Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life

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March 16, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 46 5 min read

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coverIn the same way that it would be hard to meet Scarlett Johansson and not be distracted by her beauty, it is difficult to read War and Peace and not be preoccupied with its reputation as the greatest novel ever written.  As lay readers, the specific qualities that make War and Peace so great can be hard to assess.  But just as it takes specialized knowledge to understand exactly why a magnet attracts metal, yet any five-year-old can identify a magnet when he sees one, it is one thing to apprehend the formal properties of a great work of art, but another, much more accessible question, to assess its effects.  And so, having recently finished reading War and Peace, what I want to think about is just what it is that great art does.

One way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace?  The answers, I think, tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading.

The social consequences first.  It’s a fair bet that without War and Peace I would not know that my father-in-law read the book himself in two feverish weeks 35 years ago while on sabbatical in West Berlin.  People, as I discovered, tend to remember where they were when they read War and Peace, and when they saw me with the book they told me those stories.  I learned that my friend Paul read War and Peace as a 25-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia in the late-sixties.  He told me that the experience was revelatory in that it showed him that “a classic that came with the gravity of adult recommendations could be more engaging than life and easy to read, too.”

War and Peace lends itself to sharing with others more than most books.  I wouldn’t say that shareability is an essential element of great literature, but where present, it helps.  As I read, I frequently retold episodes from the book.  I remember taking a long walk with my wife in early February and telling her the story of how Pierre, who was kind-hearted but lacked will, became engaged unwittingly to Helene who was beautiful.  With my father-in-law, as part of a conversation about how to plan for the future, I brought up the tragic tale of young Petya Rostov, who joined the Russian army in a fit of patriotic fervor, but whose romantic visions of war blinded him to its dangers right up until the moment he was shot through the head.  And on a happier note, I shared with my friend Eric a retelling of the scene of Natasha at the opera, a scene charged through with the erotic energy of a young woman suddenly becoming aware of her beauty and the power it holds over men.

This is not something I usually do, tell stories from books I read, but the spectrum of experience depicted in War and Peace, combined with the precision with which it’s captured, creates an infinite number of roads into the book and an infinite number back out.  The fact that the scenes in War and Peace are easy to retell is also in keeping with a claim my friend Paul likes to make that Tolstoy’s writing is so irreducible that the translation doesn’t matter. (For my part, I began reading the Maude translation and switched halfway through to the new Pevear and Volokhonsky; I found that while my mind was stimulated all the same, my heart raced twice as fast with the newer version.)

After the social experience of the book there is the intellectual one.  I have read other novels where the controlling idea of the story came to serve as a lens through which I viewed my days, but never has this happened quite as thoroughly as it did with War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s intellectual agenda in the book was to expose the meagerness of historical accounts of the War of 1812 that tried to reduce the world-remaking conflict to a finite and knowable set of causes.  Instead, Tolstoy wanted to depict the war in all its complexity and contingency, to show that the outcome rested at least as much on the decision of an individual soldier to charge or not as it did on Napoleon’s machinations, and that both the soldiers and the Emperor were controlled equally by forces larger than themselves.

It’s an expansive idea and one that finds ready application in almost any facet of one’s life.  I thought of Tolstoy when reading about climate change (he probably would have been a skeptic) and when assessing President Obama’s leadership on health care (I think, based on his favorable depiction of General Kutuzov, who abandoned Moscow to the French in order to preserve the Russian army, that Tolstoy would have endorsed Obama’s decision to forego the public option).

I applied War and Peace to my life in smaller ways, too.  A passage about the forced idleness of regimental life clarified vague thoughts I’d had about how having a baby makes it easier to nap guilt-free.  And at one point—I may have been walking through a park when this happened—I stopped short after reading a passage on Prince Andrei’s decision to withdraw from life into the work of his estates that seemed, minus the part about the estates, like a mimeograph of my own mind.  (One somewhat disquieting effect of reading War and Peace is that the more your own thoughts show up in its pages, the less original your life begins to feel.)

In the end, though, the reason I read novels is not because I can talk about them with other people, or because I’m looking for ideas to explain the world.  I read them for the pure aesthetic moment that comes from seeing life perfectly distilled into words.  In this respect, I don’t think there is a more able book than War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s singular genius is to be able to take the torrent of conscious experience and master it.  There are countless moments in the book where this happens, but the one that left me reeling was Tolstoy’s long, exquisite depiction of the Battle of Borodino, which was the deciding battle in the war and one of the bloodiest in history.

The night I finished reading about Borodino, it was plainly obvious that I had just read something great.  Yet here I was sitting in a corner of my couch, just the same as I had been an hour before.  I thought about the question with which I opened—what is it that greatness does?  An encounter with greatness, I would say, is like a bright light fixed in time, a marker that defines memory and makes it clearer than it otherwise might have been, that we were here.

Previously: Scenes of Retreat in War and Peace and Atonement, Selections from a Winter Reading War and Peace

Bonus Link: The Millions Interview: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

, a staff writer for The Millions, writes the Brainiac ideas column for the Boston Globe and blogs about fatherhood and family life at growingsideways.wordpress.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @kshartnett.

Essays

Another Shade of Darkness: The Life and Work of Beryl Bainbridge

Essays
March 10, 2017 | 1 book mentioned 2 6 min read
Bainbridge had no airs about her; she enjoyed nothing more than having a drink or three at her local pub with a friend, or bumming smokes from a young interviewer while explaining how she was trying to quit by puffing on her foul cabbage-leaf cigarettes. For her, being a writer was simply about the end product, not the person behind it.
Essays
| 1 book mentioned 2 6 min read
Essays

Fated Love: The Work of Valerian Pidmohylny

Essays
September 14, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 5 min read

I first read early twentieth-century Ukrainian writer Valerian Pidmohylny during a sweltering summer at Harvard Summer School. It was my first time away from home and I could relate to the protagonist Stepan who finds himself in a city full of literary opportunity and the temptations of love. In Cambridge, I discovered Ukrainian literature and though I didn’t fall in love, I developed plenty of crushes.

More than ten years later, when I had to create a writing sample for a Comparative Literature PhD application, Pidmohylny came to mind because I remembered fondly the literary milieu of his work. This time when I began reading Pidmohylny, I found myself growing melancholy. Maybe I connected too closely with the protagonists, Stepan and Slavenko. Or, maybe I related to the distant women drawn by Pidmohylny’s pen who have their own ideals when it comes to love.

In The City, the first book I picked up again, Stepan goes to Kyiv to study, as I came to New York to do the MFA at Columbia in writing fiction. After the initial bumps in the road, like having to spend his first night in barn as I spent my first couple nights in the servant’s quarters of a rent-controlled New York apartment, he finds himself drawn away from practical pursuits. He is distracted by writing and women.

Stepan has many delusions about love. He asks Zoska to marry him and proclaims it is fate after he finds out that she is the one who threw him a flower after he read his first short story before an audience. It dawned on me that I too have let myself be propelled by fate. I was enticed by literary readings and concerts. One night, in a crowded bar where one of my favorite bands was filming a video, while Elijah Wood stood in the corner, a man took my hand and we started to see each other. When we later spoke about going to an Andy Warhol theme party, we passed a banana costume hooked on a fence. He climbed the fence to retrieve the costume so that we could take it with us. Even when we didn’t make plans, he’d appear in unexpected places: in the backseat of a friend’s car and at a party snapping my picture for web site for which he had just started freelancing.

After Stepan’s proposal, he reconsiders marriage: “He felt the lazy sleep of two together in bed, from then on regular sparks of passion that become banal in the end, like tea or dinner, the familiarity with a stranger’s soul that wouldn’t have any secrets any longer, the constant accessibility to a body stifling desire, the fatigue of inevitable arguments when the depth of the difference between two beings is revealed, and then most of all, the making up – the weak submission before fate.” So, he avoids Zoska and when he finally goes to see her, he learns that she has committed suicide. Instead of considering that he was the cause of her sadness, he wonders if she has left him a letter. Strangely he feels himself invincible, that if he poisons himself or is hit by a tram, that he won’t die.

While reading this scene a second time, I commiserated with Zoska. After my first reading, I felt she was merely a flippant beauty. My friend, the man I met at the bar, disappeared without explanation and I fixated on his absence as I imagine Zoska must have fixated on Stepan’s. I imagined myself crawling inside his body so that I could be close to him forever. I held his heart in my hand.

At times, Stepan sits down at his desk and words pour out of him, and at other times he struggles with a vast emptiness inside of him. These vacillations in productivity are based on his experiences with love. It is when he is seeing his first love that he writes his first story. When he experiences disappointment with his writing, he has an affair with a woman twice his age. As I waited for my friend to contact me, I wrote a novel. I finished it before he reappeared in my life.

In a book of titled The Experience of Love, which includes essays about Pidmohylny, critic Olena Haleta writes, “Nadika, Musinka, Zoska, and Rita in The City appear as fragments, representing types rather than individuals; most of all they serve as depictions of the protagonist.” I now realize I only saw one side of my friend, the side related to myself. Ironically, when Stephan lets himself be enticed by a prostitute, the one person who doesn’t have hope that his love will transcend the physical, he longs to see her soul. She mutters, “He needs a soul! … For you my soul is beneath my skirt.”

The City was published in Ukraine in 1926 and has yet to be translated into English. A Little Touch of Drama was published serially in 1930 and was translated by George and Moira Luckyj in 1972. The Luckyj translation is available online (pdf) from the University of Toronto. A short story about a boy’s cruelty and remorse by Pidmohylny as well as a short biography are also available.

The characters of A Little Touch of Drama are equally distressed by their work and love, making them painful to visit in the text. Marta is surrounded by many suitors. She falls in love with only one, scientist Yuriy Slavenko who in the end makes a practical decision to marry someone else. Marta is left alone. Though the book revolves around Marta, Slavenko has more depth created by the control he exercises over his situation. He is the one who chooses who he will marry and Marta begins to feel ashamed about her love for him. “‘I, for sure, won’t live through this.’” Pidmohylny’s characters all arrive at this point of desperation.

Like Marta, I have often felt myself on the verge of not being able to survive. On Christmas morning, I was coming home from a house party with a boom box and frantic dancing that ended past dawn. I was wearing an evening gown, but had dark circles beneath my eyes. I was feeling post-celebration loneliness. The subway was quiet with the holiday. A man next to me offered me one of his headphones. My favorite band from the bar played. “I know this band,” I said. “I had a feeling,” he said. I would see him at the show we were both going to a few days later. But I went to the show, made the mistake of not leaving my sweater in coat check, was suffocated by the crowd, and ended up at the bar drinking an overpriced beer. I waited for fate. I expected a hand on my shoulder, a soft voice that would change the direction of my life. Instead I left the show alone.

Slavenko says to his love Marta “’Yes, I love you. I love you blindly and unconditionally. But sometimes I hate you too. When I come home after seeing you I often sit at the table and hate you with all my heart and mind. If someone told me that you’d been killed, I’d cry with joy.” Like Stepan, Slavenko is conflicted when his love for Marta interrupts his research. The time Slavenko and Marta spend together is slowly eclipsed by Slavenko’s work as he endeavors to invent a synthetic protein that will do away with hunger. His desire to do away with hunger is parallel to his desire to rid himself of the need for love. He considers his love for Marta a catastrophe, a wound capable of destroying him.

Like Slavenko, I have considered stifling love in favor of practicality. I wonder if I should concentrate on going to bed early enough to make it more unlikely that my eyes will droop in front of the computer screen and on quiet intellectual pursuits. Instead, I find convinced again that there is someone I can’t live without.

Decades after their creation, Pidmohylny’s characters remain poignant. It is with difficulty that I allow them to inhabit my life and it is with even greater difficulty that I stop myself from inhabiting their lives. It is possible that I’ve gotten exactly what Pidmohylny intended from these books. After all, doesn’t a writer strive to make a book resonate with the reader?

Essays
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Best of the Millennium Essays

Dissecting the List: An Excursus

Best of the Millennium Essays
October 13, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 1 7 min read

Of Lists, Generally

Most Emailed Articles. Most Beautiful People. 100 Best Singles. 50 Greatest Novelists Between the Ages of 31 and 33. Verily, as William H. Gass observes in his wonderful essay collection Tests of Time – which made the New York Times Notable Books List even as it missed Bestsellers by a mile – we are nowadays “obsessed by hierarchies in the form of lists.”

The etiology of this obsession is elaborate enough that a list of the Top 10 causes would not begin to exhaust it. Still, near the head of such a list, as Gass suggests, would have to be “our egalitarian and plural society,” which renders questions of value both vital and vexed. And somewhere nearby (just above, or below, or beside?) would be our access to a venue where the itch to list can be almost continuously scratched: the Internet. Online tools for the gathering and measuring and dissemination of data have made list-making so ridiculously easy as to be ubiquitous. Kissing listservs and bookmarks and blogrolls goodbye would be something like turning your back on the Internet altogether.

Still, for a certain kind of mind, the lists Gass is referring to – lists that not only collect objects but rank them – would seem to give rise to at least three problems (which appear here in no particular order):

They are always incomplete – either arbitrarily circumscribed or made on the basis of incomplete information. Who has time to listen to every Single of the Decade? To gawk at every Beautiful Person?
They present a false picture of the world, wherein “best” appears to be a fixed and ascertainable property, like the color of money, rather than, like its value, a contingency. What does “Third Best Living Drummer” mean, exactly?
They involve judgment, and therefore judges. Who has the authority to say what makes the cut and what doesn’t? Who has the audacity? Who has the right?

Thus, every list carries with it, as a built-in feature, the seeds of its own refutation. Indeed, it’s probably its hospitality to debate that makes the “Best Of” list so popular in the first place. In a familiar online dynamic, passions get stirred – one can agree (yes! great list!) or dissent (Where is x? Why no y?) or inveigh against list-making itself – but nothing is finally settled. In any case, the list, like the broader medium, holds up a mirror to one’s own preoccupations. As with any mirror, it is fearsomely hard to look away.

Of One List, More Particularly

We at The Millions have experienced first-hand what one might call “the fascination of the list.” (Fascination, n. From the Latin for bewitchment; same root as fascism.) For the better part of a decade, we’ve watched other venues trot out their literary lists, and, in addition to grumbling about the arbitrariness and banality of the results, have wondered why they didn’t resemble more closely the lists we ourselves would have made. A more principled (not to say puritanical) editorial posture might have led us to eschew the whole list-making enterprise. Yet when we noticed that the first decade of the Aughts was drawing to a close, we decided, rather than leaving the “Best of the Decade” cataloguing to institutions we didn’t quite trust, to do it ourselves. Almost immediately we discovered, or remembered, what may be the number one reason for the proliferation of lists. Making lists, – as Gass knows – is fun.

We realized from the get-go, of course, that listing the best books published in the first 10 years of the 21st Century would be an act of hubris. Why not soft-pedal it? We decided, however (and tried to state explicitly in our introduction to the series), that the spirit of the exercise was not to put to rest a conversation about taste and literary merit, but to provoke one. “Some More or Less Recent Books Some People Like,” an accurate if unwieldy title, was less likely to generate debate than “Best of the Millennium,” so we braced ourselves and went for it.

Our next challenge was figuring out how to assemble the list. Being the little-d democrats we are, we decided that any list of “The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far)” should be arrived at by voting. This meant – logically, unfairly – that books a lot of people had read were more likely to appear on our list than the unjustly neglected classics-in-the-making some other list might discover. But it didn’t mean, as the omissions of Zadie Smith, Claire Messud, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Chabon attested, that popularity alone was sufficient to get them there.

Notwithstanding this constraint, we hoped to honor works in translation. However, because our readership is overwhelmingly English-speaking, we chose to restrict our list to books available in English. This raised a whole set of issues about the speed and frequency of translation – natürlich. On the other hand, readers who elected to call us on it would also be calling attention to the parlous state of translation in the U.S. And perhaps someone better equipped than ourselves would undertake a list of the untranslated books that should have appeared.

Now for a starting point. Jan. 1, 2000 seemed a nice, round number, but proved to have odd properties. It eliminated from contention The Savage Detectives and The Elementary Particles, which found their way into English after that date, but not Suite Française, which seemed somehow less millennial.

To assemble a panel of voters, we contacted novelists, critics, novelist-critics, and editors who knew The Millions well enough to return our emails. (We forbid them from voting for themselves.) The resulting panel was destined to be demographically skewed in all sorts of important ways. It skewed coastal, it skewed white, it skewed thirtysomething and fortysomething, and it skewed toward writers and reviewers working in the genre of literary fiction. It skewed, that is, much as our site and our readership skews. This seemed to us both a minus and a plus.

We also decided, doubtless due to some unexamined numerological prejudice, to limit the number of votes each panelist got to five.

Can Anything Be Learned from a List?

For all that, the results of our survey pleased us in three ways. First, the ballots were more heterogenous than anything we’d have come up with on our own. Roughly 160 titles got mentioned in the balloting, a number of which none of us had heard of. The most frequently mentioned book by a substantial margin, The Corrections, only received a plurality of votes. Appearing alongside it among the Top 20 vote-getters were three works in translation (from three different languages), four paperback originals, five short-story collections,  and five books originated by independent presses. From the point-of-view of the possible, rather than the ideal, our Top 20 and Readers Survey and Honorable Mention and Best of the Rest lists seemed evidence of more diversity and life in the novel than has been widely rumored to exist.

Where it was homogeneous (70% of the writers have been published in The New Yorker), the Top 20 list seemed to document a number of tendencies that have been noted elsewhere, and to mark them as worth discussion. Perhaps most interesting was the preponderance of titles that cross-bred the realist patrimony of literary fiction with elements of other genres – science fiction, detective novels, and fantasy. Less widely noticed was how many of our top 20 titles made free – for better or for worse – with techniques that would as recently as the Clinton Administration have been considered avant-garde.

Moreover, the Best of the Millennium lists sparked conversations, both in our comment-threads and elsewhere. Conversations about translation. Conversations about corporate publishing. Conversations about who the hell did we think we were. Where these conversations were in progress already, the proximity of a list – a piece of potential evidence to mull over – seemed to increase the volume and the heat.

Among these conversations were, as we had hoped, many about books that didn’t make the Top 20. Some readers took up the gauntlet we’d thrown down and compiled their own lists. Others supplied overlooked titles: Gould’s Book of Fish; Tree of Smoke; The Last Samurai. (I would have liked to vote for these last two myself. And The Line of Beauty. And Against the Day. And The Wire. And True History of the Kelly Gang.) I can’t speak for our readers, but I don’t think there’s a single Millions contributor whose personal “To Be Read” list wasn’t shaken up as a result of this series.

Even some readers who rejected outright the listing impulse couldn’t resist commenting at length, as a lengthy debate between Andrew Seal and Edmond Caldwell (later continued at Dan Green‘s The Reading Experience) illustrated. This back-and-forth, which had proceeded from the suggestion that our Top 20 reflected a certain parochialism, grew more and more parochial itself. It seemed by turns to confirm the theory that lists offer a mirror of the beholder’s preoccupations, to demarcate the narrowness and/or breadth of online literary discourse, and to do all of the above at the same time. Yet it was impassioned, and alive.

Of Lists, Personally

As the “Best of the Millennium” discussion went on, however, I began to think that the most interesting datum to arise from the whole project spoke volumes about our current understanding of aesthetic experience. It was this: while I could grant dissenters their passions, some of them were unable to grant mine. “The panelists can’t possibly have felt the way they claimed to have felt The Corrections” was the tenor of these comments. It was not the first time I’d heard this line of reasoning, if that’s the right word.

As Carl Wilson notes in Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, there’s a tendency among the commentariat to view aesthetic experience through the prism of Pierre Bourdieu‘s Distinction – to assume (brace yourself: I’m about to vulgarize this) that people mostly love the things they love for what loving those things says about them. This may be true, in a sense broad enough to be almost tautological. People who responded to The Corrections – people who were, yes, moved by it – may have been united, among other things, by their desire to be united by a novel that moved them, and moved by a novel that united them. But to push this anodyne observation into an accusation of illegitimacy or blindness is to fashion it into a boomerang: it redounds upon the one hurling it, and promptly plants itself in her forehead. That is, it makes her appear far more attuned to where a work sits on the popularity-backlash curve – and far more anxious about what her own position thereupon may say about her – than the reader who simply allows herself to be, or not to be, seduced.

To put it another way, the Bourdieuvian posture – I’ve come to think of it as the Who-Are-You-Going-to-Believe,-Me-Or-Your-Lying-Eyes? school of criticism – may be as much an infection as a diagnosis. It seems to have invaded, unexamined, online discourse about books, movies, music, and art. And it seems to prompt the very flocking pattern – hype, backlash, counterbacklash – it purports to expose. At any rate, insofar as it annihilates its own object, it is transparently poor ground for any debate about value.

I prefer Kant’s definition of aesthetic experience, which, being unequal to The Critique of Pure Reason, I’ve nicked from another Gass essay: the experience of
purposiveness without purpose – either in the look of a utility that has been retired or in an accidental object that seems rationally shaped to perform an undefined task.
That last bit – an object “rationally shaped to perform an undefined task” seems to me a fair descriptor of the five books I’ve loved the most this decade: The Corrections, Twilight of the Superheroes, The Known World, Mortals, 2666. And, to the extent that our “Best of the Millennium” experiment has proceeded by accident and happenstance, it seems a decent sketch of the series itself. Perhaps we gravitate toward lists because they are themselves a kind of aesthetic experience, whether pleasurable or infuriating. At any rate, we hope you’ve found ours useful, though for what we wouldn’t presume to say.

Best of the Millennium Essays
| 1 book mentioned 1 7 min read
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46 comments:

  1. “One somewhat disquieting effect of reading War and Peace is that the more your own thoughts show up in its pages, the less original your life begins to feel.”

    During the time when I was reading War and Peace, I actually found this exact same effect to be comforting. I realized I wasn’t crazy and that the various thoughts running through my mind were the same thoughts others had been having for centuries. Sometimes it’s nice to know you aren’t alone or even original :)

  2. Having just finished reading The Brothers Karamazov (also the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation) last night just after midnight, and today still reeling from the encounter, as you say, of great art on my ordinary life, I really appreciate your thoughts.

    And for the time being, I’m swearing off epic length novels, and focusing more on novels that don’t require a quarter of a year to conquer.

  3. Nathan, I like your interpretation of the ‘unoriginality’ point. And I would say I too, on the whole, found the universality of War and Peace to be more reassuring than not.

    And Winston, thanks for reading. I’ve made a couple false starts at Bleak House in the days since I finished W&P, so it remains to be seen whether I’ve got one more big book in me, or whether it will be time to tackle more modestly sized novels for awhile

  4. It’s funny what big books can do to a person. Earlier in the year I read “The Savage Detectives” and “2666” right in a row and when I was done I found my ability to read anything of any kind of length or difficulty to be completely demolished.

  5. Lovely piece. In talking about what art does, I find it is always an assertion not of what we have done or where we have been but of what we can do. To pick one of my favorite examples, Cassavetes’ ‘A Woman Under The Influence’ is a portrait not of a marriage but of what a marriage can truly be, and expands understanding of why love matters now and forever.

  6. I do think it’s the best book ever written. Nice piece on it. I read it during a physical, emotional and religious crisis in my life in my mid thirties. I feel like it honestly helped me through it, the compassion in it is that strong.

  7. I loved your essay. I appreciate your point that as much as I might not remember a book in all its detail, I remember vividly where I was in life when I read some of my favorite ones and how the story shaped my perception of that time. In the spring of my senior year, a few months after my mother died, I read Marilynnne Robinson’s Housekeeping for an English class. The story focuses a lot on memory and loss, and it shaped the way I dealt with how my memory of my mom would change over time, a thought I was struggling with a lot right then.

  8. Very nice post. I share your interest in and passion for War and Peace. In fact, since getting a Kindle I’ve been in the habit of reading a chapter of the book a day during my subway commute. As there are 365 chapters in the book I finish a cycle every year. It’s an interesting way to read the book.

  9. I loved your sentence about how “the controlling idea of the story came to serve as a lens through which I viewed my days, but never has this happened quite as thoroughly as it did with War and Peace.”

    I think that must be why, when I was reading this novel, that everyone told me that I should re-read it every five years. Your experience of both life and the reading of the novel, changes depending on what’s happening around you.

    I first read W&P about 3 years ago (oct 07), when the war in Iraq was flailing and the American public was angry. It was a really interesting experience to read all of those war passages at that time. I wonder what life will be like in a couple of years, when I do my first re-read of the book.

  10. Maire and Brian, thanks for reading! It is nice to imagine that life is long enough to make room for more than one reading of War and Peace.

  11. Pingback: Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life « Kevin Hartnett

  12. Really great piece. I found it hard to discuss this book with people without sounding pretentious, but I think you did a fine job of describing the allure and the magnificence of the novel.

  13. Great essay.
    War and Peace is clearly the best book I’ve read. Or the one I’ve enjoyed the most. Or both.
    It also impacted my way of seeing things in millions of ways.

    As for long books (I’ve also tackled 2666 this year and am now reading Against the Day), it’s not about the length, it’s about the book.

  14. “…the spectrum of experience depicted in War and Peace, combined with the precision with which it’s captured, creates an infinite number of roads into the book and an infinite number back out.” Spectrum and precision are two words so aptly applied to Tolstoy. The same could be said for this essay! I admire your taking on W&P is such a short space here, and yet covering so much ground. I’ve enjoyed reading about your journey with the book and especially appreciate that you’ve taken the time to read it in a “whole self” way, and to report it to us in the same vein.

    Interesting to hear about your experience with the two translations, as well. Thanks, Kevin!

  16. Pingback: Reading Tolstoy » Novel Readings - Notes on Literature and Criticism
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  18. The more I think about it the more things I could say. Perhaps that is the greatness of a great art work – that it is rich enough to provoke all manner of responses even from one person.

    I read it in three enchanted weeks just before my 19th birthday in about August 1977. I was unemployed and had the time to do nothing else for those three weeks.

    Even though reading Tolstoy’s biography and thought makes me less impressed with the man than i was as a teenager the memory of the experience of reading it, though i had quite forgotten it, was summoned back by this article.

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  20. The praise for War & Peace has left me shaking my head and wondering what the heck you people have been smoking. War & Peace is the worst novel ever written. I’ve read technical manuels on how to repair computers that had better writing and more drama. It’s a long winded piece of tripe. A good editor should have wittled down this monstrosity of hot air to three hundred pages or less, but even then it still would probably be a bad book. If War & Peace is considered a farce, a social mockery of the Russian elite of that era, then perhaps I would consider it an okay book, but to take it as a serious piece of literature let alone consider it a work of art is shocking.

  21. Kevin, I enjoyed your essay (found it linked on artsandlettersdaily.com). I love serendipities and this is one of the best I’ve experienced in awhile. May I explain?

    As a life-long passionate reader, I decided to quit by job (as an attorney) two years ago, primarily to have more time to read quality literature. When people would ask me about this, my pat line was “I want more time to read–I want to be able to immerse myself in War and Peace”.

    Well, I’ve been reading quite a bit these past two years (I won’t even try to begin to list everything I’ve read, but it does include Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”–all six volumes). In any event, last night I finished “Flaubert’s Parrot” by Julian Barnes and announced to my wife that at long last it was time to tackle War and Peace. So last night I pulled it from the shelf (I also have both translations you reference, but am reading the more recent one), removed its dust jacket and began reading the introduction.

    Then this morning, while enjoying my first cup of coffee, I see the link to your essay. Imagine my delight!

    Now I’m even more excited to dive into this masterpiece.

  22. Kevin, thanks for reminding me of the experience of reading W&P. As memorable and moving a 2-3 week period as any I can recall having ‘lived’ through in ‘real life’

  23. Nice essay. I would suggest a correction: While Napoleon’s invasion of Russia occured in the same year, the “War of 1812” more commonly refers to the war between the US and Britain. Your phrasing could be clearer.

  24. I was a 15 year old asthmatic finding release through two agonizing weeks in the pages of War and Peace. It provided me with an escape from a painful situation and the characters were strong companions crowding around my sick bed.

  25. This essay captures well that sense of a great novel as a world where the reader may live, move, and have another being. Good fiction extends the sphere of our living – not only in time and space, but in the life of the mind and of the emotions. It offers virtual change of air, light, relationships, experiences, perspectives. Its magic works inwardly for growth and renewal.

  26. War and Peace is magnificent, but Anna Karenina is really the better novel. Just ask Nabokov. If you haven’t read it, wait a year to give Tolstoy a rest. Then give it a try.

  27. I agree because Scarlett Johansen is really quite ugly and only reported to be beautiful because it says so in her press release – it is the same with Tolstoy. His nose is too big.

  28. I too, can endorse the magnificence of “War and Peace”, but I would recommend “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo for a similar if not even more illuminating experience!

  29. Excellent piece. I read W&P in my 20s, b ut the BBC dramatisation the 1970s had me fall in love with Natasha when I was 16. I’m still in recovery. I flicked your piece to a friend who is not yet engaged by page 50. This should spur him on.

  31. I came across this blog by accident, and I am delighted to have found it. It was referenced by someone who posted on a Proust thread which I follow. Anyway, it took me two attempts to read W&P. the first time I quit about a quarter of the way through. The second time, a few years later, i was more able to take the time and intellectual patience to appreciate this great work of art. While I respect the entire sweep of the novel, I think the description of the Battle of Borodin is the most profound account of war and its horrible aftermaths of anything I have ever encountered.

    On a somewhat less profound note, I also like Woody Allen’s description of War and Peace: It’s a book about Russia….:-)

    Sherm

  32. Pingback: Links: Better Than Chocolate?

  33. I too came to this conversation through a link on a Marcel Proust thread I follow. Kevin’s description of the experience of reading War and Peace was delightful and made me decide to reread it myself.

    Somebody else recommends Les MIserables. Hugo’s interpretation and description of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia is the complete opposite of Tolstoy’s and it is very interesting to compare the two.

    According to Jerry Seinfeld, Tolstoy’s original titles for the novel was “War–What Is It Good For?”!

  35. It’s 25 years since I last thumbed through War & Peace and around 15 years longer since I actually read it. But just two weeks ago, I had a conversation with my wife about Russia, only to find Natasha dancing to the front of my subconscious, where she has hung around ever since, now joined by Pierre, Nicolai and Marya. I’m delighted to welcome my old friends back. Such is the power of this book! I must read the new translation.

  36. Pingback: The Millions: Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life
  37. Pingback: How Would His LIfe Be Different If He Spent the Last Three Months Not Reading War and Peace? « Read Heavily

  38. Ironically, I am nearing the end of War and Peace just now. I purchased a Kindle about two months ago and decided to make it one of my first books (to make up for the latest Dan Brown novel that was, in fact, my first.) This article resonated most in describing how changed the author felt one hour after beginning the parts of War and Peace describing the battle of Borodino, yet without ever leaving his sofa. That is an incredibly insightful way of thinking about what art and literature do for us.

  39. Pingback: E-Reading Tolstoy » Novel Readings - Notes on Literature and Criticism
  40. Pingback: Great Literature As A Tool To Combat Narcissism — Thomas A. Shakely

  42. Great article – you basically articulated everything I’ve been thinking about all week (thanks to a sprained ankle, I just marathon-read W&P in 7 days). I read books too, to hear “life perfectly distilled into words” (hoping that I’ll eventually figure out how to do it too), so Tolstoy was fairly awe-inspiring. This book was honestly a joy to read… even though he didn’t seem to know what an epilogue is :)

  43. Pingback: What is it greatness does? « Mike Cohen
  44. Pingback: Where Parents Get Their Power | Growing Sideways

  45. Yes, even I instantly caught the “War of 1812” thing, and I’m no history buff, or anything. But this article is two years old, now, so I guess I’m just being a nitpicky troll for no goddamn reason, and long after the fact, even.

    I don’t know who I am anymore.

  46. Nicely stated description of the novel and its effect on readers. I bought the book in three volumes (Everyman’s Library) for ease of handling and finished it in a few weeks. I enjoyed Anna Karenina more, but there was a great enjoyment in reading it late at night. One had something to eagerly return to before the day’s weary end. I was less impressed with the battle scenes and catastrophes, but found the weaving of peoples’ lives through turbulent and remarkable times into a rich and thought provoking tapestry to be so worth the long read. I think everyone one says ‘Wow!’ when finished, both for making a real reading effort and for experiencing a novel everyone talks about, but very, very few ever read.

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Essays

Clothes in Books and Ways to go Wrong

Essays
August 15, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 15 7 min read

I took Purity in one long gallop, reading it over four days at my friend’s house. Sarah had already read it, and was desperate for me to hurry up and finish so we could talk about it. The minute I put it down, I went to go find her. She was wearing clean white shorts and a miraculously uncreased blue linen shirt. I was wearing a regretted purchase from H&M — a white cotton dress with little roses on it that looked fine in the shop, but depressing on me. I told Sarah that I’d finished and she said, “Have you noticed,” she asked, “the clothes thing?”

Yes, the clothes thing. The whole point of Jonathan Franzen is the richness of his description, his eye for a telling detail. Where are all the clothes, then? Why are there almost no descriptions of what anyone is wearing? It seems like the most amazing oversight. How is it possible that two characters can have an extremely detailed conversation about a third character being “jealous of the internet”, or that we are subjected to a long and over-vivid description of Pip’s boring job, or the smells of different kinds of soil, and yet we are given almost nothing in the way of clothing? They all might as well be walking around naked. The only detailed description of an outfit in the first section, for instance, is the following: “she saw Stephen sitting on the front steps, wearing his little-boy clothes, his secondhand Keds and secondhand seersucker shirt.” The word “seersucker” is latched onto and used twice more (“she whispered into the seersucker of his shirt”; “she said, nuzzling the seersucker”). It gets slightly better as the novel progresses, but not by much. The first time Pip sees Andreas Wolf, for instance, his “glow of charged fame particles” are vividly described, but his clothes? No. Even Tom’s mother’s significant sundress is described only as being “of Western cut.” It’s unsettling.

I know this to be a petty criticism, but there are all kinds of nerds who write long, aggrieved blog posts about how some novelist got a car wrong, or misdated the death of an actress. Clothes have always been important to me, and while their fictional depiction might be beneath some people’s notice, it is always one of the first things I see. Clothes aren’t just something one puts on a character to stop her from being naked. Done right, clothes are everything — a way of describing class, affluence, taste, self-presentation, mental health, body image. Clothes matter. Besides all that, clothes are fun. Descriptions of dresses got me through War and Peace. I think about Dolores Haze’s outfits on a near-daily basis (“check weaves, bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts!”) I think about her cotton pyjamas in the popular butcher-boy style. Holden Caulfield’s hounds-tooth jacket, and Franny Glass’s coat, the lapel of which is kissed by Lane as a perfectly desirable extension of herself. Sara Crewe’s black velvet dress in A Little Princess, and the matching one made for her favourite doll. The green dress in Atonement (“dark green bias-cut backless evening gown with a halter neck.”) Anna Karenina’s entire wardrobe, obviously, but also Nicola Six’s clothes in London Fields. Nicola Six’s clothes are fantastic.

Aviva Rossner’s angora sweaters and “socks with little pom-poms at the heels” in The Virgins. Pnin’s “sloppy socks of scarlet wool with lilac lozenges”, his “conservative black Oxfords [which] had cost him about as much as all the rest of his clothing (flamboyant goon tie included).” May Welland at the August meeting of the Newport Archery Club, in her white dress with the pale green ribbon. I quite often get dressed with Maria Wyeth from Play It As It Lays in mind (“cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator”). I think about unfortunate clothes, as well. I think about Zora’s terrible party dress in On Beauty, and about how badly she wanted it to be right. The meanest thing Kingsley Amis ever did to a woman was to put Margaret Peele in that green paisley dress and “quasi-velvet” shoes in Lucky Jim. Vanity Fair’s Jos Sedley in his buckskins and Hessian boots, his “several immense neckcloths” and “apple green coat with steel buttons almost as large as crown pieces.”

This list changes all the time, but my current favorite fictional clothes are the ones in A Good Man is Hard to Find. There is no one quite like Flannery O’Connor for creeping out the reader via dress. Bailey’s “yellow sport shirt with bright blue parrots designed on it” contrasts in the most sinister way with the The Misfit’s too tight blue jeans, the fact that he “didn’t have on any shirt or undershirt.” I’d also like to make a plug for one of The Misfit’s companions, “a fat boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it.” Any Flannery O’Connor story will contain something similar, because she used clothes as exposition, as dialogue, as mood. Anyone to who clothes matter will have their own highlight reel, and will argue strenuously for the inclusion of Topaz’s dresses in I Capture the Castle, or Gatsby’s shirts, or Dorothea Brooke’s ugly crepe dress. They will point out, for instance, that I have neglected to mention Donna Tartt, top five fluent speaker of the language of dress. What of Judge Holden’s kid boots, in Blood Meridian? What about Ayn Rand, who, as Mallory Ortberg has noted, is just about unparalleled?

The point is, we do not lack for excellent and illuminating descriptions of clothes in literature. Given such riches, it is perhaps churlish to object to the times when people get it wrong. Haven’t we been given enough? Apparently not. Just as I can think of hundreds of times when a writer knocked it out of the park, attire-wise, (Phlox’s stupid clothes in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, all those layers and scarves and hideous cuffs), I can just as easily recall the failures. There are a variety of ways for an author to get clothes wrong, but I will stick to just two categories of offense here.

1. Outfits that don’t sound real
Purity again, and Andreas’s “good narrow jeans and a close-fitting polo shirt.” This is wrong. Andreas is a charismatic weirdo, a maniac, and I struggle to believe that he would be slinking around in such tight, nerdy clothes. Another jarring example is Princess Margaret’s dress, in Edward St. Aubyn’s Some Hope: “the ambassador raised his fork with such an extravagant gesture of appreciation that he flicked glistening brown globules over the front of the Princess’s blue tulle dress.” The Princess here is supposed to be in her sixties. Would a post-menopausal aristocrat really be wearing a blue tulle dress? Is the whole thing made out of tulle? Wouldn’t that make it more the kind of thing a small girl at a ballet recital would choose? St. Aubyn’s novels are largely autobiographical, and he has mentioned in interviews that he met the allegedly blue-tulle-dress-wearing Princess on a number of occasions. Maybe that really is what she was wearing. It doesn’t sound right, though, or not to me.

One last example, from The Rings of Saturn:  “One of them, a bridal gown made of hundreds of scraps of silk embroidered with silken thread, or rather woven over cobweb-fashion, which hung on a headless tailor’s dummy, was a work of art so colourful and of such intricacy and perfection that it seemed almost to have come to life, and at the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.” One believes the narrator, when he says that he cannot trust his memory, because this actually doesn’t sound like a dress, or not a very nice one. It sounds like a dress a person might buy from a stall at a psytrance party. The word “colourful” here is a dead giveaway that the narrator does not necessarily have a particular dress in mind: what kind of colours, exactly? “Intricate” is also no good — it seeks to give the impression of specificity, but is in fact very vague.

2. Outfits that make too much of a point
Many people are suspicious of fashion. They do not trust it or like it, and, while they see that it serves a purpose, they wish it was somehow enforceable to make everyone wear a uniform at all times. Deep down, they also believe that anyone who does take pleasure in it is lying to themselves, or doing it for the wrong reasons. I argue with such people in my head all the time, because this is not what clothes are about for me, at all. I argue with the books they have written as well. To be fair to Jeffrey Eugenides, he is mostly excellent on the subject of dress. The Lisbon girls’ prom dresses and the Obscure Object’s High Wasp style are in my own personal highlight reel. The Marriage Plot is different, though. It is deeply cynical on the subject of dress. Clothes in that novel are always an affectation or a disguise, a way for a character to control the way others see her.

Here is Madeline, getting Leonard back “Madeleine … put on her first spring dress: an apple-green baby-doll dress with a bib collar and a high hem.” Here is Madeline, trying to seem like the kind of girl who is at home in a semiotics class:  “She took out her diamond studs, leaving her ears bare. She stood in front of the mirror wondering if her Annie Hall glasses might possibly project a New Wave look…She unearthed a pair of Beatle boots … She put up her collar, and wore more black.” And here is Madeline, failed Bohemian, despondent semiotician, after she has gone back to reading novels: “The next Thursday, “Madeleine came to class wearing a Norwegian sweater with a snowflake design.” After college, she realizes that she can dress the way she has always, in her haute-bourgeois heart, wanted to dress: like a Kennedy girlfriend on holiday. Another costume, for a girl who doesn’t know who she really is. The problem with these clothes is not that they don’t sound real, or that they are badly described. It’s that Madeline only ever wears clothes to make a point, to manipulate or to persuade her audience that she is someone other than she really is. Worse, there is the implication that she has no real identity outside from what she projects. It’s exact opposite approach to O’Connor’s wardrobe choices in A Good Man is Hard to Find. The guy in the red sweat shirt, with the silver stallion? He is not wearing those clothes for anyone but himself. Same with The Misfit and his frightening jeans.

Those who are suspicious of fashion tend to believe that people (especially women) only ever wear clothes as a form of armor, a costume, and never because they get pleasure out of it. Madeline, in other words, doesn’t wear clothes because she likes them, but because she likes what they do. I find this line of thinking very depressing.

There are other categories (clothes that I think sound ugly, clothes in over-researched historical novels where the writer takes too much relish in describing jerkins and the smell of wet leather etc.), but these two stand out. I’m not asking for anything too excessive — just a few more details, a bit more effort when getting a character dressed. Clothes matter, to some of us, and we need to see them done right.

Image: John Singer Sargent, Wikipedia

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 15 7 min read
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