I have been reading Turgenev again and dipping occasionally into Avraham Yarmolinsky’s thorough and discerning evaluation of him. It was a great advantage to the Russian novelists that they were obliged to react to the Russian question; a great advantage, too, that the Russian question was to become a universal one: the question of the rise of the masses. The consequence is that Turgenev’s political novels—especially Rudin and even Fathers and Sons—are less dated outside of Russia than they are inside it, for we can afford to ignore the detail of their historical context. I first read Rudin during the Spanish Civil War and, when he died on his foreign barricade, Rudin seemed to me (and still does seem) one of “the heroes of our own time.” At the end of all Turgenev’s political stories one may detect the invisible words “And yet …” left there by his hesitant and tentative genius. He is so close to the ripple of life’s process of becoming that at the very moments of decision, departure, farewell, he seems to revise and rejuvenate. The leaf falls, but the new bud is disclosed beneath the broken stalk.
Turgenev solved the Russian problem for himself, as he solved his personal question by an ingenious psychological trick. It is rather irritating, it is a little comic when we see it in the light of his personal character, but it was serious and successful. It was the trick of assuming a premature old age. Now this device was a legacy of Byronism. One can see how it must have infuriated his younger contemporaries to hear him declare that at thirty-five his life was finished; and then to have him live another thirty years in full possession of his gracious and pertinent faculties. The trick was a kind of alibi. For behind the mist of regret, that autumnal resignation, the tenderness and the wave of the scented handkerchief in a good-bye that was never quite good-bye, there was a marksman’s eye. Yarmolinsky speaks of him stalking his characters as he stalked his grouse on the steppe of Orel or Kaluga. Every time he picks off his man and notes, as he does so, his place in the Russian fauna. Look at this from A Nest of Gentlefolk:
I want above all to know what you are like, what are your views and convictions, what you have become, what life has taught. (Mihalevitch still preserved the phraseology of 1830.)
The comic side of this adroit sense of time—so precise, so poetic and moving in his writing—comes out in Turgenev’s private life. His autumnal disguise enabled him to give his large number of love affairs a protective fragility. The autumn is the hunting season.
A Sportsman’s Sketches, A Nest of Gentlefolk, Fathers and Sons—those are the perfect books. Turgenev is the poet of spring who eludes the exhausting decisions and fulfilments of summer and finds in the autumn a second and safer spring. He is the novelist of the moments after meetings and of the moments before partings. He watches the young heart rise the first time. He watches it fall, winged, to the common distorted lot. The young and the old are his fullest characters: the homecoming and death of Bazarov and the mourning of his parents are among the truest and most moving things in literature. To this tenderness, this capacity to observe the growth of characters and the changes of the heart, as the slow days of the steppe change into the years that rattle by in Petersburg or Baden, there is, as I have said, a shrewd, hard-headed counterpart, the experienced shot:
In the general the good-nature innate in all Russians was intensified by that special kind of geniality which is peculiar to all people who have done something disgraceful.
Or:
Of his wife there is scarcely anything to be said. Her name was Kalliopa Karlovna. There was always a tear in her left eye, on the strength of which Kalliopa Karlovna (she was, one must add, of German extraction) considered herself a woman of great sensibility.
Or:
Panshin’s father, a retired cavalry officer and a notorious gambler, was a man of insinuating eyes, a battered countenance, and a nervous twitch about the mouth.
Looking back over the novels, one cannot remember any falsified character. One is taken from the dusty carriage to the great house, one meets the landowners and the servants, and then one watches life produce its surprises as the day goes by. Turgenev has the perfect discretion. He refrains from knowing in advance. In Rudin we are impressed by the bellows of the local Dr Johnson; enter Rudin, and the brilliant young man demolishes the doctor, like a young Shelley; only himself to suffer exposure as the next day shows us more of his character. His people expose themselves, as in life people expose themselves, fitfully and with contradiction. The art is directed by a sense which the English novel has never had—unless Jane Austen had something of it—the sense of a man’s character and life being divisible into subjects. Career, love, religion, money, politics, illness and the phases of the years are in turn isolated in a spirit which is both poetic and scientific. There is no muddle in Turgenev. Romantic as he may be, there is always clarity, order and economy. He writes novels as if he were not a story-teller, but a biographer.
It was Edward Garnett who, in defending the disputed portrait of Bazarov, pointed out that Bazarov ought to have been judged as the portrait not of a political type, but of the scientific temperament. (There is nothing wrong with Bazarov really, except that Turgenev showed him in the country, where he was a fish out of water, instead of in the city.) This temperament was Turgenev’s, and because of it one easily discounts the inevitable sad diminuendo of his tales, the languid dying away which is the shadow of his own wish in his work. The rest stands clearly and without date. But the method has one serious weakness. It almost certainly involved drawing directly from life, and especially it meant that Turgenev was (or thought he was) stimulated to write by an interest in living persons for their own sakes. Turgenev knew his own lack of invention, his reliance on personal experience, and he studied character with the zeal of a botanist watching a flower; but, in fact, the study of character, for a novelist, means the selection or abstraction of character. What is selected is inevitably less than what is there, and since Turgenev was (as he said) governed by the actual life story which he saw, he does not add to or transform his people. They have the clarity of something a little less than life. What is missing from them is that from which he personally recoiled—fulfilment. There are spring and autumn—there is no summer. If success is described, it is by hearsay. Marriage, for Turgenev, is either scandal or rather embarrassing domesticity, something for a fond, indulgent smile, but a quick get-away. Strangely enough, it is his objectivity which leads to his limpness.
There are two qualifications to add to this criticism. One is suggested by A Sportsman’s Sketches. His people derive a certain fullness from their part in the scene of the steppe, which none described better than he. In this book, his scrupulous habit or necessity of stopping short at what he saw and heard gave his portraits a laconic power and a terrible beauty. There the Russian day brings people to life in their random moments. The shapelessness of these pieces is the powerful shapelessness of time itself. The other qualification is the one I have indicated at the beginning of this essay. If his people lack the power to realise themselves because Turgenev himself lacked it in his own life, they have their roots in the fate of Russia. You localise them in a destiny which is beyond their own—tragic, comic, whatever they are—in the destiny of their society. They may fail, Russia goes on. One remembers that startling chapter at the end of A Nest of Gentlefolk, where, after the bitter end of Liza’s love, the novelist returns to the house. One expects the last obligatory chords of romantic sorrow, but instead, there is the cruel perennial shock of spring:
Marfa Dmitrievna’s house seemed to have grown younger; its freshly painted walls gave a bright welcome; and the panes of its open windows were crimson, shining in the setting sun; from these windows the light merry sound of ringing young voices and continual laughter floated into the street.
The new generation had grown up. It is the most tragic moment of his writing, the one most burdened with the mystery of time as it flows through the empty light of our daily life.
(1946)
HENRY JAMES
THE NOTEBOOKS OF
HENRY JAMES
The notebooks of the great authors are the idlest kind of reading as, for their writers, they have so often been the idlest kind of writing: in the forest of life they mark the trees to be felled. It is always a moment this, delicate and touch-and-go, when a piece of life is chipped off and is still neither life nor art, a fragment with the sap, the tang, the freshness still on it, to be picked up and considered. We are at a beginning, and there is a kind of pathos in knowing that presently this bright bit will be lost to life and become an anonymous, altered and perhaps undecipherable piece in the forbidding structure of a work of art. To some minds, and especially the critical, there will be a pleasure in tracing the history of that chip from the time when it flew off the axe until it found its present home in what Henry James called “the real thing”; to lazier minds there is the pleasure of being there as the first stroke rings, even when it rings flat and untrue. “A good deal might be done with Henry Pratt,” wrote Henry James, recalling an evening with this friend of his in Venice. How one responds to that suddenly decisive and injudicious cry. Hurrah, the woodman has not spared the tree! Bring Henry Pratt in here. Let us all look him over. Let us keep him here, with the soil on his roots, while we make up our ingenious minds. That is one pleasure of notebooks: they are dramatic. A character, a scene, a smudge of scenery, half a dozen lines of talk, a few epigrams with no visible means of support, are caught in all their innocence. The other attraction is the strangeness of the workshop. Here are not only the acceptable ideas but the unacceptable, the discarded, the litter of a profession, the failures.
The Notebooks of Henry James belong to the working kind. Even the opening judgment on his first twelve years as a writer is done to clear the mind and not to indulge his memory. The great are monsters of efficiency, the mills work day and night. What strikes us is how much James’s notes were used. Hawthorne’s long notes, for example, seem to have been a studied alternative to his real subjects. Dostoevsky’s—as far as we know them by quotation—generate fog rather than precision, though we may regard Dostoevsky as a note-writer whose object is to work up a fog of the right density. With James the matter is all literal: the American genius is technical and for production. The Prefaces, the anecdotes that have come down to us, show that nothing was lost: James was presentable and publishable in his very socks. His life was an arrangement in words, born to circulate.
These Notebooks of his were begun in Boston when he was thirty-eight and when he feared that he had let too many impressions slip by, and they cover thirty years. They confirm that the word was totally his form of life, as if sentences rather than blood ran in his veins. Outside of words lay the unspeakable:
Meanwhile the soothing, the healing, the sacred and salutary refuge from all these vulgarities and pains is simply to lose myself in this quiet, this blessed and uninvaded workroom, in the inestimable effort and refreshment of art, in resolute and beneficent production. I come back to it with a treasure of experience, of wisdom, of acquired material, of (it seems to me) seasoned fortitude and augmented capacity. Purchased by disgust enough, it is at any rate, a boon that now I hold it, I feel I wouldn’t, I oughtn’t to have missed. Ah, the terrible law of the artist—the law of fructification, of fertilisation, the law by which everything is grist to his mill—the law in short of the acceptance of all experience, of all suffering, of all life, of all suggestion, sensation and illumination.
And again:
To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it …
This is a language, with its “inestimables,” its “alls,” its “boons” and “beneficences,” which oddly recalls the otherworldly language (so blandly assuming solid rewards on earth) of his contemporaries, the American Transcendentalists: like them Henry James was turning in to a private Infinite which would give the painful American gregariousness a sense of privacy. His words to Logan Pearsall Smith who had described a desire to excel in literature (I quote from Simon Nowell Smith’s The Legend of the Master) are the proper conclusion:
There is one word—let me impress upon you—which you must inscribe on your banner, and that word is Loneliness.
Loneliness, like a pair of empty eyes, stares between the lines of this volume. We see the empty silent room, the desk, the lost, blank face of the well-dressed writer. Already as he takes his pen, he is far away from the dinner party he has just left. He is caught by “the terrible law.” As fast as Emerson he is turning matter into spirit. Nearly every note is made after a meeting with people whose words, or what he knows of their lives, have provided him with one of his “germs,” and at first sight, these pages might pass as the record of a vast sociability, a discreet mass of anonymous gossip. James himself, once attacked by Alphonse Daudet for frequenting people below his own intellectual level, might appear like another Thackeray ruined by dining out, or like the Major in The Real Thing with “the blankness, the deep intellectual repose of twenty years of country-house visiting.” (The American editors of the Notebook, F. O. Mathiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, point out that the French critic exaggerated: Henry James had a great many distinguished friends and some of the notes clearly are prompted by them. It is an illusion that a novelist needs high company continually, unless that happens to be his material; the conditions of the intellectual life are dangerously inclined to cut the novelist off from ordinary people who expose themselves less guardedly than the intellectuals do.) But examine a typical note carefully: the memoranda of Henry James are not jottings and reminders. They are written out, hundreds of them, at length. They are not snatched out of time, but time is in them; already the creative process has begun. A glance shows how much of James’s life must have passed in the immense labour of almost continuous writing, and writing out in full detail, as if to fill the emptiness of the day with the succulence of its lost verbatim. The earliest reference to What Maisie Knew—a story which may be followed from behind James’s shoulder in many entries in this volume—is not a hurried shorthand. It might be a minute passed from one civil servant to another:
Two days ago, at dinner at James Bryce’s, Mrs. Ashton, Mrs. Bryce’s sister, mentioned to me a situation that she had known of, of which it struck me immediately that something might be made in a tale. A child (boy or girl would do, but I see a girl, which would make it different from The Pupil) was divided by its parents in consequence of their being divorced. The court, for some reason, didn’t, as it might have done, give the child exclusively to either parent but decreed that it was to spend its time equally with each—that is alternately. Each parent married again and the child went to them a month, or three months about—finding with the one a new mother and the other a new father. Might not something be done with the idea of an odd and particular relation springing up …
James’s method is uncommon among writers and explains why his Notebooks are more fertile than most others we have been allowed to see. A full, superfluous, self-communing phrase like, “Might not something be done …” slows down the too bright idea, roots it in the mind, gives it soil. The slower the process of note-making the more likely it is to have sap and growth. James passing minutes to himself, James in colloquy, writing himself long and intimate letters: the note becomes one of those preliminary private outpourings, a “voluminous effusion … so extremely familiar, confidential and intimate—in the form of an interminable garrulous letter addressed to my own fond fancy.” Not only is his material the subject: he himself is in it, adjured, egged on and cozened. Strange cries, like the whimper of hounds on the scent, comically, not without mockery—and yet touchingly and even alarmingly: “I have only to let myself go”—break out. In life he is an outsider, but not in letters:
I have brought this little matter of Maisie to a point at which a really detailed scenario of the rest is indispensable for a straight and sure advance to the end. Let me not, just Heaven—not, God knows, that I incline to!—slacken in my deep observance of this strong and beneficent method—this intensely structural, intensely h
inged and jointed preliminary frame …
The coverts are drawn:
What is this IX, then, the moment, the stage of? Well, of a more presented, a more visible cynisme, on the part of everybody. What step does the action take in it? That of Sir C’s detachment from Ida—
Then comes the view:
Ah this divine conception of one’s little masses and periods in the scenic light—as rounded Acts; this patient, pious, nobly “vindictive” (vindicating) application of the same philosophy and method—I feel as if it still (above all, Yet) had a great deal to give me, and might carry me as far as I dream! God knows how far—into the flushed, dying day—that is! Depart et d’autre Maisie has become a bore to her parents—with Mrs. Wix to help to prove it.
And so from field to field he runs, down to that kill, so protracted, so lovingly delayed lest one thrill of the chase be lost—“Do I get anything out of Folkestone?”—where Mrs Wix at last “dit son fait to—or about.”
We could not ask for a more explicit statement of the compulsive quality of the creative process; in fact, one could say that any other quality is excluded from these notes. There is little that is casual or speculative. “Writing maketh an exact man.” The conception is musical or mathematical. Method has become a divinity. There are few descriptions of places though there is a warm evocation of what London meant to him in the early and almost pathetically impersonal summing up of his life at the beginning of the book. Our picture is continually of crowds of people, in clubs or drawing rooms; but not of people seen—for they are not usually described—but of people being useful to Henry James, in some way working for him, wired in unknown to themselves and all unworthily to his extraordinary system of secretive illumination. The lonely man lends them his foreign mind. Abstract notions occasionally are flashed to him: “What is there in the idea of Too Late?”—the idea of a passion or friendship long desired? But, generally, the information is trite. Even where the neatest plot is boxed, we see how the deliberate endeavour to heighten consciousness, which contains the whole of Henry James’s art, has transformed it at once (after, we can ask how much this very deliberateness lost for him as a novelist). Situation, dilemma rather than character, except in a very general way, mark the Notebooks; there is little portraiture and one would not gather much of James’s richness in this respect, a richness which displaces for many heretical readers the metaphysical interest of the double and triple turning of the screw upon them. How many readers, like hungry, but well-provided spiders, run carelessly over that elaborate and mathematical web, shimmering with knots and subtleties from one beautifully trussed fly to the next.
The Pritchett Century Page 69
