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Grape Picking in Burgundy

I am now at that point of my life where I and my friends have mostly all finished university and are now settling into whichever stream will carry us to our retirement. Unsurprisingly, most people are working in The City, whether as lawyers or bankers or some other nebulous financial profession. A few braver and probably more admirable souls are pursuing careers in academia. And others are merely flailing about, looking for something solid to hold on to. It is true to say that we have not graduated at a particularly good time.

Of all my friends, however, it is Sophie for whom I have the most respect. She decided to work on a vineyard in Burgundy rather than engage in any kind of rat-race. Hard, physical labour, an outdoor environment – she knew, as Wittgenstein did, that these are often the surest paths towards a happy, long, and restful sleep. She went against pressures, social and otherwise, in pursuing this, and in doing so rather showed the rest of us up by demonstrating that whatever one’s educational background, however well-bred one is, still the ultimate barrier to us working in a similar field is only our own cowardice.

I was visiting Sophie last week, just before the year’s grape picking began. That was the plan, at any rate. But the start of the harvest is unpredictable, and in the week before I arrived, I learned, rather concerningly, that instead of spending three days relaxing with an old friend, I would have to be on the fields with her, toiling away. Well, I thought, at least it will be an experience. And indeed it was.

Prejudices

Though I grew up on a farm, I never really participated in its operations, and though I live in the countryside now, I still look on those who live from the land with uncomprehending admiration. Like most people without experience of actual farm labour, I had a somewhat idealised view of things. Rather than rely on what little I remembered from our hard life in Scotland, my main inspiration was Tolstoy’s Levin, out on the fields in Anna Karenina. I believed that work outside is tough but rewarding, an opportunity to fall into a community where everyone looks out for everyone else, and that on the fields God lurks underneath each unturned stone. At the same time, however, I retained a certain cynicism. I thought that farmers were boring and bigoted, and that I was probably wrong to like the idea of the work. In short, I believed while constantly doubting what I believed.

What was surprising was that my suspicions, or rather my hopes, about the work, were far closer to reality than my cynicism was.

People

The farm we were working on was only about ten hectares, or twenty-five acres, and it was family run. Unlike other vineyards, or indeed most fruit picking jobs (as I understand it), the work here was rather light. Many of the pickers were regulars, people who came year after year. So long as the work was done, the pace was not overly important. We had a long lunch break each day, and a good number of rests during the day too. Although we were bussed about in vans, there was little else to connect us with the horror stories one reads of about migrant fruit pickers.

There were about twenty-five of us to begin with, and that number grew slightly once the weekend came around. I was the only Englishman; there were about seven or eight Poles; the rest were all French, though not necessarily from Burgundy. Except for the Poles, who spoke English, everyone else spoke French. For me, someone who hasn’t studied French in about seven years, and who has never really spoken the language, having to speak French was something I really should have anticipated. What I could not have predicted, however, was how easily I found myself speaking it.

Everyone knows the stereotype of the English or American abroad who refuses even to attempt to speak the local language. The French with me certainly knew it. It was partly because of that that I found it so easy to speak – I knew that even trying would stand me in good stead. And then, I think, and just as important, there was the matter of perfectionism. Precisely because I was out of practice, precisely because I had not studied French at university, I did not give a damn how I sounded – I just wanted to speak. And so my words were wrong, my speech a bizarre blend of French and English and occasionally any other available language too, and to top it all off, I apparently spoke with a Russian accent. But I was speaking, and as the days went by, I was speaking more and more, complex sentences even. The words were coming back to me, dug up from whatever deep recesses of my mind that they had hidden themselves. I even managed to learn a few new words too.

I would not have had so much success with the French if the people there were not so friendly. Almost without exception everyone was willing to talk to me, in one or multiple languages. And I met a random, but loveable, bunch of people. One man, in his fifties, with a sailor’s faded tattoos, a squashed nose, and a cigarette permanently poking out of his mouth, seemed unable to pick without removing his shirt, revealing a gigantic belly that rolled over the top of his disarmingly short shorts. A young guy in his late teens, who had previously been an apprentice at the vineyard, wore a different pair of football tracksuits each day, could not speak any English whatsoever, but got incredibly excited every time I said the word “whisky” for him. He would come up to me, ramble away in French for a minute, enjoying the look of dismay on my face, and then start to laugh. His good nature was infectious. I felt rather better when one of the other Frenchmen told me that this fellow spoke with the local dialect and that none of them understood most of what he said either.

Each lunch we were served by an enormous woman who had turned herself into such a wobbler that she could only walk with the aid of a stick – she was aided in her cooking by an equally large husband. The food they produced, however, was always filling, and delivered in generous helpings. I met a Bhutanese-Frenchman who had trained as a monk and seemed to spend all day drinking, and lots of pleasant young Poles, picking just because it was a bit of fun. The only person who ever bothered me was a mister T, the tractor driver, who was about my age. On my first day I looked up to see the Frenchman storming down my row towards me, shouting and gesticulating wildly in his finest French. I thought perhaps I had left something down by the tractor, but it turned out – after everyone else had stopped picking and several volunteer translators had jumped to my aid – that I had been picking particularly awfully, and that mister T (whose role had nothing to do with this) was very displeased. When he had finished berating me, he noticed that the rest of the field was glaring at him, and he backed down somewhat. Unsurprisingly, after that he did not bother me further. And for my part I tried to pick a little better.

Property

Perhaps the people who I liked best were the owners of the vineyard. The boss, P-, was only twenty-nine, and he still shared some responsibilities with his father. The vineyard is run very much as a family affair. Without teamwork, the whole thing would fall apart. This is because of French inheritance law, which is among the strictest I have come across. Nobody can be disinherited, and property must be equally divided among the children. In practice, this means that France has a high rate of inheritance-related murders. It also means that major wine-producers, including major champagne brands like Taittinger, have suffered due to the enforced division of their lands. This vineyard has already been divided by a generation or two, and that means that some of the land belongs to people who don’t work there or have any real connection to the place – instead they simply rent it back to their family, as generously or stingily as they wish.

P, his father, his uncle, his sister, and his girlfriend – these were the family. Responsibilities are divided and so far, order and financial stability has been preserved. How many more generations it can last, however, is hard to say.

P himself was an interesting character, though I did not speak to him much. He is well-educated, tall, bespectacled, and was always trudging around in shorts and big brown wellington boots. There is something of a low-budget Harry Potter cosplay about him. But what is most striking is how out of place he is here, with his reading and his interests. He is quiet, bashful even, and slow to express an opinion. Whether he is a good leader is not my place to say, but certainly he is an atypical vineyard boss. I would like to write a story about him, one of those classical tales of one being forced, not entirely against one’s will, into fulfilling a duty that nevertheless takes one away from the place where one would really be able to flourish. P’s girlfriend was also lovely, an extraordinarily friendly woman who was an artist and seemed to carry the sun around in her chest. While we were picking she would always be suggesting silly games to play, like naming every writer beginning with each letter of the alphabet, and such like. Whenever P was with her, suddenly his reservations disappeared, and he too seemed to shine with a kind of light. He smiled, he played, he ran about with their dogs. There is a story there.

Picking

Each morning I woke up at sixish, and we started work on the fields at seven thirty. Grape picking can be automated, but currently the robots aren’t quite so good as the people. We are able to better identify things like rot and unripe grapes while we are picking, but it’s hard to say how long we’ll hold onto our advantage. It almost doesn’t matter, anyway, because fewer and fewer young people are getting involved with their local vineyards, and this means that automation will become a necessity in a few years, whatever happens with the technology.

The process of grape picking is simple. You are given some secateurs and told to gather your grapes in a bucket. People with large backpack-buckets go up and down collecting the contents of your bucket, once it’s filled, and take the grapes to the tractor, where they will be sorted a second time, and taken back to base. You can cut your grapes in different ways. If you have good core strength you can squat at each vine, or else you can kneel – the Poles all came with knee protection, as if they were actually going roller-skating. Finally, if you are lazy like me, you can sit on the ground, and slide crablike down your row. This is very slow, but less painful. And given work only ends at five-thirty, it’s best to avoid what pain you can.

We were cutting red grapes, at least while I was there. These grapes are easier to spot than white grapes, but they can still pose a challenge. You sometimes have to tear down masses of leaves to get to the grapes, giving the whole thing a rather adventurous feel, as though you are actually travelling through the Amazon jungle, but it means that it’s easy to miss a bunch or two. Sometimes the vines are diseased or have something else wrong with them and their leaves turn red, which makes it much harder to find the grapes underneath.

The grapes themselves can have issues too. Ideally, they are slightly glassy, translucent, like marbles. But when only half-ripe they can be almost matte, and a deep bluey-red. This year was not a good year for the harvest. We had to pick many bunches that were not wholly ready. And those that we picked also had major issues with rot, so that after picking each bunch we often had to stand there scraping the puffs of white dust out from the centre of the grapes. This took as much time as the picking, sometimes more. But if too much rot gets into the vats, the resultant wine can have its taste completely spoilt.

I was a slow worker. Except for one of the Polish girls, for whom it was also the first time, I was the slowest. But I did my best to make up for it by being diligent. It was a strange experience, working in a family business like this. I knew exactly who I was working for, and this made me redouble my efforts even when my strength was flagging. I wanted these people to succeed. I remember the despair in P’s uncle’s eyes as he sat there, sorting the rotten grapes. They could all see that everything was going wrong, and I didn’t want to make it any worse for them.

On the final day, it was raining. Heavily. We went out onto the fields late and returned after only an hour. It was hellish in the rain. I do not think that a comparison to the battlefields of the First World War is entirely out of the question, to the fields of mud of the Somme. My boots were caked in a toecap of mud. My clothes were wet and sticky with the stuff. In the darkness and the rain the grapes were almost impossible to make out. They seemed to live a kind of ghostly, phantom existence, forever hiding just out of reach behind another clump of leaves. My basket accumulated bunches incredibly slowly. A general hopelessness ruled the day. And though I was wearing a raincoat, it felt as if the rain was seeping through it into my bones. We all worked slowly then. And I was very glad when it was over.

Pride

Grape picking is generally not done in the rain because it is inefficient and ineffective. The other two days I worked the sun had shone and everything was golden. And it is those days that I will remember best, for those days are the days that I worked properly. However much he was an idiot for idolising peasants, I do not think that Tolstoy was wrong for valuing physical labour like this. For a couple of days I went to bed exhausted and slept well. My body ached, but in a good way – as though it were thanking me for using it the way it was supposed to be used after so long spent sitting in chairs and walking around cities. I felt part of a collective, I felt welcomed, I spoke French. These are all extraordinary things. I am sure that if I had stayed longer my body would have collapsed and I would have ended up sitting in the middle of a row, my bucket on my head, in tears. But I would not blame the work for that. I would only blame myself for not starting to work sooner.

Labouring alongside others draws us closer to them. Language proved no barrier, nor did education, nor class, nor anything else. I came across a common humanity, one that we always suspect the existence of, but don’t always see. I came across real work too – work in which one feels a relinquishing of the self, and even some of that magic force which takes hold of Levin while he’s out on the fields. While I was working I thought a lot about a particular quote of Whitman’s, one that to me reflects the reality of work as I experienced it:

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.
From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.
Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself section 12

Each man hits his place. I was dreadfully slow with my picking. But I was there; I took part; I felt a part of something greater than myself, and something valuable too. The pain I felt on falling asleep and on waking, the aches and sores – these I will forget. But the pride of working will go with me forever. I certainly do not think that we need to work on the fields every day of our lives. Life is not so simple as that. But spending a week or two of each year out there, working, sweating, burning – after having a taste of it, I cannot find anything to say against it. This is real life.

And next year, if my silly office job allows me to take the time off, I will experience it again.

Many Books or Few Books?

I have a book buying problem. They arrive, four or five at a time, like clockwork several times a month. Books upon books upon books. There is nothing else, save transport or food, that I really spend money on. The main thing, anyway, is that the books keep coming. At home, the bookshelves of my “library” are overflowing, even with a good part of my collection still at Cambridge, and the floors of both that room and my bedroom are covered with books which only occasionally have consented to let me place them in boxes.

There is nothing wrong with buying books, especially when you read them, of course. I do not read all of the books that arrive, but I would say with cautious optimism that I read about a quarter of those that do. After all, in every case I ordered the books for a reason, so that even those books which I have passed over may continue to hope that I will yet turn to them and say: “well why don’t we finally get to know each other?” I am sure that Hume understands me when I ignore him to pick out a fiction writer, and that George Eliot approves when I turn to the Germans I write essays on instead of to Middlemarch. Their time will come. Well, maybe not Hume’s.

It is difficult to imagine how amazing my collection would be to someone even from just a hundred years ago. The sheer quantity of books is perhaps less impressive than their variety. I have books from hundreds and hundreds of authors, from all around the world, on topics ranging from poetry to history to oil extraction to the finer points of Eastern Orthodoxy. In the days before paperbacks, people had fewer books, and they also tended to have collected editions. When they read, it meant that they read deeply but not widely. They came to know authors, rather than books. These days, we invariably do the opposite.

Nostalgia, especially for what one hasn’t experienced, is a rather dangerous state of mind. But still I often find myself wishing I had fewer books. Even if we subscribe to the various dicta stating that the vast majority of books are rubbish, still there are far too many books to read in this life that common consensus could call amazing. Even if we dedicated our every waking moment to reading we would not even scratch the surface of all there is to read because to really understand the best books we often have to return to them several times, each time excavating a new layer of meaning.

What bothers me in this is that the thought that because there are so many good books, we have forgotten how to read them well. I understand how to read a book. The essays I write at university seem proof of this. But I generally feel like searching for themes when I read is a rather idiotic enterprise. I may find the themes, and I may even have interesting thoughts on them, but that doesn’t mean I understand the book in a deep sense and it definitely doesn’t mean I enjoyed reading it. Books that we come back to, again and again, inhabit us like a kind of spirit. Books that we read, however intensely, on Friday for an essay due in on Monday, do not.

When I was hiking in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan I had only my Kindle with me, and though I had plenty of books on it too, I decided to focus on one – Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Perhaps it was the sheer contrast – of reading one of the world’s most urbane and “civilized” authors so far from anything that he would have recognised as civilization – but I really enjoyed the book. But more strangely, I also understood the book too, even though I was sleep-deprived and stressed. The limitations of the world around me allowed me to read the book as though it was the only book I had – to really care about what was written in it and to give the characters life within my head.

At home or at Cambridge, I am surrounded by books. And whether I want it or not, that fact influences how I read them. Even a book like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which I am reading now, and which is designed to be read slowly, in fits and starts, I seem to be racing through, even though I am reading only a few pages each day. When it comes to a work of philosophy, like Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, which I ought be reading this month and in the next, then I know in advance that I am not going to understand a thing. I always have another book on my mind, distracting me from what’s at hand. Only non-fiction I can get something out of, since with such books one is often looking for facts more than anything deeper.

One of my favourite times is when I am forced to pack up my books, such as before I go on holiday or back to university. I enjoy packing my books up at such times precisely because I am forced to choose between them. I always have a secret hope that I will select few enough books as to be forced to really spend quality time with them. Each time I am disappointed. I end up ordering books, or else the remaining space on my Kindle starts rapidly diminishing. Try as I might, the desire to read many books outweighs my intention simply to read a few.

It has even started affecting my studies. To answer any of the questions on an exam paper I only need two or three texts – long or short, it does not matter. The questions are so predictable that one really can get by with only having read two texts for each question. I, however, have read far more than that, as my own posts on this blog in these past two years have perhaps indicated. It is now a question of forcing myself to cut down, to focus. If not on two or three texts, then at least on five or six, rather than fifteen.

Forcing myself to reread for the purposes of exams is not the route to a deep understanding or affection for a book either, but perhaps it will help me start on that path. However, I rather doubt that. In my experience, reading for any reason except to enjoy the book for itself makes it impossible to form a real connection with it. It’s a bit like loving a person. As soon as we’re using them for any purpose, however benign, we cannot love them anymore.

There is nothing wrong with reading so many books and ordering so many books except that it does perhaps betray a certain attitude towards life that is unhealthy if left unchecked. Wendell Berry likes to write about the need for limits and a life that has “form”. What he means is a life where we have lived well within certain bounds – mostly those of the community – without letting ambitions or our desires get the better of us, for in those cases our fates will inevitably be disappointment. A life that is focused on quantity, rather than quality, as so many of ours are these days, is a dangerous life because it leaves us no chance to be pleased with what we have. In trying to read everything we end up reading everything badly and nothing well. Books themselves become tools for sounding clever, rather than wise and lifelong companions.

I don’t know what the solution is to my problem. Perhaps I just need to stop buying books. Obviously, I do! I have tried, without much success, such solutions as only buying a new book after I have read an old one. And in recent months I have been reading more, so that the ratio of “read” to “unread” books is improving. But that still does not mean that I am reading well. Alas, time and time again I am reminded that reading is not just about dragging your eye from one side of a page to the other, but instead is an ability that can be made better and more effective with the correct frame of mind and environment.

In the end, I am left only with a kind of hope that once my studies finish and I am no longer obliged to read books, I may be able to read those books that I choose to read with a more honest eye. I imagine doing a master’s degree unrelated to literature somewhere far from my little library and taking only two or three books with me. Perhaps then I will finally read Middlemarch. Not for bragging rights, because I have read it once already, but for my soul, because back then I read it badly and can’t remember a thing. One can only hope.

Readers, what’s the solution?

Author as Prophet: the Problem with Late Tolstoy

Towards the end of his time writing Anna Karenina Tolstoy had something of a spiritual crisis and it almost killed him. He suddenly realised that the life he was living was pointless. Worse still, he was unable to identify any way of living that would return a sense of meaning to it. In A Confession, a short work of non-fiction published soon after the conversion, Tolstoy describes being driven nearly to suicide as a result of his despair. The only way out of his predicament except for suicide, as Tolstoy saw it, was through belief in God. The spiritual transformation that then came over him had profound implications for his work and the rest of his life. He eventually abandoned the city, lived like a peasant in the countryside, and began a career as a pamphleteer. What fiction did come this period was blunt and didactic, with rare exceptions like Hadji-Murat.

Many people would consider Tolstoy one of the greatest writers of all time, but they rarely have the late Tolstoy in mind. The late Tolstoy is a strange creature and just as strange a writer. I’m currently reading his only novel from the period, Resurrection, which partly prompts this post. The other prompt is that I’m dipping into essays by the wonderful American writer Wendell Berry, who seems to have sprung from the cradle just the same as Tolstoy eventually became. Berry is a defender of the old and simple ways, of a faith bound closely to the soil. I like Berry a lot, but something’s bothering me about his writing, just as Resurrection is bothering me, and just as other things Tolstoy wrote late in life have bothered me.

By “bothered”, I do not mean that my spirit is touched – it’s not that kind of bothering. If anything, the problem is the opposite. The problem is that I’m struggling to care. It’s all well and good to simply accuse the late Tolstoy of didacticism, but I think there’s some value in trying to go into detail to answer what exactly has gone wrong. There must be a reason why Anna Karenina and War and Peace are beloved by all, but Resurrection has failed to be resurrected from its canonical grave. In this essay I’d like to have a go working it out.

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

To begin with, it’s worth going back and thinking about Dostoevsky and his own fiction. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are world famous, but generally people prefer one or the other. I started out life as a huge fan of Dostoevsky, but now I’m in Tolstoy’s camp. What Dostoevsky does well is often called polyphony, after the name given it by the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. By “polyphony” I mean that Dostoevsky creates a great many characters who seem to be existing independently of their author. Their views are no longer Dostoevsky’s own. But more than that, their views are so developed, and so passionately felt, that the characters seem like they cannot be the creation of Dostoevsky at all, but rather real figures, animated by belief. I cannot think of any other writer who has written people who feel so intensely as Dostoevsky’s characters do.

For a young person, these kinds of characters are well-suited to themselves. When you are young you want desperately to believe in something. Almost without exception we were all, in our youth, hopelessly idealistic. Dostoevsky provides, in a way, a buffet of ideas for us to try. But over time we come to realise that these ideas are for the most part incompatible with a good life. Suicides, murders, and despair are the keynotes of Dostoevsky’s fiction, and they are so because they are the consequences of the characters’ ideas. Those few characters who seem to find happiness are religious, like Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, or Sonya. These characters are not particularly interesting. After all, we say, religion is for idiots.

Tolstoy’s Early and Middle Fiction

Tolstoy’s fiction before his late period is not the battleground of ideas that Dostoevsky’s is. There are characters who believe passionately, such as Levin’s radical brother in Anna Karenina, but they are few and far between. Most characters do not believe in anything, at least not actively. Anna Karenina wouldn’t say she believes in love – she just does. The same would go for Vronsky and his honour, or Dolly and her family. These people are unideological because they are all striving for one thing – a good life. Dostoevsky’s characters don’t really seem to care about happiness, and they are not striving for anything in particular. For them, the act of searching is enough. They just need some kind of outlet for the passionate feeling they have within them. The outlet’s nature, whether murder or kindness, is neither here nor there.

There are people in Tolstoy’s fiction who are after answers, who have that additional store of passion needed to demand a kind of seeking. They are the likes of Pierre and Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace, and Levin in Anna Karenina. But their crises are not the same as those of Dostoevsky’s heroes. Levin’s problem is that he is looking for an authentic and moral life. He wants to know how to live. He looks at the world of the city, where people like Stiva Oblonsky spend their days eating oysters and their nights chasing after women, and he’s disgusted. In the countryside, sitting on a haybale or cutting the wheat, he feels a kind of peace. We may call it a connection with God, but I think that that would be incorrect. What he feels is a oneness with the world, something that is more pantheistic than Christian.

Spiritual Vacuums, past and present

We can always look to Nietzsche as a great prophet of atheism, but he’s not the first by a long shot. From the Enlightenment onwards God and organised religion faced salvo upon salvo from intellectual circles, with nary any intellectually-grounded fire returned. Society was left with an absent centre, a spiritual vacuum. This was filled in many cases with radical politics. Marx called religion the “opium of the masses”, the implication being that revolutionary communism was what they really should be smoking. Nationalism also filled the void. At first that nationalism was well-intentioned, a unifying force, as it was in Italy, Germany, Greece. But in the 20^th century both Marx’s teachings and nationalism morphed into horrible monsters, leaving millions and millions of dead as a result. Nietzsche, of course, proposed his own solutions to “nihilism”, but they’ve hardly filtered out and aren’t always to everyone’s taste to begin with.

So we are left today with an even greater blank than there existed back then. Nationalism nowadays is reactionary and selfish, while left wing politics can seem so focused upon marginalised groups that any utopian thinking about the greatest marginalised group of all – the working class – appears to have fallen by the wayside. More importantly, it’s not even clear if there are enough workers left to really have a revolution. Marxism has, in some sense, just fizzled out.

Our modern-day preachers, such as Jordan Peterson, attempt to fill the void for their followers. Peter Singer’s Effective Altruism attempts to provide a philosophically-sound answer to the question of what we must do, telling us that we should give away as much as we can and focus on raising the world’s happiness in utilitarian terms. Nationalism and Islamic terrorism, meanwhile, both work by preying upon those who feel dislocated from the world they inhabit. The hatred many people feel for “outsiders” is not driven by the outsiders themselves, but by the need to feel something. And anything is better than nothing. For, there are plenty among us who feel just that – nothing, or else depression and despair. For those people, the conditions of late capitalism have successfully snuffed out their hope. And hope is one of the few things capable of expanding into the space left by the spiritual void.

One Reason Why we Read Tolstoy

To people today, characters like Levin and Pierre – and their novels – are attractive because they record a search for meaning. Not for that passionate, violent meaning that dominates Dostoevsky’s works. Most of us don’t need something to die for; we just want something to live for. We want that peace and calm in our (possibly non-existent) souls. Tolstoy’s fiction, with its emphasis on the simple, rural life, is all about that quiet faith which people once-upon-a-time would have found in religion, but now they cannot get from it for any number of valid reasons. Anna Karenina’s faith is attractive because there’s nothing to believe in except that Levin’s searching is worthwhile. There’s no God at the end of it, whatever Levin seems to think. There’s simply a sense of wholeness. A good, humble life – a virtuous life – has filled the spiritual vacuum he had once had.

And when we read Anna Karenina or War and Peace, we get the sense that we too can see the gap within us filled too, if only we go out and seek the answers, and then live them when we find them.

The Late Tolstoy – The Prophet Defeats the Disciple

After Tolstoy had his conversion, he had all the answers. No longer was he content to describe the path to harmony, he wanted to force that specific harmony upon us. As time went on that harmony became ever more specific, and ever harder to stomach. A simple life became a particularly Russian peasant life. A kind of vague pantheism became a radical form of anarchic Christianity. For some people, this is to their liking. But I have spent enough time in the Russian countryside of the present day to have my own view on what the Russian peasant’s life was probably like, and it’s not exactly positive. Tolstoy’s earlier works are so effective because they see the value of searching; his later works seem only interested in the destination.

Resurrection

Take Resurrection. I am about half-way through, and I have definitely read enough to comment on it. Tolstoy’s story is not very subtle, not because he’s forgotten how to write but because didacticism, convincing us that he’s right, is now the most important thing. Take the very first sentence, in Rosemary Edmonds’ translation:

“Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down the trees and driving away every beast and every bird – spring, however, was still spring, even in the town.”

This is great prose, but it is impossible to read this without feeling Tolstoy behind it. The late Tolstoy can no longer see objects without also seeing the way they fit into his moral system and feeling obliged to put them within said system. And this quickly becomes grating.

Resurrection is, from the title onwards, not exactly coy about its moral bent. A young man, Prince Nekhlyudov, finds himself on jury duty, tasked with judging for murder and theft a girl who he had once seduced. It turns out that his careless seduction, one winter’s night, of this servant girl, led to a whole string of events resulting in her presence in the courtroom some years later: she became pregnant, was kicked out, found work again and lost it, and eventually became a prostitute, her job when the murder took place. Nekhlyudov recognises his complicity in her fallen nature and determines to set things right, whatever the cost. Thus begins the process of his spiritual regeneration.

He breaks off his relations with a young lady, moves out of his house, gives away most of his land to his peasants, and is within a hundred pages far further down the path to a new life than Levin or Pierre managed to get in almost a thousand. Tolstoy is in such a rush to show us the wrongs of the world through Nekhlyudov’s refreshed eyes that he completely forgets to make Nekhlyudov truly breathe to begin with. His conversion is all too brief, and it feels cheap. In my head I can easily picture Tolstoy standing behind his hero with a whip, forcing Nekhlyudov to morally contort himself into the shape Tolstoy demands of him rather than letting things take their natural course.

But Nekhlyodov is not our only hero, for we also follow Maslova, the prostitute he wronged. She smokes; she drinks; she’s rude and rough. But when I read about her I can’t help but feel I’m basically just reading a list of things Tolstoy doesn’t approve of, things that Maslova will undoubtedly abandon once she’s been redeemed herself. Compare Maslova with Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov never feels like he’s waiting for redemption. There’s no sense of inevitability there. In a religious sense, perhaps, but not in a thematic sense, from the perspective of the story itself. Maslova, however, needs to be redeemed. Tolstoy just can’t leave her alone.

Both Maslova and Nekhlyodov feel like pawns upon the pages of Tolstoy’s novel, and their only purpose seems to be to advance Tolstoy’s views. They don’t seem to have any kind of independence, either of thought or of action. Reading the late Tolstoy doesn’t feel like a journey – it feels like being shackled and dragged along a specific path. We know where the destination is when we set out, whereas with Levin or Pierre we always have the feeling that there are other roads, other options for them to potentially take.

This lack of human freedom in Resurrection, when it’s coupled with Tolstoy’s didacticism, is exhausting. Like Karolina Pavlova in A Double Life, Tolstoy’s anger leaves Resurrection feeling unbalanced. It is too clear who is good and who is bad. Every detail, from Nekhlyudov’s golden cufflinks to Maslova’s drinking, seems to have its purpose as a criticism of the world as it lies before Tolstoy’s eyes. He can’t see anything without judging it, and the judgements are always unfavourable. In spite of Tolstoy’s determination to bring us to the good life, what actually happens is that the experience of reading Resurrection is depressing. And not because it’s a story about prisons.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

A good comparison for Resurrection is another one of Tolstoy’s later works, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I reread recently. Ivan was published in 1886, ten years before Resurrection, and it shows. The novella still tries to take us towards a good life, but the methods are more subtle, and the work as a whole is more joyous.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is first and foremost an extremely funny book. Tolstoy absolutely hates Ivan’s stupid boring vapid existence, but he understands that it’s better to dismantle it through laughter than try to annihilate it with a diatribe. Take the moment one of Ivan’s friends beholds his dead body and thinks “the only thing he was certain of was that in this situation you couldn’t go wrong if you made the sign of the cross”. Or how the first thought of people, hearing he’s died, is “a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t”. In undermining the solemnity of the occasion Tolstoy has his purpose – he wants to show the citizens as selfish, unvirtuous, and themselves unprepared for death. But he does it in a way that’s a joy to read.

Where Resurrection is blunt, Ivan is full of wonderful ironies and subtleties. Things that stuck out for me included the way Ivan receives his fatal injury while decorating his drawing room – meaning that he literally dies because of the banal existence he’d been living. Another moment was when Ivan is lying there dying, and his daughter’s fiancé comes and talks about an actress with him instead of showing any kind of compassion. The novella is really funny, and yet it is perfectly capable of conveying a serious message too. In fact, the seriousness is heightened by its contrast to the levity. When Ivan tells himself at last that “death has gone”, it’s a magical moment. In Resurrection, which is entirely drab, there’s far less room for any spiritual manoeuvre.

An Evangelical is Rarely Convincing…

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve spent some time volunteering in a prison, so I know a little about what Tolstoy describes in Resurrection from personal experience. I also once volunteered in a community project with people who had Down’s syndrome. Both of these experiences proved life-changing, but there’s a reason I don’t write about them, either fictionally or non-fictionally. That reason is, simply put, that I don’t think there’s much value in talking about them. The greatest lesson I took away from both experiences is that experience is much more important than thought. This is not something I can transfer, really, in writing. I don’t want to be like Tolstoy and tell people what to think. I have my views on rehabilitation, just as I have my views on everything else, but I have no desire to evangelise.

This a good time to think back to Dostoevsky again, who I deliberately brought up at the beginning. What happens in the fiction of late Tolstoy is something akin to what we would see in Dostoevsky’s works if they had only one fully-developed character – Tolstoy himself. Without showing the possibility of passionate alternative views, of the sort that (for example) each of the Karamazov brothers offer in their novel, Tolstoy sucks the ideological air from his late fiction, leaving only his own viewpoint. But in doing so, he sucks more than ideology from his pages – in some real sense he removes the life from his stories altogether.

Tolstoy’s “Good Life” in Practice

And Tolstoy himself, who ultimately lived what Dostoevsky simply had his characters feel, is the best argument against his own late fiction. He did not really find the good life – he just found something that eased his conscience and he tried to force it upon others. He tore his family apart through bickering and pettiness. Aside from stunts like making shoes by hand and walking to far-off monasteries, he could never bring himself to fully abandon his aristocratic position and home. He became an object of ridicule, or else of pity. And though he had his followers, I don’t think he was happy. Not in the way that Levin becomes happy, at least.

The spirit of searching, of passionate inquiry, that dominates Anna Karenina and War and Peace, is fundamentally unideological. It doesn’t tell us how to think, only to think. But once Tolstoy’s views are calcified in his old age, there’s no longer any point in us readers thinking for thinking’s sake – thinking now only has value inasmuch as it can lead us to Tolstoy’s views. And this demands not a garden of delightful ideas, but a path along an empty alley, at the end of which stand Tolstoy and his beliefs, and nothing besides.

Stories- not Authors – Change Us

I don’t think I can respect any writer who writes without a sincere desire to make the world a better place; but I also don’t think I can truly enjoy a writer who lets that desire overwhelm their stories and whatever else they might be able to say. The fire within them must be for the act of striving after answers, and not for the answers themselves.

Tolstoy’s mistake in his later fiction is that he forgets that although many people come to fiction to learn, they come to learn for themselves, and not to be told what to think. That is why, I think, the best fiction, in the sense of morally best as well as greatest, has always been didactic not in the sense of telling us what to think, but in reminding us of the value of thinking, of trying to find the answers for ourselves. The best fiction does not change us – it helps us to change ourselves. Anna Karenina, like War and Peace, shows what changing looks like. Both do little more than that, and for that we should be thankful.

Conclusion

The question “what must we do” has bothered me almost my entire life. I have looked everywhere for the answer, and though I have found many answers, including in Wendell Berry and Tolstoy, I have never found something that made me think it was worth giving up the search and stopping where I stood. The day we stop seeking is the day we stop growing; it is the day we lose our dynamism and become boring. It is a bitter irony that those searching for goodness and the good life are often better and kinder people than those who’ve stop at a certain idea of goodness and way of living, thinking they’re finished. Life itself is also much more interesting when we keep ourselves searching. Tolstoy himself, perhaps, understood this at the very end. A. N. Wilson ascribes to the dying Tolstoy the following words: “Search, also go on searching”.

Here at least, the late Tolstoy is absolutely right.