Dickens and Dostoevsky

The piano is eating up all my time tonight (remind me--why did I agree to be in a recital Sunday?), but I don't think you'll complain when you see what I have for you: a link to a story from the April 10 issue of the Times Literary Supplement wherein Eric Naiman takes last year's very strange kerfuffle over a purported meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky--noted in Claire Tomalin's biography and others--and starts pulling threads.

If I may engage in some wild, Friday night mixing of metaphors: the unraveling threads send Naiman down rabbit hole after rabbit hole into a world of fake names, fake citations, fake articles, and fake books, and even fake letters to the editor. I found it dizzying and deliciously entertaining, and I suspect that anyone even peripherally connected with academia--and its occasional log-rolling and insularity--will, at minimum, be amused.

"A profound and happy experience of love." Well, maybe not so much.

Following last week's post about Dostoevsky and adultery, to which this post will serve as a sort of haphazard addendum, I happened across the following passage in the 6 September 2007 issue of the London Review of Books, in a review by Stefan Collini of Peter Stanford's C. Day-Lewis: A Life (2007):

The novelist Rosamond Lehmann reviewed Poems in Wartime in the New Statesman: Day-Lewis, she proclaimed, was a "writer with a profound and happy experience of love." Day-Lewis responded to the review by inviting her to dinner, as one would.

You will not, I imagine, be surprised to learn that an affair followed the dinner nearly as quickly as dessert. I've pointed out before (somewhat facetiously and in relation to Thomas Hardy) that critics should always remember that their words can have unexpected effects on authors; in this case I can't help but wonder whether Lehmann might at some level have actually imagined her lines generating exactly the response they did--though I realize that's probably being unfair.

The affair continued, quite publicly, for years, ending when Day-Lewis fell for another woman, whom he would eventually marry. Text messaging not having been invented at the time, he ended the relationship with Lehmann by letter; one assumes that he when he left his long-suffering wife at the same time, he was at least forced to pay her the courtesy of telling her in person. (Long-suffering must be one of those adjectives that regularly sends writers of literary biography to their thesauruses--but how else can one properly describe the legion of devoted, disrespected spouses left in literature's wake?)

Surely Day-Lewis at least felt a bit guilty about his amorous indecisiveness, unlike the master of that sort of adventure, Casanova. His History of My Life--by turns charming and repellent, amusing and grotesque, yet extremely difficult to put down--may be the least repentant, least apologetic work I have ever read. If, like the Dostoevsky character I wrote about the other day, Casanova were to come face-to-face with a man whose wife he'd slept with, he surely wouldn't wait around to find out if the man knew about the affair. He'd instead start edging toward the door--through which, for a man of his boundless luck and insatiable desire, there would surely be other women to meet, preferably ones with less-attentive husbands. Even a wedding, after all, leaves him only thinking about the availability of the bride:

I left full of love, but without any plan, since I thought the beginning of a marriage presented too many difficulties.

Too many difficulties, that is, for an instant conquest; instead, he's forced to commit nearly a month to the task before he meets with success.

Which leads me to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915) (which Ford wanted to title The Saddest Story after its justifiably famous opening line, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard.") Written with a precision and restraint that brings to mind Ford's friend and mentor Joseph Conrad, it is an at times excruciating tale of self-deception and bad faith in marriage. In a 1927 Introduction to the novel, Ford recounts the following:

On one occasion I met the adjutant of my regiment just come off leave and looking extremely sick. I said: "Great heavens, man, what is the matter with you?" He replied: "Well, the day before yesterday I got engaged to be married and today I have been reading The Good Soldier."

Like Alfred Appel's story of having a bunkmate in the Army ask to read that smutty book Lolita, then toss it back to Appel after a few lines with a disgusted, "Dammit! That's literature!", Ford's story sounds a tad too good to be true. But Ford is long gone, and I hate to stand in the way of a good story, so I won't quibble.

The military angle allows me to bring this rambling post to a close by returning to Anthony Powell, and one of his least sympathetic characters, Lieutenant Odo Stevens. Jenkins meets Stevens in the early days of his Army service and describes him like this:

Narcissistic, Stevens was at the same time--if the distinction can be made--not narrowly egotistical. He was interested in everything round him, even though everything must eventually lead back to himself.

But while Odo Stevens is every bit as odious as the sound of his name would suggest, his crass self-regard allows him to get off one of the most unforgettable lines in all of A Dance to the Music of Time. While giving Jenkins a lift back to the base from a hectic weekend at the country house where Jenkins's wife and her family are staying, Stevens offhandedly comments,

Not feeling like going on the square tomorrow, are you? Still, it was the hell of a good weekend's leave. I had one of the local girls under a hedge.

And that, surely, is enough of that for today.

I begin by telling you straight out that you are a worthless scoundrel!

The other day, I mentioned that at the Brooklyn Book Festival I picked up some novellas published by Melville House. One of them was Dostoevsky's The Eternal Husband (1870), which the flap copy describes thus:

This remarkably edgy and suspenseful tale shows that, despite being better known for his voluminous and sprawling novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky was a master of the more tightly focused form of the novella.

The Eternal Husband may, in fact, constitute his most classically shaped composition, with his most devilish plot: a man answers a late-night knock on the door to find himself in a tense and puzzling confrontation with the husband of a former lover--but it isn't clear if the husband knows about the affair. What follows is one of the most beautiful and piercing considerations ever written about the qualities of love: a dazzling psychological duel between the two men over knowledge they may or may not share, bringing them to a shattering conclusion.

They write good copy, those Melville House marketing people.

The copy got me to buy the book, and in addition, before I'd had a chance to start reading, it got me thinking about how other favorite authors would have handled this plot. Graham Greene came immediately to mind. A Greene protagonist, confronted with the husband of a woman he's been sleeping with, would surely sit, his inherent guilt confirmed, and wait stolidly for the man to take a well-deserved swing at him. But if there turned out to be no blow--if the husband turned out to be ignorant after all--the Greene character would not take this close call as a sign that he should desist; rather, he would pursue the affair with ever more flagrant abandon, begging to be exposed and appropriately punished.

I imagine that a Joseph Conrad hero's reaction would be fairly similar, but still distinct. Conrad's character would wait for the revelation that will confirm the knowledge he already carries of his failure. He knows he is guilty, but the guilt is not a religious guilt; rather, it is a personal one. He has failed to live up to his own deeply felt code. His only solace now is silence: he will endure any punishment (and consider it in some sense just) rather than confirm the husband's statements--and thereby betray the only confidence he has left, that of the wife. (Think "Long Black Veil.")

About Anthony Powell, on the other hand, we don't have to speculate: in The Kindly Ones, he presents us with a very similar situation, as Nick Jenkins finds himself having drinks with Bob Duport, ex-husband of Jean Templer, with whom Jenkins had brief, passionate affair at a time when she and Duport were vaguely separated. Duport is an impressively unpleasant man (Hilary Spurling, in her guide to A Dance to the Music of Time, Invitation to the Dance, calls him "aggressive and contradictuous."), but Jenkins rightly understands that

[W]hat I had done had made him, in some small degree, part of my own life. I was bound to him throughout eternity. Moreover, I was, for the same reason, in no position to be censorious. I had undermined my own critical standing.

What follows is one of the few moments in the novel sequence where Jenkins's own feelings come to the fore. So much of Dance consists of Jenkins telling the reader about the activities of others, which he has watched from the wings while remaining relatively aloof; the Jean Templer episode affects Jenkins powerfully when it happens, and its repercussions, echoing ever so slightly throughout Jenkins's life, reawaken that power each time they surface.

In this case, Powell uses Duport to, in a sense, teach Nick a lesson, remind him that even those aspects of life that we think we know best--those people whose very hearts we think we've mapped--are full of mystery and surprise, often of an unpleasant nature. In the course of rather dispassionately relating his troubles with Jean over the years, Duport off-handedly reveals an affair that had been totally unknown to Jenkins, one that throws his own time with her into a new, stingingly cold light. It's a marvelously complicated scene, with all the power and surprise of real-life emotional reverses, and Nick Jenkins emerges from it as a more nuanced and interesting character--not just for the reader, but for himself as well.

All this is by way of thinking about how Dostoevsky would handle such a situation--and as I thought about it, I realized that I had no idea. Oh, I had some general guesses: Dostoevsky's characters tend to react to everything in some sort of overwrought fashion--getting angry, drunk, guilty, passionately loving, violent. But part of what fascinates me about Dostoevsky is that I never have any real idea, in specific, how his characters are going to act. They're so utterly foreign to me, so singular, that they seem denizens of a world that is solely Dostoevsky's, bearing little relation to my own--like pinballs behaving according to laws of a physics that is totally different from ours, though no less immutable. In my own life I know Graham Greene characters, Joseph Conrad characters, and Anthony Powell characters--but no one knows Dostoevsky characters, right? (If you do, you're living a more dramatic life than I do, certainly.) No one can actually live with that intensity; that singularity is part of what makes them teem with life. They're utterly unpredictable, yet their actions, however overblown, manage somehow to seem right, even inevitable.

In that regard, The Eternal Husband does not disappoint. The protagonist, Velchaninov, doesn't feel the slightest bit guilty about his position in relation to the husband, Pavel Pavlovitch--whom he characterizes as one of a type, "the eternal husband," a man who is destined to be a cuckold and who seeks out, unwittingly, a marriage in which he will be cuckolded (the very reason, again perhaps unwittingly, that the wife selects him)--yet he can't simply dismiss him, either. Instead, his Dostoveskian overwroughtness takes the form of obsession, a desire to know whether Pavel knows about the affair--and whether Pavel's young daughter, whom Pavel mostly disregards, might actually be Velchaninov's. That obsession also shades into paranoia, as Velchaninov has no idea what to make of Pavel Pavlovitch, who--in pure Dostoevsky fashion--is by turns lachrymose, manically exuberant, and vaguely accusing. His every statement of intent feels disingenuous--yet there is no way for Velchaninov to be sure, no way to know what Pavel wants from this renewed acquaintance. Unable to break with Pavel without knowing, Velchaninov finds himself in the role of advisor and friend--necessarily a false friend--accompanying him on an ill-fated courting expedition, all the while clueless about Pavel's knowledge and intentions. The tension is unremitting, and the resolution--surprisingly drawn-out and complicated--is frightening, oddly moving, and largely unexpected.

It's a reminder of why I return to Dostoevsky every year or two: even a second or third reading brings surprises and new insights. His vision of human life is almost wholly alien to me, but its intensity and honesty are undeniable and compelling. If Tolstoy makes us larger, more empathetic, more human, Dostoevsky, for all his vexed faith, reminds us of our smallness and failures--and yet at the same time of our unbowed determination. As Pavel says,

One drinks the cup of one's sorrow till one is drunk with it.

Tolstoy would remind us to consider, as we empty our cups, the cups that others must drink; thus, together, he and Dostoevsky become twin stars, inseparable and indispensable.