The Joy of Reading

chapter eleven

Some Victorians and

Others

Not all late-nineteenth-century authors were sourpusses like those we met in the previous chapter. Despite everything, good things were happening. Some very good books were being written by very interesting people. Two classic American novelists started and ended the century. More importantly for the world, three Russian giants emerged on the scene. Two English poets came and went, but we mustn’t forget them. Two American brothers, so unlike one another it’s hard to imagine them as brothers, bestrode the epoch. Two British tellers of tales amused and shocked their countrymen. Another British writer wrote a book whose fame will never die. His name wasn’t really Lewis Carroll, nor did his heroine really exist, but it doesn’t matter, because we all think she did, especially if we’re still young at heart.

Hawthorne and Melville were friends, at least to the extent that anyone could befriend the stone-faced author of The Scarlet Letter. The differences between these two men were as great as those between William and Henry James. And yet, in a sense, they loved one another. I hardly know whether Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy were friends. They were born within a decade of one another, but their genius separated them. Certainly Turgenev and Dostoevsky knew about Tolstoy, as did almost everyone in the world, then and since.

Browning and Hardy were also a strange pair, both great poets but neither sufficiently known in their own or later times. I mean by my lights. Not everyone will agree about either of them.

Finally, Conan Doyle and Kipling—another strange and wonderful pair. Both sold millions of copies of their books, but neither was really respected. Both were to some extent looked down upon, Conan Doyle because he was just an entertainer, Kipling—even with his Nobel Prize—because he backed the wrong side in a war that reminds historians of Vietnam and Iraq.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

1804–1864

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in Salem in 1804, spent most of his life in Massachusetts. His best stories are about the life in New England two centuries before he was born. They are among the best stories anyone has ever written about New England, and they go far toward defining our idea of New England as the home of refined moral sentiments and tortured, suffering souls.

Hawthorne himself was a tortured, suffering soul. He had three good friends. One was his wife, Sophia Peabody of Salem, whom he adored until the day he died and to whom he may have been able to reveal something of the churning torment within him. Another was Franklin Pierce, a college classmate who later became perhaps the least distinguished of all the Presidents of the United States and who sent Hawthorne to Liverpool as U. S. Consul, whence he wandered off to Italy for a few years—but he was no happier far away from New England (he carried New England within him wherever he went). The third friend was Herman Melville, who managed to escape from the same origins as his friend’s.

Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in 1849; it was published early the next year. He was very ill while he was writing it and grieving deeply over the death of his mother, whom he loved. The writing came easily that summer and fall, but he was worried about the book: probably at the same time that he knew how good it was, he was also afraid of what it said.

Melville was one of the first to read The Scarlet Letter and he felt exalted because he knew immediately how great a book it was; he felt that it allowed all American writers thenceforth to be free. Melville said things like that to Hawthorne, with his customary enthusiasm, but Hawthorne was more embarrassed than pleased.

The Scarlet Letter is about a man who has done a terrible thing that he is dying to confess.

Not everyone will agree that what Arthur Dimmesdale has done is so terrible. He has bedded a brilliant, passionate, and beautiful young woman, who loves him, and she has had a child. Why does he take no joy in this? For one thing, because she was and is married to another man; for another, because he is a clergyman and the very symbol of moral purity for his flock. It is worth remembering, furthermore, that adultery, in those old strict days, was a crime punishable by death.

The main reason why the minister suffers is not because he feels his crime is in itself so heinous, but because he cannot bring himself to reveal that he has committed it. Hester Prynne does not enjoy the luxury of secrecy; her belly has already betrayed her. Would she have remained quiet if her body had permitted it? Probably not. She is one of the great, proud women of fiction and wears with fierce defiance the letter “A,” for Adulteress, embroidered in scarlet and gold upon the bosom of her dress; she has somehow converted her punishment into a triumph.

Still, she will not reveal her lover if he will not reveal himself. She watches, in loving sympathy, as he struggles to do so. And what a struggle it is! We all watch with sympathy, and pity too, and fear, for all of us have done things that we wish to confess but cannot. (Not you, you say? Well then, everyone else.)

The Scarlet Letter is an important book not because it accurately describes how Americans lived in New England during the early seventeenth century (does it do that, after all?) but because it searches out the truth—or a truth—in human hearts, yours and mine.

Aristotle was wrong about many things, but he was right about many things, too, and one of the things he was most right about is the nature of tragedy. You see before you a man or woman, he said, who is worthy of respect—as is Hawthorne’s hero—but who is also fallible, like you. You see him fall, because he is human and therefore weak, not strong like a god. And you pity him, said Aristotle, because like you he is human and weak; and you are fearful, because you too might fall. You feel these emotions very deeply, to your heart’s core, and you are therefore purged of them, emerging from the theater where you have viewed the tragic events a better person, refreshed, more able to deal with the life that you must lead.

It is extraordinarily difficult to write a tragedy; in fact, very few completely satisfactory tragedies have ever been written. The Scarlet Letter is not the least in that small number. We pity the minister as he struggles to confess; when he finally succeeds it is almost as if we too have been able to confess. When he dies of his confession, a willing sacrifice, we are able to live.

Unfortunately, Hawthorne doesn’t appear to have benefited as much as we may from his story. His frightful loneliness was not dissipated by his considerable fame as a writer, by his friendship with a president, by his travels abroad. He died in 1864; Ralph Waldo Emerson was present at the funeral and wrote in his journal: “Yesterday, May 23, we buried Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow, in a pomp of sunshine and verdure and gentle winds … I thought there was a tragic element in the event—in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could not longer be endured, and he died of it.”

The Scarlet Letter is a very short book, but even so it is not necessary to read all of it, at least the first time through. Hawthorne was anxious about its reception; at the last moment he therefore composed a long, rambling introductory chapter—“The CustomsHouse”—that most readers should simply skip, or at least skim. Scholars and high school English teachers will dispute this advice, because “The Customs-House” is full of puzzling details that require explanations. Whenever a scholar can explain a detail he leaps at the chance, because that allows him a little longer to delay facing up to a home truth. But if you, like me, prefer home truths, then turn to Chapter 1, “The Prison Door,” and begin to read.

HERMAN MELVILLE

1819–1891

Moby Dick

The best books begin well. Moby Dick begins like this:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato threw himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

I deny the major premise: I don’t think most men cherish those feelings about the sea. Certainly I do not. And certainly it would never occur to me, no matter how far down in the dumps I was, to go on a three-year whaling voyage. But I do know about the dumps, when it is “damp, drizzly November in the soul,” and then I, like Melville, like his hero Ishmael, want to get away, to do something very strange and different from anything I have ever done before. Maybe even to search out and challenge Moby Dick, the great white whale.

The great White Whale, I should say, with capital letters, for surely this beast is more than a beast, more than a mere fish, as the whalers call him, and instead is a symbol of evil, or good, or the unconscious, or God—it doesn’t matter what, exactly, as long as we recognize that it is something immense and important to the life and mind of mankind.

For Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, out of New Bedford, Moby Dick is the symbol of all the evil in the world, the symbol of the terrible fact that there is evil in the world, that God has made the world imperfect, the why of which is indeed the central question of theology, not alone for Ahab. For Melville the White Whale is something different, which he cannot quite say, but which he allows his protagonist Ishmael to muse and speculate upon in the profound and moving chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Here Melville attempts to solve “the incantation of this whiteness,” and to learn “why it appeals with such power to the soul.”

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

And wonder ye then that Melville wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, after Moby Dick was finished: “I have written a wicked book, and I feel spotless as the lamb”? He had driven out all the damp, drizzly November thoughts from his soul, asked all the most daring, most blasphemous questions, and felt himself shrived and pure. Such is the role of art in a few great breasts; it serves some as the sea serves others.

Moby Dick contains a lot of metaphysics, but it is far from being nothing but metaphysics, and in fact it is also one of the best adventure yarns. Born in 1819, Herman Melville had served on a whaling ship and had spent four years (1841-44) knocking about the South Seas, the experiences of which time gave him the inspiration for half a dozen novels, of which Moby Dick was the best (but the others—Typee, Omoo, Mardi—were good, too). Moby Dick is full of lore; when you have finished it you will know what can be known about whaling, whale ships, and the South Seas, short of going there and spending years in a wooden ship searching for whales, which of course is no longer possible. The book is also full of psychological insights about men and sailors, and it contains unforgettable characters: Father Mapple, and his wonderful sermon—one of the great sermons in literature; Queequeg, the heathen harpooner; Starbuck, the faithful first mate who attempts to bring back his captain to a sense of his human responsibilities; the captain of the Rachel, the symbol of human kindness, who saves what little can be saved from the wreck of the Pequod; Ishmael; and Captain Ahab, than whom there is possibly no more tragic hero in fiction (his equals exist, but they are not many).

Ahab, poor benighted man, great driven spirit, searching through the wide world for the answers to questions that have no answers, and which answers we would probably not like if we could have them: Ahab is a magnificent creation, but a fearful one, too. You may not remember him with any affection; he may seem too much the exile, having isolated himself from all humanity, all warm, colorful, common life. Such a man is frightening. But if you can rise above that, then you will feel a deep sympathy for this soul, damned while still alive, condemned to follow the track of an unspeakable mystery whose end can only be disaster. Such sympathy, if you can feel it, may make you a better human being—and a wiser one; for there are surely Moby Dicks still in this world, even if there are no more White Whales.

Melville ceased to be a “public” writer after publishing his fine Civil War poems in 1866. He disappeared from view, struggling, as now seems likely, with his own Moby Dick—whatever that was to him. He died in 1891. During his last months he wrote one remarkable story, which has suggested to some wise critics that he had resolved his problem and “sailed through,” as W. H. Auden wrote in his beautiful poem about Melville, “into an extraordinary mildness.”

That story is called “Billy Budd, Foretopman,” and any lover of Melville, and of Moby Dick, should read it, too.

IVAN TURGENEV

1818–1883

First Love

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born in central Russia in 1818 and died in France in 1883. He received a desultory early education and did not come alive, as he said, until the three years that he spent at the University of Berlin from 1838 to 1841. His writing career began at that time, and he wrote for the rest of his life, a period of some forty years. First Love was written in 1860, very nearly the midpoint of those years.

Turgenev has to be counted as one of the greatest Russian writers of the nineteenth century; only Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov may be considered his equals or his betters. Yet he was very different from all of them. He was almost alone in being sensitive to Europe; and he was also alone in believing that the future of Russia lay in a steady liberalization of its society, its culture, and its economy, instead of in a revolutionary cataclysm. In fact, his hopes for his country underline the tragedy of its real history; if there had been more men like him, the world, to say nothing of Russia itself, would now be a better place than it is.

Above all Turgenev believed in literature, in poetry, in the importance of beauty in the lives of men and women and of a great country. For Henry James, it is reported, he was “the only real beautiful genius.” But this genius did not recommend Turgenev to his contemporaries, especially in Russia. His fellow countrymen thought he was weak and uninterested in the really important things, like progress, power, and revolution. He knew very well that there were even more important things than those.

His works have a delicacy, almost a fragility, that is unique among great Russian writers. They are cool and objective—sometimes, it must be admitted, to a fault. They possess a lapidary excellence that is very rare, and not just in Russia. Perhaps only Flaubert can rightly be compared to him in his own time. But Flaubert lacks his charm.

In 1860, when he wrote First Love, Turgenev had already begun to look back at his childhood and youth as a better time than the present. It had been a world, he knew, that was gone forever, a world of great landowners and peasants, of serfs and of the men and women who owned them. Serfdom was abolished in 1861, but its memory would linger on, just as the memory of slavery has lingered in the United States for more than a century. But, unlike America, Russia was not half slaveholding society, half modern industrial society; all of Russia depended on the work of serfs, and those who owned them, their fellow human beings, felt themselves almost universally to be, taking the title of a famous story of Turgenev’s, “superfluous men.” The fine and delicate problem of creating a life when there is really nothing that you have to do is the subject of many of Turgenev’s stories. Since that is the way most of us will live in the future, when machines are our slaves, we will do well to read Turgenev. By itself that would not be a good enough reason. Turgenev’s love stories will last the longest, I think, simply because love will probably survive all changes and revolutions. And Turgenev, although he never married, was in love for most of his life, always with the same woman, a beautiful and renowned French singer. There are worse ways to spend a lifetime if you are a writer. Or so they say.

First Love is a story about a young man and an older one who love the same woman, and about the conflict this situation creates in her and about how she resolves it. It is touching, beautiful, and, at the end, shocking. The jolt of understanding that strikes Vladimir Petrovich also strikes the reader, and makes him tremble. Reading the story is quite an experience.

Turgenev’s masterpiece, it is said, is the long novel Fathers and Sons (or Fathers and Children, as it is now more commonly called). Fathers and Sons possesses a political dimension lacking in First Love; it is a work on a higher and grander plane. First Love is, instead, a small but perfect jewel of a story. It is my favorite work of Turgenev. Even if you eventually decide that you prefer Fathers and Sons, or the famous play, A Month in the Country, or any other of his major works, I am certain that First Love is a very good place to begin reading Turgenev.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

1821–1881

Crime and Punishment

For two centuries the autocratic Russian state has punished those citizens who defy it by sending them, as prisoners and laborers, to Siberia, there to work out their destiny—and save their lives if they can. The Gulag, in short, was no invention of Stalin; nor did the idea die with Stalin that brutal punishment, just short of execution, but often leading to death, would “improve” men’s souls. And in fact it is hard to see how any reasonable person would ever have thought that it would succeed. Yet it did succeed in the case of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Perhaps he is the extraordinary exception who proves the rule.

He was born in 1821, the son of lower-middle-class parents—his father, the son of a priest, had run away from home to join the army and later, having retired to a dissolute life on his small estate near Moscow, was murdered by his serfs, whom he had treated with more than customary brutality. Fyodor endured a meager education among poor and downtrodden people. Though he was destined for the army as an engineer, he spent most of his time reading and writing. His first novel, Poor Folk, 1845, was highly praised. He was pleased with himself but soon fell into revolutionary thinking and joined a group that was savagely persecuted by the authorities. Together with several associates, Dostoevsky was tried in 1849 and sentenced to be shot, a fate averted at the last moment by a courier from the tsar who commuted the punishment to four years at hard labor. Dostoevsky was sent in chains to Siberia, where he lived surrounded by filth, lice, and disease, among poor folk who hated him for his relatively high birth.

But he survived, despite frequent epileptic attacks, despite the terrible solitude of his existence, despite extensions of his sentence. He even managed to fall in love with and marry a woman who, as it turned out, was dying of tuberculosis. He returned to St. Petersburg ten years after departing for Siberia, a free man and a changed one as well.

The change was extraordinary. The young rebel had become a middle-aged conservative, although he was not yet the violent reactionary that he later became. The tsar, he had concluded, had been right. He had deserved punishment and had achieved happiness in the only way possible for him and perhaps, he thought, for anyone: through suffering. He began to incorporate this doctrine, which is shared, of course, by many of the world’s great artists, in novels that place him in the first rank of Russian authors.

Crime and Punishment was one of the first of these works of Dostoevsky’s mature years. It was produced quickly, since at the time he was under severe pressure to repay large debts incurred in gambling binges, but the book is carefully shaped and plotted for all of the haste with which it was written. And its idea is both profound and shocking. Raskolnikov, the young hero of the novel, is torn between the two sides of his character: on one side, a meek, humble student, afraid to lift his voice in the world; on the other, a strong, self-willed man, insistent upon playing a leading role in the human comedy. To prove to himself that his real character is the latter and not the former, Raskolnikov decides to murder an old woman, a pawnbroker who preys upon the poor of St. Petersburg. He will murder her, he decides, thus confirming his strength of will, and also rob her, and use her money to do good for the poor. And indeed he does murder her, although with great difficulty; it is not as easy, he finds, to kill a human being as to kill a rat, say, or a fly.

The murder proves nothing and satisfies nothing. Raskolnikov is consumed by guilt and his bad dreams—those dreams that are one of the wonders of this book—become ever more nightmarish. His waking life, too, takes on the character of a nightmare. Finally he meets Svidrigailov, with whom he has a long conversation that shows him the depths of despair. Svidrigailov shares his vision of eternity with Raskolnikov:

“We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”

“Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?” Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.

“Juster? And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know it’s what I would certainly have made it,” answered Svidrigailov, with a vague smile.

It is to escape such visions, perhaps, that Raskolnikov begins to yearn for punishment, yearns to pay his debt to society and to God, so that he can once again dream of happiness. In the meantime the remarkable detective, Porfiry, is closing in. Finally, Raskolnikov is trapped, confesses, is condemned, and goes off to Siberia accompanied by his beloved Sonya, the meek and devoted heroine of the novel.

Probably The Brothers Karamazov is an even greater novel than Crime and Punishment; perhaps The Idiot and The Possessed are nearly its equal. But Crime and Punishment is, I think, the work of Dostoevsky with which a reader should begin to try to deal with the overwhelming power of this nearly mad Russian author. It takes a lot out of a reader; the pain that Raskolnikov suffers is all there, on the surface, and you may suffer it too.

LEO TOLSTOY

1828–1910

War and Peace

The Death of Ivan Ilych

Twenty-Three Tales

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana, a hundred miles south of Moscow. His parents died when he was young, and he was brought up by relatives who arranged for his education at the University of Kazan. Headstrong and uncontrollable, as well as rich, he returned home when he was nineteen to live on his estate, manage his affairs, and try to educate himself. None of this worked out well. He joined the army, serving bravely in several campaigns. He also began to write.

In 1862 he married, settled down, learned how to manage his estates efficiently, and began to write War and Peace. He worked on the book for six years, writing and rewriting; his young wife dutifully copied the entire enormous manuscript several times by hand. The book was finally published in 1869, when he was forty-one.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace is very large and vastly complex. Its scope is as wide as Russia or as life itself. It is also filled with thousands of small, carefully observed details.

Painters and moviemakers have tried to recreate the vastness of the book in other media, with their depiction of the shock of hundreds of thousands of soldiers battling at Austerlitz and Borodino, and their vision of the great emptiness of the Russian plain. These attempts have not been very successful. The scale of War and Peace is best expressed in words and best apprehended through the reader’s imagination. No film can do this book justice.

That is partly because vastness is not the book’s only characteristic, or even its leading one. Instead, it is the small details that are most vivid. Rock-hard, concrete details of experience that are exactly like the details of our own lives, they become part of our lives when we read the book.

One can wonder how anyone who has the slightest interest in books, or the barest curiosity about what the greatest of all novels may be like, could consider not reading War and Peace. At the same time it is easy to understand why many do not try it. It is too big, too “great,” too famous. There is a kind of backlash from all the effusive praise.

Let us concentrate, therefore, on how to read War and Peace. Perhaps the why will then take care of itself.

War and Peace is nearly fourteen hundred pages long. Few readers can read attentively at a steady rate of more than fifty pages an hour. This means that the book requires twenty-eight hours to read, at a minimum.

Many readers cannot read at a steady pace of fifty pages an hour. They may need a total of forty or fifty hours, or even more.

To read the book well, therefore, you will need a large chunk of free time, when you will not be too often interrupted and your mind drawn from what you are reading. Setting aside a week of your life to read War and Peace is a reasonable idea. The book is worth it.

Ideally, you should have nothing else to do during that week, besides reading, eating, and sleeping. Most readers will not be able to enjoy those ideal conditions, but try to get as close as you can.

Next, throw away any reader’s guides that list all the characters of the book and their relationships to one another. These are crutches that in the long run only impede the reader.

Reading War and Peace can be compared to moving to a new town or a new job where you know no one. At first all is confusion; you cannot connect names and faces; you do not know who will be important to you and who will not. Often your first acquaintances turn out to be unimportant, while you only meet the really important people in your new life later on—or realize only later on that they are important.

So it is with War and Peace. As you read on, the various groups of characters sort themselves out. The families become meaningful as families, the lovers as lovers, the friends as friends. You cannot know Pierre or Andrew well the first time you meet them, and an introductory note stating that they are the two most important male characters will not tell you anything you will not learn yourself and in a better way. To be told in advance that Natasha Rostov is the heroine of the book is not much help either. If you do not come to see that as the book progresses, you are blind.

It is, I think, exactly as easy, or as hard, to discern characters and character relationships in War and Peace as it is in real life. I would not welcome information from a demiurge to the effect that such and such a woman was destined to loom large in my life, or that such and such a man, after years of nodding acquaintance, would become my good friend. I prefer to find out those things as I go along. So it is with War and Peace. Let the book happen to you; do not try to control it. It was written by a master of fiction; by the master. If you are confused at the beginning, you can feel confident that you won’t end up confused. You will know all that anyone can know.

Which, of course, is not everything, about anything or anyone. One of the secrets of Tolstoy’s power as a novelist is that he allows his characters to surprise you. If they were cut and dried, molded after a formula, they would not surprise, they would simply obey the rules of their construction. But Tolstoy’s characters seem no less alive, no less predictable, than you or I. Like you and me, they surprise even themselves.

Tolstoy, in short, does not know everything about Pierre, Andrew, Natasha, Princess Mary, Nicholas, old Prince Bolkonski, Count Rostov, Platon Karateev, and the host of men and women and children who fill the pages of this book. And all the thousands of soldiers. And among the soldiers, particularly Kutuzov, the general of the Russian armies.

Kutuzov was a real man (I knew his great granddaughter), but he was—or perhaps because of that he was—an enigma. Kutuzov is extremely lethargic, old, often ill, rather doddering. He doesn’t give many orders, nor does he seem to read or listen to the reports of enemy movements that are given to him. Nevertheless, he alone knows that Napoleon will be beaten and that he—and the ordinary Russian soldiers—will beat him. He knows this intuitively; no book learning or military training could teach it to him. He alone knows that the great battle at Borodino, which everyone else (including Napoleon) believes is another French triumph, is instead a French defeat, because every man, horse, gun, or box of food that the French have lost cannot be replaced—they are too far from home—whereas the Russians are fighting for and in their homeland. Kutuzov knows, or intuits, that time is inexorably on his side, but he cannot tell anyone this; they are too impatient or too frightened to listen to him. Besides, what does it matter whether they heed it or not? Time is still on his side. Kutuzov is one of Tolstoy’s greatest creations, but he is not entirely intelligible, although he is certainly credible. Any more than a real, living person is entirely intelligible—no matter how well you may know him or her—although certainly credible.

I don’t want to say any more about how to read War and Peace for fear of saying too much about the book. To tell you the truth, I am very envious of you if you have never read it. I would give a good deal to be in your shoes, with a week of uninterrupted time stretching before me, a comfortable chair, a good light, and the book in my lap, open to page one.

When Tolstoy published the second of his two great novels, Anna Karenina, in 1877, he was nearly fifty. He was already recognized as one of the greatest novelists in the world, but he did not go on writing novels. Instead, he devoted himself to writing philosophical treatises, and stories and tales.

Just as War and Peace is almost by unanimous consent the best of all novels, so is “The Death of Ivan Ilych” close to being considered the best of all short stories. It is in fact a very simple story. Ivan Ilych, an ordinary Russian official with an ordinary job and an ordinary family, becomes ill. He visits a doctor, but the doctor doesn’t say what is the matter with him. Perhaps he doesn’t know, thinks Ivan Ilych, and he begins to be worried. He is right to worry; he is really ill. He slowly realizes this, and then comes to realize, slowly again, that he may die. Finally he knows that he will die, and he does so. That is the story of Ivan Ilych.

Death, “The undiscover’d country from whose bourn/No traveller returns,” is the most difficult of human conditions to depict in fiction. Rather, it is not hard to describe the death of someone, for this is something we are likely to have seen. But how to describe death from within? From the point of view of the dying man or woman? That is not something that any writer has experienced before writing about it!

Tolstoy, because he was a kind of magician, did not have to experience death to understand it. He knew what Ivan Ilych felt, even up to the very end. (He also knew what Prince Andrew feels when, in War and Peace, he dies in the field hospital—this is another deservedly famous death scene in Tolstoy’s works.)

How did Tolstoy know this? I can’t say. How do I know that what he says Ivan Ilych feels is what people do feel when they die, what I will feel when I die? I can’t say that, either, except that I’m certain of it. “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is indisputable. This is the way it is; this is the way it will be.

Later still, Tolstoy stopped writing even short stories about upper-class Russians and instead concentrated on the simple folk tales of peasants that he had heard all of his life and now, as an old man, wanted to reinterpret for a world audience. The best of these tales are collected in a small volume translated and edited by Aylmer Maude and called Twenty-Three Tales. Few books of its size contain such wisdom and beauty.

Some of the tales in the volume are well known in other versions—for example, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” A peasant is given the chance to possess all of the land he can walk around in a day. He has never owned any land; he sets out at break of day and walks rapidly in a great arc—he will carve out for himself an estate, he will never again be poor, his children will be landowners. He doesn’t stop to eat; there will be time for that later. But he walks too far and he realizes as the sun nears the horizon that he is still far from his starting point. He begins to run up the hill in order to complete the circle. He doesn’t make it, of course, and so he loses everything.

Many other stories in this little book are just as wonderful. My favorite is called “The Three Hermits.” A bishop visits a small desert island in the Black Sea. It is inhabited by three old men who are reputed to be very holy. The bishop hopes to learn from them, but when he discovers that they do not know how to pray—do not even know the Lord’s Prayer—he is dismayed and decides he must teach them instead. He spends all day, and finally, after many hours of effort, they are letter perfect: Each of them can repeat the Lord’s Prayer by himself, and they can repeat it together in a kind of singsong unison. The bishop departs, feeling very satisfied with himself. Then something happens. I will not tell you what; I do not want to spoil it for you. It is a miracle, and I think the only completely believable miracle in fiction.

In 1910, in November, when he was a very old man and half mad, Tolstoy left home because he was at odds with his wife and because he somehow wanted to make the world a better place. He began to walk—he knew not where. Every newspaper in the civilized world headlined his disappearance, and hordes of reporters descended upon his province and his little town. A few days later he arrived at a remote railway junction at Astapovo, Ryazan Province, suffering from pneumonia, and there he died. What he had seen during those few lost days, and why he had wandered where he went, and whether he had found what he was seeking, we do not know.

ROBERT BROWNING

1812–1889

Selected Poems

Robert Browning was born in London in 1812. He received practically no formal education, reading instead in his father’s large library. He lived at home with his parents until he was thirty-four, reading and writing poems.

The story of Browning’s courtship of and marriage to Elizabeth Barrett, the invalid poet who was six years his senior, is, because of the long-running play The Barretts of Wimpole Street and the later movie, as well known as the story of any English poet’s life. Indeed it is a fine story. Browning fell in love with Elizabeth in 1845, before he had ever met her (although he had read her poems). He rescued her the next year from the half-prison that was her father’s home and swept her off to Italy in a romantic turmoil that gave both of them great joy. She wrote better poems about their love than she had ever written before, but he wrote little then, conserving until after her death in 1861 the well of inspiration that she remained to him throughout his days. He would have been a fine poet without her; with her he became a great one.

Browning felt that there are three levels or kinds of poets: good, better, and best. He defined them in “Sordello.”. The good poets, he wrote:

say they so have seen;

For the better, what it was they saw; the best Impart the gift of seeing to the rest.

The ordinary poet looks out the window and tells his auditors, seated in the room, that he sees something outside. The better poet gives his readers a detailed running account of what he is seeing outside the window. The best poet, whom Browning called the “Maker-see,” puts his readers at the window and lets them see for themselves. It is a great gift.

It was a gift that Browning had in full measure. Take this short poem, titled “Meeting at Night”:

The gray sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In fiery ringlets from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears, Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Each line gives more concrete reality to the scene, until the final triumph of “the quick sharp scratch/And blue spurt of a lighted match,” with its extraordinary caesura between “blue” and “spurt” while the “made-to-see” reader waits for the match to light, and then the quiet sound of two hearts “beating each to each.” I have read that poem a hundred times and never tire of it. I never will tire of it until I cease to think that poetry has everything to do with real life.

The intensity of physical presence is the most characteristic mark of Browning’s poetry, but there are other intensities as well that, in the end, are even more important. Browning is the acknowledged master of the dramatic monologue, in which a single speaker tells a story or describes a scene as though he were describing it to another person, an auditor who, though silent, is just as much a character in the poem as the speaker himself. The intensity of presence of these auditors is sometimes almost overwhelming, even though they do not say a word: the wife in “Andrea del Sarto”; the investigating officer (as the reader must suppose himself to be) listening to the crazed account of his crime by “Porphyria’s Lover”; the representative of the count in “My Last Duchess.” The drama of these lyric poems is all in the interchange, in the words spoken and the words attended to, even though only one side of the conversation is heard. Browning’s dramatic monologues are among the finest achievements of English poetry.

His single finest poem is, I think, The Ring and the Book (1868–69). This long poem in twelve books had a curious genesis. Browning came upon an old book in a shop in Florence that detailed the crime, committed two centuries before, of a certain Count Guido Franceschini, who, to recoup his wasted fortune, tricked a young girl into marrying him, then, after tortuous windings of the plot, murdered her and her parents and was himself executed for the deed. Browning worked for years on the poem and made of it what is certainly the finest detective story in verse. Each of the twelve books of the poem tells the story, or an aspect of the story—there is remarkably little repetition—from a different point of view. The Ring and the Book is not easy reading but it is worth the effort to read it. You will feel when you are finished that you have seen into three human hearts as perhaps you have rarely been able to see before.

That is the secret of reading Browning: to let him make you see. Some readers resist this; they find him too difficult, his syntax too complicated, his verse too dense and packed with meaning. This criticism applies, perhaps, to all the best poets, to all of the “makers-see.” At any rate, Browning is one of those.

You may wish to start with these poems: “Home-Thoughts, from Abroad,” “Home-Thoughts, from the Sea,” “Meeting at Night,” “Porphyria’s Lover,” “My Last Duchess,” “A Woman’s Last Word,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” “The Last Ride Together,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Prospice,” and “Rabbi Ben Ezra.” Whether you decide to tackle The Ring and the Book is up to you.

LEWIS CARROLL

1832–1898

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Through the Looking-Glass and What

Alice Found There

Lewis Carroll loved photography, mathematics, and little girls. Out of these, plus a wonderfully playful imagination and a good memory, he fashioned one of the great books of all time.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland begins with Alice falling through a rabbit hole into another world. This could be the dark place that is the camera, which sees the world upside down and in other odd ways through a small aperture. Alice, furthermore, is both enlarged and reduced, like a picture in an enlarger in a darkroom. Mathematics controls all these changes; Alice in Wonderland has been called a primer of the differential and integral calculus. And of course Alice is a little girl, and a most charming one. She is both serious and playful, and insistent upon understanding what is happening to her. She is distressed by the bodily changes that overtake her, as all little girls are, but at the same time she is brave and faces up to whatever she has to face—including caterpillars, hedgehogs, and queens.

The images of Alice in Wonderland are unforgettable; we can never get them out of our heads. (Partly this is because of John Tenniel’s wonderful illustrations for the original edition; when reading Alice you should seek an edition with reproductions of those old illustrations.) Alice swimming with the White Rabbit, with his white gloves still on, in the Pool of Tears. Alice at the Mad Tea Party, surrounded by that magical company, from the Mad Hatter to the Dormouse, sleepily sinking into his tea. Alice growing down into a mite and up into a giant, her head sticking out of the chimney of her little Wonderland house. The trial, with the Queen as both judge and jury—“That’s not fair!” says Alice; the accused is the Dormouse again, who always ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The famous game of croquet, in which the hoops are hedgehogs that get up from time to time and walk away, leaving the players to scratch their heads and wonder where the next shot is supposed to go. The Jabberwock. The Caterpillar smoking his hookah on his mushroom. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The Walrus and the Carpenter and the Oysters that dance into their mouths. And so forth and so on.

Some of these images come from Alice in Wonderland’s marvelous sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, which was published a few years later. The two books make up one great fantasy, and it is hard to keep them apart in the memory. In fact, it’s not worth trying to do so.

How they ever got written is an extraordinary accident. Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles L. Dodgson, enjoyed entertaining the three young daughters of the master of his Oxford college and one day they went on a picnic and were caught in the rain. Two weeks later they went on another picnic and he told them stories about a little girl named Alice who fell down a rabbit hole on a rainy day.

He always told the girls stories, and they always loved them; but this time the story seemed especially good and Alice Liddell, the oldest of his three companions—she was ten—asked him to write it down. He did so and made funny illustrations for it and gave it to her for a present. Of course she liked it all the better, and so did her sisters and her mother and father. However, nothing would ever have come of it if Charles Kingsley, the novelist, had not happened to see the manuscript lying on a table in the Liddells’ home. Kingsley picked it up and read it. “Extraordinary! It must be published!” he declared.

Dodgson consulted other author friends; they also said the book was good. He revised it and published it, with Tenniel’s illustrations, in 1865. Through the Looking-Glass came along in 1871.

By the time Dodgson died, in 1898, Alice (the two books taken together) had become the most popular children’s book in England, and by 1932, the centenary of Lewis Carroll’s birth, when there were celebrations of Alice in all the English-speaking countries, it had become probably the most popular children’s book in the world.

It is hard to say why, exactly. Many critical theories have been advanced, but they all dwindle to silliness when they face the reality of Alice itself—or Alice herself. Maybe it is just that the combination of photography, mathematics, and little girls is dynamite, especially when ignited by a lively imagination.

THOMAS HARDY

1840–1928

Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Selected Poems

Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset, in the West Country of England that his works made famous, in 1840. For the first twenty-five years of his life he was torn between two careers, architecture and literature. Literature won out.

He began in the 1870s to produce a series of novels that—since they were published anonymously—were at first supposed to be by George Eliot. His first popular success was Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The Return of the Native, somber and powerful, appeared in 1878. His most famous novel, and probably his best, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, was not published until 1891.

The subtitle of Tess was “A Pure Woman,” but the phrase is ironic. Tess is terribly wronged in this wonderful book, and it is her young and naive husband, more than anyone else, who wrongs her. The world is all against her, we see, and there is no God, no good, no deep justice to protect and succor her. If there is a God, He has sported with Tess, as we learn from the powerful last paragraph of the novel.

Yet Tess is not beyond blame. Some readers see the book as containing an accusation of Tess: it is all, this terrible mix-up, this frightful injustice, her own fault. There is merit in that reading as long as it is not the only reading of the novel.

Deeper than that, we must ask what Hardy himself thought about Tess. The other novels give us a clue. In all of them there is a woman more or less like Tess (though none is as truly interesting as she, none so breaks our hearts). And all of these heroines share a womanly strangeness and dangerousness. Hardy, who created heroines more alluring and attractive than those in any other Victorian novel, also expressed with extraordinary power the Victorian fear of women. Do women feel more deeply than men? Do their emotions go where a man’s cannot follow? Something like that is what Hardy is saying in his novels, and especially in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

Hardy’s poetical career was full of contradictions. He had begun writing poems about his Wessex country when a young man, and he kept on writing them all of his life. But during the twenty-five years when he was writing his novels, he published no poems. His last novel, Jude the Obscure (1896), was from the popular point of view a failure, although some critics regarded it highly. Hardy thereupon began to devote himself to poetry, and wrote and published it for the remaining years of his long life.

The tone in Hardy’s poems that compels readers of today and forces them to listen, but that offended many readers years ago, is one of almost total pessimism, beyond despair. The word “despair” means “without hope,” and theologically speaking that is a sin, for to despair is to deny the possibility of God’s saving grace.

Hardy did not care about that. If he was to be damned for having no hope, so be it. Many people were like him in despairing of the world and of the goodness, so-called, of mankind. At least Hell would not be a lonely place.

Hardy’s despair was not, as one might say, of the sort that is active: he did not think the Devil rules the world, or that God hates man and wants to thwart him. He simply believed that there was nothing there to guide and succor the world, nothing but blind chance. In “Hap” he makes this clear. If there were only a vengeful God who would tell him that His divine happiness depended on suffering man, Hardy says, he could endure it—but there is none such. Instead, “Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan … These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.”

“Purblind Doomsters” are at the center of Hardy’s concept of things. There is a power that controls and ordains our fate: This power is absolute, and our fates are unavoidable. But there is no way in which we can understand it. It is totally beyond our ken. If we know anything at all about this power, it is that it seems to joy in strewing pains about our pilgrimage rather than blisses. But even that is not certain and may be illusory.

Because he was without hope does not mean that Hardy was unhappy. That is a curious and wonderful thing about him, and the thing that makes his poetry magical:

Let me enjoy the earth no less

Because the all-enacting Might

That fashioned forth its loveliness

Had other aims than my delight.

Is it necessary, after all, for happiness, to believe that we are “taken care of,” mothered, fathered, tended to our dying day? Hardy says no. He is one of the great pagan writers, two thousand years after their time. He has more in common with Lucretius, say, who lived two millennia before him, than with his contemporary, W.B. Yeats. Thus Hardy’s vision of the world—cold, unyielding, beautiful—seems sometimes hard to take. But it is one with which we must learn to deal, because it may be—not necessarily is—true.

Hardy’s Collected Poems is a massive volume, with hundreds and hundreds of poems (most are short, many very short). Here it is difficult and finally unwise to make a selection and say (as we may of Yeats or Robert Frost): Read these first, and then go on to another selection of your own making. Every reader of Hardy has his or her own favorites, and you will have yours when you begin to read him. Start at the beginning of the volume and read through, a few poems at a time, not more than ten pages an evening. Skip as much as you want. Flip the pages and read a poem whose title attracts you. There is a remarkable consistency; not one of this large number is a bad poem, although some are better than others. They were written at all times during Hardy’s life; sometimes he published poems he had written as long as forty or even fifty years earlier, so it does not matter at all which you read first.

I think you will want to keep on reading Hardy, not steadily, not every day forever, but forever nevertheless. He will become a habit.

WILLIAM JAMES

1842–1910

The Principles of Psychology

William and Henry James are certainly the leading brother act in the history of literature. As brothers, they were close; William, especially, adored his younger brother Henry. They did not entirely approve of one another; William, especially again, did not think the way Henry wrote English was as clear as it could be. Henry did not feel that way about William’s prose style, and indeed no one ever wrote English better than William James.

William was born in New York in 1842, some fifteen months before Henry. His education was irregular, partly because of his irregular family life and partly because of the almost continuous ill health that he suffered until the time that he married Alice Gibbons; thereafter his neurasthenia disappeared, and he began to show an energy and an ability to work hitherto unknown. He taught at Harvard for thirty-five years, but his real life unfolded in his study, where he wrote a series of remarkably readable books.

His writing career divides neatly into three periods or phases. The first culminated in the publication of The Principles of Psychology, in two volumes, in 1890. The second, in which his curious mind turned to problems of religion, culminated in the Gifford Lectures of 1902, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. The third, devoted to philosophy, culminated in Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking (1907). All three books were accompanied and followed by collections of essays, like “The Will to Believe,” which lays it down as a human necessity that everyone must, sooner or later, go beyond the definite and the certain, and take the “leap of faith”—in short, you have to believe in something for which there is less than enough evidence. I think we know this to be true, from our own life experience.

William James spent nearly twenty years studying the subject of psychology—not the mental philosophy of the “genteel tradition,” as George Santayana called it, but the laboratory science that is psychology today. At the end of the twenty years, however, he seems to have become bored with psychology. Nevertheless, he had written one of the greatest books on the subject, which, although it is dated in some respects, is still more pleasurable to read than almost any other book on the subject.

Actually, James’s Principles of Psychology is no more dated than Galileo’s Two New Sciences, Newton’s Principia, or Darwin’s Origin of Species. All four books make mistakes and reveal ignorance on the part of their authors of some things that we now know. Yet each book not only signaled a new turning in the career of thought, but showed the new way to go.

The pragmatism of William James is the most commonsensible of commonsense philosophies, and his psychology is equally credible and down to earth. His long, fascinating book is full of lore and learning, but in no book is learning presented in such a delightful and easy way. In fact, one of the best things about William James’s Psychology is the great number of long quotations from other psychologists and philosophers. His book is an anthology of the field, and the quotations are so well chosen and so deftly interwoven with his own commentary that one concludes that no other of these somewhat antique experts needs to be read.

Ideally, a book on psychology should be full of wisdom. Most books on psychology are not, but I don’t know of any book that contains more wisdom about the way people are and the way they think and the things they do than James’s Principles of Psychology. Each chapter contains pages of useful advice for readers, young and old, male and female. This, for example, from the chapter “Habit,” which has always seemed to me to be an invaluable observation on the life we live:

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone…. Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out … Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together.

I love the novels of Henry James but I do sometimes fervently wish he had been able to write as clearly as that!

After completing his two-volume Principles of Psychology, William James rewrote it and published it in a single volume titled Psychology: Briefer Course. There is a temptation to read this instead of the massive original version, but it should be resisted. Psychology: Briefer Course presents the psychological doctrine of James in a succinct and dependable way, and doubtless many students of psychology are content with what they find there. But it does so at a price; in the shorter work, James excised many quotations and wise observations about human life. It is just those things above all that make The Principles of Psychology a valuable book.

HENRY JAMES

1843–1916

The Portrait of a Lady

The Ambassadors

The Golden Bowl

Henry James was born in New York City in 1843, the son of a well-to-do Swedenborgian philosopher who provided Henry, and his brother William, with every possible intellectual luxury: excellent schools, trips to Europe, visits to museums and the theater. In their late teens William studied painting and Henry attended Harvard Law School, but it soon became apparent to the latter what he wished to be: a writer. That is what he was for the rest of his life.

Henry James was not nearly so sure, at least at first, where he wanted to live. The more he thought about it, the more inadequate America seemed as a literary locale; the example of Hawthorne, whom James considered to have been insufficiently challenged by his New England surroundings, was deeply disturbing. In his early thirties, therefore, James went to Paris, hoping to find a more congenial environment for his art. He met everyone and enjoyed a social triumph, but he soon concluded that he would never be able to bridge the linguistic gulf that separated him from the French—this despite the fact that he spoke French nearly perfectly. He moved to London in 1876 and there discovered his spiritual home. The next year he wrote: “I am now more at home in London than anywhere else in the world … My interest in London is chiefly that of an observer where there is most in the world to observe.”

James had social as well as literary ambitions, and the former were soon rewarded when he could boast that he had been invited to dinner more than one hundred times in a year. Literary success was another matter; the fact is he never had it, although he continued to write and to publish for forty years. Toward the end he began to be appreciated by a small coterie of the best English writers—they called him “The Master”—but he never enjoyed a large public success. At one point, recognizing that he would never be able to write a really popular novel, he turned to producing works for the stage, but his failure was even more catastrophic there. His persistence was heroic, and to his heroism in simply keeping at it we owe some of the finest literary novels ever written.

The Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881, shows the great skill that its author had acquired in the steady writing he had been doing for more than ten years. It is, I think, the most affecting of James’s novels; it may be his only genuinely tragic story. The American also ends unhappily, but Christopher Newman, the hero, although he loses his love (and although her end is tragic), still has a great deal of life to look forward to, and we know that nothing will hold him back from doing so. At the end of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer has no future to look forward to. It touches your heart to think of what she is going to have to endure for the rest of her life.

Her life, at least the part of it we see, began so well, so hopefully. She is American and rich and, what is more, in control of her own money. She has nothing to do, as she says, but “confront her destiny,” and at first it seems she will do this well and courageously. But a woman must marry, she thinks, to complete herself, and she finds that what really confronts her is a choice among suitors. The tragedy of this beautiful, intelligent, accomplished young woman is that she chooses the wrong man and thus ruins her life.

At first Gilbert Osmond does not seem to be the wrong man. At any rate, he has everything Isabel lacks, and desires: most notably culture and a solid position—albeit as an expatriate—in Italian society. Their life together, Isabel believes, will be a work of art, in accordance with the many fine pieces in Gilbert’s home, which becomes her own and which she further embellishes with her wealth. But Gilbert, although he possesses impeccable taste, is a cruel, bad man, and he begins to torture Isabel in small, bland ways that become more and more frightful as the novel proceeds. He never says an angry word to her; he never strikes her; but he makes her inexpressibly unhappy.

In the end, one of her old admirers, the rejected suitor Caspar Goodwood, tries to reach her, to offer her an escape from her misery. Divorce is not out of the question, he says; and if she is unwilling to take her wealth back from her husband (or finds herself unable to do so owing to Italian law), then he, Caspar, will give her everything he has, and that is a great deal. But Isabel cannot accept this generous offer. She hates Osmond; she is willing to admit that she could love Goodwood. But the woman who sought, as a girl, to confront her destiny cannot now pretend that life is a game one can abandon when it becomes unpleasant.

The novels of Henry James are often criticized for their lack of events, their paucity of action and adventure. The Portrait of a Lady has more action than many other novels of James. The book’s main defect is James’s failure adequately to answer the question of why Isabel marries Osmond. We know she should not, but we cannot stop her! But given that choice, that donnée, as James liked to say, the rest is inevitable—and deeply moving.

The Ambassadors (1903) is one of the most complex novels ever written. An American gentleman of a certain age, Lambert Strether, who is engaged to marry a wealthy widow (also of a certain age) in Massachusetts, is sent by his fiancée to Paris to bring back her son Chad, who has apparently become involved with a woman of … how to say it . . . easy virtue? No, that’s not right, far from it, but certainly a woman of a type not easily understood by moralistic New Englanders. Strether meets Chad and is immediately struck by how much he has changed. The naïve young man he knew has become very much a gentleman of a type he has never confronted before: smooth, refined in his manners and his taste, elegant in all the best senses of the word. Strether is certain that a woman has somehow been involved, and when he meets the Comtesse de Vionnet he realizes that it is she who has brought about this remarkable transformation.

He also realizes, as time passes, two things that are really inseparable. First, he has ruined his life by refusing to live it—by succumbing to the numb satisfactions of provincial American society, so different from the intricate and beautiful customs and beliefs of Parisian existence. Second, he finds that he is unwilling to destroy the bond that has been formed between his prospective stepson and this elegant and beautiful femme du monde. In fact he finds himself being drawn into her spell, and he accepts what is for him almost as remarkable a transformation. He hardly knows what to do, and when Chad’s mother sends out another “ambassador,” her cold-hearted daughter, he accepts with some equanimity her threat that if he does not immediately change his ways the rich widow who is his fiancée will drop him like a hot coal. But in the last analysis he knows he is willing to accept the loss of everything he has thought most dear.

The novel, in fact, is strikingly suspenseful and I will not spoil it for you by telling you what happens. I will only say that despite its “Jamesian” faults of complex sentence structure, thinking, and feeling—thus permitting you to decide for yourself—it is very much worthy reading. Don’t let those apparent faults turn you off.

The Golden Bowl, the last of Henry James’s novels (published in 1904), is quintessential James, the perfect example of what James did better than almost any writer who ever lived, and also of what he did not and could not do. What Henry James could not be bothered to do, especially in his last years, was tell a story full of dramatic incident. In fact, almost nothing happens in The Golden Bowl; the book is about things that do not happen. The characters talk—endlessly; they feel deeply, they suffer, they exult. But they do nothing. Those readers should be forgiven who have struggled over The Golden Bowl and come away almost frantic with frustration, exhausted by their effort to pierce through the fog of conversation to find out what has really occurred.

Indeed, the climax of The Golden Bowl, instead of being an act, is a nonact—a refusal to act on the part of one of the four main characters, who may be called the heroine. Maggie, having tortured Charlotte almost to madness by her refusal to notice what is evident to everyone else, is teased, tempted, taunted by Charlotte in the great, climactic scene on the terrace of Adam Verver’s country house. There, Maggie resists the temptation, avoids being drawn down and into Charlotte’s last, desperate attempt to escape from the web of silence that surrounds her. Maggie’s brilliantly intelligent escape from being herself entrapped in a series of ultimately disastrous revelations and accusations is one of the most remarkable events in fiction.

Or nonevents. For many readers that is just the problem—with The Golden Bowl and with the other late novels of Henry James. To readers brought up on popular fiction, The Golden Bowl is boring, trivial. Why bother to read five hundred pages that finally add up to nothing—to the status quo, which now will persist forevermore? Why strain to understand what is so hard to understand? Why make the enormous effort required to cut through the miasma of polite euphemisms, glancing allusions, and half-truths—as well as half-lies—to arrive at the tiny kernel of reality resting at the center of this conundrum?

The reason is that the story of The Golden Bowl is more real by far than the stories of many of those eventful entertainments. Reality is almost unbearable to many people; they do not like Henry James. But if you are able to face it, to see something that is real and not be appalled (the Gorgon’s head!), then The Golden Bowl becomes not unbearably boring but unbearably exciting instead.

Consider the situation—the donnée—of The Golden Bowl. An Italian prince, young, handsome, brilliant, but nearly penniless, is to marry the shy, inexperienced, but pretty daughter of an American multimillionaire, Maggie. She adores the prince and half knows her doting father has bought him for her; but the prince loves Maggie, too, in his aristocratically correct and honorable way. In the past he has also loved another woman, a friend of Maggie’s, a tall, beautiful, accomplished American who is as poor as the prince himself. The prince marries the heiress; and then—very surprisingly—the wealthy American, a widower, falls in love with the prince’s ex-mistress and marries her. The two couples then proceed to live together in London and in Mr. Verver’s magnificent home in the English countryside.

So much is fact, is undeniable. But the book is not about these facts and could not care less about these obvious, surface relationships. Its real subject is not the open loves but the covert ones, concerning each of which there are many unanswered, perhaps unanswerable questions. Rather, it is about the frantic search for those answers, and for a solution to the problem of the book, on the part of all four of its protagonists—a solution that will avoid social ruin for Charlotte, financial ruin for the prince, and the loss of all they most deeply love for both Maggie and her father.

The solution is found, and they all survive. You have to look sharp to see it happen. The Golden Bowl is difficult reading. Take it slow and easy. Be patient. Remember that it is probably no more difficult to discern what the prince is thinking, for example, or the princess, than to discern the thoughts in your own mind—or your lover’s. Follow the thread; the clues are skillfully laid down and in the last analysis are hard to miss.

I hope you will end up agreeing with me that no book ever had a more satisfying conclusion.

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

1859–1930

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

In one of her Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen tells of a certain young man who proposes a singularly original theory of creation. Nature is wasteful, the young man declares; not only does she produce many more fish eggs than ever develop into fish, but she also produces many more simulated human beings than ever develop into real ones. Her method, the young man explains, is to produce billions of simulations, of which only a few are artists, and a much smaller proportion great artists; these in turn write fictions, the heroes of a few of which are real, and the only real human beings in the world. Hamlet, the young man says, Faust, and Don Giovanni—these and a handful more are all that wasteful Nature has managed to create in half a dozen millennia.

The young man might have included Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in his list.

Whatever credence you pay to his theory, the young man is right about one thing: this sort of reality is not a common occurrence. Many good books, even great ones, lack characters like Holmes and Watson. Characters that move out of the stories and into our imaginations, freely, like living persons. Characters about whom we can compose other stories, as has happened more than once to Holmes and his entourage.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859. He attended the University of Edinburgh, gained a medical degree, and engaged a small suite of offices just off Harley Street, in London, then as now the fashionable street for London doctors. But few patients came, and Doyle had plenty of time to dream up adventures for his imaginary hero. The first Sherlock Holmes story, and still one of the best, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in 1887, when Doyle was twenty-eight. Others followed quickly. Writing, Doyle discovered, was more remunerative than medicine, even though he had sold the entire copyright of “A Study in Scarlet” for twenty-five pounds. (He never made that sort of mistake again and in time became one of the most prosperous of authors.) By 1891 he had given up medicine altogether.

The best proof of the living reality of Holmes and Watson is that we enjoy most, on rereading the stories, not their plots—those we remember vividly—but their small and homely details of life at 221B Baker Street (a false address, as I discovered to my dismay the first time I visited London). Holmes stretched out on the sofa with a migraine, Watson writing at the window. The fire flickering in the grate, when in comes Mrs. Hudson with a message. The gaunt figure of Holmes beside Watson’s bed, shielding the candle from the draft: “Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot!”

Some of the plots are not worth remembering—even Conan Doyle nodded. But many stories are first rate. I like best the long, early tales: “A Study in Scarlet,” “The Sign of Four,” “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” and “The Valley of Fear.” Of these “A Study in Scarlet,” for its imaginative touches—Doyle was here creating his immortal characters—and “The Valley of Fear,” for its genuine sense of terror, seem to me superior to anything else Doyle ever wrote. But what am I saying? Can any story be scarier, the first time you read it, than “The Hound of the Baskervilles”?

“Footprints?”

“Footprints.”

“A man’s or a woman’s?”

Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered:

“Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

I remember to this day, though it happened many years ago, the shiver that ran down my back when I read those words. For months I could not walk outside in the country without constantly looking over my shoulder. What if I had seen a great hound bounding down the path after me, his muzzle outlined by a terrible ghastly light? I too would have dropped dead from fear, like poor Sir Charles Baskerville.

There are many more wonderful stories: “The Red-Headed League”; “The Five Orange Pips”; “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (another producer of nightmares); “The Crooked Man”; and “The Final Problem,” in which Doyle attempted to rid himself of Holmes, of whom it is said he had grown weary; but an enchanted public insisted that he resuscitate him, and so we have “The Adventure of the Empty House,” “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,” and “His Last Bow”—fortunately, not really his last. And so on and so on. Our only regret is that there are not more.

In fact there is more. “The White Company,” the story of a soldier of fortune who actually existed and whose image is one of only two in the Duomo at Florence, and whose castle is just around the corner from Cortona, where I used to live, is a rousing tale and proof that Conan Doyle could write other kinds of stories, too. Alas, there is no Sherlock in it, nor Dr. Watson.

RUDYARD KIPLING

1865–1936

The Jungle Books

Rudyard Kipling was once the most popular living English author. Novels like The Light That Failed (1890) and Kim (1901), collections of light verse such as Departmental Ditties (1886) and Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), and books of short stories like Stalky & Co. (1899) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) earned him a worldwide reputation among readers who knew English. Born in Bombay, India, in 1865, the son of a socially important Anglo-Indian family, he represented a type of Englishman most of the world admired before World War I. After the war his reputation flagged, as the world’s view of England and Englishness changed. Kipling’s books ceased to be widely read and widely bought. When he died in 1936, despite his Nobel Prize, he was an almost forgotten figure.

However, The Jungle Books (1894-95) remained as popular as ever, and indeed I hope they will never die. They first appeared as two separate volumes, but they have almost always been published as a single collection of stories about the animals of the jungle that are joined together by poems for young readers. The stories are themselves written for young people. They are far from being mere children’s stories, although in fact they were written for Kipling’s grandchild.

The hero of these tales of an India that, if it ever existed, certainly exists no more, is Mowgli, a white child abandoned by his kind and nurtured, brought up, and educated by a family of wolves. Mowgli’s foster parents are excellent teachers, although they do not teach him Latin and Greek, arithmetic and geometry, ancient history and geography. Instead, they teach him to survive in the jungle, which has perils not known to ordinary humans, and especially to speak and understand the languages of the jungle, which are the main tools of survival of this hairless cub, as his foster mother lovingly calls him. Mowgli is also sent to school to Ba-a, the great python, Bagheera, the black panther, and Baloo, the black bear, who loves Mowgli with all his heart and is heartbroken because his clever little pupil does not seem to learn fast enough. But Mowgli does learn, although he likes to tease Baloo, and none too soon, for before Baloo thinks he is ready Mowgli is thrown into a series of adventures that test everything he knows.

The adventures are wonderful—at the water hole with the elephants, in the abandoned fortress now occupied by tribes of monkeys, in the pit full of vipers. But it is the education of Mowgli by his loving mentors—the wolf, the bear, the snake, and the great cat—that is the finest part of The Jungle Books, I think, and the part of the work that will ensure its fame. I have been reading The Jungle Books all my life, and I can close my eyes at this instant and see Bagheera stretched out in all his shining blackness along a limb of a tree, with Mowgli perched like a little naked doll between his paws, learning the language and the lingo of all the jungle cats; or see him curled up within the coils of the great python’s enormous glistening body, learning the language of all the snakes and lizards that so terrify other human beings. In fact, I don’t think there is any other account of an education that is so fascinating in all of literature, unless it is the education given to the young King Arthur by Merlyn in T.H. White’s Once and Future King—and in that case the teachers are animals, too, and not men or women.

Although The Jungle Books seem to me incomparably the best of Kipling, other works deserve to be read. Among the novels perhaps only Kim will be appreciated by modern American readers, but it is a good book. To balance the sentimental absurdities of poems like “Gunga-Din,” there is one great poem by Kipling, “Recessional,” written during the funeral of King Edward VII, when Kipling foresaw the disasters of the twentieth century with a peculiar clarity. And the Just-So Stories (1902) also remain popular, although most of them have become a bit creaky. One, however, retains its own vitality and is often reprinted separately. Called “The Cat That Walked by Himself,” this famous story tells how the first cat came to be a pet of mankind, but without giving up his soul and his liberty as did the first dog. It is a lovely story, and cat lovers will agree that it is profoundly true.