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1.51k reviews for:
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
George Saunders
4.52 AVERAGE
1.51k reviews for:
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
George Saunders
4.52 AVERAGE
George Saunders reminds me of a mechanic I once had who loved opera. I would bring my old truck in and he'd come out all greasy, whistling a Verdi tune. At first this seemed incongruous to me, just like it seems incongruous for Saunders in this intelligent and sensitive analysis of Russian literature to tell budding young writers to cultivate their "shit piles," i.e., their immature voices,. But it's not as incongruous as it is honest and practical. At one point, Saunders poses an exercise: compare Tolstoy's early story "The Snowstorm" to his short masterpiece, "Master and Man." The earlier story is, relatively speaking, Tolstoy's shit pile. Good writing, even masterpieces of literature, start out kind of shitty. And so do great writers, at least some of the time. How the work progresses and how writers can improve their writing is what this book is about, and it's one of the finest of its kind.
informative
medium-paced
funny
informative
reflective
I was fortunate enough to take a writing seminar with George Saunders as an undergraduate, so listening to this on audiobook felt like being a college student again in a Short Story class in the best way. I recognized/remembered some of his writing feedback, and I still enjoy his humor very much. Upstate's writer dad. Carefully analyzing a handful of short stories by Russian authors I've been too intimidated to read was a delightful bonus.
Glad I went with the audiobook. The readers were wonderful, and hearing Saunders walk through his analyses in his own voice meant a lot to me. He's such a generous and insightful teacher.
funny
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
It's always nice to hear someone talk about something they're passionate about. I will always love when someone tells me about something they earnestly love, and for that I liked this book a lot. There were some ideas Saunders presented about reading that will probably stick with me through everything I read from this point on: the concept of a Things I Can't Help Noticing (TICHN) cart, the idea of comparing how much space, in pages or lines, certain descriptions or events take up in the short story, and stopping to ask yourself what you're expectations for the story going forward are after every page or so, to name a few. I know I have a tendency to read more with my intuition than intellect, relying more on my impressions of the story than on a technical perspective of why something ought to be some way to service the story. (Well, the author felt that it had to be that way! What other reason do they really have?) I got some more appreciation for the ability of a short story to make points and connections that a medium like an essay would not be able to, and the stories Saunders picked raised some interesting, earnest questions about Life (haha like in the title) that I enjoyed contemplating with Saunders.
The last chapter, especially, I found very beautiful. I think Saunders is clearly very smart, and the way he addresses that all he can show us still happens in our head, describing us "trying on" his perspectives felt very practical and nuanced to me, even as it was loving and hopeful. He demonstrates a clear intuition and understanding for the art of writing that I think any reader will appreciate, especially given his remarkable humility in writing.
I got the chance to read some curated works by famous authors, which was good for me - I now get a flavor of what Chekhov was important for, apart from his gun. This was my first time reading anything by Gogol, and I found that I really liked it.
Saunders' interactions with the authors he picked from, and with literature and writing as a whole, are decently different from mine, to say the least, and that affected my ability to engage with his writing and ideas in varying ways.
That's as much as I have to say that's strictly related to the book. The rest is a hissy fit/personal essay saying the most about how exactly my interactions with literature affected my engagement with this book.
I saw that a friend of mine was reading this book on StoryGraph and my first thought, upon reading the title, was "What qualification do these Russians have to tell me how to read and how to live my life?" I suspected it would just be a book where some famous author sings the praises of four other famous authors and I didn't see the appeal in some guy telling my why four already firmly established literary figures are important. Given that these famous literary figures were predominantly 19th century Russian men, I also had my suspicions about the attitudes they would take on women. (Unless, mercifully, women were not mentioned at all.) To put it in the worst feminazi terms possible, I thought it would be a dude jerking off himself and four of his heros, a microcosm of the literary boys' club.
This friend seemed very happy with the book and said he was curious what I would think about it.
He described it in a way that was much more appealing to me - a literature teacher, talking about stories he teaches to his students, asking the reader to engage with the stories in the way he asks aspiring writers to engage with it. The description made the book seem more earnest, and thus more approachable.
When I got my hands on the book, a detail on the cover jumped out to me that seemed to confirm my former suspicions. The two male figures swimming did not need to be shown in profile. The decision to make their behinds so well defined was a cheeky touch (pun intended) - and I think to myself that a female figure thus portrayed would be titillating, salacious. These swimmers enjoy their nakedness without any qualification, without self-consciousness. For me, they are emblematic of the world men in classical literature enjoy - one where women are irrelevant to the point that a story can have mainly men as acting characters, and in this homogeneous place, to be a man is to be bodiless, unsexed: the human experience, at least all that is relevant about it, *is* the experience of being a man. In contrast, to use Khadija Mbowe's paraphrasing of Julia Seranos, "women = sex and therefore sex = bad" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuRK5naSfDQ&list=PLZzHhtt6-BdilZImaG9vLMtaknUfVQOPJ&index=186). I feel myself cringing against the reality that men can take off and put on their sex like clothing, but I, no matter my flailing, can never take it off.
I told myself I was overreacting. I was *literally* judging a book by its cover. I had to read it first.
In the first story, "In the Cart", Saunders has us ponder our expectations at each page. When the story opens with an early spring day, birds singing, snow still in the ditches, and a woman absorbed in her own thoughts, I think to myself, "this is going to be some kind of parable about humans making up problems when the world is beautiful." It is my instinct to think that a 19th century Russian man will only center a story around a woman if he needs someone to shame. It is to my pleasant surprise that Saunders finds her sympathetic - assumes the reader will find her sympathetic, too. Maybe I don't need to fear that women exist in these stories only to be shamed or fucked in some combination.
I am also pleasantly surprised when he makes this point regarding the reader and the author: "A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer. We feel her, over on the production end of the process, imagining that we are as intelligent and worldly and curious as she is." (pg 117)
So far, so good. I would very much like for the author to be writing to me as an equal. I don't expect it from the crowd Saunders is pulling from, though.
When I was 17, reading Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky, it was hot on the tails of me finishing The Brothers Karamazov, which I loved, but which cannot be described as a light read. I was young, a little burnt out, and a little stupid (ok maybe a lot stupid), but Dostoevsky was a figure I respected morally and intellectually, and I thought I might as well polish off all the books my father had of his in our library. I was slogging through Demons, comprehending little, when, around halfway through the book, we get a portrait of a "girl-student" trying to be an activist. She is jumpy, easily aggravated, misquotes the bible, and seems to be constantly trying to assert that she knows more than everyone around her while obviously understanding little. A general tries to chastise her about how a woman should behave, admonishing her that he used to hold her in his arms. Reading this passage I thought, "oh shit, that's how Dostoevsky would see me!"; I had approached the book with humility, looking for something useful from an author I trusted to have a gift for nuance and empathy, and it felt like he had looked me in the face with pity and disdain and said "you won't understand any of this, it's not for you." I don't remember much else of the book, so I guess he was right.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by that first story. I thought it felt a little artificial, pointed, that Saunders would refer to an author in the abstract as a woman, when all the stories he had chosen were written by men, but I took it as an effort to invite female readers to appreciate a form of literature that he loved, and I could get behind that.
Then I read "The Darling", which Saunders asserts is not sexist, and I think to myself, "well, it wouldn't really be feminist to expect every portrayal of a woman to be favorable, that's silly and flattening, so I see where he's coming from, and Chekhov never overtly implies that the Darling's vices are the vices of most women. However, he really couldn't have written this same story about a man. It is a story that can only exist in a world where this behavior is more or less expected of women. I'll read it because I think it's useful to me, but I can't fault any woman who puts this one down." Saunders' declaration that thinking of the story as sexist is "selling the story short" felt particularly laughable to me for that reason - the story is not a person. Any woman reading for herself has every right to sell it as short as she wants. (Naturally, a professional critic could be asked to do more, but I'm not about to tell a friend of mind to suspend her misgivings for Chekhoov's The Darling. I simply doubt it will be worth all that much to her.)
This got me thinking again about The Cart story. Half of it is her idle fantasies about the man who's financially better off, but a total boob. For a woman in this time frame, this marriage fantasy is integral to the theme of her "fall from grace", her memory of her former glory, and any potential to escape. For a man? How would this fantasy read? Did Chekhov see this as a story about the human experience, or about the extenuating circumstance that is being a woman?
Then I read "The Man and Master" and the following notes and I felt much of my suspicion was well-founded. For the most part, women don't feature in this story, which I always find promising in these stories because then I don't have to think about my gender. This does, however, mean that when women *do* get mentioned, it's with a quick jab that feels all the more out of left field. In this story, after getting lost twice in a snowstorm, our main characters stop to have dinner with a large family, that has been together for generations, but is on the brink of splitting into several houses due to conflicts that Tolstoy assures us, "start[ed] as usual among the women." [pg 185] We learn later that "his third son...had not sent him anything for the holiday though he had sent a French shawl to his wife," and that the second son is thinking of dividing up the household [pg 189]. Well, on the face of it, this reads like something *the sons* have done, but I suppose Tolstoy wants us to infer that the wives have instigated this somehow. I am meant to imagine a friction between the women that is petty and unworthy of discussing, that only comes to an interesting head when a man acts in the fray. Frankly, I might even buy that the women started it: all of them stuck together keeping one house, never getting a break from each other, it would be so easy to get stir crazy! I think, also, that for men who go out to work and probably speak to each other most at meal times and in bars, it's easy to judge women for the discord of communal living and feel high and mighty about it.
Whatever. Tolstoy may not know that this jab doesn't do anything for his story, but I do, so I'll excise it in my mind and try to judge the story as if all he said was that this family had been a strong unit and is not anymore.
When Saunders talks about this story, he mentions Tolstoy's supreme gift for playing an empathetic G-d, praising the inner monologues he gives even minor characters, giving (all male) examples of this happening in the story. The way he introduces this, though, is by mentioning a diary from Tolstoy's wife, Sonya, in which she complains that she is the only one responsible for any of the care around the house, including all business interactions, that he mopes and writes and neglects their children and then complains and berates her for bothering with such low stuff, the low stuff that keeps him fed and his house in order. Saunders follows this anecdote with "Well, duly noted, Sonya: the guy sounds like a pain. Yet his writing is full of compassion. That's what he's known for," [pg 220] which to me reads, "sorry your husband was a dick, but he was good at pretending he wasn't, so we don't care!". Hey man, Ouch!
I am reminded of the legend of Annapurna/Parvati. The god Shiva gets into an argument with his consort Parvati about the worth of food and material things. He claims that all of it is vapid, substanceless, an illusion. In her anger, Parvati disappears, and with her, all food. Humanity, hungry, neglects their spiritual and intellectual lives, and even the gods beg for food. They go to the last kitchen on earth in Varanasi, where Shiva finds Parvati as the goddess Annapurna, the goddess of food, and he is forced to concede that, while he has ascended past the need for food, his followers have not.
Tolstoy doesn't even get to be Shiva in this story. Tolstoy is one of Shiva's begging followers, who would have liked to believe that Shiva was right, but is himself the reason why Annapurna is right. It seems that Tolstoy liked to think of himself as ascended past all the base and low things that his wife was concerned with, not realizing that his moralizing work as an author was sustained entirely by his wife's efforts with the low things of his life. Could he have had as much time to write if he was caring for his children, or the house where he did his work? Saunders also tells us that Tolstoy was pro-chastity but had a hard time living by it. Go figure. (Saunders addresses Tolstoy's contradictory nature more fully after the last story, assessing that Tolstoy's writing holds up better than his stated beliefs because of how his contradictory behaviors influenced it.)
For all the praise of Tolstoy's morality, I am frankly not surprised that it is a shallow one based on other people shouldering the burden for what he considered beneath him. After all, even Saunders admits that in The Man and Master, Nikita, the serf, gets much less care and development in the story than his master, who Tolstoy probably found easier to empathize with. Even Saunders considers it a harm to the story that Tolstoy has flattened Nikita into an idealized portrait of a serf.
Even though Saunders makes note of this failing, and how sexism/homophobia/racism harms other stories by neglecting the depth of its characters, Saunders never once makes note of the line about how the dissolution of the family began with the women. I guess he didn't notice?
I had only read two of Tolstoy's stories prior to this, and I had really liked them! I thought highly of the guy! Fuck, Gandhi looked up to Tolstoy, and he's a giant of peaceful resistance! (Then again, Gandhi also slept naked with his grandniece at 70, when she was in her late teens, to test his abstinence...go figure. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/02/766083651/gandhi-is-deeply-revered-but-his-attitudes-on-race-and-sex-are-under-scrutiny)
Am I gonna let one line sway me? Well, it's not just the one line, is it? The value of Tolstoy's work is our faith in its moral integrity, and Tolstoy, for all that Saunders' thinks he makes a good G-d, clearly places more importance not only on male characters but on land-owning characters. Even before the line in question, I was struck by the fact that Nikita talks to the other serfs more or less the same way he talks to the animals, struck by how they didn't get names ("the cook's husband" and "the workmen's cook"). People like to ask that we separate the art from the artist but how can that be cleanly possible, when the art is a representation of the perspective of the artist?
And while I'm griping about separating art from artist, the timeline in which I was reading this book coincides unfortunately with my discovery that Cormac McCarthy was a groomer. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctgp2gyyON0)
While the woman he groomed, Augusta Britt, is still in love with him and made every effort to find a journalist who would portray their story in the most favorable light, even she says that when she was 20 she realized "if something ever happened to him, I could survive physically, but I wouldn't be able to survive emotionally. I wouldn't be able to survive on my own without him. And that's not love. That's not healthy, at least." Even while she defends him to the best of her ability, she describes the deep depressions she would be thrown into when he would send her a manuscript with a character based off of her, a victim bearing all of her personal traumas, only to kill the character off. "...it's just so full of me, and yet isn't me. It was so confusing. Reading about Blevins getting killed was so sad. I cried for days...I was surprised that it didn't feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated. All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged in to fiction. I didn't know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most imporant person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about?" Even the journalist, who's trying very hard to make this all look romantic, observes, "Her mission from the age of 11 was to be good, to survive, and yet McCarthy kept killing her."
A comment on this article reads, "I don't understand the new trend of being unable to separate the artist from the art. Cormac McCarthy had a 16-year-old muse when he was 42. Ok. Fine. But my issue is deeper than art/artist separation. It brings to light the question: Are artists (writers) supposed to be 'good' according to some arbitrary societal standard? If so, why, and who makes those calls? Don't people understand that writers have always been the freaks, weirdos, intense individuals, rebels, etc? Just like painters and all other artists. Look at Hemingway or Van Gogh or Dostoevsky. I think people like to project, like to point the finger of bame, like to be part of a mob. But the deeper truth is that we know writers are human, just like everyone else." (A note for the reader: according to letters from McCarthy's friends, either Augusta was in fact 14 at the time, or there was another teenage muse.)
If the art is separate from the artist then the art cannot be used to blot out his vices. It is very clear to me that what this commenter wants is for the art to absolve the artist - but the art here is the chewed-up-spat-out bastard image of a woman who was much more than the eternal dying victim McCarthy made her into. Is her life worth so little? Is a woman just collateral damage, so long as her abuser puts her image to paper? Plenty of shitty, unremarkable people are pedophiles. McCarthy's behavior is not the quirk of a genius, it's not something that separates him from the rest of us, it's what sinks him low. Augusta Britt (and McCarthy's three wives) is not (/are not) the necessary damage for his genius, they just bore the brunt of a horrible and mundane vice from a guy who was otherwise capable of greatness.
So much space is made to sing the praises of these legends, and so many excuses are produced when we learn that these men are human (or, in McCarthy's case, worse), but what space, really, is made for grief over the people they've hurt? Every acknowledgement of an artist's carelessness with other human beings is met with "but"s. I get that these works have widespread cultural impact - everybody fucking does, it's all anybody talks about. Can I please just have a moment to be earnestly angry, without any qualification or exception? I am angry for Augusta, I am angry for Sonya, I am angry for Ghandi's grand-niece, I am angry for Francoise Gilot (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/visual-art/the-100-year-old-it-girl-picasso-took-the-cigarette-and-touched-it-to-my-right-cheek-1.4781289), and so many others whose names and stories I don't know because the image of their abusers was more important for "the culture" than the value of their happiness.
As Kristin Hayter says (under the moniker Lingua Ignota) in FRAGRANT IS MY MANY FLOWER'D CROWN,
"For I have learned
all men are brothers,
and brothers only love each other.
Brothers in arms,
Brothers in each other's arms."
I am angry, I am angry, I am angry, and I want to spit on all their art for making human beings into so much churned mulch in the paths of "great men". For all that Saunders likes to throw around 'she' for hypothetical authors, I don't believe that any author he has chosen imagines that I am "as intelligent and worldly and curious as she is."
In his notes following "Gooseberries", Saunders mentions his experience having short story writer Tobias Wolff read Chekhov aloud: "It was like having Chekhov himself there in the room with us: a charming, beloved person who thought highly of us and wanted, in his quiet way, to engage us... I felt part of a literary community, finally, a community that included everyone in the room...all of us acolytes together in the short story priesthood." Later, describing the relationship between Chekhov and Tolstoy, he quotes from their letters, "If he were to die, there would be a big, empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never loved any man as much as him," (Chekhov) and "I never knew he loved me so much."
When you read such beautiful and tender proclamations of love it is hard not to love the people doing the loving. Looking at the canon of literature, this place where (predominantly) men share their sorrows, anxieties, celebrations and perspectives, how earnestly they engage with each other and give genuine praise and heartfelt, constructive criticism, the more I love how they love each other, and the more I love them, too. And I envy them. I'm fucking green with it. I envy them the space they have in the hallowed halls of institution and academia to love each other openly and entirely. It's easy for Tolstoy to love Chekhov and too much to ask that he love his wife.
In the beginning I mentioned that, for me, the world of literature is a world where to be a man is to be sexless, and everything legitimate in life is part of this "sexless" experience. I fell for that, hook, line, and sinker. I really felt like, in order for an aspect of my experience to be legitimate, it had to be separable from my experience of living as a woman. Even when I read female authors, I find myself longing for a version of their stories where they examine their main themes without acknowledging the role of their sex in the way they present the question, even as I acknowledge to myself that that does affect how you go about answering it for yourself, even as I acknowledge that all art is painted from the perspective of the artist and it would thus be dishonest to forgo it. All this to say that my irritation about the canon of literature is not just some distant notion of correct and incorrect, logical and illogical, careful and uncareful: I feel squished.
Really, I feel vulnerable, and I don't like it, and I have built a wall of rage around me to feel safe in, even as I fear that it traps me more than protects me.
The last chapter, especially, I found very beautiful. I think Saunders is clearly very smart, and the way he addresses that all he can show us still happens in our head, describing us "trying on" his perspectives felt very practical and nuanced to me, even as it was loving and hopeful. He demonstrates a clear intuition and understanding for the art of writing that I think any reader will appreciate, especially given his remarkable humility in writing.
I got the chance to read some curated works by famous authors, which was good for me - I now get a flavor of what Chekhov was important for, apart from his gun. This was my first time reading anything by Gogol, and I found that I really liked it.
Saunders' interactions with the authors he picked from, and with literature and writing as a whole, are decently different from mine, to say the least, and that affected my ability to engage with his writing and ideas in varying ways.
That's as much as I have to say that's strictly related to the book. The rest is a hissy fit/personal essay saying the most about how exactly my interactions with literature affected my engagement with this book.
I saw that a friend of mine was reading this book on StoryGraph and my first thought, upon reading the title, was "What qualification do these Russians have to tell me how to read and how to live my life?" I suspected it would just be a book where some famous author sings the praises of four other famous authors and I didn't see the appeal in some guy telling my why four already firmly established literary figures are important. Given that these famous literary figures were predominantly 19th century Russian men, I also had my suspicions about the attitudes they would take on women. (Unless, mercifully, women were not mentioned at all.) To put it in the worst feminazi terms possible, I thought it would be a dude jerking off himself and four of his heros, a microcosm of the literary boys' club.
This friend seemed very happy with the book and said he was curious what I would think about it.
He described it in a way that was much more appealing to me - a literature teacher, talking about stories he teaches to his students, asking the reader to engage with the stories in the way he asks aspiring writers to engage with it. The description made the book seem more earnest, and thus more approachable.
When I got my hands on the book, a detail on the cover jumped out to me that seemed to confirm my former suspicions. The two male figures swimming did not need to be shown in profile. The decision to make their behinds so well defined was a cheeky touch (pun intended) - and I think to myself that a female figure thus portrayed would be titillating, salacious. These swimmers enjoy their nakedness without any qualification, without self-consciousness. For me, they are emblematic of the world men in classical literature enjoy - one where women are irrelevant to the point that a story can have mainly men as acting characters, and in this homogeneous place, to be a man is to be bodiless, unsexed: the human experience, at least all that is relevant about it, *is* the experience of being a man. In contrast, to use Khadija Mbowe's paraphrasing of Julia Seranos, "women = sex and therefore sex = bad" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuRK5naSfDQ&list=PLZzHhtt6-BdilZImaG9vLMtaknUfVQOPJ&index=186). I feel myself cringing against the reality that men can take off and put on their sex like clothing, but I, no matter my flailing, can never take it off.
I told myself I was overreacting. I was *literally* judging a book by its cover. I had to read it first.
In the first story, "In the Cart", Saunders has us ponder our expectations at each page. When the story opens with an early spring day, birds singing, snow still in the ditches, and a woman absorbed in her own thoughts, I think to myself, "this is going to be some kind of parable about humans making up problems when the world is beautiful." It is my instinct to think that a 19th century Russian man will only center a story around a woman if he needs someone to shame. It is to my pleasant surprise that Saunders finds her sympathetic - assumes the reader will find her sympathetic, too. Maybe I don't need to fear that women exist in these stories only to be shamed or fucked in some combination.
I am also pleasantly surprised when he makes this point regarding the reader and the author: "A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer. We feel her, over on the production end of the process, imagining that we are as intelligent and worldly and curious as she is." (pg 117)
So far, so good. I would very much like for the author to be writing to me as an equal. I don't expect it from the crowd Saunders is pulling from, though.
When I was 17, reading Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky, it was hot on the tails of me finishing The Brothers Karamazov, which I loved, but which cannot be described as a light read. I was young, a little burnt out, and a little stupid (ok maybe a lot stupid), but Dostoevsky was a figure I respected morally and intellectually, and I thought I might as well polish off all the books my father had of his in our library. I was slogging through Demons, comprehending little, when, around halfway through the book, we get a portrait of a "girl-student" trying to be an activist. She is jumpy, easily aggravated, misquotes the bible, and seems to be constantly trying to assert that she knows more than everyone around her while obviously understanding little. A general tries to chastise her about how a woman should behave, admonishing her that he used to hold her in his arms. Reading this passage I thought, "oh shit, that's how Dostoevsky would see me!"; I had approached the book with humility, looking for something useful from an author I trusted to have a gift for nuance and empathy, and it felt like he had looked me in the face with pity and disdain and said "you won't understand any of this, it's not for you." I don't remember much else of the book, so I guess he was right.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by that first story. I thought it felt a little artificial, pointed, that Saunders would refer to an author in the abstract as a woman, when all the stories he had chosen were written by men, but I took it as an effort to invite female readers to appreciate a form of literature that he loved, and I could get behind that.
Then I read "The Darling", which Saunders asserts is not sexist, and I think to myself, "well, it wouldn't really be feminist to expect every portrayal of a woman to be favorable, that's silly and flattening, so I see where he's coming from, and Chekhov never overtly implies that the Darling's vices are the vices of most women. However, he really couldn't have written this same story about a man. It is a story that can only exist in a world where this behavior is more or less expected of women. I'll read it because I think it's useful to me, but I can't fault any woman who puts this one down." Saunders' declaration that thinking of the story as sexist is "selling the story short" felt particularly laughable to me for that reason - the story is not a person. Any woman reading for herself has every right to sell it as short as she wants. (Naturally, a professional critic could be asked to do more, but I'm not about to tell a friend of mind to suspend her misgivings for Chekhoov's The Darling. I simply doubt it will be worth all that much to her.)
This got me thinking again about The Cart story. Half of it is her idle fantasies about the man who's financially better off, but a total boob. For a woman in this time frame, this marriage fantasy is integral to the theme of her "fall from grace", her memory of her former glory, and any potential to escape. For a man? How would this fantasy read? Did Chekhov see this as a story about the human experience, or about the extenuating circumstance that is being a woman?
Then I read "The Man and Master" and the following notes and I felt much of my suspicion was well-founded. For the most part, women don't feature in this story, which I always find promising in these stories because then I don't have to think about my gender. This does, however, mean that when women *do* get mentioned, it's with a quick jab that feels all the more out of left field. In this story, after getting lost twice in a snowstorm, our main characters stop to have dinner with a large family, that has been together for generations, but is on the brink of splitting into several houses due to conflicts that Tolstoy assures us, "start[ed] as usual among the women." [pg 185] We learn later that "his third son...had not sent him anything for the holiday though he had sent a French shawl to his wife," and that the second son is thinking of dividing up the household [pg 189]. Well, on the face of it, this reads like something *the sons* have done, but I suppose Tolstoy wants us to infer that the wives have instigated this somehow. I am meant to imagine a friction between the women that is petty and unworthy of discussing, that only comes to an interesting head when a man acts in the fray. Frankly, I might even buy that the women started it: all of them stuck together keeping one house, never getting a break from each other, it would be so easy to get stir crazy! I think, also, that for men who go out to work and probably speak to each other most at meal times and in bars, it's easy to judge women for the discord of communal living and feel high and mighty about it.
Whatever. Tolstoy may not know that this jab doesn't do anything for his story, but I do, so I'll excise it in my mind and try to judge the story as if all he said was that this family had been a strong unit and is not anymore.
When Saunders talks about this story, he mentions Tolstoy's supreme gift for playing an empathetic G-d, praising the inner monologues he gives even minor characters, giving (all male) examples of this happening in the story. The way he introduces this, though, is by mentioning a diary from Tolstoy's wife, Sonya, in which she complains that she is the only one responsible for any of the care around the house, including all business interactions, that he mopes and writes and neglects their children and then complains and berates her for bothering with such low stuff, the low stuff that keeps him fed and his house in order. Saunders follows this anecdote with "Well, duly noted, Sonya: the guy sounds like a pain. Yet his writing is full of compassion. That's what he's known for," [pg 220] which to me reads, "sorry your husband was a dick, but he was good at pretending he wasn't, so we don't care!". Hey man, Ouch!
I am reminded of the legend of Annapurna/Parvati. The god Shiva gets into an argument with his consort Parvati about the worth of food and material things. He claims that all of it is vapid, substanceless, an illusion. In her anger, Parvati disappears, and with her, all food. Humanity, hungry, neglects their spiritual and intellectual lives, and even the gods beg for food. They go to the last kitchen on earth in Varanasi, where Shiva finds Parvati as the goddess Annapurna, the goddess of food, and he is forced to concede that, while he has ascended past the need for food, his followers have not.
Tolstoy doesn't even get to be Shiva in this story. Tolstoy is one of Shiva's begging followers, who would have liked to believe that Shiva was right, but is himself the reason why Annapurna is right. It seems that Tolstoy liked to think of himself as ascended past all the base and low things that his wife was concerned with, not realizing that his moralizing work as an author was sustained entirely by his wife's efforts with the low things of his life. Could he have had as much time to write if he was caring for his children, or the house where he did his work? Saunders also tells us that Tolstoy was pro-chastity but had a hard time living by it. Go figure. (Saunders addresses Tolstoy's contradictory nature more fully after the last story, assessing that Tolstoy's writing holds up better than his stated beliefs because of how his contradictory behaviors influenced it.)
For all the praise of Tolstoy's morality, I am frankly not surprised that it is a shallow one based on other people shouldering the burden for what he considered beneath him. After all, even Saunders admits that in The Man and Master, Nikita, the serf, gets much less care and development in the story than his master, who Tolstoy probably found easier to empathize with. Even Saunders considers it a harm to the story that Tolstoy has flattened Nikita into an idealized portrait of a serf.
Even though Saunders makes note of this failing, and how sexism/homophobia/racism harms other stories by neglecting the depth of its characters, Saunders never once makes note of the line about how the dissolution of the family began with the women. I guess he didn't notice?
I had only read two of Tolstoy's stories prior to this, and I had really liked them! I thought highly of the guy! Fuck, Gandhi looked up to Tolstoy, and he's a giant of peaceful resistance! (Then again, Gandhi also slept naked with his grandniece at 70, when she was in her late teens, to test his abstinence...go figure. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/02/766083651/gandhi-is-deeply-revered-but-his-attitudes-on-race-and-sex-are-under-scrutiny)
Am I gonna let one line sway me? Well, it's not just the one line, is it? The value of Tolstoy's work is our faith in its moral integrity, and Tolstoy, for all that Saunders' thinks he makes a good G-d, clearly places more importance not only on male characters but on land-owning characters. Even before the line in question, I was struck by the fact that Nikita talks to the other serfs more or less the same way he talks to the animals, struck by how they didn't get names ("the cook's husband" and "the workmen's cook"). People like to ask that we separate the art from the artist but how can that be cleanly possible, when the art is a representation of the perspective of the artist?
And while I'm griping about separating art from artist, the timeline in which I was reading this book coincides unfortunately with my discovery that Cormac McCarthy was a groomer. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctgp2gyyON0)
While the woman he groomed, Augusta Britt, is still in love with him and made every effort to find a journalist who would portray their story in the most favorable light, even she says that when she was 20 she realized "if something ever happened to him, I could survive physically, but I wouldn't be able to survive emotionally. I wouldn't be able to survive on my own without him. And that's not love. That's not healthy, at least." Even while she defends him to the best of her ability, she describes the deep depressions she would be thrown into when he would send her a manuscript with a character based off of her, a victim bearing all of her personal traumas, only to kill the character off. "...it's just so full of me, and yet isn't me. It was so confusing. Reading about Blevins getting killed was so sad. I cried for days...I was surprised that it didn't feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated. All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged in to fiction. I didn't know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most imporant person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about?" Even the journalist, who's trying very hard to make this all look romantic, observes, "Her mission from the age of 11 was to be good, to survive, and yet McCarthy kept killing her."
A comment on this article reads, "I don't understand the new trend of being unable to separate the artist from the art. Cormac McCarthy had a 16-year-old muse when he was 42. Ok. Fine. But my issue is deeper than art/artist separation. It brings to light the question: Are artists (writers) supposed to be 'good' according to some arbitrary societal standard? If so, why, and who makes those calls? Don't people understand that writers have always been the freaks, weirdos, intense individuals, rebels, etc? Just like painters and all other artists. Look at Hemingway or Van Gogh or Dostoevsky. I think people like to project, like to point the finger of bame, like to be part of a mob. But the deeper truth is that we know writers are human, just like everyone else." (A note for the reader: according to letters from McCarthy's friends, either Augusta was in fact 14 at the time, or there was another teenage muse.)
If the art is separate from the artist then the art cannot be used to blot out his vices. It is very clear to me that what this commenter wants is for the art to absolve the artist - but the art here is the chewed-up-spat-out bastard image of a woman who was much more than the eternal dying victim McCarthy made her into. Is her life worth so little? Is a woman just collateral damage, so long as her abuser puts her image to paper? Plenty of shitty, unremarkable people are pedophiles. McCarthy's behavior is not the quirk of a genius, it's not something that separates him from the rest of us, it's what sinks him low. Augusta Britt (and McCarthy's three wives) is not (/are not) the necessary damage for his genius, they just bore the brunt of a horrible and mundane vice from a guy who was otherwise capable of greatness.
So much space is made to sing the praises of these legends, and so many excuses are produced when we learn that these men are human (or, in McCarthy's case, worse), but what space, really, is made for grief over the people they've hurt? Every acknowledgement of an artist's carelessness with other human beings is met with "but"s. I get that these works have widespread cultural impact - everybody fucking does, it's all anybody talks about. Can I please just have a moment to be earnestly angry, without any qualification or exception? I am angry for Augusta, I am angry for Sonya, I am angry for Ghandi's grand-niece, I am angry for Francoise Gilot (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/visual-art/the-100-year-old-it-girl-picasso-took-the-cigarette-and-touched-it-to-my-right-cheek-1.4781289), and so many others whose names and stories I don't know because the image of their abusers was more important for "the culture" than the value of their happiness.
As Kristin Hayter says (under the moniker Lingua Ignota) in FRAGRANT IS MY MANY FLOWER'D CROWN,
"For I have learned
all men are brothers,
and brothers only love each other.
Brothers in arms,
Brothers in each other's arms."
I am angry, I am angry, I am angry, and I want to spit on all their art for making human beings into so much churned mulch in the paths of "great men". For all that Saunders likes to throw around 'she' for hypothetical authors, I don't believe that any author he has chosen imagines that I am "as intelligent and worldly and curious as she is."
In his notes following "Gooseberries", Saunders mentions his experience having short story writer Tobias Wolff read Chekhov aloud: "It was like having Chekhov himself there in the room with us: a charming, beloved person who thought highly of us and wanted, in his quiet way, to engage us... I felt part of a literary community, finally, a community that included everyone in the room...all of us acolytes together in the short story priesthood." Later, describing the relationship between Chekhov and Tolstoy, he quotes from their letters, "If he were to die, there would be a big, empty place in my life. To begin with, because I have never loved any man as much as him," (Chekhov) and "I never knew he loved me so much."
When you read such beautiful and tender proclamations of love it is hard not to love the people doing the loving. Looking at the canon of literature, this place where (predominantly) men share their sorrows, anxieties, celebrations and perspectives, how earnestly they engage with each other and give genuine praise and heartfelt, constructive criticism, the more I love how they love each other, and the more I love them, too. And I envy them. I'm fucking green with it. I envy them the space they have in the hallowed halls of institution and academia to love each other openly and entirely. It's easy for Tolstoy to love Chekhov and too much to ask that he love his wife.
In the beginning I mentioned that, for me, the world of literature is a world where to be a man is to be sexless, and everything legitimate in life is part of this "sexless" experience. I fell for that, hook, line, and sinker. I really felt like, in order for an aspect of my experience to be legitimate, it had to be separable from my experience of living as a woman. Even when I read female authors, I find myself longing for a version of their stories where they examine their main themes without acknowledging the role of their sex in the way they present the question, even as I acknowledge to myself that that does affect how you go about answering it for yourself, even as I acknowledge that all art is painted from the perspective of the artist and it would thus be dishonest to forgo it. All this to say that my irritation about the canon of literature is not just some distant notion of correct and incorrect, logical and illogical, careful and uncareful: I feel squished.
Really, I feel vulnerable, and I don't like it, and I have built a wall of rage around me to feel safe in, even as I fear that it traps me more than protects me.
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
omg i cannot express enough how much i LOVED this book
thank u george for reminding me why i love literature
thank u george for reminding me why i love literature
adventurous
challenging
inspiring
medium-paced
funny
inspiring
lighthearted
slow-paced