A Year in Reading: Diane Williams

A mist hung over the earth. So begins one of the great novels of the twentieth century, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate; the short drumroll of a sentence is somehow ominous, and we soon discover we are outside a German prison camp, looking through barbed wire at a set of identical wooden barracks. The next chapter takes us inside the camp, where we meet a collection of Russians of various political persuasions, as well as Spaniards, Italians, Englishmen, even an American colonel (who finds it strange that an intelligent-looking Russian major can’t understand his English). This movement, from outside in, is typical of the novel, which takes us places we don’t want to go, but does so with a humane insistence we find impossible to resist. After six chapters in which we get to know these people – especially the Old Bolshevik Mostovskoy, who is troubled that “much in his own soul had become alien to him” – we are suddenly dropped into a command post in the besieged city of Stalingrad, where we are confronted with an entirely different collection of people, some of them historical figures (generals and commissars) and others fictional. This too is typical; the novel does not let us rest for long in any situation, but whisks us up and down the Volga (much of it is set in cities like Kazan and Saratov), west to Moscow, and further west to the German camps, showing us a vast panorama of Russia (and Germany) at war.

If this is reminiscent of War and Peace, it should be; Grossman, a war correspondent who visited the front as often as he could and shared as much as he could of the soldiers’ lives, carried a copy with him and read it constantly, and he was deliberately creating a counterpart to Tolstoy’s epic. A foolish undertaking, you might think, but he pulled it off. His huge novel has nothing in common with the modernist works that stand beside it on the shelf of twentieth-century Russian masterpieces, Bely’s Petersburg and Olesha’s Envy and Nabokov’s The Gift; there are no magical interludes or language games or hidden messages, just a well-told tale of an extended family caught up in circumstances beyond their, or anyone’s, control. We get to know Lyudmila, annoyed with her husband, her daughter, and her mother (who lives with her in Kazan), terrified for her son Tolya (who’s in the army), and concerned for her sister Evgeniya; Evgeniya’s ex-husband Krymov, who’s sent to Stalingrad as a commissar; and especially Lyudmila’s husband Viktor Shtrum, a physicist who almost as soon as we’re introduced to him we find thinking “about something he’d never thought about before, something fascism had forced him to think about – the fact that he was a Jew, and that his mother was a Jew.” Those facts are guns on the wall, and following Chekhov’s prescription they go off.

It is of course inevitable that the Nazis play a considerable role in a World War II novel, and the horrors of their beliefs and their actions are not stinted; what is astonishing is that they are presented as human beings with understandable motives, unlike in almost any other Russian war novel. And what is even more astonishing is that the doctrinaire communists are presented as no better than the doctrinaire Nazis – the Soviet system of camps and terror is explicitly compared to the German one. It is almost inconceivable that Grossman thought this book could be published in the Soviet Union in 1960, but he did; he was doubtless prepared for it to be rejected by the magazine he sent it to, but not for the secret police to show up and confiscate every scrap of it they could get their hands on – Grossman was told by a top member of the Politburo that it could not be published for two hundred years. However, a copy was eventually smuggled abroad (long after the author’s premature death in 1964) and published in 1980; at that point, in the depths of the Brezhnev stagnation, no one could have guessed that in less than a decade it would be published in the Soviet Union, shortly before that country ceased to exist. It had a powerful effect, but it was only one of a flood of forbidden works that were suddenly appearing; we can only imagine the effect it would have had if it could have appeared in its full, scarifying glory in 1960, with the war fresh in memory and Stalin even fresher. It might well be Grossman rather than Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn who was remembered as the writer who exploded the frozen Stalinist world of literature.

I said there were no language games, but I didn’t mean the writing is not superbly effective. Remember that opening sentence? The payoff comes hundreds of pages later, in part II, chapter 29 (chapter 28 in the NYRB translation). Obersturmbannführer Liss is visiting the site where an extermination camp is being constructed, and as his plane lands Grossman says A mist spread over the earth. Even if a reader doesn’t consciously remember the first line of the novel, this reprise should make a chill run up the spine. Unfortunately, the existing translation does not bring this out (I’ve retranslated all the quotes here); it’s well enough done that I encourage everyone to go out and get it, but it’s got enough omissions and mistranslations that it’s high time another one appeared. Many of the other recent Russian classics (like Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita and Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki) have multiple translations, and it’s the least Grossman deserves. His combination of bravura storytelling and clear moral vision has few peers.

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As our planet has rotated once again around the sun in a nearly perfect circle, I will now highlight several books from this year’s reading that move in more eccentric orbits. Each proves that Ambrose Bierce’s withering definition of eccentricity — “a method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to accentuate their incapacity” — has its limitations.

1.
I picked up Edith Sitwell’s The English Eccentrics from a tucked-away shelf in a used bookstore, which struck me as fitting given that the book’s mission is to reanimate long-buried “mummies lying under the ruins of time.” This nonpareil work opens with a tableau of “The Battlebridge Dust and Cinder-Heap,” a mountain of debris that was removed in 1850 to make way for London’s King Cross Station. Sitwell conceives of the pile as a heap of stories and memories speaking to us through the muttering dust:

We may seek in our dust-heap for some rigid, and even splendid, attitude of Death, some exaggeration of the attitudes common to Life. This attitude, rigidity, protest, or explanation, has been called eccentricity by those whose bones are too pliant.

That is, Sitwell’s eccentricity is less a deviation than a heightened state of the human, a protest against submitting to any greater, inhuman system: “Any criticism of the world’s arrangement, if expressed by only one gesture, and that of sufficient contortion, becomes eccentricity.”

Attuned to the “articulations rising from the dust,” Sitwell passes these tales of past eccentrics on to us: ornamental hermits, bearded men paid to reside in the grottos of country estates; Celestina Collins, a miserly woman who dined nightly with her favorite rooster and a humungous rat (until she kills the latter while breaking up a fight over their respective rations); the “amphibious” Lord Rokeby, known for the pathological “frequency of [his] ablutions;” Jemmy Hirst, a retired tanner who conducted his beloved hunts on the back of a “bull of ample proportions and uncertain temper” and preferred “a crowd of vivacious and sagacious pigs” to hound dogs; and the “loving and gay saint,” naturalist Charles Waterton, a rider of crocodiles who “was seized by a strong wish to have his big toe sucked by the Vampire Bat, just once, so that he could say that this adventure had befallen him.”

There is a note of elegy in each of her portraits, regardless of whether they chronicle a life of ebullience or despair:

…although the dusty world is too deafened by the sound of the machines that it has made for the trapping and murdering of time to listen to those sounds that are clear as the song of angels.

2.
I also greatly enjoyed Simon Winders’s Danubia, a wonderful book written by a man finely attuned to the oddness of history. It tracks the course not of the river Danube, but of the Habsburg line, the “catastrophically inbred and unlucky family” that finally lost power when the Austrian-Hungarian Empire collapsed in the First World War. Remarkable about them is how very unremarkable they were:

To us the Habsburg rulers — many quite mediocre or merely dutiful — can seem as specialized and helpless as koala bears and their claims to grandeur and the highest place in Europe an obvious try-on.

There are exceptions of course, such as Maximilian I, an “unusual Habsburg in being both a convincing man of action and an intellectual.” And there are other strange birds literally and figuratively on display: notably Rudolph II, a collector of exotica, including a dodo and a cassowary. He was obsessed with “glyptics, the art of carving on precious stone;” patronized the fruit-crazed painter Arimboldo, the “Milanese oddball,” and allowed a lion and tiger to roam his castle at will, occasionally mauling or killing terrified servants.

But generally, the book can’t therefore rely on the personalities of its subjects to generate interest. After Leopold II dies in 1792, Winder gives a typically candid assessment of what’s to come in the remainder of his book: “His successors were a narrow dullard, a simpleton, a narrow dullard and a non-entity, and those four get us to 1918.”

What makes the parade of dullards interesting is the Winder’s own eccentricity. While Danubia is not a personal history per se, it is a work of history in which personality shines through. For instance, in explaining his preference for the “sheer, wild ungovernability” of the Danube over the Mediterranean and environs, Winder recounts an anxiety-ridden trip to Italy:

I felt trapped in the sort of novel in which a young curate sits on his own in his hotel room, leafing through his fine edition of Robert Browning, while his beautiful wife hands out with dockside minotaurs, feeling their deltoids.

Throughout, Winder demonstrates an unalloyed, boyish enthusiasm for his subject. When he visits a small museum of in the Czech town of Cheb, he is “hardly able to control [his] excitement,” futilely attempting to focus on the ground floor exhibits before bounding up the stairs to see the main attraction: the bedchamber in which Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian warlord during the 30 Years War, was assassinated.

The book always comes back to the Hapsburgs but never passes up a diverting detour. On the fate of hippos loosed from zoos during various conflicts, Winder contemplates composing a “parallel history of Central Europe seen through the endurance of one brave African artiodactyl family.” Another fascinating aside delves into the satirical implications of a Guinea-Pig village wherein the furry inhabitants inhabit a scaled representation of a Hungarian town. (He calls it a “genuinely frightening, brilliant piece of work.”) In a tome that spans half a millennium, Winder knows when to drop the doctrinal disputes and battles over succession to focus on history’s long-neglected subjects: scurrying rodents.

3.
While we’re on the subject of autocrats, there’s Frances Fitzgibbons, the indomitable heroine of Raymond Kennedy’s Ride a Cockhorse, an immensely entertaining New York Review of Books reissue I finally got around to reading. Fitzgibbons, a mild-mannered, widowed loan officer in her mid-40s, undergoes a transformation in which she rediscovers her “gift for persuasive speech” and experiences a “sudden quickening of her libido.” She beds a “resplendent young drum major” from the high school marching band, then rapidly seizes control of the bank where she has worked for years, the oldest in the small New England town. Frances accomplishes this coup through chutzpah, media savvy, sexual magnetism, swift firings, brute force, and outrageous assertions that are nonetheless immediately accepted as truth.

One could read the novel as a portrait of female empowerment — a demented Lean In — or as a statement about the amorality of capitalism set during a national financial crisis: “Sentiment has its place in bed, not on the dotted line of a home mortgage.” But Ride a Cockhorse is more accurately about the seductive lure of fascism, both the “pure egoistic excitement” enjoyed by those in power and the comically abject desire to submit to them. “Chief” Fitzgibbons is a “brooding tyrant” with a cobbled-together, and priceless, retinue of toadies that include a secretary-turned-enforcer, a hair-dresser, and Frances’s smitten, Peeping Tom son-in-law. As she ascends to power, Fitzgibbons, who in the novel’s first scene admires the “martial beauty” of a passing parade, begins to dress more and more like a New England version of Il Duce.

Though we can’t help but cheer her on as she runs criminally roughshod over the “gutless” executives in her way, we also recognize the truth about her best expressed in an anonymous bit of bathroom graffiti: “Frankie Fitz is a fascist pig.”

4.
Because concluding the year with a bathroom stall scene seems depressing, I’ll briefly mention Ari Goldman’s The Late Starters Orchestra, an uplifting chronicle of a journalist’s “middle-aged musical obsession” with the cello. As opposed to other shopworn works in the same genre, Goldman’s strikes the perfect balance of unselfconscious devotion (he proudly joins in his son’s youth orchestra), nuttiness (his used cello has a bullet hole in the front), and spirituality. Goldman ultimately performs a Bach minuet and “Mimkomcha,” a Shlomo Carlebach melody inspired by Hebrew prayer. Though the setting is only a small birthday, he makes us believe that he has reached his own “musical promised land.”

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I spent a lot of time this year learning about the religion in which I was raised. I wasn’t alone: the nomination of a certain presidential candidate guaranteed that many people would read up on Mormonism. What were they reading? Over the summer, a Mormon historian who has written a few pieces for me at Slate pointed out that the top-selling book in the Mormonism category at Amazon — after the Kindle edition of the Mormon scriptures, that is — has been, for pretty much eight years straight, Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer. This jibed with my experience: It’s typically the only book about the religion that my secular, left-leaning friends have read.

Which is unfortunate. Because however well it’s written — and I’m a fan of Krakauer’s writing, particularly Into the Wild — the book has a tendentious take on religion in general and Mormonism in particular. Imagine a book that presented itself as a history of Islam and was called Under the Banner of Jihad, with half of its chapters devoted to Mohammed and the early days of the faith and the other half devoted to Osama Bin Laden. And imagine its thesis was that religion tends to make people violent and that Islam does so more than most. Books like that exist, I’m sure — plenty, I imagine. But do you want to read them?

A couple other books I read this summer were just as gripping as Krakauer’s and yet addressed Mormonism in a more nuanced fashion than he manages. And they’re hardly apologetics: One got the author kicked out of the Mormon church and the other is a true-crime tale about the religion’s gravest scandal of the last 30 years. That one’s called Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders. It centers on Mark Hofmann, a world-class forger who, after growing up in the faith, faked several seemingly landmark Mormon documents that, if authentic, complicated the church’s history in uncomfortable ways. As his deceptions — and shady financial dealings — caught up with him, Hoffman took to making bombs, killing two people and wounding himself. Salamander tells the whole sorry story with careful research and not a shred of sensationalism.

But an even more stunning tale is told in No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, by Fawn M. Brodie. While it’s no longer the definitive biography of Mormonism’s founding prophet — that would be Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, by Richard Lyman Bushman — it’s a classic. And Brodie writes beautifully. “Carried along in the migration had come the flotsam of the godly,” she says of the nonconformists who fanned out west from New England in the early nineteenth century. “The body of the prophet lay for a time quite alone,” she writes near the end, describing the scene after Smith’s murder, “until Willard Richards ventured forth to carry it back into the jail and lay it beside the body of his brother.” Her comment in the preface that “Joseph Smith dared to found a religion in the age of printing” remains a key insight for students of the religion. Brodie — whose uncle David O. McKay would become the president of the LDS church, but who had long since ceased believing in the Mormon gospel herself — published the book in 1945. She was excommunicated the following year. If you’re interested in Mormonism — because of Mitt Romney or for any other reason — read her book.

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