Reading Chekhov

 And Astrov in Uncle Vanya: 

Those who will live a hundred or two hundred years after us, and who will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly—they will, perhaps, find a means of being happy. .. . 

Astrov is also—and chiefly—known for his concern about the destruction of the Russian forests and for his remarkable grasp of the principles of ecology, decades before the term came into use as we now know it. A. P. Chudakov and Simon Karlinsky have both written of Chekhov as a kind of protoenvironmentalist. “In the twentieth century the preservation of nature has long been and will be more and more the measure by which the moral potential of each person is tested,” Chudakov writes in Chekhov’s Poetics (1971; published in English in 1983). “[Chekhov] was the first in literature who included the relationship of man to nature in his sphere of ethics.” Karlinsky, in the introduction to his invaluable Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (1973), and in an essay entitled “Huntsmen, Birds, Forests and Three Sisters” (1981), writes of Chekhov’s prescient uneasiness about the destruction of ecosystems. In the essay, Karlinsky speculates about the literary and scientific sources of Chekhov’s environmentalism, citing Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, the French geogra. pher Elisée Reclus, and the Russian climatologist Alexande, Voyeykov. But writing of the nature symbolism in Three Sisters, he makes a telling error: 

At the end of the play, Natasha intends to consolidate her victory by chopping down the beautiful trees. . .. 

“I will order them first of all to chop down this avenue of firs, and then this maple tree here. . . . It is so ugly in the evening.” After destroying the magnificent trees that meant so much to the departing Vershinin and the exterminated Tuzenbach, Natasha plans to replace free nature with a tame variant of it that is acceptable to her: “And here I will order them to plant little flowers, lots of little flowers, and they’ll smell... .” 

Avenues of firs and specimen maples are, of course, no more a part of “free nature” than are beds of tacky little flowers. They belong to what Michael Pollan has wonderfully called “second nature”—the sphere of horticulture. In his writings, as in his life, Chekhov was a good deal less involved with trees growing in the forest than with those planted in an orchard. He was a poet of the domesticated landscape rather than of the Sublime, drawn more to the charm of a shady old garden than to the grandiloquence of untouched wilderness. In the story “Ariadne” (1895), a character named Lubkov “would sometimes stand still before some magnificent landscape and say: ‘It would be nice to have tea here.’ ” 

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In his stories and plays, Chekhov is afraid for all men. He was Only in his twenties and thirties when he wrote most of them, but like other geniuses—especially those who die prematurely—he wrote as if he were old. Toward the end of “Ward No. 6,” he veers off—as he does in other dark and terrible works, such as “Peasants” and “In the Ravine”—to rejoice for all men in the beauty of the world. There is always this amazing movement in Chekhov from the difficult and fearful to the simple and beautiful. As Ragin lies dying, Chekhov tells us, he sees “a greenness before his eyes”; then “a herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him.” 

“Life is given to us only once.” The line (or a variant) appears in story after story and is delivered so quietly and 

offhandedly that we almost miss its terror. Chekhov was never one to insist on anything. He didn’t preach, or even teach. He is our poet of the provisional and fragmentary. When a story or play ends, nothing seems to be settled. “Ward No. 6,” for instance, does not end with the image of the beautiful deer. Before Ragin dies another thought passes through his mind: “A peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter... . Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion forever.” The registered letter—there is a bit of theatricality in its not being an ordinary letter—glints with meaning. What does it say? Who sent it? The ending of “Ward No. 6” inevitably evokes (and was surely influenced by) the ending of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” but Chekhov declines to report the mystical experience that Tolstoy confidently reports his hero to have had. Chekhov enters the dying Ragin’s mind, but emerges with the most laconic and incomplete of reports. Tolstoy’s audacious authorial omniscience gives him his position as the greatest of the’ nineteenth-century Russian realists. Chekhov’s experiments with authorial reticence—equally audacious in their waypoint toward twentieth-century modernism. 

Here at the New Y

...most of the drama consists of the uncanny moving about in an old house of a skeleton, referred to as “the bones.” Now it happened that a couple of us at the reading were members of the celebrated secret society at Yale known as Skull and Bones, or “Bones” for short. In those days, secret societies in general and that secret society in particular were of great importance; indeed the very name of Bones was held in awe, and not at Yale alone. people out in the world believed that if the sacred name were ever to be mentioned in the presence of a Bones man, he woul immediately get up and leave the room. As for Bones men themselves, they never uttered the word except to other Bones men and then, by preference, only deep within the windowless stone tomb on High Street in which the society has had its headquarters for nearly a hundred and fifty years. 

“The Witch of Coés” is a ghost story told in verse, and Frost was accustomed to reading it to great effect, making his auditors’ flesh creep; but that evening in Pierson his hushed reiteration of “the bones’ sent my Bones clubmate and me into childish fits of giggles, which, try as hard as we could, we failed to suppress. It was a humiliating moment for us, and still more humiliating for Frost, who hurried the poem to its close and the evening to an end. The scandalous ruin of his reading was entirely our fault, and yet we could not so much as offer him an apology; for to explain our unbecoming conduct would have required us to mention the unmentionable word, which in the Yale of that day would have caused a second scandal greater than the first. 

Many years later, at about the time of his eightieth birthday (and taking care not to refresh his recollection of our previous encounter), I interviewed Frost for a possible “Talk” piece in the magazine. As it happened, though I took ample notes, I never got around to writing it. | experience failures of this kind often and for a variety of unpredictable reasons. Perhaps I thought Frost had been getting too much newspaper publicity to make a New Yorker piece seem desirable at that moment; perhaps, less rationally, I & hore a grudge against Frost because he had once caused me to do him an injury, and I was punishing him by failing both him and me. In any event, Frost at eighty was a formidable figure, well worth my study whether I wrote about him or not, He had spent a lifetime perfecting himself in the role of a humorous Yankee cracker-barrel philosopher, and of course he was no such thing. Every gesture and glance and modulation of voice gave proof of his skill as an actor; it was like a game to stand in his presence and try to gauge the degree of his being other and elsewhere ~ try to catch a glimpse of the hard-as-nails maker of the poems inside the lovable old stager who went around reciting them. The poems themselves were so often truculent, unloving, and unforgiving (‘the art of life is passing losses on”), while the speaker on the lecture platform and in the college common room was just the sort of genial foxy grandpa who in his younger days would have seen fit to stop by woods on a snowy evening. 

Frost was an exceedingly handsome man. The thickening of his body as he grew older suited him; it provided a proper base for the big, chunky, Roman head, crowned with white hair that appeared to have known only his fingers for a comb. Though born in San Francisco, educated in part at Harvard, and long a resident of England, he had acquired and naturalized the laconic drawl of a New Hampshire hayseed and he moved like one, never in haste. At the time of my interview, I was eager to get behind the skilled actor and come to grips with the cutthroat competitor of whom I had heard. There were stories — the truth of which became evi dent when his letters began to be published after his death ~ that much of Frost's life had been devoted to sedulously puffing himself and putting down rivals. I wanted to hear from his own lips at that late point in his fame and age an appraisal of his ruthless behavior. I had wrung a considerable measure of truth out of Frank Lloyd Wright under similar circumstances, but Frost was too wily for me. Again and again to any question that threatened the embittered and embittering author with having to emerge and face examination, he would reply with a superlatively homely “Oh, come!” His eyes would twinkle, not benignty but with the Satisfaction of having withheld from me something of value. 

Wallace Stevens took care not to become, like Frost, a public figure, He was not good copy for reporters. “Words of the world,” he had written, “are the life of the world.” It is a stunning claim to make for letters, and he was the only writer in America in his time superb enough to make it. In his carefully guarded, magisterial pride, he must have known that he had the right to do so, Not for him an unseemly scrambling to attain a place at the top of the steeple; where he stood on the ground, none stood higher than he. 

And

In my memory is an episode the leading figures of which are Frost and Stevens. I was told it by Stevens and I often play it over in my mind, like a short home movie, for the pleasure it gives me. The time is late at night and the place is Florida. Frost and Stevens, who are staying at the same resort hotel, have been out drinking at a bar somewhere along the beach. Tipsily, in perfect contentment, they are making their way back to the hotel on a boardwalk that runs a foot or so above the sand. They are holding fast to each other, and each is sure that it is he who is supporting his companion. Frost staggers, catches his heel on the edge of the boardwalk, and starts to fall. Stevens strengthens his hold on him, but in vain — over Frost goes, with Stevens on top of him. The two bulky old poets fall in a single knot onto the sand and start rolling over and over in the moonlight down the long slope of the beach to the edge of the sea. 

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4 —_ > 

Our traditional confusion in respect to people’s identities has extended to and embraced the jobs people hold. Most of us tend not only to put the wrong names to people but to put them in the wrong jobs as well. There are writers that I assume are editors, editors that | assume are artists, artists that | assume are space salesmen on the business side of the magazine. (The latter mistake js a result of the unexpected way some artists dress, in the pinstripe plumage of Madison Avenue.) Our errors are the result of an ignorance that may have come into existence by chance, in the hysteria of Ross’s reckless hiring, firing, and switching about of jobs in the early days of the magazine, but there are those on the staff — our conspiracy seekers? — who suspect its continuance of being cultivated for a reason. To the extent that anything with a structure as meager as The New Yorker's may be said to have “management,” maybe it is useful for the management to leave writers and editors as much in the dark about each other as possible. What was once a mere awkward not-knowing has been transformed over the years into a secrecy imposed from above, and one can imagine that this secrecy has its Byzantine advantages. Ross could never keep a secret for long, but Shawn relishes keeping them and will go to his grave in happy possession of many thousands of confidences, most of them (for Shawn will surely outlive us all) no longer of the slightest importance. I suspect Truax, the master secret-keeper, of having taught Shawn the art, but how apt a pupil Shawn has proved to be! It was a case of one genius pointing out the way to another. Truax is a man SO exceedingly secretive that he would gladly make up a story in order not to be able to tell it to anyone; Shawn does not go that far, but he goes pretty far. Once he said to me, “I hope I am not betraying a confidence, but | have been talking with Joe Liebling and he tells me that he has just finished drinking a full quart of orange juice.” 

& on Shirley J.

Shirley Jackson Hyman wrote under her maiden name. Early in her career, she published a story in The New Yorker called ‘‘The Lottery,” which caused a sensation. It was about a scapegoat chosen by lot to be stoned to death in a community that the author was purposely vague about — perhaps the dreadful events of the story had taken place long ago, in some foreign backwater of civilization, or perhaps (and more likely) they were taking place here in America, in the twentieth century. Hundreds of letters came in from troubled and excited readers, causing a furor not to be equalled until the publication of Salinger’s “Franny.” 

The story made Shirley Jackson famous. She became increasingly preoccupied with witchcraft and claimed, with apparent seriousness, to be able to exercise diabolical powers. Once, when for some reason she was angry with her publisher, Alfred Knopf, she learned that he was journeying up to Vermont to ski. The Hymans had then recently moved to Bennington, so Knopf was unwittingly putting himself within close range of Shirley’s evil eye. She made an image of wax and stuck a pin in one leg of the image, and, sure enough, Knopf broke a leg skiing — broke it, indeed, in three places. Shirley would hint darkly that she had enjoyed a good many other triumphs of that nature. 

Shirley and Stanley had met as undergraduates at Syracuse University. She was a bluff, good-looking Californian, who wore glasses and weighed too much — a classic fat girl, with the fat girl’s air of clowning frivolity to mask no telling what depths of unexamined self-loathing. As for Stanley, he was the classic bright jewish boy from Brooklyn, also wearing glasses and also a self. mocker. He was a disciple of Kenneth Burke and was burning to become a celebrated critic; until that time came, he would earn a living by journalism and teaching. Though without money, they married and set about having a family; soon there were four children and then almost at once, so it seemed, grandchildren. 

The Hymans lived at first in Greenwich Village and later in a forlorn, ill-dusted house in Westport. That house was the scene of many drunken revels, one of them especially notable for its lack of charm. Dylan Thomas was on one of his reading tours in America; somebody brought him to a party at the Hymans’, where Thomas took a shine to Shirley. By this stage of his life, Thomas was no longer the promising romantic boy of the Augustus John portrait; he was a tubby little man, with thinning hair and brown teeth with holes in them. Despite his appearance, he enjoyed a considerable sexual success among suggestible college girls, whom he would approach with the honest if unappealing inquiry, “Can I jump you?” At the Hymans’, a drunken Thomas put the question to a drunken Shirley, while a drunken Stanley sat contentedly in front of his TV screen, watching a night baseball game. Hearing no negative in response to his question, Thomas made a pass at Shirley, who leapt to her feet and lumbered past Stanley, with Thomas in close pursuit. She mounted the front Stairs, ran along the hall, stumbled down the back stairs, and again lumbered past Stanley. Shirley and Thomas made the circuit three or four times before Stanley, irritated at having his view of the ball game repeatedly interrupted by the gross beasts jogging past him, reached out and grabbed Thomas by the belt of his trousers, causing him to fall to the floor, while the winded Shirley mounted the stairs for the last time. 

Shirley grew so fat that it became painful for her to walk; bones in her feet threatened to break under the heavy burden of her body. The last time Anne and I saw her before she died — death came to her in her sleep, of a heart attack — was at a party we gave to celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The party took place at our country place in Norfolk. On a stretch of lawn between our house and the surrounding woods, we had pitched an enormous white marquee; metal-lined boxes, ordinarily used to hold potted flowers, were filled with ice and scores of bottles of Piper-Heidsieck, and a very satisfactory occasion it turned out to be. Shirley and Stanley had arranged to be driven down from Bennington. Shirley was wearing a shapeless reddish coverall, which served to exaggerate her size and not, as she must have hoped, to diminish it, and with her sharp writer’s eye she cannot have failed to note that to many of the other guests she seemed an apparition, impossible to account for in their world of strict bodily discipline. The Hymans stayed late, as they always did, drinking and talking. Stanley sat slumped in a cloud of cigarette smoke on a couch in the living room; at his feet were some boys and girls of college age, a couple of Gills among them. They saw the relish with which Stanley in his cups took the bait of hard questions; joyously he lashed out at them, scolding them and instructing them as he coughed and choked and laughed and scattered ashes and liquor down the front of his rumpled clothes. Shirley in the dining room was determined to be helpful — she would assist Anne and me in drawing up a list of all the presents we had received that day. (One of them was the Hymans’ own present, an ingot of pure silver that Stanley had ordered from the Treasury. “A silver anniversary is a silver anniversary,” Stanley said. He was shocked that one of our Norfolk neighbors had given us a quart-tin of homemade maple syrup.) Shirley scribbled away diligently in the candlelit dusk of the dining room, smiling a child’s smile at the accomplishment of the task she had set herself. In the morning, when we looked at the list, not a word of it was legible. 

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In this country more than in any other that I know of, the relationship between writers and alcohol is a curiously close one. 

I have often asked literary scholars for an explanation of the fact that while in the nineteenth century few of our writers except Poe were heavy drinkers, in the twentieth century almost every writer worthy of the name has been one. Among the dead, we have only to think of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lardner, Marquand, Sinclair Lewis, O’Hara, Crane, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Wallace Stevens, O’Neill, Barry, Millay, Dorothy Parker, Hammett, Roethke, Benchley, and Berryman. Among the living, the list is equally long, if not equally distinguished. Surely the provocation to drink that was faced by Melville, James, Twain, and other leading literary figures of the nineteenth century was as great as any provocation we face today, but none of them drank too much and most of us do. It is a mystery, which I am content to leave to scholars; I wish only to be understood as feeling admiration for my colleagues when I speak of their enjoyment of drink and of their willing capitulation to it. The more abstinent of my readers are reminded that “symposium” comes from the Greek word for “drinking party,” and that if getting tight was good enough for Socrates, it is surely good enough for the rest of us. 

With that caveat, I count myself free to mention what happy times Wilson used to have, drinking in the Algonquin lobby, or at the Princeton Club, or in any number of bars and restaurants around town. He had an enviable gift for seeming to remain sober, or, at any rate, for remaining coherent. He would seat himself on a couch at the Algonquin, surrounded by such young folk as Epstein, the artist Edward Gorey, and Clelia Delafield, who, with Epstein and Gorey, had founded an attractive, financially unsuccessful publishing house for children’s books, called The Looking Glass Library. Wilson would order a double martini, or, if he was in his bourbon phase, a double bourbon; that would be followed by another double, and then another. Alcohol banished his shyness and made him eloquent; after a few hours of talk, it was possible that when he attempted to get up, he would fall down. No matter. He was still in command of his beautiful mind, and the abused body must shift for itself as best it could. 

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Oh, but John O’Hara was a difficult man! Indeed, there are those who would describe him as impossible, and they would have their reasons. At a memorial service held for him shortly after his death, in 1970, his publisher, Bennett Cerf, delivered the eulogy. I proved to consist in large part of stories about O’Hara’s often wounded feelings and about his many broken-off relationships. Cerf appeared not to notice that he was sketching a thoroughly unpleasant likeness of his close friend. It was said of O’Hazra, nobody any longer remembers by whom, that he was a master of the fancied slight. Once it befell that Robert Benchley and his daughter-in-law Marjorie, catching sight of O’Hara at “’21,” called him over to their table. Marjorie said, “John, we’ve just been seeing Pal Joey again, and, do you know, I like it even better than I did the first time.” O’Hara: “What was the matter with it the first time?” 

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In his teens, Capote served for a time as an office boy on The New Yorker. He was a tiny, round-faced, slender creature, as exotic as an osprey. He and Daise Terry, who was in charge of the office help and who also took charge of running the weekly art meetings, doted on each other. There was a gap of fifty years or so between them in respect to age, but they were a close couple, alike in size, in their relish for gossip, and in their cynical view of other members of the staff. Capote dressed with an eccentricity that wasn’t to become a commonplace among the young for another twenty-five years; I recall him sweeping through the corridors of the magazine in a black opera cape, his long golden hair falling to his shoulders: an apparition that put one in mind of Oscar Wilde in Nevada, in his velvets and lilies. 

The story goes that after Capote’s departure from the magazine it was discovered that he had been serving as a sort of self-appointed art editor. One of his tasks was to open the envelopes that contained drawings sent in by artists from all round the country; when Capote didn’t like a drawing, he dropped it over the far edge of the big table at which he worked. Years passed, and someone thought to move the table. Behind it were found hundreds of drawings that Capote had peremptorily rejected, instead of sending them along to Geraghty and Ross. True or false? Nobody knows, for Capote anecdotes are hard to check. If he didn’t invent the non-fiction novel, he early became the master of the self-serving anecdote, many of them composed out of the thinnest possible air, but told with a zestful self-love that renders them irresistible.