Chekhov's Humanity... City and Country

Chekhov generally refrained from passing judgment on his characters, playing more the role of objective "witness." Well, sort of. "Man will become better when you show him what he is like," he wrote in one of his notebooks. Often his moral pronouncements are put into the mouths of characters with a deceptive simplicity; as readers, we recognize that the speaker is often both impassioned and hypocritical, sincere and ignorant. And because Chekhov always approached and drew his characters humanely, we can never look at a character and say, "What a hypocrite" or "How ignorant" - because they are too recognizable, too much like ourselves.

Anyway. A couple of stories I recently read with bits of this layered commentary, on city and country life. In Russia, of course, city and country have always been code words for social class - peasants, landed gentry, sophisticated intelligentsia, etc. Many of Chekhov's characters, however, are often in fluid social positions, which allows him to comment on class positions in a more dynamic way.

From "Gooseberries": The narrator is speaking about his brother. Their father was a military man who rose to the rank of officer and came to own a small country estate. As children the two brothers thus lived in the country; after their father's death, all property was lost to creditors, and so they became white-collar professionals.

He was a kind and gentle soul and I loved him, but I never sympathized with his desire to shut himself up for the rest of his life on a little property of his own. It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man. It is also asserted that if our educated class is drawn to the land and seeks to settle on farms, that's a good thing. But these farms amount to the same six feet of earth. To retire from the city, from the struggle, from the hubbub, to go off and hide on one's own farm - that's not life, it is selfishness, sloth, it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without works. Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.

From "On Official Business": The main character here is a magistrate, young and ambitious for a career and lifestyle in Moscow but paying his dues in the provinces.

The fatherland, the real Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but these were the provinces, the colonies. When you dream of playing a part, of becoming known, of being, for instance, examining magistrate in important cases or prosecutor in a circuit court, of being a social lion, you inevitably think of Moscow. If you are to live, then it must be in Moscow; here, nothing matters to you; you get reconciled readily to your insignificant role, and only look for one thing in life - to get away, to get away as quickly as possible... and he kept thinking that all about him was not life but scraps of life, fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no conclusion from it... It occurred to him that since the life about him here in the wilds was unintelligible to him, and since he did not see it, it meant that it was nonexistent.

Both passages express the superiority of city life; and yet both characters are limited in their experiences and understanding. Each bring their prejudices. Chekhov himself summered in the country and eventually settled down on a rural estate; but seemed throughout his life to be dogged by a consciousness of the poor upon whose backs the wealthy and comfortable lived. "As though someone were knocking with a little hammer on his temples," he writes of the young magistrate, who ultimately has nightmares about how the poor "shouldered all that was darkest and most burdensome in life" and how "to wish for oneself a bright and active life among happy, contented people, and constantly to dream of such a life, that meant dreaming of new suicides of men crushed by toil and care..."

As for the man who criticizes his brother for "escaping" to the country, he has similar thoughts as the magistrate after seeing the life of comfort and satiation his brother made for himself (Chekhov even repeats the use of the phrase "a little hammer" in reference to one's conscience), that "obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence." But in this story, Chekhov bears "witness" to something perhaps even more implicating: the man's audience, the two other men who listen to him speak of his brother and the revelations he had with regard to happiness and the poor, don't care to hear him speak of it. "...it was tedious to listen to the story of the poor devil of a clerk who ate gooseberries. One felt like talking about elegant people, about women."

Bronx Skies

"We all suffered from the same shortage of vocabulary, as if language itself had fled the Bronx, and curiosity had been bleached out of us. School was of little help. Our teachers had succumbed to the neighborhood’s affliction, a kind of constant, sluggish sleep." From an article in the City section of The NY Times this Sunday, by Jerome Charyn, novelist and Bronx native.

On quiet days when I work at home, I sometimes take a few minutes to sit by the window that looks out onto the street in front of our building. The view is a waterproofing company's warehouse, Bruckner Blvd., the on-ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, billboards billboards billboards... and quite a lot of sky. I can see what kind of traffic day it is; and it always seems that people are driving away from here, as fast as they can.

Sometimes I really have no idea what I'm doing here. Lately I've begun to imagine living somewhere else - a different borough, a smaller city, perhaps even a small town. This morning the pup and I walked under the bridge (a spooky underpass) to the handball courts, where I sometimes take him to toss the tennis ball around; but a shady-looking guy was sitting on the curb there, with no one else in sight, and I didn't feel safe. Ho hum.

This is where I am, for now. Half the time, anyway. When I sit by the window, I think about this: this is where I am. Somehow, I got here. And this is where I am.

It's not much of a pedestrian's neighborhood (shady-looking guys, etc.), so when I'm here, I'm mostly inside. Grocery shopping, miscellaneous errands, these things are accomplished mostly by driving to somewhere else. The other night we stopped in at a Puerto Rican restaurant a few blocks away and flumoxed the two women at the counter with our non-Spanish. I do find delight in seeing the Korean dry cleaners' and the Chinese takeout owners' faces light up when we walk in.

So I learn about my borough in tiny tidbits. It's a huge borough, its history of people groups diverse. But when it comes to writers, the Bronx is very much the un-Brooklyn: writers flock to Brooklyn as the new literary enclave, while they overcome obstacles and flee the Bronx for brighter skies (Delillo, Doctorow, etc. - Mr. Charyn now lives in Manhattan, I believe, and Paris.)

Here's another one, which I ran across I don't remember where. A self-published memoir by James McSherry called A Clean Street's a Happy Street. "A well-crafted and poignant memoir about a chaotic childhood in the Bronx," the review says. The title struck me, because of the garbagey-ness around here. I'll see if I can get my hands on the book.

Pilgrim in Provincetown

Boston or New York embodies our condition in one aspect: We are strangers among millions living in cubes like Anasazi in a world we fashioned. And Provincetown shows, by contrast, that we live on a strand between sea and sky. Here are protoplasmic, peeled people in wind against crystal skies. Our soft tissues are outside, like unearthed and drying worms'. The people in cities are like Mexican jumping beans, like larvae in tequila bottles, soft bits in hard boxes. And so forth. The length to which we as people go to hide our nakedness by blocking sky!

There was a fatal problem. There always is. Provincetown people too, and all people worldwide who could swing it, were also bare tissues living under roofs. An honest way through, all but changing the whole idea, would be a set of interleaved narratives, Boston people and desert villagers. -from The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard

It's been a while. City and country somehow receding as main characters in this day-to-day. But I've just finished The Maytrees, Annie Dillard's new novel (and her last book, she says: "This one just about killed me... I want to change and grow."), and made note of the above for OITB (that's Orchid in the Bronx): Toby Maytree, a Provincetown poet, is thinking about a book-length poem which he will start writing shortly.

Anasazi: "The ancestors of modern Pueblo Indians, about 20 separate tribes living in New Mexico and Arizona. There never was an 'Anasazi' tribe, nor did any group of people call themselves by that name. Anasazi is a descriptive term of Navajo origin. Archaeologists applied the term to villagers who lived and farmed in the Four Corners between the years 1 and 1300 AD." One of many things/words I had to look up throughout the reading of The Maytrees. Along with hoyden, folderol, lagniappe, albedo, howitzer, Algreba, skeg, chert. (Any idea? You are much smarter than I.)

AD's story of love found, lost, found, pondered upon, redefined, undefined is as dense as it is earthy, heady as it is moving. Like everything of hers, it hurt my head to read; she's so damn smart, it actually grinds the brain. But in this one, you can feel her heart fighting for space next to - or at least somewhere near - her mind. As a reader, it's a unique experience - feeling something in your chest swell and tighten as you reach for the dictionary. Bare tissues living under roofs.

And it's definitely a country story. AD has come home to Tinker Creek in a way; this time it's the dunes and the starry skies of Cape Cod. The wind, the sand, the "green sea," "black cordgrass, " "parabolic dunes," "low swale," and "shack gulls" - all constantly in motion, ebbing and flowing like the tide throughout the story. On the one hand, I'm sad AD says she's "done." On the other hand, she's earned it, and I've barely understood everything she's written to date, so it's not like I won't have her work to re-read for many years to come.

V-Day 2008

J. brought me orchids, I brought him roses. Earlier in the day, we had poo-pooed the silly holiday, planned to have no special plans. "Boy, are we suckers," we said, exchanging flora.

A funny pairing, but oh well. I do love flowers.