Odd Jobs (37 page)

These expatriate gentry have little to do but talk and improve their finesse as they drift across a Europe whose exchange rate favors the Gilded Age American dollar, and this leisure, this exclusive labor in human relationships, supplies a stately languor to the developments—to the exquisitely modulated evolution, conversation by conversation, of the characters toward their proper romantic fate. As subjects for a novel, they are rather too ideal, too complacently and volubly self-concerned. Howells would not write about Americans abroad again, turning to New York and a more muscular, Tolstoyan, socially challenging, economically panoramic style of fiction. James, on the other hand, never wearied of his Americans freed of the vacuous coarseness of America, and refined their scruples and disappointments into fictions so spectacularly finespun as to be modernist. No such late blooming awaited Howells; he never wrote better than in
Indian Summer
, though he wrote much more,
and for decades admirably acted the part of Foremost American Man of Letters. His talent was very American in needing an injection of youth, of youth’s suppleness and careless rapture; his casual charm and vivacious accuracy of observation were definitively displayed in his very first novels,
Their Wedding Journey
and
A Chance Acquaintance
, not so much novels as elaborations of trips he and Mrs. Howells had taken.

Indian Summer
, too, has a trip at its heart, a return to Italy, and its hero, at the age of forty-one, is saying goodbye, on behalf of an author in his mid-forties, to youth. A midlife crisis has rarely been sketched in fiction with better humor, with gentler comedy, or more gracious acceptance of life’s irreversibility. This comedy’s curious Virgil, godless old Mr. Waters from Haddam East Village, states the optimistic, Emersonian principle that makes Howells’s novels so strangely delicious and diffident: “the wonderful degree of amelioration that any given difficulty finds in the realization.” Elsewhere, Mr. Waters avows that “men fail, but man succeeds.” Colville, amid the “illogical processes” of amorous tendency, somehow fails to evade an “affection he could not check without a degree of brutality for which only a better man would have the courage.” But mankind, in the form of a predominantly feminine polite society, succeeds in straightening out the tangle. Howells’s tropism toward “the smiling aspects of life” finds, in the microcosm of these few amiable tourists in Florence, a world where smiling does not deny the deeper intuitions of his realism.

T
HE
R
USSIAN LANDSCAPE
surprises the American visitor with an impression of feminine gentleness. Rollingly flat and most conspicuously marked by the wavering white verticals of the ubiquitous birches, it lacks the shaggy, rocky assertiveness a North American is used to. It seems a young and tender landscape, without defenses. When the single-station radio in the hotel room croons and wails its state-approved folk song, there is no mistaking what the song is about: the motherland. In the fall of 1964 I spent a month in the Soviet Union, and at the end of it my constant companion and weariless interpreter, Frieda Lurie, presented me with a copy of Prishvin’s
Nature’s Diary
. The volume, printed in
slightly ragged type by Moscow’s Foreign Languages Publishing House, was small enough to fit into a coat pocket and decorated with a few line drawings in the innocent Soviet style. Frieda could have chosen no nicer souvenir of her country. From its first pages—from Prishvin’s sighting of the first cloud of spring, “huge and warm, smooth and gleaming, also like the unruffled breast of a swan”—I felt drawn back into that maternal immensity, into a stately progress of weather and vital cycle upon a colossal stage, as related in a prose now limpidly transparent and now almost gruff, a foxy prose glistening with alert specifics and with
joie de vivre
.

Nature’s Diary
records a Russian’s love of his land, particularly of the swampy, almost featureless, virtually endless taiga that stretches, south of the tundra, from the Gulf of Finland to the Sea of Okhotsk. Most of Siberia is taiga, but great tracts of European Russia also hold these sub-arctic forests of spruce and fir and birch and aspen, abounding in wildlife; the observations and adventures recorded in Prishvin’s
Diary
stem from a year, the author’s fiftieth, spent in deliberate nature study at a rudimentary research station near Lake Pleshcheyevo, less than a hundred miles northeast of Moscow. This was the time of Lenin’s dying and the murderous struggles for power from which Stalin emerged triumphant and Trotsky an exile; but Communism intrudes rarely into the texture of life by Lake Pleshcheyevo, and when it does it takes the innocuous form of some raggle-taggle and self-important young Komsomol members. The youthful Socialist republic was still a world where one could get away from it all. “My love for nature,” Prishvin boasts, “has never prevented me from liking beautiful cities and their complex and fascinating world. But when I tire of city life I take a tram and within twenty minutes am out in the open again. I must have been cut out for a free existence. I can live for years in the huts of fishermen, hunters and peasants.”

Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin, the son of a rich merchant, was born in 1873 on the family estate in the north of Russia. While a student at Riga, he was arrested for revolutionary activity. After his release, he studied in Leipzig and in 1902 received a degree in agronomy. As young gentlemen were in those years, Prishvin was free to indulge his interests, and he travelled throughout Russia, Central Asia, and the Far East, educating himself in ornithology, linguistics, folklore, and ethnography. His first two books—
In the Land of Unfrightened Birds and Animals
(1907) and
Small, Round Loaf
(1908)—dealt with northern Russia and the customs
and legends of its peasants. According to the literary historian D. S. Mirsky, “These studies taught Prishvin to value the originality of the uneducated Russian and the native force of ‘unlatinized’ Russian speech.” Mirsky claims Prishvin to have been further influenced along these lines by a younger writer, the Symbolist Alexey Remizov, whose greatly varied production was “unified by one purpose—which is to delatinize and defrenchify the Russian literary language and to restore to it its natural Russian raciness.” While such linguistic nuances can scarcely be conveyed in translation, this rendering by Lev Navrozov does permit us to feel a raciness in the highly informal organization—an impulsiveness of movement that keeps the reader constantly and pleasantly off-balance as he moves with Prishvin through the year. Almost half the book, for instance, is taken up with spring, and the summer section is monopolized by the author’s hunting dogs, and the final pages are concerned with a bear hunt that took place nowhere near Lake Pleshcheyevo.
Nature’s Diary
, and Prishvin’s other rural sketches, achieved considerable popularity with an increasingly urbanized Soviet public; he maintained, we are told, his artistic independence throughout the Stalin era, and died in 1954, at the age of eighty-one.

The nature he contributes to the Penguin Nature Library seems familiar; we have already met it in the scenery of Turgenev and Tolstoy, Chekhov and Nabokov. The continental cold is slow to relinquish the land—we read of frost in May—and quick to reclaim it, with flurries of snow and a film of morning ice on the autumnal marshes. But the fauna, above all the birds, begins its cycles of procreation in the depths of winter, and Prishvin’s swift eye sees life everywhere. Carrion crows somersault in their love frenzy, the blackcocks sing and mate as the icy creeks thaw into song, the cranes and kestrels return, and ducks fill the air with noise. Man, too, is active in the cold landscape: “The snow was frozen hard and powdered by the latest fall. The going was pure joy whichever way we turned.” And then, gradually, the frogs stir, the finches arrive, grass appears, and the first mushrooms and the early flowers, the blossoms of aspen and lungwort; the first cuckoo is heard, and then the first nightingale. These manifestations of thaw and revival are intermixed, in Prishvin’s diary entries, with the comings and goings of men—with local gossip and the lore of pike fishermen, with an archaeological expedition and an ethnological excursion to see a pre-Christian village rite, the Nettle Feast. Nature, which to an American instinct looms as purely and grandly inhuman as an Ansel Adams photograph, is for the Russian interwoven
with humanity; this North Russia is a vast and forbidding but long-inhabited terrain, warmed in its remotest corners by the traces of men. In the dead cold of a winter night, a hunter in pursuit of a marten burns an anthill to make himself a warm bed of ashes, and the charred ruins remember him. On a desolate marsh, Prishvin (to his annoyance) suddenly spots another man walking. He participates in an archaeological dig, which finds evidence of long habitation, the skull of a prehistoric predecessor—“more impressive” than he had expected, the skull’s color “not the colour of bone but almost that of copper or burnt clay,” the teeth and forehead perfectly white. Everywhere in this wild landscape, people pop up, more than we can keep track of. The peasantry seems ubiquitous, like walking tummocks or another species of animal, part of the land’s furniture and casually included in this inventory:

Some of the peasant lore—frogs are woken from hibernation by thunder, a mushroom detected by the human eye will cease to grow—is perhaps open to scientific refutation, but the observations that the roach is a lonely fish and that roach soup makes people brood would seem hard to argue. Prishvin himself asserts with mystic authority: “The orioles are very fond of choppy weather. They like the sun to come and go, and the wind to play with the leaves as with waves. Orioles, swallows, gulls and martins have a kinship with the wind.”

Man’s interpenetration with nature takes many forms: superstition, lore, and annual rite, as in the Nettle Feast; scientific probing and investigation, as in Prishvin’s research; pantheistic communion (“I … sat down on a soft mossy hillock under a pine-tree and began to sip the tea slowly, musing and gradually merging with the life around me”); and hunting. There is a great deal of hunting and killing here—more than a modern nature-lover expects. Prishvin at one point steps forward to reassure the squeamish: “There is no need to pity the animal, my kind-hearted readers, we’re all due for it sooner or later, I for one am almost ready.…” To hunt successfully, one must empathize with the animals, think like them; in this immemorial way Man draws close to his fellow
creatures. The strategies of foxes, the scruples of wolves are fascinatingly noted. And the minds of the dogs trained to hunt at Man’s side are wonderfully well explored. With Olympian humor Prishvin explicates the urinary truce agreements of competing dogs; he triumphantly psychoanalyzes the feminine pretenses of his disappointing pointer, Kate, her nose dulled by two housebound years in Moscow, and rejoices when her nose revives in the country wind. Nature for Prishvin not only spreads itself externally but lies within the mind of a dog, a fox, even a fish or mayfly. He tiptoes toward the mysteries of the woods; he marvels at the snoring sound that emerges from a tree holding a sleeping wood-grouse and speculates on its source:

Though he was something of a scientist, there is little in Prishvin’s grasp of nature that corresponds to Loren Eiseley’s paleontological perspective or Joseph Wood Krutch’s biological microscopy. He is, like Thoreau and John Muir and Annie Dillard, confrontational in his dealings with the outdoors, and existential, his own consciousness his keenest exploratory tool. Nature to Prishvin appears “little known,” and the riddles that concern him—how do wood-grouse snore? why do the jackdaws come to see off the migrating rooks?—are ones that a closely observant child might ask. He restores us, in an anecdote like that of the old itinerant nurse who successfully pleaded for mercy with the wolves, to the pre-medieval Europe of the fairy tales, when animals spoke with dignity on behalf of their own societies and men shared with all life a single network of sensation and motive. The semi-centenarian is thrilled to be alive, he tells us more than once. His descriptions of days—especially of that magical hour before dawn, which he is always avid to witness—have a sublime freshness:

An Adamic freshness of earliest morning is what one finds in Prishvin; we see the earth being created, and its elemental patterns established: