Odd Jobs (49 page)

This apotheosized Franklin is the outermost shell; the innermost nugget can perhaps be found in the autobiographical passage where, discussing
their English forebears, Franklin relayed to his son an anecdote he had heard from his uncle Benjamin: “This obscure Family of ours was early in the Reformation, and continu’d Protestants thro’ the Reign of Queen Mary, when they were sometimes in Danger of Trouble on Account of their Zeal against Popery. They had got an English Bible, & to conceal & secure it, it was fastned open with Tapes under & within the Frame of a Joint Stool. When my Great Great Grandfather read in it to his Family, he turn’d up the Joint Stool upon his Knees, turning over the Leaves then under the Tapes. One of the Children stood at the Door to give Notice if he saw the Apparitor coming, who was an Officer of the Spiritual Court. In that Case the Stool was turn’d down again upon its feet, when the Bible remain’d conceal’d under it as before.” A self-reliant piety yoked to an unembarrassed practicality—here, in this quintessential Protestant gadget, this seat with a Bible on its underside, we have Franklin in embryo, waiting to be born.

T
OLSTOY
’
S
D
IARIES, EDITED AND
translated from the Russian by R. F. Christian in two volumes:
1847–1894
and
1895–1910
. 755 pp. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985.

If all the formal works of, say, Emerson or Kierkegaard quite vanished, and only their journals remained, we would still have a good idea of their thought and sensibilities, and an adumbration of their achievements. In the case of, say, Edmund Wilson or Franz Kafka, the relative loss would be greater, but a fair sense of the man and the reach of his concerns and his imagination would remain. But in the case of Tolstoy, who kept a diary, off and on, from the age of eighteen to that of eighty-two and whose journals occupy thirteen volumes in the complete Russian edition, we would have hardly a clue to the generous-spirited, all-knowing author of
War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Family Happiness
, and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” A reading through of the two-volume abridgment of
Tolstoy’s Diaries
is a claustrophobic experience, an intimate long sojourn with a mentality so morose and censorious, so puritanically
perfectionist and dourly dissatisfied, that any significant creative achievement would seem to have been out of the question. The sunlight of Tolstoy’s art scarcely penetrates into the monk’s cell of his unremitting moralism and self-scorn; the artist’s thoroughly illumined world, creating its characteristic Tolstoyan impression of simultaneous transparence and density, lies beyond the horizon of the diaries, which began as a schoolboy’s notations on his strenuous self-improvement and ended as an old man’s melancholy, oblique communications with his hysterical wife and an unseen host of more or less burdensome disciples. A note of unhealth sounds from beginning to end: the first entries are made in the Kazan University clinic, where the young law student was confined with a case of gonorrhea, and the last were scrawled on the internationally renowned sage’s deathbed in the railroad depot at Astapovo, a few days after he had at last fled the conflicting claims of family and philosophy, of earthly existence and ideal goodness.

The Tolstoy we care most about, the man who between 1863 and 1877 wrote
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
, kept his journal least assiduously. Again, in the 1890s, when he composed his third full-size novel,
Resurrection
, there was a slacking off. The Tolstoy we might do with less of, the elderly prophet in baggy peasant shirt and forked white beard, who lived on and on into this uncongenial century, became quite attached to daily diary entries, and well over two-thirds of Mr. Christian’s seven-hundred-page selection comes from the years between 1880 and 1910. The young Tolstoy, up to his marriage to Sonya Behrs at the age of thirty-four, accounts for one hundred and sixty-five pages. He priggishly announces to himself at the outset: “I have never kept a diary before, because I could never see the benefit of it. But now that I am concerned with the development of my own faculties, I shall be able to judge from a diary the progress of that development.” Finding odd moments between bouts of dissipation and soldiering, of European travel, estate management, and educational theory tested upon peasant children, he takes note of his toothaches and losses at cards (both prodigious) and even now and then of his considerable literary successes, which began with “Childhood,” composed when he was twenty-three. He is a tireless compiler of lists of rules for himself—“Rules for developing the physical Will,” “Rules for developing the emotional will,” “Rules for subordinating to the will the feeling of love of gain,” “Rules for developing lofty feelings and eliminating base ones, or, to put it another way, rules for developing the feeling of love and eliminating the feeling
of self-love.” His was an ego determined to concoct a superego as powerful as itself: “I am beginning to acquire physical will-power, but my mental will-power is still very weak. With patience and application I am sure that I shall achieve everything I want.” His program for himself was infinitely ambitious: “What is the purpose of a man’s life? Whatever the point of departure for my reasoning, whatever I take as its source, I always come to the same conclusion: the purpose of a man’s life is the furtherance in every possible way of the all-round development of everything that exists.”

He never moderated that mighty sense of purpose. In these early pages he pays homage to Franklin and Rousseau and Sterne, and reminds us of how much Tolstoy himself remained rooted in the eighteenth century, a man of the Enlightenment to whom “man’s primary faculty” is self-evidently “reason.” We are also reminded that Tolstoy was an orphan from the age of nine, left with no conscious memory of his mother, who died when he was not quite two, and with no very directive image of his father. Nicholas Tolstoy, a dandified playboy whose own father had bankrupted the family with such luxuries as sending his laundry across Europe to be washed in Holland, had married Leo’s mother, Marya Volkonsky, as a way out of financial destitution; she was five years older than he and characterized in a contemporary letter as “an ugly old maid with bushy eyebrows.” A shy, well-educated woman, she was the heiress to the rich estate of Yasnaya Polyana, which Leo, the youngest of the four sons that the couple bore, was eventually to inherit.

Although “Childhood” should not be taken (as Tolstoy himself insisted) as a purely autobiographical document, the sketch of the father surely conveys the emotional temperature of Nicholas’s paternity: “He was a man of the preceding century and possessed the elusive nature blended of chivalry, initiative, self-confidence, amiability and rakishness characteristic of that century’s youth.… His life was so full of all kinds of diversions that he had no time to form any convictions and, besides, he was so happy in life that he saw no necessity for it.” Within a few years of his father’s sudden death of apoplexy, the child’s affectionate grandmother and his aunt Aline, his official guardian, both died; though the prosperous family matrix provided more aunts (notably his father’s distant cousin, Aunt Toinette) and tutors and servants to fill the void, Tolstoy’s feeling, as recalled in
My Confession
, was that “I was alone, wholly alone, in my search after goodness. Every time I tried to express the longings of my heart to be morally good, I was met with contempt
and ridicule, but as soon as I gave way to low passions, I was praised and encouraged.” An unnamed “kind-hearted aunt” would tell him that “there was one thing above all others which she wished for me—an intrigue with a married woman.” Tolstoy states of this nurturing time, “I cannot now recall those years without a painful feeling of horror and loathing.” For all of his life, and in crisis proportion for the last thirty years of it, he was to feel, as a journal entry of 1891 puts it, “depressed by the evil life of the gentry of which I’m a part.” A year later he wrote, “even the people who are always with me—my children, my wife.… In the midst of all these people I am alone, quite alone and isolated.”

As alone as God, he created himself, and a clangor of resolve and self-rebuke rings through the early journals. “I’m tormented by the pettiness of my life … but I still have the strength to despise both myself and my life. There’s something in me that makes me believe that I wasn’t born to be the same as other people.… I am old—the time for development has passed, or is passing; but I’m still tormented by thirst … not for fame—I don’t want fame and I despise it—but to have a big influence on people’s happiness and usefulness.” The vagueness and largeness of “people” perhaps compensate for something more palpable, a social deficiency that Tolstoy describes as “my inability to get on with people.” He asks, “Why are all people—not only those whom I don’t like or respect and who are of a different bent from me, but all people without exception—noticeably ill at ease with me? I must be a difficult, unbearable person.” The next year, at the age of twenty-four, he asks his journal, “Why does nobody love me? I’m not a fool, not deformed, not an evil man, not an ignoramus. It’s incomprehensible.” And the next year, a soldier now, he asks, “What am I?” and answers:

In fact he was brave, and had citations to prove it, and if an ignoramus one who read widely all his life, not only in Russian and the foreign languages expectable among the aristocracy (French, German, and English) but in, as occasion demanded, Dutch, Italian, Latin, and Greek. Ugliness is a self-accusation hard to pin down for rebuttal. Henri Troyat, in his biography of Tolstoy, does not give a source for his affecting word-picture of “little Leo” as he, having admired his face disguised with a turban and a burnt-cork mustache, became grieved to see that “when his make-up was washed off again there was the same old baby face, with its shapeless nose and thick lips and little gray eyes. A big, fat boy, a ‘patapour,’ like Papa said.” A few years later, according to Troyat, “he had hoped his features would improve with time, but at nine, at ten, he still had his cauliflower nose and little steely eyes set deep in their sockets.” The hero of “Childhood,” it seems safe to presume, speaks for “little Leo” when he confesses, “I thought there would be no happiness on this earth for someone with such a broad nose, thick lips and small gray eyes as mine. I prayed to God for a miracle that would transform me into a handsome man, and I would have given all I had and all I might ever have in the future for a handsome face.” On the youthful photographs, he looks as handsome as most, and the face from “Childhood” that we remember is this one, after the hero, made bold by a little champagne, has energetically danced with the lovely little Sonya:

But what the mirror sees, or other people see, is less important than what the mind’s eye conceives. “My shyness was aggravated by the conviction that I was ugly,” states the narrator of “Boyhood.” “I am quite certain that nothing has such a telling impact on a man’s cast of thought as his appearance, and not his appearance itself so much as his conviction that it is attractive or unattractive.” Tolstoy thought of himself, with a certainty as unusual as his sense of moral isolation, as physically ugly, and the mother, herself homely, who might have weaned him away from self-dislike on this score (“I am told,” he noted in his “Recollections,” “that she was very fond of me, and called me, ‘
mon petit Benjamin
’ ”), died before he could remember her. In “Childhood” he constructs a mother
who offers the rather stern consolation, “Remember, Nikolenka, that no one will ever love you for your face, so you must try to be a good and clever boy.”

Try he did, becoming a cruelly demanding tutor to his own lazy and wayward pupil. “It’s sad to know,” he wrote, “that my mind is uneducated, imprecise and feeble (although supple), that my feelings lack constancy and strength, that my will is so wavering that the least circumstance destroys all my good intentions.” “I lack perseverance and persistence in everything. As a result I’ve become unbearably repulsive to myself.” This repulsiveness extends to his writing: “Got up early, got on with
Childhood;
it’s become extremely repulsive.” Of the same work, he wrote, “I’m absolutely convinced that it’s no good at all. The style is too careless and there are too few ideas to make it possible to forgive the emptiness of content.”

From the start, he was the most harshly self-critical of writers. Of
A Landowner’s Morning
, which he had begun with considerable enthusiasm (“Feel positively ashamed to be devoting my time to such follies as my stories when I’ve begun such a wonderful thing”), he finally concluded, “It’s definitely poor, but I’ll publish it,” just as, two months before in 1856, he had noted, “Finished
Youth;
poor, but sent it off.” Self-condemnation marches in stride with his growing oeuvre. “I’m altogether dissatisfied with the Caucasian tale” (8/18/57). “Received
Family Happiness
. It’s a shameful abomination” (5/9/59). “Corrected the proofs of
The Cossacks
—it’s terribly weak” (1/23/63). During the years of his two great novels, the carping diary falls all but silent, and does not show Tolstoy disparaging
War and Peace
. His work on
Anna Karenina
, however, proceeded by surges of enthusiasm and indifference, and at the end, as the novel thrived at the bookstores, he grumbled to his family, “What’s so difficult about describing how an officer gets entangled with a woman? There’s nothing difficult in that, and above all, nothing worthwhile. It’s bad, and it serves no purpose.” In
My Confession
, begun in 1879, he dismissed his great creative period in a paragraph: