The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The most skazka-like element in the story is Zhivago’s half brother Evgraf, who is really a supernatural figure. Evgraf is introduced so unobtrusively that we do not at first pay attention to him, and we have to go back later to look him up. Zhivago’s unreliable father has left his wife for a princess with the hybrid name of Stolbunova-Enrici, by whom he has had a son. The half-celestial personality of the son is evidently adumbrated when we are told that the mother is “mechtatel’ nitsa i sumasbrodka,” “a dreamer and rather mad (or erratic).” Yury Andreyevich’s mother is characterized with similar brevity as “myagkaya…mechtatel’ nitsa,” “gentle, a dreamer.” (The translator has muffed this significant repetition by combining the two epithets of the first of these descriptions into the single blank word “eccentric.”) The Princess and her illegitimate son live far away, on the outskirts of Omsk, in Siberia. The Princess never goes out, and nobody knows what they live on. Yury Andreyevich has seen a photograph of their house, with five plate-glass windows and stucco medallions, and has felt that it was staring at him in a hostile way across all the thousands of versts and that sooner or later its glance will be fatal. Partly out of fear of this, partly out of contempt for litigation, he refuses to contest the claims to his father’s estate of this princess and another of his father’s mistresses, and he is rewarded for his renunciation by the strange intervention in his favor at critical times in his life of his mysterious half brother from the East. At the time of the victory of the workers in the fighting of the October days and the transfer of power to the Soviets, the Doctor walks out at night in the midst of a heavy snowstorm and buys a paper which carries the news. In order to get light to read it, he goes into the entrance hall of an unknown building. An eighteen-year-old boy comes downstairs in a Siberian fur coat and fur cap. He has narrow Kirghizan eyes but something aristocratic in his face—“the shy ray, the hidden delicacy, which is sometimes found in persons of mixed and complicated stock and which seems to have been brought from afar.” Zhivago does not know that it is his half brother Evgraf, but the apparition afterward haunts him. This is the moment of his most wholehearted enthusiasm for the success of the Revolution. He feels that there is something characteristic of Russia in the drastic directness, the rude courage, of the sweeping away of the old order—“something of the uncompromising clarity of Pushkin, of the unevasive fidelity to facts of Tolstoy.” One imagines at this point that Evgraf is meant to represent something sound, at once popular and noble, in Russia, and as the story goes on one suspects that he may even be intended to embody the old conception of “Holy Russia.” One becomes more and more aware that Pasternak’s book is studded with the symbolism of the Orthodox Church. The five barless windows of the house in Siberia are the five wounds of Jesus. (The number five elsewhere appears, and always with sinister significance: the five-o’clock train from which the older Zhivago throws himself, the five conspirators in the forest who try to murder the partisan leader.) Evgraf is a guardian angel, but he is also, with his dark face, the angel of death. And yet death is always followed by resurrection. Three times, like the fairy in the folk tale, he comes to Yury Andreyevich’s rescue. First when, before Zhivago has taken his family away, he collapses in Moscow with typhus; again, when he is marooned with his family in the Urals, before he has been kidnapped by the partisans; and finally when, returned to Moscow, unwanted and unassimilable, he is on the point of petering out. On this last occasion, Evgraf induces him to leave for a time his devoted lower-class wife and provides him with lodgings in which to write. We never know what Evgraf is or how he accomplishes his miracles; he is always an important person whose authority is felt at once, never questioned; he can always produce food, secure for his half brother conditions of leisure. Yet we do not know what office he holds, why he is always so sure of himself, how he has managed to escape the purges. On his third intervention, he brings death in the flesh. The Doctor, now hidden from his family, does not survive his last creative liberation, but Evgraf preserves his manuscripts, the poems in which Yury lives again. Since “Yury” is a Russian equivalent for “George,” the Russian reader will have guessed by this time that Zhivago is St. George, the martyr, who is supposed to have paid with his life for his audacity in arguing Christianity with Diocletian. He has written in the Urals, with the wolves on the horizon, a queer poem with an unexpected ending, about the battle of St. George with the Dragon, which we shall read in the final chapter. (One suspects that the legends of St. Larisa and St. Eugraphos, after whom the heroine and Evgraf are named, would reveal further connections between the characters and the hagiography of the Orthodox Church. A mythological Larisa is supposed to have been the wife of Poseidon, and Pasternak’s Larisa is associated with the sea by Zhivago—for reasons which, however, I have not grasped.) Evgraf, a general now, appears for the last time toward the end of the second great war to rescue the daughter of Larisa and Yury, born after her flight with Komarovsky and abandoned with a peasant family, who has been partially reduced to the level of a peasant and yet knows that she is something else. Evgraf will see that she is educated (the importance of education is emphasized all through the book).

  By this time, we are quite aware that the theme of death and resurrection, slipped into the first pages, is central to the whole book, repeated in all sorts of variations and with ever stronger positive force. Again and again the characters are entombed and rise from the tomb. Evgraf is the angel at the grave. The father, enmeshed in the financial ruin entailed by his emotional instability, has leaped out of the train; Yury Andreyevich, the son, with sclerosis of the heart, is suffocating on a crowded tram, tries to get a window up, then forces his way out and drops dead on the curb. And in the interval between these two deaths, the incidents that join them together are now seen to compose a sequence of images, sometimes physical, sometimes spiritual, of the cycle of extinction and survival. The vodka and pancakes of Shrovetide—which in Russia is dedicated both to the dead and to the renewal of life by marriage—are a ritual symbol of the theme. The second of these references is a herald of Evgraf’s second intervention. The Jewish boy in the station who is thinking about “what it means to be a Jew” and paying no attention to the man who has just then committed suicide—he later adapts himself to the Moscow regime, though not with the same enthusiasm as the non-Jewish friend who has been brainwashed—is meant to illustrate the author’s conception of the too self-centered role of the Jews. The book begins with the burial of Yury’s mother and the night in the monastery, in which no special ray of light is yet seen; and we have afterward the escape from the train of the prisoners condemned to forced labor; the shooting, on the edge of a precipice, of the vodka distillers and other offenders, of whom one, a backward boy, survives; the burial of the old woman by her murderer in the pit in which she has been hoarding potatoes, and the escape, through taking refuge in an underground cave, in the raid that follows the murder, of a boy who is suspected already of having committed it; and the trapping in the cellar of the murderer of the husband of the peasant woman with whom the daughter of Zhivago and Larisa has been living. Pasternak keeps too close to real life to perpetrate a monotonous allegory. In this last-mentioned instance of burial, there is no resurrection for the brute. He is held prisoner by the woman whose husband has been killed, and she allows him to strangle her little boy, whom he has taken down with him as a hostage. The abandoned daughter of Zhivago and Larisa flags a passing train—the husband of the woman was a signalman—and the trainmen bring out the murderer, tie him to the tracks, and run over him. The woman, as a result of all this, goes mad. Here it is the girl who escapes from the household which has for her been a tomb.

  The last chapter is composed of Zhivago’s poems, which have been published after his death. The reader, when he faces this chapter, may be somewhat puzzled and dubious as to why what is ostensibly a story should be prolonged by what looks like an appendix; but by the time we have finished these poems, we see that they are needed to complete the book, that the
theme only now gets its full, triumphant statement. These poems fall into two series, which alternate and echo one another and merge. One sequence recapitulates certain incidents of Zhivago’s life and grows darker with the parting from Larisa and the darkness of the oppression of Stalin: “For this in early spring my friends and I gather together, and our evenings are farewells, our feasts are testaments, in order that our hidden stream of suffering may warm the cold of existence.” The other of these sequences commemorates the holy days of the Church and the main events of the life of Jesus. The gloomy poem quoted above is followed by “Evil Days,” the entrance of Christ into Jerusalem and giving him up for judgment to the dregs of society by “the dark forces of the Temple,” and his memory at this moment, of his bounty at Cana and his bringing Lazarus back from the tomb; then two poems on Mary Magdalene, with whom we have already had some intimation that Larisa is to be identified (after all, she could never get away from Komarovsky, whom she has married in the Far East). The last magnificent poem of this sombre yet affirmative series gives us Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. “I shall descend into the grave,” it ends, “and on the third day I shall rise again and as rafts float along the river, so the centuries, like the barges of a caravan, shall, for my judgment, float down out of darkness.”

  · · ·

  I assume that by this time everybody knows that Doctor Zhivago has not been published in Russia, that the manuscript was brought out of the Soviet Union by the Italian Leftist publisher Feltrinelli, that Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize, and that the anti-creative bureaucrats who are allowed in the Soviet Union to interfere in matters of literature—sounding much like those Mississippi newspapers which raised a howl against Faulkner in the same situation—have compelled him to refuse this reward. I do not, however, in paying my respects to the official mediocrities of Moscow, want to adopt the self-righteous attitude toward Russia which has become official in the United States. On hearing of this literary crisis, Secretary Dulles said that “it illustrates what I said last night. The system of international Communism insists on conformity not only in deed but in thought. Anything a little out of line they try to stamp out.” Doctor Zhivago is not merely a little out of line with the assumptions of the Soviet Union; it presents a radical criticism of all our supposedly democratic but more and more centralized societies. The criticism of Pasternak’s novel is directed at conditions and tendencies which are in evidence all over the world and which have lately become pronounced in the United States. Here is a quotation from Pasternak which might equally apply to us: “It was then,” says Larisa of the First World War, “that untruth came to the land of Russia. The first disaster, the root of future evil, was the loss of faith in one’s own opinion. They imagined that the time had passed for them to pay attention to the promptings of moral feeling, that one now had to sing with the general voice and to live by the general notions that were being thrust upon one.”

  Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history. Nobody could have written it in a totalitarian state and turned it loose on the world who did not have the courage of genius. May his guardian angel be with him! His book is a great act of faith in art and in the human spirit. As for his enemies in his fatherland, I predict that their children, over their vodka and tea, will be talking about the relations between Larisa Fyodorovna and Pasha and Yury Andreyevich as their parents, and I don’t doubt they themselves, have talked about Tatiana and Lensky and Evgeny Onegin, and Natasha and Prince André and Pierre.

  JOHN MCCARTEN

  JULY 31, 1954 (ON ON THE WATERFRONT)

  N THE WATERFRONT is based solidly and most satisfactorily on the New York Sun articles about labor conditions along the New York docks, which won for Malcolm Johnson, their author, a Pulitzer Prize. As dramatized by Budd Schulberg, Mr. Johnson’s findings add up to the sort of galvanic movie we used to get when the Warner Brothers were riding herd on Al Capone and his associates. The locale of Mr. Schulberg’s story is Hoboken, for which in the lovely past I used to have the same malty affection Romberg had for Heidelberg. The stratum of Hoboken society that Mr. Schulberg depicts—and bear in mind that the script is, if anything, a rather gentle depiction of real happenings—consists of people among whom even Senator McCarthy’s Indian might be considered effete; mayhem and murder are as lightly regarded in this crowd as traffic violations are in more civilized circles. To deal with this violent, brawling, and terrifying littoral—the Cro-Magnon depths of our social structure—Mr. Schulberg has assembled a lot of full-bodied characters, and given them motivations far more plausible than we have come to expect in movies like this. Contributing to the credibility of On the Waterfront, which had the good fortune to be directed by Elia Kazan, is the fact that it was actually made in Hoboken; in none of the scenes is there a trace of the fictitious background that can be so unsettling in films with documentary origins.

  The tale that Mr. Schulberg has woven together to sustain Mr. Johnson’s brutal discoveries centers on a classic situation—the redemption of a sinner through love. This particular sinner is a longshoreman, no brighter than the next, who has dreamed long dreams of being a champion boxer and winds up wielding a baling hook on the sufferance of hopelessly corrupt labor bosses. I won’t try to describe the intricacies of the pattern Mr. Schulberg has invented to show how our hero emerges from the awful wallow that circumstance has plunged him into, but I will say that in the person of Marlon Brando he is a thoroughly convincing individual. Indeed, I’d give cozy odds that no actor this year is going to match Mr. Brando’s performance here. At that, he’s only a short length ahead of some of his colleagues in this enterprise. As a priest who comes to the realization that the hold of a ship is just as good a place for religion as any temple, Karl Malden is superb, and as the lady who does most to redeem Mr. Brando, Eva Marie Saint is altogether captivating. Mr. Schulberg, who, I’ve been informed, used to own a piece of a fighter, has garnished On the Waterfront with a good deal of pugilistic argot, and he—or maybe Mr. Kazan—has had the courage to include in the cast such battlers as Tony Galento, Tami Mauriello, and Abe Simon. All of them, it seems to me, do better here than they ever did in the ring. To spell out in detail all the other worthies involved in On the Waterfront —and among them Lee J. Cobb is conspicuously competent—would be an impossibility in this space, but I must say a word for the score Leonard Bernstein composed to accompany this movie. It is at once pertinent and unobtrusive, and it always serves to step up the dramatic points the film is making.

  NOVEMBER 28, 1959 (ON THE 400 BLOWS)

  HE FRENCH FILM called The 400 Blows was produced, directed, and written (in collaboration with Marcel Moussy) by a young man named François Truffaut, who is almost as capable as Vittorio De Sica at depicting a small boy’s confusion when trying to face up to an adult world that is no more enlightened than a jungle. (I’m thinking of Bicycle Thief.) The boy whose short and sad career M. Truffaut outlines here is a prepossessing twelve-year-old, portrayed by Jean-Pierre Léaud, a lad who has had no previous experience as an actor but is altogether the perfect type to represent a bewildered small fry, alternately mischievous and pathetic, intransigent and affectionate. This small fry is a product of the most sordid circumstances. (“Faire les quatre cents coups” is the French equivalent of “hell-raising.”) His handsome mother (Claire Maurier), who bore him out of wedlock, is now married to a foolish man (Albert Rémy) who ignores her infidelities while devoting himself to the petty activities of an automobile club. Living in close quarters with this pair, our boy obviously never gets a chance to establish any stable values, and eventually, having stirred up the wrath of his schoolmaster with his pranks, he becomes an outlaw on the loose in Paris. M. Truffaut apparently has a very low opinion of the teaching methods of Parisian public schools, and I think you will, too, after witnessing some of the educational exercises he puts on view. But worse is to come. As a fugitive in Paris, living uncertainly by his wits, young Jean
-Pierre has only one friend (Patrick Auffay) upon whom he can depend. Adept at petty thievery, he sustains himself for a while by pinching clocks and the like (his chum, whose mother is a drunk and whose father is a horseplayer, knows all about the art of pawning things), but when he finally tries a big job—the theft of a typewriter from his stepfather’s office—he is arrested. M. Truffaut’s attitude toward lower-echelon French educators is nothing short of admiration compared to what he thinks of the French police. Jean-Pierre is literally thrown into a chicken-wire pen, after being fingerprinted as if he were the prize criminal catch of the age. His companions are thieves and prostitutes, and when, at length, his parents are called in to make some sort of decision about his fate, neither of them can do anything more charitable than surrender him to the court, to be sent to a juvenile-delinquent home for observation.