Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing
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but rather ‘I don’t like Orlando, I don’t like To the Lighthouse, I don’t like Virginia Woolf.’ After all, when people of equal discrimination to oneself adore, or hate, the same book, the smallest act of modesty, the minimum act of respect for the great profession of literary critic should be ‘I don’t like Woolf, but that is just my bias.’
Another problem with her is that when it is not a question of one of her achieved works, she is often on an edge where the sort of questions that lurk in the unfinished shadier areas of life are unresolved. In this collection is a little sketch called ‘A Modern Salon’, about Lady Ottoline Morrell, who played such a role in the lives and work of many artists and writers of the time, from D. H. Lawrence to Bertrand Russell. We are glad to read what Woolf thinks, when so many others have had their say. Woolf describes her as a great lady who has become discontented with her own class and found what she wanted in artists, writers. ‘They see her as a disembodied spirit escaping from her world into purer air.’ And, ‘She comes from a distance with strange colours on her.’ That aristocrats had, and in some places still have, glamour, we have to acknowledge, and here Woolf is trying to analyse it and its effects on ‘humbler creatures’, but there is something uncomfortably sticky here; she labours on, sentence after sentence, until it seems she is trying to stick a pin through a butterfly’s head. There were few aristocrats in the Bohemian world of that time: it is a pity Ottoline Morrell was such a bizarre representative. A pitiful woman, she seems now, so generous with money and hospitality to so many protégés, and betrayed and caricatured by many of them. They don’t come out very well, the high-minded citizens of Bohemia, in their collision with money and aristocracy.
It is hard for a writer to be objective about another who has had such an influence – on me, on other women writers. Not her styles, her experiments, her sometimes intemperate pronouncements, but simply her existence, her bravery, her wit, her ability to look at the situation of women without bitterness. And yet she could hit back. There were not so many female writers then, when she began to write, or even when I did. A hint of hostilities confronted is in her sketch here of a visit to James Strachey and his Cambridge friends. ‘I was conscious that not only my remarks but my presence was criticised. They wished for the truth, and doubted whether a woman could speak or be it.’ And then the wasp’s swift sting: ‘I had to remember that one is not fully grown at 21.’
I think a good deal of her waspishness was simply that: women writers did not, and occasionally even now do not, have an easy time of it.
We all wish our idols and exemplars were perfect; a pity she was such a wasp, such a snob – and all the rest of it, but love has to be warts and all. At her best she was a very great artist, I think, and part of the reason was that she was suffused with the spirit of ‘They wished for the truth’ – like her friends, and, indeed, all of Bohemia.
Tolstoy was always in trouble with the censor and the Czar’s police. He was expected by the common people and the liberal opposition to take a stand – and he did – on every kind of humanitarian issue, from famines mishandled by the government, to persecutions by an arbitrary and often cruel regime. He was known as much as a social critic and moralist as an author. ‘There are two czars in Russia,’ pronounced one liberal spokesman, ‘and the other is Tolstoy.’ He was described as the conscience of the world. The Kreutzer Sonata, published in 1889 when Tolstoy was 61, caused instant scandal. The censor was going to ban it but a compromise was reached by allowing an edition too expensive for ordinary people. Not that banning Tolstoy did much good: his works were copied out by disciples and distributed in hundreds of copies. Samizdat was not invented by the Soviets. (Samizdat was the illegal distribution of works banned by the Communist Party.) Because of Tolstoy’s moral authority it was not possible to ignore it or pretend that these unappetising views were of no importance. In the United States the US Postal Service banned the mailing of newspapers serialising The Kreutzer Sonata. Theodore Roosevelt said that Tolstoy was a sexual moral pervert. The nascent women’s movements were furious: this was the time of the New Woman. Chekhov, who revered Tolstoy, defended the book because of its aesthetic virtues and because, he said, the whole subject needed discussion. The emotional reactions to the novel have always been inordinate, but something written at white heat must provoke incandescent reactions. Reading it now I think people will feel first of all, curiosity – what was all that fuss about? – and then almost certainly, disquiet, dismay, and incredulity that anything so wrongheaded could be written by a favourite author: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection.
Reading it now something has to strike you. The tale originated in a true story, which was in all the newspapers, and used by Tolstoy for polemic purposes. A husband did kill his wife from jealousy, but the tale as told by Tolstoy makes you ask, ‘Wait a minute, but what, in fact, did this erring wife do?’ Nothing much, even according to the stricter modes and morals of that time. A furore of suspicion and rage is built on atmosphere, glances, possibilities by a husband’s jealous imagination. We may imagine her defending herself. ‘But, Your Honour, nothing happened! I have the misfortune to be married to a jealous maniac who has made my life a misery. He himself introduced this man who is supposed to be my lover into our house and encouraged his visits to play music – we are both keen amateur musicians. The evening my husband returned unexpectedly and found me having supper with this supposed lover I had thought that for once I could invite him around without being made to feel a criminal. Sir, nothing could have been more innocent. How could I possibly have done anything wrong? The servants were up, serving supper, and the children were awake and watching everything, the way children do. Nothing happened. Nothing could have happened.’ She never did get the chance to defend herself because her husband killed her dead, in a jealous fury.
The novel could be read as a brilliant account of unjustified male jealousy. There could not be a better description of a man working himself up into jealous madness. It could be analysed, and almost certainly has been, by psychiatrists presenting it as a case history of latent homosexuality, textbook stuff, really.
It is useful to contrast the fevered voice of Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata with Anna Karenina, a panoramic account of sexual and marital relations. In it, a newly married couple, Kitty and Levin, are just settling into their life together in the country. Levin is modelled on the young Tolstoy. He is described as eccentric in his social views, awkward in company and immoderately in love with his wife. It is summer, the house is full of visitors, and one of them is a young man from the fashionable life that Levin (and Tolstoy) despises. He is a comic character, stout, wearing a ridiculous Scottish bonnet and streamers, is greedy, and he has a crush on Kitty. Flirting with her is normal behaviour for the Moscow and St Petersburg salons, but Levin suffers and throws him out of the house. His worldly male relatives mock him and call him ‘a turk’. Wonderfully observed are the absurd quarrels of the young couple, instigated always by the husband, who is ashamed of himself and cannot stop watching his imagined rival and putting the worst possible interpretation on everything he sees. Levin is seen as an oddball by family and neighbours – all those ridiculous ideas about the peasants and agriculture – and as foolishly jealous, but held in the sweep and power of that novel, when Levin throws the society peacock out of the house Tolstoy’s affectionate portrait tells us that he thinks Levin is no more than rather touchingly absurd. But the same author wrote The Kreutzer Sonata. The same author wrote War and Peace, whose great quality is balance, the command of a panoramic sweep of events and people. That dispassionate eagle eye is nowhere here. What we have in The Kreutzer Sonata is the power and the energy, but not the sanity of judgement. His position could not be more extreme, and in case anyone might imagine that he regretted The Kreutzer Sonata he wrote an apologia, Sequel to The Kreutzer Sonata, some time later, where he reiterated it all, like hammering nails into a coffin, burying any possibility of joy, enjoyment, even the mildest fun in sex, love, lovemaking. Yet the author of the two great novels describes all kinds of passion, enjoyment, the emotions that we sinful lesser mortals might associate with sex.
In the grip of his fanaticism, Tolstoy advocated chastity for the entire human race, and when