Pym, Powell, Murdoch, Bayley

John Bayley's introduction to the 2009 Virago edition of Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings (1958) might as well have been written specifically for me, as it brings in two writers very close to my heart, Anthony Powell and Bayley's wife, Iris Murdoch.

Powell, as I've noted before, was a fan of Pym, writing in his journals in 1992,

From being merely tolerant of [her] as a novelist, I have now got into the swing of her style and characters, find the books very amusing. . . . She is one of the few novelists I regret never having met.

But Bayley reveals much more:

Addicts of Pym tend to get together to discuss their heroine, and that happened to me with Powell. We agreed, for example, that his own immortal character Kenneth Widmerpool might have walked out of a Pym novel, together, of course, with his mother in her famous "bridge coat," a garment that much delighted Pym.

I think Widmerpool is ultimately too grasping to fit in a Pym novel, but his mother--good god, yes!

About Murdoch, Bayley offers the passing observation that she was "never a fan of Pym's novels," but liked her greatly as a person. His invocation of the pair in his introduction is perfect, for A Glass of Blessings is simultaneously the most Powellian and most Murdochian of the Pym novels I've read (which at this point is most of them).

The Powell links are easy to trace--indeed, it's hard to imagine any Powell fan not perking up at a couple of points in the novel when the narrator and protagonist, Wilmet Forsyth, a thirty-five-year-old married housewife, reflects, Nick Jenkins&8211;like, on the people around her. Here, for example:

At that moment I heard the bell ring and shortly afterwards Sir Denbigh Grote came into the room, rubbing his hands together as if it were a cold afternoon. He looked so much like a retired diplomat is generally supposed to look, even to his monocle, that I never thought of him as being the sort of person one needed to describe in any detail. What did seem unusual was his friendship with Miss Prideaux, who in spite of being a gentlewoman had only been a governess in some of the countries where he had served in a much higher capacity. It could only be supposed that retirement, like death, is a kind of leveller; and that social differences had been forgotten in the common pleasure of recalling garden parties at the embassies to celebrate the sovereign's birthday, and other similar functions which few people would have been capable of discussing at all knowledgeably.

It's Powell to a T--especially from "It could only be supposed" on; the internal reflection is pure Nick Jenkins, especially in its focus on the effects of the passage of time on status and class relations. Pym even uses a semicolon, like Powell, where an ordinary writer would use a comma! The Murdoch echo is more muted, but ultimately, I think, just as inescapable for a fan of both writers. A Glass of Blessings, like many Pym novels, turns on a character who fails to imagine the full scope of the lives of those around her--and is thus surprised when they a revealed to be fully rounded humans, acting on emotion and sentiment, instead of plodding along on the familiar paths she's assumed they'd follow. Late in the novel Wilmet lies abed, thinking about some news she's just had delivered about an acquaintance:

I lay awake for rather a long time, either because of the coffee or my confused thoughts. It seemed as if life had been going on around me without my knowing it, in the disconcerting way that it sometimes does, like the traffic swirling past when one is standing on an island in the middle of the road. Sybil and Professor Root, Piers and Keith, Marius and Mary--the names did sound odd together--all doing things without, as it were, consulting me.

One of Murdoch's great themes is the way that our solipsism blinds us to the reality--and separateness, difference--of other people, and, while usually stated more quietly than in Murdoch's novels, it's also one of Pym's recurring points. Even people we think of as good friends can regularly surprise us with their actions--and, more, with the reminder those actions bring that we're not after all the center of the universe. (Of course--what supplies much of the humor in Pym--we would never think of ourselves as the center of the universe . . . it just happens that only rarely can we achieve the critical distance required to escape our own glorious shadow.)

That said, I'm not surprised that Murdoch wasn't a fan of Pym's novels. She should have been, clearly: the two were working different sections of the same field. But Pym had none of Murdoch's glittering skill with--and love of--plot, none of her excessive qualities, none of her confidence in (and fear of) the tranformative, even demonic powers of love and passion (to say nothing of true eros, which has a deliberately muted place in Pym). Pym, as Bayley puts it in "Barbara Pym as Comforter," an essay he contributed to "All This Reading: The Literary World of Barbara Pym (2003), "offers the comfort of total non-insistence." She simply presents lives as they are, with the absolute minimum of drama required to sustain a novel; one of the most impressive things about A Glass of Blessings is how little of note happens in the book. Where Murdoch is everywhere overflowing, Pym is everywhere restrained.

And yet perhaps there was a late rapprochement. Bayley concludes "Barbara Pym as Comforter," with a few words about his late wife:

The novel is, ultimately, a very personal form, so I will conclude on a personal note. My wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, suffered in the last years of her life from Alzheimer's disease. When she had been well and writing her own novels, I would sometimes read her bits of Pym that had amused or delighted me. I continued to do this when she was ill, and she always smiled at me or at the writer, even if she did not understand. After I had put her to bed, I came down for my own drink and supper, during which I usually and avidly read a Pym. The novels not only sustained but calmed and satisfied me during those days, as nothing else could.

A key thing that we learn from Pym is that one should take what comfort one can; the world offers little, and we should hold tight to it. Who knows what Iris Murdoch understood, much less appreciated, of what her husband read her, but the comfort the thought brought him was as real as anything.

"Tolstoy's truest prayer was the manuscript of Hadji Murad"

One of my tiny goals in writing this blog is to make it one of the first places people land following searches for information about Tolstoy's last fiction, the posthumously published novella Hadji Murat (1912). I've raved about the book before: though one of the least well-known of Tolstoy's works, it's the perfect introduction to his genius, offering in a mere hundred-plus pages glimpses of both his unmatched eye for telling detail and the seemingly endless wells of sympathy that underlie his characterizations. At the same time, when set next to his early novel The Cossacks, which is set in the same region, Hadji Murat serves as a clear demonstration of the growth of his skill and perception. Despite the fact that the The Cossacks was based largely on Tolstoy's own experiences as a young man, while Hadji Murat was created through research, it is the earlier novel that at times feels imagined or constructed, while the later novel never feels less than fully lived.

In Tolstoy and the Novel (1966), John Bayley writes that "some portraits in the story are as life-giving and complete as those in War and Peace," while Viktor Shklovsky, in Energy of Delusion (1981), not only makes the grand claim of this post's headline, but also writes, "Among his great works, Tolstoy has one that's the best. It's Hadji Murad." The tale's place at the end of Tolstoy's ouevre is given a further poignancy by the fact that even as he wrote it, Tolstoy was actively denying to himself that literature had value. As A. N. Wilson explains in Tolstoy: A Biography (1988)

While he was writing it between 1896 and 1904, so little did its subject matter accord with mainstream Tolstoyan pacifism that he felt obliged to work on it "on the quiet" and, by the time he had completed the Shakespeare essay and persuaded himself that literature was evil or a waste of time, Hadji Murat was laid aside.

Wilson explains that though Tolstoy denigrated his achievement, his wife, even as their long-running marital wars were reaching fever pitch, treasured the book, writing in her diary,

I have done nothing but copy out Hadji Murat. It's so good! I simply couldn't tear myself away from it.

What brings me back to Hadji Murat today is a letter I came across in the second volume of R. F. Christian's two-volume collection of Tolstoy's letters. Written from Yasnaya Polyana in January of 1903 to Anna Avessalomovna Korganova, the widow of the army officer who had guarded Hadji Murat after he had crossed over to the Russian side in the perpetual war in the Caucasus, it reveals Tolstoy even at that late date searching for specific details to give his portrait of the charismatic rebel leader the force of reality.

Dear Anna Avessalomovna,

Your son, Ivan Iosifovich, having learned that I am writing about Hadji Murat, was kind enough to tell me many details about him and, moreover, permitted me to turn to you with a request for more detailed information about the naib Shamil who lived with you at Nukha. Although Ivan Iosifovich's information is very interesting, many things might have been unknown to him or wrongly understood by him, since he was only a ten-year-old boy at the time. I am venturing therefore to turn to you, Anna Avessolomovna, with the request to answer certain questions of mine and to tell me all you remember about this man and about his escape and tragic end.

Any detail about his life during his stay with you, his appearance and his relations with your family and other people, any apparently insignificant detail which has stuck in your memory, will be very interesting and valuable to me.

My questions are as follows:

1. Did he speak even a little Russian?
2. Whose were the horses on which he tried to escape--his own, or ones given to him? And were they good horses, and what colour were they?
3. Did he limp noticeably?
4. Did the house where you lived upstairs, and he downstairs, have a garden?
5. Was he strict in observing Mohammedan rituals, the five daily prayers etc.

Forgive me, Anna Avessalomovna, for troubling you with such trifles, and accept my sincere gratitude for everything you do to carry out my request.

I remain, with the utmost respect, at your service,
Lev Tolstoy

P.S. Another question (6) What were the murids like who were with Hadji Murat and escaped with him, and how did they differ from him?

And yet another question (7) Did they have rifles on them when they escaped?

It's the hurried questions in the postscript that really bring Tolstoy to life in this letter; like a good friend lingering at a dinner party because there's still so much more to talk about, he can't help but want to know more, more, more. I love question six in particular, the way its request for what are essentially brief character studies rests on an implicit confidence that the discernment and descriptive powers of a master novelist--what Shklovsky calls "Tolstoy's strength and ability to construct the temple of the human soul"--are available to any stranger to call on when asked.

The letter seems to support what Shklovsky, in his typically fervid fashion, notes about Tolstoy's work on this novel in his last years:

[E]ven when he was sick and close to death, Tolstoy was still doing research for this novel. He demanded books, checking the details in them. . . . When Tolstoy finished Hadji Murad, he lifted himself up on the arms of his chair and said: that's how it should be, yes, that's how it should be.

And there he was, a mountaineer, heading straight toward the bullets.

He was singing a song.

As I've urged before: read Hadji Murat. You won't regret it.

Labor Day weekend notes

A type of blog post that I tend to really enjoy, but which I don’t make myself very often because it feels lazy, is a notes post. But all week I’ve been accumulating little bits of stuff that really don’t have a place other than in a notes column, so here you go.

1) Thinking back to my post from earlier this week about progressivism and certainty, I keep imagining a slogan built from my thoughts: “Vote Democrat. We’re the party of Job.” Or “Vote Democrat. We won’t pretend to know, but we’ll give it our best shot.”

The Republican ads, of course, would be along the lines of, “The Democrats promise to give you boils and kill your family and your livestock. It happened to Job, and it’ll happen to you.”

2) Speaking of politics, I assume you noticed that about ten days ago, the White House released George W. Bush’s reading list for the summer. His reading of The Stranger, which enormous-headed White House flack Tony Snow discussed with the media, got most of the attention—which isn’t unreasonable, because based on the limited evidence at hand I’m actually willing to believe Bush actually read it.

As for the other books on the list, though? I call bullshit. He’s got some good John D. MacDonald detective novels on there, and I’m willing to believe he’s read, say, two of them. There are a couple of Flashman novels, and I’ll give him one. But has he really read Kai Bird and Martin Sherman’s biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus? (Would he even be able to give a four-sentence explanation of who Oppenheimer is?) Or Ronald White’s very serious book about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural? Could he possibly have read Rory Stewart’s book about walking across Afghanistan? And, if so, did he learn anything about the complexity that underlies his black-and-white statements about peoples and nations?

The main reason I call bullshit, though? He’s got 48 books on his summer reading list. Now, I know that our Derelict in Chief takes a lot of time off. But I, a fast reader who spends my non-work time doing little else, get through, at most, 110 books a year. Yet I’m supposed to believe that the President of the United States—whose lack of dedication to his job is surely counterbalanced in this case by his evident stupidity—can find time to read 48 books in a summer?

These people reflexively lie about every single damn thing. If they tell you you’re alive and well, you probably ought to go ahead and stagger to the morgue.

3) Someone who’s honest about not reading? Cincinnati Reds outfielder Adam Dunn, who claims to have read only two books since high school: Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights and a young adult novel called The Summer of the Monkeys. Give me dumb and honest any day, especially if it comes with prodigious home run power.

4) Thinking about the morgue reminds me that the best thing I read this week was a short story by Will McIntosh called “Followed,” in the most recent issue of a journal called Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which is a product of Small Beer Press (best known as Kelly Link’s publisher). “Followed” is a zombie story, and like all good zombie stories, it’s a also a commentary on contemporary society—but it’s the sharpest I’ve ever come across. In the world McIntosh has created, people are followed around by reanimated corpses whose deaths they have caused, directly or indirectly, through their grotesque overconsumption.

She came wandering down the sidewalk like any other corpse, her herky-jerky walk unmistakable among the fluid strides of the living. . . . Strange how most TV shows depicted the world as corpseless. Nary a corpse to be seen on the sitcoms, cop shows, interactives—all those people, walking the streets, working, and not one of the followed by a corpse.

“Followed” is well worth the price of the journal itself. You can order it here.

5) Speaking of reanimation, I know I'm not the first to suggest this, but don’t you think it would be fun to bring Borges back and show him the Wikipedia? As my friend Bob pointed out the other night, the author of “Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” would surely thrill to the fact that the entries for Kashyyk and Tattoine outstrip, in length and detail, the entries for, say, Saturn and Neptune.

He would also, surely, appreciate that empty feeling you get at the end of an evening spent in the byways of the Web, wandering, and not necessarily ever finding what you started out looking for:

Unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable.

6) Something else I think Borges would have appreciated is the literary hoax recently perpetrated by an anonymous enemy of English writer A. N. Wilson. Wilson, many of whose books I love, but who seems to be a monstrous prick (His memoir of his friendship with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley is the most mean-spirited and petty book I’ve ever read.) was suckered into including in his recent biography of poet John Betjeman a letter that was a complete forgery.

The forgery came to light when its unknown author (suspected to be the author of another recent Betjeman biography), who had supplied the letter to Wilson under the name of Eve de Harben (an anagram of "Ever been had?") wrote to the Sunday Times of London, revealing that the letter was a forgery . . . and that the initial letters of each of the sentences of the missive, taken in order, spelled out “A. N. Wilson is a shit."

Nearly as much fun, for me, was that the letter refers to Anthony Powell:

Anthony Powell has written to me, and mentions you admiringly. Some of his comments about the Army are v. funny. He's somebody I'd like to know better when the war is over. I find his letters funnier than his books.

7) And, on the topic of things that don’t exist, my friend and former co-worker Erin says:

I tried to post a comment to your blog but it wouldn't let me! I dreamed a few nights ago that I wrote a book called Scurry and that I had to approve the cover design (a b/w photo of a fully dressed woman sitting at the tide line of a Scottish-looking beach) while talking on a cell phone and driving in traffic. What’s with all the book dreams?

All I could tell Erin was that if she’ll actually publish Scurry, I’ll write about it here.

8) Boswell, in his London Journal, records some advice that we bloggers should probably take to heart:

I read [Lord Erskine] a little of [my journal] this evening. To be sure it is very carelessly wrote, which he freely took notice, and said it might become a habit to me to write in that manner, so that I would learn a mere slatternly style. He advised me to take more pains upon it, and to render it useful by being a good method to practice writing: to turn periods and render myself ready at different kinds of expression. He is very right. I shall be more attentive for the future, and rather give a little neatly done than good deal slovenly.

9) And, finally, since my book-laden return from Portland (and Powell’s) in early July, I’ve only bought four books. Well, unless you count the four Hard Case Crime books that came in the mail. Or the couple of New York Review Books that a friend sent me. Or the mystery novel my dad lent me.

Regardless, I’ve made progress. For the first time in several years, I’ve got fewer unread books in the house than I did two months ago.

It’s important, in these late-summer days, to enjoy small victories. Enjoy the holiday.