Book Review Article Ford Madox Ford, THE GOOD SOLDIER

                                                Natan Altman, Landscape in Blue, 1914

FROM THE SERIES "LOOKING BACK ON LITERARY CLASSICS FROM THE PAST"

Book Review Article

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (“Beati Immaculati”), Vintage Paperback, 1989, with an introduction (“An Interpretation”) by Mark Schorer, and the author’s dedicatory letter to his wife Stella Ford (January 9, 1927). The novel was first published in 1915.

The blurb on the front cover of my copy is from Graham Greene: “One of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our [20^th] century.” Blurbs usually exaggerate. So too does this one, but it exaggerates in the wrong direction. The first time I read this book I thought, “This is the great American novel.” In rereading it for this review, I have not changed my opinion. 

Of course, it’s not exactly an American novel. It is set in Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century and describes people who move in cosmopolitan circles. Despite its American narrator, the style seems purely British; the narrator uses British locutions and spellings consistently (‘colour’ for ‘color’, etc.). In his letter of 1927, Ford reports the words of a “fervent young admirer” who once exclaimed, “By Jove, The Good Soldier is the finest novel in the English language.” Whereupon, Ford’s friend John Rodker replied, “Ah yes. It is, but you have left out a word. It is the finest French novel in the English language!”

Forty years after the great Vladimir Nabokov’s death, some of his books are already beginning to age. Recently, I tried rereading one of his best Russian-language novels, The Gift, in English. It failed to hold my attention. Same goes for The Defense. Other novels, such as Bend Sinister, written in English, were never that good to begin with. Still brilliant, however, are works such as the magnificent Despair, a book in which Nabokov does totally novel and creative things with the form of the novel. As for Ford Madox Ford, his century-old Good Soldier has not aged in the least.

                                                                             #

The first amazing line of the book is one of the great bravura beginnings of all time: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” In fact, the original title was The Saddest Story, and in commenting on the book twelve years later, Ford still regrets that his publisher convinced him to change it.

What is so amazing about the first line? Is it not a sad story? At the end of the whole pathetic/bathetic mess, will not the reader conclude that he has seldom read anything sadder? Well, yes, but the comic irony that suffuses the book begins right here at the start. In the first place, our narrator, an American named Dowell—probably the most bizarre narrator in all of twentieth-century fiction—has not heard this story. Rather he has lived it, he is in it, and is still living the consequences of all its events at the end. This notwithstanding how persistently he tries to distance himself from the incessant melodrama.

The careful reader discovers early on that this novel’s teller is a textbook case of the unreliable narrator. “I swear to you that they [the Ashburnhams] were the model couple.” The narrator makes this assertion—which he knows to be patently false—on page 11, then spends the rest of the book, beginning with a description of Leonora’s despair on that same page, proving it nonsense. As Dowell tells the story, his method involves incessant self-contradiction. Things were like this; no, wait: they were like that.

Quote from the first paragraph: “My wife [Florence Hurlbird] and I knew Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows.”

So a man sits down to narrate a story—one in which he has played a central part—and informs the reader at the outset that he really understands nothing about the story he is telling. John Dowell—we learn that his name is John only midway through the book, p. 90—must have a middle name as well. Most befitting of all would be “I know nothing”: John Know-Nothing Dowell.

The central leitmotif of “hearts” also shows up right at the beginning. The book is about “sounding the depths of English hearts,” while remaining in the shallows as far as his own heart is concerned. There is the thing of “heart trouble.” Naïve American Dowell informs us that his wife, “poor Florence,” suffers from “a heart,” as does Captain Ashburnham, the good soldier of the title. By the time he sits down to narrate the story—after the central events are over and two of the main characters are dead—Dowell knows perfectly well that both of these characters suffered not from physical heart trouble, but from a predilection for romantic adventurism. An ancillary character, Florence’s Uncle John, is another man with heart trouble who turns out to have a perfectly healthy heart.

For a goodly portion of the book Dowell—along with his creator, Ford, the Narrative Presence pulling all the puppet strings—conceals much from the reader, and even from himself. In a typical blurted-out revelation (on p. 53) Dowell reveals the following: “You understand that there was nothing the matter with Edward Ashburnham’s heart—that he had thrown up his commission and had left India and come half the world over in order to follow a woman [Maisie Maidan] who really had a ‘heart’ to Nauheim. That was the sort of sentimental ass he was.”

The leitmotif of “bad hearts”—including three deaths, two of romantic love, and one of an actual heart attack—comes neatly to a head near the end of the novel, in the comic episode of what to do with the money Uncle John Hurlbird has left in his will. This money comes to Dowell, since Hurlbird has died just five days before Florence. The old man, who thought he had heart trouble, but did not, wished to make a charitable donation to some institution in aid of heart sufferers. Dowell—true to his usual bizarre instincts—decides that it is appropriate for the money to go to heart patients. After all, Uncle John had thought he had heart problems. “Moreover, Florence had certainly died of her heart [i.e., of her romantic predilections], as I saw it.” A page later: “This may strike you, silent listeners, as being funny.” You’re right, it does. The Good Soldier is a comic novel.

We learn on the second page that the action takes place, in large part, in 1904, nine years before the time of the writing, when Dowell was 36, Florence 30, Captain Edward Ashburnham 42, and his wife Leonora 31. Now, in 1913, older but not much wiser, Dowell is 45 and living in England, a country he had never even set foot in until six months before he began writing.

The central place of action is the famous German spa of Bad Nauheim, where rich people from all over the world come to take the waters. Rich Americans, far from being aristocrats, but possessing enough money to live the high-class life, Dowell and Florence have spent their married years in Paris. Every year, from July through September, they come to Nauheim, where ailing Florence nurses her ostensibly bad heart. There in Nauheim they make the acquaintance of the Ashburnhams, whom Dowell describes as “good people,” the kind who know how to behave according to accepted rules of the aristocratic class.

The narrative details how the lives of four people, all “quite good people” of the spa-visiting class, goes along for nine stable years of “stepping a lovely minuet,” and then suddenly “vanishes in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks.” But wait, says Dowell, it was not really a minuet at all; it was “a prison full of screaming hysterics,” but wait, no: “I swear by the sacred name of the creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true plash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins . . . If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?”

Such is the world of Dowell, who has spent his entire life pretending to himself that the good apples are not rotten inside. He concludes his expatiation on apples with this: “I know nothing—nothing in the world—of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone—horribly alone.” One is reminded of the teller of the tale of Job in the bible: “For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow.” The messengers who come to Job, to tell him of all the hideous tribulations that Satan—with the permission of the Lord—has visited upon him, always end their reports with this: “and I only have escaped alone to tell thee.”

Much changed and chagrined unto death, Dowell is the only escapee from the torture chambers of the four central characters at Nauheim, and although most of these characters place their faith in God, the god of this story seems mostly like the otiose god of the Job story, He who turns Satan lose, to do as he wishes with the life of the good man Job.

The central narrative of The Good Soldier is basically melodramatic, relating the story of Captain Edward Ashburnham, whose life is ruined because, essentially, he cannot keep his penis—or at least his romantic sentiments—in his pants pocket. What is “the good soldier,” Ashburnham, really like? Over the course of the book Dowell tells us repeatedly, constantly contradicting himself. Here is a typical assertion early on: “Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest-looking sort of chap, an excellent magistrate, a first-class soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire, England.” Later on: The “splendid fellow that he was—the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinary kind, careful, and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, etc.” And again, “I liked him so much—so infinitely much.”

Dowell gives numerous examples of this aristocrat-landlord’s kindnesses to the soldiers serving under him in India, and to the tenants on his landed estate of Branshaw Teleragh. With his way of jerking back and forth between love and hatred for all of the other characters, Dowell dwells at times on Ashburnham’s foibles; he is, above all, “a sentimentalist,” a man with a “intense, optimistic belief that the woman he was making love to at the moment was the one he was destined, at last, to be eternally constant to.” And this: “he was just exactly the sort of chap you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine—and it was madness.” 

Is “the good soldier” really much of a soldier? Well, after all, “all good soldiers are sentimentalists,” and Captain Ashburnham of the 14^th Hussars has never seen action in battle. His eyes: “they were perfectly honest, perfectly straitforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid.”

Over the course of the narrative Ashburnham runs through affairs with four different women—and practically ruins himself and his whole family on an adventure with one of them, “a cosmopolitan harpy” who is little more than a prostitute. This is a femme fatale character out of pulp fiction, the mistress of a Russian Grand Duke. Edward also gets involved with blackmailers, more lowlife figures from the cheap, lurid world of melodrama. Dowell paints him as something of a dunce, and the reader sometimes wonders if this is not exaggerated. 

Halfway through the narrative Dowell himself gets dubious about what he has told us.

“It is very difficult to give an all-round impression of any man. I wonder how far I have succeeded with Edward Ashburnham. I dare say I haven’t succeeded at all.” It is easier to believe Dowell when he describes Ashburnham as “a luckless devil . . . tormented by blind and inscrutable destiny.” But when it comes to the inscrutable destiny, it wreaks its merciless havoc on each of the main characters of the book. 

At one point, while asserting that Ashburnham “was my wife’s lover . . . that he killed her,” Dowell goes on to ask pity for Ashburnham on the part of “the silent listener” to the tale Dowell is telling. The apparently neutral-sexed Dowell admires Ashburnham with what at times seems almost a homosexual attachment. He doesn’t much admire any of the women in the book, is, in fact, at heart a misogynist.

Like Dowell, and, in fact, like most of the book’s central characters, Ashburnham seems to be, essentially, an innocent, unaware of his deepest emotions, of why he does one thing or another—preferring to keep true feelings repressed. He tells Dowell that at the moment of one of the book’s climactic scenes—his declaration of his deepest feelings for “the girl,” his ward Nancy, while eavesdropping Florence lurks behind a tree—that he had no idea that his feelings for the girl were romantically inclined. But after that he knew that he was hopelessly in love with her. Something similar occurs after Florence’s sudden death by suicide—a direct result of what she has just heard behind the tree—when the first words that come blurting out of Dowell from deep within are these: “Now I can marry the girl.”

What was Florence like? Through Dowell’s eyes we view her as a flighty creature, hyper-romantic, given to making a pretense of her book-learning, but really utterly shallow, mendacious and vulgar. Of all the characters, Florence receives the heaviest dose of Dowell’s opprobrium. Early on he tells us that “She was bright, and she danced.” But then again, she is a graduate of Vassar, she knows things; she likes to talk, way too much, but she can speak with authority on “William the Silent and Gustave the Loquacious, about Paris frocks, about how the poor dressed in 1337.”

One of the climactic episodes in the book describes a day trip to Marburg, where Florence leads a little tour for the others, expatiating on Martin Luther’s document of protest, the foundation of the Protestant Religion. In an act of spite directed at Leonora, an Irish Catholic by birth, Florence extols the Protestant religion, while excoriating lowlife Italian and Irish Catholics. At this point Leonora rushes out of the room with Dowell, upset by the direct insult to her religion, but even more by Florence’s obvious moves on her husband Edward. She asks Dowell, “Can’t you see what’s happening.” Of course, he cannot, nor does he wish to.

Dowell sees his own job as follows: “My function in life was to keep that bright thing [Florence] in existence . . . and the task lasted for years.” Again: “In the retaining of her in this world I had my occupation, my career, my ambition.” Later on, he still has an intense desire to comfort dead Florence, be the nursemaid to her that he was for twelve years, while admitting, “I hate Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness.”

The story of how Florence and Dowell came to marry is another bizarre tale, in a book teeming with bizarreness: “I just drifted in and wanted Florence.” Drifted in how and why? Drifted in from exactly where? Dowell spends the whole novel revealing to the baffled reader very little about himself. What about his parents? Not a single word about them, or practically any other relatives. Where was he educated? Despite deferring to Florence when it comes to reading and books, Dowell appears to be well read. He throws into his narrative classical references and French words; he manipulates a large vocabulary: words like “propinquity,” “affaissement,” “pococurantism.”

How did he come into the money that allows him to lead a life of luxury and leisure, mixing with the upper classes at a European spa? Don’t know. All we know about his past is that he is a Quaker from Philadelphia. But how in the world did he come to be the weird, dispassionate cipher of a person that he is—all wrapped up in self-deception? Who knows? A thunderbolt of a sentence appears midway in the book, when Dowell asserts, “I don’t know that analysis of my own psychology matters at all to this story.”

Dowell decides to marry Florence for reasons never explained. “I determined with all the obstinacy of a possibly weak nature, if not to make her mine, at least to marry her. I had no occupation—I had no business affairs . . . . . . I was like a chicken that determined to get across the road in front of an automobile.” As for Florence, she marries him for his money, and because he can take her back to Europe, where she will reunite with an old lover, Jimmy. She makes it clear from the start that “she did not want much [read ‘any’] physical passion in the affair,” then makes sure her new husband will stay out of her boudoir by faking a weak heart. Just as Edward Ashburnham, another of Florence’s lovers, will stay with them in Paris from time to time, reaping the pleasures of that boudoir, so too does the reprobate Jimmy live with them in their Paris flat, “whether we were there or not.”

Dowell’s “elopement” with Florence, featuring his securing a minister for a hasty marriage in the middle of the night—along with a rope ladder, on which he climbs up and down to Florence’s window—is one of the great comic scenes in the novel, which features comic irony on all different levels. On his first climb up the ladder Florence greets him with a warm embrace, the first and last of his life. But then, warm embraces are not really his thing, and he seems content to cohabit a sexless marriage. He informs the reader at one point that he never had any peace with Florence, and that “I hardly believe that I cared for her in the way of love after a year or two of it.”

What is his reaction to her sudden death, a suicide that he takes for a heart attack? He blurts out to Leonora, “Now I can marry the girl.” Later he says, “From that day to this I have never given her [Florence] another thought; I have not bestowed upon her so much as a sigh.” He once refers to the years with Florence as “twelve years of playing the trained poodle.”

Dowell sees his main function as that of nursemaid to the sick. Very early on (p. 10), he describes himself as a “sedulous strained nurse,” and he still is playing the role of nurse and companion to the ill at the very end of the book. But upon their first meeting Leonora discerns that it is he who really needs nursing: “By God, she looked at me as if I were an invalid—as any kind woman may look at a poor chap in a bath chair. And, yes, from that day forward she always treated me and not Florence as if I were the invalid.”

“There is about this story none of the elevation that accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis, no destiny.” So it’s not a tragedy; it’s a farce. Although Dowell mentions the word ‘melodrama’ only once in the course of the narrative, the action of The Good Soldier runs on melodrama. The God of Farce, who is in charge of the scenario, puts eavesdropping Florence behind a tree, where she can overhear Edward’s declaration of love to Nancy. Distraught Florence returns running to the hotel, where that same god—gleefully rubbing his hands together—has placed the ludicrous character of Bagshawe in confabulation with Dowell. This is Bagshawe’s only appearance in the novel. So it turns out, he is the landowner whose English estate Florence and the notorious Jimmy, along with Uncle John, once visited. As soon as he lays eyes on her, Bagshawe blurts out to Dowell—The Good Soldier is replete with blurtings: “By Jove! Flory Hurlbird. . . . . The last time I saw that girl she was coming out of the bedroom of a young man called Jimmy at five o’clock in the morning. In my house at Ledbury.” 

According to what Dowell later says, Florence may have survived the revelation of Edward’s love for Nancy, but she could not survive the Bagshawe mortification, the unmasking of her deep sordid secret, the affair with scapegrace Jimmy.

More sheer melodrama is the tale of Maisie Maidan, with more comic irony ascendant. Of all the characters in the book with bad hearts, Maisie is the only one who actually has heart trouble. Melodrama depends on certain worn tropes to advance the action, such as that of eavesdropping. As Florence is to die by suicide after overhearing Edward’s declaration of love to “the girl,” Nancy, so Maisie dies of a heart attack after overhearing Edward speak disparagingly of her to Florence, revealing that Leonora has paid her passage to Nauheim from the Far East. 

Leonora comes upon the dead body of poor Maisie, collapsed in a trunk, with its small feet sticking out. “She had died so grotesquely that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and it had closed upon her, like the jaws of a gigantic alligator.”

Of all the main characters, Florence seems the only manipulator, and the only one not totally steeped in naivety. She has hopes of becoming a British landowner, making her way with Edward back to the landed estates where her ancestors once lived. Edward Ashburnham is a romantic idealist, who, so we are told, at the time of his marriage to Leonora still did not know where babies come from. Leonora herself, educated in a Catholic convent, has led a cloistered life even later, cut off from the world and accompanied by a bevy of sisters, in an Irish landed estate. Bound to her marriage by Catholic law, Leonora spends her life trying to steer Edward through his affairs and bring him back to her—while also taking control of his financial affairs, in order to keep him from ruining the family. “Leonora loved Edward with a passion that was yet like an agony of hatred. And she had lived with him for years and years without addressing to him one word of tenderness.”

Then there is “the girl,” Nancy Rufford, whose name is first revealed only on p. 103. Fleeing from a disreputable mother and a gruff military man of a father, Nancy has lived as a ward of the Ashburnhams from age thirteen. Also educated in a convent, she has little understanding of how the world works. In the final melodrama of the book—when Edward falls hopelessly in love with her and she begins to realize that she is in love with him—we learn that Nancy, at age 22, has no idea what adultery is.  She knows that it is bad, “probably something like catching salmon out of season . . . it had something to do with kissing.” Nancy “began thinking about love, she who had never before considered it as anything other than a rather humorous, rather nonsensical matter.”

Of course, the central character in the book is our dubious narrator, Dowell himself, although he would be shocked to learn this truth. A creature of utter naivety, a man with a flair for self-deception and not much of anything else, this vacant homunculus creeps his way through the book, feeling sorry for himself. How could Florence and Edward have so deceived him, he a man who can “vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and the absolute chastity of my life? . . . Am I no better than a eunuch?” Actually, he is a kind of eunuch, utterly sexless, apparently not even interested in sex. “Of the question of the sex instinct I know very little and I do not think that it counts for very much in a really great passion.”

Florence’s aunts, who try to warn him away from Florence, call him lazy, but Dowell is, rather, inert. “The first thing they asked me was not how I did but what did I do? And I did nothing. I suppose I ought to have done something, but I didn’t see any call to do it. Why does one do things?”

Another prominent irony is the fact that the cipher Dowell, who apparently has never had much happiness in his life, experiences sheer happiness amidst the nine years of his life with Florence and the Ashburnhams. “What chance did I have against those three hardened gamblers? . . . They were three to one and they made me happy. Oh, God, they made me so happy that I doubt if even paradise, that shall smooth out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me the like.” Nine years of happiness, while being deceived and diligently deceiving himself—the story of Dowell’s years with Florence and the Ashburnhams.

After Florence’s death Dowell gets the news from Leonora that he had concealed for years from himself:  that his wife had been Edward’s mistress. When Leonora informs him about the suicide of Florence, he says, “Did Florence commit suicide? I didn’t know.” He who knows perfectly well that Florence does not have heart problems convinces himself that she died of a heart attack. Then again, the ingenuous Edward believes that as well.

d

The Writing/Telling of the Narrative

Ford Madox Ford began working on this novel on his fortieth birthday, Dec. 17, 1913. It is, as he has asserted, “his best book technically.” Mark Schorer remarks that “it has perfect clarity of surface and nearly mathematical poise . . . it is like some structure all of glass and brilliantly illuminated, from which one looks out upon a sable jungle and ragged darkness.” Ford himself has also stated that “I had never really tried to put into any novel of mine all that I knew about writing . . . but I have always been mad about writing—about the way writing should be done—and, partly alone, partly with the companionship of Conrad, I had even at that date made exhaustive studies into how words should be handled and novels constructed. So on the day I was forty I sat down to show what I could do—and The Good Soldier resulted.”

The impressionistic structuring of the novel is beyond brilliant, and it is this artistic structure that takes narrative based on gross incidence of melodrama and transforms the melodrama into pathos. Much of the novel’s effect, of course, is based on its dispassionate, weird narrator, Dowell, a man who is so empty of purpose that he entertains himself at the Nauheim spa by counting his footsteps as he ambles about.

Dowell begins as follows (p. 7): “You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.”

Only much later, near the end of the book, do we realize the circumstances involved in Dowell’s decision to tell the Ashburnham story. Having left for the U.S. after the death of Florence, he receives telegrams from both Edward and Leonora. They invite him to come visit them in England on an urgent matter. When he arrives—unsuspecting and naïve as always—he blunders into the last tumultuous melodrama—this this one involving Edward’s love for his ward Nancy. He imagines that they want him to come back and marry Nancy.

Dowell witnesses the final scenes of hysteria. Leonora insists to Nancy that she must “belong to Edward,” who is dying of love for the girl. Although he knows it will kill him, Edward insists on separating Nancy from his life. The hapless Dowell drifts about aimlessly in the midst of this turmoil, wondering “why they always turn to me to be serviceable . . . I have never been the least good.”

After the suicide of Edward, Nancy, who has gone abroad, to rejoin her father, goes mad. Leonora soon makes a new life for herself in a marriage to a neighboring landowner, but Dowell sets off for Asia to find Nancy. He brings her back to Branshaw Teleragh, the Ashburnham estate, which he has purchased. So at the novel’s end Dowell has, in effect, taken the place of Edward Ashburnham, but he continues to play his old role, not as deranged Nancy’s lover, but as her nursemaid. Once again, he is the invalid caring for an invalid.

Early on Dowell remarks that “I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down” [to tell the story]. “So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars.” This early citation hints to the reader what Dowell himself does not know, and what becomes ever more apparent to that reader as the tale progresses: that he is a fine writer.

Here is another example, his description of Nancy, whom he loves: “She was all in white, and so tall and fragile; and she had only just put her hair up, so that the carriage of her neck had that charming touch of youth and of unfamiliarity. Over her throat there played the reflection from a little pool of water, left by a thunderstorm of the night before, and all the rest of her features were in the diffused and luminous shade of her white parasol . . . And there was a little colour in her cheeks and light in her deep blue eyes.”

Of all the crazy ironies in The Good Soldier this—Dowell’s obvious talent as a writer—may be the craziest of all, but passage after well-written passage demonstrates its truth. The only way to make this gibe with everything else we know about Dowell is to assume that a certain jokey God of Melodramatic Farce is behind the whole business, and this joker, who can write, guides the pen of Dowell as he proceeds.

Dowell has no confidence in his ability to make sense of what he is telling. He once addresses his imaginary collocutor as follows: “You, the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don’t tell me anything.” As if to say, “Please make some sense of this hysterical mess I’m describing to you. Tell me what it’s all about.” Nor does he have confidence in his narrative skills: “I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way” (p. 201). Ostensibly fumbling about in his efforts to give coherence to his narrative, Dowell puts the story together by skipping back and forth in time and presenting a series of scenes. The technique, unbeknownst to its teller, is reminiscent of French impressionist painting.

After a long description of the sites in Europe that he and Florence have once visited—and never returned to—Dowell hints at the impressionistic technique: “Not one of them did we see more than once, so that the whole world for me is like spots of colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren’t so I should have something to catch hold of now.” Over the course of the book Dowell paints an impressionist painting, but when he finishes it and steps back to look at it, he ends up too close to the spots on the canvas; he cannot make anything of the whole: “After forty-five years of mixing with one’s kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one’s fellow beings. But one doesn’t.”

We, the readers, however, aided by the creative skill of Ford Madox Ford, can discern the pattern, can put together the blotches of color that fit together to make a brilliant work of art of the whole.

The artistic structure of the whole artifact is built upon the magical date of August 4: (1) August 4 is Florence’s birthday; (2) On Aug. 4, 1899, she sets out with her Uncle John and a young man named Jimmy on a world tour; (3) On Aug. 4, 1900, “she yielded to an action that certainly coloured her whole life—as well as mine.” This was her decision to begin an affair with Jimmy, the morning that Bagshawe caught her coming out of Jimmy’s bedroom; (4) On Aug. 4, 1901, “she married me, and set sail for Europe in a great gale of wind—the gale that affected her heart.” Dowell knows this business about the heart trouble to be untrue, but propagates the lie anyway, something he frequently does; (5) Aug. 4, 1904, is the date of the fateful daytrip to Marburg, and the day Maisie Maidan died of a heart attack; (6) Aug. 4, 1913, is “the last day of my absolute ignorance, and, I assure you, or my perfect happiness.” Of course, Dowell was only partially ignorant of the situation before this, and his “perfect happiness” was always tempered with grief. This Aug. 4, 1913, is the day Bagshawe steps into the action, and the day of Florence’s suicide.

Dowell concludes his tale with a smear of sarcasm: “Well, that is the end of the story. And when I come to look at it, I see that it is a happy ending, with wedding bells and all.” Truer to the spirit of the book are some of his little asides edging their way into the narrative. This: “Who in this world knows anything of any other heart—or of his own?” Or this one, for example, a plaint asking why people can’t have what they want: “Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people—like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords—broken, punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?”

Here is Nancy speaking, puzzling over her life, ruined, apparently, by the Joker God of Chaos, who has manipulated the melodrama: “The blessed saints. You would think they would spare you such things. I don’t believe all the sinning in the world could make one deserve them.” Or this, Dowell again, the lines that end the film of The Good Soldier (1981): “Here were two noble natures—for I am convinced that both Edward and Leonora had noble natures—here, then, were two noble natures, drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a lagoon and causing miseries, heartaches, agony of the mind, and death. And they themselves steadily deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To point what lesson? It is all a darkness.”

Such are the phrases that—put together with a masterful creative structure—help turn melodrama into deeply felt art, bathos into a pathos that elevates this novel to a position high in the pantheon of American literature.

d

A Note on the Subtitles

The first of these, “A Tale of Passion,” is, obviously, ironic. Yes, The Good Soldier is a tale of passion, but the narrative is suffused with the dispassion of the teller, Dowell, a man incapable of even conceiving what passion is.

The second, “Beati Immaculati,” appears to be ironic as well. All of the characters, including even Dowell, are believers in the Christian God of mercy, but there are constant suggestions that the god in control of human lives—at least the lives of the main characters in this novel—is, most frequently, merciless, an Evil Joker of a god. Here is the source of the Latin phrase:

Beginning of Psalm 119 (King James): 1-8

“Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord [Beati immaculati in via, qui ambulant in lege Domini]. Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek him with the whole heart. They also do no iniquity: they walk in his ways. Thou hast commanded us to keep thy precepts diligently. O that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes! Then shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect unto all thy commandments. I will praise thee with uprightness of heart, when I shall have learned thy righteous judgments. I will keep thy statutes. O forsake me not utterly.”

                                                       Marc Chagall, La Danza, 1951

Book Review, CORMAC MCCARTHY, "The Road"

BOOK REVIEW

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (NY: Vintage Books [Random House]), 2006

I’m ten years late getting around to reading this book, but since it has to rank among the most powerful pieces of American fiction written in the past ten years, it remains more than worthy of discussion. McCarthy here tells a tale of “nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before” (3). We’re in the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction. Bad times have descended upon the U.S. and the whole world, consequent upon some enormous Catastrophe. We are never told what happened—it could have been a nuclear war—but one thing is obvious: something really big has blown, leaving ash all over the earth and floating through the air. Apparently most animals are extinct, and the few human beings who survive face fellow humans who are, largely, living beastly lives.

Incidentally, I happened recently to have reread, for the first time in fifty-five years, Pat Frank’s early classic in the same genre, Alas, Babylon (1959), which tells of a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and describes how a town in Central Florida copes with the disaster. Although most of the country is obliterated, Frank depicts the small group of survivors as doing rather well at coping. The book concludes with the U.S.A. slowly picking itself up after the disaster, preparing to go on with its country and its human lives. McCarthy’s dark tale seems, at least to me, rather better at showing how things would be in the era of Post-Catastrophe.

The action of the The Road describes a father and son wandering through the devastation, on their way somewhere in search of survival. They have an old road map, which they consult periodically, but the author never lets the reader have a look at that map. Descriptions of the flora suggest that they are wandering in the Appalachian Mountains, through Tennessee and the Carolinas to the Carolina coast. Since they are bearing south most of the time, and since they are oppressed by the cold, we assume that they are making, eventually, for Florida. At one point they come across an old sign reading, “See Rock City” (21), but no other place names are mentioned. The reader and the protagonists are just “out there somewhere,” in a dead land that has no name. Sometimes it appears that they are on the road not really to get anywhere, but just to keep in motion, one step ahead of death.

The characters as well, have no names—or, rather, they must have names, but McCarthy prefers not to reveal them to the reader, and, in so doing, he makes them broadly symbolic of the everyman generic father-son. At one point midway in the novel the boy and father meet an old man, who tells them his name is Ely (167). The reader thinks, “Aha, finally somebody with a name,” but four pages later the father asks, “Is your name really Ely” and the old man answers, “No.” No one in this dim post-apocalyptic world trusts anyone else, and people revert to age-old superstitions: give a man your name and he might conjure with it to do you harm.

You don’t have to read far into this book to realize that if something like this conflagration ever descends upon our world, then the most fortunate of human beings will be those who die quickly. Of course, we prefer, or rather the neurons deep in our brain—in charge of creating defensive mechanisms that enable us to go on living—prefer not looking at the possibility of such a thing. In writing this book, McCarthy forces the reader to look, although even after reading the whole novel most of us will fall back on those defense mechanisms and put the matter out of our minds. The anodyne ending of the novel (more on this later) suggests that McCarthy himself could not quite do without certain false consolations.

To knock us modern-day civilized Americans altogether on our ears it would not even take a nuclear conflagration.  We are so inured, e.g., to the comforts of electricity, that were terrorists to launch a cyberattack, knocking out our electric grids for months, or even years, we would, alas, probably quickly find ourselves in something like the horrendous situation described in this novel—in which everything is dog eat dog, cannibalism is the norm, and the most beastly types are most likely to survive.

Here is that same old man they meet on the road, describing his take on preparation for the disaster (168).

                I knew this was coming.

                Did you try to get ready for it?

                No. What would you do?

                I don’t know.

                People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.

Now tomorrow has arrived, and it still doesn’t know that people are there. Maybe that’s the biggest difference between the way people would think before and after the Catastrophe. Before the event they think tomorrow might know they are here, but after the event they know that tomorrow, or today, or yesterday—or God, if there is a God, which most likely there is not—have no inkling of their existence. The world of The Road is a dead world: “The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void” (11). Indeed, it appears throughout the book that God is dead as well, at least until the very last pages.

All the old rules by which people live their lives have been abrogated. When the father and son share some food with that old man whom they encounter on the road, he never thanks them. “Thank you” has gone out with the going out of the world. “You won’t wish us luck either, will you?” says the father. The old man replies, “I don’t know what that would mean. What luck would look like. Who would know such a thing?” (174).

We meet the mother of the boy and wife of the main protagonist only for one brief scene, but that scene is powerfully written, and it rings true. The unnamed woman tells her husband she is about to commit suicide, and she departs with no loving words for him, or for the universe.

“We’re not survivors; we’re the walking dead in a horror film” (55). “I didn’t bring myself to this. I was brought. And now I’m done” (56). “My only hope is for eternal nothingness, and I hope it with all my heart” (57). She goes on to insist that surviving only for oneself is impossible: “You can’t survive only for yourself. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love.”

Why is she so insistent on dying? Because the world she knew is dead, and not likely to somehow resurrect itself. “Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him [the son]. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won’t face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen, but I can’t” (56).

We are provided few glimpses of what human society, to the extent that it even exists, is like in this new world of the dead, but one brief scene, describing the marchers of a ragtag army, provides all the detail we need. “…the marchers appear four abreast. Dressed in clothing of every description, all wearing red scarves at their necks. Red or orange, as close to red as they could find. . . . He wallowed on the ground and lay watching across his forearm. An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon. They clanked past, marching with a swaying gait like wind-up toys. Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. Shh, he said. Shh. The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry. The boy lay with his face in his arms, terrified. They passed two hundred feet away, the ground shuddering lightly. Tramping. Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen of them, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites, illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.” (91-92).

Slaves, catamites and pregnant women. At first one thinks, Well, at least in face of all the beastliness of the new dead world, they are concerned with propagating the species, but then, later in the book, there are hints that fetuses are cooked and eaten as delicacies. The constant question of the boy when he and his father encounter other humans, “Are they the good guys or the bad guys?” At least until the very end of the book the only good guys in this whole universe appear to be the father and son. They are, it seems, the last real human beings still left on earth.

The dogs and cats have all been eaten; there are no more birds in the skies. In fact, most animals are extinct; the only trace of cows is “a lingering odor” in a barn (120). The boy hopes to see a blue sea when they finally reach the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, but that sea, so it turns out, is as gray as the sky and the earth. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, in the world of The Road, the only emperor is the emperor of I scream. Here’s what the world looks like when it’s gone:

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe” (130).

Oddly enough, it is incantatory descriptive passages like these, depicting a dead world in beautiful language, that somehow save the reader of this book from descending into total despair. It is what one critic called “this violent grotesque world rendered in gorgeous, melancholic, even biblical cadences.” Another declared that “the book announces the triumph of language over nothingness.” As Anthony Burgess once wrote in a different context, “The denial of human joy is made through language that is itself a joy.” Before watching the film of this novel (2011), I assumed that it would be oppressive, since it would, of necessity, be devoid of that redemption through language. The very process of filming, relying mostly on graphic imagery, militates against the redeeming verbiage of the printed book. But I didn’t find the film depressing. It, like the book, is certainly no joy ride, but the director of the film uses creative artistic graphic imagery to take some of the pain off the production.

The book is a road book, and the movie of The Road is a Hollywood “road movie,” a tale of travelling from place to place having adventures. This is a tried-and-true Hollywood genre, but it has its origins in the picaresque novels at the dawn of the literary age. It is certainly fitting that The Road should be a picaresque, since here we are reading something like the last novel ever to be written. It is, therefore, somehow appropriate that its structure should resemble the first novels ever written.

I’m not sure anyone has commented on something I find interesting in McCarthy’s novel: words applicable to the situation of the dire tragedy depicted here can also be applicable to the human condition in general. The wife’s words about how, if one wishes to survive one needs someone to live for (cited above), are equally applicable, say, to old men and women in our un-apocalyptic world who lose their spouses late in life. As the wife says, one “would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love.” This is exactly what bereaved spouses are doing when they spend time talking alone to their dead loved ones.

Then again, even if we never (God grant) have to see the world end before our eyes, as the characters of this book see it, each of us individually must face the trials and tribulations, the hurts and pains and losses of any life. We also must face the ending of our own personal world; and, like the wife of the novel, none of us have brought ourselves to any of this—we were brought.

Here is another typical passage describing what is left of a once familiar world after the coming of the Catastrophe:

“Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusted cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses, shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. The thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts” (273). [Webster’s Second International Dictionary: crozzle—“to shrivel or cake with heat; to burn to a cinder,” listed as dialectical English]

As I’ve mentioned several times, there is no place left for a God in the crozzled hearts of the characters. There is little or no trace of a Deus around for most of the action of the novel. When father and son stumble upon a stroke of stupendous good luck, finding an underground bunker full of food (138-39), they never even think of thanking God—although they thank the missing people who left them this cornucopia. Then, right at the end of The Road, Deus out of a machine suddenly shows up. The father finally gives up his struggle to survive, tells his son to go on without him, and dies. Then, abruptly, God is back.

God shows up in the person of a “good guy,” who ambles into the book and adopts the boy, saving him from a certain death (281-87). This good guy also has two children and a wonderful wife, and none of them eat people. In light of the bleak reality that McCarthy has been describing for the first 280 pages of the book, the Deus ex machina ending is totally unbelievable.  I’m not sure exactly what the author is up to here. With his consummate feel for the artistic integrity of the structure, he could not have believed he could get away with this ending. Any yet there it is, staring us in the face, something like the ending of Huckleberry Finn. No, please. Don’t stick this not-good-at-all ending on a very good book.

Is the appearance of the miraculous family that takes the boy in one of the boy’s dreams, or that of his dying father? Could be, and maybe that is the only way to justify the ending, but McCarthy gives us nothing dreamlike in this descriptive passage—nothing to suggest that the scene is other than reality. I don’t get it. But since those pages are there, we can only accept the ending, look past the final six pages, and exult in the artistry of the first 280 pages of this brilliant book.

               

BOOK REVIEW: MAXIM SHRAYER, "Bunin and Nabokov"

BOOK REVIEW

Maksim D. Shraer ( Maxim Shrayer). Bunin i Nabokov: istorija sopernichestva [Bunin and Nabokov: The History of a Rivalry] (2-oe izdanie). Moskva: ANF, 2015. Index of names. 219 pp. Cloth. Available on Amazon and at www.biblio-globus.us.

“When Bunin and Nabokov are together, looking at each other, it’s like two movie cameras are running.”

                                                              …Mark Aldanov, cited on p. 95

[All translations from the Russian in this review are mine—URB]

Professor Shrayer has been working his way toward the publication of this fascinating book since his days in graduate school at Yale. His dissertation (1995) is titled, “The Poetics of Vladimir Nabokov’s Short Stories, with Reference to Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin.” For a complete listing of everything he has published on Bunin and Nabokov since then, see note 22 (185). It is certainly an impressive list. Now, having worked some twenty years on the two writers and their relationship—studying their literary works, reading their letters and diaries in archives (with the help of the redoubtable Richard Davies at the Leeds Russian Archive), consulting any and all commentary on their works and lives—Shrayer has ferretted out practically everything extant in regard to Bunin and Nabokov. The result is this compact book, laden with interesting facts and even highly entertaining.

The two authors tiptoed around each other for years, danced together and apart (mostly apart), sparred in personal meetings and on paper.  Nabokov-Sirin used, or attempted to use Bunin at various times in furtherance of personal literary or life’s goals. Bunin had no need to use the younger writer in such ways, but he was acutely aware of Nabokov’s growing reputation in the thirties. As the story begins Bunin, thirty years older than Nabokov, is already the most famous Russian writer of the emigration, and young Nabokov is in awe of him. The cajolery and flattery begins with Nabokov’s father, the famous jurist, politician and publicist V.D. Nabokov (1869-1922). Bunin knew him personally; they had met on several occasions.

On Dec. 12, 1920, the elder Nabokov writes a long and obsequious letter to the old master, thanking him profusely for the enormous artistic delight that Bunin has delivered to him and to all readers of the journal “Rul’. After waxing eloquent on Bunin’s artistic glory, the politician Nabokov finally gets around to his real reason for writing: “If you have come across my son’s verses in ‘Rul’ (signed Cantab.), please let me know your opinion of them”(30). The elder Nabokov goes on buttering up the master (31-33), and then the young writer Nabokov himself, still a student at Cambridge, sends his own first letters, which, given the mature author’s pose of arrogant superciliousness, are shocking for their self-abnegating servility (33-35).

In the second of these letters Nabokov includes a poem dedicated to Bunin. In the first he thanks Bunin for writing about “my timid creative works” (o moem robkom tvorchestve), and concludes by practically asking Bunin to be a father figure to him: “Slovom, khochu ja vam skazat’, kak beskonechno uteshaet menja soznan’e, chto est’ k komu obratit’sja v eti dni velikoj sirosti (In a word, I’d like to tell you how infinitely I am consoled by knowing I have someone to turn to in these days of great bereavement”—34). Nabokov’s father was murdered on Mar. 28, 1922. The bereavement in this letter apparently alludes to the recent loss of the homeland, but there is also here a remarkable premonition. Almost as if Nabokov anticipated his father’s death and his personal bereavement (sirost’—“orphanhood”), which came a year after this letter was written.  

A big issue right from the start is this: in the authors’ personal relations, in their letters to one another, in the inscriptions they wrote each other in the frontispieces of gifted books, how can you distinguish sincerity from insincerity? One fact shines through the posturing and the fakery: Nabokov was consistent over the course of a lifetime in his love for Bunin’s poetry. In a letter of May 11, 1929, he mentions that while still a child he had already memorized a lot of the verses, and a week later he “complains” that Bunin in a recent publication of his collected poems had changed some of his favorite lines. He informs Bunin that he has identified the butterfly in one of the poems (37-38).

In a reading at a gathering in Berlin, in Dec.,1933, the two writers finally met, after years of corresponding by mail (84). At this occasion Nabokov-Sirin made a speech about Bunin as a poet and declaimed some of his favorite Bunin verses. Much later, in requesting that Nabokov read in his honor at a festive occasion in New York (in 1951), Bunin may have recalled that reading in Berlin and anticipated Nabokov’s again declaiming his poetry (168). An interesting footnote: in 1945 Bunin declared that Nabokov’s poetry was better than his prose (43).

It cannot be overemphasized how much young Nabokov’s appreciation of his verse must have meant to Bunin, whose poetry was widely scorned as old-fashioned, and had been so scorned by the modernist writers he hated even before his emigration. One of my professors from graduate school, the poet Yurij Pavlovich Ivask, who knew Bunin personally in France, held his prose in high esteem, but spoke with mockery of his verse. Ivask’s attitude expressed that of the majority. In consistently praising Bunin’s poetry over his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov was very much in the minority.

As for Bunin’s prose, Nabokov blew hot and cold over the course of his lifetime. In a letter to his wife, e.g. (July 16, 1926), he once expressed a high opinion of what was to become one of Bunin’s most well-known stories, “Sunstroke” (“Solnechnyj udar,”—“velikolepnyj rasskaz Bunina” (44), but not long after that, in the early thirties, he wrote a brutal parody of the story:“Khvat”—“A Dashing Fellow” in English translation. [My opinion, URB; Prof. Shrayer does not mention this story]. Later he included “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” to this day Bunin’s most well-known work in the West, in a list of recommended reading for his students at Harvard (173).

Given Nabokov’s love for Bunin’s poetry, Prof. Shrayer raises the question of to what extent the beloved verses influenced the tonality and style of Nabokov’s creative writing. A good question, but an even better question is to what extent Bunin’s prose style was instrumental in Nabokov’s development. Nabokov spent a lifetime denying that the prose had any influence on him, but time and again Shrayer cites comments of critics to the contrary. He writes (76) that “above all, Nabokov learned from Bunin the art of intonation and rhythm in prose.” I say amen to that. Gleb Struve also had it exactly right in what he wrote in 1936: “It’s hard to find any ancestors for Sirin in Russian literature. As a stylist he learned a thing or two from Bunin, but it’s hard to imagine any two writers more different in their spirit and essence” (93). Maja Kaganskaja is also perspicacious in remarking (134) that Nabokov took Bunin’s style and used it in the service of an anti-Bunin poetics.

In discussing the congruence of prose styles, Prof. Shrayer (76) compares a passage from “The Gentleman from San Francisco” with a passage from Nabokov’s “Pil’gram” (in translation “The Aurelian, 1930). You could do this with any number of prose works. Some of Nabokov-Sirin’s earliest stories so resemble Bunin that they could almost have been written by him. Take, e.g., “The Word,” published in 1923, and translated into English by Dmitri Nabokov long after his father’s death (The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005 and Jan. 2, 2006). Here we have the almost plotless story line so favored by Bunin in his early years, the long intricate sentences, the lush, over-lavish style, the Romantic extravagance:

“Wings, wings, wings [of angels]! How can I describe their convolutions and their tints? They were all-powerful and soft—tawny, purple, deep blue, velvety black, with fiery dust on the rounded tips of their bowed feathers. Like precipitous clouds they stood, imperiously poised above the angels’ luminous shoulders; now and then and angel, in a kind of marvelous transport, as if unable to restrain his bliss, suddenly, for a single instant, unfurled his winged beauty, and it was like a burst of sunlight, like the sparkling of millions of eyes”  (New Yorker, p. 76).

“A kind of marvelous transport.” Yes, but a story overloaded with such passages may make for a bit too much transport. In reading this, one is reminded of the way Gorky and Chekhov cautioned Bunin to stop overloading his sentences and paragraphs, of how Yury Olesha found too much sparkling lavish imagery in “The Gentleman from San Francisco.” I wonder if “The Word,” almost fustian in its Romantic loftiness, would have even been published, had Nabokov still been alive in 2005. In his preface to the collected stories, Dmitri Nabokov gives half a page to “The Word,” mentioning its “ingenuous rapture,” but, of course, saying not one word about Bunin. See The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, N.Y., 1995, p.xvii. The story is notably absent in the “Bottom of the Barrel” list in the front matter (Nabokov’s listing of the last of the early Russian-language stories to be translated into English).

You may reply, “All right, Bunin’s influence was there early on, but Nabokov soon left behind such hyper-lyrical, exalted prose. He quickly transcended his dependence on the old man.” You’re right. He did of course go off in a completely different direction; his metaphysics and Bunin’s have nothing in common, and the modernist movement in literature is a more important influence on him in his mature years.

But take a percipient reader of Nabokov’s best stuff in English.  A man who considers Nabokov the best American writer of his time. One who has never read Bunin. Send him “The Gentleman from San Francisco” to read. In 2006 I sent John Updike a copy of my Bunin translations (Night of Denial, Northwestern University Press, 2006). Here is a quotation from a post card he wrote me that year: (see above, top of this posting).

“I had never read a word by Bunin and read instantly the two stories you urged and then ‘The Gentleman from SF,’ in its full-throated style of translation. . . . . He is strikingly like Nabokov in his hyper-realism, in his insistence on wringing the last drop of descriptive elegance from his prose. . . .”

So there you have it. It is as if Bunin were a writer obviously influenced by Vladimir Nabokov, who was fifteen years old when “The Gentleman from San Francisco” was published. Throughout the whole of his life Nabokov never once acknowledged his stylistic debt to Bunin’s prose style. In his Russian-language memoir, Drugie berega, he dismisses Bunin’s “parchovaja proza, (brocaded prose)” and writes a parody of it (179-80, 175). This strikes me as one of Nabokov’s diversionary maneuvers, something like the way he implicitly denied his affair with Irina Guadanini in letters to his wife by expressly mentioning Guadanini and telling Vera (in English) “don’t you dare be jealous” (109—letter of Feb. 15, 1937). There was no love affair, but oh yes there was; there is no “brocaded prose” in Nabokov’s style, but oh yes, there is.

Nabokov’s almost total rejection of Bunin as a prose writer came late in his life, after his emigration to the U.S. It was certainly influenced by years of accumulated personal animosity between him and the old master. Prof. Shrayer takes Nabokov’s final verdict on Bunin (“a prose writer whom I rank below Turgenev”) as the title of his last chapter. He is especially good at detailing how the two came to despise each other over twenty years of émigré life in Europe. Of course, one could certainly have predicted the souring of the relationship, given the hyper-developed ego of most literary artists. Shrayer never says so, but what Bunin and Nabokov have most in common is their excessive pride and the almost megalomaniac nursing of the personal ego.

Of course, Nabokov is notorious for his judgments on some of his compatriots. His rankings of Russian writers for his students, as Prof. Shrayer acknowledges (169) cannot be taken seriously. His opinion of Gogol took radical dips and swoops at various points in his life, but he wrote a book about the great man that comes out, primarily, as a burlesque of Gogol and an exaltation of himself. As for Dostoevsky, despite Nabokov’s vehement condemnation of him, his constant attempts to toss him overboard, off the ship of Russian Literature (Bunin shared his opinion of Dostoevsky), the history of Russian Literature, when it makes its lists, will always rank Dostoevsky in the Top Five, above Nabokov.

As for Bunin’s prose works, few would argue that “The Gentleman from San Francisco” does not belong in the pantheon of great Russian literature. Or take Drydale (Sukhodol), the best novella Bunin wrote and one of the best any Russian has written. Then there is “Light Breathing,” generally acknowledged as Bunin’s best short story. Nabokov once mentioned that this was his favorite Bunin story. The list could go on.

You can follow the change in the relationship of Bunin and Nabokov by reading successive inscriptions written by Nabokov in the books he published and gifted to Bunin. The inscriptions are at first meek, ingratiating. The novel Mashen’ka: “Most deeply respected and dear Ivan Alekseevich, with joy and terror I send you my first book. I beg of you, do not judge me too harshly. With all my soul yours. V. Nabokov (44-45).” The collection of stories and poems, Vozvrashchenie Chorba: “To Ivan Bunin. To the great master from a sedulous disciple. V. Nabokov” (49).

By the early to mid-thirties Nabokov had, in his fame and renown in émigré circles, overtaken Bunin. He was widely considered the best writer of the emigration. Meanwhile, he came across Bunin frequently in émigré literary circles and did not much like him. By 1936, when he sent Bunin his novel Otchajanie (Despair) his inscription reads as if written by one who cannot think of a single genuine thing to say: “Dear Ivan Alekseevich, It was really, really nice seeing you in Paris [one too many “reallys” here, struggling to be sincere, failing]. But there remain thousands [read “zero”] of things that I have not expressed to you, and now all of that won’t fit into this inscription in a book. At any rate, I send you heartfelt [not really] greetings!” [exclamation point, striving to be genuinely exclamatory, failing] (107).

In 1938, sending Bunin Invitation to a Beheading, a novel that he surely knew would enrage the old man, Nabokov wrote a short and stereotyped inscription: “To Dear Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, with the sincerest [s samim luchshim—literally, “with the very best”] of greetings from the author” (121). For Bunin’s (enraged) reaction to the novel, see p. 88. In reading the later, most mature, of Nabokov-Sirin’s Russian-language works, Bunin’s rage knew no bounds. See, e.g., p. 136, where Bunin tells of re-reading “the bizarre and lewd Gift, swearing (rugajas’ materno) as I read,” and calls one of Nabokov’s best stories, “Spring in Fialta,” “nothing but banal vulgarity (odna poshlost’).”

It is no surprise that Bunin, a man whole favorite nephew once nicknamed “Sudorozhnyj” (The Convulsive One), would not sit idly by and watch his literary fame be overshadowed. But despite his aggravation with Nabokov-Sirin, which intensified as Nabokov’s star rose ever higher, Bunin could be remarkably generous in his praise of his younger colleague—although he delivered that praise through gritted teeth. Examples are rife throughout Shrayer’s book. Here are a few:

“He has discovered a whole new world, and for this we must be grateful to him” (56). “He’s a monster, but what a writer” (102). When they met later Nabokov asked Bunin, “What are you doing calling me a monster?” (111). Other of Bunin’s terms of endearment: he’s a “joker in a cheap sideshow” (shut balagannyj), he’s “a slapdash cabdriver outside a midnight dive” (likhach vozle nochnogo kabaka) (144),” he’s “a jackass buffoon” (shut gorokhovyj) (144), “a red-headed circus clown” (143). The thing about the circus clown here is in reference to the hated Aleksandr Blok, but Bunin sometimes saved time and energy by using the same invective for Blok and Nabokov (note, once again, the grudging admiration): “There you have probably the most adroit writer in all of the boundless realm of Russian literature, and he’s a red-headed circus clown. But, sinner that I am, I love talent, even in clowns” (this quotation is not in Shrayer’s book; it is cited in Aleksandr Bakhrakh, Bunin v khalate, 1979, p. 110).

At one point, before they had met, Bunin even applied one of his favorite theories on “degeneracy” to Nabokov: “’What does he look like?’ asked Jan [Bunin]. He doesn’t resemble his father, who was a nobleman (barin). With him you sense a definite degeneracy” (58—from the diary of Vera Bunina, Jan., 1931). On Bunin’s interest in degeneracy, see Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial (translation, critical afterword and notes by R. Bowie) Northwestern University Press, 2006, p. 579-80.

As is obvious by some of the quotes above, by the mid-thirties the antagonism between the two writers had become personal. In letters to his wife Nabokov emphasized how Bunin’s very appearance was repulsive. “Bunin is turning out to be nothing but an old vulgarian” (110). “He is “gruesome, pitiful, bags under his eyes, the neck of a tortoise, constantly tipsy” (111). Bunin in the mid to late thirties had become truly pitiful, after his lover and protégé Galina Kuznetsova left him. He never recovered from this loss (90-91). But are the pitiful ever pitied? Seldom. In English the words “pitiful” and “pathetic” have secondary, pejorative meanings.

Bunin did not include Nabokov among those he excoriated in his remarkably acerbic and bilious Reminiscences (1950), but Nabokov made mention of Bunin, both in his Russian memoirs, Drugie berega, and in his English-language Conclusive Evidence and Speak, Memory. In a letter to his wife Vera (sent Jan. 30, 1936), he describes a meeting with Bunin in a Paris restaurant (95-96), and he elaborates on that meeting (rather, he embellishes it) in the memoirs. Prof. Shrayer cites this passage in all its variants (95-100). Here is how it goes in Speak, Memory:

            Another independent writer was Ivan Bunin. I had always preferred his little-known verse to his celebrated prose. . . . At the time I found him tremendously perturbed by the personal problem of aging. The first thing he said to me was to remark with satisfaction that his posture was better than mine, despite his being some thirty years older. He was basking in the Nobel prize he had just received [actually three years previous to the meeting here described—the basking was already over, URB] and invited me to some kind of expensive and fashionable eating place in Paris for a heart-to-heart talk. Unfortunately, I happen to have a morbid dislike for restaurants and cafes, especially Parisian ones—I detest crowds, harried waiters, Bohemians, vermouth concoctions, coffee, zakuski, floor shows and so forth. I like to eat and drink in a recumbent position (preferably on a couch) and in silence. Heart-to-heart talks, confessions in the Dostoevskian manner, are also not in my line. Bunin, a spry old gentleman, with a rich and unchaste vocabulary, was puzzled by my irresponsiveness to the hazel grouse of which I had had enough in my childhood and exasperated by my refusal to discuss eschatological matters. Toward the end of the meal we were utterly bored with each other. “You will die in dreadful pain and complete isolation,” remarked Bunin bitterly as we went toward the cloakroom. An attractive, frail-looking girl took the check for our heavy overcoats and presently fell with them in her embrace upon the low counter. I wanted to help Bunin into his raglan but he stopped me with a proud gesture of his open hand. Still struggling perfunctorily—he was now trying to help me—we emerged into the pallid bleakness of a Paris winter day. My companion was about to button his collar when a look of surprise and distress twisted his handsome features. Gingerly opening his overcoat, he began tugging at something under his armpit. I came to his assistance and together we finally dragged out of his sleeve my long woolen scarf which the girl had stuffed into the wrong coat. The thing came out inch by inch; it was like unwrapping a mummy and we kept slowly revolving around each other in the process, to the ribald amusement of three sidewalk whores. Then, when the operation was over, we walked on without a word to a street corner where we shook hands and separated (Speak, Memory, revised ed., 1966, p.285-86).

Can we ever really trust the reminiscences of a creative writer of fiction? A creative writer loves to make as much creatively as possible out of a remembered incident. One interested in comparing variants of the story related here, both in three different memoirs and a personal letter, may consult Prof. Shrayer’s book (95-100). Late in his life Bunin, exasperated by this tale, denied that it had ever happened, even denied that he had ever been in a restaurant with Nabokov (170-72).

Of course, even were the episode related with exactitude, Nabokov’s arch, condescending and supercilious tone here would have driven Bunin beside himself. But what really happened? Did Nabokov make up the whole thing? Not likely, since he wrote of it at the time to his wife (95-96), and he would have no reason to prevaricate in his letters to Vera, except when he was trying to conceal his affairs (see 109-111).

As described in the letter, the episode bears some resemblance to what later showed up in the memoirs, but telling details from the letter are missing. Nabokov writes how he was tired and cross that evening, how Bunin dragged him to the restaurant Chez Kornillof against his will. “I lost my temper (over going out to dine with him) as I have not lost it in a long time, but by the end and afterward, when we went out onto the street, there suddenly started flashing a few sparks of mutuality, and by the time we arrived at the Café Mjura [Le Murat]. . . . where stout Aldanov awaited us, things had become quite gay” (95). At the end of the letter (96) Nabokov tells how Bunin described his first marriage in Odessa, the death of his six-year-old son, and the inspiration for writing his long story “Mitya’s Love.” Nothing “eschatological” here, but Nabokov appears to have been interested.

Did Bunin really tell him he would die alone and in dreadful pain? It seems rather harsh, even for the “convulsive” Bunin. Wouldn’t Nabokov have mentioned such a remark to his wife in that letter? Maybe so, maybe no. The remark is repeated (cited exactly) in the memoirs (98-99), and in another letter to Vera, a year later (Apr. 2, 1937) Nabokov describes a gathering of writers, at which Bunin hissed at him, “You will die alone and in terrible agony” (Vy umrete odin i v strashnykh muchenijakh—110).

Most likely Bunin said this only once, and Nabokov took the phrase from the gathering in 1937 and stuck it into the restaurant conversation. The whole thing smacks of a kind of plagiarism from the hack critic Skabichesky, who once referred to Chekhov as “a mindless literary clown who will die in a ditch, forgotten by all” (cited in Simon Karlinsky article, in Welleck book, New Perspectives on Chekhov, p. 43).

What about the description of the recalcitrant scarf, which is also missing in the letter? This most likely was Nabokov’s invention. Prof. Shrayer suggests that this “allegory of the unwrapping of the mummy” and this dancing of the two writers around one another suggests Nabokov’s distancing himself not only from Bunin (who represented a living relic, the “last of the Mohicans”), but from the whole tradition of Russian culture. Nabokov’s Kafkaesque Invitation to a Beheading, a novel far removed from anything in classical Russian literature, was already running serialized in Sovremennye zapiski at the time, and The Gift was about to be published (100).

On Feb. 7, 1938 Bunin sent a postcard to Nabokov (113), ending it by saying, “I greet you and your spouse; in my thoughts I whip your heir” (“myslenno seku Vashego naslednika” [young Dmitri]. Prof. Shrayer takes this whipping joke as the title for his Chapter Three, making no comment upon it. The inference is obvious: Bunin knew who he’d really like to whip. Speaking of jokes, and “red-headed circus clowns,” the prankster Nabokov had played an April Fool’s joke on Bunin the previous year (Apr. 1, 1937). As he describes it in a letter to Vera (dated Apr. 12), Nabokov spread a rumor that while Bunin had been out carousing in the night his apartment was burgled. The news quickly spread, and that same day a reporter from the Russian newspaper Poslednie novosti showed up to interview the touchy ‘Convulsive One.’ “It seems he’s taken offense at me” (concludes Nabokov). . . . Then (tongue in cheek?), “I don’t understand what there is to be offended about” (110).

On Mar. 14, 1938, in Paris, Bunin attended the opening performance of Nabokov’s play Sobytie, only to find himself burlesqued in the character called Famous Writer (117). After the play was staged in New York (Apr., 1941) a critic suggested that “Sirin is settling scores with a certain writer. . . .  whom we all know.” Nabokov wrote a heated (and surely prevaricating) missive of denial to the newspaper that had published the review (119), but the damage was already done.

 By 1939 Nabokov had reason to regret burlesquing the old master. He needed a favor from him. On Mar. 28, 1939, Nabokov wrote a letter to Bunin that, given his pride and arrogance, must have been difficult for him to write. The Second World War was on the horizon, and Nabokov was looking for a way to get himself and his family out of France. He explained to Bunin that he was looking for a teaching position in a British or American university and needed testimonial letters from well-known figures in Russian culture, including Bunin. “You can write the letter either in English or French, whichever is convenient” (122-123). Neither was convenient. Bunin had practically no English, and his command of French, despite years of residence in the country, was weak.

As things turned out, Nabokov himself wrote the testimonial letter and sent it to Bunin to sign. Given the quite recent lampooning he had received in Nabokov’s play, and given what had by then become extreme antagonism between the two, Bunin’s willingness to sign such a letter is somewhat surprising. He did, however, sign it, adding “Nobel Laureate” after his signature, and even sent along with it a good-humored reply, in which he included an anecdote about the poet Balmont (127-28). Perhaps recalling the April Fool’s joke two years before that, Bunin dated the testimonial “Apr. 1st, 1939” (125).

The correspondence over the testimonial letter effectively marked the end of any and all intercourse between the two men. Long fed up with one another, they never corresponded again. Nabokov-Sirin soon left for the U.S., where he dropped the “Sirin” and began writing in English. Bunin remained in France, still grieving over his loss of Galina Kuznetsova. He struggled through the tribulations of life in wartime France, after the Nazis had come. He and his family eked out an existence in Grasse, with barely enough to eat. After the war ended, he went on struggling with the illnesses of old age, impoverished, surely aware that he was a literary anachronism.

It would be nice if there were a happy ending to the story of the rivalry, some sort of eleventh- hour reconciliation between the two great men of letters. But such was not to be. Rather, the story ends on a sour note. In a letter to Nabokov (Aug. 13, 1948) Mark Aldanov wrote, “If you are interested in Bunin (and I know you have love for him in your heart), then I have some bad news [literally, “I must chagrin you”]. His health is very very bad. And of the [Nobel] prize money nothing is left. I have been raising money for him here” (166).

But Nabokov could not conjure up any love for Bunin in his heart. In January of 1951 the solicitous Aldanov was helping organize an ‘evening’ for Bunin in New York, hoping to honor him, probably for the last time in his life, and to raise more money to support him. He wrote Nabokov:

“If there is any possibility [of your participating] I ask you not to let Bunin down. He is 81 now, very ill, and you are hardly likely ever to see him again. And you will have the pleasure of knowing that you’ve done a great service for him.” Bunin himself did not approach Nabokov directly, but in a letter to Aldanov (Feb. 9, 1951) he wrote, “I would be very grateful to V.V. Nabokov-Sirin if he would read something from my works at the event. Please send him a heartfelt greeting [serdechnyj poklon] from me” (168).

Nabokov had already forgotten how, in 1939, Bunin had graciously signed the testimonial for him, lending his prestige as Nobel laureate to Nabokov’s search for a university position. Nabokov refused to participate in the literary event. Here are parts of his letter: “As you know I’m not a big fan of I.A. I value his poetry highly, but the prose. . . . or the reminiscences in the allée. . . . You tell me that he’s 80, that he’s sick and poor. You are much more kind and indulgent that I am. . . . [How can I say positive things] “about a person who is in every respect alien to me, about a prose writer whom I rank lower than Turgenev?” (168).

And so on. Way back when Bunin met with V.D. Nabokov in 1921, the latter described his son as follows: “He’s a remarkable son, solicitous to extremes [redko zabotlivy], kind [dobryj]” (31). Maybe this was a good characterization of the young Nabokov-Sirin, but in his later years it’s doubtful that even Nabokov would describe himself as dobryj. Nabokov concludes his letter to Aldanov by saying that he has a memoir coming out, in which he openly expresses his view of Bunin’s works. In other words, he would look foolish and hypocritical, showing up in New York, at an event in honor of the old man.

All they were asking for was ten minutes of his time. Nabokov could have read a few of his favorite poems by Bunin, as he had done years ago, in Europe. But by this time he was already preparing to play the insane game of image building that became so important in his life after Lolita. The game of constructing the Image of the Great Writer, which Nabokov got his wife and son thoroughly involved in. Each of the three played that game of megalomania to the hilt, all the way to end of their lives on earth. So the myth would go, The Great Man had no antecedents, no influences, except perhaps for Pushkin and Shakespeare. Someone such as a mere Bunin would have to be expunged from the record of the Great Man’s past.

For some time Nabokov, his family and disciples did a good job at such expunging, but, of course, in the end all the documentation had to come out. And in writing this book, Prof. Shrayer has done a wonderful job of bringing more of it out. The book reveals the dirty secret that Nabokov and his family never would admit: the secret of the influence of Bunin’s prose style on the style of Nabokov’s prose works. In the process of revelation Shrayer is a (probably reluctant) contributor to the debunking of the Myth.

Prof. Shrayer concludes his book with a hypothesis that Bunin wrote his final collection of stories, Temnye allei, in a desperate attempt to win back the literary laurels that the younger writer had seized from him. This hypothesis is rather doubtful. The struggle between the two for supremacy was long over by the time the sick, demoralized and poverty-stricken Bunin wrote the last of his stories. Nabokov was the winner, and Bunin knew it. Looking at the works of the two writers from today’s perspective, Nabokov is still the winner. Whatever else you can say about the man, Nabokov, you have to admit that he’s a literary genius. Bunin is a good writer, at times a great writer, but he’s not a genius. Examples of Nabokov’s genius as a prose writer are rife. To take just one, I have never read a novel in which the narrative structure is so consummately unique as that of Nabokov’s Despair. It’s simply sui generis. Nobody else in world literature has ever done anything like this.

In the final chapter of his book, Prof. Shrayer explores differences in the worldview of the two writers. He emphasizes Bunin’s search for eternal verities in new words (in Temnye allei) through his airing out of the Eros-Thanatos thing that had long been central in his works (150-51). Shrayer makes the assumption (at least implicity) that Bunin found those new words in his final short stories. I personally, like Nabokov (159-60), find little new or particularly interesting in the love-death business of the allée stories. Bunin had already done this years ago, and better, in such works as “The Grammar of Love” and “Light Breathing.” I spent, on and off, roughly thirty years trying to translate Bunin’s prose into English, and, as the translator of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the renowned Francis Steegmuller, has written, a translator “by the very nature of his effort becomes more intimate with the text than any reader no matter how critical.” Therefore, I think my objections to those who praise Temnye allei as Bunin’s best work are well founded. But since my case is stated elsewhere, in the critical afterword to my translations (Bunin, Night of Denial, p.664-66), there is no need to repeat it here.

Prof. Shrayer makes much, maybe too much, of the difference between Bunin’s and Nabokov’s conception of life and death, and life after death, as reflected in their works. Bunin, suggests Shrayer, whose stories have closed endings, cannot understand the way that Nabokov’s endings open up into other, transcendent worlds. “The reader has already parted with the heroes, but the music of Nabokov’s ending still continues sounding in his memory” (160). But then, is this really so different from the way a reader feels after the ending of any great work of art, including Bunin’s best? Great literature does open up doors into the transcendent, although no flesh and blood writer, including Nabokov, can ever see into that “otherworldly” realm. A good example of such opening of the doors is Bunin’s “Light Breathing,” one of his most musical and most lyrical compositions. The music plays on in the reader’s head after the story is finished. The story is sad, but the lyricism and the music make it beautifully sad, recalling the paradox of art once mentioned by Anthony Burgess: “The denial of joy is made through language which is itself a joy” (Harper’s, August, 1976, p. 80). The idea of the joy of beautiful language is central to the art of both Bunin and Nabokov.

Summing up. Prof. Shrayer is to be congratulated for his many years of labor over this book. He has ferreted out things of great interest to the world of Slavic literature. The book is fascinating, highly entertaining. It often even provides the reader with a good laugh. What more could we ask from a scholar of creative literature?