The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  Chichikov, the character at the heart of Gogol’s masterpiece, is a lower-echelon civil servant with a corrupt past who specializes in what Gogol calls “blandiloquence,” or elaborately empty compliments. Chichikov was brought up by a father whose last words of advice to his son were to please his superiors, not to be seduced by friendship, and to remember that nothing in life is so important as money—advice, notes Gogol, “that remained deeply engraved in his soul.”

  One of life’s “acquirers”—for Gogol a major sin—Chichikov turns out to be an inept acquirer, which makes him quite as interesting as he is detestable. “Wise is the man,” Gogol writes, “who does not disdain any character, and instead, examining him with a searching look, plumbs him to the very main-springs of his being.” That sentence should stand as the first commandment for every novelist.

  Chichikov is a fantast, who imagines himself one day running a plush and productive estate, with a pretty wife and fine children, himself the very model of the perfect Russian citizen. Although Gogol writes, “we have not taken a virtuous man as our hero,” he has made Chichikov oddly sympathetic. So that vile and petty in so many ways, Chichikov, when he is caught out at his game, garners our pity. Who cannot feel for the poor wretch, down on his knees, begging forgiveness “in his tailcoat of Narvarino smoke and flame, in his velvet waistcoat and new trousers, with his satin necktie and carefully groomed hair from which emanated the fresh smell of eau de Cologne.”

  Gogol was contemplating two further volumes to complete Dead Souls. The plan was for the first volume to be devoted to Crime, the second to Punishment, and a third to Redemption. He thought of the completed Dead Souls as a catechism of sorts that would save the Russian soul. In his second and third volumes, as he wrote to a friend, “the Russian would appear in the fullness of his national nature, in all the rich variety of the inner forces contained within him.” Gogol, thank goodness, was never able to get these volumes, with their implicit preachiness, written.

  Late in his short life, Gogol simultaneously found religion and promptly lost art. Once Gogol began to think of himself as a Christian reformer, Nabokov writes, “he lost the magic of creating something out of nothing.” His genius for devising delicious details disappeared; his powers of invention deserted him. Before he died, he burned what he had written of the second volume of his novel. The last ten years of his life Gogol suffered greatly from writer’s block, and died an excruciating death from anemia of the brain at the age of forty-three.

  Dead Souls, meanwhile, is among that small number of uncompleted masterpieces that includes Tchaikovsky’s Unfinished Symphony, and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, but with the important qualification that Nikolai Gogol’s great work is all the better for remaining unfinished.

  Speak, Memory

  (2014)

  Few are the truly great autobiographies: Benvenuto Cellini’s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, Ben Franklin’s, Edward Gibbon’s, John Stuart Mills’s, Henry Adams’s, possibly Gertrude Stein’s, and not many more. Nor ought one to be surprised at the paucity of their number. Of all forms of literature, autobiography is perhaps the most difficult to bring off successfully. Maintaining candor without lapsing into cant or self-adulation is only one of the difficulties autobiography presents. George Orwell underscored the point:

  Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

  To write superior autobiography one requires not only literary gifts, which are obtainable with effort, but also an intrinsically interesting life, which is less frequently available. Those who possess the one are frequently devoid of the other, and vice versa. Only a fortunate few are able to reimagine their lives, to find themes and patterns that explain a life, in the way successful autobiography requires.

  Vladimir Nabokov was among them. Late in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966), he writes that “the spiral is a spiritualized circle,” and “a colored spiral in a small ball of glass is how I see my own life.” This spiral took four twists. The first was the 20 years he spent in aristocratic opulence in his native Russia (1899–1919). This was followed by 21 years of impoverished exile in England, Germany, and France (1919–1940). The third was the years he spent as a teacher in the US (1940–1960). The enormous success of his novel Lolita, freeing him to return to Europe—specifically to Montreux, Switzerland—provided the fourth twist, in which he was able to live out his days writing and pursuing butterflies until his death at the age of 78 in 1977.

  Speak, Memory does not take up Nabokov’s life in the US, the bulk of which he spent teaching literature at Cornell University; nor does it touch on his days in Montreux. The book ends as he, his Jewish wife and their young son, fleeing the Nazis, are about to sail off to America. Much of the greater part of the autobiography is given over to his life in Russia. He writes of his “careful reconstruction of my artificial but beautifully exact Russian past,” from which he was brutally severed by the Russian Revolution. He never returned to Russia.

  As an autobiographer—and as a novelist, too—Nabokov worked microscopically—rather than telescopically. The miniature was his entrée into the grander scene. “There is, it would seem,” he writes, “in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones that is intrinsically artistic.” Such was his own method as an artist, and such was the art it produced on which his own international reputation rests.

  Nabokov’s portraits of his parents in Speak, Memory are a reminder of what good luck it is in life to love one’s mother and father. Of his mother, he writes: “To love with all one’s soul and leave the rest to fate was the simple rule she heeded.” Speak, Memory provides verbal snapshots of his mother with her brown dachshunds, out hunting mushrooms, listening appreciatively to her son’s first overheated poems. With her delicate sensitivity to the illusions of others, she understood what the nurturing of an artistic son required. “She cherished her own past,” Nabokov writes, “with the same retrospective fervor that I now do her image and my own past.”

  Nabokov’s father was a man given to good causes, who stood ready to sacrifice, and ultimately to die, for them. A man of learning and culture, he spoke out against government-encouraged pogroms, was against capital punishment, wrote against much that was cruel in the czarist regimes of his day. He served in Alexander Kerensky’s cabinet. Nabokov’s father lives forever in his son’s—and now our—view of him being tossed into the air in gratitude and adulation by the peasants on his estate for justly mediating a dispute among them. “For an instant,” Nabokov writes, having viewed this as a boy from a dining-room window, “the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in midair, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features turned to the sky.” He was killed in 1922 in Berlin, while shielding a liberal politician and editor from the pistol-fire of a far-right czarist fanatic.

  In Speak, Memory Nabokov describes his childhood as “cosmopolitan,” which it assuredly was, with four languages spoken in the family. The Nabokovs had not one but two chauffeurs to drive their three cars. Winters, when not in Biarritz, they occupied a mansion on a fashionable street in St. Petersburg. Four Great Danes were loosed at night under the control of a night watchman to guard Vyra, their estate 50 miles from town. Cooks, maids, gardeners, footmen were among the multitudinous household staff. An endless parade of tutors—German, English, French—was entrusted with the early education of the family’s six children. What Nabokov calls “the stability and essential completeness” of his young life was of course wiped out by the Bolsheviks.

  Speak, Memory is not without its longueurs. A lengthy section is given over to lepidoptery; another to the composition
of chess problems. Odd that so great a writer is unable to generate passion in his readers for what were two among his own greatest passions, but it is so. Both, though, touch on his artistic life. Rare butterflies show up in several of his novels and stories. In The Defense he wrote one of the great novels about chess, a book whose true theme is obsession.

  In his autobiography, Nabokov writes of those “things that one always hopes might survive captivity in the zoo of words.” In this zoo one finds, to cite merely half a dozen, such exotic verbal creatures as “karakul,” “chamfrained,” “intrados,” “discarnate” and “intervestibular.” Surprising juxtapositions (“flowing nuns” and “the numb fury of verse making”) and lilting formulations (a cousin who had “a sense of honor equivalent, morally, to perfect pitch,” and “elegant old poets and their smiling similes”) arise everywhere. Vladimir Nabokov hadn’t it in him to write an uninteresting sentence.

  A masterpiece of autobiography ought to capture the spirit of a time and place, be memorably well written, and make a reasonable pass at understanding that greatest of all conundrums, its author’s own life. On all three counts, Speak, Memory qualifies.

  Epictetus

  (2016)

  Chief among the schools of ancient philosophy were the Academics led by Plato, the Peripatetics by Aristotle, the Epicureans by Epicurus, and the Stoics founded by Zeno of Citium. Only Stoicism, now nearly entirely eclipsed, gained a strong footing in the Roman Empire, where it was embraced by Marcus Aurelius, best of all emperors, who, in his Meditations, produced one of the leading Stoic texts. The major Stoic teachers were Chrysippus, Diogenes of Babylon, and, above all, Epictetus (ce 55–135). Cicero and Seneca claimed to be Stoics, but the wavering temperament of the first and the expensive tastes of the second did not permit them to live the philosophy in the quotidian manner Stoicism requires.

  Epictetus, the slave of a freedman of Nero named Epaphroditus, who eventually freed him, was Phrygian (from Western Anatolia) by birth and lame in one leg. When in ce 89 the Emperor Domitian banished all philosophers from Rome, Epictetus took up residence in what is now Albania. Like Socrates, whom he much admired, Epictetus committed none of his teachings to writing. He had the good fortune to have among his pupils Arrian, the chronicler of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, who transcribed Epictetus’s teachings around ce 108 into a work called the Encheiridion, or Handbook, but which now carries the overarching title of Discourses of Epictetus.

  In what has come down to us, Epictetus largely ignores the scientific and metaphysical teachings of the Academics and Peripatetics. He concentrates instead on ethics and the ideal of the virtuous life. Virtue, in Epictetus’s philosophy, brings tranquility, leading on to happiness. Unlike the Epicureans, who taught that tranquility resided exclusively outside the life of action, the Stoics were not disdainful of the active life, and in Marcus Aurelius the theme of service not only to individuals but to the wider community is part of the human contract. Epictetus’s philosophy is grounded in common sense. How best to meet the requirements of life, or how to live one’s life “conformable to nature,” is his principal lesson.

  The first step on the way to doing this, according to Epictetus, is the scrupulous observation of appearances to form a right judgment of them. “Either things appear as they are,” he notes, “or they are not, and do not even appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be.” Misapprehension of appearances sets one on the track of anguish, frustrated desire, sadness, ruin. This advice of Epictetus is a precursor to Henry James’s advice to be a person on whom nothing is lost.

  “No man is free unless he is master of himself,” claims Epictetus, and self-mastery comes through will. We must will what is right for us, and will the avoidance of what is not. Will is strengthened through accurate observation of appearances. Will operates only on those things within our power.

  In our power are opinion, movement toward a thing, desire, aversion . . . ; and in a word, whatever are our own acts; not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices . . . , and in a word, whatever are not our own acts.

  This distinction anticipates Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer, later adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous: “O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, / The courage to change what can be changed, / and the wisdom to know the one from the other.”

  Desire, for Epictetus, must be carefully monitored. One must not “require a fig in winter.” Freedom is gained, he holds, “not by the full possession of the things which are desired, but by removing the desire.” Do not “desire many things, and you will have what you want.” (This advice, if followed, would close down the consumer society.) All that you truly have need of is “firmness, of a mind which is conformable to nature, of being free from perturbation.”

  “From your own thoughts,” Epictetus states, “cast away sadness, fear, desire, envy, malevolence, avarice, effeminacy, intemperance.” Among the things we must not desire is long life. Behind this desire is the fear of death, which is useless since all things in life are transient. Like Montaigne, Epictetus invokes us never to allow death to be long out of mind. Montaigne hoped that death would take him while he was cultivating the cabbages in his garden. “May death take me,” Epictetus says, “while I am thinking of these things, while I am thus writing and reading.” We know that Montaigne’s death was a painful one, of quinsy, which rendered him speechless at the end. How Epictetus died is not known.

  Virtue is truly its only reward for Epictetus, for, though he frequently cites God and his greater design of the world, no mention in his work is made of an afterlife. Nor is there any talk of the fate of the soul once departed, if depart it does, from the body. What one gains from the philosophy of Epictetus is awareness, a plan for righteous conduct, and self-mastery of the kind available only to those rare philosophers for whom word and deed are indivisible.

  H. W. Fowler

  (2017)

  After completing the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Henry Watson Fowler suggested to Oxford University Press doing a dictionary that would leave out the obvious words and instead concentrate on those that were confusing and inexact as well as on troubling idioms and obsolete rules. An editor at Oxford referred to it as a “Utopian dictionary,” one “that would sell very well—in Utopia.” The book, published in 1926 under the title A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was in fact a modest bestseller, and subsequently went through several editions and two revisions.

  The book’s success was owing entirely to its author, H. W. Fowler, a former English public-school teacher, a failed literary journalist, and a lexicographer extraordinaire. Fowler was magisterial and commonsensical, immensely knowledgeable and understatedly witty, a grammatical moralist whose hatred of humbug made him a moralist on the side of good sense.

  A radical in his day, Fowler held that it was no crime to end a sentence with a preposition, that it was better to split an infinitive than to write an awkward sentence attempting to avoid doing so, that common words were to be preferred over foreign and polysyllabic ones. Fowler, as Ernest Gowers, author of The Complete Plain Words, wrote, “was an emancipator from the fetters of the grammatical pedants that had bound us for so long.”

  A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is suffused with the personality and idiosyncrasies of its author, more so perhaps than even Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary. Fowler had a taste for risky but amusing generalizations. In his entry on “Didacticism,” for example, he remarks that “men are as much possessed by the didactic impulse as women by the maternal instinct.” By way of usage, he also taught good manners. His entry “French Words” begins:

  Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth—greater, indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion and good manners.

  One frequently turns to Fowler for advice on useful distinctions: between “forceful” and “forcible,” or �
��intense” and “intensive,” or among “finical,” “finicking,” “finicky” and “finikin.” He was excellent at stripping a euphemism or genteelism down to its essential meaning: “‘Not to put too fine a point upon it’ is an apology for a downright expression, and means ‘to put it bluntly.’” On occasion he supplies a brief entry on language change, as in the entry “hair-do”: “This now compound noun has reached the dictionaries, and deserves to supersede the alien coiffure and to be written hairdo.”

  The great gems in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage are the lengthier entries sometimes buried under titles that have now themselves become the names for good sense in composition. “Elegant Variation,” for example, denoting that habit of “second-rate writers, those more intent on expressing themselves prettily than on conveying their meaning clearly. . .” Elegant variation is the sin in composition of calling the same thing, or naming the same act, by as many different words as possible. The dialogue of amateur writers of fiction, suckers for elegant variation, tends to have their characters not merely “say,” but “opine,” “allow,” “retort,” “riposte,” and so on into the night.

  Other such entries include “Love of the Long Word,” “Split Infinitive,” “Superiority,” “Novelese,” “Hybrids and Malformations,” “Novelty-Hunting,” “Vogue Words,” “Slipshod Extensions,” and others. One gets a strong sense of Fowler’s general tone, wit, and point of view from the opening of his article “Sturdy Indefensibles”: