The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  Most are murderers, the victims of love and family despotism. Even those who are sent out here for arson and for counterfeiting are being punished for their love affairs, since they were enticed into crime by their lovers.

  Now they were “settled.” Twenty years before Chekhov’s time such women were sent to brothels.

  Chekhov made a study of the grim mining settlements all over the island. Due was a place of violent brawls and robberies. On another journey there is a place called Upper Armudan, famous for its card-players. They gambled here with their rations and clothing. Once he was obliged to stay in a garret in the jail because the only other room was fully occupied by bugs and cockroaches. The jailer said these creatures “win all the time.”

  It seemed as though the walls and ceiling were covered with black crepe, which stirred as if blown by a wind. From the rapid and disorderly movements of portions of the crepe you could guess the composition of this boiling, seething mass.

  During his journeys Chekhov came across dozens of criminal life stories. He got used to the apathy of the women, but the lot of the children born there horrified him.

  What is terrifying in the cities and villages of Russia is commonplace here.… When children see chained convicts dragging a wheelbarrow full of sand, they hang onto the back of the barrow and laugh uproariously.

  They played Soldiers-and-Convicts and Vagrants among themselves and knew the exact meaning of “executioner,” “prisoners in chains,” and “cohabitant.” He records a talk with a boy of ten.

  “What is your father’s name?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he answered.…

  “You are living with your father and don’t know his name? That is disgraceful.”

  “He’s not my real father.”

  “What do you mean, he’s not your real father?”

  “He’s my mother’s cohabitant.”

  “Is your mother married or a widow?”

  “A widow. She came because of her husband.”

  “What do you mean, she came because of her husband?”

  “She killed him.”

  In spite of this Chekhov was convinced that the children were “the most useful, the most necessary and the most pleasant” creatures on the island and that the convicts themselves felt this too. The children loved their “impure mothers and criminal fathers more than anything else in the world.… often children are the only tie that binds men and women to life, saving them from despair and a final disintegration.” Yet the parents seemed indifferent to child prostitution.

  The most horrifying pages of the book are those describing a flogging. Chekhov steeled himself to watch it and to record almost every stroke and all the screams of the criminal and the cold professional attitude of the flogger, counting out the strokes. Chekhov was impelled to identify himself with all the pain on the island. The one relief from the sight of human degradation came to him from the sights of nature: the crops, the forests, the animals, birds and shoals of fish. He studied the agriculture of the island very seriously. Writing the book when he was back home was a trying labor for one who was not by nature a documentary journalist. He added very enlightening footnotes. The book did not appear until 1895.

  By October he was glad to leave Sakhalin, glad to stop being a doctor, examining human degradation, and to be a free globe-trotter. He left on a steamer by way of Hong Kong and Singapore. He reveled above all in Ceylon, where, he claimed in a letter to Alexander, he had made love to a dark girl under the palm trees; he also acquired three mongooses, and then went on to Odessa. At Tula his mother and sister met him, and then home to Moscow. He had been away eight months. He was thirty. He told his friends and family:

  I can say I have lived! I’ve had everything I want. I have been in Hell which is Sakhalin and in Paradise which is Ceylon.

  He was restless. This labor of writing a “book of statistics” hung over him like a punishment for a long time, for once more he was frantic about money. He had spent more than he could afford. His mind was full of stories begging to be written.

  The man so conscientious in his duties inevitably craved once more for escape and evasion. The “cure” was more travel and, although protesting, he jumped recklessly at the chance of a trip to Europe with Suvorin. The distraction was indeed a cure. On Sakhalin he had simply worked too hard; now with Suvorin and Suvorin’s son he moved from barbarism to civilization. Vienna amazed him. He had never seen anything like this in his life.

  I have for the first time realized.… that architecture is an art. And here the art is not seen in little bits, as with us, but stretches over several miles. And then on every side street there is sure to be a bookshop.… It is strange that here one is free to read anything and to say what one likes.

  They went on to Venice: “For us poor and oppressed Russians it is easy to go out of our minds here in a world of beauty, wealth, and freedom,” he writes. And in another letter: “And the house where Desdemona lived is to let!”

  On they went to Bologna and Florence. What works of art! What singing! What neckties in the shops! In Naples he was enchanted by the famous aquarium and studied the grace and viciousness of the exotic fish. He climbed Vesuvius and looked down on the crater and heard “Satan snoring under cover of the smoke.” In Monte Carlo he could not resist a gamble and lost more than he could afford. “If I had money to spare I would spend the whole year gambling”—and, in one sense, his own life had become a gamble. In Nice he thought the luxury of the resort vulgarized the scenery. In Paris there were riots, but he thought the French “magnificent.” He was impressed at the Chamber of Deputies, where he heard a free and stormy debate on the behavior of the police in the riots. Imagine the freedom to criticize the police! For once in his life he was staying in luxury hotels. He loved the Moulin Rouge but he eventually tired of “men who tie boa constrictors round their bodies, ladies who kick up to the ceiling, flying people, lions, cafés chantants, dinners and lunches.” He wanted to get back to work. His depression had gone.

  On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays I write my Sakhalin book, on the other days, except Sunday, my novel, and on Sundays, short stories.

  He had paid his debt to medicine.

  (1988)

  LITERARY CRITICISM

  MARK TWAIN

  THE AMERICAN PURITAN

  After reading Hemingway and Faulkner and speculating upon the breach of the American novel with its English tradition, we go back to the two decisive, indigenous Americans who opened the new vein—Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. Everything really American, really non-English comes out of that pair of spiritual derelicts, those two scarecrow figures with their half-lynched minds. Both of them, but particularly Twain, represent the obverse side of Puritanism. We have never had this obverse in England, for the political power of Puritanism lasted for only a generation and has since always bowed if it has not succumbed to civilised orthodoxy. If an Englishman hated Puritanism, there was the rest of the elaborate English tradition to support him; but American Puritanism was totalitarian and if an American opposed it, he found himself alone in a wilderness with nothing but bottomless cynicism and humorous bitterness for his consolation. There has never been in English literature a cynicism to compare with the American; at any rate we have never had that, in some ways vital, but always sardonic or wretched, cynicism with its broken chopper edge and its ugly wound. We have also never had its by-product: the humorous philosophers; Franklin’s Poor Richard, the Josh Billingses, the Artemus Wards, the Pudd’nhead Wilsons and Will Rogerses with their close-fisted proverbs:

  “Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond: cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college education.”

  Or

  “Consider well the proportion of things. It is better to be a young June bug than an old bird of Paradise.”

  I say we have never had this kind of thing, but there is one exception to prove the rule and to prove it very well, for he also is an uprooted and, so to speak
, colonial writer. Kipling with his “A woman is always a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke” is our first American writer with a cynicism, a cigar-stained humour and a jungle book of beliefs which, I think, would be a characteristic of our literature if we become seriously totalitarian in the future. For English totalitarianism would create the boredom and bitterness of the spiritual wilderness, as surely as Puritanism did in America.

  When Mark Twain turned upon the religion of his childhood because it was intolerable, he was unaware that it would destroy him by turning him into a money-grubber of the most disastrously Puritan kind. Fortunately the resources of the imagination are endless even when a fanatical philosophy wrecks human life, genius and happiness. Out of the mess which Twain made of his life, amid the awful pile of tripe which he wrote, there does rise one book which has the serenity of a thing of genius. Huckleberry Finn takes the breath away. Knowing his life, knowing the hell from which the book has ascended, one dreads as one turns from page to page the seemingly inevitable flop. How can so tortured and so angry a comedian refrain from blackguarding God, Man and Nature for the narrow boredom of his early life, and thus ruin the gurgling comedy and grinning horror of the story? But an imaginative writer appears to get one lucky break in his career; for a moment the conflicts are assimilated, the engine ceases to work against itself. The gears do not crash and Huckleberry Finn hums on without a jar. America gets its first and indisputable masterpiece. The boyhood of Huck Finn is the boyhood of a new culture and a new world.

  The curious thing about Huckleberry Finn is that, although it is one of the funniest books in all literature and really astonishing in the variety of its farce and character, we are even more moved than we are amused by it. Why are we moved? Do we feel the sentiment of sympathy only? Are we sighing with some envy and self-pity? “Alas, Huck Finn is just what I would have been in my boyhood if I had had half a chance.” Are we sorry for the vagrant, or are we moved by his rebellion? These minor feelings may play their part; but they are only sighs on the surface of the main stream of our emotion. Twain has brought to his subject far more than this personal longing; he has become the channel of the generic American emotion which floods all really American literature—nostalgia. In that brilliant, hit-or-miss book, Studies in Classical American Literature, which is either dead right or dead wrong, D. H. Lawrence called this feeling the longing of the rebel for a master. It may be simply the longing for a spiritual home, but it is as strong in Mark Twain as it is implicit in Hemingway. One finds this nostalgia in Anglo-Irish literature which is also colonial and, in a less lasting way, once again in the work of Kipling. The peculiar power of American nostalgia is that it is not only harking back to something lost in the past, but suggests also the tragedy of a lost future. As Huck Finn and old Jim drift down the Mississippi from one horrifying little town to the next and hear the voices of men quietly swearing at one another across the water about “a chaw of tobacco”; as they pass the time of day with the scroungers, rogues, murderers, the lonely women, the frothing revivalists, the maundering boatmen and fantastic drunks, we see the human wastage that is left behind in the wake of a great effort of the human will, the hopes frustrated, the idealism which has been whittled down to eccentricity and mere animal cunning. These people are the price paid for building a new country. The human spectacle is there. It is not, once you have faced it—which Dickens did not do in Martin Chuzzlewit, obsessed as he was by the negative pathos of the immigrant—it is not a disheartening spectacle; for the value of a native humour like Twain’s is that it records a profound reality in human nature: the ability of man to adjust himself to any circumstance and somehow to survive and make a life.

  Movement is one of the great consolers of human woe; movement, a process of continual migration is the history of America. It is this factor which gives Twain’s wonderful descriptions of the journey down the Mississippi its haunting overtone and which, naturally enough, awakens a sensibility in him which is shown nowhere else in his writings and which is indeed vulgarly repressed in them:

  … then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywhere—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-clattering may be. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was on the woods on t’other side—you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and wasn’t black any more but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows … and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled-up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag in the swift current which breaks on it and that streak looks that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank t’other side of the river, being a woodyard likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres …

  And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along and by-and-by, lazy off to sleep. Wake up, by-and-by, and look to see what done it, and may be see a steamboat, coughing along upstream, so far off towards the other side you couldn’t tell nothing about her only whether she was sternwheel or side wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness. Once there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steam boats wouldn’t run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing—heard them plain; but we couldn’t see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly, it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says, “No, spirits wouldn’t say ‘dern this dem fog.’ ”

  (Note the word “way” in this passage; it is a key nostalgic word in the American vocabulary, vaguely vernacular and burdened with the associations of the half-articulate. It is a favourite Hemingway word, of course: “I feel that way”—not the how or what he feels of the educated man.)

  The theme of Huckleberry Finn is the rebellion against civilisation and especially against its traditions:

  I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

  Huck isn’t interested in “Moses and the Bulrushers” because Huck “don’t take no stock of dead people.” He garbles European history when he is discussing Kings with Jim, the Negro. Whether Huck is the kind of boy who will grow up to build a new civilisation is doubtful; Tom Sawyer obviously will because he is imaginative. Huck never imagines anything except fears. Huck is “low down plain ornery,” always in trouble because of the way he was brought up with “Pap.” He is a natural anarchist and bum. He can live without civilisation, depending on shrewd affections and loyalty to friends. He is the first of those typical American portraits of the underdog, which have culminated in the poor white literature and in Charlie Chaplin—an underdog who gets along on horse sense, so to speak. Romanticism, ideas, ideals are repugnant to Huck; he “reckons” he “guesses,” but he doesn’t think. In this he is the opposite of his hero, Tom Sawyer. Tom had been telling “stretchers” about Arabs, elephants and Aladdin’s lamp. Huck goes at once “into a brood.”

  I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an irony ring and went out into the woods and rubbed it till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it wasn’t no use, none of the genies came. So then I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and elephants, but as for me I think different. It has all the marks
of a Sunday school.

  That is, of American Puritan civilisation, the only civilisation he knew.

  “Ornery,” broody, superstitious, with a taste for horrors, ingenious, courageous without knowing it, natural, sound-hearted, philosophical in a homely way—those are the attributes of the gorgeous, garrulous Huck and they give a cruelly extravagant narrative its humanity. He obliges you to accept the boy as the devastating norm. Without him the violence of the book would be stark reporting of low life. For if Huckleberry Finn is a great comic book it is also a book of terror and brutality. Think of the scenes: Pap and d.t.’s chasing Huck round the cabin with a knife; Huck sitting up all night with a gun preparing to shoot the old man; Huck’s early familiarity with corpses; the pig-killing scene; the sight of the frame house (evidently some sort of brothel) floating down the Mississippi with a murdered man in it; the fantastic events at the Southern house where two families shoot each other down in vendetta; the drunken Boggs who comes into town to pick a quarrel and is eventually coolly shot dead before the eyes of his screaming young daughter by the man he has insulted. The “Duke” and the “King,” those cynical rascals whose adventures liven up the second half of the story, are sharpers, twisters and crooks of the lowest kind. Yet a child is relating all this with a child’s detachment and with a touch of morbidity. Marvellous as the tale is, as a collection of picaresque episodes and as a description of the mess of frontier life, it is strong meat. Sometimes we wonder how Twain’s public stomached such illusionless reporting. The farce and the important fact that in this one book Mark Twain never forced a point nor overwrote—in the Dickens way for example—are of course the transfiguring and beguiling qualities. His corpse and coffin humour is a dry wine which raises the animal spirits. Old Jim not only looked like a dead man after the “King” had painted him blue, but like one “who had been dead a considerable time.”