarse man Thackeray on hearing Turgenev recite in Russian a poem by his adored Pushkin. When Maupassant went to visit him two weeks before his death, Turgenev asked him to bring a revolver with him next time: he had cancer of the spine and was in terrible pain. During his last days he was delirious, calling Pauline Viardot “Lady Macbeth” and reproaching her for having denied him the happiness of marriage. Indeed, he always referred to their relationship as his “unofficial marriage”. He lapsed into a coma from which he only emerged to say to Pauline: “Come closer … closer. The time has come to say goodbye … like the Russian czars … Here is the queen of queens. What good she has done!” It is hard to know whether those last words were ironic or not. Ivan Turgenev died on September 3, 1883, at the age of sixty-four, in Bougival, near Paris. His body was taken to St Petersburg and buried, according to his wishes, beside his old friend Belinski, who
had died many years before.

  Turgenev was so trusting that he spent his whole life allowing himself to be duped, especially by his compatriots, whom he would always bail out with help and money if he found them in difficulties, even if they were complete strangers. Despite being both atheistic and frivolous, he embraced literary seriousness and a number of other virtues with far greater rigour than his contemporaries. In a little-known piece, “The Execution of Tropmann”, about an execution he had witnessed in Paris in 1870, he tells how, as the moment approached for the murderer Tropmann to be guillotined, “the sense of some unknown transgression committed by me, of some secret shame, grew ever stronger inside me”, and he adds that the horses pulling the covered wagon waiting to take away the corpse seemed to him, at that moment, the only innocent creatures there. This story is one of the most powerful arguments against the death penalty ever written. Or, perhaps, one of the saddest. Indeed, Pauline Viardot or “La García”, who presumably knew him well, said of Ivan Turgenev: “He was the saddest of men.”

  Thomas Mann in his Suffering

  ACCORDING TO THOMAS Mann, any novel that lacked irony was, by definition, dull, and he, of course, believed that his own novels were shot through with it, a rather extraordinary belief for anyone who has read his most famous epics. This statement may be slightly more understandable if you bear in mind that Mann made a clear distinction between humour and irony and judged that Dickens had too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Perhaps this explains why Mann only obliges one to laugh occasionally (one senses that he was smiling as he wrote it) and why Dickens makes one laugh out loud on almost every other page.

  What seems certain is that the one area in which Thomas Mann never raised a laugh (not even a forced one) was in his private life, at least to judge by his letters and diaries, which are dreadfully serious. The latter, of course, were only published in 1975, twenty years after his death, and once you have read them, there seem to be only three possible reasons for the delay: to keep people waiting and to give himself airs; to prevent people from knowing too soon that he couldn’t keep his eyes off young men; and so that no one would know the trouble he had with his stomach and how fundamental to him these vicissitudes (his stomach’s, I mean) were.

  Any writer who leaves behind him sealed envelopes not to be opened until long after his death is clearly convinced of his own immense importance, as tends to be confirmed when, after all that patient waiting, the wretched, disappointing envelopes are finally opened. In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded, from the time he got up in the morning to what the weather was like, as well as what he was reading and, above all, what he was writing. Only very rarely, though, does he make any wise comment on these things, and so his diaries seem more like those of someone intent on helping posterity to make a detailed reconstruction of each incomparable day than those of someone intent on relating secret events or confiding private opinions. They give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: “Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!” It is perhaps harder to foresee the astonishing, revelatory impact of the prolonged reports on how his stomach is doing: “Not well. Abdominal pain from my large intestine,” he notes one day in 1918. “Slight abdominal pains”, he feels obliged to record in 1919, and the same year, he says: “Had a bowel movement after breakfast.” In 1921, things have not improved, but are deemed just as worthy of note: “In the evening, palpitations and stomach cramps”, or: “Indisposed, stomach upset”. Later, in 1933, Mann is still obsessed, and quite right too: “Had breakfast in bed. A tendency to diarrhoea.” It is hardly surprising that, a year on, he is complaining: “My stomach hurts”, nor that in 1937 he is sufficiently lucid to acknowledge: “My stomach is unclean”, and to add: “I had difficulty swallowing my food, which had to be passed through a sieve.” In 1939, the tables have turned, and so he deems it reasonable to note: “Constipation”. At least the year before, in 1938, we find a different, although no less distasteful note: “I’ve been without my false teeth for quite some time. Pain.”

  One should not think, however, that the diaries are concerned only with such banal indispositions: as well as telling us whether or not he drank a glass of punch, that his rugs have come back from the cleaner’s, or that he visited the chiropodist having first been to the manicurist, there are eloquent remarks on Mann’s tortured sexuality. For example: “Tenderness.” Or: “Erotic night. But one may not wish for calm quand même.” Or even more problematically: “Yesterday, shortly before going to bed, I suffered an attack of the sexual variety, which had serious consequences for my nerves: over-excitement, fear, persistent insomnia, weakness of the stomach which manifested itself in acidity and nausea.” And again: “Sexual excess, but although the nervous excitement long delayed sleep, it has proved intellectually rather more beneficial than otherwise.” That word “intellectually” helps us decipher perhaps another, frankly enigmatic comment: “Sexual disturbance and disturbance in my activities when faced by the impossibility of refusing to write an obituary for Eduard Keyserling.” Finally, stomach and sex are reunited in this optimistic, or, rather, credulous note: “I have had to stop drinking the strong beer they make nowadays, not just because it attacked my stomach, but also because it acted as an aphrodisiac, exciting me and giving me restless nights.” The general tone is this: “Last night and this evening too: tormented by sex.”

  Although, as you can see, Mann was never very specific, one assumes that these attacks, excesses and disturbances must have been to do with his wife, Katia, the mother of his six children. And yet other women seem to have been entirely invisible to him, unlike boys. When he went to hear a reading by Rabindranath Tagore, his impression of him “as being a refined old English lady” was confirmed; on the other hand, it did not escape his notice that Tagore’s son was “brown and muscular, a very virile type”. At the same event, he was “captivated by two young men, strangers to me, handsome, possibly Jewish”. A few days later, the company of “a healthy young fellow with golden hair” cast “a sweet spell” over him, and a few weeks afterwards, a young gardener, “beardless, with brown arms and open shirt, gave me quite a turn”. He was enormously grateful to the German cinema of the 1930s which, unlike the American and French varieties, offered him “the pleasure of contemplating young bodies, especially those of the masculine sex, in the nude”. Although he generally despised the art, so bereft of words and representative only of the ordinary man, he recognised its “sensual effects on the soul”.

  One has the awful feeling that Thomas Mann, far from the humour and irony attributed to him by some of his readers and acquaintances, suffered constantly from melancholy, indolence, nervous attacks, feelings of panic, and various other psychological torments, the most prominent of which was irritation. With the exception of Proust (and in an entirely different way), no one else has explored so thoroughly the relationship between illness and the artistic nature, and, in that sense, one might say he was always rather old-fashioned, since that particular link had been made at least a hundred years before he published his first novel, Buddenbrooks, in 1901. The odd thing is that his various ills and anxieties were very stable: they did not abandon him in any of the many places in which he was obliged to live when he went into exile from Germany before the beginning of the Second World War and after the Nobel Prize—which he received in 1929 as if it were the
most natural thing in the world. What, in the end, ennobles him is his unequivocal opposition to Nazism, from start to finish, even though his own political or apolitical ideas were never very clear and did not, perhaps, have much to recommend them: he appears to have favoured, in opposition to both fascism and liberalism, an “enlightened dictatorship”, an expression in which the adjective is far too vague and connotative not to be over-ruled by the noun.

  The sad thing about Thomas Mann is that he really believed that he did not take himself seriously, when what leaps out at you, from novels, essays, letters and diaries alike, is his utter belief in his own immortality. On one occasion, in order to play down the merits of his novella Death in Venice, which an American was praising to the skies, all he could think of to bring his admirer down to earth was this: “After all, relatively speaking, I was still a beginner. A beginner of genius but still a beginner.” Once he was no longer a beginner, he considered himself capable of the greatest achievements, and, in a letter to the critic Carl Maria Weber, spoke confidently of “the great story that I have yet to write”. His admiration for Don Quixote is well known, since he made use of his reading of the book while on board the steamship Volendam, which was carrying him to New York, to write a slender volume, Voyage with Don Quixote. However, he not only found the sober, magisterial conclusion of Cervantes’ novel disappointing, he felt he could improve on it: “The close of the book is rather flat, not gripping enough; I mean to do better with Jacob.” He was referring, of course, to the Jacob of his tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, which, in Spain, only the patient (and resentful) Juan Benet has been capable of reading in its entirety. It is surprising to learn that Mann believed that great books were the result of modest intentions, that ambition should not come first and should not precede the work, that it should be bound up with the work and not with the ego of its creator. “There is nothing falser than ambition in the abstract, than ambition itself, independent of the work, the pallid ambition of the ego. Anyone who harbours such feelings is behaving like a sick eagle,” he wrote. Given his own ambitions, both expressed and unexpressed, one would have to conclude that the illness from which the eagle Mann was suffering was nothing less than blindness. Speaking to an old school friend about death, he commented: “As immortalised by me in The Magic Mountain.” Only someone with ambitions and who took himself very seriously indeed could gravely note down in his diary one day in 1935: “Letter in French from a young writer from Santiago de Chile, informing me of my influence on new Chilean literature.” I cannot help underlining four words: the first two are “informing me,” the second is “influence”, the third is “Chilean.”