The Peter Cushing centenary

As a keen fan of Hammer horror films, I could not let the opportunity pass to pay a tribute to Peter Cushing on his centenary. Actually, his centenary was yesterday, and I should have written something last night, but I decided instead to pour myself a good whisky, sit back, and watch the great man in The Gorgon.

Peter Cushing and Barbara Shelley in “The Gorgon”

Curious film, The Gorgon. Obviously, they were looking for a horror theme a bit different from the usual fare of Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy and the Werewolf, and, perhaps rather bizarrely, hit upon the Greek myth of the Gorgon, the creature who had live snakes instead of hair, and the sight of whom turned people into stone. Not too terrifying a premise, admittedly, but director Terence Fisher, cameraman Michael Reed, set designer Bernard Robinson and composer James Bernard all combined their considerable talents to give the film a gorgeous romantic gloss. Lyricism is not a quality we tend to associate with horror films –a t least, not nowadays – but there is a haunting dreamlike lyricism to this (as some of the screen-shots here will testify) that really is quite unlike anything I have seen in any other film.

Peter Cushing’s role – as the guilt-ridden doctor in love with his assistant Carla, and trying desperately to protect her – is badly under-written (screenwriter John Gilling complained about the changes made to his original script, claiming that but for these changes, it “might have been a very good movie”), but, as ever, Cushing makes more out of the role that one could think possible. But he had a habit of doing that. Because he made most of his career in horror films, non-aficionados of the genre often seem not to realise what a truly fine actor he was. In film after film, he projected elements that, judging from the script alone, simply weren’t there. And the range too is surprising: from the kindly but authoritative presence as van Helsing, to the cold and austere Sherlock Holmes, to the gentle and persecuted old man in Tales From the Crypt, to the murdering religious fanatic in Twins of Evil. Putting my personal taste aside, it is doubtful that any of these films would be ranked alongside La Grande Illusion or Citizen Kane, but that does not detract from the quality of the performances. In Twins of Evil, for instance, he actually makes the religious fanatic Gustav Weil appear, ultimately, a sympathetic figure, as the realisation of the true nature of his acts begins to dawn upon him. Cushing projects here a depth of character that one had no right to expect given the premise and the script.

Perhaps the centrepiece of Cushing’s performances are the five Frankenstein films he made with director Terence Fisher –

Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein

The Curse of Frankenstein, The Revenge of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Created Woman (a personal favourite of Martin Scorsese’s, apparently), Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (surely amongst the finest of all gothic films) and Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell. (The Evil of Frankenstein was directed by Freddie Francis, and is not really part of this series.) These films are no mere series of worn-out sequels in a tired franchise; each of these films re-thinks the premise of the original, and provides new and intelligent variations. Taken together, I really do think they are among the finest achievements of British cinema, irrespective of genre. And at the centre of these films are the performances of Peter Cushing: his depiction of the increasingly monomaniac and unhinged Frankenstein is breathtaking.

And yet, from all accounts, this stalwart of horror films was in real life the warmest and kindest of people. We all speak well of the dead – especially on their centenary – but those who knew him and worked with him all invariably break into a loving smile when remembering the man. He was a much-loved resident of the seaside town of Whitstable, which has been warmly celebrating his centenary. There is even a beauty spot on the beach that has been named Cushing’s View.

There’s not much to be said about the man that hasn’t been said already. He was a part of my childhood, and of my growing up, and now, for that reason (though not only for that reason), I would like to offer my own tribute and thanks to one of the finest of all screen actors.

( I should like to point out that, it just so happens, today is the birthday of that other great stalwart of hammer Horror films, Christopher Lee. Happy birthday, Sir Chris – but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait another nine years for your centenary celebrations!)

Prince Hal, Hamlet, and Antony: parallels and contrasts

I can’t help thinking of Hamlet as a sort of neurotic cousin of Prince Hal’s. I had suggested this tentatively when I wrote about Hamlet as part of my trawl through the Shakespeare plays, but I think I am less tentative about it now. Of course there are very salient differences between Hamlet and the Prince Hal we see in the Henry IV plays: Shakespeare wasn’t interested in merely repeating himself, after all. But the parallels are so very striking that it is hard to avoid the impression that Shakespeare was exploring similar themes from a somewhat different perspective. And if so, comparing and contrasting the two characters seems a fruitful exercise.

Both princes are extraordinarily quick and intelligent. Hamlet could easily have held his own with Hal and Falstaff in terms of quickness of wit and of verbal dexterity; and while no-one in Hamlet’s play can quite keep up with him, one doubts whether Falstaff or Hal would have had such problems. These three seem to me quite indisputably the three most intelligent characters Shakespeare ever created.

More crucially, both Hal and Hamlet live under the shadow of an immense obligation of duty. Both their fathers expect filial love to be shown in the form of adherence to duty: Hal’s father, King Henry IV, laments his son’s apparent dereliction of that great weight of duty, while the ghost of Hamlet’s father commands his son to duty with the words “if ever thou didst thou dear father love”. (And this is the only point during the meeting with his father’s ghost that Hamlet appears to break down: “Oh God!”) Hal, of course, accepts his responsibilities, as he knew from the start he had to; he is reconciled to his father before his father’s death, and, in accepting his father’s values, he breaks off connection with his surrogate father, Falstaff. But in doing so, he has also to amputate away a big part of himself. What he becomes after this amputation we may see in Henry V: here, we see the great leader of men, but, inevitably, there is something missing; and that something is that part of himself he had discarded. King Henry V cannot, though he tries, forge the bonds with the common people that his former self, Prince Hal, had done with such ease. The assumption of responsibility requires a sacrifice of a big part of one’s own self.

Shortly after writing Henry V, Shakespeare went on to write about Hamlet, another intelligent prince, also under the weight of a call to duty; but this prince had not been reconciled to his father before his father’s death, and is now crushed under the weight of the responsibility that is placed upon his shoulders. Unlike Hal, he cannot steel himself to amputate away that part of himself that prevents his assuming his filial duty.

I can’t help wondering also to what extent Hamlet actually grieves for his father. He knows he should. He castigates his mother, and indeed develops a sort of hatred for her, for her refusal to grieve for her husband. And yet, while he opens to the audience some of the deepest recesses of the mind, at no point do I remember him exhibiting any real grief for his father’s death. And when he meets his father’s ghost, there is conspicuously no expression of love or even of affection on either side.

If it is indeed the case that Hamlet cannot grieve, then the awareness of this is intolerable – as intolerable, perhaps, as is the burden of duty now placed upon him. For Hamlet knows that lack of grief for the dead robs life itself of any pattern that could render it significance. Customary suits of solemn black, windy suspiration of forced breath, the fruitful river in the eye, the dejected ‘havior of the visage, together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief – these, indeed seem. Hamlet goes on to say that he has that within himself that which “passeth show”; but whether that which passes show is indeed grief, which he never expresses, or, possibly, an inability to grieve, he does not specify.

It is hard to imagine a character so self-aware as Hamlet not to be aware of this, although it may be too painful for him to acknowledge openly. Is this, I wonder, why Hamlet keeps castigating himself so mercilessly throughout the play?

I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?

Of course, it will be objected that I am building an edifice on what is no more than a conjecture. Perhaps. But without this conjecture, there is too much about Hamlet that I cannot make sense of. Why, despite a facility with language that enables him to express the subtlest and most elusive of thoughts and feelings, does he never express grief for his father? Why does he express no love or affection when he meets with is father’s ghost? Why does he castigate himself so mercilessly throughout? Why does he admire Fortinbras even while recognising him as being but a warmonger?

Hamlet’s path of development is complex, and there can be no single way of interpreting it. But most readers and audiences tend to agree that while he does carry out his duty at the end, the Hamlet at the end is not the same Hamlet we had seen at the start, and that, as with King Henry V compared to his former self, there is something that is missing. Possibly the two princes had made similar journeys, albeit via different routes.

Another character who has makes a similar journey is, I think, Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. At the start of the play, he is roundly dismissed, as is Prince Hal, merely as a riotous drunkard – as a person of no real consequence. But, when duty calls, he, like Prince Hal, answers it; and the duty that calls him is the same duty that calls Prince Hamlet – that of avenging a murdered father. (Caesar had been for Antony a father figure.) And this riotous drunkard, this playboy, transforms himself into a ruthless politician and soldier. Shakespeare does not, in this play, consider what Antony had to sacrifice of himself in order to achieve this transformation. But perhaps he returns to this in Antony and Cleopatra. Commentators tell us not to think of this play as a sequel to the earlier Julius Caesar, and that is probably sensible advice, but I wonder if the two plays are entirely unconnected. For here, in the later play, we see Antony no longer young: he is well past his prime, and now facing old age. Having made his decision to choose duty over his personal inclinations, he has lived a life of service to his country, as a politician, as a soldier, and as a ruler. He is renowned and respected for all this. But that part of him which he had been forced to sacrifice has not entirely gone away. And now, in his sunset years, it returns and makes its claim. All that Antony had lived his life for, all that he had sacrificed for, now come to mean nothing: kingdoms are clay. All he wants now is to befuddle that once sharp mind of his with alcohol, and fall into Cleopatra’s arms. And even from this Shakespeare creates the sublime.

Gogol’s “Dead Souls”: a comic inferno

A preamble
I had first read Dead Souls when, as a teenager, I developed a mania for 19^th century Russian literature, and determined to read everything I could lay my hands on. The version I read then was the work of an anonymous translator, and probably one of the many versions that had been so mercilessly attacked by Nabokov as “worthless”. Nabokov did, however, praise the translation by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, a revised version of which is still available. Since Nabokov’s critique, a good many well-received translations have appeared. I re-read Dead Souls a few years ago in the highly rated modern translation by Robert Maguire published by Penguin Classics. This third and latest reading was in response to a mini-group-read organized by Richard, who blogs in Caravana de Recuerdos, and by Scott, who blogs in Six Words for a Hat. I have, till now, deliberately avoided reading their posts on Dead Souls until I had put my own reactions down on paper – or, at least, on computer screen. I’ll remedy that as I have posted this.

The translation I read this time round was the older version published by Penguin Classics, by David Magarshack. All quoted passages in this post are taken from this translation.

***

Anyone familiar with 19^th century literature will know the landscape. An unutterably dreary, drab little town, somewhere in the provinces, miles from anywhere, riddled with filth and poverty and decay and corruption, and stinking of moral stagnation and decay. It is the place from which any person of sensitivity longs to escape – like Chekhov’s Three Sisters; those who don’t, like Chekhov’s Ionych, become embroiled in the corruption; or, like Dr Ragin in Chekhov’s “Ward 6”, become victims of it. It is this town that forms the grey setting of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and it is this town we see collapsing into psychopathic violence and an almost apocalyptic disorder in Dostoyevsky’s Demons; and it is this town also that is revealed in Tolstoy’s Resurrection as containing behind its shallow façades of faux-respectability the most unutterable institutionalised cruelties. Meanwhile in Saltykov-Schedrin’s The Golovlyov Family, this town seems to stand for Hell itself, from which no-one can ultimately escape. This town is as much a landscape of the mind as it is a real landscape, and it looms large in Russian literature.

The earliest appearance of this town, as far as my admittedly limited reading allows me to judge, is in Gogol’s play The Government Inspector. And it reappears in the novel Dead Souls. In the play, an ordinary man, at a loose end and unable to pay his hotel bill, is mistaken by the corrupt town officials for an inspector, and is larded with all sorts of bribes; by the time the truth is realised, he is away with his gains. And even as we’re laughing, the mayor of the town breaks the invisible fourth wall of the stage to tell us directly, the audience, that we are laughing at ourselves: we all inhabit this Town of the Mind. In Dead Souls, which Gogol referred to as a “poem” rather than as a novel, we once again have a visitor from outside, who causes consternation. But it is not the outsider, Chichikov, who seems at first to be the centre of the reader’s attention: it is the rather eccentric narrator. Chichikov is described, and yet not described, so that we, the reader, get no mental picture of him:

The gentleman in the carriage is neither too fat, nor too thin; he cannot be said to be old, but he was not too young either.

And having given us this piece of non-description, the narrator veers off for no apparent reason to tell us about two peasants speaking about Chichikov’s carriage. What they say is not quite nonsensical, but it doesn’t really seem to make much sense either:

“Lord,” said one of them to the other, “what a wheel! What do you say? Would a wheel like that, if put to it, ever get to Moscow or wouldn’t it?” “It would all right,” replied the other. “But it wouldn’t get to Kazan, would it?” “No, it wouldn’t get to Kazan,”” replied the other. That was the end of the conversation.

The narrator is in no rush to move things along. We are given a leisurely account, seemingly overloaded with utterly irrelevant detail, of the filthy inn, and of the people working there; and then, of the town itself. The details the narrator fixes upon tend towards the eccentric, or even the downright bizarre; much of what he says seems like non-sequiturs. And when the narrator uses a simile or a metaphor, the image takes on a life of its own, quite overwhelming that which it purports to describe:

As he entered the ballroom, Chichikov had for a moment to screw up his eyes, dazzled by the blaze of candles, the lamps, the ladies’ gowns. Everything was flooded in light. Black frock-coats glided and flitted about singly or in swarms here and there like so many flies on a sparkling white sugar-loaf on a hot July day when the old housekeeper chops or breaks it up into glittering lumps in front of an open window, the children gather and look on, watching with interest the movements of her rough hands raising and lowering the hammer, while the aerial squadrons of flies, borne on the light breeze, fly in boldly, just as if they owned the place and, taking advantage of the old woman’s feeble eyesight and the sunshine that dazzles her eyes, cover the dainty lumps in small groups or in swarms.

Whew! But we aren’t finished yet:

Already satiated by the abundant summer, which sets up dainty dishes for them on every step, they fly in…

And so on for another few hundred words, the reality this image has been set up to elucidate by now more or less forgotten. It is fair to say, I think, that I have never come across a narrative voice quite like this one. Dickens too loved eccentricity, and one often wonders about the sanity of some of his characters; but here, one is left wondering about the sanity of the narrator himself.

In the second chapter, Chichikov sets off to visit local landowners. The landowners and their estates are all described by that same affable but seemingly demented narrative voice. And what that voice tells us is just as bizarre as the voice itself. These elements of the bizarre are dropped in as if they were perfectly reasonable and everyday. For instance, Chichikov, having lost his way on a stormy night, and his carriage having overturned, is put up by elderly widow, who sees to his comfort:

“Take the gentleman’s coat and underwear and dry them first in front of the fire as you used to for your late master, and afterwards have them well brushed and beaten.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Fetinya, spreading a sheet over  the featherbed and laying down the pillows.

“Well, here’s your bed all ready for you, sir,” said the old lady. “Good night, sir, sleep well. Are you sure you don’t want anything else? Perhaps you’re used to having your heels tickled for the night. My late husband could not get to sleep without it.”

As the novel progresses, an extraordinarily vivid cast of characters appears – each bizarre and eccentric beyond the bounds of sanity. There’s the impossibly effusive Manilov; the bear-like, deliberate, and somewhat madly methodical Sobakevich; the disgustingly filthy and threadbare Plyushkov, surely the most grotesque and repulsive of all literary misers; and Nozdryov, the colourful braggart, bully and compulsive liar – except, of course, no-one outside a Gogol novel could lie with quite such uninhibited flamboyance and gusto. Chichikov visits these landlords to buy from them, at as cheap a price as he can, serfs (or, not to put too fine a gloss on it, slaves, which is what they were) – serfs who are dead, the “dead souls” of the title, but who are still listed from the last official census as being alive, and for whom, consequently, the landowner is continuing to pay taxes. When Chichikov’s curious business activities are known, the town is in turmoil. All sorts of strange stories start up, and are believed: it becomes common knowledge, for instance, that Chichikov had been planning to elope with the Governor’s daughter (shameless hussy that she is!) A meeting of worthies discuss who Chichikov may be. The postmaster knows: Chichikov is none other than Captain Kopeikin! And who is this Captain Kopeikin? The postmaster launches on a long story – fully reproduced, in all its Gogolian bizarreness – of a Captain Kopeikin who had lost an arm and a leg in the 1812 campaign. Only after the story has progressed through several pages does someone think of mentioning that Chichikov has both arms and both legs. The postmaster admits that he was wrong, and sits down; Kopeikin is not mentioned again. Why the postmaster had thought Kopeikin was Chichikov in the first place is not explained.

The pace of the narration is slow – for modern readers, perhaps,  too slow for a comedy: but it is in the narrator’s eccentric voice that so much of the comedy resides – a voice apparently gentle and friendly and even reasonable, and yet, we suspect, utterly insane. And for that voice to establish itself, a slowness of pace is required. The narrative, such as it is, unfolds at a leisurely pace, and that leisurely pace may perhaps suggest a certain gentleness: but the sheer bizarre nature of the content, full of mad non-sequiturs and irrelevant and often grotesque details, belies any sense of the gentle. Gogol had seemingly intended this narrative to be the first part of a trilogy that was to reflect Dante’s vision of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise: what we see here is no less than Gogol’s vision of Inferno itself. The Dead Souls of the title are not merely the dead peasants.

It is hard to imagine how these Dead Souls presented here could be redeemed, as Gogol had intended: it is hard to imagine what Gogol’s Purgatorio and Paradiso may have been like. Gogol never completed his grandiose project. Towards the end of his life (he died when still in his early 40s), he became dangerously insane, developed a sort of religious mania, and seemingly starved himself to death. And, during these last terrible days, he burnt what  he had written of the second part of Dead Souls. (There exists a quite horrific painting by Ilya Repin of Gogol burning the manuscript.) Some fragments of this second part have, however, survived, and all modern English editions dutifully include these chapters, but I find them distressingly banal and uninspired. Gogol may have aspired towards redemption, but it seems to me unlikely that his imagination could conceive of anything but the hellish. The rather hellish last days of Gogol’s own life are perhaps not surprising.

What we get in this novel – or this “poem”, as Gogol insisted it to be – is a vision of Hell itself. But things are never simple with Gogol. From our viewpoint, we may think this to be the Hell of a slave-owning society; and yet, Gogol was firmly in favour of serfdom (slavery by another name), and opposed strongly liberal campaigns for emancipation. It is hard, at least for me, to imagine what really went on in that very strange mind of his. I generally try to heed the well-worn advice of “trust the book, not the writer”, but it becomes difficult here to try to put out of mind details of Gogol’s own life and opinions.

In this third reading, the sense of an Inferno seemed more apparent than had previously been the case. It’s a comic Inferno, certainly, but comedy and seriousness are by no means mutually incompatible. Somehow, the comedy renders this Inferno all the more disturbing: as with the farting devils of Dante, the comedy, if anything, intensifies the horror. Here is world that is utterly grotesque, but presented with such vividness and, despite its slow pace, animated with such vitality, that the effect it had on Russian literary culture, and, one suspects, on the Russian mind itself, is tremendous, and can hardly be under-estimated. That drab Gogolian town became for succeeding writers –  for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov, for Saltykov-Schedrin – the very image of Hell itself. I know of nothing quite like this outside Russian literature: in no other literature that I know of has a physical location become so firmly entrenched as also a moral and psychological landscape. But G9ogol could not transcend this landscape, much though he longed to, any more than could the characters of Saltykov-Schedrin’s utterly bleak and desolate novel The Golovlyov Family. This is a Hell in which we still remain trapped.

On desiccated pedants, and ageing hippies

I’m coming into this a bit late. In media res, as they say. (Or at least, those who are classically educated say. Or those who, like me, haven’t had the benefits of a classical education, but who nonetheless enjoy showing off by peppering their writing with Latin tags.) A veritable storm is currently raging here in Britain on educational practice, and, until about a couple of days ago, I knew nothing of it. Mea culpa.

Having researched the matter a bit on the internet yesterday, but having had neither the time nor the patience to read through everything that has been written on this fraught matter, it seems to me that, as ever, two opposed sets of stereotypes are emerging, and that each side is seeing the other purely in terms of these stereotypes. And it doesn’t help that people from both sides seem intent upon living up – or down – to these stereotypical images. On one side, we have the dry-as-dust desiccated pedants determined to make the process of learning as unpleasant as possible, reducing education merely to endless learning by rote, and labelling as failures that vast majority of children who, when tested at an impossibly early age, fail to meet requisite pre-determined standards. And on the other side, we have ageing hippies disputing the very concept of correctness (seemingly on the grounds that deeming a child’s response as “incorrect” can but cause irreparable damage to that child’s psyche), and insisting that any learning that isn’t “fun” or “exciting” is not worthy of the name.

So what side am I on? I ask myself. Am I a Desiccated Pedant (DP) or an Ageing Hippy (AH)? I seem to have divided loyalties here: one the one hand, I am, by nature, a cultural conservative (as this earlier post of mine amply testifies), constantly bemoaning “our benighted times” to anyone who will listen – or just to myself when no-one does; but on the other hand, my political sympathies remain strongly on the Left – or, at least, on what passes for the Left in our benighted times.

This whole thing came to my attention by a speech given a few days ago by Education Secretary Michael Gove (DP), in which, amongst other things, he attacked by name children’s writer and poet Michael Rosen (AH). Rosen, in turn, penned a combative response.

(Rosen’s response relates only to that part of Gove’s speech in which he is referenced, but it is worth pointing out that Gove’s story of schoolchildren using Mr Men stories to learn about Nazi Germany has turned out not to be true: apparently, the students in question – they were 15-16 year olds – were exchanging ideas about how best to teach small children about Nazi Germany. Gove has not, to my knowledge, yet apologised for having used evidence that is inaccurate, to put it mildly; and Michael Rosen seems to me therefore perfectly entitled to post on his on Twitter account (@MichaelRosenYes) hostile tweets such as “Why did Gove lie about the Mr Men teacher? He was getting his students to write stories for young children – not teaching the orig. history!” And later: “Children, the person in charge of your school has told a lie about a teacher and Mr Men books. Shall we ask him what he thinks about lying?” It’s all, as I said, got more than a little fraught.)

In the meantime, Toby Young, whom I had previously known as editor of the self-regarding but little read Modern Review and as a self-confessed former cocaine addict (see his introduction to this book, in which he talks about himself rather than about the book), has a go at Rosen for a grammatical error in his piece:

In the course of extolling his own virtues as an educator – he’s the ex-Children’s Laureate and has written over 140 books – [Rosen] writes:

“I have spent thousands of hours in schools in the last 40 years doing writing workshops with children engaging in discussions with them about what kinds of language is appropriate for a particular piece of writing.”

Call me an old pedant, but shouldn’t there be a comma after “children”? And, more importantly, shouldn’t it be “what kinds of language *are* appropriate” not “what kinds of language *is* appropriate”?

In answer to Mr Young’s questions, yes, there should be a comma after “children”, and yes again, that should have been “are” rather than “is”. And while we’re picking on errors, Mr Young’s own piece should have spoken of “two howling errors”, rather than “a howling error” (my italics). However, I am fairly sure even Mr Young knows how to count to two, just as I am fairly sure that Mr Rosen understands basic use of punctuation, and the difference between plural and singular. The errors from both writers are errors of carelessness and of proof-reading rather than of ignorance, and, being myself guilty on several occasions in this blog of carelessness and poor proof-reading, I am prepared to be charitable about these matters, although I know it can be argued that professional writers writing in national newspapers should be held to higher standards than a mere unpaid blogger such as myself. But let’s leave that aside. More serious is a letter to which Mr Young links, signed by a hundred (count ‘em!) academics, addressed to the Guardian and to the Independent, raising concerns about the new national Curriculum proposed by Michael Gove. Incredibly, this letter is riddled with grammatical errors. A few examples will suffice:

This mountain of data will not develop children’s ability to think, including problem-solving, critical understanding and creativity.

Dear me!

This will put pressure on teachers to rely on rote learning without understanding.

Is it the teachers or the children who will be subjected to “rote learning without understanding”?. From the context, one may infer it’s the children, but this should have been clear from what is written: the reader shouldn’t need to infer.

Inappropriate demands will lead to failure and demoralisation. The learner is largely ignored.

Why the change from the future tense to the present tense?

Little account is taken of children’s potential interests and capacities, or that young children need to relate abstract ideas to their experience, lives and activity.

“…their experiences, lives and activities”, surely? But even leaving that one aside, the sentence is pisspoor for reasons that may be explained without recourse to grammatical technicalities. In very simple mathematical form:

A.X + A.Y = A.(X+Y)

Put into words, we may apply A to X, and then apply A to Y, and then add them together (that’s the left hand side of the equation); or we may add X and Y together first, and then apply A to the combined entity (the right hand side of the equation). The two amount to the same, but the right hand side is more compact and more elegant.

So, to apply this to a simple sentence, I could say “I’d love a whisky, or I’d love a brandy” (left hand side of the equation); or I could say “I’d love a whisky or a brandy” (right hand side of the equation). They mean the same. In this case:

A = “I’d love a…”

X = “a whisky”

Y = “a brandy”

The offending sentence from the letter quoted above has the same simple structure, and this time:

A = “Little account is taken of…”

X = “children’s potential interests and capacities”

Y = “that young children need to relate abstract ideas to their experience, lives and activity”

But while A can easily be applied to X (“Little account is taken of children’s potential interests and capacities”), when you apply A to Y, you get gobbledegook (“Little account is taken of that young children need to relate abstract ideas to their experience, lives and activity”).

In short, it doesn’t take a detailed understanding of grammar to see that this sentence is incorrect: it just takes a basic feel for the language, and for how it works. Those who do not possess even this really have no business pontificating in public on matters of education.

But it is hard to know which is more shocking: that a letter signed by a hundred academics and educationalists should contain basic errors; or that, once these errors have been pointed out, people should write in to the Guardian defending this same letter (one correspondent even describing it as “well written and correct”). For the errors in the academics’ letter are not errors of carelessness, or of proof-reading: these are errors of people who seem neither to know nor to care about even the basics of the language in which they write.

And yes, it matters. The thrust of the various letters in the Guardian defending the academics’ letter seems to be that we know by instinct what is correct and what isn’t, and that this instinct overrides rules; or that language is all about communication, and as long as language communicates, we need not worry about rules; indeed, rules may act a barrier to communication, and certainly act as a barrier to creativity; and so on. The kind of stuff that gives even Ageing Hippyism a bad name.

I am afraid I am enough of a Desiccated Pedant not to be impressed by any of this. Our instinct for language may no doubt be sufficient for our everyday needs (“It’s a sunny day outside”, “My credit card bill is due”, “I fancy a beer”, etc.), but if we wish to express thoughts that are intricate or subtle or precise, we will not be able to do so without an understanding of the intricacies and the subtleties and the precisions of language. Indeed, it’s even worse than that: not only will we not be able to express such thoughts, we won’t be able even to think them. How can I think a subtle thought, or a complex thought, or a precise thought, if I do not possess language of sufficient intricacy, subtlety and precision with which to think them? To deny children the teaching of the intricacies and subtleties and precisions of language – i.e. grammar – is to deny them access not merely to jobs, but to thought itself.

Of course, as Michael Rosen explains so clearly in his article, there is not one single correct grammar, but many. Indeed, he is far from objecting to the teaching of grammar:

Michael Gove wants to position me as someone who is against schools teaching grammar. No, I am someone who thinks that the place for grammar teaching is the secondary school, college and university, and that it should be taught on the basis of the evidence that someone like Professor Debra Myhill has produced. In fact, I am so keen on grammar, I have written a mini-course in grammar and put it up on my blog where it is free for all to read and download.

However, I must confess to reverting to my Desiccated Pedant mode when I read this:

A problem that arises from talking about “correct grammar” is that it suggests that all other ways of speaking or writing are incorrect. This consigns the majority to being in error. Gove might be happy with that way of viewing humanity, but I’m not.

Even if we are to accept that there are alternative grammars all equally valid, it does not follow that there can be nothing that is incorrect. In mathematics, for example, there are many correct ways of solving simultaneous equations; but there are many incorrect ones also that lead to wrong answers. If every mode of speaking or of writing were to be correct, then why bother with teaching grammar in the first place? This applies to any subject: if everything were correct, then why teach anything at all? Isn’t it then merely a case of – as Pirandello put it – right you are if you think you are?

To demonstrate that there is more than one form of Standard English, Michael Rosen gives us the following:

To take one simple example, we can write in modern Standard English: “Do you have any wool?” “Have you got any wool?” “Have you any wool?” All three are acceptable forms of Standard English.

That’s fair enough. But should someone – a child, say, whose first language is not English – say “Do have any wool you got?”, would it not be right to correct the child? Or does Michael Rosen really think that doing so would “consign” the child “to being in error”? For if this child is not corrected, I don’t see we’re doing the child any favour. But if this child is to be corrected, then I don’t really see the validity of Rosen’s point.

Neither am I impressed by the various appeals to “creativity”. I am not even sure what is meant by “creativity” in this context. One cannot, after all, expect someone to be, say, a creative strategist in chess who is ignorant even of the basic moves. Before we even think of creativity, we must provide children material to be creative with. Even a creative genius such as Schubert, even while creating works the quality of which we lesser mortals can but wonder at in awed disbelief, took formal lessons in counterpoint. He did not see these formal lessons as a bar to creativity: quite the opposite.

And sadly, yes, this does mean an element of rote learning. Of course I don’t want to see education as merely a sequence of learning by rote without understanding: no reasonable person, I think, does. But I don’t really see how all rote learning can be avoided. It is not possible to become acquainted with the wonders and the beauties of mathematics without knowing, at the very least, the times tables. And should anyone know of a way of teaching the times tables that does not involve rote learning, I’d be glad to hear it. And so it continues, year after year of boring drudgery, until the beauty of the subject becomes apparent. And similarly with other subjects – both the sciences and the arts: to get to the stage where things get really interesting, one has to trawl through much that is boring and dull. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. Under the circumstances, the Ageing Hippy stance of insisting only on that which excites and stimulates children does strike me as misplaced. It robs them of that which, ultimately, enriches.

So on balance, on matters of education, I think I am more of a Desiccated Pedant than an Ageing Hippy. Which is a bit of a shame, as I’d much rather be on Michael Rosen’s side than on Toby Young’s. Best would be if people could move away from their entrenched positions, and consider seriously what the other side is saying, but, as with anything else, that would be too much to hope for.

“Levels of Life” by Julian Barnes: a meditation on grief

In the 8^th book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the gods Jupiter and Mercury, wandering the earth in disguise, find scant hospitality in the homes of the wealthy; however, they do find welcome from a poor and elderly couple, Philemon and Baucis. Once they reveal themselves as gods, they ask their hosts what they most desire. And their hosts reply that they would like to die at the same time. It isn’t death they seek to avoid, but the grief that accompanies loss. As reward, they pass from life simultaneously, metamorphosed into a pair of intertwining trees.

Grief is an emotion that we possibly still haven’t come to terms with, despite centuries of experience. We all know ‘tis common: all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity; and yet, grief sticks in our throat. We know neither how to react to the grief of others, nor how to express our own. In the presence of the grief of others, we worry about appearing intrusive, or uncaring, or insincere; we worry about saying things that are trite, or sentimental, or commonplace. And silence seems no better. As for our own grief, words, once again, fail us: what we experience is so powerful that it demands to be spoken; and yet, whatever we say falls short, too short.

Many feel embarrassed by the whole thing. Some resort to “black humour”, or “gallows humour”, claiming this is the only way we can deal with emotions so powerful. Perhaps. But even if this were so (which I doubt), humour comes well short of expressing what we feel. Indeed, some may argue that it expresses quite the opposite.

Some four years ago, literary agent Pat Kavanagh, Julian Barnes’ wife of thirty years, died of a late-diagnosed cancer: “it was thirty-seven days from diagnosis to death,” Barnes tells us. In his latest book, Levels of Life, Julian Barnes writes a memoir – not of their life together, but of his grief. He is well aware of the pitfalls of writing such a book: he is laying himself open to accusations of breast-beating, and of self-pity. For what we know must be and is as common as any the most vulgar thing to sense, why should we in our peevish opposition take it to heart? Why indeed.

The theme of grief is not, of course, a new one: anyone who has thought seriously about life has also thought seriously about death. But each individual’s grief is different, because each individual is different. However, as Barnes tells us, unique though each individual grief may be, there can be overlaps. (“Griefs do not explain one another, but they may overlap.”) By focusing on the individual, light may be thrown on the general. And so Barnes focusses on the individual grief that he is, naturally, closest to: his own.

This is not a novel. Perhaps the second of its three parts contains elements of fiction: I haven’t checked. And it is hard to describe it as a “memoir” either – although I have done so earlier for convenience. Rather, it is a personal meditation on the nature of a personal grief.

But of course, no matter how sincere and deeply felt the writing may be, unless it has some sort of structure, it would be mere meandering. The titles of the three chapters given in the list of contents give a fair idea of the form of the work:

-       The Sin of Height
-       On the Level
-       The Loss of Depth

A journey from the heights to the depths – from the heights, where one may, blasphemously, take a God’s eye view on those puny human creatures; down to the level of humanity itself, without self-aggrandisement or hubris; and finally, to the depths of our deepest feelings, where we grieve for loss. Or, if we want to read the title of that last chapter differently, where we lose the sense of depth itself, and everything appears shallow and meaningless. Even so cursory a summary indicates the various different meanings that may be attached to the concepts of height and of depth – both literal, and, in various different ways, metaphorical.

Each chapter starts in almost the same way:

You put two things together that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.

You put together two things that have not been put together before; and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

And, at the start of the final chapter:

You put together two people who have not been put together before.

In the first chapter, the two things that are put together – at least in a literal sense – are hot air ballooning and photography. These two things are put together, and a new image of humanity emerges: an objective view from the heights. This view reached its culmination in the famous picture taken by Apollo astronauts of earthrise from the moon – beautiful, cold, and inhumanly objective. This first part focuses on ballooning: in prose of limpid elegance, Barnes tells us about some of the pioneering balloonists – the bluff Englishman Fred Burnaby; the glamorous and enticing celebrity Sarah Bernhardt; and the eccentric Félix Tournachon, pioneer both of ballooning and of photography. This is certainly an unexpected beginning to a book that is essentially a meditation on personal grief, but Barnes is establishing the images and emblems that are to hold the book together. In the second chapter, Barnes continues in this vein, giving us an unlikely story of Fred Burnaby’s unsuccessful wooing of Sarah Bernhardt. How much of this is true and how much fiction, I do not know.

It is in the third and the longest part that we get to the heart of the matter: the loss of depth. When two people come together, sometimes, when it works, something new is made.

Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

What follows is hard to categorise in any conventional sense. Fiction it most certainly isn’t. The back of the dust jacket helpfully offers “biography/memoir”, but they both seem inadequate. If “meditation” were a recognised literary category, that would perhaps be more applicable.

And this is the point where readers embarrassed by direct description of powerful and personal emotion should stop. But such embarrassment is surely misplaced. Writers always have depicted human emotion, and have not shirked even the most powerful of them – and even when the emotions are their own: one thinks of Milton’s sonnet on seeing his dead wife in his dream; or Ben Jonson’s lament for his dead son; or Wordsworth’s heartbreaking sonnet about his dead daughter (he had not forgotten her, he tells us – he had merely forgotten momentarily that she was no longer alive). The Bengali-speaker will know also the disconsolate poems written by Rabindranath after the death of his young wife and two daughters within a few years, and also the poems he continued to write to the very end of his long life on those moments in which that intensity of grief would, for no apparent reason, resurge. No – however embarrassed we may feel by the direct depiction of raw and powerful emotions, such matters are legitimately within the provenance of literature.

Not that Barnes makes a show of his grief. He depicts it honestly and clearly, and soberly, knowing fully that any attempt to make an exhibition of such matters would not merely be disrespectful, but empty emotional grandstanding. The voice he speaks in is clear and lucid, quiet and thoughtful: all hint of hysteria is avoided. He speaks, amongst other things, of his anger; however, he does not believe in God, there is no-one he could direct that anger towards. So he directed it, unfairly, at others – those who said the wrong things (not that there is any right thing to be said), those who said nothing at all, those who kept away, those who didn’t. As a former lexicographer, he takes issue with the various euphemisms people use – “lost”, “passed away”, and so on, although avoidance of such euphemisms would not have helped either. As bereaved, he feels literally be-reaved, robbed: the injustice was palpable, but there is no-one whom he could possibly charge with the injustice, with the robbery. He speaks – once again calmly, without hysteria – of his thoughts of suicide, deciding against it only because with his death, his memories of his wife would die also.

He considers the various platitudes and truisms that are trotted out on these occasions. He rejects angrily Nietzsche’s assertion that whatever does not kill us makes us stronger; he also rejects the idea of time being a healer. He tells us that he still speaks to his wife, even though he is convinced that she cannot be there even in spirit. He tells us that he has become unexpectedly fond of opera, a medium he had never cared for before, because it addresses the most powerful of emotions directly and openly, and without any apology or doing so.

He rejects any consolation religion has to offer. He speaks of a Christian friend of his:

He [said] he would pray for her. I didn’t object, but shockingly soon found myself informing him, not without bitterness, that his god didn’t seem to have been very effective. He replied, “Have you ever considered that she might have suffered more?” Ah, I thought, so that’s the best your pale Galilean can do.

One does not need to be Christian to find this unfair: one cannot, after all, condemn the whole of Christianity on the basis of a few injudicious and insensitive words uttered by an adherent. But religion has nothing to offer Barnes.

Of course, had he lived, say, a hundred or so years earlier, he would have been more likely to have been a believer, or, at least, to have turned to religion at so stressful a time: our stance in these matters owes more to the currents of our times and less to our own independent thought than we’d like perhaps to think. In our age, we have “killed God”, and while Barnes thinks this was the right thing to have done, there remains a part of him that can regret this:

When we killed – or exiled – God, we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren’t going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height – even if it was only the illusion of a view – wasn’t so bad.

I personally cannot think much of any conviction, however true we may think it to be (we can never be certain, of course: at least, I can’t), that adds to our sorrows; but there is something admirable all the same in Barnes’ refusal to espouse that which he had rejected before. But perhaps, I can’t help feeling, we would have been better not to have sawn off that branch. As Barnes himself acknowledges at the start of this third part, there exists a truth other than pure mathematical truth.

Barnes reflects on the moral status also of love and of grief:

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. Whereas grief, love’s opposite, does not seem to occupy a moral space. The defensive, curled position it forces us into if we are to survive makes us more selfish.

This did, I admit, strike me as odd when I read it. Is grief really the opposite of love? We grieve only for the loss of her whom we had loved, and whom we continue to love: without love, there is no grief. Is grief therefore not the complement rather than the opposite? Hamlet had, correctly, taken his mother’s lack of grief to indicate her lack of love, and, this being so, he could no longer make sense of the world, he could no longer see in life any significant pattern. The intensity of grief seems to me an indication that what we are grieving for is worth grieving for. And, maybe, that does in itself render life – even without any thought of a possible afterlife – at least some semblance of a significance.

Barnes later changes his mind on this point, but his reason for thinking of grief as not occupying a moral space is an interesting one: to survive grief, he says, we must be selfish. This is an area of the human mind with which I am unfamiliar, and I can’t say I have as yet quite absorbed it.

The book ends on a vaguely hopeful note. Not that the grief has in any way disappeared, or has been in any way assuaged. But there appears a hope, expressed as ever in the clearest and most lucid of prose, that perhaps a new stage of life may now be entered. What that stage is, he does not know: he can but guess where the balloon will land. It will go wherever the wind takes it.

And the wind, of course, bloweth where it listeth.

***

Although the prose is simple and elegant, this book is not an easy read. It is certainly not a comfortable read, and neither is it meant to be. There is throughout a dogged determination to refuse all easy solutions, to reject all possible consolation. The rawness of the emotions seems to rub against the quiet and dignified eloquence of the telling, and even the various emblems of ballooning and of aerial photography cannot impart a decorous shape to a theme that is so infinitely large and incomprehensible.

This is an account of an intelligent and reasonable man trying, with predictable lack of success, to understand that which is beyond al understanding. But if the attempt to understand is doomed to failure, one can, at least depict. What is depicted here is an important aspect of our lives – our lives, because while griefs cannot explain each other, they do overlap.

What makes characters tragic?

Imagine, in the final chapter of a novel, the protagonist taking a walk in the park on a windy day; and that the wind very suddenly becomes a violent storm; and that the protagonist, before she can head home, is killed by a tree falling upon her. I think we can agree that this would be a deeply unsatisfactory ending, and few would describe it as “tragic”. But why? People in real life have indeed been killed by trees falling on them is high winds, and when it happens, it is most certainly tragic. However, we reply, the rules that govern art are not quite the rules that govern real life; and in art, one simply can’t kill off a protagonist by dropping a tree on her head.

Of course, the idea of “rules governing art” is problematic, to say the least. Who formulated these rules? we may well ask. And why should we be expected to conform to them? The answers to these questions seem to me to be, respectively, “No-one”, and “You needn’t”. The idea of prescriptive rules in art is nonsense: what we sometimes think of as “rules” are really no more than observations on what tends to work, and what doesn’t. So if there exists a “rule” that a narrative should not be resolved by some arbitrary event unconnected with the protagonist’s character or actions, then that is not because some pedantic busybody has made it up; rather, it is because we observe that arbitrary endings tend to leave the reader unsatisfied. We may allow chance to play its part in narrative, but when it plays a decisive part, then, irrespective of how true-to-life it may be, the narrative seems unresolved and incomplete.

This consideration, together with a misreading of the concept of “hamartia” in Aristotle’s Poetics, has led to the much cited principle of the “tragic flaw” – the idea that tragic protagonists must have some shortcoming in their character, and that, because of this shortcoming, they come to a sticky end. This has always seemed to me disastrously reductive: far from helping us understand profound and difficult works, it diminishes their richness and complexity to a mere barren formula. So Hamlet is indecisive, Othello jealous, Macbeth ambitious, and so on; and once the boxes are all routinely ticked, the plays can be marked as “solved” and folded away, like completed crossword puzzles. But I remain unconvinced that this takes us any closer to understanding the work. Even if the idea of the tragic flaw were but a “tool”, I cannot see what aspect of our understanding this this tool has helped enhance.

Of course I agree that Hamlet, Othello et al all play their part in their own tragedies: were that not so, their stories would be of no more than that of the tree falling on the head. But to obtain even a basic understanding of these complex characters, we must delve deeper, far deeper, than merely sticking simple labels on them. And what labels we observe others sticking on them, we must question. For instance, is Hamlet really indecisive? He is certainly not indecisive when he plunges his sword through the arras and kills Polonius; neither is he indecisive when he jumps onto the pirates’ ship; or when he confronts Laertes at Ophelia’s funeral. Yes, he is indeed unable to act in carrying out his father’s commandment, but to ascribe this merely to “indecision” seems to me not merely an over-simplification, but worse, a distortion.

Nor can Hamlet’s “flaw” be described, as it sometimes is, as that of “thinking too much”. Hamlet himself, admittedly, speaks of “thinking too precisely on the event”, but should we see this as a flaw? Since when has depth of thought been a flaw? Would Hamlet have been free of his tragic flaw had he thought too little? Or maybe he should have thought just enough – neither too much, nor too little? Maybe his tragic flaw lies in his not finding that precise level beyond which intellectual activity becomes tragic?

This sort of thing quickly becomes a bit silly, and does not, I think, lead to any greater understanding of the work. And worse, in presenting works of moral complexity and of psychological depth as essentially moral fables, it distorts. For in seeing tragedy as essentially a consequence of shortcomings in the protagonist’s character, there seems to me to be an implication that were it not for those shortcomings, were it but possible for the protagonist to be at some ideal level free of flaws, then there need have been no tragedy at all. And this strikes me as deeply wrong-headed.

Let us stick with Hamlet. Let us imagine a Hamlet free from the supposed flaws of indecision, or of “thinking too much”. This Hamlet wastes no time mobilising his forces, killing Claudius, and establishing himself as king. But would such a Hamlet be free of flaws? Such a Hamlet would, after all, fail to think about, and, indeed, be insensitive to, the various complex moral issues in which he is enmeshed. And in killing the man his mother loves, he must either be insensitive to the distress he causes his mother, or he must bear the guilt for it. For, as the Greek tragedians knew too well, even a killing that is committed in the name of justice carries with it an intolerable burden of guilt.

In short, whatever sort of person Hamlet is, whatever he does, his fate is tragic. This is because the world itself is tragic, and we cannot escape it. We must beware of reducing works of complexity to a “message”, but if the great masterpieces of tragic literature were to have a lesson at all, it is not that we may avoid tragedy to the extent that we are successful in minimising the effects of our flaws, but rather that whatever we do, however we act, the tragic world, the essence of which we have witnessed on stage, is our world also.

Whether perfect happiness would be procured by perfect goodness … this world will never afford an opportunity of deciding. But this, at least, may be maintained, that we do not always find visible happiness in proportion to visible virtue. All natural and almost all political evils, are incident alike to the bad and good: they are confounded in the misery of a famine, and not much distinguished in the fury of a faction; they sink together in a tempest, and are driven together from their country by invaders. All that virtue can afford is quietness of conscience, a steady prospect of a happier state; this may enable us to endure calamity with patience; but remember that patience must suppose pain.

- from “Rasselas” by Samuel Johnson, Chapter 27

***

There is one undisputed masterpiece of tragic drama in which the concept of a “tragic flaw” breaks down completely, and this is the very work that Aristotle focussed on in his Poetics: King Oedipus by Sophocles. In Aristotle’s formulation, Oedipus’ “hamartia” was killing his father, and marrying his mother: these aren’t “tragic flaws” because he did all this unknowingly, but it is, nonetheless, “hamartia” in the sense that Aristotle had intended it – i.e. it is an “error”. However, commentators have frequently tried to interpret Oedipus’ tragic fate in terms of some character flaw of his, and, in the process, have tied themselves in all sorts of absurd knots.

We are sometimes told, for instance, that Oedipus’ tragic flaw is that he is arrogant and hot-tempered. Indeed he is: Sophocles was too fine a dramatist to present us with major characters who are morally perfect. But neither his arrogance nor his hot temper is the cause of his downfall.

Or we are sometimes told that his downfall came about because he was too inquisitive – because he continued searching for the truth even when told to stop. But is searching for the truth not a noble activity? And, as king responsible for his subjects, is he not duty-bound to search for the truth that, according to Apollo’s oracle, will free his people from the plague that is devastating them?

I suppose when all else fails, we could see it as a grave moral warning not to kill our fathers and then marry our mothers! Absurd as it may seem, some have seen the play in such terms also.

But once we move away from the “tragic flaw” theory of tragedy, we may, I think, approach a better understanding of this elusive and difficult play. For if Oedipus’ fate is not a consequence of any conscious action of his, we are seeing on stage a vision of humans but as playthings of the gods. Sophocles depicts , in effect, the tree falling on the protagonist’s head, deemed to do so by gods who, but for the oracular edicts from Delphi, remain absent and silent. That Sophocles could create from this drama that grips as no other, drama that thousands of years later is regarded as the very epitome of tragic action, is a testament to his genius, and a reminder that the literature at this level is not subject to any of our “rules”.

Tolstoy’s “confession”

CASSIUS

Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?

BRUTUS

No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself,
But by reflection, by some other things.

CASSIUS

‘Tis just:
And it is very much lamented, Brutus,
That you have no such mirrors as will turn
Your hidden worthiness into your eye

- from Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2, by William Shakespeare

 

The general consensus of opinion appears to be that while Tolstoy’s greatness as a novelist is beyond dispute, his polemics are a bit loopy, and are, on the whole, best ignored.

I think I probably subscribed to this also: after all, from what I knew of Tolstoy’s life, the moral and religious convictions of his later years brought happiness neither to himself nor to the people around him. And what great wisdom can it be that makes people unhappy?

So I, too, was content to think of his polemical writings as merely “loopy”; and so, I ignored them. But this won’t really do: his fiction, right to the end of a life, is quite clearly the product of an extraordinary mind; and that he should switch this mind off when writing polemics, and allow some inferior mind to take over, seems unlikely to say the least.

So I turned to the first of his major polemical writings of his late period, “A Confession”, written in 1879 shortly after the completion of Anna Karenina, while he was in his early 50s. Here, the writer who is perhaps equalled only by Shakespeare in his understanding of humanity in all its extraordinary diversity, turns the spotlight upon himself, and tries to understand the promptings of his own soul. The result is enthralling, but, as with the last section of Anna Karenina (which finds frequent echoes here), it is also, it seems to me, open-ended.

As is well-known, the depiction of the spiritual crisis Levin undergoes in Anna Karenina is almost entirely autobiographical. The details of Levin’s crisis, and that of Tolstoy’s as recorded here, seem virtually identical. Here too, we get the startling details of how he had kept away from ropes and knives and guns for fear that he might be tempted into suicide; here too is the realisation that there exist powerful forces other than reason that shape his thoughts. But before we get to this stage, Tolstoy tells us how his spiritual crisis had come about.

Although raised in the Orthodox Russian faith, he had not, he tells us, taken it very seriously. At first, he had accepted the outward shows without thinking too hard; but after a while, he couldn’t help but note the various absurdities of human life itself, and what struck him as its pointlessness. And set against this pointlessness, the rituals of the church seemed meaningless. All this may come as something of a surprise to those who know and love War and Peace and Anna Karenina, as those books could only have been written by someone who loved life, who loved the constant flux that constituted living, who was dazzled by the sheer plenitude of it all. And yet, this same man, having already scaled some of the greatest peaks of artistic achievements, says this:

Before occupying myself with my Samara estate, with the education of my son, or with the writing of books, I had to know why I was doing these things. While I did not know why, I could not do anything. Amidst my thoughts concerning the farm, which at the time kept me very busy, a question would suddenly come into my head: “Well, fine, you will have 6,000 desyatins in the Samara province and 300 horses, and then what?” And feeling completely taken back, I would not know what to think next. Or, beginning to reflect on the education of my children, I would ask myself, “Why?” Or deliberating how the peasants may achieve prosperity I would suddenly ask myself, “What concern is it of mine?” Or thinking about the fame my own writing had brought me, I would say to myself, “Well, fine, so you can be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière, more famous than all the writers in the world, and so what?”

And I had absolutely no answer.

On reflection, perhaps it was precisely because Tolstoy loved so much that these questions were for him so terrible: only someone who loves life could be so horrified by the possibility of its futility. These questions, for Tolstoy, demanded answers: there had to be, for him, some meaning to his life, to his activities, that would not be obliterated by his physical death. In the absence of answers, his life became for him, he tells us, “hateful”; and this is why he had to keep himself away, like his creation Levin, from temptations of self-slaughter.

At this point, he introduces what he claims is a traditional fable. A man falls down the well, but manages to hold on to a branch projecting from the wall of the well. At the bottom of the well is a dragon. While he is holding on to this branch, he knows he is safe from the dragon, but two mice – a black and a white, night and day – are gnawing away at the branch, and he knows that eventually he will fall prey to the dragon. And the thought of this gives him no peace. Near where he hangs is honey which he can lick, but the thought of that dragon, and of the fate that awaits him, prevents him from enjoying this honey.

The meaning of the fable is obvious enough, but there is a contrivance about it that seems most unTolstoyan, and very far from the seemingly effortless simplicity of the fables he was later to go on to write (“How Much Land Does a Man Need?”, “What Men Live By”, etc.) How could other people enjoy the honey while being aware of the dragon? he asks himself. He describes some mechanisms whereby the question of the dragon may be avoided, but such mechanisms, he decides, are not for him: at the end of it all there’s that dragon, and that sucks out of life all possibility of meaning.

And yet, Tolstoy is not prepared to turn his back on life. He speaks of Socrates, of Buddha, and of Schopenhauer, all in their different ways turning away from this world, renouncing desire, abjuring the earthly. But the man who had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina couldn’t do that: even when he had renounced these works, he couldn’t do that: he loved life too much. And in any case, he reflected, even Socrates, Buddha and Schopenhauer, for all their renunciation, went on living. Tolstoy could not force himself into renunciation: to renounce life was unthinkable, and to go on living a life which one had renounced seemed to him yet another form of meaninglessness.

As ever with Tolstoy, the writing is extraordinarily simple and direct. Whether or not the reader shares Tolstoy’s outlook, the intensity and directness with which his crisis is described is startling:

My position was terrible. I knew that I could find nothing along the path of knowledge, other than negation of life. While in faith I found nothing other than a negation of reason, which was even more impossible than denial of life. According to rational knowledge life is an evil and people know it. They have the choice of ending their lives and yet they have always carried on living, just as I myself have done, despite having known for a long time that life is meaningless and evil. According to faith it follows that in order to comprehend the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which meaning was necessary.

Like Levin, Tolstoy saw the possibility of an answer – a possibility only – from the simple life of peasantry. Now, Tolstoy is frequently accused of idealising peasant life, and peasant wisdom; however, Tolstoy was close to the peasantry, while his accusers are almost invariably far removed from the lives of the illiterate and the impoverished. So perhaps we ought to give Tolstoy at least some benefit of the doubt when he says that in the lives of many peasants, poor, illiterate and uneducated, he had found a serenity and an equanimity that were so conspicuously lacking in his own life. And the possibility struck him that they may be in possession of something that had eluded him.

And there came to him a realisation also that there were powerful forces in his mind other than the rational:

Thus in addition to rational knowledge, which I had hitherto thought to be the only knowledge, I was inevitably led to acknowledge that there does exist another kind of knowledge – an irrational one – possessed by humanity as a whole: faith, which affords the possibility of living.

It is easy for the modern reader to dismiss this merely as sentimental religiosity, but perhaps, once again, we should not be so cavalier in rejecting this. For it is true that there is much we – even secularists, even atheists – hold on to that we have not arrived at through exercising our reason. For instance, I am convinced that slavery is a great evil; but did I reach this moral position through exercising my reason? Did I set out to myself what the objectives of human activities should be, and why, and then reason to myself why slavery hinders rather than helps us achieve our objectives? Of course I didn’t. I don’t know where my conviction comes from that slavery is evil, but it’s not through reason. Of course, we all know slavery is very cruel, but the conviction that cruelty is an evil is not, once again, one that I have arrived at through ratiocination. How I have arrived at it, I don’t know. But Tolstoy’s realisation that there are powerful forces at work in shaping our thoughts and our moral values that are not in themselves rational is one I find myself sympathetic with.

But I do find myself somewhat nervous, to say the least, in Tolstoy’s placing so much faith in the power on unreason – in his identifying our inner moral voice as divine. For inner moral voices have led people to commit all sorts of horrors. And I cannot believe that Tolstoy could have been unaware of this. Perhaps it is not surprising that Tolstoy’s religious conversion never brought him the serenity he so craved.

But, provisionally, his religious conversion gives him some semblance at least of answers to those questions which, for him, had to be answered:

…to the question: what meaning is there that is not destroyed by death? The answer is: unity with the infinite, God, heaven.

But Tolstoy was at least as complex a character as any that he had depicted in his work, and reading this, it’s hard to escape the feeling that perhaps he didn’t see himself to quite as much depth as he saw his own creations: as Brutus knew, the eye sees not itself. Tolstoy, by temperament, was a rational creature: accepting the irrational, though attractive, though seemingly the answer to the questions that so tormented him, was not easy. There was nothing of the mystical in Tolstoy: the heaven he yearned for was not the heaven in some promised life to come, but heaven in the here-and-now. And to this end, he went on to make moral demands of his fellow human beings that he must have known his fellow human beings could not live up to. He made these same moral demands of himself, and it seems he couldn’t live up to them either. Tolstoy was as fascinating a character as any he created.

***

I am not capable of providing a critique of “A Confession” from a philosophical or a theological point of view: I am not sufficiently knowledgeable in either area. With hindsight, we can see that Tolstoy’s religious conversion had not brought him the peace and serenity he had so craved. That his questions remained unanswered, or, at best, only partially answered, was perhaps inevitable: the most profound questions about our lives will always elude us. But what I find particularly enthralling about “A Confession” is Tolstoy’s attempt, after having peered so deeply into the minds of others, to understand himself: The eye may not see itself, and Tolstoy’s vision of himself may have been incomplete; but it is, nonetheless, an extraordinary eye.

[All excerpts taken from the translation by Jean Kentish, published by Penguin Classics]