Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  There is a certain book that, if there were still any desert islands to be shipwrecked on, I would hope to have with me at the time. First, frankly, because of the company—it has so much of it. It has two heroines, one blond and gentle, of the pretty sort that dark women like to think of as ninnies, and one dark, fiery and ve-ery slightly masculine—of the type the gentle ones like to call “bluestocking.” Its heroes are two also—brothers, Robert, a mill-owner, tradesman, Whig, an unromantic man of action who “seems unconscious that his features are fine,” and Louis, the tutor, the seeming misanthrope, who really has a “quiet, out of the way humor”—one of the typical hommes fatales of nineteenth-century novels—those gentlemen whose attractive morbidity proceeds from the possession of qualities superior to their station in life. I leave it to you to guess which of the four marries who. In addition to these, the large cast includes three comic curates, three spinsters, two rectors, a country squire, a pompous baronet and a modest one, a mischievous scamp of fourteen and several other charming children, various supernumeraries drawn from village life, etc.

  This is a novel full of that coziness which the psychological novel has lost, a novel truly crammed with the furniture of daily living. Reading it is like walking into a series of genre pictures, into parlors, salons, kitchens, schoolrooms, and yet, because it was written in 1849 and is set in three towns in the West Riding of Yorkshire, it is pervaded too by those great secondary characteristics of nineteenth century English romanticism—the wind and the weather. Its plot is of the period, an entirely un-selfconscious blend of melodrama and sociological observation in which there is a mystery of parentage for one heroine and the dread risk of hydrophobia for the other; yet, underlying these, one of the most solid representations we have of England at the time of the industrial revolution—the period when the woolen trade was suffering from the effects of the Orders in Council, the wars of 1812 and the riots of the workers over the introduction of new machinery. The novel has humor too, high comedy and low, that its author intended; second, for us, the unconscious humor that we now find in those stilted mores of the emotions that we have learned to call Victorian. It has everything.

  It remains only to tell you what the name of the book is: it was written by a woman who was born in 1816 and died in 1855; it is of course Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, to my mind a book grossly neglected in favor of Jane Eyre, and I send you off to it without further ado, stopping only to quote its first line—one of the most enchanting beginnings I know—“Of late years, an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England.”

  We come now to one of the great novels of the world—as I say that, I always find myself thinking what a singular treasure one has when one is able to say such a thing almost without thinking, without question. Criticism is a defensive procedure, beset with the never quite submerged antics of the ego, for in judging we know full well that we judge ourselves. But on those occasions when we meet a truly great work of art and can subscribe to it fully, then judgment quite literally rests. By this I mean that such a meeting rests us—we find ourselves suddenly in that area which is below ego and above fashion, where, unutterably relieved, we can declare for the absolute. We are surprised by the lasting. We’ve been muddling along with the transitory; we are suddenly suspended in what is sure. It is no less difficult to talk about, however.

  I first read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons when I was about seventeen; I was reading it in the family living room where my father was also sitting quietly reading, and when I finished the next but last chapter, which tells of the death of the medical student Bazarov, in the house of his parents, I found myself crying hard, openly, in a way that I had never before cried over a book—and perhaps not since—and I sneaked out of the room so that my father would not see. At the time I no doubt cried partly because the death of the young and untried is peculiarly affecting to those who are the same, who perhaps have already imagined themselves on a similar bier. And partly, I suppose, because Bazarov, the nihilist who denied filial love even while he suffered from it, had something to say to me; although I did not see, as an older person might, that his nihilism was only that of the young, I recognized the suffering. No doubt I thought too that I would have loved and understood him, as Madame Odintsov, whom he loved, had not. I was later to see otherwise, that their tragedy was that they had understood each other, and had parted for this, not for the lack of it.

  But, to return to that living room, I often wonder now, in the way that we like to rearrange the past, of what conversation would have ensued if my father had caught me sneaking away, and if I had handed him the book, saying: “Read it. And explain to me. Why am I crying?” For the simple and eternal subject of this book, set down with the Russian genius for depicting the concrete in the terms of the illimitable, is this: two generations, and the gaps and ties that lie between them—between the older, rebels passé, who have settled with life, and younger revolutionaries with the short future of revolutionaries, who think they will not settle. And how this has gone on, two by two, and will go on, two by two. And how, in Turgenev’s mind, it perhaps does not go on in vain.

  About seventeen years later I re-read the book, and was shocked to see all I had missed in it. “I read too much too young,” I thought to myself. I think otherwise now. Such books should be read first when one is young enough to care without quite knowing why, and again during those smart years when one thinks one knows why one once did care, and again—and this I look forward to—when one is too old not to care, and not to know why. Meanwhile, every time I re-read Fathers and Sons—I did so again in order to be able to talk to you about it—I see something I missed before, and I do not expect ever to read it without doing so.

  Let me tell you, briefly, what it concerns. Nicholas Petrovich is awaiting his son Arcadi, who has just graduated from the university and is bringing home for a visit his friend Bazarov, son of a retired doctor, and himself a medical student. Arcadi, a sweet and simple young man who “loved nature although he did not dare avow it” and is doomed by his admiration of Bazarov, the brilliant disciple of scientific materialism pushed to the nth, who believes, or thinks he believes this: “I do not believe it at all necessary to know each individual in particular. … Moral maladies spring from a bad education, from the absurd condition of our social law. Reform society and you will have no more of them … in a society well-organized it will be all the same whether a man is stupid or intelligent, bad or good.” “A good chemist is twenty times more useful than a good poet.”

  Arcadi is ashamed to let his friend see the depth of his love for his own father. The two friends visit Bazarov’s parents, and there we see that Bazarov also has not been able to quench his family feelings—his tenderness toward the worth and the foibles of his father, his inability to be harsh to the simple, doting attentions of his mother. Meanwhile, we see the two fathers, good fellows, not really old—Nicholas P. is still in his middle forties—but both of them retired to those compromises that individual lives sooner or later make. Arcadi’s father, full of vague, well-intentioned efforts to manage his farm under the recent rulings which have freed the serfs, is abashed before the sweeping theories of the young men; Vasili, Bazarov’s father, retired from practice, but still doctoring, is outmoded in his son’s eyes. The sad timidity of the fathers before their critic sons, their sense of failure, of compromise, of not yet being, wholly negligible—and this complicated with an insistent love of their critics; opposite them the young men, bent on changing the world, despising their elders for their abdication from it, unaware that they themselves hold the ovum of compromise—and this all complicated with a love for those whom their theories teach them to despise—all this Turgenev does in the round, as the whole novel, separate its facets as we may, does. Do not think that I do it any sort of justice here.

  The action of the novel occurs entirely in the series of visits paid by the young men; on one of these, to the house of Mme. Odintsov, Bazarov falls in love and “recogni
zed with a sombre indignation that romanticism had gained on himself.” Mme. Odintsov, beautiful, rich, has, after certain difficulties, attained her defenses, and means to keep them; for her “tranquility is better than anything.” She is one of those subtle people who choose the expedient thing even while they are well aware of what they lose by doing so. In the account of their love affair, as in the account of the fathers and sons, we hear, with the same extra-sensory perception with which we hear it beneath the concrete action of all great fiction, the sound of the mills of the gods grinding. Here it is the sound of what people must give up, or will give up—in favor of what they cannot give up. But I am way ahead of myself. That happens to be what I saw in last week’s re-reading.

  What I saw in the second reading was entirely different. It was then, say 1948; by then, a whole generation of students, locked like me in the ivory towers of literature had had to become “politically conscious.” And I saw with amazement that I had entirely missed seeing the extent to which this is a novel of political and social ideas. Perhaps I may be excused for this because, as with the “historical” novel, I had been trained by this time to think of the “political” novel as a separate entity, where the people were always pastiche to the ideas. Whereas, in the 19th century Russian novel, although the air is political, the garden is political, and social argument streams through the Russian temperament like arterial blood—man as a human animal underwrites it all. Fathers and Sons takes place during the era of reforms that began with the accession of Alexander, when the serfs were freed, the peasants allowed to pay for land and given courts of justice—you may remember the reference in the first paragraph of the book, to the domestic, “a servant of the new generation of progress.” Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches played an important role in bringing about these reforms, for which he later was punished, and his portrait of Bazarov so outraged his friends that he went to live abroad. All his work is documentary in the narrow sense as well as the large. Yet I had been so interested in the people, it had all seemed so natural, that I had hardly noticed. As I have said, this is a great novel.

  But, during those years over here after the iron curtain fell, when people wondered what the Russians were like now, when later one heard it surmised that the Russians were still Byzantine, still Slavophile, still in fact Russian, I often wondered why the knowledge that censorship denied us was not more sought in those books that ignore frontiers, in a book like this, where the author can say, in a casual aside: “The city of X, to which the two friends went, had for governor a man still young, at once progressive and despotic, as so many are in Russia.” Or where Bazarov can say of “Liberals”; “You gentlemen cannot go beyond a generous indignation … or resignation, things which do not mean much. You think you are great men, you think yourself at the pinnacle of human perfection when you have ceased to beat your servants, and we, we ask only to fight with one another and to beat. Our dust reddens your eyes, our mire soils you; you admire yourselves complacently; you take pleasure in reproaching yourself; all that bores us; we have other things to do than to admire or reproach ourselves; we must have other men broken at the wheel.” Does that sound familiar?

  Later on I saw many other things in this book. Once, when I was reading another favorite, James’ The Bostonians, I thought suddenly of Eudoxia Kukshin in the Turgenev book, the emancipated woman, and of how Turgenev had done, in ten hilarious pages, so much of what James had done in 378. And I thought of Turgenev’s portrait of Anna, Bazarov’s mother, the simple, household woman, whom he has set down forever in two pages of short sentences bright as silk, in a way that James, for all his long and marvelous respirations, perhaps could not do. Still later when, having become a writer, I was reading with a certain professionalism, more aware of trade-secrets, as it were, I saw how Paul, Arcadi’s uncle, the frustrated elegant of whom Bazarov says “his nails might be sent to the Exhibition,” a man who in a lesser book would be made to say all the properly wrong things that would conform him to type, is here made to step out of character now and then, to speak on the side of the angels, to say some of the right things that make him a man. Bazarov, of course, does speak in a straight “line”; the secret here is that while he does so, we watch him feeling in another.

  But the story must end. Bazarov returns to live in his father’s house and help him doctor; he contracts a surgical infection from an autopsy on a typhus patient, and dies—untried.

  And now I shall have to reverse myself. I’ve been telling you that novels are neither political tracts nor historical ones, are stories of individuals, not eras, and I am now about to tell you of two modern novels, one of which began as a political tract, and another, in which an era—ours just past—is the true subject. But “modern” means in part a “reversal.” And, as I have said, the novel is a protean form. If it won’t remain consistent, there is no reason why I should.

  I was in Rome during the spring elections of 1953. The city, with almost every building plastered from roof-line to pavement with election posters, looked like an enormous mosaic. Almost all the posters had that wonderful Italian versatility of design and color, and many of my American friends were making collections of them. This was the period of McCarthy at home; it came uncomfortably to us to admit that the Communist posters were by far the handsomest and had the most effective slogans. A friend and I were sitting in his car, parked off the Piazza del Populo, looking at some of them. My friend was an Englishman, a Catholic who had spent some of his boyhood in Italy, had worked with British Intelligence there during the war, and was now a critic and editor specializing in Italian literature. We were looking at one poster that had a photo of a banquet table surrounded by members of ducal or princely families—one was a Torlonia. The name of each man was printed over his head, and beneath the photo there was a list of figures, enumerating the taxes each of the men should by law have paid, and the actual smaller amounts each had paid. “Can one trust those figures?” I said. “Is this true?” My friend sighed. “Yes,” he said. “Unfortunately, there is no need to exaggerate them. You in America have wealthy men, but you cannot understand the kind of wealth a man can have here. None of your American millionaires is rich the way Torlonia is—in privilege, in land, and in human men.” Just then, a group of young boys and girls surrounded our car—it was not a pretentious one—and spat into it. After they had gone, and we had cleaned ourselves, my friend said: “I don’t suppose I can make you understand the basis for Communism here. I love southern Italy, yet I cannot bear to stay here long, because I know how the peasants have to live. I’m a Catholic, but if I stayed there for any length of time, I would have to become a Communist too. Not in any intellectual way, in theirs. And in spite of all that we all well know. But I don’t suppose you could understand.”

  But I did understand, because I had read Silone’s Fontamara. Fontamara is a town in southern Italy, and this is a story of how Fascism and Communism came to that town, and of what was there before. It was written in 1930, probably when Silone was still a member of the Party, but although he may have begun it as a pamphleteer, he finished it as a novelist, and the reader does not have to know or subscribe to any Internationale except that of human beings in order to participate. What Silone has done is to show how some people have to live, and he has done it from the inside of the peasant mind, using the choral dignity of a people who have no written language. As he himself says, the story is “woven”; it is told by three people, as an old man, his wife and his son, each of them handing over the next chapter to another: “my wife will tell you what happened next”; “my son will tell you what happened next.” And they do. And you see. As Silone says in his preface: “… let each man tell his story in his own way.” Many years later it was reprinted, not long ago, in a revised version I did not read. It did not seem to me to need revision.

  And as each man tells his story in his own way, we are beginning to see, perhaps without even having paused to note the great landmarks of Joyce and Proust, what a long wa
y the novel has come. People are still its subject, but now it is people in the aggregate, almost in the mass, as if the individual no longer has enough weight to hold a story together, against the single all-face of the human condition. The arena has become more compelling than the gladiators—as it had in the Malraux novels. Or the novel takes to an old and tried way of handling men in the aggregate—to satire—to Orwellian returns to Erewhon and Gulliver’s Travels. Or in those novels which cling, however tenuously to the story of the individual, we see the powerful, nullifying mask of the real hero—our era, our “spirit of the age”—peering always over his shoulder. And then the novel perhaps tumbles toward essay.

  In 1949, a novel called Do I Wake or Sleep appeared under the name of Isabel Bolton, a pseudonym. Since then she has published several others. All of them were written during her sixties or later, and all have a similar scheme—a tenuous, brittle plot, touched upon sometimes faintly, sometimes luridly, and always transmitted through the mind of one observer, who is always a woman looking back upon her past, out upon her world. All of the first three novels were set in New York—Do I Wake opened at the World’s Fair in 1939, just after Hitler entered the Sudetenland. What she did with the New York scene was to make it no longer a scene only, but a fusion of the sensations peculiar to a city strung upon the nerves of its inhabitants. She had a style that, like all the best, seemed fatally wedded to the meaning it carried, the one inseparable from the other. Its nearest antecedent was possibly Virginia Woolf, the Woolf of the last extraordinary novel, that ought to be better known—Between the Acts. Like Woolf, she used breathless, cumulative phrases, flashing with participles, whose almost wearing cadence seemed certain to topple, but built instead into sentences whose strange effect is to make the present, our present, constantly palpable. “But isn’t this poetry?” it was said, and the next instant—because a strong analytic intellect, prosaic enough when it wished, was working there—“But isn’t this essay?”