A post suitable to the Friday of what has been a very long week, with too much work and not enough piano playing, but at least the right number of martinis

I originally intended to build tonight's post around a passage from the wonderfully cracked, cascading, brilliant lunacy of Marguerite Young's Miss Mackintosh, My Darling (1965), the subject of the World's Least Popular Book Club (New Members Welcome!). A passage like this, for example:

He could not be easily persuaded, he believed, even by the intoxicating, contagious madness of an angelic, lawless woman he had always compassionately, profoundly loved, one for whom he would have sacrificed his life, his own best interests, having loved her just as much as his dead brother had hated her, scorning impatiently her love, not returning it, even making light of it in a most high-handed manner, even saying she had only pretended to be insane. Perhaps Mr. Spitzter loved her even more than his brother had hated her. His brother had been insolent, a gambler, a spender of borrowed money, a quick suicide, a four-flusher with a quick come-back, a ready apology or the banal dismissal of the need for apology, very different from cautious Mr. Spitzer, who claimed never to have placed a bet on even that which he had been most certain of. His brother had been worldly, but Mr. Spitzer had always been, if he might sometimes say so, unworldly and abstruse.

Though she tormented Mr. Spitzer endlessly, sometimes implying that he did not exist, it was perhaps because, after all, in spite of the fact that she could be committed to no one, her imagination floating through unknown amplitudes, she had become grudgingly fond of him, this one faithful caller, he at least providing her a rare amusement.

The suggested searches in this 1,000-page novel at Amazon? "Suffrage captain," "great shiek," opium lady," "black king," "little shadow boxer," and "ghost buggy." (Did I mention that the book club is accepting new members? We'll waive the initiation fee!)

But then, on the bus heading home from work, a soft autumn rain plickering the windows as the gray of Lake Michigan roiled in the distance, I read this passage, from Chekhov's The Duel (1891):

"And last night, for instance, I comforted myself by thinking repeatedly: Oh, how right Tolstoy is, how unmercifully right! And this made me feel better. In point of fact, brother, he truly is a great writer! Regardless of what anyone says."

Samoylenko, having never read Tolstoy but spent each day preparing to read him, felt embarrassed and said:

"Yes, all writers write from the imagination, but he's straight from nature . . ."

Which brings to mind this passage from Chekhov's letters, sent to A. S. Suvorin on May 4, 1889:

Nature is an excellent sedative. It pacifies--that is, it makes one indifferent. And it is essential in this world to be indifferent. Only those who are indifferent are able to see things clearly, to be just and to work. Of course, I am only speaking of intelligent people of fine natures; the empty and selfish are indifferent enough any way.

Chekhov, even when he's being intentionally provocative, as seems likely here, always comes across as fundamentally decent, an opinion which has thus far been borne out by everything I've read about him. Lilian Hellman, in an introduction to a collection of Chekhov's letters, wrote,

Chekhov was a pleasant man, witty and wise and tolerant and kind, with nothing wishywashy in his kindness nor self-righteous in his tolerance, and his wit was not ill-humored. He would have seen through you, of course, as he did through everybody, but being seen through doesn't hurt too much if it's done with affection.

Tolstoy, on the other hand, was, as is well known, nearly as horrible, at least to his family, as he was brilliant. Berryman's assessment of Rilke would suit: Tolstoy was a shit. As a husband, he calls to mind the end of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find": Tolstoy would have been a good husband, "if it had been somebody there to shoot [him] every minute of [his] life."

So for Friday, my love to Tolstoy's work, my admiration to Marguerite Young's ambition and singularity, but a seat at my bar for Chekhov, who need do nothing more than sit quietly, listening to the piano and nodding, perhaps pausing once in a while to wipe the foam from his mustache.

 Enjoy the weekend, folks.

The long war of the Tolstoys

The new volume of Sofia Tolstoy's diaries that I wrote about back in the summer has just been published here in the States, and the very first entry I saw when I opened the book at random gives a perfect sense of just how crazy the Tolstoys' lives were by the end. Here's the entry for August 31, 1909--which, I should warn you, is pretty horrible:

This morning we had a visit from a 30-year-old Romanian who had castrated himself at the age of 18 after reading The Kreutzer Sonata. He then took to working on his land--just 19 acres--and was terribly disillusioned today to see that Tolstoy writes one thing but lives in luxury. He questioned everyone, seeking an explanation of this contradiction. He was obviously very hurt, and said he wanted to cry, and kept repeating, "My God, my God! How can this be? What shall I tell them at home?" Then a rich deaf mute arrived from Kiev with his friend, a barber, especially to make Tolstoy's acquaintance. Goldenweiser came and played chess with L.N.

The Kreutzer Sonata, with its violent condemnation of marriage and conjugal love, was, as you might expect, a sore point with Sofia. She was embarrassed by the all-too-easily drawn conclusion that life with her had led Tolstoy to that renunciation--a conclusion that, while not inaccurate, certainly doesn't do justice to Tolstoy's own eager part in the long war of mutual cruelty that was their marriage.

And in her diaries, Sofia was writing at least as much for Lev, whom she knew would read them, as for herself, so it's no surprise to find her emphasizing the disillusion of the poor young Romanian. Yet even taking that into account, I'm astonished by how matter-of-fact she is about the man's self-mutilation. My god, he castrated himself because of something her husband had written--and her only real response is a sort of unsurprised snort at his disillusion? And then she just trucks along to an account of the next couple of visitors they had that day?

Here is where--as James Meek pointed out in his fascinating article about the diaries for the London Review of Books this summer--what you want is facing-page dual (and dueling) diaries. We see here what Sofia wanted us to see of this event, and, to some extent, how it affected her. But what about Lev? What is it like to have someone take a fairly unhinged rant of yours so brutally seriously? Surely even Lev, so self-confident and--when it helped him to be--so self-delusional, was shaken by that?

"Yet I love him when he is kind and normal and full of human weakness," or, The Terrible Tolstoys

If you haven't seen it, you should check out the great article by James Meek in the July 22nd issue of the London Review of Books about the Tolstoy marriage and its end. Prompted by a handful of new books, including a new edition of Sofia Tolstoy's diaries that will be published here in the fall, the piece offers all the jaw-dropping craziness and mutual torment that we're used to encountering any time we look into that endlessly fascinating (and troubling) marriage:

There was happiness and love between the couple, particularly in the early years; despite his increasingly Talibanic public stance about even conjugal sex, they kept making love into old age. But from the beginning their marriage was punctuated by mutual jealousy, by fights by a sense that they were suffocating each other, by Sofya Andreyevna's fear that he was withholding both his mind and his heart from her, and that, if she withheld her mind and heart from him, he wouldn't care.

"If I could kill him and create a new person exactly the same as he is now, I would do so happily," she wrote a few months after they were married.

I'm not actually sure what Sofia means by that statement--unless that the act of murdering her husband would be pleasing if it could be undone--but its impossibility, following as it does here Meeks's succinct account of the basic, intractable problem of their marriage, seems emblematic.

And then there's the fundamental sadness--and crazy, curdled idealism--of the couples' mutually shared diaries:

Sofia Andreyevna’s voice as she writes about the Kreutzer episode indicates the evolution of her idea of her audience; that she might be addressing posterity, or her husband’s audience, as well as herself and her descendants. From the beginning, she was addressing Tolstoy. As a prelude to their marriage, Tolstoy asked if she kept a diary and, when she said she had kept one since she was 11, asked if he could read it. She refused, and let him read a short story she had written instead. In the week between his proposal and their wedding, he gave her his diaries to read. She read of his drinking, gambling and sexual adventures and of the child he’d fathered with a peasant woman. She was, she wrote later, ‘shattered’ by his ‘excess of honesty’.

So the idea was set in motion of the mutual reading of supposedly personal diaries, and at times the entries in the diaries of husband and wife reflect the fact that they are speaking to each other while pretending to have secret thoughts. As relations between the couple became stale and formal, Sofia Andreyevna valued free, exclusive and continuous access to Tolstoy’s diaries as a surrogate for the great man’s love and friendship.

Any ground would do for the site of a battle between the two, so I suppose had they not shared their diaries, they'd likely have found another way to score all the points and mount all the defenses contained therein. But what must it do to a relationship--to a self--to have to actively reconstruct and shape it retrospectively, day by day, as part of a never-ending offensive? To pretend to openness yet know, even as you deny it to yourself, that you're mounting an argument at least as much as you're recounting events?

Oh, 'tis a good thing the Tolstoys aren't with us in the age of the blog. Now that would get ugly, fast.