The other book I read in secret was “Little Women.” When it was given to me I was insulted, as the title seemed too sissy to be endured—it made me think of cigar boxes full of dolls’ clothes and passing around cakes at a meeting of your mother’s garden club. But on a tedious Sunday I started it, and for a year I read it constantly. But because I cried so much over Jo’s refusal to marry Laurie and the death of Beth I did not want the family to catch me with the book, and I read it at night after going to bed.
About a year later “My Life” by Isadora Duncan affected me like the rash. It made me want to take on the responsibility of the whole family and traipse with them to Chicago and Paris and Greece. It made me sicken for the hectic radiance of concert halls and starvation in dubious hotels. This book also was the cause of a School of the Dance in our neighborhood. And for a whole week I managed, by strategy and bribes, to keep a little gang of sweaty children draped in sheets and hopping hopelessly around the back yard.
Often there comes a time in early adolescence when books suddenly take on a new meaning. The books that most of us enjoy in childhood are the ones through which we can enjoy some outward, physical adventure that is not likely to befall us in everyday life. Or we like the sound of words put together in a pleasant way. But then all at once neither outward experience nor jingles can satisfy us altogether, and we are drawn to the richer and more dramatic adventures of the soul. With me this change came when, at thirteen, I first read the great Russians.
The books of Dostoevski—“The Brothers Karamazov,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “The Idiot”—opened the door to an immense and marvelous new world. For years I had seen these books on the shelves of the public library, but on examining them I had been put off by the indigestible names and the small print. So when at last I read Dostoevski it was a shock that I shall never forget—and the same amazement takes hold of me whenever I read these books today, a sense of wonder that cannot be jaded by familiarity. Along with Dostoevski the stories of Chekhov have for me the same powerful fascination. The hot lazy Russian summers, the lonely villages on the steppes, the old grandfathers who sleep with the children on the stove, the white winters of Saint Petersburg—these are as close to me as scenes from my own home town. And of course there are “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina” and some of the shorter works of Tolstoy. “Dead Souls” by Gogol and all the works of Turgenev are books that can keep me at home almost any evening.
Sometimes it seems to me that the grandeur of Russian literature lies in the fact that the Russian writers, more perhaps than any others, have been able to accept the conditions of human existence. Life by them was reckoned as a unit, and they knew the necessity of death. Yet the dominant attitude of the great Russians is not one of cynicism.
An appreciation of French literature did not come to me so explosively as did the Russians; indeed, it crept up on me in a curious way. Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” and the novels of Stendhal did not appeal to me at all on first acquaintance. Now I read them lovingly and often. The poetry of Baudelaire and any kind of alcohol are good companions—one of the best ways I know of spending a winter evening is to sit alone in the kitchen with one’s feet on the stove, a decanter of sherry on the floor near-by, and to read “Les Fleurs du Mal” aloud to oneself. Proust is another matter, and if possible (though this is unlikely) he should be read straight through and in a state of dead sobriety. It is like the strange and brilliant life submerged in a tropical sea—this world of Proust’s. And the striking thing is that the elaborate precision with which Proust develops his detailed effects is used in this great work as a whole, so that these volumes are an architectural phenomenon. The sinister and tragic evolution of Proust’s characters, from the Baron de Charlus to Madame Verdurin, is done with pure wizardry that one cannot forget. Moncrieff’s translation does a fine job of preserving the style of the original.
German literature does not seem to translate so well—German poetry least of all. The prose work of Goethe interests me far more than the poetry. The same is true of Rainer Maria Rilke, and “The Journal of My Other Self” and “Letters to a Young Poet” are valuable books for any young author. “The Castle” and “Investigations of a Dog” by Franz Kafka are as strange and compelling as dreams.
“Wuthering Heights” is one of my favorite English novels. And the books of Jane Austen have a sharp charm that draws me back to them over and over again. Then, of course, there are “Moll Flanders” and “Tristram Shandy.” Most of the novels of Walter Scott I remember sulkily and in tedious detail—for we read and had examinations about his books continuously in high school, and they bored me. None of the novels of D. H. Lawrence ever bored me, however. And the first reading of “Sons and Lovers,” when I was sixteen, was a trap for me as it is a trap for most young authors: I wanted to write a novel just like it, and for a few painful months I even tried to. One of the most extraordinary of Lawrence’s works I came across only a year or so ago, and that is his introduction to M. M.’s “Memoirs of the Foreign Legion.”
The first pages of Melville’s “Moby Dick” are not easy to forget. The very first words—“My name is Ishmael!” echo in the mind a long time after. Also the somber delicacy of Hawthorne’s style has the same spell-binding quality as winter sunlight seen through a window of colored glass. Then Walt Whitman—he certainly is hard to forget. Among the recent Southern writers Thomas Wolfe is one whom I most admire. In “Look Homeward, Angel” there is for me a passionate feeling of recognition. Faulkner is interesting and when I read “The Sound and the Fury” a whole new track of thought was opened up for me.
The short stories of Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Mansfield came my way at just about the same time. For many years I have read and re-read both these authors. The curious beauty of Mansfield’s stories is like music heard from a faraway piano and stopped suddenly in the middle of a phrase. One is left with a feeling of sadness and tension that is hard to explain. And such stories as “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Hemingway are little milestones. I am glad that I did not read “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann until I was about eighteen years old. And I am glad also that I read Joyce’s “The Dead” when I was still in high school—a couple of years before I got hold of a copy of “Ulysses.”
Some books, as one thinks back casually, do not seem to fit into any particular category. Among these is Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives.” These long novellae are arresting both from a technical and an emotional point of view. One of these stories, “Melanctha,” catches the subtle, musical quality of Negro language and thought as well as any writing I know. Also quite apart from other books is the work of Isak Dinesen, a Danish woman who writes in English. Her “Seven Gothic Tales” has a weird, cold beauty that is like frost flowers on a windowpane. Then there is the work of Richard Wright who, in his books about the problems of the Negro, has surely staked a new mine of literary material. And the stories of Kay Boyle and Katherine Anne Porter—and the dark, lovely sketches of small town American life in “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson. . . .
These, then, are a few of the books I remember just now. And yet “remember” is hardly the word, for there is implied the possibility that one might forget. While books that one loves are a part of oneself, like a muscle or a nerve. And in thinking back at random one is likely to overlook the books that are dear above all others. A moment ago I realized I had not mentioned a book that I have come to understand in the past couple of years and that now I like to read in almost every evening—the Bible. That, also, is a book to be remembered.
The Russian Realists and Southern Literature
IN THE SOUTH during the past fifteen years a genre of writing has come about that is sufficiently homogeneous to have led critics to label it “the Gothic School.” This tag, however, is unfortunate. The effect of a Gothic tale may be similar to that of a Faulkner story in its evocation of horror, beauty, and emotional ambivalence—but this effect evolves from
opposite sources; in the former the means used are romantic or supernatural, in the latter a peculiar and intense realism. Modern Southern writing seems rather to be most indebted to Russian literature, to be the progeny of the Russian realists. And this influence is not accidental. The circumstances under which Southern literature has been produced are strikingly like those under which the Russians functioned. In both old Russia and the South up to the present time a dominant characteristic was the cheapness of human life.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Russian novelists, particularly Dostoievsky, were criticized harshly for their so called “cruelty.” This same objection is now being raised against the new Southern writers. On first thought the accusation seems puzzling. Art, from the time of the Greek tragedians on, has unhesitatingly portrayed violence, madness, murder, and destruction. No single instance of “cruelty” in Russian or Southern writing could not be matched or outdone by the Greeks, the Elizabethans, or, for that matter, the creators of the Old Testament. Therefore it is not the specific “cruelty” itself that is shocking, but the manner in which it is presented. And it is in this approach to life and suffering that the Southerners are so indebted to the Russians. The technique briefly is this: a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail.
To the reader accustomed to the classical traditions this method has a repellent quality. If, for instance, a child dies and the life and death of this child is presented in a single sentence, and if the author passes over this without comment or apparent pity but goes on with no shift in tone to some trivial detail—this method of presentation seems cynical. The reader is used to having the relative values of an emotional experience categorized by the author. And when the author disclaims this responsibility the reader is confused and offended.
Marmeladov’s funeral supper in Crime and Punishment, and As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, are good examples of this type of realism. The two works have much in common. Both deal with the subject of death. In both there is a fusion of anguish and farce that acts on the reader with an almost physical force. Marmeladov’s violent death, Katerina Ivanovna’s agitation about the supper, the details of the food served, the clerk “who had not a word to say for himself and smelt abominably”—on the surface the whole situation would seem to be a hopeless emotional rag-bag. In the face of agony and starvation the reader suddenly finds himself laughing at the absurdities between Katerina Ivanovna and the landlady, or smiling at the antics of the little Pole. And unconsciously after the laughter the reader feels guilty; he senses that the author has duped him in some way.
Farce and tragedy have always been used as foils for each other. But it is rare, except in the works of the Russians and the Southerners, that they are superimposed one upon the other so that their effects are experienced simultaneously. It is this emotional composite that has brought about the accusations of “cruelty.” D. S. Mirsky, in commenting on a passage from Dostoievsky, says: “Though the element of humor is unmistakably present, it is a kind of humor that requires a rather peculiar constitution to amuse.”
In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, this fusion is complete. The story deals with the funeral journey made by Anse Bundren to bury his wife. He is taking the body to his wife’s family graveyard some forty miles away; the journey takes him and his children several days and in the course of it the body decomposes in the heat and they meet with a mad plethora of disasters. They lose their mules while fording a stream, one son breaks his leg and it becomes gangrenous, another son goes mad, the daughter is seduced—a more unholy cortege could hardly be imagined. But the immensities of these disasters are given no more accent than the most inconsequential happenings. Anse throughout the story has his mind on the false teeth he is going to buy when he reaches the town. The girl is concerned with some cake she has brought with her to sell. The boy with the gangrenous leg keeps saying of the pain, “It don’t bother me none,” and his main worry is that his box of carpenter’s tools will be lost on the way. The author reports this confusion of values but takes on himself no spiritual responsibility.
To understand this attitude one has to know the South. The South and old Russia have much in common sociologically. The South has always been a section apart from the rest of the United States, having interests and a personality distinctly its own. Economically and in other ways it has been used as a sort of colony to the rest of the nation. The poverty is unlike anything known in other parts of this country. In social structure there is a division of classes similar to that in old Russia. The South is the only part of the nation having a definite peasant class. But in spite of social divisions the people of the South are homogeneous. The Southerner and the Russian are both “types” in that they have certain recognizable and national psychological traits. Hedonistic, imaginative, lazy, and emotional—there is surely a cousinly resemblance.
In both the South and old Russia the cheapness of life is realized at every turn. The thing itself, the material detail, has an exaggerated value. Life is plentiful; children are born and they die, or if they do not die they live and struggle. And in the fight to maintain existence the whole life and suffering of a human being can be bound up in ten acres of washed out land, in a mule, in a bale of cotton. In Chekhov’s “The Peasants,” the loss of the samovar in the hut is as sad, if not sadder, than the death of Nikolai or the cruelty of the old grandmother. And in Tobacco Road, Jeeter Lester’s bargain, the swapping of his daughter for seven dollars and a throw-in, is symbolical. Life, death, the experiences of the spirit, these come and go and we do not know for what reason; but the thing is there, it remains to plague or comfort, and its value is immutable.
Gogol is credited to be the first of the realists. In “The Overcoat” the little clerk identifies his whole life with his new winter cloak, and loses heart and dies when it is stolen. From the time of Gogol, or from about 1850 until 1900, imaginative writing in Russia can be regarded as one artistic growth. Chekhov differs certainly from Aksakov and from Turgenev, but taken all in all the approach to their material and the general technique is the same. Morally the attitude is this: human beings are neither good nor evil, they are only unhappy and more or less adjusted to their unhappiness. People are born into a world of confusion, a society in which the system of values is so uncertain that who can say if a man is worth more than a load of hay, or if life itself is precious enough to justify the struggle to obtain the material objects necessary for its maintenance. This attitude was perhaps characteristic of all Russians during those times, and the writers only reported exactly what was true in their time and place. It is the unconscious moral approach, the fundamental spiritual basis of their work. But this by no means precludes a higher conscious level. And it is in the great philosophical novels that the culmination of Russian realism has been reached.
In the space of fourteen years, from 1866 to 1880, Dostoievsky wrote his four masterpieces: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. These works are extremely complex. Dostoievsky, in the true Russian tradition, approaches life from a completely unbiased point of view; the evil, the confusion of life, he reports with the sharpest candor, fusing the most diverse emotions into a composite whole. But in addition to this he employs the analytical approach. It is almost as though having long looked on life and having faithfully reflected what he has seen in his art, he is appalled both by life itself and by what he has written. And unable to reject either, or to delude himself, he assumes the supreme responsibility and answers the riddle of life itself. But to do so he would have to be a Messiah. Sociologically these problems could never be altogether solved, and besides Dostoievsky was indifferent to economic theories. And it is in his role as a Messiah that Dostoievsky fails to meet the responsibility he has assumed. The questions he poses are too immense. They are like angry demands to God. Why has man let himself be demeaned and allowed his
spirit to be corrupted by matter? Why is there evil? Why poverty and suffering? Dostoievsky demands magnificently, but his solution, the “new Christianity,” does not answer; it is almost as though he uses Christ as a contrivance.
The “solution” to Crime and Punishment is a personal solution, the problems were metaphysical and universal. Raskolnikov is a symbol of the tragic inability of man to find an inward harmony with this world of disorder. The problem deals with the evils of society, and Raskolnikov is only a result of this discordance. By withdrawal, by personal expiation, by the recognition of a personal God, a Raskolnikov may or may not find a subjective state of grace. But if so only a collateral issue has been resolved; the basic problem remains untouched. It is like trying to reach the Q.E.D. of a geometrical problem by means of primer arithmetic.
As a moral analyst Tolstoi is clearer. He not only demands why, but what and how as well. From the time he was about fifty years of age his Confessions give us a beautiful record of a human being in conflict with a world of disharmony. “I felt,” he wrote, “that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped.” He goes on to admit that from an outward point of view his own personal life was ideal—he was in good health, unworried by finances, content in his family. Yet the whole of life around him seemed grotesquely out of balance. He writes: “The meaningless absurdity of life—it is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.” Tolstoi’s conversion is too well known to need more than mention here. In essence it is the same as Raskolnikov’s as it is a purely solitary spiritual experience and fails to solve the problem as a whole.
But the measure of success achieved by these metaphysical and moral explorations is not of the greatest importance in itself. Their value is primarily catalytic. It is the way in which these moral probings affect the work as a whole that counts. And the effect is enormous. For Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, and the minor moralists brought to Russian realism one element that had hitherto been obscure or lacking. That is the element of passion.
Carson McCullers Page 46
