Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing
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of ‘And so what!’ Or, rather tant pis, as this member of a francophile caste would have put it.
But he could not have believed in the possibility of chastity, for his own life taught him otherwise. His struggles with his sexuality are documented, and by himself, sometimes confusingly, not because he tried to conceal them, but because his behaviour and his principles did not match.
Before marriage he was corrupt and debased – so he said. He slept around with peasant women and there was at least one illegitimate child. There were always the gypsies, too, rather, THE GYPSIES! always charming young men from the paths of virtue, and Tolstoy went off to the gypsies, like so many of the characters from the novels of that time. After marriage no gypsies, and he tried hard to be a faithful husband. He was strongly sexed, going at it well into his seventies.
Late in his life Tolstoy became what we would call a born-again Christian. He had a religious experience which changed him. A type of religious conversion is described in Anna Karenina. Levin is in despair because he has no faith. Hard for us now to understand this, unless it is transposed into political terms, but people in the nineteenth century went through torments over losing faith, lacking faith, longing for faith. I myself met, when a girl, survivors of that struggle, much battered by the experience. Now, looking back, we may hear, louder than any other voice, Matthew Arnold’s ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ – the loss of faith in God.
Levin was suicidal. In a beautifully moving chapter Tolstoy describes him at last achieving faith: now we would say that the psychological conflict and tension was so great it would have to be resolved one way or the other.
Christianity’s great contribution to human happiness has been a hatred of the body, and of the flesh; distrust of women, dislike of sex. In this it is unlike the two other Middle Eastern religions. Judaism, far from denouncing sex, prescribes lovemaking for the faithful on their Sabbath, thus sanctifying and celebrating sex. Islam is not a puritan religion. Not in Judaism and Islam do we find celibate priests who use nuns or their housekeepers as their mistresses, or are driven to sex with little boys. But Christianity might have been tailored to fit Tolstoy’s needs and nature.
He became what he always had the potential for – a fanatic. There are descriptions of him, after his conversion, his fevered fervid face, his bullying manner, telling people of their duty to become like him, because being a fanatic, there was only one truth, his. There is such a thing as the logic of the fanatic, who begins with a proposition or a set of them, and from there develop inexorably all the rest.
It was wrong, it was wicked, to have sex with a pregnant woman or a lactating one. His wife Sonya protested at his inconsistencies, but Tolstoy was never afraid of contradicting himself. Thus he is driven – by logic – at least for the period of the argument, to support polygamy, for the sensible Tolstoy knows that celibacy is impossible. He is rather like those politicians, their fiery years forgotten, who tell teenagers that it is easy to ‘just to say No’. Say No – that’s all there is to it! Anyone with an ounce of common sense, or even with a working memory of their young selves, must know it is absurd: but we are in the grip of fanatic logic.
My favourite is the Inquisition which, having burned a heretic alive, used to send their police around to collect from the relatives money to pay for the wood used for the bonfire. Who else? The relatives might not have wanted their loved one incinerated, but obviously it was they who were responsible for the monster and therefore they must pay. It makes an entertaining, if painful, pastime, watching the logic-chopping of extremists, unfortunately so numerous in our sad times, and Tolstoy’s recommendation for celibacy for the entire human race is an excellent example.
What women might think about these prohibitions (and his wife had many loudly-voiced ideas of her own) did not interest Tolstoy. He insists that women are ‘pure’. Even ‘as pure as doves’. The sane Tolstoy knows this is rubbish, but he has to insist that women all hate sex, which is vile, shameful and even unnatural – these are only some of his epithets. A pure maiden will always hate sex.
Chekhov, who stood by him in the fuss over the book, told him that he talked nonsense about female sexuality. At some point one does have to ask if perhaps the trouble was really a simple one: Tolstoy was no good in bed. There must be some explanation for his insistence that women dislike sex. His Sonya did not like it but saw sex as a way of keeping him at heel. When he did ask to sleep alone, she refused. She welcomed sex with him because he became friendly, simple, affectionate: if his disciples knew, she mocked, the reason for his saintliness, that his good moods were the result of sex with his wife, then they too would mock this apostle for total celibacy.
If Tolstoy was bad at sex, there is a parallel, D. H. Lawrence, who clearly knew little about sex: at least, the author of his earlier books did not. Yet he also wrote wonderfully about love, sexual power struggles, the higher and lower reaches of passion. Very odd, that. Later, the earthy Frieda would have taught him better, but poor Sonya Tolstoy slept with only one man in her life, whose embraces were described as bear-like.
When he is writing his great novels there is no suggestion that his characters hate sex, but as a polemicist he says that women hate sex and after sex are cold and hostile, and that this hostility is the real relationship between men and women, concealed by the recurring cycles of sexual attraction and indifference.
When Tolstoy was very old, sex ceased, and Sonya Tolstoy complained that what she had always feared had happened: without the sexual bond all ties were cut between them. Yet, very old, they were writing loving notes saying they could not live without each other.
This cycle of sex and quarrelling has always fascinated me. Anybody who has enjoyed passionate sex will recall as passionate quarrels, but surely it is not surprising, when sex is such a promoter of strong emotions of all kinds that antagonism should sometimes be one of them. It is not unknown, either, for people to report enjoying the crazy quarrels that may spice and heighten sex. Enjoy – out with the word. Woman is an unwilling victim and man the guilt-ridden and driven aggressor.
Thirteen children did his countess and Tolstoy get between them. Sonya Tolstoy had eight children in eight years. Yes, there were nannies and nursemaids, but the implications of the simple physical fact are surely enough to explain a lot of that rioting emotion.
They lost three children, in three years, to illnesses that these days would not amount to more than a few days’ indisposition. Of the thirteen children they lost four. Sonya Tolstoy must always have been pregnant, nursing, and a good part of the time in mourning. Tolstoy was as affected by these deaths as his wife. After a particularly poignant death of a much loved child – the thirteenth, he said: ‘Yes, he was a delightful wonderful little boy. But what does it mean to say he is dead? There is no death; he is not dead because we love him, because he is giving us life.’ This apparently monstrous egotism was not what it looks like, for we have an account of Tolstoy, crazed with grief, running across the fields to escape from his emotion, repeating ‘in a jerky savage voice’ ‘There is no death! There is no death!’
The Kreutzer Sonata was written after hearing the music played, which affected him strongly: he was white and suffering, and arranged to have it played again. As a result of the first hearing he made love to Sonya – if that is the word for it – and as a result of that she got pregnant with the little boy Ivan, who died seven years later and caused Tolstoy to insist: There is no death.
By this time he was claiming that there was no justification for art that is not polemical. In 1865 he wrote ‘The aims of art are incommensurable with the aims of socialism. An artist’s mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.’ By the time he was writing socialist and religious tracts art nevertheless sometimes triumphed over polemics, in Resurrection, for instance, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Not very long after this tract against sex, The Kreutzer Sonata, which no one could say is not a compelling read, came Bohemianism, to be intensified by the First World War and its social aftermath, Free Love and ‘Live, Drink and Be Merry for Tomorrow We Die’. As early as 1907 there was a scene like a rude riposte to Tolstoy and his Kreutzer Sonata. Ida John dying in