WAR AND PEACE, PIECEMEAL (1)

About three hundred pages in, end of Volume One of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, it’s time to take stock. Reading War and Peace seems to conjure more readily comparisons to the Hollywood epic, or TV Mini-Series, than to the epic poems of antiquity. What Tolstoy does well is what every storyteller, particularly in motion pictures, has tried to do well after him: give us action and give us interaction, with enough context to keep it interesting, but never to bury depiction with exposition. In other words, in that pithy phrase, ‘show, don’t tell.’ Tolstoy’s great novel, so far, is very readable because it is comprised of scenes, most of which are short and very focused. It gives us a mammoth tale in bite-sized chunks, as it gives us a cast of characters who are just distinctive enough to keep confusion at bay, but which are also more or less of a type, which is to say, aristocrats rather unremarkable in themselves.

So, as with many genteel drawing-room dramas, part of the fascination is seeing 'how the other half lives.' Tolstoy looks back at the generation of his grandparents, and he has the great good fortune to be an insider to both the aristocracy and the military, the shaping forces of that world. The gauntlet that Tolstoy flings down, for the novel, is the illusion of rendering all levels of society equally well: Napoleon and Alexander, the Russian czar; the aristocrats in their various capacities -- Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Count Nikolai Rostov are the two we follow into battle in Volume One, both present at the debacle of Austerlitz as Volume One ends -- as well as the generals, the hussars, the enlisted men, the horses even; then there are the ladies seeking suitable union (as for instance Princess Elena Kuragin) or avoiding unsuitable union (as for instance Princess Marya Bolkonsky); there’s the illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov, Pierre, who inherits everything, despite the efforts of his more legimate kin to put themselves forward. It’s a cast that only vaguely includes the commoners, but somehow Tolstoy’s grasp of his characters’ milieu, his magisterial 'what I assume, you shall assume' register, makes aristocrats common enough even for American readers born in the twentieth century.

In the first Volume most of the intrigues center on the Kuragin family, trying to maneuver more favor from the dying Count Bezukhov, and trying to maneuver a comfortable marriage for young Anatole. The figure who emerges as the most indelible is the old Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky who runs his household in an unvarying manner, and is pleased that his devout daughter Marya refuses Anatole Kuragin. At the end of Part One, the going-off-to-war leave-taking of the patriarch by Prince Bolkonsky’s son, Andrei, is the first scene that overwhelmed me with Tolstoy’s precise grasp of tone. In cinema or television, the scene would be fraught with some kind of emotive soundtrack rendering a garden variety 'emotionality,' that flattening of affect that says, in effect, that what these characters feel is what 'we all feel.' What makes Tolstoy the lord of realist fiction is that he knows that what 'everyone' feels is what convention dictates they feel, but that what each individual feels is what their own natures dictate. And what he’s after is the individual natures of humanity depicted in the confines of rather rigorous conventions: interactions in high society salons, rituals of courtship and marriage, rituals of death, enactments of inheritance and social placement, tensions within hierarchies, both familial and martial, the rituals of war and the strategies of battle, and, so to speak, the best-laid plans of mice and men.

Tolstoy’s narrative opens in medias res upon a society facing the threat of the foreign invader. It’s 1805 and Napoleon, or, as the Russian aristocracy like to call him, ‘Buonaparte,’ is already on the war-path. War and Peace is a tale that had to be told: a crucial period of European history from the perspective of that great power to the East. Tolstoy’s definitive conceit is that we are being allowed to visit ‘behind the scenes’ at the cultural moment when the first major pan-European threat of modern times emerged and was quelled. The context, then, is the last hurrah of the old aristocracy of Old Europe, while the element of historical fact that veers toward absurdity is that the Russian aristocracy speak to each other in French. It’s as if a major country had already been colonized by a foreign power and culture. It’s so remarkable that no one remarks on it. The French are the enemy, and yet adopting their language and their manner is the measure of one’s civility and standing in Russian society. Is there any way such a culture could endure in modern times?

SEIZED BY CÉZANNE

If you grew up in the Philly area like I did, you had the good fortune of living in proximity to some great Cézannes -- in the collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the Barnes Foundation, in NYC at the Met and MoMA, in DC at the National Gallery -- so the notion of going to a show like Cézanne and Beyond (at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) might give you a certain ‘been there, done that’ feeling. Not so. I saw the show yesterday and fell in love again with the man who invented modern painting.

The show sets thirty to forty Cézannes against works by later artists who can claim the Master as a major influence. There are some great pairings, à la those Art History exams where two slides are set side-by-side and your task is to identify both and write an essay comparing them. My favorite, on that score, was Mondrian’s Ginger Jar still-life next to a Cézanne which also prominently featured a large jar. And the Jasper Johns painting on a table drawer took on extra aura situated next to a Cézanne still-life with a similar drawer, and a Giacometti painting of a table with drawers, topped by a solitary orange. (The Giacometti, by the way, was stunning and is in the possession of the Met, though I can’t recall ever seeing it on exhibit before.)

On first entering the exhibit, I was primarily interested in the painters other than Cézanne (didn’t I already know all I needed to know about the latter?), and learned that, in the 1920s, Arshile Gorky was able to knock-off still-lifes of fruit and views of buildings that were dead-ringers for Cézanne’s style of the 1870s-80s, no mean feat (and so I’m looking forward to the Philly museum’s Gorky retrospective, coming this October). But not engaging immediately with the Cézanne paintings may have had more to do with the fact that I entered the exhibit at about 11:30, when a drove of people did, most of whom sported headphones and devices allowing them to listen to commentary, which meant they pretty much stood en masse in front of whichever painting they first came to that was included on their walky-talky thingy. Eventually, intrepid art admirer that I am, I was able to doubleback and get a gander at paintings formerly obscured by thick crowds of staring listeners. (The funniest moment, to me, came when I’d spent ten minutes or so fully engaged by a Cézanne landscape only to turn from my corner perch to find a dozen or more people all looking at my painting.)

My favorite area of the exhibit was a little corridor identified on the brochure as “Toward Abstraction,” featuring a Cézanne landscape I’d never seen before in person (though it’s owned by the Baltimore Art Museum). No paintings in this area had ‘talk’ symbols and so were largely ignored. The Baltimore St. Victoire was a standout with its abstract layering of planes of space in the foreground; not yet become a mosaic of broken planes as in the later St. Victoire paintings, the areas of this landscape read like distinct painterly treatments, risking here and there stylized incoherence that was offset by naturalistic color overall and patches of naturalisitc rendering, particularly in the sky and in the distant mountain. The overlap of those distinct areas produced a fascinating landscape that, like the wonderful still-life (from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris) with piles of fruit and energetic, mountainous swatches of cloth, was a wonder of emerging and receding forms and of effects of color. In the d’Orsay still-life the contrast between the colorful drape (a background that contained the entire display, but for a small glimpse of table) and the white tablecloth bunched and draped beneath stray fruit and a display plate lifted against an abyss of colored shapes (including what seemed to be a house in the distance) was a disquisition on the relations of forms to color in painting. Also not to be missed is “Large Pine and Red Earth” from The Hermitage in St. Petersberg, a painting the like of which I’d never seen, where the bravura treatment of foliage (always remarkable in Cézanne) renders tight, mosaic-like patterns irradiating from and framing a central tree that literally bridges earth and sky.

In the furthest room were a number of landscapes, from the 1870s to the 1890s to the 1900s, most from the area of St. Victoire. The Jasper Johns paintings placed in this room helped to underscore a point that I seem never quite willing to relinquish: to some degree, mastery of the art of painting is about the skill of applying paint, is about the touch in handling the brush. The Johns paintings looked like hamfisted mockeries -- as indeed they are, mockeries of Abstract Expressionism -- and so rather out of place in a room with canvases where the Master takes apart painting, while still painting masterfully.

After leaving the exhibit, I went over to the museum’s permanent collection to revisit again that great story in the history of painting (specifically French painting) that takes us from Corot’s lightly feathered trees and chalky landforms in the 1860s, to the groundbreakingly flippant brushstrokes of Manet in the 1870s, to Monet’s miraculous decade, the 1880s, where the rendering of light in painting is re-invented, all of which served to underscore that the paintings I’d just seen in the Cézanne exhibit showed that, in the 1890s, the only game in town was Cézanne.

By the 1900s, Cézanne begins to look too much, for my money, like Matisse, so shamelessly did the later master crib from him, but I had emerged from the exhibit thinking, ‘conjure up what fin-de-siècle fulminations you will, the only reason the 1890s matter, for art, is because that’s when Cézanne achieved his full method.’ Et tout le reste n'est que l’histoire de l’art.

BOOK TALK

Facebook abounds in quizzes. I haven’t yet taken tests to determine which philosopher or movie hero or pop diva I am, nor what city, ethnic food, or personality type. And no one has tagged me to reveal 25 things about myself. But I’m an inveterate list-maker and when I saw this quiz on the page of a facebook friend, I felt an overwhelming desire to appropriate it and give my responses. So, though no one asked me for this, here it is.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Don DeLillo, I have all his novels: 14.
2) What book do you own the most copies of?
James Joyce’s Ulysses: four
3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Not particularly, what’s that about?
4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
I’ve gotten over that, but I used to have a major crush on Jessica Swanlake.
5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
James Joyce’s Ulysses, probably up to about ten times, but parts of it many more times.
6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
Gerald Gottlieb’s retelling of the story of Ulysses: The Adventures of Ulysses
7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
The Truth about Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie
8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee
9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
I’m not tagging anyone, but, I believe that no one should shuffle off this mortal coil without reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, they can even take my class in it if they want help. Apart from that, I’d say everyone should read at least one Dostoevsky novel, Don Quixote, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. But the recent book I’m recommending to everyone is the answer to #8.
10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
I really don’t know or much care. James Joyce never got one, thus invalidating any claim the Prize has to legitimacy, in my view. So I have no real hopes for Thomas Pynchon, my favorite living writer. Coetzee already got it, as did Marquez. I think I’m more inclined to say who should not get it. But if Roth gets it, I'll be pleased.
11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Well, when I was young I wanted to see a movie made of Dostoevsky’s Devils (The Possessed), I even casted it in my mind; I still think it should be possible to do an accurate film of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but I’ve given up hope after Branagh's travesty. I tend to like books that are unfilmable, but T. C. Boyle’s Drop City might be fun as a movie.
12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Any of Pynchon’s novels, Ulysses (badly made into a film twice), One Hundred Years of Solitude, just about anything I really like, really.
13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I don’t know about ‘weirdest’ and I don’t remember dreams that well, so I’ll simply cite the most memorable: once in grad school while reading lots of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Ezra himself appeared in a dream (I think I sorta stumbled upon him sitting somewhere, maybe on campus) and was reciting Cantos, but these were not poems that I’d actually read. When I woke up I could dimly recall some of the lines he recited because, by the end, the lines were simply happening in my own mind. That was pretty weird, come to think of it.
14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
Cover to cover? I mean, I amused myself for awhile in a book café once reading Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Barry Williams’ account of being Greg Brady in The Brady Bunch, and, also in that café, skimmed No One Here Gets Out Alive, Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkin’s account of Jim Morrison, which is appallingly bad. In fiction, the award goes to William M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, a pretty wretched post-apocalyptic sci-fi tale I actually had to teach as a grad student at Princeton. Ask my daughter about my many pithy and scathing put-downs of the book.
15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Finnegans Wake, which I’ve read three times in its entirety, and parts of it many, many more times.
16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
I haven’t seen many enacted on stage; does the film Titus (of Titus Andronicus) by Julie Taymor count? I also watched a BBC production of Measure for Measure which, while not ‘obscure,’ doesn’t seem to get staged much.
17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
The Russians, at first. Dostoevsky was major for me, from my teens. And Chekhov’s plays. I still need to read War and Peace, though. Proust and Flaubert are two biggies of my twenties, and I want to re-read the Stendhal novels I read so quickly in grad school. And maybe even make it through a couple Balzacs. So, probably the French, since Proust was a three time (in its entirety) read for me. I used to have a saying: there are two kinds of people in this world: those who have read Proust, and those who haven’t.
18) Roth or Updike?
Roth, easily. I’m a major Updike detractor. His stuff really annoys the hell out of me.
19) Hemingway or Faulkner?
Faulkner, the only American novelist that can give Dostoevsky a run for his money.
20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, in that order.
21) Austen or Eliot?
Austen, though Middlemarch might be the greatest single 19th century British novel.
22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I already said it: I haven’t read War and Peace; but I have the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation now and I have resolved to read it this year (my 50th). In English: Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, then probably Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
23) What is your favorite novel?
James Joyce's Ulysses; runners-up are One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez); Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), Lolita (Nabokov), Madame Bovary (Flaubert), The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky); Don Quixote (Cervantes), and, if you count the entire thing as a novel, Proust’s Recherche.
24) Play?
Hamlet, of course, with Macbeth a close second. But I’m also very partial to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard; Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia; Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
25) Poem?
All-time favorite poem?? How about some greatest hits? Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn; Keats’ To a Nightingale; Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode; Whitman’s Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking; Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat; Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; Stevens’ Sunday Morning; Crane’s Broken Tower; Thomas’ Fern Hill; Ashbery’s Soonest Mended
26) Essay?
Not too many essays have burned themselves into my brain, so I’m simply going to say Emerson, and go with the one I’ve assigned to students: Self-Reliance. For more recent essayists, I’ll go with Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Virginia Woolf is a great essayist but I can’t name a particular favorite. The greatest essayist of alltime, of course, is the inventor of the form: Montaigne.
27) Short story?
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka; or The Dead by James Joyce; I have to admit I’m not much of a short story reader, but collections I’d strongly recommend: Joyce’s Dubliners; Kafka’s Collected Stories; Nabokov’s Dozen (my favorite is Spring in Fialta); and Salinger’s Nine Stories (my favorite is The Laughing Man); recent favorite: the brilliant Pastoralia by George Saunders.
28) Work of non-fiction?
My favorite scholarly work is probably Angus Fletcher’s Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode; my favorite biography is James Joyce by Richard Ellmann; favorite work of reportage: Michael Herr’s Dispatches; memoir: Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking; for cultural history, a recent read I really enjoyed: Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America by Jonathan Gould; for world history, any of the series by Eric Hobsbawm.
29) Who is your favorite writer?
James Joyce, obviously.
30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
I would’ve said John Updike, but he recently died. So... probably Stephen King, in the sense that he has great commercial success and is starting to be taken more ‘seriously’; otherwise, the insufferably prolific Joyce Carol Oates
31) What is your desert island book?
Probably Ulysses; I would set out to memorize the entire thing, then eat the book. But I might actually prefer The Complete Shakespeare.
32) And ... what are you reading right now?
I’m about to begin War and Peace, seriously. I’m in the midst of Gogol’s St. Petersberg stories, D. A. Powell’s Chronic (poems), Allen Grossman’s The Ether Dome (poems), and have gotten not too far yet in Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare: Will in the World, but am better than halfway through Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe.

DYLANIN’

Together Through Life, Bob Dylan’s third album of the 21st century, was released on Tuesday. I’ve been listening to it pretty regularly because, though it didn’t seem like the kind of thing I most wanted to hear when I first heard it Tues-Wed, it has come to dominate the mood in these uneasy early spring days.

'Beyond here lies nothin’ -- nothin’ done and nothin’ said.' The first song is one reason I keep playing the album: it has a no-nonsense, quick grab that doesn’t let up. It has the feel of a song that sums up a lot, but without the kind of lyrical brilliance of a song like 'Times Have Changed.' Instead, it offers a groove, and horns, and Dylan’s voice, in its shrugging, worn-out grimness, seems just the right mood: no quarter asked, none given.

'I’m always on my guard, admitting life is hard' The second track has a bit of a ‘Mood Indigo’ feel -- mellow, aged, wizened even. This is Dylan in some old crooner incarnation, the old crooner on hard times (just listen to that cracked voice), but still able to put it across sweet when called for. Time to follow those spotlight stepping stones off-stage, folks. He even hums as he goes...

'I just want to say that Hell is my wife’s home town.' Delivered almost with a carny bark, with a nice little walking blues riff puttering around the lyrics, this is a stand-out. Very amusing, in a style that Dylan rarely attempts -- but think of something like 'Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat' for its deadpan throwaway jabs. And the little chuckles that surface in the fade are priceless. Willie Dixon, bless him, gets credit on the tune, and I suspect Bob’s delivery is a bit of a tip of the hat as well -- he's never sounded more like an old bluesman.

'If You Ever Go to Houston' was the first song to bore me, and though I’ve become a bit more positive about its midtempo step-out, I can’t reconcile myself to that incessant accordian. And this is the place to note that on this album David Hidalgo’s accordian is way too out-front a good part of the time; when it’s in the background, it’s acceptable, but when it carries the tune, as here, its drone makes me want to drop off. (I have nothing against the instrument itself, since Tom Waits and Richard Thompson and the Mekons have all used it quite effectively.)

Closing ‘the side’ is 'Forgetful Heart' (‘lost your power of recall / every little detail you don’t remember at all') which has some of the ominous sound of songs like 'Going, Going, Gone' or 'Not Dark Yet,' helped along by Mike Campbell’s brooding guitar -- nothing flash, nothing stabbing, just a long meditative scowl. 'Can’t take much more / why can’t we love like we did before' -- the lyrics are as if penned to one’s own recalcitrant seat of emotions, and ends with the album’s best couplet: 'The door has closed forevermore / if indeed there ever was a door.'

Start the next side with one of those peppy little blues struts that seem to me must be much more fun to play than they are to listen to: 'Jolene' doesn’t get up to much, but it does resurrect the ghost of Jerry Garcia a bit. Bear in mind that Garcia’s longtime lyricist Robert Hunter collaborated with Dylan on all but one track; this is the song where that’s very much evident, as it’s easy to imagine Jerry cruising his way through this one, getting everybody to do their best 'and you’re the queen' steps.

'This Dream of You' is the song sans Hunter. This is one where the accordian is really necessary to the feel Dylan goes for: it has to sound like a night wandering through its courses at the local cantina, or is that bistro, with a wide-eyed singer watching those ‘shadows that seem to know it all.’ There are a few moments where a big production hook seems ready to jump out, but Dylan keeps it close to his chest, nothing that would embarrass a coterie of locals watching another sad sack eat his heart out.

'Shake Shake Mama, raise your voice and pray / if you’re goin' on home, best go the shortest way.' Yeah, this is one of those songs from the old blues becomes rock’n’roll era that Dylan has always been partial to ('Outlaw Blues'; 'Obviously Five Believers'); tune makes me think of 'my little baby loves shortnin’ shortnin.'

'I Feel a Change Comin’ On' is swanky and breezy -- think 'I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,' from the old days -- and hard not to like (except for that damned tweeting accordian), especially when Bob lets us in on the following: 'I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver, and I’m reading James Joyce / Some people they tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice.' Yeah.

In closing, Bob picks on one of the most mindless sayings of the post-‘80s generation: 'It’s All Good.' It’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really good, and Bob lets us take that in as he piles up the dysfunction, then maybe ribs us with the thought that watching it all go down is, indeed, pretty fucking good, but the song never really goes for the jugular, the way something like 'Jokerman' did back in the ‘80s. Too many pulled punches.

Talk about me, babe, if you must
Throw out the dirt, pile on the dust
I’d do the same thing, if I could,
You know what they say, they say it’s all good.

The album is more or less all good too, though none of it’s great -- nothing comes close to the major splendor of 'Red River Shore,' a track abandoned and then allowed to surface on 2007's Tell Tale Signs. As the third in the Jack Frost trilogy (Love and Theft, 2001; Modern Times, 2006; Together Through Life, 2009), it’s the least of the three, but is the one that seems to hearken back most to the Dylan albums of yore (vinyl days, in other words). Think of an album like New Morning (1970) or Planet Waves (1974) or Under the Red Sky (1990), albums that have a characteristic vibe, but aren’t often revisited as major moments in the career (though Planet Waves was Dylan’s first number one album, largely due to the comeback tour with The Band that promoted it). Together Through Life is quick, cool, fun, and, as the man said at the close of 'Highlands,' 'that’s good enough for now.'