Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing
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her rapscallion of a husband, Augustus John, then at the height of his fame. In the next room his mistress is looking after the children.
The Bohemians, who repudiated all conventional sexual morality as thoroughly as did Tolstoy, though from the opposite viewpoint, were then a minority which set out to shock. Epatering the bourgeoisie was their raison d’être. And then, not so long after that, came the Second World War, and wartime morality, and then what a witty friend used to call ‘The horizontal handshake’, and now young women depart from all over Europe in droves for holiday shores where they screw, presumably enjoyably, with males who wait for them like Inuits for migrating caribou.
Hedonism rules, okay?
What has happened? Birth control has.
In Anna Karenina Dolly, overburdened with children, visits bad Anna the outcast from society who confides that she knows how to prevent conception. She is kind enough not to point out that she is still young and pretty while Dolly is worn out with childbearing. Shock and horror is what Dolly feels. She is repulsed. And that is what Tolstoy feels about birth control. It is unnatural, says he, and women make monsters of themselves, destroying in themselves their capacity of being women, that is, mothers, so that ‘men may make no interruption of their enjoyment’. Note that it is the men who are doing the enjoying.
Anna Karenina, is always talked of as the story of Anna, a society beauty, and her seducer Vronsky, a variation of the great nineteenth-century theme of adultery. Its fame as the greatest of the adultery novels (some claim that for Madame Bovary) tends to obscure the scope of the novel: Tolstoy portrayed a gallery of women of that time. Dolly is the unhappy wife of a bad husband. Kitty is the happy wife of a jealous and loving husband. There are court ladies, whom Tolstoy detests, and peasant women, whom he admires. One is Levin’s housekeeper, more of a friend than a servant, and another the peasant woman who came to rescue Dolly from her domestic disorders. A young peasant woman shocked Dolly by saying that ‘The Lord has relieved me of a burden’, talking of the death of a child – one mouth less to feed. A spinster fails to get a husband and is doomed to a life of being a guest in other people’s houses. A bad woman – Anna Karenina’s mirror – is a prostitute and can have no future. This is a novel about the situation of women in that time. Anna now would not have to throw herself under a train. Dolly would not have so many children. Kitty perhaps would not be so content as the wife of an unreasonably jealous man. The spinster would have a career, might be a single mother. Nowhere in Anna Karenina does that great artist describe a wife or mistress disgusted with sex and full of implacable hatred for men’s sexuality. Anna hates Vronsky at the end because he is free and she is not, but she does not hate him sexually.
There is just a hint of the conflict between the moralist and the artist in this novel, which begins with the inscription, like a curse, ‘“Vengeance is mine, I will repay” saith the Lord.’ But there is no vengeance, the novel is irradiated by Tolstoy’s love and understanding of everything.
Understanding of everything and everybody but not of himself. He said to Gorki, ‘Man can endure earthquake, epidemics, dreadful diseases, every form of spiritual torment, but the most dreadful tragedy that can befall him and will remain, is the tragedy of the bedroom.’
We have the diaries of two people with a gift for complaint, invective, and a relish for recording the minutiae of the ups and downs of their love. For it was that. In between the storms were days of tranquillity. We have all the facts, or think we have, but few of us now have the experiences that could tell us what life in that family was like.
Yasnaya Polyana – which can translate as Aspen Glades, or Bright Glades – the Tolstoys’ country house, is now a shrine, and visited by thousands every year. It was the estate’s manor house, a large villa, with many rooms that turned out not to be enough to accommodate all those children, and so a wing was built on. There were all kinds of sheds, outhouses and annexes. Now it has to impress us by its potentialities for discomfort, because of the numbers of people it had to house. Large, high-ceilinged rooms, which must have been hell to heat. In summer, set as it is in fields and woods, what a paradise – but there is a long Russian winter. The furniture is adequate. The sofa where Tolstoy was born and where the countess laboured thirteen times is hard, slippery, ungiving.
Fresh water did not come gushing from taps: it was brought in by the bucket and there was a bathhouse. No electric light. There is a scene of Tolstoy, an old man, writing in his study with the aid of a single candle.
The house held the parents, thirteen children, servants, nursemaids, tutors – one lived there with his wife and two children – governesses, relatives and many visitors. There were also the disciples, who expected to be fed and, often, housed, sometimes for weeks. They would fit themselves into the servants’ rooms in the attic – what happened to them? – or doss down in the corridors. It was usual to have 30 people sit down for a meal. Comfort of the sort we take for granted there was none. Privacy, which we have learned to need, was not easily got. Tolstoy had his study but it was permeable by anyone who decided they had the right – Sonya, and his chief disciple, the appalling Chertkov, and people demanding spiritual counselling. Once out of his study, then he was part of everything. The quarrels of adults, the squabbles of children, the crying of babies, the arguments of the disciples must have reverberated in those wooden walls. The countess understandably complained of ‘nerves’ and surely Tolstoy was entitled to them too.
Thirteen children. Thirteen. Thirteen. Four, dead. We are not talking about a peasant woman, a farm woman, with expectations for a hard life, but an educated sensitive woman who could never have dreamed of the kind of life she in fact had to lead.
There is a tirade in The Kreutzer Sonata about the unhappiness that children bring, mostly the misery of the fear of them dying: the slightest indisposition could become a serious illness. In both Anna Karenina and War and Peace the difficulties of childbearing and childrearing are depicted. Tolstoy was not a father removed from the burdens of the family. How could he have been, in that house? He knew all about pregnancy and morning sickness, and milk fever and cracked nipples. He knew about the discomforts of breast-feeding and sleepless nights. His great novels accepted life’s ills, as they accepted its delights, everything is in balance, in proportion; but somewhere, at some point, it became impossible for him to stand his life. A skin had been ripped off him: it must have happened. It is often enough suggested that Sonya Tolstoy was a bit demented; though we must remember that she copied out War and Peace and all the other novels, many times, while she was carrying and giving birth and nursing and serving her Leo who, she complained, insisted on his marital rights before she was even healed after childbirth. Surely Leo Tolstoy became a bit demented too, quite apart from the old man’s infatuation with his disciple Chertkov, who was like a horrible caricature of himself.
Those of us who have known people with clinical depression, or suffering the dark night of the soul, have heard descriptions of spiritual landscapes so dreadful that attempts at consolation ring as false as badly tuned pianos. And so they are received by the sufferers who look at you with a contempt for your superficiality. ‘What I am feeling now, that’s the truth’ they may actually spell out to the stupid one. ‘When you are depressed you see the truth, the rest is illusion.’ So one feels reading The Kreutzer Sonata. Here is a landscape of despair – no exit! Remember the cage he had made for himself, this highly sexed man. Sex – bad. Sex with a pregnant or nursing woman – bad. No sex outside marriage. A recipe for guilt and self-hatred. The wasteland he describes that lacks any joy, pleasure – one hardly dare use the word love – is the truth. So be it.
Let us imagine ourselves back in that house. It is night, supper over, the visitors and disciples in their nooks and corners. The older children are still up, studying or playing, and their voices are loud and so are their feet on the wooden floors. The little ones are in their rooms with their nurses and are as noisy as small children are.
Tolstoy wants to be a husband tonight – so he puts it. God is not coming to his aid in his battles with lust.
Sonya’s newest baby is six months old. She is afraid that she is pregnant again. She has to be in a state of conflict as her Leo approaches, smiling and affectionate: carefree sex has not yet been invented