by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
Becoming Dostoevsky
To be true to one’s self: this modern yearning takes the form of hoping, first of all, to discover what that self might be. Among writers it figures as a search for an authentic voice, which is to say, a public or literary voice, an outward simulation of self. But then, as the years pass, writers, fearing the humiliation that comes when fading of energy leads to self-imitation, want to break away from their true self. They want a second chance, another start. They want a new self won through transcending the old one. At the very moment of his death, Henry James, in his unfinished novel The Ivory Tower, was on the verge of creating a new Henry James, fiercely satirical in his view of society as he had seldom been before. Similar things could be said about Melville, George Eliot, Fitzgerald. But the most striking instance seems to me that of Dickens, who was only fifty-eight when he died, but who in his late great work—the four novels from Bleak House to Our Mutual Friend—was steadily becoming “another” writer.
In Little Dorrit there is a passage likely to excite the curiosity of any serious reader. It occurs in Book the First, Chapter 14. Little Dorrit, having been locked out of the Marshalsea Prison, walks with her weak-minded friend Maggy through the cold London night. They have no shelter. They meet an unnamed prostitute who at first takes Little Dorrit to be a child.
The supposed child kept her head drooped down, and kept her form close at Maggy’s side.
“Poor thing!” said the woman. “Have you no feeling, that you keep her out in the cruel streets at such a time as this? Have you no eyes, that you don’t see how delicate and slender she is? Have you no sense (you don’t look as if you had much) that you don’t take more pity on this cold and trembling little hand?”
She had stepped across to that side, and held the hand between her own two, chafing it. “Kiss a poor lost creature, dear,” she said, bending her face, “and tell me where she’s taking you.”
Little Dorrit turned toward her.
“Why, my God!” she said, recoiling, “you’re a woman!”
“Don’t mind that!” said Little Dorrit, clasping one of her hands that had suddenly released hers. “I am not afraid of you.”
“Then you had better be,” she answered. “Have you no mother?”
“No.”
“No father?”
“Yes, a very dear one.”
“Go home to him, and be afraid of me. Let me go. Good night!”
“I must thank you first; let me speak to you as if I really were a child.”
“You can’t do it,” said the woman. “You are kind and innocent; but you can’t look at me out of a child’s eyes. I never should have touched you, but I thought that you were a child.”
And with a strange, wild cry, she went away.
The prostitute assumes Little Dorrit is safe to approach because she is a child, since a child will not rebuff her. Actually, being quite indifferent to the world’s judgments about “fallen women,” Little Dorrit would welcome her with kindness. But the prostitute, even while recognizing that Little Dorrit is “kind and innocent,” cannot really credit her essential goodness, for all experience dictates that such goodness in an adult is beyond credence.
Dickens offers no explanation of why he included this passage, nor does he bring back the prostitute on a later page, as is his usual way with minor figures.
Now there is a way of “absorbing” this passage into the scheme of the novel, and that is to suggest that the prostitute’s response to Little Dorrit is an extreme refraction of the worldliness which, in this book as no doubt in the actual world, denies the possibility of the kind of goodness represented by Little Dorrit. This would seem to be a fairly plausible reading, at least thematically, but it quite fails to account for what is most striking about the passage—its intense, even overwrought tone, the vibration of the prose. It is overwrought and pulsing even for Dickens, with an excess of emotion beyond any cause that we can plausibly locate in the story itself.
Our natural desire to find a harmonious relation between a local passage and the novel’s dominant theme can easily lead us into the error—rather frequent in academic criticism—which takes it for granted that everything in a novel has a necessary function. If it’s there, there must be a good reason for it, and the critic’s job is to find the reason. The error consists in a failure to recognize the frequency with which, in extended works of fiction, there are and perhaps need to be loose ends, cues not taken up, false starts. No writer, not even the most self-conscious craftsman, is likely to keep every line under entire control.
Let me then propose a speculation. Dickens was the kind of novelist who kept looking past the work on which he was engaged, straining toward new insights and devices, retuning moral premises which, it might be, he had not yet fully developed in the book he was composing. None of his novels was quite like either its predecessors or successors: there is constant restlessness, movement forward and sometimes backward.
In the passage I have quoted, Dickens was anticipating that late in his career he might become Dostoevsky. There is a powerful urge, never completed, to enact a transition from the Dickens who was using his early comic grotesques in behalf of a stringent moral-social criticism to a dimly envisaged Dickens who would penetrate, as no English novelist had yet done, mixed psychological states, extreme versions of human personality and its disorders, and perhaps even negotiate the Dostoevskian vision of redemption through sin. The prostitute seems more like a character out of Crime and Punishment than out of any of Dickens’s novels: there is really no urgent “need” for her in Little Dorrit, although the tone of the passage suggests that in ways we will never quite grasp Dickens felt a need to imagine her. And perhaps—I continue to speculate—if Dickens had gone ahead to “become” Dostoevsky, the figures of Little Dorrit and the prostitute, here briefly crossing, would have been conflated.
By the time Dickens came to write Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel, he was struggling toward a view of the human psyche and, still more important, a prospect of salvation not realized in any of his earlier books, though anticipated in the chapter about Miss Wade in Little Dorrit and in the portrayal of Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend. Done with a caustic innerness unique in Dickens’s fiction, Bradley Headstone represents a fusion of class ressentiment and psychological malaise. Earnest, sweaty, rigid, Headstone suffers the exquisite pain of a plebeian risen, through costly exertions, to the status of respectability—he is a schoolmaster—but constantly aware of his clumsiness of person and speech. His dark-suited outer presence barely masks a seething mass of anger, frustration, self-hatred, and he knows that no exertions on his part will ever bring him the ease and polish of a gentleman. In this truly Dostoevskian portrait, Dickens projected both a sense of lingering plebeian rage and an equally powerful wish to subject his memories to punitive rebuke. The result is a great piece of work, even if ill-adjusted to other parts of Our Mutual Friend. We respond to such elements or strands in the late novels as to a musical composition which contains a phrase that will be fully developed only in a later work—which in the life of Dickens never materialized. So there is little point in asking what light the passage I have quoted from Little Dorrit sheds on the novel as a whole, for the passage really belongs, as it were, to another novel, one that might have brought Dickens to a triumph of self-transcendence but was, alas, never to be written.
That Dickens greatly influenced Dostoevsky is common knowledge (see Angus Wilson’s “Dickens and Dostoevsky” in his book Diversity and Depth in Fiction). That Dickens knew only a story or two by Dostoevsky seems also well established—it is quite impossible that he could have been significantly influenced by Dostoevsky. What was at work were parallel developments and inclinations within two writers profoundly troubled by the life of nineteenth-century Europe and, more important still, profoundly moved by the possibilities evoked in the story of Christ. To become Dostoevsky could, I venture, have been Dickens’s literary fate had he lived another seven or eigh
t years. Or to phrase this notion more modestly, let us say that Dostoevsky is a name we give to the glimpsed desires of the late Dickens.
Note
1* There are problems of translation here. I have used the version in Ernest Simmons’s biography of Dostoevsky, since it seems the clearest, but in the English translation of Konstantin Mochulsky’s study of Dostoevsky, the key phrase is rendered as “a positively beautiful individual.” I think it all but certain that, given Dostoevsky’s cast of mind, he would have been referring to moral qualities. Simmons translates Dostoevsky’s description of Don Quixote and Pickwick as “ridiculous”; the translator of Mochulsky prefers “comic.” Both convey Dostoevsky’s point, but for my purposes “comic” seems preferable.
Tolstoy: Did Anna Have to Die?
{1994}
IN HIS BOOK Personal Impressions Isaiah Berlin prints an account of a lengthy conversation he had in 1945 with Anna Akhmatova, the great Russian poet. Why, Akhmatova asks him,
Why did Anna Karenina have to be killed? . . . As soon as she leaves Karenin, everything changes; she suddenly becomes a fallen woman in Tolstoy’s eyes. . . . Of course there are pages of genius, but the basic morality is disgusting. Who punishes Anna? God? No, society; that same society the hypocrisy of which Tolstoy is never tired of denouncing. In the end he tells us that she repels even Vronsky. Tolstoy is lying: he knew better than that. The morality of Anna Karenina is the morality of Tolstoy’s wife, of his Moscow aunts; he knew the truth, yet he forced himself, shamefully, to conform to philistine convention. Tolstoy’s morality is a direct expression of his own private life, his personal vicissitudes. When he was happily married he wrote War and Peace, which celebrates family life. After he started hating Sofia Andreevna, but was not prepared to divorce her because divorce is condemned by society, and perhaps by the peasants too, he wrote Anna Karenina and punished her for leaving Karenin. When he was old and no longer lusted so violently for peasant girls, he wrote The Kreutzer Sonata, and forbade sex altogether.
To this vivid account Berlin adds the remark, “Perhaps this summing up was not meant too seriously: but Akhmatova’s dislike of Tolstoy’s sermons was genuine. She regarded him as an egocentric of immense vanity, and an enemy of love and freedom.” Just how seriously Akhmatova meant her attack on Tolstoy we will never know, but it is interesting that D. H. Lawrence, a writer utterly different from her, had a similar view of Tolstoy’s novel, though in somewhat cruder form. Lawrence wrote:
Why, when you look at it, all the tragedy comes from Vronsky’s and Anna’s fear of society. . . . They couldn’t live in the pride of their sincere passion, and spit in Mother Grundy’s eye. And that, that cowardice, was the real “sin.” The novel makes it obvious, and knocks old Leo’s teeth out.
Well, old Leo’s teeth are not so easily knocked out. Provocative as the remarks of Akhmatova and Lawrence may be, they suffer from a common fault: they fail to consider Anna Karenina as a character in a novel, as she actually appears in Tolstoy’s pages.
Anna is so sexually vibrant, so striking in her beauty and charm, that one can easily forget how limited are her social views and circumstances. The wife of a high czarist official, Anna is a woman completely part of the Russian upper classes. At no point does she express any explicit criticism of the values that inform her society and her class, let alone any rebellious sentiments. She is not a George Sand or a Frieda Lawrence, not even a George Eliot. Tolstoy is quite clear about this in a passage that comes shortly after Anna has told Karenin about her affair with Vronsky:
She felt that the position she enjoyed in society, which had seemed of so little consequence that morning, was precious to her after all, and that she would not have the strength to exchange it for the shameful one of a woman who has deserted her husband and child to join her lover; that, however she might struggle, she could not be stronger than herself. She would never know freedom in love. . . .
Especially telling are the words, “she could not be stronger than herself”—something that a self-declared rebel might be supposed to be. Until this point Tolstoy has shrewdly, with what might be called his sexual cunning, persuaded us of Anna’s attractiveness. He relies very little on direct statement, knowing that it is seldom effective in this respect, but instead registers the impressions Anna makes on other characters, most strikingly in the incident toward the end of the novel where the upright Levin, meeting her, with his disposition toward righteousness, succumbs to her completely. Anna’s power of attraction clearly rests on a strong, increasingly asserted sexuality, especially of course for Vronsky; when he first pursues her, she experiences “a feeling of joyful pride,” the pride of a beautiful woman. Her sexuality is not aggressive, except a little toward the end, when unhappiness prods her to an exercise of her powers; but in the main, it is a sexuality that is simply part of her splendid being. Yet even though she is able to rise above, or, if you prefer, sink below, the norms and customs of her social milieu, she makes no effort to deny or reject these. Her passion is neither sustained nor spoiled by an idea.
And that is precisely what makes Anna so interesting. An intellectual rebel against the norms of nineteenth-century Russian society might well engage our sympathies, but in a way less dramatic, less internalized than by the situation Tolstoy creates. Anna Karenina is not struggling for a new mode or path in life, either for herself or for her sex; she cares only about being with the man she loves, quite apart from any larger social or moral issues. Yet this soon becomes the root of her dilemma. The love between Anna and Vronsky, based as it is on a fine mixture of sexual attraction and personal sympathies, brings her into a deadly clash with society, a clash she never desires nor quite understands. Indeed, I would say that the power of the novel depends on the fact that Anna remains a conventional woman—intelligent, sensitive, even bold—but still a conventional woman driven by the strength of her feelings into an unconventional role she cannot in principle defend. She feels her love to be good, she believes her behavior is bad.
If my account, so far, has any merit, then the question to be asked is not Why must Anna be killed? A real-life Anna would probably not kill herself, but would drag out her years unhappily, with or without Vronsky. For certain kinds of readers, her death is to be seen as a mere novelistic convention, a device for rounding out the plot. But I think the real question, drawing upon the entirety of the action provided by Tolstoy, is not the death of Anna; it is the impossibility of the life she has chosen with Vronsky—an impossibility that finds its final realization in her suicide. In saying this, I should add that, as drawn by Tolstoy, Vronsky is a decent and honorable man who loves Anna and suffers because of her suffering. The two are trapped simply because it is impossible for people like them—which is to say, almost everyone—to live “outside” society. Portrayed as it is with a protective tenderness, the love of Anna and Vronsky seems deeply affecting: Tolstoy offers no judgment, either for himself or on behalf of his aunts; but this love remains unsupported by any principle (or delusion) strong enough to enable them to resist the judgments of the society in which they must continue to live.
There is a revealing incident when Anna and Vronsky go off to live comfortably in Venice. Cut off from his usual pursuits, Vronsky decides to take up painting, perhaps with some hope for self-fulfillment, perhaps simply to pass the time. (“Soon he felt a desire spring up in his heart for desires.”) Anna and Vronsky meet a Russian painter named Mikhailov, an irritable fellow but a serious artist, and through his unspoken but harsh judgment of Vronsky’s painting we recognize a dismissal of artistic dilettantism. Vronsky himself, acknowledging as much, abandons his painting and returns with Anna to Russia. He is a nobleman, an officer and sportsman, unable to live for long apart from his “natural” milieu. Meanwhile Mikhailov’s view of Vronsky’s painting has a certain impact on Anna’s passing notion that she will write children’s books. Art and literature cannot provide a sanctuary; step by step Tolstoy tightens the noose of their isolation.
Unlike V
ronsky, Anna can for a time live by love alone (“To have him entirely to herself was a continual joy”). Now I suppose this might be taken as evidence of Tolstoy’s sexual bias—the belief that while personal relations suffice for women, men need a larger arena of public life. But it is also possible—I think, plausible—to conclude that Tolstoy is showing that, for all their individuality, Anna and Vronsky cannot wrench themselves away from the mores of their historical moment. Even Anna comes to feel that a life devoted entirely to love can be stifling and that, like everyone else, she needs the comforts of sociability, so that when her sister-in-law Dolly comes to visit the house she shares with Vronsky, Anna is delighted.
Just how does society press down on the two lovers? Not through a lack of money. Not through social cuts, though they suffer a few. It is the verdict of society that deprives Anna of her son, Seryozha, and Vronsky, with the best will in the world, cannot quite grasp, let alone share, the pain this brings her. The most severe pressures, however, are internal, within Anna and Vronsky themselves. They introject society’s judgments, they feel uneasy in the presence of others, they make others feel uneasy in their presence. The very atmosphere of their life forms a kind of social pressure. Without normal social relations, Anna and Vronsky, even while deeply in love, begin to get on each other’s nerves, become suspicious and hurt, start protecting themselves from the wounds each feels the other is inflicting even while aware that neither intends to. It is all insidious, terrible, part of the destructiveness so often interwoven with a great love. Society manifests itself in the most painful way: through their self-consciousness. All this Tolstoy understood with an intuitive exactness, and nothing he ever wrote matches in honesty his portrait of the disintegration of their love.
