The Perfect Order of Things (11 page)

I hurried back to my room downstairs—back to Tolstoy, back to Levin’s unhappy thwarting at the hands of young Dolly. Tolstoy had such excitement about romantic love (at least for a while). You can feel him purr during his great love scenes. He adored the red-light, green-light nature of it, its democratic stranglehold. You’re never too rich, too beautiful, too stupid, too broke, too
anything
to resist its crooking finger. Unlike Chekhov, whose unhappy characters tend to stay unhappy, Tolstoy believed (once again, for a while) that romantic, sexualized love had the power to transform people, to make them happy. It lured Prince Andrei from a pit of malignant self-absorption; made Pierre Bezuhov into an adult; thrilled Anna Karenina for the only time in her life. Eventually it ripened and completed Levin as a man.

One morning Molly and I were having breakfast in the upstairs bar. I was spooning honeyed yogurt into my mouth with a greedy urgency.

“I don’t mean to be insulting,” Molly said with a strained smile, “but you’re making quite a racket over there.”

That, for those who don’t recognize it, is the sound of a woman who no longer wants you. It reminded me— with the suddenness of someone smashing a hammer on the table—of a scene that I had read only days before, where Anna views her husband’s ears (they stick out) with revulsion.

A few days later, the sun was setting over the river. Such a melancholy time, the boats with little bow lanterns, like fireflies, drifting downstream with the current. I was caught midway in that famous scene where Anna, having fled her family, sneaks back to her former house to visit her nine-year-old son. Her husband is asleep downstairs. She bribes a servant, she starts up the stairs—I knew that this was a one-time moment in literature, that I would never again get to experience the unfolding of this scene
without knowing its outcome
. Would she get to see the little boy or not? It felt as urgent as a crisis in my own life and I feared, I actually feared, that Molly with her blond hair and sharp features, those beautiful eyelashes, would wander into the room at the very second and spoil everything. I leapt up from the bed and locked the door to the room.

The end of a love affair comes in different ways. For Molly, it was the spectacle of me wolfing down a dish of yogurt (as if someone might steal it); for me, it was the moment I decided to shut her out of the room and all the things inside it.

Pretty much everything Tolstoy wrote after
Anna K.
is so top-heavy with pedantry or moral instruction that you can’t finish it. The danger signs were there even in the divine
War and Peace
: that dull section where Pierre joins the Freemasons; or the novel’s last, dreadful chapter. (Surely the real ending comes forty pages earlier, with Prince Andrei’s son eavesdropping on a favourite uncle downstairs.) There’s trouble brewing here and there in
Anna Karenina
too, in Levin’s tiresome reflections on rural agriculture. How I long to stop strangers when I see these books under their arms, to implore them to skip those sections so they won’t leave such magnificent works on a note of anticlimax.

From 1881 onwards, Tolstoy underwent a spiritual crisis that was characterized by great, some would say insane, extremes, a disgust with sex, a disdain for literature, an abandonment of secular pleasures, even riding his bicycle. (“Daddy loves giving things up,” one of his daughters wrote snidely in her diary.) This unforgiving embrace of Christianity (with a few suggestions for its improvement, naturally) made him a kind of holy figure in Russia and attracted devotees and lunatics from all over the country, many of whom stayed at the house, much to the fury of Madame Tolstoy. But even when he was out in the barn dressed like a peasant, making his own boots and calling his wife a whore, there remained a few dazzling literary turns in the, by now, old coot. It was as if every so often Tolstoy couldn’t stop being Tolstoy, couldn’t stand in the way of his own nagging genius.

People know
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
(1886), but for some reason almost no one I’ve talked to has read the extraordinary novella
Master and Man
, which he wrote when he was seventy-two years old. I came across it by accident years after I thought I knew all the Tolstoy hits, when, out of a nostalgia for a more excitable time in my life (literature leaves fainter traces as the years go by), I sat in on an undergraduate course in the nineteenth-century Russian novel at the University of Toronto. (I had time as well as nostalgia on my hands.)
Master and Man
, I discovered, is the great Tolstoy buried treasure. It’s a very simple story indeed. A peasant, Nikita, and his master, a lumber merchant, set off on a winter afternoon to conclude a deal in a neighbouring village. A storm comes up; they lose their way; night falls. As the two drift through a zone of lunar frigidity (“It sometimes seemed that the sledge was standing still and the countryside was rolling away behind them”), what the reader experiences may well be the best description of winter in literature.

Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia, who looked after the business end of things, was away when Tolstoy finished
Master and
Man
. In her absence he sold it to a magazine for next to nothing. Big trouble when she came back. Raging through the house (the servants cringing behind the furniture), she accused him of sleeping with the editor and raised such a row that Tolstoy declared the marriage over and went to his room to pack. Not to be outdone, Sofia ran outside into the Russian winter clad in only a nightdress and a dressing gown. Wearing underwear and a vest, with no shirt, Tolstoy chased after her. Once rescued, the distraught wife took to her bed. Unable to endure her unhappiness, Tolstoy relented and cancelled the magazine deal. But two days after the rights were formally returned, their seven-year-old son, Vanichka, a gifted, sweet-natured boy, developed scarlet fever and died. His parents, the quarrel over the manuscript forgotten, sat together on the sofa, “almost unconscious with grief.”

A word to the wise, if I may, about
Master and Man
in particular and about Tolstoy in general. Be careful. Tolstoy is not afraid to hurt you. When the timber merchant realizes that Nikita is freezing to death, he does something so astonishing—and then
not
astonishing—that you have the feeling of someone sticking a hand into your chest. I won’t ruin the story for you but, in a word, this is not the guy to read before your afternoon nap.

Which brings us happily and finally to the present. Late fall in Havana, Cuba. Not the end but nearing the final chapters of my life with Tolstoy. I didn’t bring him with me this time, but then again, he is somebody you never quite leave behind. Once infected, never cured. And, like Proust, Tolstoy changes not just the way you see the world but occasionally even the way you experience it. Sometimes, in fact, I feel I’ve come to lean on Tolstoy rather too much; have seen him in too many of my own life’s events (Oh! Just like that moment in—); have quoted him too often (as I do with the Beatles when I try to inspire my son’s sporadically deflated musical aspirations). I remember once, when I was working in television, a producer raised her head in indignation from a script I’d written about a Manitoba violinist and snapped, “No more Tolstoy, okay!”

So—a last Tolstoy moment before I go. It’s a sunny day in Havana, the wind high and whipping through the power lines outside my hotel window; the ocean is bluer than yesterday but still wild and white-capped. Many years have lapsed since Bangkok. I have remarried, but I have left my wife at home this time, have come for a holiday in my own company, something I have not done for many years.

Yesterday I took a walk along the seawall. A wedding procession roared by; it looked like a scene from
Godfather
Two
, when Michael Corleone goes to Cuba. Later I had a coffee on the terrace of the Hotel Inglaterra in the old city. (What does one do with all this time on one’s hands? I can’t quite remember.) Another wedding procession, beribboned cars from the fifties, a white bride and a black groom perched on the back of a convertible. A Frenchman at the next table tells me Havana is a big town for public weddings. Which makes me think about my own wedding only a few years ago. We had it in the living room of our new house (my “starter” home, age fifty-six) in Kensington Market. My second ex-wife, Catherine, stood with our son, both of them lanky and lovely. How lucky I am, I thought, looking at them, that they are still here, still part of my life.

And there’s M., my first ex-wife—the one who gave me Tolstoy all those years ago—laying out the food and bossing the help around (she wants the food table against the wall, not “in the middle of the goddamn room”). Our daughter, all grown up now, tall and blond and somehow extravagant even at rest, calls the room to order. She is the Master of Ceremonies tonight and begins to read, stopping a sentence in. “I hope I can get through this without bursting into tears,” she says. The room falls silent. She continues.

Prince Andrei loved dancing . . . and chose Natasha for a partner because Pierre pointed her out to him, and because she was the first pretty girl who caught his eyes. But he had no sooner put his arm around that slender, supple waist, and felt her stirring so close to him, and smiling so close to him, than the intoxication of her beauty flew to his head.

Looking at my daughter and then at Rachel, my wife of only a few minutes now (so pretty in her black dress), I feel a wave of almost unendurable good fortune. And I think: You must not ask more from life than this.

6

Ladies and Gentlemen,
the Beatles!

T
he other night I did a search on my eight-year-old computer and discovered that there were over 250 different documents where I mentioned the Beatles by name. Book reviews, a screenplay (unproduced), a novel, a magazine article on Tolstoy, diaries, letters, even a wine review. They certainly got to me, those boys.

And so when I started to write this book, on going back to places where you’ve suffered, I had to mention them. Because if you’re my age and have ever suffered in the name of love, chances are you’ve done it with the Beatles in the background.

I went out and bought the paperback of Bob Spitz’s 2005, brick-sized Beatle biography. It’s a beautifully written, nine-hundred-page travail. Mr. Spitz spent six years on it, moved to Liverpool for six months, split up with his wife over it. But something surprising and vaguely discomforting happened. I got through maybe a hundred pages and then I stopped. I knew all the stories and I just didn’t care to hear them again. I was Beatled-out. A new verb, that, to be Beatled-out: to love something like you’ll probably never love anything again, but to have had enough for one lifetime.

But let’s go back for a moment or two. It was 1987, George Harrison had just released his final album,
Cloud
Nine
, and I was going to London to interview him. Shooting through the darkness at 37,000 feet above the Atlantic, I stared into space with the
gravitas
of a man going to his execution. I had two stiff drinks to calm down, but they skated weightlessly over my excitement. The image of John, Paul and George singing “This Boy” into a single microphone on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in 1964 was paralyzing. A list of do-not-do’s: For God’s sake, don’t ask him if he got a lot of girls. Or if he ever felt “weird” about kicking Pete Best out of the band. Nor does he need to know that you once had a skinny girlfriend in Kansas City who, substituting a perfume bottle for a microphone, used to sing “If I Fell” in front of her bedroom mirror. Oh, and don’t bother telling him about Raissa and that time you heard “Don’t Let Me Down” at five o’clock in the morning in a Paris café and nearly died of longing for her. Don’t tell him your publisher moonlights occasionally in a Beatles cover band. And don’t ask the one question that no one on earth can answer except those four young men in the limo:
What was it like to be in the Beatles?

In preparation for the interview, I spent a sunny morning driving around Liverpool with Nancy Rutledge, a middle-aged real estate agent. Nancy was George’s girlfriend for a few months when they were both sixteen, but with that hard-headed common sense so typical of northerners she didn’t appear to think it was a big deal.

She drove me to the Cavern Club, or its replacement rather. Unwise city fathers tore down the original in 1973 to make room for an underground rail loop. It was here, under the famous brick archway, that the boys made it big, playing 292 shows, afternoon and night, from 1961 to 1963, the last gig only a month or so after recording “She Loves You.” It was also here that a gay young record store owner, Brian Epstein, fell in love at first sight (those black leather jackets helped) and offered to get them a record deal. Which, after an imprudent executive at Decca Records told him that guitar bands were “finished,” he did.

While Nancy stopped at a pastry store to pick up a birthday cake for a client, I hopped out of the car and phoned a friend in Toronto, himself a scrupulous Beatles fan.

“Guess where I am?” I said breathlessly.

“Where?”

“I’m at the Cavern Club.” But his response was not what I’d hoped for.

“They tore down the Cavern Club years ago,” he said.

“Yes, I know that, but . . .” I began to explain but the moment was lost, and walking away from the red phone booth (Nancy waiting for me in a restaurant) I was perplexed by my friend’s coldness, his appetite to diminish my excitement, and I was again reminded that you have to be careful to whose ears you bring good news, that the world, even your friends, sometimes
especially
your friends, doesn’t always wish you good fortune. Still, it troubled me, and for the next few days I found myself returning to it.

We looked at other spots: George’s childhood home, the hairdressing salon where Ringo’s wife, Maureen, worked, the Strawberry Field orphanage and the Casbah Coffee Club, which was run by Pete Best’s mom. “Pete’s fine now,” Nancy said brightly. “He had a rough spell, you can only imagine, but he’s gotten quite famous, even a bit rich.”