Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

by John Updike

  Reading through The Gambler and its attendant documents produces several unexpected impressions—chief among them that the lovers did not much like one another. Indeed, through the mist of egoistical preoccupations they hardly saw each other. Polina’s story “The Stranger and Her Lover” betrays no awareness that she is representing, in fictional guise, one of the century’s most fascinating spirits: “He started telling her various anecdotes and stories from his own life. These tales might have been, perhaps, of some interest to other people, but Anna saw little wit, and even less refinement, about them.” Once Dostoevsky returns to Russia, he drops out of her diary with scarcely a thud, to be replaced by a titillating series of (at the least) flirtations. Mr. Wasiolek, in his introduction, protests: “one is dismayed to find that it is only our interest that lifts the image of Dostoevsky in her diary from the mesh of her prosaisms.” The literary scholar, necessarily in love with greatness, cannot help scolding this mediocre little blue-stocking who, awarded the living Dostoevsky’s love, betrayed him with a—Wasiolek’s phrase—“trivial and insensitive medical student.” Worse yet, in her fictional representation Dostoevsky appears “petty, boastful, and vulgar; his only redeeming features consist in his appreciation of her majestic character and beauty, in his astonishment at having possessed her, and in his contrition at having lost her.” It is true that Polina’s “The Stranger and Her Lover” is pitiably inept and self-promoting; the persistently “majestic” heroine obtusely refuses to perceive that her one ticket to significance, from the standpoint of posterity, lies with this repulsive, repelled lover, whose immortal genius is never for an instant permitted to wink through the vapors of her narcissism.

  But does Polina fare better in Dostoevsky’s version of their affair, in the minor masterpiece The Gambler? Not much. The pages dealing with “Polina Aleksandrovna” and her willful abuse of the infatuated “Aleksei Ivanovich” seem rather perfunctory, as though the author were blocking out an idea instead of giving flesh to inspiration. “I simply don’t understand what I find in her. All right, she is beautiful, that she is; or it seems that she is. She drives other men out of their minds, too. She is tall and slender, though very slim. It seems as if one could tie her in a knot or bend her double. Her foot is long and narrow: tormenting. Exactly so: tormenting.” The focus is on the torment, not on the woman. When she dares Aleksei to insult a passing baron, the vivacity of the incident depends on his zealous willingness to play the fool; he overreacts to her, as he overreacts to the seductive spin of the roulette wheel. Her moods, indeed, have for Aleksei the blind chanciness of roulette, and they offer him the same opportunity to humiliate and impoverish himself and thereby to demonstrate his exalted Russian disregard of material consequence. Aleksei, and the author, do not attempt to discover an inner logic of Polina’s behavior, because a cruel arbitrariness is what satisfies them. So Polina remains too volatile to be grasped by our imaginations; “one could tie her in a knot or bend her double.” In contrast, a secondary female character, the French adventuress Blanche, is quite solid:

  She is tall, with broad, strong shoulders. Her neck and bosom are magnificent. Her complexion is a swarthy yellow, her hair raven black, and she’s got a great deal of it, enough for two coiffures. Her eyes are black with yellowish whites, her look insolent, her teeth very white, and her lips always painted. Her perfume smells of musk.

  This musky creature develops amusingly when Aleksei, in a feverish trance of gambling clairvoyance, wins a hundred thousand gulden; Polina, though she is deeply in debt, in good Slavic style disdains the money (“The bankroll hit me painfully in the face and scattered all over the floor”), whereupon Blanche delightedly pounces upon the fortune: “First of all, je veux cinquante mille francs. You will give them to me in Frankfort. Nous allons à Paris. We’ll be living together there et je te ferai voir des étoiles en plein jour.” In Paris, however, instead of making him see stars in daytime, Blanche deigns to tie his necktie for him every morning and shrewdly uses his money to set herself up as a respectable person: “So now I have established myself in decent style once and for all, and nobody is going to put me out, not for a long time, at least that’s the way I’ve got it planned.” To crown her new status, she weds a useless but ornamental general, a Russian aristocrat whose mother’s fortune has been disastrously depreciated at the voracious tables of “Roulettenburg.” Nevertheless, Blanche will make the best of the bargain: “To begin with, he’s got his pension, and second, he’ll live in a back room, where he’ll be perfectly happy. I shall be ‘madame la Générale.’ I’ll belong to a nice social set.… Later I’ll be a Russian landowner; j’aurai un château, des moujiks, et puis j’aurai toujours mon million.” In this interplay between brisk French avarice and the mystical wastefulness of the Russian character, The Gambler finds its best comedy and its serious point, anticipating the magnificent if deluded Slavophilism of the great novels to follow. Seen, caricaturally, as a hard-headed, hard-hearted European, with her main-spring plainly diagrammed, Blanche succeeds as a character and as a lovable woman. “Blanche, it ought to be said, was indeed a very nice, good-natured girl—in her own way, of course; I did not appreciate her enough in the beginning.” Whereas Polina remains mysterious, and rather unlikable, to the end.

  Polina Suslova’s diary explains her more sympathetically than does either work of fiction. The grandiose, ill-coordinated self-assertiveness that her own story expresses and that Dostoevsky’s portrays is here muted and disclosed as fruit of a central plight: she is a woman.

  Now I feel and see clearly that I cannot live, that I cannot find happiness in the enjoyment of love, because the caresses of men will remind me of my humiliations and my sufferings.

  Clinically she observes herself in love with the indifferent Salvador, transcribing each of her pleading, unanswered letters; mordantly noting the fluctuations of her disease. “Any mention of S[alvador] gives me a terrifying, painful, and sweet feeling. However, what rubbish that whole thing was, everything that happened between me and Salv[ador].” Coolly, with her nearest approaches to irony, she admires her beloved’s stratagems of withdrawal while she records her own maneuvers with Dostoevsky, moderated “so that he could neither cherish hope nor be quite without it.” Out of her pain, she rises to chilling heights of detachment: “Today I have been thinking a great deal, and I almost felt glad that Salvador loves me so little; it makes me freer.” Freedom is what she wants and cannot attain:

  I am now thinking about my return to Russia. Where shall I go, to whom? To my brother, to my father? I will never be as free as I would like to, and to what end should I suffer this dependency? What have I in common with these people? Carry out my ideas! Stupid.

  She distrusts her ideas as she distrusts her loves. In the midst of a discussion with one of her intellectual, revolutionary boy friends, she flashes out, “Why go to see a woman? There isn’t much interesting about me, is there? If you are looking for intellect and erudition, you won’t come here to find them.” In a shocking passage, she is abruptly, without anesthesia or psychological preparation, operated upon by a doctor:

  He said, as he was putting away his instruments, that after this operation I could have children if I got married. I said that I found no comfort in this. “Why so?” he asked; “all women want to have children.” “Because I don’t know how to bring them up,” I said. The thoughts which occurred to me in connection with this conversation made me sad and caused me to shed tears, which I did not hold back.

  Polina’s feminism turns her diary outward from the stifling self-concern of her fiction; her jottings abound in sharp vignettes of the life about her as she moves from Baden-Baden to Turin and Genoa and Rome, and then to Paris and Zurich and back to Petersburg. She is unself-consciously sensitive, as the pain of Salvador ebbs, to other women: waitresses, flower girls, kept women, landladies, lady novelists, countesses. Only with another woman can she relax and spill her grief: “I could not restrain myself, but dropped on my knees before her [th
e Countess Salias] and began to sob aloud. She was frightened and wanted to get me a glass of water. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘forget it; I feel good this way.’ ” As she receives compassion from women, so she gives it; she offers to find work for a young woman who begs for two sous on the street, and she takes note of the inequities between a young student and his mistress:

  The relationship between the student and the lady is a touching one. At table, she lets him have the choice morsels; when she pours herself some wine, she always lets him have some first.

  With the same eye, she observes her feelings, in the course of her entanglements, of humiliation, disgust, and uncertainly, and the contradictory behavior these feelings engender. As she tussles with an admirer called Robescourt:

  Then there began an incoherent conversation, interrupted by kisses. He was trembling all over, and he had such a happy, smiling face. I was also feeling happy, but kept breaking off our ardent embraces, with my pleas to be left alone. I kept pushing him away, then again passionately stretched out my arms to him.

  Her awareness of her own ambivalence gives some episodes the sentence-by-sentence surprisingness of the best fiction:

  I stroked his hair and kissed his forehead. We talked all kinds of light-hearted nonsense, no worries or doubts of any sort entered my mind. Then I drove over to the C[ountess’s]. He accompanied me. As we were sitting in the carriage hand in hand, I felt that his love was not a good one, if this can be called love. We got up. We parted in the park. Having walked a considerable distance I turned around and saw him standing there, following me with his eyes, but it was a farce, and an awkward one, in fact. He came the next night. There was no limit to his rapture and passion, and I surrendered to these moments without any anxiety or doubt.

  He wanted more than that, but I wouldn’t let it happen, and he saw his mistake. I said that I was leaving.

  Such a passage, in which the subtle female heart begs dignity and verity of a world that offers her only motherhood and “love,” illuminates from within the self-punishing, lover-punishing perversity that Dostoevsky was content to represent as an inscrutable delirium.

  Yet these two people, who saw into each other so imperfectly, so carelessly, were useful to one another. Dostoevsky’s “turbulent and destructive affair with Polina Suslova,” as Wasiolek calls it, coincides, he admits, with the writer’s final awakening, the production of two works—Notes from the Underground in 1864, Crime and Punishment in 1866—that lift him into the empyrean of Western literature, into that small circle of writers who have appreciably enlarged Man’s self-knowledge. In her story, Polina has Dostoevsky’s surrogate say, “You have meant a lot to me. Your love descended upon me like a gift from God, against all hope and expectation, when I was weary and desperate. This young life at my side promised me so much and has already given me so much. It has resurrected my faith and what remained of my former strength.” Was this a real speech, or her own sentimental fantasy? At any rate, the heroine responds with a startlingly dry inner observation: “ ‘You’ve really put it to good use,’ thought Anna, but she said nothing.” This mirrors a passage in The Gambler, as Aleksei meditates:

  She doesn’t bother to hide her aversion to me at all, this I can see. But she also does not conceal from me either the fact that she needs me for some purpose and that she is saving me for some future use.

  What were these uses? In Dostoevsky’s case, Polina—apart from her sexual benefactions in the short period before she shut them off—helped him debase himself toward that ground of suffering nullity from which he drew creative strength. Self-humiliation is one of the writer’s most useful aids; it puts him in touch with the basal humanity that dignity, honors, flattery, and prosperity would estrange him from. It frees the artist of a respectable man’s baggage. Biting the dirt, he recovers the taste of comedy and dread. Among contemporary practitioners, Norman Mailer most diligently, or at least most publicly, humiliates himself, but any serious writer needs keep some access to shame and abasement. Dostoevsky’s need was acute; that Polina taunted him with her lovers, banished him from her bed, ignored his immense gifts, and urged him to play the fool should not be counted against her. In her unhappiness, she had an instinct for the necessary plunge. With odd generosity, she lent Dostoevsky money for his gambling, which became to his temperament a religious trance, a frightful prostration to the divine nihil, a kind of induced epilepsy, a giddy descent into himself, a defiance of worldly wisdom. In his begging letters to Polina he exults in his pennilessness, in the contempt expressed by his German servants, for “there is no greater crime in the eyes of a German than to have no money.” But there is, he announces in the next letter, food beyond bread: “I continue to go without dinner, subsisting on my morning and evening tea for the third day now, and strangely enough, I am not very hungry at all.” Eventually, such a regimen kills; Dostoevsky turns from Polina and takes shelter in marriage to a kind woman.

  What of Polina, though; what was Dostoevsky’s use to her? Not, I suspect, as an intellectual companion. In her diary, though she mentions a healing talk with him about “the emancipation of women,” it is the feline Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Gaut who manages to speak her heart’s language.

  Yesterday Gaut was here and I had a sentimental discussion with him: on love, marriage, etc.… “And love,” he said, “passion, what are they? Just a needless scandal. Surround yourself with sensible people, that’s all.”

  I agreed with him.

  Her soul finds flattery, too, in the company of her revolutionary countrymen—Herzen, Bakunin, Luginin. Dostoevsky by this time is not even a liberal. And before she begins this diary, she has committed herself to younger lovers. Dostoevsky tells her, “You fell in love with me by mistake.” But there is evidence in her diary that he did, once, perform for her the lover’s essential service: he shook her up. “I hear about F[yodor] M[ikhailovich]. I simply hate him. He made me suffer so much, when it was possible not to suffer.” And “As I remember what happened two years ago, I begin to hate D[ostoevsky]. He was the first to kill my faith.” Yet a proud otherworldliness is perhaps what they shared. Though he accuses her, when she first refuses to sleep with him, of a “utilitarian attitude,” in the end, in the last entry in the diary, all passion useless, she talks teasingly, in a vein dear to his heart: “I said that I was going to become a holy woman, that I would walk through the Kremlin gardens in Moscow in my bare feet, telling people that I was having conversations with angels.”

  In fact, she married, in her middle years, a much younger man who was, strangely, an ardent devotee of Dostoevsky—the critic and littérateur V. V. Rozanov. He grew to hate her. Her later life has the flavor of The Possessed. After parting with Dostoevsky, she opened a village school that the authorities closed on the grounds that she bobbed her hair, never went to church, and had consorted abroad with revolutionaries. Six years after marrying Rozanov, she fled with a young lover; when this neo-Salvador spurned her, she denounced him to the police as a revolutionary. Her husband, whom she refused to divorce, likened her to Catherine de Medici and claimed to have found a perfect description of her in Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Injured: a woman who “looked upon everyone with impartial severity, like the abbess of a medieval convent,” yet whose “sensuality was such that even the Marquis de Sade might have taken lessons from her.… In the very heat of voluptuousness she would suddenly laugh like one possessed.” Dostoevsky wrote the description first; then he met Polina.

  KNUT HAMSUN

  “My Mind Was Without a Shadow”

  HUNGER, by Knut Hamsun, translated from the Norwegian by Robert Bly. 232 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967.

  ON OVERGROWN PATHS, by Knut Hamsun, translated from the Norwegian by Carl L. Anderson. 176 pp. Paul S. Eriksson, 1967.

  Coincidence, of the rather amiable kind it amused Knut Hamsun to record, marks the simultaneous publication in the United States of his first novel, Hunger, and his last book, a memoir entitled On Overgrown Paths. Hunger was written by
a starving young man in the late 1880’s and finally published, after serialization, in 1890, when Hamsun was thirty-one; On Overgrown Paths was written by a disgraced old man, held accused of treason, in the late 1940’s and was published in 1949, when Hamsun was ninety. Sixty years and a career that included a Nobel Prize lie between them, yet the books are similar, and are beautiful in the same way. They are laconic, brutal, joyous, and not quite formless. Their literary freshness flows from a positive human quality of, to give it a negative name, defenselessness. The “I” of both accounts has scorned all systems, has formed no alliances, not even with a woman; Hamsun’s wife, though she shared his ordeal of ostracism and harassment after the war, is virtually absent from the pages of On Overgrown Paths. The ratty boarding houses of Hunger and the various institutions of Hamsun’s internment and, for that matter, the hunter’s hut occupied by the hero of his novel Pan are all temporary shelters unregretfully shed by a spirit intent upon the inner play of mood, a rapt yet detached spirit to whom pain is merely one of the many winds that tug and shift the soul. Such lucidity approaches madness; in the absence of all other armor, a carapace of willful eccentricity must be grown. As a young transient in this country, Hamsun began to spit blood, and countered the diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis by riding on top of a locomotive from Minneapolis to New York, gulping fresh air all the way. The cure worked; but the same headlong stubbornness also led him to support the Nazis to the end, writing, upon Hitler’s death, “He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.” At the very outset of his career, the young Hamsun undertook a lecture tour attacking the living great writers of Norway, culminating in a verbal assault upon Ibsen while Ibsen sat glowering in the front row. Hamsun was always more enthusiastically admired in Germany and Slavic Europe than in Norway itself. Of American writers, he resembles Hemingway in his estrangement from the cultural establishment, in his proud follies, in his cauterization of prose style, in the impression of lightness and transparency his pessimism produces. By this analogy, On Overgrown Paths is like A Moveable Feast—a return, after troubled middle years spent pursuing “depth” with a puerile ideology, to an instinctive youthful allegiance to surfaces and moments.