Lasting impressions, p.1
Lasting Impressions, page 1
LASTING IMPRESSIONS
Selected Essays
V. S. PRITCHETT
Contents
Sholom Aleichem PAIN AND LAUGHTER
Isaac Babel FIVE MINUTES OF LIFE
Simone de Beauvoir GROWING OLD
Gerald Brenan THE SAYINGS OF DON GERALDO
Robert Browning PIONEER
Bruce Chatwin WELSH PEASANTS
Flaubert & Turgenev SPECTATORS
Humboldt UNIVERSAL MAN
Molly Keane IRISH BEHAVIOUR
Le Roy Ladurie MEDIEVAL VOICES
Lorca THE DEATH OF LORCA
André Malraux MALRAUX AND PICASSO
Thomas Mann THE ROMANTIC AGONY
V.S. Naipaul IRAN AND PAKISTAN
George Orwell THE CRYSTAL SPIRIT
John Osborne A BETTER CLASS OF PERSON
Walker Percy CLOWNS
Forrest Reid ESCAPING FROM BELFAST
Salman Rushdie MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry LOST IN THE STARS
Bruno Schulz COMIC GENIUS
Bernard Shaw THE STAMP OF THE PURITAN
John Updike GETTING RICHER
Rebecca West ONE OF NATURE’S BALKANS
Oscar Wilde AN ANGLO-IRISHMAN
P. G. Wodehouse NEVER-NEVER-LAND
Mary Wollstonecraft THE STRENGTH OF AN INJURED SPIRIT
LIST OF BOOKS
Preface
When I look back on my seventy years as a writer, I see myself as a traveller not only on the long journeys I have made in Europe and the Americas, but also as a literary journalist. Although I have written long biographical studies of Chekhov, Turgenev and Balzac, I have, as a short story writer, preferred the shorter evocations and I have profited by the discipline imposed by limited space.
This collection of literary essays - my ninth - may appear to be a haphazard journey through different countries and different generations, from Lorca to John Updike, from Browning to Wilde, but my purpose has always been the same: to explore the writers and their intentions.
I should like to thank the editors of the publications in which these pieces first appeared for helping me on my literary travels and for their permission to reprint them here.
Sholom Aleichem
Pain and Laughter
Sholom Aleichem is one of the prolific masters of Yiddish comic storytelling, an art springing from the oral folk traditions of Eastern Europe and crossed by the pain and laughter of racial calamity. Like all comics he is serious, has one foot in the disorder and madness of the world and, as a Jew, the other foot in the now perplexing, now exalted, adjuration of the Law and the Prophets. Did God really choose their fate for the Jewish people? If so, was He being irresponsible, or why doesn’t He make it clear? There is no answer. The oppressed stick to their rituals and are obliged to perfect the delights of cunning, the consolations of extravagant fantasy, the ironies and pedantries of the moralist who is privately turning his resignation into a weapon. With so many insoluble dilemmas on his hands, Aleichem developed that nimbleness of mind and fancy, those skills of masking and ventriloquism, that made him the prolific ‘natural’ in short tales drawn partly from the remaking of folk tradition, a juggler of puns, proverbs, and sudden revealing images caught from the bewildered tongues of his people.
There are certain distinctions to be noted when we speak of the general Jewish gift for anecdote. These are made clear in the exchange of letters between Irving Howe and Ruth Wisse which introduce their selection from a striking variety of Aleichem’s best work and discuss the growth of mind it reveals. Mr Howe points out that Aleichem is not a ‘folksy tickler of Jewish vanities’ and the Yiddish folk material he uses is not as cosy ‘as later generations of Jews have liked to suppose’. Under the laughter is fright and the old driving forces of anxiety and guilt: if Aleichem is close to folk sources he escapes the collective claustrophobia of a folk tradition that was broken by the pogroms and wars that drove the Eastern European Jews to flight or death; he has let in the light of ‘a complicated and individual vision of human existence. That means terror and joy, dark and bright, fear and play.’
Ruth Wisse points to Aleichem’s position in the period when the Jewish moral crisis came to a head in Eastern Europe. Writing of his contemporaries, the classical masters Mendele Mocher Sforim and I. L. Peretz, she says that they are embattled writers, ‘fiercely critical of their society’, strong in dialectical tendency, pitting old against new; whereas Aleichem, who also felt the break in the Jewish tradition and in his own life, ‘makes it his artistic business to close the gap. In fact, wherever the danger of dissolution is greatest, the stories work their magic in simulating or creating a terra firma.’ I do not know the work of these writers but it is certainly true of Aleichem’s work that it shows his balance and poise in tales like ‘A Yom Kippur Scandal’, ‘Station Baranovich’, the terrifying ‘Krushniker Delegation’, ‘Eternal Life’, and above all in the four grave Tevye tales. As he tries to face his daughters’ rebellion against tradition Tevye becomes, tragically, something more than a folk figure: he becomes a man.
Aleichem has the style of the spontaneous talker, at home in many garrulous idioms; it is a style that plays as it moves forward dramatically and then, hit by an image or a proverb, circles back. The narrator’s mind is continually split between what is happening and something else, some fear, some scheme, some hope that is going on in his mind. He acts on impulse and regrets at once; always escaping from his situation, he is back in it only to find it changed, usually for the worse. He writes as a man backing away from the next minute and going headlong into it. Nearly all of Aleichem’s people are whirled around by their imaginations, addressing fate, knocked this way and then that by scripture or the proverbs–‘When a soup bone is stuck in somebody’s face who doesn’t give it a lick?’ On second thoughts, ‘You can skin a bear in the forest but you still can’t sell its hide there.’ Speculation is their anguish. They burn with a fever. ‘My blood began to whistle like a teakettle. ‘ Aleichem’s powers of invention pour out of the language he utters. The innumerable surprises of language so entangle us that we are caught out by the vaster surprises of the tale. In catching us out, his art shows its depth.
Aleichem’s people themselves belong to a storytelling culture. He is as astonished and disturbed by his bizarre tales as we are and uses the device of not bringing them to an end, sometimes in order to show that the meaning of the tale has been hidden and we must work it out for ourselves or go on making it up on our own. This is evidence of a very self-conscious art, as Mr Howe says.
A clear example is ‘A Yom Kippur Scandal’. A stranger comes to the synagogue and overcomes mistrust by handing out silver coins, but when the rituals are over, he suddenly screams out that he has been robbed of 1800 roubles, on the holiest day of the year. He had put the money into the praying stand and it has gone. The rabbi and his congregation turn out their pockets. Only one person refuses. He is a young man notorious for knowing the Talmud by heart, for being a master of Hebrew, arithmetic, algebra, unequalled in chess–perfection. The congregation argue with him, he begs to be spared, but they throw him to the ground and, going through his pockets discover only a couple of gnawed chicken bones and a dozen plum pits still wet from chewing.
You can imagine what an impression this made–to discover food in the pockets of our prodigy on this holiest of fast days. Can you imagine the look on the young man’s face, and on his father-in-law’s? And on that of our poor rabbi?
But what about the 1800 roubles? Never found. Gone forever, says the storyteller, and never explains. We can suspect, if we like, that the stranger had invented the drama, to cover up the fact that he had stolen his employer’s money. But Aleichem does not explain. Why not? Because the deeper sin than the sin of theft is the sin against God and His Law? Aleichem still doesn’t say. We are perhaps left to search our own souls. Who knows?
’Station Baranovich’ is another tale that stops short of its ending. It is told by a Jewish stranger on a train and is an event that occurred in czarist times. A loose-tongued bartender called Kivke starts a religious argument with peasants on a Sunday. He is reported to the police and is sentenced to be stripped naked and to run a gauntlet of cavalry officers, who will whip him. The Jews unite to plot his escape. They fake the death of Kivke in prison, arrange a mock funeral, and get him out of the country. He shows his gratitude by blackmailing them for larger and larger sums of money now that he is free. The final threat is to report the whole thing to the Russian Commissioner. But at this point the train stops at Baranovich and the teller of the story jumps out. What happened next, what is the end? the listeners shout. All they get is
’What end? It was just the beginning!’
and he is gone. Aleichem says
May Station Baranovich burn to the ground!
What does he mean? Ruth Wisse says it sounds like a protest against his own art or a defence of it. More likely it seems to me that the end being ‘just the beginning’ evokes the only too familiar frightful prospect that awaited the Jews of that village, a further test of their emotions, their ingenuity as an oppressed people.
Aleichem’s humour has a double edge; it is concerned with a good deal of trickery or with efforts to bring off a successful or kind action which come to disaster because of some helpless absent-mindedness. In ‘Eternal Life’ the green young theological student who lives under the thumb of his mother-in-law volunteers, out of a desire to do a good deed that will win him Eternal Life, to tak
My tongue seemed to stick to my palate. I decided that, since I had begun with lies, I might as well continue with lies, and I made up a long tale about my mother-in-law sitting alone, knitting a sock, forgetting that her son Ephraim was there, a boy of thirteen, overgrown and a complete fool. He was playing with his shadow. He stole up to her, waved his hands over her head and uttered a goat cry, Mehh! He was making a shadow goat on the wall. And at this sound my mother-in-law fell from her stool and died.
Again and again, the storyteller invents other selves when he dramatises a dilemma. Yet this story is not mechanical farce; it passes through the moods of youthful exultation and sorrow, and as the blizzard drives him almost into sleep on the sleigh, the idea of Eternal Life has the sweetness of death and then turns to terror, for the wind seems to be the voice of the dead woman on the sleigh. She seems to accuse him and say, What are you doing to me, young man? Destroying a daughter of Israel who has died?
In this story we move through joy, exaltation, fear, and farce, as if these were a weather in which the people live. Indeed in all the stories, the feelings bound from one to another. The characters repeat themselves with comic fervour, as if searching for guarantees; they dramatise themselves as if they were momentary universes. Each in turn is the only one who loves, hates, scolds, whines, tricks or believes. In their voices these people, who have no land, have their territory and thus Aleichem has written its history.
Irving Howe notes that the Mottel farces introduce a Tom Sawyer-like note, which one does not hear in the adult stories. I notice something like a theme of Flann O’Brien’s in one of them, My Brother Elye’s Drink -in ‘Mottel the Cantor’s Son’. It is about a boy out to make a fortune from homemade kvass and ink, and who even offers to rid his town of mice. One can see Aleichem’s instant, restless eye unfitted him for the novel. As the Tevye stories show, he could be grave without encumbering himself with novelistic architecture. One surprise is the almost complete lack of erotic or mystical fantasy, such as we find in I. B. Singer.
Isaac Babel
Five Minutes of Life
Isaac Babel was the most telling writer of abrupt stories to come out of the Russian revolution. This gentle Jew was a man who hit one in the belly. More important he had–what is indispensable to short stories–a distinct voice. Made famous by Red Cavalry and the Odessa stories–he was rewarded with a very pretty dacha–he worked under Gorki’s influence and protection as a writer precariously accepted by the regime but increasingly restless and finally silent under it as a person and an artist; he was allowed to go to Paris and Italy, but his foreign contacts must have brought him under suspicion; he was arrested, secretly tried, and presumably executed, in the general Stalinist attack on the arts in 1939. A blunt story–rather like one of his own. His works vanished; references to them were cut out of histories and criticism; his manuscripts and papers were either destroyed or, haphazard, lost. Not until 1964 was he rehabilitated and there was a public celebration of his genius.
Letters written to his first family who were in Brussels and Paris have been recovered; also stories lost in periodicals or in salvaged manuscripts. Few have yet appeared in Russia or in translation. It is the same old stupid Soviet tale. The MacAndrew edition contains his letters and two early stories, including the famous ‘My First Fee’: the Max Hayward edition which first appeared in 1969 also contains early work like ‘An Evening at the Empress’s’ and ‘The Chinaman’, and the texts of a long interview, and of the speeches made in 1964 by Ehrenburg, Paustovsky, Nikulin and Munblit. The Paustovsky piece supplements the fine portrait in Babel’s Years of Hope and is a valuable and intimate account of his habits as a writer in the early days. He and Paustovsky belonged to the very talented group who began to write in Odessa in the terrible period of the Civil War. In spite of biographical criticisms made by Nathalie Babel, the edition of her father’s stories introduced by Lionel Trilling in 1955 is important.
The subjects of a very large number of Babel’s stories are primitive and direct. The war and the expropriations have turned the peasants on the Asiatic border into murderers, looters, and bandits; the new government forces are as ruthless in getting a new regime set up. Babel’s prose is sharp and laconic. There is little comment. And yet within the fatalism of the tales there is the unmistakable Jewish humanity; sometimes the Jewish humour and fantasy–what one can only call the irony of recognition: the recognition of the manly or womanly essence of each briefly elicited character. Babel had a master in Gorki, but his deeper masters were Gogol and Maupassant: Gogol for the imaginative richness, Maupassant for detachment, economy, and devilish skill. Eventually Babel was to find Maupassant cold. What I think Babel meant was that the Frenchman was outside, whereas all Babel’s characters carry some grain of the presence of Russia, the self being a fragment of the land’s fatality. One says, as one sees the Kulak kill his horse rather than let it go to the Cheka people when he is turned out, when one sees him become a legend as a bandit, and when he is run to earth and killed in a pit: ‘Yes, that is how it was. It was the end of an epoch, dreadful.’ One has seen the rage of a lifetime.
As an artist, Babel describes himself in ‘My First Fee’:
From childhood all the strength of my being had been devoted to the invention of tales, plays and stories–thousands of them. They lay on my heart like toads on a stone. I was possessed by devilish pride and did not want to write them down prematurely.
His early idea was to ‘dress them in beautiful clothes’ and he could write, for example:
The flowering acacias along the streets began to moan in a low, faltering voice.
Later, in his innumerable re-writings (so that one very short tale might be drained from dozens of versions as long as a novel), his aim was to cut and cut and cut. He was tormented by the amount of words and inventions inside himself.
On the other hand, occasionally he expanded an early version. ‘My First Fee’ has an early laconic version called ‘Answer to an Inquiry’, which contains one of those brief asides which are a remarkable but traditional part of his art—an item in a prostitute’s room:
In a small glass bowl of milky liquid flies are dying—each in his own way.
and, although the end is sharper in the first version, the second and longer one is richer. The boy’s lying tale is now really fantastic; and the symbol for describing the sexual act is more truthful than anything by contemporary masturbators:
Now tell me, I should like to ask you: have you ever seen a village carpenter helping his mate to build a house? Have you seen how thick and fast and gaily the shavings fly as they plane a beam together? That night this thirty-year-old woman taught me all the tricks of her trade.
In story after story Babel worked until he hit upon the symbol that turns it from anecdote into five minutes of life. He was not a novelist. By 1937 he was being semi-officially questioned about not writing on a large scale like Tolstoy or the very bien vu Sholokhov. It was being insinuated that he was idle and not pulling his weight. Poor devil! Short story writers are poets. Babel could not but be opposed to the clichés of Socialist Realism and particularly to the rhetorical magazine prose it had led to. He was also asked why he wrote of the exceptional rather than the typical, and one knows what Stalinism meant by ‘typical’: the middlebrow ideal. He replied with Goethe’s simple definition of the novella: it is a story about an unusual occurrence. And he went on—the interview appears verbatim in Hayward’s volume:
… Tolstoy was able to describe what happened to him minute by minute, he remembered it all, whereas I, evidently, only have it in me to describe the most interesting five minutes I’ve experienced in twenty-four hours.
He was opposed to the short story as a condensed novel. The short story is an insight.
