Odd Jobs (51 page)

He preached asceticism but excelled in the portrayal of happiness; the concept figures in his work as prominently as that of truth, and seems to constitute the core of his genuinely religious, pantheistic intuitions; the hero of “Youth,” lying awake on a moonlit night, beside a pond, amid birches and dew-coated flowers and gleaming, leaping frogs, confides, “All this assumed a strange meaning to me, signifying an excess of beauty together with a sort of uncompleted happiness.”

It seems a sad paradox that the author who among male authors has given us unsurpassedly sympathetic and vital female characters, and
whose literary career owed so much to the advice and secretarial labors of his wife and daughters, and who in “The Kreutzer Sonata” delivered a kind of feminist tract, should in his journals, under the stress of his struggles with Sonya, sink from casual chauvinism to dire misogyny:

These strictures relate, perhaps, to the unreality of his own mother and the reality, even as he approaches death, of his need for her: “I, an old man, wanted to become a child, to nestle up against a loving creature, to snuggle up, to complain, to be caressed and comforted. But who is this creature I could nestle up against and in whose arms I could weep and
complain? Nobody now alive.” He never had a conversation with Marya Tolstoy; she was made into a silent immensity, a religious ideal:

The words “true” and “truth” echo through these journals,
^a
and the triumph of Tolstoy’s art is the impression of truth it makes upon us, even when tinged by a cranky and stringent ideology. We assimilate the imagery, dialogue, and psychologies of his fiction as if they were already our own; the air we breathe within the books seems our natural air as well. Seeing exposed, in the journals, the scathing critical sourness with which Tolstoy regarded his own work, the work of others, and much of the world itself, one can only deduce that a supreme art can be achieved through a process largely negative, with a hypertrophied critical faculty pitted against an irrepressible creative urge. He was a terrific reviser;
War and Peace
was copied over and over by his patient wife, and was corrected so extensively in proof that his publisher, Bartenyev, wrote him: “God alone knows what you are doing! If you go on like that we will be correcting and resetting forever. Anyone can tell you that half your changes are unnecessary.… For the love of God, stop scribbling!” But Tolstoy answered, “It is impossible for me not to scribble the way I scribble.” Very early in his career, at the age of twenty-four, he noted, “I must abandon for ever the idea of writing without revising.” He achieved the vital concreteness and directness of his prose as if sculpturally, through a series of self-critical blows, a succession of energetic corrections. James Joyce, arguing about Tolstoy with his brother Stanislaus in 1905, intuitively couched his praise in negatives: “Tolstoy is a magnificent writer. He is never dull, never stupid, never tired, never pedantic, never theatrical!”
^b
Proust, the other modern novelist who approached Tolstoy’s grandeur of ambition, had this to say of him: “Every so-called stroke of observation is simply the clothing, the proof, the instance, of a law, a law of reason or of unreason, which the novelist has laid bare.… One feels oneself moving amid a throng of laws.… And for all that, in this apparently inexhaustible fund of creation it seems as though Tolstoi were repeating himself, as though he had no more than a few themes at his disposal, disguised and reshaped.… Might not the same memory have ‘sat’ for Kitty passing by in the carriage and Natasha in the carriage following the army?”
^c
Indeed, part of Tolstoy’s truth is a stubborn fidelity, in his fiction, to what his heart has verified; he refused to leave a certain emotional base, defined by Yasnaya Polyana. The scowling, bearded prophet, pronouncing on “the all-round development of everything that exists,” looks out with the deepset live gray eyes of the overheated little boy, his cowlicks sticking up but the general expression “so lively, healthy and good-natured that I was pleased with myself.” The year of his death, he wrote in his diary a sentiment stemming from childhood and more than once echoed in his youth: “What a strange thing: I love myself, but nobody loves me.” Issued from the height of so long and victorious a life, the humble confession becomes epic.

Perhaps a word should be offered about this translation of the journals as an editorial production. Though admirable, it is not inviting and could have been, one suspects, nicer. Scribner’s has done no more than serve up the English edition—big grim gray pages, numerous typos,
^d
and all. The two volumes are a bit large to be handy, and making one’s way from the index in the second, and back and forth to the footnotes in the back of each, is awkward. Mr. Christian has previously edited two volumes of Tolstoy’s letters, and his knowledge of the minutiae of Tolstoy’s life is impressively thorough. As in any selection, what was left out haunts what is in; triple dots swarm like mayflies, and a lot of the entries seem very snippety. As it happens, Professor Leon Stilman, of Columbia University, twenty-five years ago edited an edition of the diaries from Tolstoy’s last year, 1910, and this single dramatic year of uncut entries
made compelling reading. The entry of April 13 appears in the Christian edition (ellipses and brackets his) as:

The Stilman edition carries the section after the first ellipsis to a startling outburst:

Of the ten passages that I had noted, in the back of the Stilman book, as especially shrewd or poignant, eight were omitted by Mr. Christian, including this valuable and typically Tolstoyan insight: “I am conscious of myself in exactly the same way now, at eighty-one, as I was conscious of myself, my ‘I,’ at five or six years of age.” If diaries are worth translating at all, an uncut version is perhaps best; it enables the reader to decide for himself what is important and to experience the drift of days somewhat as the writer did.

Mr. Christian’s edition seems inadequate as a scholarly resource, while still intimidating to the general reader. Thus continue the ragged, unsystematic fortunes of Tolstoy’s journals in English. The year 1917 saw published, by Dutton and Knopf respectively, two “first volumes” that turned out to be the last:
The Diaries of Leo Tolstoy: Youth
—
1847 to 1852
, translated by C. J. Hogarth and A. Sirnis, and
The Journal of Leo Tolstoi: First Volume
—
1895 to 1899
, translated by Rose Strunsky. Ten years later, Doubleday brought out the journals from 1853 to 1857, as rendered into English by the veteran Tolstoy translators Louise and Aylmer Maude. None of these volumes (all out of print) had a sequel, though sequels were implied; all of them, it might be said, were pleasanter to hold and peruse than Mr. Christian’s big boxed pair. And all but Ms. Strunsky’s carried the footnotes at the bottom of the pages, where footnotes, as the very word suggests, should be.

B
ERNARD
S
HAW:
Volume 1, 1856–1898, The Search for Love
, by Michael Holroyd. 486 pp. Random House, 1988.

C
OLLECTED
L
ETTERS
1926–1950, by Bernard Shaw, edited by Dan H. Laurence. 946 pp. Viking, 1988.

Bernard Shaw, as he preferred to be called, was for so long a globally famous writer that it comes as a surprise to realize what a slow bloomer, in the world’s gardens, he was. The third child and only son of an alcoholic Irish Protestant gentleman, George Carr Shaw, and a dedicated amateur singer, Lucinda Elizabeth “Bessie” Gurly Shaw, he was born into genteel poverty and raised in a curious
ménage à trois
rounded out by one George John Vandeleur Lee, his mother’s singing teacher, a musical pedagogue of some small fame in Dublin society, and possibly (a rumor never confirmed) George Bernard’s actual father. Sonny, as the boy was nicknamed, hated every school he attended, did poorly, and dropped out for good at the age of fifteen. The gawky, daydreaming youth then became an errand boy for a real-estate firm, rising to cashier and rent collector; in London, where he followed his mother and sisters and Vandeleur Lee at the age of twenty, he lived with his mother and sister Lucy, penned some music criticism under Lee’s name, worked for the Edison Telephone Company until the company was disbanded, spent his days in the British Museum reading Marx and writing novels no one would publish, became a vegetarian and a Socialist, taught himself shorthand and foreign languages, applied unsuccessfully for a variety of lowly jobs, boxed, sang, suffered severe monthly headaches, wore broken boots and mended clothes, and felt himself to be, he wrote in his journal, “a complete outsider.”

Only as he neared the age of thirty, with the help of his new friend William Archer, did Shaw find his niche as a journalistic critic—of music, of art, of novels, and finally, for Frank Harris’s
Saturday Review
, of the theatre. By the age of forty-one, he had come to sign himself as “G.B.S.” and to cut something of a figure in London; still, the available evidence for his self-proclaimed genius consisted in the main of four novels that had eventually been serialized in Socialist magazines, a great many superior
and spirited columns in the back files of periodicals, a number of tracts and countless speeches for the Fabian Society, and a small and willful book on Ibsen. He did not seriously turn to playwriting until he was over thirty-five; his first drama,
Widowers’ Houses
, was begun as a collaboration with Archer, abandoned after two acts, completed by Shaw alone in 1892, and given two performances, at the first of which he was hissed. Five years later, he felt finished with the stage; of his eight plays, only one,
Arms and the Man
, was anything other than a complete financial failure, and most had not even been produced. Sir Henry Irving reneged on an agreement to star in
The Man of Destiny
, and
Candida
, conceived as a West End vehicle for Janet Achurch, was given instead an inglorious one-performance run in Aberdeen. In 1896 Shaw had met Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a plump Irish heiress six months younger than he. She possessed, Beatrice Webb wrote, “masses of chocolate brown hair,” and in “flowing white evening robes she approaches beauty.” Shaw, after two decades of mostly but not exclusively verbal philandering, married her. At the same time, his first volume of drama and prefaces,
Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant
, was published, and an American production of
The Devil’s Disciple
proved a success and earned the playwright over six hundred pounds. By his wedding day—June 1, 1898—Shaw had solid ground under him at last, and there he is left standing by Michael Holroyd’s scintillating and suspenseful biography.

Mr. Holroyd’s slightly pathetic subtitle derives from his premise that Shaw was unloved by his mother: “In her eyes he was an inferior little male animal tainted with all the potential weaknesses of her husband.” Shaw himself, in his assorted autobiographical writings, is the primary source for this alleged maternal coolness: “She did not hate anybody, nor love anybody,” and “We as children had to find our way in a household where there was neither hate nor love.” Even when her son was arguing Bessie Shaw’s case, he managed to sketch a bleak picture: “Poverty, ostracism, disgust, three children, a house rented at £30 a year or thereabouts, a drunken husband obviously incapable of improving the situation … it says a great deal for my mother’s humanity that she did not hate her children.” The biographer fastens firmly onto this initial deprivation as the clue to Shaw’s stubbornly buoyant character: