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Bird Man

Western Meadowlark (Sturnella Neglecta). (Design Pics via AP)

Eva Holland | Longreads | February 2017 | 10 minutes (2641 words)

 

Noah Strycker spotted the first bird before I made it from the parked car to the edge of the marsh. “It’s a rough-legged hawk,” he said when I caught up to him, gesturing for me to peer through his long, 60-power Swarovski scope. I obliged, and there it was: large, mottled white-and-brown, perched on the bare branch of a distant tree.

The sightings kept coming. Strycker picked out a Western meadowlark (“Oregon’s state bird,” he noted), a group of killdeer — lankier members of the plover family — and nearby, on an open mudflat, an American pipit, and a least sandpiper. He identified a red-shouldered hawk, pointing out the distinctive red-orange bars across its chest, and then two, three, four bald eagles. A red-tailed hawk and three northern harriers joined our growing list of raptor sightings.

“I’m just looking for something that doesn’t look like a tree branch,” he explained, scanning the horizon with binoculars. I imitated him with my borrowed binos, watching for lumps, movement, anything out of place. Around us, there was nothing — to my eye — but a sea of tall dried winter grasses and bare, dead-looking trees, lit up by the slanting winter sun.

It was January 16, 2016. Strycker had been home in Oregon for less than two weeks, after a year on the road. On December 31, 2015, he had completed his global “Big Year” — an attempt to see as many bird species as possible over 365 days. The previous world record, set in 2008 by a British couple, was 4,341 species. Strycker’s goal was to see 5,000 bird species; he finished the year with an astonishing list of 6,042. In one year, he saw more bird varieties than many elite birders will see in a lifetime. But the new record wouldn’t stand for long: a Dutch birder, Arjan Dwarshuis, cleared 6100 species sighted by early November 2016, and announced that he hoped to break 7000 by year’s end. On December 31, he spotted his 6,833rd variety. He had seen two-thirds of the world’s roughly 10,000 bird species.

Strycker and Dwarshuis are extreme practitioners of an extremely common practice. Birding is big business: in 2011, 18 million Americans traveled with the specific intent to see birds, spending an estimated $15 billion on food, lodging, transportation, and guides in the process. Birders are list-makers: they track their species sighted in a day, in a month, in a year, in a lifetime. In doing so, they act on a deeply ingrained human instinct: to classify and categorize the world around us. Animal behaviorists call that instinct our umwelt — the way we navigate the world.

Though he was attempting to complete the biggest Big Year of all time, Strycker’s goal, beyond tallying a massive list, was to build something larger: to both lean on and to nurture a growing global community, and to show the world that birding matters; that it taps into something larger — something human. He wanted, he told me, to sell the world on birds.

Across the marsh, a flock of tens of thousands of dunlins — gray-brown shorebirds from the sandpiper family — had taken flight. Unremarkable on the ground, in the air they became a shifting cloud of light and shadow, flying in tight formation. Their white bellies glinted in the sun when they turned one way, then the whole group seemed to vanish when they turned away again. Strycker kept pointing out new birds on the mudflats, but I couldn’t stop staring at the dunlins, following their zigs and zags through my binoculars. Like millions of other people, I had seen that viral video of a starling murmuration — but here was the real thing, unspooling in front of me. The dunlins flew back and forth in a rippling unison, moving like a flag in a high wind, gleaming in the January sun.

I had to admit: I was sold.

* * *

Modern birding began with Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds, published in 1934. The book was revolutionary: while naturalists had typically killed their specimens and carried them home in order to study them, the portable field guide meant that people — people in North America, at least — could now identify birds on sight, in the wild.

Once bird species were readily quantifiable by anyone who’d studied a field guide, it wasn’t long before birders began competing to see who could spot the most species. Big Days became Big Months became Big Years, and the North American Big Year was the biggest of them all. The original record, set at 497 species in 1939, was broken in 1953 (by Roger Tory Peterson himself, with 572) and again in 1956 (598).

The old style of watching birds — people of means, mostly, taking train or car trips, and eventually flights, to places with known guides, and with plenty of downtime between trips — stood until 1971, when a college student based in Arizona spotted 626 species. Young Ted Parker’s record, in turn, was broken by his close friend, Kenn Kaufman, in 1973. Kaufman was a long-haired teenager who’d dropped out of high school in Kansas to chase birds — he set his new record, 671 species, by spending the full year on the road. He hitchhiked back and forth across the continent, tapping into a network of local knowledge as he went, and sleeping out under the stars. His approach — grassroots knowledge and constant travel over targeted trips and hired guides — was an inspiration for Noah Strycker’s global big year.

* * *

One of the first things we do, from infancy, is learn to categorize the world around us: That’s a dog. That’s a cat. That’s a bird. We gain a more complex understanding as we go: that’s a blue jay. That’s a cardinal. That’s a bald eagle. But while the basic impulse behind birding — categorization and collection — is near universal, we don’t all advance to the level of knowledge or intense attention wielded by active birders. What makes someone take that leap?

To explain themselves, birders talk about “spark birds” — the single bird species, or single sighting, that cements a lifelong addiction. For Strycker, now 31, that encounter came at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge when he was just 14 years old. The refuge is best known as the site of last winter’s armed occupation by an anti-government militia, but back then, it was a quiet, wild corner of eastern Oregon, popular with birders and virtually no one else. A couple of years earlier, Strycker’s fifth-grade teacher had installed bird feeders outside her classroom windows and passed out binoculars for each student’s desk. Her young pupil went home and begged his parents to build birdhouses on their wooded property just southeast of Eugene. He had already begun memorizing the identifying markers and distinctive chirps and calls of his local birds. Eventually he started birding farther afield — and Malheur was an early, favorite destination.

That’s where he spotted them, on a visit with his father during the spring migration: a barred owl and its heavyweight cousin, a great horned owl, brawling on the ground over a snake that each was intent on eating. This wasn’t a passive songbird on its perch. This was primal violence: beaks and talons, feathers and dust. He was hooked.

Barred Owl  -- Mircea Costina/Rex Features via AP Images

Barred Owl — Mircea Costina/Rex Features via AP Images

Since then, Strycker has made a career of watching birds, counting birds, and thinking and writing about birds. At 16, he landed a summer job surveying the bird population at a reservoir outside Eugene. He started submitting articles to birding magazines — they were good enough that one of his first editors initially wondered whether a parent wrote them. At 18, he was named “Young Birder of the Year” by the American Birding Association. While at Oregon State University (where he studied fisheries and wildlife science, with a minor in fine art), he did field research in Oregon, Panama, Michigan, Maine, and Hawaii. He was also hired as a part-time, paid editor at Birding magazine, a job he still holds a decade later. On customs and immigration forms, he lists his profession as “bird man” — as good a way as any to describe his cobbled-together, bird-themed professional life.

The nearly three months he spent in Antarctica after college, at a remote three-person research camp, inspired his first book, Among Penguins, published in 2011. It’s a young man’s memoir (count the penis jokes) that nonetheless established Strycker’s voice as a writer: earnest, light-hearted, informed, and likeable. Then came more field work in Australia, Costa Rica, Ecuador; California’s Point Reyes, and the Farallon Islands, and a side gig as the resident ornithologist/naturalist for a small cruise company specializing in the Arctic and the Antarctic.

…birds have something to teach people – that intensive, intentional observation of birds can reveal truths not just about life as a bird, but about ourselves.

In 2014, Riverhead Books published Strycker’s second book, a well-reviewed collection of essays called The Thing With Feathers. It mixes the latest academic research with Strycker’s own thoughtful observations from the field. Whether he’s discussing how the nesting habits of fairy wrens can illuminate some of human society’s norms, or exploring what nutcrackers can teach us about the limits and possibilities of memory, his premise, broadly speaking, is that birds have something to teach people — that intensive, intentional observation of birds can reveal truths not just about life as a bird, but about ourselves. (“It takes time to get to know birds,” Strycker writes, “as it takes time to get to know anyone.”)

During his Big Year, Strycker spotted an average of 17 bird species per day to hit his total of 6,042. In one hot streak, in Ecuador, he spotted 625 species in 12 days. There was no time to rest, or to contemplate what he was seeing. He crashed in hostels, with friends, and on birders’ couches, and lived out of a carry-on sized backpack. He moved rapidly from place to place — traveling mostly overland, averaging one short-haul flight per week. His carefully constructed around-the-world route took him to 41 countries and all seven continents. The year cost him, all in, roughly $60,000. (Nearly half of that went to flights alone.) A publisher’s advance, for a forthcoming book about the year, footed the bill.

He recalls sleeping past 6:30 a.m. just once in 2015. Most days he was up and on the hunt by 4:30 or five in the morning, often keeping at it until 10 or 11 p.m. that night. He had worried, before he started, about burnout, but instead, he just seemed to get stronger as he went. His ears and eyes got sharper; his list grew and grew.

On January 1, 2016, in India, the day after he’d completed his record-setting Big Year, Strycker woke up at 5 a.m. and…went birding.

* * *

By late afternoon, the sun was setting and the air had turned cool. Strycker suggested that we wait for dusk, in hopes of spotting a short-eared owl as it emerged for the night. I was game.

While we waited, we watched two northern harriers making low, lazy loops above the marsh. A type of hawk, the harrier tends to hunt from flight, Strycker explained. He’s a natural teacher, slipping casually into a clear, explanatory mode without ever seeming to lecture, delving into a memory bank of knowledge about hundreds, even thousands of bird species: their shapes and sizes, their feather colors and patterns, their calls and songs, their movements. In the fading light, and with the birds in near-constant motion, he could still easily identify the harriers by their style of flight.

The owl we were waiting for shared some habits with the harriers. It, too, hunts from the air, he explained: hovering low over the marshes and fields where its prey, small mammals, try to hide.

Then — speak of the devil — the short-eared owl appeared, flying behind one of the harriers, both of them just shadows in the dusk. Through my binoculars I could see its pale face popping out of the darkness — a sign that this was a male bird. Another owl joined the first, and then a third. Soon, with Strycker’s help, I could distinguish between their flight and the harriers’: the owls’ languid, deliberate wing beats reminded me of a ray’s slow underwater flight. I said so, and Strycker complimented me on the comparison. I felt that surging glow of achievement — the feeling you get when you answer a tricky question correctly at pub trivia, or you navigate the subway successfully in a new-to-you city.

Birding fulfills its practitioners on several levels. It can be about activism, or altruism, and about competition: Arjan Dwarshuis, throughout his mission to break Strycker’s record, was also aiming to raise money for BirdLife’s Preventing Extinctions Programme. It can provide the small, specific pleasure I experienced with the short-eared owls — the little thrill of lining up the details to make a correct identification — or moments of abstract, transcendent beauty, like my long drinking-in of the dunlins. Perhaps most importantly, it can feed our bone-deep, soul-deep need to classify and organize the world around us.

The term umwelt comes from the German word meaning, roughly, “environment” or “surroundings.” But in this context it refers to a given species’ way of perceiving the world around it: dogs organize their world by smell, bees by ultraviolet light, and so on. Carol Kaesuk Yoon, a biologist, proposed in her 2009 book, Naming Nature, that we humans, in turn, navigate through and organize our world via a system of ordering and classification of other natural beings, and that this system is remarkably consistent across history, languages, cultures, ecosystems, and societies. Our umwelt is “our shared human vision of life.”

This isn’t merely a vestigial trait from the days when our daily survival hinged on correctly identifying predators and prey. It’s a vital part of our orientation in the world. When brain-injured humans lose access to their umwelt, their ability to navigate the world through a system of classifications, they lose their bearings. One such patient, who otherwise acted and interacted normally, had to be regularly prevented from trying to consume his hospital blankets and other inanimate, inedible objects. Another, a former birder, could no longer distinguish between species of birds in the images shown to him — he told the doctors that they all “look the same.” Think of a musician who’s no longer able to distinguish between notes, or a foodie without taste and smell: their world is cruelly diminished.

The umwelt, Yoon writes, “is so potent, so compelling, and so vivid that we cannot ignore it. We find we simply must and do order and name the living world…We humans can be counted on to do a number of things: breathe, eat, walk, notice organisms, and organize them into a hierarchical classification.”

In Among Penguins, Strycker’s stock response to the inevitable question, “What got you into birding?” echoes that idea: “I sit back, smile, and ask the asker: ‘What got you so interested in eating, sleeping, walking, and talking?’”

What motivated Noah Strycker to spend a year circling the world, seeking out birds for up to 18 hours every day? What drives millions of birders to venture out into the fields and forests every year, ears cocked and field guides in hand? Call it competitive desire, or the collector’s compulsive need to make and complete ever-longer lists. Call it umwelt.

Maybe it’s all those things, or maybe it’s something less complex. When I asked Ted Floyd, Noah Strycker’s longtime mentor and editor at Birding magazine, what he thought drove Strycker, his answer was simple: “He’s just really, really interested in birds.”

That night in the marsh, we watched the short-eared owls bank and hover, glide and bank again, until their silhouettes faded into the deepening darkness — until even Noah Strycker couldn’t see them anymore.

* * *

Eva Holland is a writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory whose work we’ve featured on Longreads many times in the past. Visit her personal site at evaholland.com.

Editor: Krista Stevens | Fact checker: Matt Giles

How David Bowie Came Out As Gay (And What He Meant By It)

Simon Reynolds | Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century | Dey Street Books| October 2016 | 19 minutes (5,289 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Shock and Awe, by Simon Reynolds.

* * *

People like Lou and I are probably predicting the end of an era … I mean that catastrophically.
Any society that allows people like Lou and me to become rampant is pretty well lost.

On Sunday afternoon, 16 July 1972, David Bowie held a tea-time press conference at the Dorchester, a deluxe five-star hotel on London’s Park Lane. Mostly for the benefit of American journalists flown in to watch him and his new backing band, The Spiders from Mars, in action, the event was also a chance to show off Bowie’s new ‘protégés’, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. They had – separately – made their UK live debuts on the two preceding nights, at the exact same venue, King’s Cross Cinema.

Glammed up in maroon-polished nails and rock-star shades, Reed sashayed across the second-floor suite and kissed Bowie full on the mouth. Sitting in the corner, Iggy also displayed a recent glitter makeover, with silver-dyed hair, eye make-up and T. Rex T- shirt. Reed, Iggy and Bowie would later pose for the only known photograph of the threesome together, Bowie looking resplendent in a flared-cuff Peter Pan tunic made from a crinkly, light-catching fabric. That was just one of three outfits he wore that afternoon – surely the first time in history a rock’n’roll press conference involved costume changes.

During a wide-ranging and somewhat grandiloquent audience with the assembled journalists, Bowie declared: ‘People like Lou and I are probably predicting the end of an era … I mean that catastrophically. Any society that allows people like Lou and me to become rampant is pretty well lost. We’re both pretty mixed-up, paranoid people, absolute walking messes. If we’re the spearhead of anything, we’re not necessarily the spearhead of anything good.’ What a strange thing to announce – that you’re the herald of Western civilisation’s terminal decline, the decadent symptom that precedes a collapse into barbarism or perhaps a fascist dictatorship. But would an ‘absolute walking mess’ really be capable of such a crisply articulated mission statement? There’s a curious unreality to Bowie’s claims, especially made in such swanky surroundings. Yet the reporters nodded and scribbled them down in their notepads. Suddenly Bowie seemed to have the power to make people take his make-believe seriously … to make them believe it too. Something that in the previous eight strenuous years of striving he’d never managed before, apart from a smatter of fanatical supporters within the UK entertainment industry.

Some eighteen months before the Dorchester summit, the singer had looked washed-up. Deserted by his primary collaborators Tony Visconti and Mick Ronson, he put out the career-nadir single ‘Holy Holy’. (Can you hum it? Did you even know it existed?)

Yet a little over a year later, Bowie had everybody’s ears, everyone’s eyes. His fortunes had transformed absolutely: if not the biggest star in Britain, he was the buzziest, the focus of serious analysis in a way that far better-selling contemporaries like Marc Bolan and Slade never achieved. No longer a loser, he had somehow become the Midas man, a pop miracle-worker resurrecting the stalled careers of his heroes, from long-standing admirations like Lou Reed to recent infatuations like Iggy Pop and Mott the Hoople. Sprinkling them with his stardust, Bowie even got them to change their appearance in his image. There was talk of movies and stage musicals, the sort of diversification that’s tediously commonplace in today’s pop business, but back then was unusual and exciting.

‘People look to me to see what the spirit of the Seventies is,’ Bowie said to William S. Burroughs in a famous 1974 dialogue convened by Rolling Stone. This was not boasting, just the simple truth. How did Bowie manage to manoeuvre himself into place as weathervane of the zeitgeist? The battle was not won on the radio airwaves or at record-store cash registers. There are bands from the early seventies who sold millions more records than Bowie ever did, but they never came near to having the high profile he had at the time and are barely remembered today. Bowie’s theatre of war was the media, where victory is measured in think pieces and columns, controversy and the circulation of carefully chosen, eye-arresting photographs. Read more…

Why You Should Cheer for Derrick Jones Jr in the NBA’s Slam Dunk Contest

Credit: Alex Osborne/YouTube

The slam dunk contest is arguably NBA All-Star weekend’s most outstanding event. From Michael Jordan to Dominique Wilkins and Vince Carter, you’ll never remember who won the actual game, but you’ll for sure never forget the insanely athletic dunks these athletes unveil annually (which you’ll then try—and fail miserably—to reenact on the playground).

This year is no exception. Aaron Gordon of the Orlando Magic hopes to retain his 2016 title, and he’s joined by Glenn Robinson III (of the Indiana Pacers) and Lob City’s very own DeAndre Jordan. The fourth contestant, though, is the one you should actively root for—Derrick Jones Jr, who has played just 11 minutes for the Phoenix Suns this season.

Just 19 years old, Jones might just be the league’s most athletic player. Fresh out of UNLV, where the highly-ranked prospect had an inconsistent freshman season, Jones suits up for the North Arizona Suns, Phoenix’s NBDL affiliate, and he is the first ever current player from the D-League to compete in an All-Star weekend. And his addition to the event isn’t a charity case: Jones has insane hops. Read more…

How the Humanities Became Morally Incoherent

Last week here on Longreads, Josh Roiland shared an unflinching account of his struggle with debt and economic precarity as a tenure-track professor. It was a sobering story — especially since the tenure track, for anyone not on it, appears like a lush, care-free, wood-panneled paradise. At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard adjunct Kevin Birmingham takes a step back to examine the systemic injustice at the core of today’s humanities: adjunct labor. He does it with a gutsy, powerful move, delivering his critique of academia as the acceptance speech for a prestigious literary-criticism award.

No one, of course, signed up for this. You wanted to teach Milton and Toni Morrison. You wanted to change the way we understand novels and plays. You agree that the current state of affairs is awful. You have written all about the patriarchy and racism and poverty and the subaltern. You call administrators “neoliberals,” and that feels good. You have little job-market chats with incoming grad students. It makes you sad the way local decisions ripple out across the wide surface of a culture, how literary intentions end up serving unforeseen interests, how people may grow rich or suffer, how what was an expression of freedom now becomes a trap, how what was virtuous now becomes immoral.

I sometimes wonder when the ripples widened out beyond what I had imagined. Recently, I sat next to two professors at the plenary session of a graduate-student conference. The students had been presenting their research all weekend, and now they were listening to us. “What is your advice?” a student asked. “Get your hands dirty,” one of the professors said. “Throw yourself into your work. Don’t be afraid.” He is a good person. He is an important scholar and an inspiring teacher. He immigrated to the United States decades ago and threw himself into his love for literature. He worked his way up, as we say, published several books, received tenure, won fellowships and awards, and now, in 2016, he was offering advice about bravery to graduate students surviving on $10,000 a year. This is the carefully dressed underclass of his department, the people who, when he wasn’t looking — because he didn’t go to yesterday’s luncheon — furtively filled their tote bags with leftover fruit and potato chips.

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Learning About Memory from a Woman Who Lost Hers

Chart from "The Phrenological Journal," (c) The Wellcome Trust

Lonni Sue Johnson was a successful illustrator — think New Yorker covers — amateur violist, pilot, and small businesswoman. When the herpes simplex virus attacked her brain, it caused substantial tissue loss in her medial temporal lobes; she lost almost her entire lifetime of knowledge and experiences, along with the ability to form new memories. In Aeon, Michael Lemonick describes how she’s invaluable to neuroscientists working to understand how we make, organize, and store memories.

There’s no established protocol, however, for probing an amnesia victim on the sorts of knowledge Johnson gathered in her lifetime. The neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins started at the most basic level they could think of – the ‘Who painted this?’ test, which she pretty much failed. Her semantic memory about art and artists, her primary area of expertise, was significantly impaired. Remarkably, though, when the scientists included some of her own artworks in the testing, she correctly flagged every one as hers. Even more surprising, when the researchers added drawings done in a style somewhat similar to Johnson’s, she picked them out as artworks she might have produced. To do so, she had to be drawing on some sort of memory. It clearly wasn’t episodic memory, since artworks aren’t events – but it’s unclear that it qualifies as semantic memory either, since it addresses an ineffable quality, not a set of facts. ‘I don’t think we know how to characterise that sort of memory,’ Barbara Landau, one of the Johns Hopkins scientists, told me in an interview.

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Trilby, the Novel That Gave Us ‘Svengali’

A scene from the 1931 film Svengali. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Emma Garman | Longreads | February 2017 | 6 minutes (1,788 words)

In the fall of 1894, a New Jersey reader wrote to George du Maurier, the Franco-British author and satirical cartoonist whose Harper’s Monthly serial, Trilby, had just come out as a novel. The concerned correspondent asked that his mind be put to rest regarding the decorousness of relations between Trilby, the young heroine, and musical genius Svengali, under whose hypnotic spell she becomes an overnight opera sensation. Du Maurier replied politely but briefly: “I beg to say that you are right about Trilby. When free from mesmeric influence, she lived with him as his daughter, and was quite innocent of any other relation.” His assurance was published in The Argonaut, a San Francisco weekly, thus alleviating any similar fears for the girl’s reputation among that paper’s readership. In Brooklyn, meanwhile, a woman had a disagreement with her husband over Trilby’s morals, culminating in her smashing an earthenware jar over his head. Luckily for the woman, the injured party declined to give evidence in court. Perhaps he appreciated that when it came to Trilby, emotions ran high.

Irish-Scotch-French model and laundress Trilby O’Ferrall was partly based on real women, including a 17-year-old girl, nicknamed Carry, whom du Maurier and his friend Felix Moscheles knew as art students—and amateur mesmerists—in Belgium in the late 1850s. With her “rich crop of brown hair, very blue inquisitive eyes, and a figure of peculiar elasticity,” Carry modeled nude for them and allowed herself to be hypnotized. Her soul, Moscheles later claimed, “was steeped in the very essence of Trilbyism.” Du Maurier’s granddaughter, the novelist Daphne du Maurier, concurred: “Carry . . . had the same camaraderie, the same boyish attraction, the same funny shy reserve.” Another inspiration was Anna Bishop, an opera star reputed to be in sinister thrall to her older lover-manager, the French harpist and composer Robert Nicolas-Charles Bochsa. In 1839, Bishop caused a scandal by leaving her husband for Boscha, and to his musical accompaniment, the legend went, she sang as she never had before. Read more…

Papers

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The Man in a Shell

Sarah Miller

This story, the first in Chekhov’s little trilogy, is a story within a story — all the stories in the trilogy follow this format — about a teacher named Burkin and a veterinarian named Ivan Ivanych who stop and spend the night at the home of a friend named Prokofy. The story, told by Burkin to Ivan Ivanych, is bookended by Prokofy’s wife, Marva.

Among other things, they spoke of the Elder’s wife, Marva, a healthy and by no means stupid woman, observing that she had never been beyond her native village, had never seen a city or a railway in her life, and had spent the last ten years hugging the stove and only going out into the street at night.

The moment they discuss Marva here, at the beginning, I knew the story she was going to somehow figure in at the end. Of course I could be lying about having known that – it’s something a Chekhovian character might do. That said, it’s not like it’s a terribly brilliant insight. I’d go so far as to say that if you took notice of the mention of the wife at the beginning and didn’t know she’d be shuffling around at the end you’re an idiot. I know that’s not very nice but I think Chekhov would have wanted me to tell you that, and furthermore, he would have wanted me to say it in that way.

That said, I did wonder: Did Chekhov know at the beginning that Marva would be shuffling around at the end? Did he sit down and map it out?

sarah_shell

Maybe I am just really basic but this is how I saw the “The Man In a Shell,” stripped down to its essentials: Belikov is a loser who never gets laid and is uptight (in a shell). For a brief period of time he thinks an attractive woman might have sex with him. He is mistaken. He is mistaken because he is the kind of guy who fucks everything up by being himself (i.e., a person). He dies of some combination of shame and disappointment. His coffin reminds everyone of the shell he lived in in life.

If there is something more going on in that story I am open to hearing it but if an argument breaks out I will probably win.

After Burkin finishes his story, Ivan Ivanych hungers for further discussion. He wonders if this story of a man in a shell is not a story about a sad outlier, but about many people, even himself:

“Yes, that’s the way it is,” repeated Ivan Ivanych; “and isn’t our living in the airless, crowded town, our writing useless papers, our playing vint—isn’t all that a sort of shell for us? And this spending our lives among pettifogging, idle men and silly, unoccupied women, our talking and our listening to all sorts of poppycock— isn’t that a shell, too? If you like, I will tell you a very instructive story.”

Burkin is very attached to the sad outlier theory:

“No; it’s time to turn in,” said Burkin. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

I get it. Everyone is in shells. The narrator is in a shell and either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know. His one-man audience is in a shell and and knows. And Marva draws the story’s finish line with her footsteps, walking along the borders of her own shell:

They went into the barn and lay down on the hay. And they were both covered up and had dozed off when suddenly there was the sound of light footsteps— tap, tap. Someone was walking near the barn, walking a little and stopping, and a minute later, tap, tap again. The dogs began to growl.
“That’s Marva,” said Burkin.
The footsteps died away.

Not much comes after that — just more of Ivan Ivanych wanting to discuss further and Burkin refusing. In the end, I sighed and was like, “Yeah, we’re all in shells, me, you and the next guy, get in line.” I felt dismissive. I thought “Leave it to a dude (in a shell) to write about a dude (in a shell) telling a story about another dude (who is also in a shell) to another dude etc.”

I bet Marva never talks such nonsense and doesn’t care if she’s in a shell. #imwithher.

* * *

David Lipsky

“Now Listen to What Happened Next”

Nabokov once ranked the Russians. Tolstoy first (“tiger bright” being the unforgettable diagnosis.) Then Gogol. (For grotesque, focused comedy: When Barton Fink slow-pans past the staff and hallways at the Hotel Earle, you think: Gogol! This goes for lots of Coen Brothers product.) Third, Chekhov. Nabokov adds playfully that Dostoyevsky and the rest are probably “waiting at the door of my office to discuss their low marks.”

Another Nabokov-on-Chekhov observation offers a kind of challenge, as you lift book and plunge into the faded stream of outback Russia in the 1890s. Readers who failed to appreciate Chekhov, Nabokov says, were “not the right sort.”

So, on top of instructions from George Saunders and Maria Bustillos, I started with a social pinch. The one before a wine-tasting, a festival of foreign cinema, or meeting prospective in-laws: Who wants to not be the right sort?

*

Brilliant writers tend to be tactically brilliant readers. Nabokov has served as a sort of escalator down into the larger shopping concourse of Russian letters. He taught literature at Cornell for a decade, before Lolita liberated him from office hours and gravity. He taught books as writing how-to. (Courses may still be attended via his Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature.) A semester-long magnifying glass, as he explained, “It should be clear that my course . . . is a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures.” He set students a paradox: “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” First reads are a fog, all that Tindr anxiety: will the book thrill? Will it suck? Second and all reads subsequent are the asking yourself why: why did you make this book part of your life? Was it smile, style, drive, wit?

These questions are George Saunders’ to his class: A class specifically for writers. The modest nods to academic decorum and the provost from Nabokov plop off, fenders and decals. This is a look at engine block and wheel design, by people meaning to strap on helmets and drive the course themselves. “How does a good story work?  What do you value in a story?” Saunders asks. “What we really want to accomplish is to improve your fiction.” When Joan Didion decided to become a writer, she typed out whole Hemingway short stories: she wanted to feel how it felt, those words and narratives coming from under her fingers.

Saunders is the best writer of short fiction in America. The funniest, the most wrenching, most compressed, most entertaining. His best stuff (In Persuasion Nation, for this reader’s dollar) works by being incredibly stripped down. A thing he’s famous for saying is, “Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.”

So not surprising to learn he subjects his stories to drafts in the hundreds—slimming, exercising, putting them on the scale, sending them off for more laps round the track. Or that improvement derives from Nabokov-style rereading; thinking about Saunders, you realize people don’t talk enough about how rewriting is really a kind of activated rereading. As Saunders explains, clicking back to his own stuff again “with a fresh mind, every time.” (Another bonus via Maria is discovering that Saunders—whose in-person persona is all fuddled graciousness: why are you making such a fuss over piddling me?—is a hardass at the blackboard. “I’m not going to be accepting late papers,” his syllabus warns. In bold. Fiction-making is too serious for messing around.) So this is the Saunders shell I read this Chekhov trilogy from: how the stories worked, with the hope of meeting that minimum “enjoy” standard so Nabokov’s spirit wouldn’t be snubbing me at any ghostly parties.

Classroom anxiety, social and paranormal anxiety. I did not join Burkin and Ivan Ivanych’s muddy hike as an especially light-hearted reader.

*

The first reassurance. “Man in a Shell” books; it’s fast, which took out a third anxiety, with any literature predating the invention of the phone. Old literature is time travel. How much false liking/understanding will I have to produce for a world I can no longer really imaginatively grasp?

This starts in the first graf: our two hikers tarry at the barn of “the Elder, Prokofy”—is that a Russian honorific? They’ve “long been thoroughly at home in the district.” What would a Eurasian district even mean? The isolating thought—“Can’t know this universe”—finds you, there in the movie seat, popcorn cooling in your lap. Nothing to be done, except to anxiously trust.

So the modern jumpiness—no wasting of reader time—in the delivery of plot is great. An immediate and pleasant pre-echo of terse Raymond Carver: “They were telling each other stories.” In Saunders’ Syracuse workshop, he’d probably emphasize to students how quickly readers are tucked into a story. (Tolstoy got stymied between his two Nabokov blue-ribbon novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. So he reached for the standard lost-writer’s trail map: another writer. For him, a collection of stories by Pushkin. Tolstoy came across one opening: “The guests were getting ready to leave for the country house.” He exclaimed to his wife, “That’s the way for us to write! Anyone else would start by describing the guests, the rooms, but he jumped straight into the action.” He began Anna Karenina that day. There’s a line in Italo Calvino about twin populations of habitual readers. Those in it strictly for the kicks; and those—each one harboring the J. J. Abrams gene—condemned to “use books to produce other books.”) Chekhov does not chance reader boredom. It’s as if he’s got two internal clocks: one revolving at his personal Chekhov brain pace, then a stopwatch ticking out just how long readers can wait.

The second thing that calmed me down—fiction of the past offering an opportunity to sightsee—was noticing the pre-moderns were just as dumbly reassured by stuff like evolutionary psychology as we are. Burkin, “the high school teacher,” points out to Ivan that the tendency to withdraw into shells is general. Potentially a remnant from “the time when man’s ancestor was not yet a gregarious animal and lived alone in his lair.” Just as shipwrecked, just as curious about the millennia of sunken fleets that marooned them on the island.

By page two we’re inside the shell-dweller’s story: the little high school Greek teacher Belikov, told by Burkin to “the veterinary” Ivan Ivanych, whose “rather queer double surname—Chimsha-Himalaisky—did not suit him at all.” (An additional read reveals this Gogolian joke also providing economic set-up for a larger point in the next story.)

Burkin lays out the unappealing character of this Belikov who is now two months dead. Belikov would “always laud the past and things that had never existed . . . ‘Oh, how sonorous, how beautiful the Greek language is!’ he would say, with a saccharine expression.” Liveliness of observation wakes us up, too. (In the Alice Munro story called “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” readers activate when they hit one early verb: “. . . rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish.”) This is how people talk about the dead great writers: a plummy solemnity—formal clothes that don’t really fit that well—and the nod that comes too quick. When people discuss Chekhov, it’s sometimes in that same saccharine voice.

And there’s a structuring reassurance: By telling us that Belikov is recently gone, we know the story has an end; we’re curious, too, if shell preference had anything to do with demise. Belikov was self-cloistering, always protecting himself from influences. Wearing galoshes, toting an umbrella for all weathers. “The only things that were clear to him were Government regulations and newspaper notices in which something was forbidden.” Readers are moved to some evolutionary psych speculation of their own. This type of person, who responds to any development—tea shop, drama club—with “It’s all very well, but you can’t tell what will come of it,” seems at first a branch of humanity that went dry and extinct.

Now the Saundersizing: first character, then story-making. (In Saunders’ work, the order is reversed or electrically mingled.) We’ve got the fearful and dominating, sniveling and aggressive Belikov—Chekhov winds him towards a story. This little man’s personality is posed as a problem for others. A character whose bent shadow falls across every doorframe. In one sentence Chekhov starts with character—and then shows that touch chilling neighbors. This is the kind of speed and direction you find in a great Saunders story like “Jon.”

And what do you think, with his sighs, his moping, the dark spectacles on his pale little face, a little face like a polecat’s, you know, he weighed us all down, and we submitted.

Before our eyes, character has grown a complication. The story has expanded: no longer just about shitty Belikov. About how one person’s relentless attention can compress everything into shittiness. Now we have a story. (Reassuringly and fascinatingly for us—since as the future’s readers we can’t help but be tourists, noting what Chekhovian customs got adopted—this is now a story in the first-person plural. A story narrated by the school’s “we”; long before Faulkner’s town narration in “A Rose for Emily” or Jeff Eugenides’ daring suburb-narrated first book The Virgin Suicides. This noticing helps, as an orienting point.)

In our middle section, Chekhov slyly extends Belikov’s fecal reach. “He had a peculiar habit of visiting our lodgings,” Belikov says. “Would you believe it . . . this little man, who always wore rubbers and carried an umbrella, had the whole high school under his thumb for fully fifteen years!” (All those littles, repeated enough to give us the odd flake-by-flake power of the negligible.) Then Chekhov escalates: a school, he senses, might not be big enough. There’s more exaggeration in stories than we think, shouting to get you heard above the din. “The high school? The whole town!”

Saunders is himself a tactically brilliant reader. Saunders’ background is—of all things—engineering, mining. He attended the (apparently four-star) Colorado School of Mines. He brings excavation and schematics to his reading approach. If you want to see how a story precisely works, check his essay “The Perfect Gerbil,” from his collection The Braindead Megaphone. It makes a charming, perfect blueprint out of Donald Barthelme’s story “The School.” And in the most generous way possible—to Barthelme, readers, writing workshops—lays bare its flanges and pistons.

So here’s what the Saunders I know through that essay might say about this moment: Chekhov understands he’s built Belikov’s shitty little character (little being the operative word—note how often Chekhov’s been repeating it). Now a story has come into play. His oppression of an entire town. That raises a question, whose answer the reader can now begin to anticipate: how does an entire town shuck off an oppressor?

And now our anxiety about being polite future-time tourists, doing the public-spirited work of keeping the library visited, falls away. We’re residents: we’ve dropped our bags and will stay. We are reading a story about Twitter. About the fear of public correction—how the fear of having daily behaviors uncharitably examined and publicized can in-shell everyone. (You could call this “Town in a Shell.”) And this is the face-in-the-mirror surprise of reading the past’s stuff. It’s still alive because people and problems are the same—the desire to be oneself, to not be thought too terribly of, to learn what the world will tolerate and the rewards or punishments of staying within that tight or wide lane. It’s the strange thing about fiction: pick up a newspaper from 1898, it’s dead. The problems faced feel dead. Even the rhythm of the prose and thought feels hopelessly embalmed. But good fiction, the real writing, of 1898 will feel as alive as an unposed photograph. People and their anxieties seem remarkably, comically, and even depressingly consistent. So the headlines don’t yellow. people unnerved by fear of outside uncharitable opinion. A link you’d always read, since it’s one you’re likely to find yourself stuck inside.

Saunders once wrote he’d internalized John Updike as a short-story writer. Updike “was capable of finding stories everywhere,” he said, “—like Chekhov.” Updike spoke about this finding-everywhere process. There were, he’d decided, two kinds of fictional suspense. One was circumstantial suspense: the appetite, from comics on up to the tiger-bright, “to know the outcome of an unresolved situation.” Two was gnostic suspense, “the expectation that at any moment an illumination will occur.” (“Plot caters to the first; style, wit of expression, truth of observation [and] all the commendable rest pay court to the second.”) Updike threw in his lot with circumstantial, the less “dispensable” commodity. “I try instantly to set in motion a certain forward tilt of suspense or curiosity,” Updike wrote, “And at the end of the story or novel to rectify the tilt, to complete the motion.” The forward tilt now is the overthrow of this little man.

You can tell Chekhov feels this. For the first time, he cuts from the story being told back to Elder Prokofy’s barn: to the veterinary Ivan Ivanych, coughing, relighting his pipe, gazing at the moon—a pause to mark the change of acts.

From here Chekhov demonstrates how to tell the active part of a story. Burkin, the teacher, once shared a house with Belikov. Think how economic Chekhov’s been with Belikov, really. We see: littleness, galoshes, umbrella, self-protection, hear a favorite phrase, which Chekhov has Belikov repeat: “Oh, you can’t tell what may come of it!” This is—in the language of standups and the South Park writers room—callback, a reassuring commodity in fiction reading. It tells readers you slipped them the initial detail on purpose, and so helps you pass a kind of readerly in-control test. Stating an idea, then restoring it, is a way that fiction writers can rhyme in prose. As readers, we’re satisfied by the return of thoughts, images, behaviors, just as in poetry by hearing a sound return in the couplet’s rhyme. The poet shows enough control to qualify for our continuing attention. Saunders might remind his class a reader doesn’t know them yet: this gives them confidence you are telling thing on purpose. (And on second draft—the writer’s reread—you make this effect deliberate. If Chekhov discovered the dialog he liked later, he could go back and insert it towards the beginning. Drafts allow you to make the accidental, the improvised, the afternoon of unbelievable keyboard luck, feel on purpose.) And this kind of management of effects is I think what Nabokov meant when he said we can only know a book we’ve lived through twice: those repeat times, we experience it through the writers’ eyes.

Here’s Saunders on that Barthelme story—working as “Man in a Shell” has. “He sets up a pattern,” Saunders says, “then escalates it.” From Belikov in a shell to colleagues, then indeed whole town, shelled. Saunders writes that Barthelme finds he’s “gone about as far along that axis as he can.” As Saunders feels this out with him, Barthelme “understands that, to continue escalating, he has to leap to another axis.”

This is where Chekhov’s story finds itself. Just at moment where you’ve mastered the pattern—Chekhov needs a new one to carry you towards the end.

“And imagine,” Burkin says, “this teacher of Greek—this man in a shell—came near to getting married.”

As with our previous act break, we mark it by a cut to the present-day barn. The veterinary Ivan Ivanych scoffs. Burkin must be joking.

So now Chekhov brings in the story’s last act. We understand that Belikov wears soul galoshes. That he insists on keeping himself, teacher’s lounge, a whole school, a town (Saunders would call this the escalation) under a very tiny umbrella, inside a tightly buttoned coat. He now brings in characters from outside—the Ukrainian Varenka Kovalenko, her history teacher brother, Mihail. (Let’s assume that “Ukrainian” presented some special free-spirit meaning to the 1898 reader—we glimpse it, accept it, this far in we’re past worrying about all this now.) Chekhov gives another lesson in quick vivid character-making. Mihail is “a tall, dark young man with huge hands”—pretty much all we need. All the modern and great thriller writer Lee Child gives us of his Jack Reacher, who’s played in the movies by Tom Cruise. “Reacher was six feet and five inches tall and had hands the size of supermarket chickens.” Our brains take in and translate: big and potentially mashing. His sister Varenka is presented as Belikov’s opposite, as Heath Ledger’s chalky Joker is the strict gruff Batman’s. (“Man in a Shell” gives Batman and the Joker the chance to finally kiss.) “She was tall, well built, with black eyebrows and red cheeks . . . and so lively, so noisy,” Chekhov writes. “At the least provocation, she would go off into ringing laughter: Ha-ha-ha!”

She sings Little Russian (we can assume this means Ukrainian) songs like “The Winds Are Blowing.” And here’s another Chekovian Federal Reverse-like demonstration of economy. We really do know only a few specific things about Belikov. There’s the Greek language, protective gear, that fake saccharine-excremental word “sonorous.” Belikov takes a liking to Varenka. Expresses it in Belikovese: “He sat down beside her and said with a saccharine smile: ‘The Little Russian tongue reminds one of ancient Greek in its softness and agreeable sonority.’” With repeating details this far-off outback world becomes real, shares the gravity of ours.

A picture confirms the mismatch and everything we’ve know about two characters. Varenka and Belikov share a theater box. “Varenka would be sitting in it, fanning herself, beaming and happy, and beside her would be Belikov, a twisted little man [again!], looking as though he had been pulled out of his lodging by pincers.” The pincers excitingly bring back the man’s shell, and are a writer following and trusting his brain, letting it make lightning connections: Belikov is disgusting, and extraction would be managed by something scientific, antiseptic and effortful.

Another bit of callbacking—Belikov “used to call on Kovalenko just as he did on the rest of us.” From a universe of behaviors, we get an illusion of selecting; Chekhov just happens to find ones we know. “He would sit quietly, and Varenka would sing to him ‘The Winds Are Blowing,’ or would stare at him pensively with her dark eyes, or would suddenly go off into a peal of laughter—Ha-ha-ha!” (The story suggests that character-making is a strategic lack of variety.) When Belikov considers marriage, Chekhov reuses again. Marriage, Belikov says, is serious and must be carefully weighed, “so that nothing untoward may come of it.”

And our problem’s unforeseeable solution. Belikov is Twitter. Twitter costs us stuff: Freedom, lightness. Twitter has made lots of people into roadkill. Amy Schumer, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King: every so often, Twitter decides to roust them from town. The solution was always before us: We just need to get Twitter hitched. And bearing in mind Saunders’ classroom advice, we build a sense of how the story works. Character; then problem; then potential solution. Will the solution hold?

“Now listen to what happened next,” Burkin says in the story. In his 1962 story “Packed Dirt,” Updike uses the same formula. We can assume he wasn’t thinking about Chekhov—on the tiny off chance he was, not of “Man in a Shell.” But it’s the same formula, at the same point in a story: “It happened this way.” It’s why the Saunders and Nabokov detective approach makes such sense. The problems of being a person, and reading, and telling a story persist, way after the particular story or national styles or living styles molder—and what’s left is the bright thing, preserved human thought, shining and alive. We’re inside the story, Chekhov’s built a world lightly and solidly. Because of this, I can with relief pass that Nabokov test: I’ve loved something by Chekhov. “Now listen to what happened next.”

* * *

Ryan Bradley

“Now listen to what happened next”

Why do we tell each other stories? For entertainment? To pass the time? To explain ourselves, or other people, or the world? To live?

Two men settle into a barn after a day of hunting. Or, rather, one is inside the barn, in the darkness, and the other man is outside it, “smoking a pipe in the moonlight.” The man inside the barn, in the darkness, is a high school teacher named Burkin. The other is a veterinarian named Ivan Ivanych. Although Ivan Ivanych has another name, too, which, we’re told, does not suit him at all. Everyone calls him Ivan Ivanych. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin stay up into the night telling stories. They comment on a woman, Mavra, the wife of the man who owns the barn they’re staying in. Mavra has never left the village, has never seen a city or railway, and has “spent the last ten years hugging the stove and only going out into the street at night.” Mavra reminded Burkin of someone else, a former colleague named Belikov. “You have heard of him, no doubt,” Burkin says to Ivan Ivanych, then launches into Belikov’s story, the story of the man in the shell.

Is the story of the man in the shell a comedy or tragedy? Drama or farce? A love story or…what? It’s all these things and also, mainly, not any of them. It’s a story to get through the night, about a pretty sad and unlikeable man who reminds another man of a sort of sad (maybe?) woman nearby. But then, it’s also a story with a much different, much deeper meaning to its recipient, Ivan Ivanych.

There are funny moments in Burkin’s story of Belikov. When Belikov sees his love interest and her older brother rolling by on bicycles and goes from green to white, aghast at such impropriety. That’s a funny moment. There’s Belikov himself, always wearing rubbers, a warm coat and an umbrella “even in the finest weather.” He’s constantly all covered up, like a nevernude. Then there’s what happens soon after the bicycle incident, when Belikov confronts the older brother and the older brother tells him off, grabs him by the collar, gives him a shove, and Belikov rolls “noisily downstairs” before feeling his nose “to see whether his spectacles were intact.” As he’s tumbling down, all Buster Keaton-like, his love interest and her friends walk in and see him falling and burst into laughter: “Ha-ha-ha!” Also funny. And not funny at all.

Things quickly turn for Belikov. The laughter—laughter directed at him, from the woman and her friends—puts “an end to everything” for him. He goes to bed and never gets up again. After a month like this, Belikov dies. Of shame? It’s never really clear.

So much about Belikov’s internal life is unclear to us, filtered through the eyes of Burkin and delivered into the darkness of the barn as this story he’s crafted. Then, the observations that make up this little parable are received through the ears of his companion, sitting out under the moonlight (and of course us, on the page). We’re constantly aware that this is a story being delivered,—Chekhov carefully works in moments of Ivan Ivanych commenting on Burkin’s story, putting us back into the scene at the barn, adding in the timeless phrase of the spoken tale: “Now listen to what happened next.”

Now listen to what happened next, after Belikov dies, at his funeral. We’re at the end of Burkin’s story, and we haven’t been made aware of the barn scene in quite awhile, but suddenly we are made very aware of the storyteller, his interpretation, his reading of the events he has witnessed. We hear Burkin describe Belikov, dead in his coffin, with an expression that is “mild, pleasant, even cheerful, as though he were glad that he had at last been put into a case that he would never leave again.” Burkin confesses that “it is a great pleasure to bury people like Belikov.” And he and his colleagues all return from the cemetery in good humor. Time passes, and life goes on, “stupid as before.” The end of Burkin’s story, which he repeats for Ivan Ivanych, is “how many more of them there will be!” He’s talking about men in shells, men like Belikov who cover themselves up, feelings and all, and can take to bed and die after being laughed at. He’s also talking about Mavra, the woman who only goes out at night and never leaves the village. What sad small lives many people lead, all these people in their shells.

Ivan Ivanych sees it that way—“Yes,” he says, “that’s the way it is.” He says this twice. But then he seems to disagree, or at least deepen or broaden the meaning of Burkin’s tale. The “airless, crowded town” they live in, “the useless papers” they write, this “talking and listening to all sorts of poppycock—isn’t that a shell, too?” He offers to tell Burkin “a very instructive story.” But Burkin says no, “it’s time to turn in…Tomorrow’s another day.”

As they lie down in the barn, they hear Mavra walking near the barn. Ivan Ivanych goes on a sort of rant, despairing over all the lies, the insults and humiliations one must put up with and smile in the face of, just to get by. This man who has one name but was given another “more suitable” name seems to be talking about Belikov and Mavra, all the people in shells, but also himself, Burkin, everyone. Burkin, the teacher, brushes him off. “That’s a horse of another color, Ivan Ivanych,” he says. Ten minutes later Burkin is asleep, and Ivan Ivanych, sighing and turning, gets up, goes outside into the moonlight, and relights his pipe.

The power of a story, and this story in particular, lies in our interpretation of its ambiguities. We get to see how the messenger can fail to grasp the meaning of his own message, and why that doesn’t, in the end, really matter. We tell ourselves stories for so many reasons, but in the end we’re really only telling them to ourselves, even when someone else is listening, and giving us something different to consider. Chekov shows us a story told and heard, and how it can mean two—or more, or many more—things at the same time and be equally true.

* * *

Maria Bustillos

“All forms of not playing are playing.”

That is a phrase I once heard attributed to that old charlatan, the founder of est, Werner Erhard (né John Paul Rosenberg), though I think he might never have said any such thing, since I’m the only person cited in Google searches on this phrase. As I recall, though, I heard both the phrase and its attribution from my brother, who was by way of being what we used to call an “est-hole” and therefore might have had it from “Werner” himself, or from one of his acolytes, in lovely La Jolla where they all used to snort outrageous amounts of blow and congratulate themselves by the sea because they’d “Gotten It”, all the livelong day and night.

All this by way of saying that the bone-deeply familiar feeling imparted by reading “The Man in a Shell” is the same as this coke-addled 1980s est message, namely, that there is no escaping the world, however thick the coverings you try to shield yourself with, however much you hang back from it in fear: it’s coming to get you anyway. A message weirdly apropos with respect to my brother, who gave up est ages ago in favor of Bible-thumping, Rush Limbaugh and so on. My brother is one of the smartest and most talented people I’ve ever met, but he became scareder and scareder as the years ground him down; nowadays he just listens to Fox News and Rush, and rails against the End Times. That kind of fear makes people horribly judgmental, whether they are my brother or poor Belikov. Such people always give me the feeling that they are hurtling toward some especially bad end.

After all, the End Times are coming for each of us, one by one, and in the meantime all we have is the world, and ourselves, and one another. Maybe the Belikovs of the world are especially sad because, while they share the same doom as everyone else’s, they are denied the comforts of companionship, and of optimism, which are I think the main things that can at least soften the blow.

Please forgive me for understanding nothing whatsoever about how stories this compactly powerful are structured, or about formal academic literary criticism, come to that. But even I can see that there is great subtlety in the narration of this story. Chekov himself, in a way, is a Man in a Shell, covering his own ideas with the voice of Burkin, the high school teacher. Then Burkin conceals his ideas about the main story of Belikov, Varenka and her terrible but highly sympathetic brother, Kovalenko, by presenting without much comment the questionable reports of the principal’s wife, and of Belikov, Varenka and Kovalenko themselves.

These assorted raconteurs all left a great deal out—many of the principal things I most wanted to know. The foremost lacuna: exactly what was Belikov thinking, when he put the photograph of Varenka next to his bed? How could he have gotten to age forty without a girl ever being kind to him? On the other hand, how could Varenka be kind to him when he was such an old stick-in-the-mud? Could anyone on earth ever have gotten that man onto a bicycle? (I remember reading that bicycling was considered scandalous in London at that time as well, it was for wild, uninhibited people, maybe like skateboards are now.) If the wedding had come off, what would have become of the bicycling?

But. If this super inhibited middle-aged guy Belikov went so far as to speak out loud to his neighbor about marrying someone, and he put her photograph near his bed, was he in his private moments filled with a nameless longing, with burning passion, with ideas of this girl naked and trembling in his arms? Surely he has to have been? Was he in love, was he thinking about maybe really trying to live his life? About “playing”, maybe—playing openly—assuming his place at the table, instead of hiding in one of the not-playing methods of playing? Or was Belikov so completely bundled up, so covered with rubbers and umbrellas, so pre-coffined, that he didn’t really feel much? Beyond the bare understanding that Varenka liked the idea of getting married (Ha-ha-ha! she must have been out of her mind! I get that the 19th century notion of marriage was utterly different from our own, but why on earth did she think that this cold fish, this anti-bicyclist, would make any better of a companion than her noisy, rambunctious and yet weirdly sympathetic brother? Probably I love that guy because I am as exasperated with all these people as he is! Okay, obviously, he is “on the side of the honest and the free.”)

Is it Chekhov or Burkin who won’t tell us what was really going on with Belikov? Furthermore, how does either of them know what Varenka was thinking when she saw Belikov falling down the stairs—that she thought it had been an accident, and therefore comical? How does either of them know exactly what Belikov thought about this laughter—that it was mockery? It’s important if this is fact, rather than surmise.

Nobody really disagrees with Kovalenko about what a poor prospect for a brother-in-law the “informer” Belikov is making; Chekhov, Burkin, everyone appears to agree. I was sad that Belikov got pitched down the stairs, though—that’s “explicitly forbidden”, I think, pitching people down the stairs. It is a little embarrassing to me to be so certain that Kovalenko was in the right, but that was the impression that Ivan Ivanych was left with, as well. It’s kind of co-signed, that way.

Another thing: Who made the caricature of Belikov? Am I really dumb, and it’s obvious and I missed it? This person must have known that Belikov would be driven plumb loco by the caricature! So it seems like a terrifically malicious thing to do—I didn’t think we met anyone in the story who’d be mean enough to do that—certainly not Kovalenko. Offhand I would say it has to have been a student? Or a cynically-inclined colleague, someone possessed of a blacker sense of humor than anyone we got to know. If the caricaturist knew about “Anthropos” (which please, that is hilarious, who knew less about Anthropos than this Belikov?) then he must have known about his victim’s humorless, fearful, martinet-like character. It really gives you the creeps, thinking about that kind of cruelty.

So in the end, it turned out that Belikov was right to be so scared, right? “That which you most fear shall surely come upon you.” (I can’t remember who said that—my brother again, probably! Sounds like him.) But Belikov—standing before this scary thing, paralyzed by the possibility of a new life, like a child before a turning jump-rope who just can’t leap in. Who knew what would come of it? Something terrible, that’s what! Something that made him curl up and die for real. Why, for god’s sake? Is it possible even in the frail 19th century that anyone could be terrified enough to die of bicycles and a little snort of laughter?

* * *

1377969856

Gooseberries

Sarah Miller

“Gooseberries” opens with an oppressive gray sky that turns to rain. There’s a respite of coziness – dry clothes, and a pretty woman bearing tea and food – before Ivan Ivanych leads us into the utterly black story at its core.

The story starts out mildly. There are two brothers who take different paths: “I [Ivan Ivanych] went in for a learned profession and became a veterinary; Nikolay [Ivanych] at nineteen began to clerk in a provincial branch of the Treasury.” The boys grew up in the country, and Nikolay Ivanych yearns to return to that life, while Ivan Ivanych has some scorn for it, which seems particular to that time – it might be something like us rolling our eyes when people move from New York or the Bay Area to the Hudson Valley or Sonoma and raise chickens and hang antlers on their walls.

But that’s just punditry. Ivan Ivanych’s actual words: “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.”

(As I said, I don’t understand the specific way in which he disapproves of where his brother wants to live, but I was once the city person who didn’t understand why anyone lived in the country and now I am the opposite and I can only imagine whatever is behind his opinions is similarly tedious and self-aggrandizing.)

But Nikolay Ivanych’s desire to get a home in the country isn’t just a wish, it is an obsession. The horror of the story kicks in when we see what he’s willing to do to make it happen:

Still for the sake of buying a property with a gooseberry patch he married an elderly, homely widow, without a trace of affection for her, but simply because she had money. After marrying her, he went on living parsimoniously, keeping her half-starved, and he put her money in the bank in his own name. She had previously been the wife of a postmaster, who had got her used to pies and cordials. This second husband did not even give her enough black bread. She began to sicken, and some three years later gave up the ghost. And, of course, it never for a moment occurred to my brother that he was to blame for her death.

I could not stop thinking about the widow. I had to stop reading just to obsess about it, to chew on my disgust. I hated thinking about it, but I wanted to, it reminded me seeing repulsive images on the internet by mistake and going back to look at them again.

I imagined the widow feeling loved and cared for by her first husband. I imagined her relief in thinking someone else would love and care for her once again, and how she would have learned – slowly? quickly? Which would be worse? – that she had been deceived. I thought about how every single day, her hunger would be the proof of his deceit and how she would die slowly, knowing that her body was being starved because it was not pleasing enough to the eye to be kept alive.

The darkness of the story deepens when Ivan Ivanych gets to the country estate his brother has schemed for and it’s a total lemon, with a polluted stream and bad feng shui – “I was at a loss as to how to get to the yard and where to leave my horse,” Ivan Ivanych complains. But Nikolay Ivanych sees none of this, and has no sense that the world he inhabits is actually a hideously deformed version of the one he wanted or that he himself is cruel and stupid. His foul gooseberries taste good to him – he doesn’t even know reality when he puts it in his mouth.

The point of the story isn’t that there’s such an utter disconnect between what Nikolay Ivanych thinks he is (a country gentleman living in paradise) and what he actually is (a crass pig living in a dump). Nor is it that his blissful contentment with his vile life has rendered Ivan Ivanych unable to bear happiness in others. The point isn’t even the impassioned Sanderseque speech – that is a compliment, by the way – that Ivan Ivanych gives at the end of his story:

Why must we wait, I ask you? For what reason? I am told that nothing can be done all at once, that every idea is realized gradually, in its own time. But who is it that says so? Where is the proof that it is just? You cite the natural order of things, the law governing all phenomena, but is there law, is there order in the fact that I, a living, thinking man, stand beside a ditch and wait for it to close up of itself or fill up with silt, when I could jump over it or throw a bridge across it? And again, why must we wait? Wait, until we have no strength to live, and yet we have to live and are eager to live!

The point is that in the end, everyone just thinks Ivan Ivanych’s story is boring.

Ivan Ivanych’s story satisfied neither Burkin nor Alyohin. With the ladies and generals looking down from the golden frames, seeming alive in the dim light, 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.

Which is funny. We always waste our best material.

* * *

David Lipsky

“Sad Books for Humorous People”

Chekhov wrote the trilogy in 1898, at a time of depletion: he was 38 and told a friend he’d had to overcome a kind of physical repugnance, an aversion to settling down into his own verbal works. Writing was like “eating cabbage soup from which a cockroach has just been removed.”

“Gooseberries” is my favorite—the Empire Strikes Back of our trilogy. We got character in “Shell” by quick vivid strokes. Varenka “walked with her arms akimbo, laughed, sang, danced.” Chekhov does the same here with landscape. “You could see there was another vast plain, telegraph poles, a train that from afar looked like a caterpillar crawling.” (The third pictorial item receiving slightly more luxe treatment will come up in our third, Return of the Jedi story.) Which makes sense, since “Gooseberries” is about landscape.

Chekhov gives a picture of cockroach-broth land. “It was damp, muddy, dreary; and the water looked cold and unkind.” The unkind—it’s like the pincers necessary for successful Belikov extraction. Chekhov trusting that his connections will be understood by the reader, since they’re outfitted with the same kind of brain. (In his famous cruise ship piece, David Wallace writes, “The Atlantic that seethes off the eastern U.S. is glaucous and lightless and looks mean.”)

Near the end of “Shell,” Ivan Ivanych—not exactly a big speaking role thus far—tells Burkin he has on offer “a very instructive story.” Burkin counsels sleep. Burkin today reminds Ivan, since a good story handles remembering on the reader’s behalf. As Ivan takes breath and pipe, rain. Another one-sentence Chekhov watercolor. “The dogs, already wet, stood with their tails between their legs and looked at them feelingly.” [A gray Chardin you pass in the museum.]

Rain drives them to the gentleman’s farm owned by Alyohin. The rain delay—neat compositional work—makes Ivan’s story feel more precious. We’ve had to fight through plains and muck for it. If we think about this as Saunders invites students to, we find the delay working two things: It makes the paragraphs describing Aloyhin and his farm suspended; we read with the nice tension of awaiting something else, with bated readerly breath. And they raise our toweled-down expectation to finally hear, for God’s sake, Ivan Ivanych’s story.

As Nabokov predicts: Our next read is the true one. Alyohin is apparently grateful for company. A few grafs on he baldly says it: “You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you, gentlemen.” The following story, “About Love,” will explain and be driven by Alyohin’s loneliness. Alyohin tells the friends, “I don’t think I’ve had a wash since spring.” It seems to be summer. So, a long time between bathing stations. For a story to work, Saunders might tell his class, it’s good to show cause-and-effect operating in your world as they do past the edge of the page: it lends the imaginary weight. When Aloyhin slips into the waters of his bathing cabin, the water goes brown. After soaping, “dark-blue, the color of ink.” It’s pleasing. In Philip Pullman’s fantasy series His Dark Materials, a talking armored polar bear (a panserbjørn, for fans) escapes a crowded battlefield by balloon; when the bear steps in, the basket lurches. Bears are heavy—and an absolutely phantom world attains the dignified weight of the real.

Chekhov has time for this physics because he knows we’re waiting on Ivan’s tale. And in this real estate story, there’s another beautiful, poised landscape. Ivan Ivanych swimming in the drizzle.

No trace of Chekhov’s desktop reluctance. Every line full and sure. As Flaubert once said, “each phrase crammed to bursting with its idea.”

Ivan Ivanych came out of the cabin, plunged into the water with a splash, and swam in the rain . . . He raised waves on which white lilies swayed . . . He swam to the mill, spoke to the peasants there, and turned back and in the middle of the river lay floating, exposing his face to the rain.

Back indoors, Ivan begins his story.

Nabokov—who liked to ravish and astonish [and innovate] in prose—would not seem first pick for a Chekhov nominating speech. Nabokov says a lovely thing about Chekhov’s writing voice; it’s what you see above, the lily pads in Ivan’s swimming wake.

Russian critics have noted that Chekhov’s style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. His dictionary is poor, his combination of words almost trivial—the purple patch, the juicy verb, the hothouse adjective, the crême-de-menthe epithet, brought in on a silver tray, these were foreign to him. . . . His literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve. When Turgenev sits down to discuss a landscape, you notice that he is concerned with the trouser-crease of his phrase; he crosses his legs with an eye upon the color of his socks. Chekhov does not mind, not because these matters are not important—for some writers they are naturally and very beautifully important when the right temperament is there—but Chekhov does not mind because his temperament is quite foreign to verbal inventiveness. Even a bit of bad grammar or a slack newspaperish sentence left him unconcerned. . . [He was] less concerned than for instance Conrad was when (according to Ford Madox Ford) he tried to find a word of two syllables and a half—not merely two and not merely three, but exactly two and a half—which he felt was absolutely necessary to end a certain description. And being Conrad he was perfectly right, for that was the nature of his talent. Chekhov would have ended that sentence with an “out” or an “in” and never have noticed his ending—and Chekhov was a much greater writer than good old Conrad.

Ivan’s story moves along the same problem-potential solutions lines as “Man in a Shell.” Problem: Ivan’s brother Nikolay longs for a life wholly other than his city one. Possible fix: Country estate, with gooseberries.

“Once a man is possessed by an idea,” Chekhov warns, “this is no doing anything with him.” Nikolay gives over all pleasures. The world condenses to just the one dining thought: Eventually, Nikolay must eat gooseberries grown on his own land. Nikolay marries for money, ignores (pretty much into the grave; murder by marital neglect) his wife, inherits. Buys, plants. Plans at last come to fruition. (How fun to use that word in a non-metaphoric way.) Chekhov slyly shoehorns in an act break—a cut to Alyohin’s living room, under portraits of the fashionable and dead, before the second movement begins.

I had seen this story in tables of contents—Selected Stories of Chekhov and Best Russian Tales—and always assumed it would be about straw hats and spread blankets and jolly fruit picking. It’s much darker. (Maybe stories as boring as my imagined one can’t exist: or wouldn’t attract sufficient readerly love to make the trip from then to now.) About the warping desire for that afternoon of straw hats and blankets[—a total surprise]. A good story is always so true it amounts to a scandal. A yes! to a slow-dawning argument in our heads we didn’t know we were having.

The second act answers the first’s Q: what would it be like, to have a desire absolutely met? In just the way we wanted? (It happens so rarely this part of the story almost qualifies as science-fiction.) Ivan visits his brother. A servant brings out a plate of gooseberries. Always that bit of fictional exaggeration—Ivan happens to be present for the estate’s first yield. “He ate the gooseberries greedily,” Ivan says, “and kept repeating, ‘Ah, how delicious! Do taste them!’ ” Ivan tells us the fruit is in fact hard and sour.

I don’t want to push the moment: that would be Belikov and sonorous. When there’s a layer of false coating true enthusiasm the body throws up its hands and walks away. But Ivan is in bed. Through the wall, he hears his brother rise again and again—making for the kitchen to shovel down more sour gooseberries.

Nabokov has a lovely and rainy definition for Chekhov: “Sad books for humorous people.” Chekhov served his apprenticeship writing comedy for the newspapers—fast stories, tossed off the way you imagine Mozart scribbled out concertos, the page stained with spills from his flagon. Belikov’s story is sad—but his death is comic and liberating. He’s crushed by light spirits—it’s as if he were run over by a truck weighed down by DVDs of Seinfeld.

The “Gooseberries” end is sad in this delightfully unexpected way. Humor is speed, per Saunders, and it’s also the surprise, the break in the pattern. Chekhov comes at us from unforeseen angles. A less humorous writer might have Nikolay never find the right farm. Or his berry bushes not produce. Or the taste differ from memory. Sour is sad; Nikolay continuing to happily munch is sad comedy—it contains the compulsive, automatic element of comedy, which is Henri Bergson’s definition of humor. “[The image we have so far found in all laughable objects,] something mechanical in something living.” Sadness and comedy together makes it a feature (a lamppost in fog) of what Nabokov calls “the Chekhovian dove-gray world.” It’s what Nabokov says of the characters in general—you hear it in how much Ivan wanted to tell this story. A “typical Chekhovian hero,” Nabokov writes, “was the unfortunate bearer of a vague but beautiful human truth, a burden which he could neither get rid of nor carry.”

The rest of the story is a political speech. I’ll make you a bet. Six weeks from now, you’ll remember Varenka’s tripartite laugh and Belikov’s needing to be extracted. From “Gooseberries,” Ivan’s rain swim and the man hunched over that unappetizing plate. (Nikolay and berries, Chekhov and his soup. Your day self finds its way into your work.) Nikolai eating sour berries isn’t a social point. It’s the personal one of how, against evidence, we fool ourselves into victory. In a sense, Chekhov believing this story can be political is Nikolay serenely finding his gardening plan a success.

In the last grafs, Chekhov—understanding his trilogy’s needs—turns the lens on Alyohin. The man is yawning, up since dawn. Happy for any distraction. “The guests were not talking about groats, or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his life, and he was glad of it and wanted them to go on.” Chekhov is preparing the character for “About Love.” It goes back to Nabokov and rereading. A writer is never experiencing the story for the first time. Beyond everything else, when you reread, you join them in the spirit of the game. Ivan and Burkin retire. “The rain beat against the window panes all night.” The weather Ivan swam beneath, that drove them indoors. A story remembering what readers forgot.

* * *

Ryan Bradley

Why must we wait?

I’m rewriting this essay because what’s most important to me about the Gooseberries story has changed over the past 24 hours. A lot has changed over the past 24 hours. Donald Trump was elected president, being the main thing that has changed. That, followed by a bunch of my own thoughts—about not just the nation but my own career choices, my own path and what I do with my journalism and should aim to do with it going forward—all these thoughts are changing still. I haven’t quite figured out how to put these into words in the shape of sentences. So I’ve been rereading Gooseberries and realized what had grabbed me revisiting it weeks ago and writing about it no longer grabbed me. But let me back up a little bit.

This is Ivan Ivanych’s story, the one he wanted to tell Burkin at the barn that night, after Ivan Ivanych takes the more expansive view of the shells we all live in. It’s a story about Ivan Ivanych’s visit to his brother’s sad and lonely country estate, and his experience seeing his brother, “a happy man, one whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, who was satisfied with his lot and with himself” and feeling some sadness, yes, but also more than that: “an oppressive feeling bordering on despair.”

What happens next, Ivan Ivanych’s unpacking of his feeling that is close to despair but not quite, is of course what is currently most relevant to me. But I want to flash back to what my previous version of this essay had been about, if only because I think it demonstrates exactly what the prompt for these essays has been: the power of good storytelling and what we (in this case I) value in that. What had at first struck me about Chekov’s story were all the other, smaller, nested stories told before and after and even during Ivan Ivanych’s story of his brother and the gooseberries, and who is telling these stories, and what these smaller stories are doing here in the larger one. All these “tunes from other operas”—how they show us how characters’ move in the world and think about their place in it. I am fascinated by the use of these little stories to make a character more fully alive, sure, but to also set up and help us better understand aspects of what is to come. This story—or, at least, Ivan Ivanych—is grappling with one of the biggest questions of all: how to be good. I think the little stories, where we see him, where we hear from him, help us get there.

First, there’s some time and action before he begins telling his story. We get to see him in the countryside, in the cabin, in the rain, but especially the moment he’s diving in the river. Something that always amazes me about Chekhov is just how efficiently he sketches character and scene. This paragraph is a wonder:

Ivan Ivanych came out of the cabin, plunged into the water with a splash and swam in the rain, thrusting his arms out wide; he raised waves on which white lilies swayed. He swam out to the middle of the river and dived and a minute later came up in another spot and swam on and kept diving, trying to touch bottom. “By God!” he kept repeating delightedly, “by God!” He swam to the mill, spoke to the peasants there, and turned back and in the middle of the river lay floating, exposing his face to the rain. Burkin and Alyohin were already dressed and ready to leave, but he kept on swimming and diving. “By God!” he kept exclaiming. “Lord, have mercy on me.”

What all we’re seeing here—his faith, the natural world, the repeated plunging into the unknown depths…all of it comes back later on when he’s grappling near despair. (An aside: The line, “he raised white waves on which white lilies swayed” kills me.) Also the two stories he tells about money, one about the man dying man eating his lottery tickets and cash with honey “so that no one should get it,” and the other about the man whose leg is sliced off, anxious about the rubles stashed in his boot, left behind with the rest of his leg. Sure these moments aren’t directly connected to the gooseberries story he tells about his brother, but they exist in the same story Chekhov has constructed. The other operas, arranged alongside each other, creating and setting up something much, much deeper.

Okay so let’s go deep. Let’s hear from Ivan Ivanych about his near despair. The happy man, he says, “is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible.” We’re all in a general hypnosis, he says. If only, behind every door of every happy man there was “someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws.” Of course there is no man, he says. So what do we do?

This problem—of the lack of reminder of the sadness of the world, a hammer that breaks through the willful blindness of so many and forces discomfort and recognition and action—reminds me exactly of the same problem laid out by The Misfit, at the end of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”—“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit says after shooting the grandmother, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

(Look, I’m a dumb journalism major who didn’t take nearly enough English or literature classes in college, but it’s probably not a coincidence that these two short stories that grapple with the great big question of how to be good in the face of evil—or not just the face of evil, in the face of the enormity of the world and its comforts, where evil is too often easily ignored, well these are two of the most celebrated stories of all time, right? Because there’s basically no bigger question. How to do good: that’s the whole dang tamale.)

Ivan Ivanych wants to make the necessity of doing good as clear as possible. Do not quiet down, “don’t let yourself be lulled to sleep!” he says—“if life has a meaning and a purpose, that meaning and purpose is not our happiness but something greater and more rational. Do good!” In my used copy of this translation, this bit was circled, highlighted, and underlined several times by several previous readers. It’s a great bit, probably the heart of the story. But what’s calling out to me most, right now, faced with my own not even near despair but full blooming despair, is what Ivan Ivanych says before he lands on his simple and earnest call to goodness.

He’s in an argument with himself here, and Burkin. He’s saying how he used to think that freedom, while essential, was something certain people had to wait for. “Why must we wait?” he says, “looking wrathfully at Burkin.” Then: “Why must we wait, I ask you? For what reason? I am told that nothing can be done all at once, that every idea is realized gradually, in its own time. But who is it that says so? Where is the proof that it is just?” Which. Like. Fuck. Exactly. EXACTLY.

I keep hearing about how many people voted because they felt left behind, that they felt like they were losing out while others benefitted, and having this argument with myself about how so many of the statistics say exactly the opposite, and how so many voters just elected a man who is almost certain to make things so much worse because they felt some way. And part of me longs to maybe empathize or at least recognize that feeling is almost certainly important, and valid, but what I’ve decided is far more useful is not to wait. There is, truly, no time left. How do you do good? You can have a man with a hammer behind a door, reminding you, or a gun pointed at you, or the most frightening awful human you could imagine in power. And you get to work. Immediately.

* * *

Maria Bustillos

Our two guys are outside, again, in Nature, which begins by being at first touching and ravishingly beautiful, then suddenly becomes very uncomfortable, wet, cold, dirty, and inconvenient. This disappointment and mess prefigures the whole story: the “idyll of nature” is shown up for a fairy-tale, a false (ish) idealization. Or rather, it’s both true and false; the earth, Nature, our home, is a place of drop-dead, heart-bursting beauty. But go outside, make yourself vulnerable, lay yourself bare to that (or any) experience and you are liable to be scraped raw, harmed, wet, dirtied.

Now they take refuge with their weird friend, Alyohin, get tidied up and start shooting the breeze over “tea and jam”, a wonderful-sounding meal I have never understood in the least, because is there bread or not, and if not, are you saying you just eat the jam with a spoon? Maybe it’s more like a compote, not so sweet as what we would call jam.

Soon the idea of money is introduced—money as a corrupting force. (This bit is easy to understand, as it is presented in what became a conventional 20th-c. way; money as a form of filth, degradation.) “Money, like vodka, can do queer things to a man.” Money is not Nature, has nothing to do with Nature, but Ivanych’s brother Nikolay is completely enslaved to money—for the sake of Nature. He scrimps and saves in a most unattractive and cheeseparing way, because money will someday free him into the life he wants, give him the enjoyment of starlings, garden paths, flowers, fruit—particularly, gooseberries. Can a gross, filthy thing, got by dishonorable means, purify or ennoble us? (No.)

Once his dream is fulfilled, it emerges that that Nikolay isn’t so much out there enjoying Nature as he is getting fat and icky-looking, embroiling himself in lawsuits and demanding to be addressed as “Your Honor”. He has bad instincts, Nikolay, getting the peasants drunk on vodka and pompously holding forth on how “we, of the gentry” ought to look after them (with beatings, and no education, because “sadly” that’s what’s appropriate for them.) The gooseberries, so longed for, turn out to be sour and hard (you can’t get sweet gooseberries from a sour nature! A little poetic license there.) But Nikolay doesn’t care, he thinks they are delicious. The general unsatisfactoriness and creepiness of his brother’s condition depresses Ivanych in the worst way. (Personally, I was relieved that at least he was enjoying the gooseberries! It would be far worse if you worked that hard and then you got there and hated it all, which happens to people all the time, especially where money is concerned.)

Nikolay also reminded me of this thing Shaw said The Quintessence of Ibsenism. (He and Chekhov were just four years apart in age; much as I love him, I think you could say that Shaw is like a meaner, snarkier, less intelligent Chekhov.) “The fox not only declares that the grapes he cannot get are sour: he also insists that the sloes he can get are sweet.” (A remark about the Victorian version of Tea Partiers, basically.) Here is what I found interesting about that: There’s a subtle but infinite difference between talking yourself into a thing you can’t really believe (Fox News method), and whole-heartedly, sincerely, unquestioningly believing a false thing. Ivanych seems so disappointed that his brother really was enjoying the sour gooseberries, in the whole-hearted way; not pretending to enjoy them, but really enjoying them. His capacity even to determine the truth had been wrecked. Is Ivanych’s view of this matter reliable? I say yes.

Ivanych is so disgusted by the spectacle of his brother’s grossness and degradation that he is suddenly filled with revolutionary egalitarian fervor. What sends Ivanych the worst is apparently Nikolay’s contentment in his own brutishness; he is the “happy man” who is just like a pig, grunting with satisfaction at his sour, unpleasant life. What it took to return to the idyll of his youth, all the years of loveless money-grubbing, broke his ability to ever get back there, as Ivanych did when he went for his uncomplicated, un-calculating swim in the river at Alyohin’s. (He is a veterinarian—I think maybe he has it both ways, somehow, civilization and the love of Nature existing naturally, side by side.)

Then Ivanych rails against the smug, blind pretense that everything is going just great, the everyday conventional disaster of the world. The familiarity of this passage is kind of uncanny for the modern-day reader of progressive political convictions. It’s so exactly like watching those “Morning in America” bullshit Republican campaign commercials. “The Real America” etc. White people (salt of the earth!) standing by a pickup truck and looking nobly into the sunset. Let’s pretend! Ibsen is all about this, as well. Let’s pretend, and make matters about a zillion times worse!! (cf. Ghosts.) That stuff makes me feel exactly the same way Ivanych does: “What is terrible in life goes on behind the scenes.” Nikolay doesn’t even notice how much his fellow-pigs are suffering, not a tiny bit—worst of all, he never spares a moment’s thought for the lot of pigs generally, and his own ineluctable sharing of their same fate.

One wonders, how would Ivanych have felt if the gooseberries were ripe and sweet? I guess at least then, all the cheeseparing would not have been in vain; if he were a kind boss, if there really were starlings and fruit? It’s largely the loss of Ivanych’s own illusions about rural life—and the ruin of his hopes for his brother’s happiness—that hurt. (I get exactly like that with my Republican brother, and thought man, I could talk about this with Chekhov for hours and I think we would understand one another perfectly because it is exactly, exactly the same.)

But Ivanych’s audience, Alyohin and Burkin, don’t care much about the story of Nikolay, or about any revelations of the terrors behind the scenes, because they themselves are in comfy-pig rural mode, clean and cozy, enjoying themselves; they are living in the moment; it’s what we have, after all. Which is also true.

* * *

900462724

About Love

Sarah Miller

“About Love” incorporated two things I always appreciate in fiction: narrative tension and adultery. I wasn’t sitting on the edge of my seat to see how “The Man in A Shell” or “Gooseberries” would end. But with “About Love” I was surprised (despite the story’s title) when the story veered toward the wife, Anna, and I wanted to know (despite kind of knowing, in the sense that the narrator Alyohin and Anna are not a couple when he tells the story) what would happen between them. Stories without tension aren’t much more than narcissistic exercises to me (I’ve written plenty of them, so I should know.)

Love is a popular subject for fiction with good reason – it’s about “relatable” stuff like tastes and fate and there’s a lot of suspense in wondering who is going to be made happy or unhappy by the outcome. But adultery as a subject offers everything love offers and then additionally pits personal desires against societal expectations and demands characters make a choice about whether they’d rather be happy or good. And then there’s the economic element of it. Nothing reminds you of how much it sucks to be poor like people who could be together despite public disapproval if only they could afford it. The most devastating element of “About Love” is that Anna and her rich husband keep offering Alyohin money.

Here is Alyohin’s last moment with Anna:

When our eyes met right there in the compartment our spiritual strength deserted us both, I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands wet with tears—oh, how miserable we were!—I confessed my love to her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how needless and petty and deceptive was all that had hindered us from loving each other.

The above paragraph could be found in almost identical form in Anna Karenina, or The End of the Affair, or The Sun Also Rises. But adultery stories thrill every time. They remind us that there is this one life and that it ends and you have to fill it up correctly and you probably can’t and won’t. They remind us of death without actually saying death. Though often people in adultery stories die as well – extra punishment.

Chekhov is not my favorite. I could have predicted this. To be fair, his not being an English woman born somewhere between 1920 and 1940 puts him right away at a distinct disadvantage. He’s not someone I actively scorn, like Gertrude Stein or Jack Kerouac, or someone I wish I could get into and just can’t, like Kingsley Amis. His project, as I see it from the embarrassingly limited viewpoint of having read The Cherry Orchard and Uncle Vanya about 100 years ago and The Little Trilogy last week, just isn’t really My Thing.

There’s a tediously instructive side of Chekov that always repels a little even when I am being otherwise seduced. Lines like “People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about,” or “I have noticed that Ukrainian women always laugh or cry—there is no intermediate state for them” or “What isn’t done in the provinces out of boredom, how many useless and foolish things! And that is because what is necessary isn’t done at all,” reminds me of a purposefully cryptic teenager who is just starting to realize how annoying he is but isn’t sure what other personality to take on.

But this is only about fifty percent of what I think about him. The other fifty percent of me, which seems to have really very little in common with the first fifty percent, likes the way he seems to understand that how we live is not really living but just some shadow of an attempt at it. As my friend said the other day in a g chat:

sm1

I wrote back:

sm2

and then I said:

sm3

I thought this was pretty interesting but he didn’t write back. I felt like the Ivan Ivanych of g-chat. The rain beat against the windows.

* * *

David Lipsky

“Oyster Car”

Donald Rayfield, in his non-short (700 pages) Chekhov bio, informs us this is the “most moving” of the trilogy stories. For this reader, it’s the only Belikov—where affection feels imposed. The reason has to do with patterning.

There’s a great line from the brilliant dead movie critic Pauline Kael. She had disliked a (Chekhovian) Woody Allen movie called Crimes and Misdemeanors. I think she’s wrong. But in the service of being wrong Kael says a brilliant thing. “He’s telling us not just what we already know but what we’ve already rejected.”

“About Love” doesn’t tell a new thing. Its pattern-making and escalation stick. It tells us what we knew going in.

Ivan Ivanych (this means Ivan son-of-Ivan, on the patriarchal ID cards of the past,) is still traveling with Burkin. They’re still being hosted by that non-regular bath-taker of gusto, Alyohin. This third story is told in first person.

There’s a principle among comedy writers—the rule of threes. Chekhov came up as a writer of short, funny pieces for the newspapers (it’s how he supported his big failed family; the thin reed of newspaper comedy), and so might have come across a version himself. The first two items in a run establish the pattern, so it can be broken by the third. This’s so inscribed in comedy you sometimes see it becoming comedy. Drawn Together was a Comedy Central cartoon reality show. (Sit a second with that idea.) One house. Eight cartoon archetypes. Superman, a dirty-minded Disney princess, Spongebob Squarepants, all sharing a house fitted with a constellation of reality-TV cameras. There’s an episode that spoofs the unbelievable right-wing moment when politicians really did worry whether a kid’s show, Teletubbies, might turn unsuspecting viewers gay. Spongebob on Drawn Together gets yanked from the air. The controversy evaporates. He exclaims, “Now I can go back to doing what I do best: entertaining kids, annoying parents, and funny third thing!” A pattern so strong commentary on it actually meets the pattern: “funny third thing” really is a funny third thing.

That’s how our trilogy has worked: Burkin, in third person, tells a story. Ivan Ivanych, in third person, tells a story. Now unnamed narrator with Ivan and Burkin relates a story in first person. (In non-comedy terms, it’s why the land can be “muddy, dreary, unkind.” And why that caterpillar-like train crawls at the sentence end.) But the story told isn’t any fun.

My favorite Chekhovs (because I am a reader with unsurprising passions) are “The Lady With The Little Dog,” and the great nasty “The Duel,” which Philip Roth writes sharply about in his academic (and Chekhovian) novel, The Professor of Desire. Both stories are sad: both stories’ sadness is so precise, so intelligently and surprisingly felt, the sadness feels light. There’s a moment in “Lady with the Little Dog.” Married Gurov has made love to married Anna. She feels the full shared moral weight. He removes his pocket knife, slices some watermelon, eats without hurry. This gesture is so real and unpredictable it is itself the funny third thing; in the gray warmth of Chekhov’s prose, we smile at this recognized human moment like catching a candid photo of ourselves we’ve forgotten.

“About Love” has no moment like this. There is fun. For one thing, we see Raymond Carver getting an idea for his most famous story—a graft of the title. From “About Love” to “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” (Americans turn out to be more prolix than Russians.) Chekhov: “The conversation turned to love.” Carver: “We somehow got on the subject of love.” (Carver was an avowed Chekhov fan. His final story, “Errand,” about Chekhov’s death in a German hotel at age 44, ran a year before Carver himself died, age 50. Chekhov-tinged short fiction is powerful stuff.) Chekhov, on the landowner Alyohin, “It looked as though he wanted to tell a story.” Carver, on the physician Mel McGinnis. “My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.” So this story contained a seed, the flower of a better one.

The story builds, as we watch through Saundersized eyes. Alyohin is requisitioned from university for service on his family’s stony, unrewarding farm; he works with much industry but without relish. “I found it awfully tedious, and frowned with disgust, like a village cat driven by hunger to eat cucumbers in the kitchen garden. [Chekhov and that soup again.] My body ached, and I slept on my feet.” Saunders might quote to his class from John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse,” a story that’s a how-to for writing a story. “To say that Ambrose’s and Peter’s mother was pretty is to accomplish nothing; the reader may acknowledge the proposition, but the imagination is not engaged.” Lorrie Moore, Saunders’ only competition as a writer of American short stories, wants to tell us a character is unsettled, unhinged, angry with worry: “The mother does not feel large and cheerful. In her mind, she is scathing, acid-tongued, wraith-thin, and chain-smoking out on a fire escape somewhere.” To say Alyohin was exhausted accomplishes nothing. “I slept on my feet,” we can see. When Nabokov wants us to imagine Lolita’s Humbert in prison, he writes, “While I stand gripping the bars.” In the political section of “Gooseberries,” Chekhov cautions, “Life will sooner or later show you its claws.”

Alyohin gives up the news and outside interests; to preserve his farm he must become one of its beasts. (When Ivan and Burkin meet him in “Gooseberries” he’s cinched a rope for a belt and hasn’t bathed in forever. Like one of the manimals from Island of Dr. Moreau.) Chekhov builds him and his situation; as the town in “Shell” needs liberation, Alyohin needs comfort, contact: Alyohin needs to be restored to his factory setting of human.

He meets the Luganoviches and falls for the wife—Anna Alexeyevna. (Another of those details that bring us up short about the difference between then and now. “After dinner, they played a duet on the piano.” Late-evening, small town life; post-meal, pre-Netflix. Or maybe just small town life. In David Mamet’s small-town movie State and Main, a bookstore owner tells a Hollywood scriptwriter she belongs to the local theatre group. “You have to make your own fun,” he observes. “Everyone makes their own fun,” she counters. “If you don’t make it yourself, it ain’t fun, it’s entertainment.”) Again, this is the way our trilogy has worked. Problem, proposed solution, expanded problem: Anna is after all a Luganovich, another man’s wife. There’s a lovely line: “I did not think of her, but it was as though her shadow were lying lightly on my soul.” Not: “I didn’t think of her, but it was as though she was with me anyway.” That would be a proposition we might agree with; “her shadow on my soul” makes us feel and see.

Another lovely line gives us a snapshot of the time. Alyohin tells us,“ ‘The old woman had it easy,’ the proverb runs, ‘so she bought a pig.’ The Luganoviches had it easy, so they made friends with me.”

A nice measure of their love: hard-working Alyohin is endlessly penniless. But he will not accept offered sums from the L’s. It was fascinating via the Chekhov bio—since Chekhov wrote easily and came fast to success—to learn how often Chekhov was on the loan-acceptance side of friendship. Fiction connects with us in strange ways. I read this while finishing an overdue book, subsidized by lots of friends and well-wishers. It struck me—one of those fictional lines that alarms the whole torso—that Chekhov was expressing love as a willingness not to accept support: “Nothing in the world would have induced me to borrow from the Luganoviches.” In my experience, nothing pincers you out of the shells like fiction; it catches and exhumes you while unawares.

The failure of the story, for this reader, tells us something about the rigorousness and dictates of the work. How everything can be right . . . and yet not come off—as in a sexual encounter, a presidential campaign, an armed takeover of Nakatomi Plaza. Chekhov is of course great on love. (A charismatic late to marriage will develop subject matter expertise. Chekhov was not espoused until age 41.) Alyohin and Anna don’t want to love each other. They “timidly and jealously concealed it. We were afraid of everything that would reveal our secret to ourselves.” He gets just right the brushed shoulders and the solid feel of a beloved, unembraced presence beside you. In a theatre box (again!): “I would take the opera glass from her hands without a word, and feel at that moment that she was close to me, that she was mine, that we could not live without each other.”

Another note on threes, at this end of our trilogy: order is important in fiction. To a degree we don’t often realize, without the Hogwarts comprehension spell of rereads. “Shell” was about propriety and a failed love; “Gooseberries” about real estate and forced satisfaction; “About Love” is what it says. Imagine the order with the last two reversed: Chekhov is clever to separate his two small-town love stories with one about a man in love with an image of his own lifestyle.

In The Corrections—really a trilogy of novellas—Jon Franzen makes the same decision. Singles love story, married fight story, singles love story. There’s a part of a writer’s mind that’s always tracking this. First in others’ work then, with a little luck, in their own. Barth suggests it as a means to jump from reader to writer: “By never again reading your own stories or anybody else’s—or watching any stage or screen or TV play—innocently, but always with a third eye monitoring how the author does it: what dramaturgical cards are being played and subsequently picked up (or forgotten); what way points (and how many, and in what sequence) the author has chosen to the dramaturgical destination, and why; what pistols, to use Anton Chekhov’s famous example, are being hung on the wall in act one in order to be fired in act three.”

The relationship sours: Alyohin has paused and considered too long. (Updike, in a very early story. “Women hate mens’ doubts: They amount to insults.”) Anna becomes impatient. Unacted-upon love emits a stink the way old milk does in the fridge; something delayed until curdle, it sends you into a bad mood, or out of the room. “No matter what I said she disagreed with me,” Alyohin relates, “and if I had an argument she sided with my opponent. If I dropped something, she would say coldly: ‘I congratulate you.’” The dropped tray, the lunchroom applause—they apparently belong to a long noble tradition.

And then at the final moment, the story wobbles. Anna is married. Alyohin is moral. She’s departing by train. They confess their love—Alyohin gets his error: “ I realized that when you love you must either, in your reasoning about that love, start from what is higher, more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning, or you must not reason at all”—and Anna leaves.

In “Gooseberries,” the berries are sour; surprise one. Nikolay devours anyway, telling himself they’re sweet; surprise two. “Shell” features a surprise escalation: the final cozy shell is Belikov’s coffin. (“His expression was mild, pleasant, even cheerful,” Chekhov explains, “as though he were glad that he had at last been put into a case that he would never leave again.”) In “About Love,” Aloyin and Anna do realistically what we expect, in just the manner we expected. No surprise last item. And their story bounces off our circuits. (I’ll make you another bet: in twelve weeks, you’ll still have the sound of Ivan’s brother cheerlessly munching. And you will remember the next thing I’m about to say. But you will not remember Anna and Alyohin at all.) I know Chehkov’s last drink—champagne. German medical tradition was to serve sparkling wine at the moment a case turned hopeless. Chekhov’s last words were, “I haven’t had champagne in a long time.” Something good—a drink; something bad—demise. Chekhov’s final exchange was Chekhovian. He was an elegant man with a great hatred for convention. I don’t know what happened to Nabokov and Carver’s bodies after death—I imagine they were transported to the usual destination in the usual way. But I do remember what happened to Chekhov’s—it’s surprising, perfectly reasonable, not what you expect. “The last trick that Fate played on him,” Chekhov translator Avram Yarmolinsky writes, “was of the sort it would have amused him to jot down in his notebook.” Chekhov’s body was carted from Germany to Moscow in a refrigerated train car “for the transportation of fresh oysters.” This story ends in the normal train car, with the expected farewell.

And so at the last measure—thanks, Alyohin—I find I’ve failed Nabokov’s test after all.

* * *

Ryan Bradley

“Luckily or not, there is nothing in our lives that does not come to an end sooner or later”

Is “About Love” really about love? Haha seriously—I’m not sure it is! I know that it is a love story, I know that Alyohin, the guy telling the story (“a man of forty, tall and rotund, with long hair, looking more like a professor or an artist than a gentleman farmer”—we met him yesterday, in “Gooseberries,” he owns Sofyino, the land and barns and mill and bathing-cabin where Ivan Ivanych and Burkin stay) begins his story after the conversation turns to love. So he is pretty sure it’s a love story. But sometimes we tell each other stories that we say are about one thing and are really about something else. I think that’s what Chekov is doing here, presenting an interrogation of an idea he’s been circling around in the previous two stories.

I think the trilogy—first about the ways we all mask our true selves, then about the importance of doing good above all else, then about love—is really trying to come to terms with the fundamental problems of being free, what that means, how hard that is, and how often, even though we are free, we can be trapped. Trapped, in this case, by love.

Love, far from being the greatest thing in the world, “is a hindrance and a source of dissatisfaction and irritation,” Alyohin says. Of this he is certain. Then he launches into his story that is not quite about unrequited love but a love that can’t ever really be, of a woman who is married, with children, and will not leave her life for him. This makes him unhappy for years. It makes her unhappy too, maybe, though we never really have a sense of her internal life. Alyohin is trapped by this love. And maybe this woman, Anna Alexeyevna, is also trapped, or at least made sad by the fact that she loves they guy she’ll never be with, because of her comfortable life and husband and kids. Finally, when they express their love to one another in the most melodramatic and cliché way imaginable—on a trail, pulling away from station—what happens? Nothing. Actually, it’s better than nothing. The train has started to move, and Alyohin has to go to another compartment and sit and wait for the next station and then take a long walk home, like a real comic loser.

Two things I want to attempt to figure out. First, Chekhov describes Burkin and Ivan Ivanych walking out to the balcony and admiring the river while Alyohin is telling the story. What is with this river? It’s the same one Ivan Ivanych was joyously swimming in, diving down to the bottom, yelling “By God!” about. I don’t want to go so far as to say this river represents something like freedom and happiness and goodness, but maybe it’s close. It’s contentment, the enjoyment of a beautiful, natural, life-giving thing for exactly what it is. It is the exact opposite of all the things that get in the way of freedom. I have to assume Ivan Ivanych is naked when he’s swimming, because, yeah, he’s stripped of those shells.

There is also the sentence Alyohin utters before finishing his super sad love story: “Luckily or not, there is nothing in our lives that does not come to an end sooner or later.” Hot damn that’s true, and in that truth there is a kind of freedom. I suppose Chekhov is saying we all eventually get free even if it’s in death. Chekhov was, after all, a doctor, and often dark as hell in the sort of vaguely humorous way of someone who spends an awful lot of time in close proximity to death. But maybe he’s just thumbing his nose at all the romantic suckers, writers especially, who would put love above everything else. There are things more important than love, acts more devotional, ways to happiness more pure, selves more true. I’m not sure, maybe that’s what Ivan Ivanych is thinking about when he’s staring out at that river. Or maybe he’d just like to get back in.

* * *

Maria Bustillos

The story of Alyohin’s lost love, as told to Burkin and Ivanych. First we learn that Alyohin is a principled man. His dad had gone into debt over Alyohin’s education, so Alyohin feels indebted, and wants to pay back. Paradoxically, though, this means that instead of benefiting from his education by improving his own lot materially, professionally, Alyohin is going to be stuck on the farm for the duration. That part was a little unclear. What did Alyohin’s dad think was going to become of him? Why was he drawn back to this hard life where you only take a couple of baths a year?? What was the purpose of going to school? He is ready to renounce things, it seems, this man.

Then: she comes. Alyohin meets this nice middle-aged guy Luganovich and his young wife, Anna, in the course of his landed-gentry duties. These new people seem almost painfully ordinary, conventional, though Anna is beautiful and elegant in her ways. There’s a certain sympathy between them straightaway, Anna and Alyohin. One of the best things about the Luganoviches, apparently, is that they can appreciate Alyohin’s education: they lament that this cultivated man is busting tail on the farm rather than doing something more civilized (How could he “rush around like a squirrel in a cage, work hard and yet always be penniless”?)

This soothes Alyohin’s vanity. But then, he finds the Luganoviches themselves to be not really all that civilized. They can’t even fathom, for example, that those accused of a crime might be innocent, and are all ready to condemn the Jews who’ve been accused (wrongly, as it seems to Alyohin) of arson. Alyohin is condescending toward the Luganoviches, a bit, seems almost to feel that they are unworthy of their position. So I took against Anna from the first moment, on account of her position vis-à-vis the innocent Jews.

But Alyohin really likes Luganoviches a lot, becomes an informal member of their household, goes over there and listens to Anna play the piano for ages, which does sound pleasant. He wouldn’t borrow money from them, though he would from everyone else. This is an unimportant detail, he (falsely!) says to Burkin and Ivanych: “why mention the matter?” It’s the most important thing! He didn’t want to alter their relation of friendliness by tainting it with money. All these stories view money as a tainted thing, liable to corrupt.

Alyohin and Anna slowly become aware of a growing feeling for one another. It’s an entirely concealed love: he starts to think about the impossibility of confessing, let alone consummating this secret passion, though he is dead certain she reciprocates. “She would follow me, but where?” (Good question! cf. Anna Karenina, it would almost certainly be a real mess.) Then Anna gets “nervous prostration.” It seems pretty clear that she has got nervous prostration because she is lovesick. (I don’t think Chekhov is sneaky enough to knock her down for some other reason.) We don’t really get to learn how she felt about Alyohin, though, any more than we learned how Varenka felt about Belikov.

“What is higher, more important than happiness or unhappiness”—this first flush of love, as yet unconsummated, might pass, at least to some degree, in time, if it isn’t based in a deeper regard and admiration. I don’t know. As a former adulteress for whom everything uncannily worked out just great, twenty years on, I have extremely complicated feelings about these things. But I thought it very striking that Alyohin can no longer recall what it was about Anna Alexeyvna that he found so arresting. She was charming, pretty, that’s all. But he says, too, a feeling of nearness—sometimes I think there’s not so much more to The Real Thing than that, because such a nearness is so rare and precious. That is to say, some people—a very few—just have a conductivity to them, specifically relative to ourselves. An ordinary person who sits next to you on the train, for example, your soul and his are just in the ordinary relation of two people sitting near one another. But the one whom you are meant to love: the very air around such a person begins to scintillate with gathering meaning and feeling. If you pay attention, too, that feeling just grows more and more, even for twenty years. Maybe that’s the seed without which real love can’t grow: a natural fittingness, a sympathy between our souls, so that they are more open to one another. A capacity for touch, whether you act on it or not.

All three men go on flights of fancy that are related, each as he tells his story: Burkin’s is against the humdrum life-denying martinets of the world, like Belikov; Ivanych against life-denying money-grubbing like his brother’s; Alyohin’s against the conventional buttoned-upness of married life, as against the freedom of real love, which makes “sin or virtue in their usual meaning” irrelevant—in short, all three stories are about the prison of conventional life, where people are doing their time day to day together and pretending that we’re not going to die, vs. being keenly aware in every second that we’re part of nature, no matter how much we’ve bundled ourselves up, becoffined ourselves already, settled for “the done thing”, remain asleep, unaware. “Sin or virtue”—these things mean something very different from the POV of the real reality, which has a way of breaking in on us like a thunderclap (just like in “Tenth of December”.) When suddenly you see from that higher place and everything is so shimmering with meaning, light poured over all our moments like honey so that they glow and thrum with it; there is one single story for each life, each one brimming, teeming, beautiful and terrible in each second.

I don’t know Chekhov’s love life but I defy anybody who is really in love and loved in return, who has held the beloved and kissed, wept—I don’t know. It seems to me that’s the exact moment when you would just throw everything over, sell your estate, head over to the Crimea. Is this parallel to Alyohin’s renunciation of the “civilized” life? He preferred to hang back, not feel, not wash, not love, no longer read, no longer live? Is this self-control, a wise resignation, or some kind of horrible torpor?

He’s happy to see his friends who’re wet through, bathes for them, is ready to tell his story. I thought it was sad and so interesting how he couldn’t quite put his finger on why he had been so attracted to this girl. She was sweet, sympathetic! She was near, so near.

This was the hardest one of the three for me. I do not understand how people can choose other than love.

* * *

Syracuse Transcript

THE MAN IN THE SHELL (OR CASE, DEPENDING ON WHICH TRANSLATION YOU READ, BUT IT IS KIND OF INTERESTING HOW “SHELL” AND “CASE” MEAN ROUGHLY THE SAME THING IN RUSSIAN, APPARENTLY)

So here are three frame stories, linked by various recurring characters. The first one opens with two men, one inside the barn, one outside; Ivan Ivanovich agitated and smoking in the moonlight, and Burkin asleep inside; at the end of the second story Ivan is asleep, and Burkin agitated and awake. (“I’m just kind of noting some broad things, so we can come in and look at them later.”)

[From here on, in this heavily abridged transcript, George’s remarks are in bold and everyone else’s, including my own, are not—just to simplify, because the rest of us just felt like one big student.]

One of the benefits of this framing stuff… and this is sort of hard to talk about, but in a room full of artists, we have to. One of the delights of this Belikov guy is that he’s so unlikable. Right? It’s such a beautifully cruel caricature of a guy, and there’s something about it that’s really fun.

If you hear someone saying, “You know what? I really did something bad.” And you say, “Well… I’m sure it’s not that bad,” and then he tells you, and it is really bad. You know. There’s something fascinating about that. It really is a basic human curiosity… or it’s a basic human delight in mocking someone else, or being able to look down on someone else.

So that’s one of the arrows in our quiver. And if you can do it, like we all can, actually—some of us do it better than others—that’s a valid… valence. You can almost feel Chekhov rubbing his hands together when he gets on that riff about: “He’s a man in a case.” “Yeah, that’s right! He always wears galoshes and—you know what else? His penknife! It’s in a case.

That’s a very simple pleasure. That’s actually what propels us through this story, is that there’s this despicable guy. Is he going to stay despicable? Yeah!—he is, actually. That’s kind of good.

Don’t you think that kind of necessitates the frame in a way? It’s easier to have one character tell a cruel caricature of someone else, than to have a narrative presence?

Now: how is it? I think you’re right, but how is this.

Because then we’re relieved of the burden of wondering like oh, is the narrator kind of a dick? Because ultimately, you enter other consciousnesses, but to some extent you want to trust the narrator the most. Absent “unreliable narrator” stuff. So here, you don’t have to worry about like: “Well, am I a bad person for laughing at this guy?” Because [a character in the story] is the one who’s doing it.

Yeah. Yeah. What it really is, is an unreliable narrator story with a sort of confirming device. You know, where the listener can go, “Oh, I don’t know! That’s a horse of a different color.” Or… he can kind of destabilize the main narrator. We’ll talk about this more, but it’s a really great technique, and Chekhov is the master of it…

That the stories are embedded, with another character telling it, everything becomes a little more acceptable: less trying to teach you, or preach to you.

Exactly. It’s like if I say, “I hate dogs.” You go, “Wow. What a jerk!” But if I say, “I hate dogs,” and this other guy says, “I don’t think you mean it”—already it’s a different rhetoric, you know.

The uber-narrator is saying he hates dogs—and we don’t know how we feel about that. As opposed to the uber-narrator seeming to say: “I hate dogs.” Maybe that’s the unreliable narrator, where we know the author isn’t the character. But this is a way of putting that right into the story. And it’s very, very powerful.

Other things about that central story that we should have on the map?

If he’s so unpleasant, why do all these chicks want to marry the guy off? I mean they pick the worst guy in town, and this beautiful girl?

[another student] … well, that’s the way it works.

[laughter]

That’s a good question; I mean, what was that—

I think it was something like—him getting married might fix him, or something? Like, as a solution to their problem, not a solution to his… get him a girl to focus on.

And he says, “he’d been in our town for ten or fifteen years,” I mean, that’s incredible.

She’s not exactly the most… um, marriageable… you know. I’m trying to say this in a nice way, but she’s “approaching thirty.”

[laughter]

The line was, “She was not young anymore, she was nearly thirty.” But these were, you know, they were different times.

But she was “a peach,” though! She was a peach.

Yeah, she’s a beautiful girl. She even walks with her arms akimbo! Which, to me… that’s it. Even though… I don’t even know what that means.

She’s a cyclist, though, he can’t get over the fact that she’s a cyclist.

Yeah. As in Tolstoy, one of the amazing things about this is the way that Chekhov can kind of peel off a very simple thing that we’ve probably seen millions of times in our own life and never thought of as literary.

There’s also the line about the women growing livelier and even better-looking, as if they’d found an object in life.

That “even better-looking” is a great addition to that, isn’t it.

And now… let me show you something in terms of just line-to-line stuff, the way this escalation might happen. Okay, so the marriage is suggested, and that great riff, that now Belikov is going to apply his same way of thinking to this marriage. Well, it’s very serious. We have to take this very seriously. “You don’t know what may come of it.

They handed you a peach! And you still don’t know how to take it.

So then, on 363, you can almost feel the storyteller working here.

Okay… we just got the beat that says Belikov is not overjoyed, he’s not really properly appreciative of this, he’s not a man in love, exactly; he’s sort of trying to be in love, but he’s too cautious. And Chekhov says, “And he did not propose; he kept putting it off, to the vexation of the principal’s wife and all our ladies.

Okay, so now Chekhov’s got a little bit of a checkmate going—he’s on the beat called, “we’re delaying the proposal.” Now you can see one good story might be, if he just keeps delaying. In other words, if his timidity disables him, and he can never get the job done, and she drifts off to another man; that might be possible. But then somehow Chekhov goes in another direction: “a colossal scandal.”

Now—so first he’s got to put some things into play here. I’m guessing that maybe he thought of this colossal scandal. Maybe he heard about it. Maybe he rejected the thing I just said as being too standard. But as soon as he said, you know: “If it had not been for a colossal scandal,”—I think he knew where he was going. But then he looks around a little bit and he says, all right, what do I need to pull this off. Okay. What do I have. Welllll, I’ve got this brother [of the “peach,” Varenka], with the big booming voice. I haven’t used him yet. Hmm. Let me turn my attention to him for a minute.

I must tell you that Varenka’s brother conceived a hatred of Belikov from the first day of their acquaintance and couldn’t endure him.” That’s an interesting thought. He’s there, but we haven’t thought about him.

And then the brother says what we’ve been saying. “I don’t understand how you can put up with that informer, that nasty mug.” There’s a little pleasure at that; our surrogate has kind of just stepped in. “The atmosphere you breathe is vile, stifling!” And you’re laughing, you know?

I think of this, where you know… “You’re marrying this guy? This is a lifetime of him sitting there going hmm. Hmm. This guy actually will take anything good in your life, and go hmm? ‘Are you sure you want to—oh, that’s—is that thing expressly permitted?‘“ You know? He’s death, actually. So Chekhov introduces the brother, lets the brother occupy our viewpoint, basically.

All right… Again, I don’t know how he does this, but first of all, look how deadly efficient it is. He’s got the brother calling Belikov a spider. Then he needs something else. You know, you can feel him thinking, all right, I’ve got to put the brother and Belikov in conflict. How do I do it? And some impulse of his says, I don’t do it directly. Let me reach for one other element. And he thinks up this brilliant caricature of “Anthropos in Love.” Just—it’s a perfect thing, because you know that’s exactly what would kill Belikov, to be publicly shamed. So somehow from the mystery of art, Chekhov comes up with that bit about that caricature. And that is like the catalyst for the explosion. That little illustration.

We might just pause at that moment and notice that most of us, myself included, would say, Oh, I’ve got the brother, and I’ve got Belikov; all I’ve got to do is get them in the same room. And that’s kind of true. Okay, once they’re in the room, what are they going to fight about? The obvious thing is the sister. But Chekhov somehow puts the [other] thing first; he comes up with that illustration, and puts it in the air first. Which then… I don’t know why that’s magical, but somehow it lets the confrontation feel more natural maybe… I’m not sure.

He was going to be in love, right? This was a guy who was ten, fifteen years being exactly the same. Now something happened in that guy’s life that creates mockery in this community. Who drew that caricature? And why didn’t he draw it five years ago?

No, that’s exactly… and I think you get the reason, one reason he did, is because, well, it’s “Anthropos in Love.” And this guy dared to budge. So the community’s a little bit harsh, I mean, this is not exactly a nice thing, either. So anyway, we’ve got that illustration; somehow, it’s a stroke of genius, he puts that in there before there’s any hint of a confrontation.

And then there’s the bicycle, which is a stroke of genius thing in that if he should be so outraged by the bicycle, it’s kind of the last straw for us, in a weird way. So again, we’re admiring, but there’s something about the constant escalation of this… also, notice how free of reality it is. Chekhov always gets called a realist, but this is as caricaturish or elemental as anything you’ll ever read, as elemental as Beckett, really. Chekhov doesn’t do soft edges. It’s kind of abrupt, and… okay, what else do you want to talk about here?

It’s kind of good to have the caricature and the bicycle, as well, because he’s kind of wronged by the caricature, whereas he’s definitely wrong, with the bicycle, so he goes into the confrontation armed and incorrect at the same time.

That’s right. And that confrontation is interesting because first Belikov says, basically, “I want to apologize, I want you to know that I had nothing to do with that caricature.” Well… duh. You know, then he wants to say—”This was very irregular, and I’m very sorry for my part in it and I apologize to your sister.” And then he segues and says: “And also. This bicycle.”

What I imagine is him at home, agitated by this double violation of his principles. One, he’s been caricatured—two, his fiancee! Is almost—is on a bike! Wait a minute! Wait a minute. Something’s going on here. I’m going to get myself together. I’m going to go take care of this… And he’s maybe not even sure what he’s going to say. And he says the first thing, and then he can’t help but slide into the second. Which is, “You know… you are wearing an embroidered shirt. Are you mad?” And then one more beat, into basically saying: “If the authorities found out about this!” And then the brother says, “Go ahead and inform.

The brother says: “Whoever meddles in my private affairs can go to the devil!” Now, he means Belikov; Belikov says, “He’s insulted our superiors!” and it escalates from there, and he says: “Well you know, I’m going to have to turn you in.” It’s a brilliant little escalation…

Doug Unger [who taught creative writing at Syracuse in 1983 – 91] used to talk about how, in dialogue—in good dialogue—people are never talking directly to each other. You ask me A, and I answer, A prime. You misunderstand A prime, and you challenge me with C. In bad dialogue, they’re always saying, well,

“How are you?”

“I’m fine!”

“Do you have issues with your mother?”

“I do! She’s always…”

[laughter]

They’re trying to reach out, but they’re like, poking each other in the eye as they reach, you know. So the way Doug used to talk about it would be that if I’m talking to James, I have a thought bubble here, and James has a thought bubble, and most of what we’re doing is, we’re dumping out our thought bubbles regardless of what the other person is saying. So if I wake up that morning feeling wronged in my life, and James says, “That’s a nice shirt!”—I say, “Yeah, but nobody ever—no one ever appreciates it!”

So that’s a really interesting way to take your dialogue from—I mean, he makes it poetry, basically. It’s two solitudes, trying to connect, and they fail. This is not a fight that had to happen, actually. But each person had their own little issues that they were bringing to it, so.

It’s [Belikov’s] attempt to regain authority, though. Here he’s terrorized these people for ten years, they all have to be all worried about what’s he going to think. Now the bicycle thing… and that was true, too, I remember like, Shaw writing about that, how bicycling was super eccentric and wild, like being on a skateboard, when you’re supposed to be having all this dignity? You’re not having dignity, and this guy was so into that. So now he’s going to assert his authority again, and be back in charge, and tell everybody how they are going to behave—and it completely fell to pieces!

Yeah. It’s like when you’re trying to get a big animal back in the basket and you have to use too much force. Not that I’ve done that a lot, but.

[laughter]

But he becomes overtly an informer for the first time, in that moment. It’s very sad, and tragic. And yet… let’s also note how much fun it is when he goes down the stairs. When someone finally stands up to evil, it’s really a thrill, you know. And that actually is, you know, that’s part of our job, to make situations where that thrill can be introduced. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure. I don’t know, maybe it feels a little movieish or something, but that’s fun, you know. When he grabs him by the… and gives him a push. And when she walks in at that moment, that’s even better. “Ha-ha-ha!

Before he’s been thrown down the stairs, he’s never been that offended in his life.

So he’s never been that offended verbally, he gets thrown down the stairs, and then the girl walks in and laughs. And all the Russian readers know that he has to die right away.

[Shocked laughter, here, but also acknowledging the justice of this observation.]

And then this narrator, at the bottom of page 368. It’s a tragic story, it’s a harsh story, it’s a little bit of an unbelievable story, actually, and you can kind of normalize it by saying, “I confess, it is a great pleasure to bury people like Belikov.” You kind of feel a bit of a shock, and you think, yeah it was! it’s a pleasure to get him out of the story, even. And that thing about him finding the case that he always wanted. Okay, that’s the story. Let’s see… so, when we sort of glance at that story, what’s coming off it, what are the themes, what vibe do you take from that story into what’s coming.

This is the thing about Chekhov. His themes are so photographic, that when you try to pin them down, you always reduce them.

One thing is that even the worst guy can be in love.

So even this lowly, terrible Man in a Shell has the desire for love. Now what Chekhov will always do is to present a duality. So… that’s true. And what’s also true is that that guy’s characteristics prevented him. So you see that it’s both possible, and impossible: a hundred percent.

Now at this point—the story, we’re done, right? And we’re reminded that there’s a frame. And this is a lovely little sequence, here:

The high school teacher came out of the barn.

Remember, we haven’t seen him yet.

He was a short, stout man, completely bald, with a black beard that nearly reached his waist.

That beard was kind of surprising: to his waist! Wow, really weird!

…two dogs came out with him.

Oh!—and he says:

“What a moon!”

You know. There’s that feeling of… what’s been in the dark, what’s been in the case, is out. And it’s a little crazy. We’ve got a long beard, and there’s two unexpected dogs, and you can see the moon. Just that kind of feeling. Now this is something very characteristic of Chekhov, which is [that] anybody reading that story, I think, is going to be struck at some level by that, right? It’s a story about compression, and closure, and darkness, and bluh. And when the story is done, and Belikov is dead—ding dong, the witch is dead—the barn door comes open, and Burkin comes out, and he’s kind of funny-looking, and he doesn’t mind, and the dogs come out… but. If we use our sort of, high-school minds and say, what’s the meaning? It’s a little beautiful… you know, it’s just a little beautiful. You can’t exactly say that it’s a metaphor… kind of, but… right?

Well… they start out, and they’ve gone outside, and they want to go shooting? And be in nature, and expose themselves to the beauty. And it’s also going to hurt you, maybe, to be outside. And that’s what happens to Belikov. He comes outside for a second, into the world, and it’s a disaster. So there’s this huge amount of shells, and inside, and outside, and exposing yourself to the elements or to feelings, or to life… it’s dangerous.

Right. So this is the way Chekhovian metaphor works is, you can say that this story is working with inside and outside. It’s in the barn, it’s in the story. But when your mind goes for the reduction, it can’t quite get it. It just knows that inside/outside is a thing. And that’s actually very sophisticated, because as we talk about those examples… sometimes the reading mind is just delighted by parallels, you know. Juxtapositions. It doesn’t really have to know what the juxtaposition amounts to. A good reader, where we are now, would be kind of aware that In and Out is working. Light and Dark is working. And I think that’s because of the barn. I mean, it’s not daytime: Chekhov goes a lot of trouble to point out that the barn is dark, and Burkin is invisible. That’s the subtlety of Chekhov; we feel that that’s a thing, but we can’t quite say why, and he’s not going to pause to tell us exactly.

The whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about the theme, like where fear makes humans animals? And that especially, like the Man in the Shell, I mean he was literally like a crab or something, in a shell. And thinking about in this period of dictatorship, and how sociological studies have shown that people hunker down and go into their family units, and are less on the streets, and have more privacy, and they’re more closed off.

I think that’s exactly right. I’m sure Chekhov at this time was feeling what was coming because what was coming was already happening. Which is that there were a lot of Marxists, and they were severe. I’m sure that there were already secret societies. And within the Tsarist regime, there were a lot of informers too. So this is something that he’s picking up on.

I was thinking well, yes, the story itself is a shell, but like, Chekhov and I—we know. We know what Ivan [the narrator of the story] doesn’t. I don’t know if anyone else felt that way.

Yeah, yeah, right. Well also because here, and at the end of “Gooseberries,” especially, we’re regarded as a sort of an accessory character. Which is a pleasure for reader and writer. So now, then, Burkin doesn’t want to hear that story. And Chekhov, for structural—for formal reasons, doesn’t want to tell it right here. So they went into the barn; now they’re both in the dark, they’re both covered up; and then they hear these footsteps—

[here you can hear the tick-tick-tick of the chalk against the board, as he draws the path of footsteps outside the barn]

—and that is Mavra, who started us off. So let’s not underestimate the pleasures of symmetry. Mavra is actually… she was the way we got into the story in the first place, if you remember. She’s the one who never left her town, and so on. There’s something—and it’s so simple, and I don’t know that there’s quote-unquote “meaning” in it. But there’s something really pleasurable about having her just come out there for a second. Again, this is subtle.

Now they’ve gone in. This is—in and out, they have both gone in now, and so that’s a change: one out, one in. And then… there’s something really sensual about the fact that she’s walking out there, this woman who’s never been anywhere is now coming to them a little bit, to see what’s going on, and it’s just symmetrical, which is very nice. It doesn’t make or break the story but it’s just a nice thing, that Chekhov remembered that that ball was up in the air. In a small way, Mavra was in her house, where she likes to be. And she came out, right? She came out why? Because she’s curious, I think, a little bit.

* * *

GOOSEBERRIES

Okay so now we segue into “Gooseberries.” Burkin goes, “Last time we were in the barn, you were going to tell me a story.” And [Ivan] says, “Yes, I wanted to tell you about my brother.” And we feel a little bit like, “Okay, good, let’s hear it.” And we think: This is a response to “The Man in a Shell”—what’s it going to be?

He heaved a slow sigh, lit his pipe, but then it began to rain.

Now we notice—I mean structurally—that is a three-page digression; he’s going to tell you a story, and then he doesn’t get to it until 374. “We were two brothers,” he began. And you know, a bad workshop would say, “Why don’t you cut that out that whole thing?—’I wanted to tell you about my brother; my brother, who was two years my junior… I went in for a learned profession.”

This is a great place for you to find out about your narrative instincts. Because we’re reverse-engineering this story, basically. There’s a three-page digression. As you look at it, you should be asking: Why is this necessary? Why is it justified? How do you do that? So let’s look at it, starting from 372-373, what are the main beats in there—and I say “beats,” like in the Hollywood sense—what happens? What are the elements.

They’re wet and uncomfortable?

Right [writing at chalkboard] so they’re wet… For me—when I say “beats,” I think what I’m looking for is action. There’s actions—not so much mood or tone, but the specific action that we notice as we go through. They felt cold; they meet Alyohin; they go to the house; so… on 372, I’m not finding anything that feels beat-ish, this is all sort of just stage mechanics.

We go to the house, a large structure, he lived downstairs…

They see the maid.

Yes. Pelageya. Now, again, we notice, one of the reasons she stays in our memory I think is because that little thing is so cool, where the two guys go: Whoa. She’s one of the most beautiful women in literature, even though she is never described, and it’s because of those guys, literally, in a stranger’s house—you just walked in, and you’re a little bit rude, you go: Ohhh. So she’s suddenly on the page.

Then they go swimming. Alyohin, a little funny bit where he gets in the water and it turns jet black. “I haven’t bathed in quite a long time.” Then Ivan comes out, and jumps in with him, and I think this is a beat: Ivan is so delighted by this. It’s a very unforgettable image, and we’ve all done it, coming out of a cool lake: Ah, my god! Life! You feel so good. He swam to the mill…

So that’s a beat [writing at board], let’s just say he’s delighted, let’s just call it that, he’s having pleasure. Then that is complicated by Burkin. “You’ve had enough!”

I think it’s neat to introduce her that way and then to have him be so dirty, actually? Because I thought oh, she’s beautiful, maybe she’s his mistress. But like it just adds to the energy of this contradictory guy. Maybe she’s not, and that makes me like him more.

Right. Here’s how I see it. Everybody can see it differently, and you’ll all be correct. You could take a Chekhov story and say, I’m going to look at this in terms of gender roles, and it will fall open at your feet. You could say, I’m doing it in terms of light and dark. It will fall at your feet.

But in this case, the one thing that I notice is that Ivan is having this moment of pleasure—just sensual, happy pleasure and indulgence. Burkin says ahahhhhh—stop it. Now, we feel that Burkin is playing a Belikovian role. We also then, suddenly—pleasure becomes a thing, again. Like In and Out was a—pleasure becomes a thing.

And jumping ahead a bit, Ivan is about to give a big speech about how there shouldn’t be any happiness in the world. Right? There is no happiness and there never should be—a very beautiful, convincing speech, that his actions directly contradict.

He does say, “Lord, have mercy.

So now we’ve got pleasure, is in the mix; there’s Pelageya, she’s a maid, but she’s so beautiful that they have to stop, you know, so there’s another beat of sort of, life. So now let’s get into the heart of the story here, to see if we can make more sense of this.

So he’s got a brother, they have a taste of the country, they’re little tiny petit-noblemen. His grandfather or father was a private, who just barely made it over the line into the nobility. Then they lose their money—so they’re not nobility.

On page 375, Ivan, there’s a little bit of an aside where he says—here Chekhov/Ivan is responding to Tolstoy—he’s got a story in which it says a man only needs six feet to be buried in. And Chekhov says, or Ivan says, “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.” And he makes a beautiful little speech that I totally believe, about what we need in the world. We need to be expansive and free. I think this is basically Chekhov talking; you know, you can read his letters and he says very similar things. But we just note that he’s attributed it to Ivan; this is not Chekhov talking, this is Ivan. Ivan gets on his soapbox there, a little bit.

Also, it recalls the last story.

Yes. That’s right. Right. Which is why he’s telling you, presumably.

So then, what happens. Oh, the guy kills his wife, right? The guy wants this land so much that it’s his single focus in life, and he gets married to a widow, and basically starves her to death and takes her money, and, you know—it’s really comic, the way it’s presented, and he’s looking through the ads, and he says, “Country life has its advantages,” and all this kind of thing. He draws a plan of the estate.

Now here’s a brilliant thing that Chekhov does, and it’s a habit we should all get into: When you find yourself in your stories asserting something general, then you always should be pushing, pushing to get to the objective throughout. “My brother loved the country life, and he had a big fantasy of getting a farm.” The inner editor in you should say, How so? Tell me more. Well, he always wanted an estate. What kind? Ah, well, different kinds, but always they had these four things. Da-da-da-da, gooseberries. Really? And then you push one more, and you say, Let’s just keep it simple. He wanted gooseberries. Let that be the emblem of everything that he wanted.

And somehow, you know, it bites.

They’re tart; they’re not the sweetest berries.

They’re not the sweetest.

They’re good!

When we get through this whole story, he gets his gooseberries, the brother comes to visit him. There’s that bit where everybody looks like a pig on his estate; that’s on 378. “It looked as though he might grunt into the quilt at any moment.” Because Chekhov knows that that’s where he’s going with these people. They are self-interested and selfish, piggish people.

Okay. So when we step away from that story, which actually is very sophisticated; the story is made a story by Ivan’s beautiful speech about the happy man. What do you take away from that?

Let’s make sure we have it truly right… At the end Ivan, who’s told the story, says, “Lord forgive us sinners,” and he pulls the bedclothes over his head—which again, evokes Belikov, a little bit—and goes to sleep. But he’s left his pipe on the table, right? And the pipe stinks, and keeps Burkin awake. And… but also, you remember that what keeps you awake is agitation, and so maybe Burkin is agitated, also… something like that.

Of all the things we’ll talk about this year, this is the most useful tip I can point out.

Get ready for this.

[laughter]

All right, so. We all know that one of the problems, when you’re young—younger than you are now—is that you always keep showing up in your stories. Your opinions keep showing up in stories. And at some point you’re told, that it’s not—the story is not just your opinion. The story is of you, but it’s not you, so let’s just…

On 381 there’s a beautiful speech. “Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws”—I mean, to me that’s one of the most truthful statements about the purpose of fiction, maybe. But just, in general. Don’t, don’t—don’t you agree with that? And all he says about how, you know—most people are so happy, and it seems as if that happiness is supported by the misery of these silent masses, you know, it’s a really beautiful statement. And I’m going to say, that’s Chekhov. That if you go into his notebooks, and—that’s basically him. It’s pretty much his opinion.

So he embeds that in here. And I think anybody reading that goes, even if you didn’t like Ivan so far, you kind of go, well, you know what? I have to say… you’re right about that one, I agree with you on that. There’s something about happiness that’s a little… We’ve all felt that, too. You got everything you wanted, and you do feel a bit like a pig. It makes you actually insecure, when you get to have happiness…

But there’s something very comforting in it. Because life is going to come and show you its claws no matter how comfortable you are.

Well, that’s true.

So… it’s kind of this egalitarian, like—let’s all be quite comfortable that terrible things are coming, together.

Yeah. That’s right. But his thing here is, I don’t want to be happy. And he says, to his friend: You’re young! Do good, do good… he’s kind of a little bit obnoxious. So anyway, the mechanical move is simply, this is truth. Your truth. You go home right now and write two paragraphs that you really believe in. Your ethos, your manifesto, based on what you know so far. You know that that doesn’t belong in the story. People will yell at you for that, you know.

So this for me is a model. The thing is, okay. Are we limited people? We have limited imaginations.

Actually, no. Because if I say to you: defend Obamacare. You can do it. And if I say, I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you can tear Obamacare down, you can do it. Or if I said: come up with a scenario where abortion makes sense. You could do it. Come up with a scenario where you cringe when you read about abortion, that you feel so sad about it… you could do it.

We actually have quite unlimited powers of imagination. This is a little trick for allowing anything and everything you can make up into a story. And the trick is: attribute.

Anything you feel, if it’s an unholy impulse. You know. An evil thought. A naive thought. Just… if you say it clearly, then you just push it away from yourself, like Chekhov does. I just made a rant against the uh, Latvians. Whatever, you know. That’s not very nice. Do I really believe it? Well, no, but I said it. And I said it pretty clearly. Okay. Give it to somebody else, to say it, you know.

It’s a very powerful thing, because you have complete access to your imagination, in all the moods of you—you know? Your meanness, your idealism, your everything? You have access to it, because you don’t have to claim it. You make it and—that’s Dylan’s trick, actually. If you try to construct a coherent persona from Dylan’s body of work you can’t, it’s just an incredible multiplicity. But once you create it, then you can consider it an object to be used, as Chekhov does.

Let’s take a little break.

* * *

ABOUT LOVE

What Chekhov is doing is he’s stepping out, and he’s asserting at least two things on a given topic and then going, “Yeah.”

[laughter]

It’s very powerful, and it goes back to his statement that art doesn’t have to solve problems, it has to formulate them correctly. So the problem, one of the many problems this story raises: Can we trust our own pleasure, that is a simple way of saying it. Can we trust our own pleasure? And his answer is yes and no, and then he just walks. Because… he’s not here to answer that question, because it’s such a profound question that it’s not answerable.

But if you really look under the surface, you can manifest an unbelievable number of viewpoints. I mean… that’s called empathy, actually. Especially people who are as language-gifted as you are. You can do an exercise: Put in a box, fifty viewpoints. Even, onerous ones—it doesn’t matter.

Uh. Skinhead. OK. You could all do a skinhead, no question about it. But one of the moves is that you have to allow yourself to do it joyfully, without any kind of like… you know sometimes when we’re doing a viewpoint we’re not entirely sure of, we might undercut it as we’re doing it. But I would say do a full-out racist, crazy, xenophobic skinhead: just do it. You know. Now, it’s scary that you can. That’s a little scary; but then you have the text, then, what you do it from there. I mean, this is Shakespeare’s thing, right? Shakespeare can do anybody, and he has them talking to each other, you know. It’s very powerful…

But now let’s think about this in like, Tolstoy. Tolstoy is simpler; he’s more elemental, in a certain way, than Chekhov. Because Tolstoy will sort of build the opinion right into the story. Chekhov is a gentler soul, actually. There’s a great story that illustrates the two of them. Tolstoy was of course much older, and in youth a giant. Chekhov was also quite famous, but he was younger. And Chekhov was from peasant stock. His grandfather was a serf, and his father was this kind of brutal, I think he was some kind of church musician or something, but he beat the boys… Chekhov just barely made it out of the real difficult provincial life.

So Tolstoy was sort of bragging about what a player he was. He says something like—and Chekhov’s very goodlooking, you know—he says, “I bet you are a real,”—and in the translation it has an f and then a line, so you don’t know what the word is. And you think, I bet you are a real fucker, basically, or something. And Chekhov blushes, and he doesn’t answer. And Tolstoy says, “Ah, when I was young…” and Chekhov just kind of… you know, he’s actually more genteel than, uh, impulsive.

But I think Chekhov always—I think he was sort of a guy who was always having strong opinions, and then reconsidering. You can kind of feel that in his work. He’s able to put up these very strong, fiercely drawn caricatures, and then kind of say to the reader, “I know. I feel the same way, kind of. So, let me put this dirty pipe on the table. Now you know where we stand with him…” Then he says, “But also, didn’t he have kind of a good point?” There’s that constant back and forth which is very… That’s—that’s why we love him, I think…

Maybe we should start with this: What’s the thumbnail version of this one, this story here?

Like in a Hollywood version, like can you say it in one sentence, you know: “In a world where…”

Guy loves this woman that he can’t have…?

Yeah. Guy loves his best friend’s wife and does nothing about it. Right? And that’s basically it.

He gets taken in by this couple, falls in love with the wife, seems like the wife maybe falls in love with him. But he also kinda falls in love with the husband, right? He falls in love with the friendship. And in the end, it’s like a Waiting for Godot. They are attracted and they don’t do anything about it. Except at the last minute there’s a little burst of kissing in the train and then he gets in the next car, right, and rides a whole town down, gets off and walks home. That’s it. Very simple.

It seems to be a medium though… in the first story, under the guise of total deprivation in the other one people turn into pigs, right?—and here it’s like there’s a bit of indulgence in the love and the feelings. There’s also restraint and respect for the marriage, maybe.

I feel that very strongly. I always find it very moving when he doesn’t, you know, when his respect for the friendship is enough to counterweight his attraction; for him to say, “In this life I won’t have full love…” because it would be so damaging and that very… that practical consideration, about would her life be better?… I find that very moving.

A lot of times, if you were to bring up… you know, I saw on the news today, these people were convicted and I think they were innocent. A lot of people. because they don’t want to have to deal with the fact that the system is kind of broken, they say, “Oh no, it couldn’t be, couldn’t be.” I think that was really realistic.

And you know one thing that’s worth mentioning is that that, I often remember this story as being, a very good marriage, very good people, and this sort of possible interloper. But actually the husband in that story is a little bit less good than the narrator, he’s got that shut-down mentality, he’s a little dull, and yet he’s a good friend and so they don’t…and the thing about this story too is that there’s a cost, right?

You can see that they’re in love in a way that the husband and wife, I’m going to say, weren’t ever, maybe, would you say? So do they the right thing, which is to not pursue it and it’s not free… It’s corrosive. She starts snapping at him. Like, I love that whenever he would drop something, she’d say, I congratulate you.

She got nervous prostration. So that didn’t work out.

They both knew they’d missed the boat. They’re sweet, I guess.

Ok, let’s cut to the chase. I think this is a beautiful story and a beautiful ending of the trilogy. What is it that, if you were moved by the story, what moved you?

It’s like the ideal love is the one that doesn’t get satisfied, kind of like… the moment in the theater where their shoulders touch. It’s not going to get better than that. Like, that’s it.

And for me, like, I’m supposed to root for him…but the problems, I thought, were so… I’m not so sure there was a way for him to be happy, even if he had acted on it… I don’t know what they would have done. That’s a scandal, like to do something with his best friend. There’s so many things that go with that. Oh we’re in love, but …our lives are still ruined. In that sense, I was kind of happy. He kind of did the right thing. I kind of did not want him to do the other thing.

That’s what Chekhov does. He takes the argument at its highest level on both sides, and he puts them there and they both sit there. And I don’t think you can really…I never walk away from this story sure of what they should have done. As I’m getting older, I’m happier that they did what they did, I noticed. You can always think, “Oh, that’s so painful.” And also when you get older you think: imagine! He breaks off this marriage, she probably loses her kids. They go back to this house that we’ve been hearing about, and they’re living with Nikanor and Pelageya in this shithole. He’s gotta work 24/7 to keep the thing afloat. And then there’s that thing between them, where he’s always looking at her to see if she’s happy, she’s always looking… you know, it gets very complicated. I don’t feel like it’s gonna go very well.

But he doesn’t even remember why he liked her so much. That was what made me think: OK, you’ve dodged a bullet. Or at least, you’re now saying to yourself that you dodged one. Because this is all happening many years later, you’re hearing the—and he’s all fat and doesn’t bathe now. So, he’s remembering something, who knows how well or clearly. But because he doesn’t remember—if you really fall in love with somebody you know all the reasons why, you know? I think. I mean, I do. The ideas and stuff that a person had that attracted you to them? And it doesn’t really exist in her. She was just this beautiful, elegant, charming… those are the adjectives that keep coming up. But it’s not like, this is the one person who could make sense of the world for me, it’s not like that.

Whatever the reality of their relationship would have been, I think there was something that was sort of devastating about this that reminded of both moments of “In the Cart” [another Chekhov story] and “The Overcoat.” [Gogol] For me, the emotional core of the story was at the bottom of 393, when he says, “I would take the opera glass from her hands without a word and feel, at that moment, that she was close to me, that she was mine, that we could not live without each other, but by some strange misunderstanding, when we came out of the theater we always said goodbye and parted like strangers.”

And something about misunderstanding, there, is like in “In the Cart”, that sort of beautiful moment at the end. And then, in “The Overcoat”, there’s a sense, there’s this brief glimpse of an idea, of a life that you think could be yours. And it’s just, like, in this road that’s right next to where you are, and you can’t quite bridge it…

Now, we might, technically we might just notice this is a story—that’s exactly it—and that is something that doesn’t happen. You know, we always think we have to make drama. Well, you know, when you make a desire as beautifully as Chekhov has made it here, that’s the energy you have to work with. And at that point it’s kind of your choice. You know, you can do whatever you want with that energy. The only thing you can’t do is forget that you made it. So what he does is, he says is, they’re there, and at that moment they know. There’s like a mutual confession that, yeah, OK, all this time, yes: yes. And Chekhov just knows that there’s energy in that. And he does a very sophisticated thing, which is to have them not act on it.

That’s really hard to do, and to take away from the story. I feel like this is something I really would have loved when I was in high school, or something… and just like totally missed the point, insofar as I would have been like: “Oh, you can have a story where nothing happens! I want to write a story where nothing happens.” But that’s not what happens.

Right, and what it does though, maybe, is that it redirects our minds, because…it’s not really about what happens, but it’s about the energy that gets created by those things. The energy of the first story gets made by that delicious description of a jerk. The energy, you can feel it, the energy gets made. So in a certain sense, what you’re trying to do in prose, by any means necessary, is make that energy. I’m just calling it energy, you know. It’s just kind of a fullness that gets made. Once you make it, you have to be aware that you’ve made it, and then you somehow have to dispense with it.

It’s almost like… in a simple way, it’s a sort of three-ring circus where he raises the issue, here. Isn’t it terrible when people oppress one another? Yes.

Isn’t over-caution terrible? Yes it is.

Shouldn’t you be open-hearted? Yes.

All right then, come over to the second ring: let’s make it a little more complicated. Here’s a guy who, the brother, who’s very energetic in pursuit of what he wants. He loves, he has a great love in his life, which is his farm. Unfortunately, he killed a lady to get it, and when he got it, he turned into a pig! Well, what do you think now?

And then the reader might say, “Well actually, that’s true, you know.”

“And so how do we feel about pleasure? That swimming, that was pretty unclean, wasn’t it?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean that.”

Or maybe you come out of this saying, “Right, so what we need to do is be moderate in all things, and shoot for the greater good.”

Good! Come over here.

“You’re the guy who’s very moderate about love. How’s it working out for you?”

“Terrible.”

“Oh, you’re right, so he probably should have, you know, gone for it, right?”

“Yeah?”

“How would that work out for him?”

Terrible.”

I sometimes think Chekhov’s stories work like that. You get to the end and, the whole time you feel this moral presence: “Anton, what should I believe? What do you want me to believe? ‘Love is good.’ ‘No, it’s not good.’“ And he’s constantly guiding you by the shoulders. Every time it gets too simple he goes, “No no no no no…no no…no no no no…no no.” And at the end he just kind of drops you off a cliff.

[laughter]

So there isn’t any—he’s not gonna have—last week I sent that thing, you know, his “holy of holies” is freedom. So even freedom from being statically connected to any one idea, which is pretty…and also the freedom of not being connected to that one either, you know. He’s remarkable.

There’s a really, there’s a very symmetrical thing. That’s what resonated for me from your Hollywood idea, because there’s always a freedom speech in the movie. There’s a freedom speech in each of these stories, and it’s all against conventionality. It’s not that it’s necessarily going to work out for you, but there’s an underlying moral message of, “Consider taking a shot at freedom. Maybe it doesn’t work out for you, but it’s something to think about, rather than just like, hiding in the conventional bullshit.” And he talks about this, too. There’s a really good potted biography in the front of this book about how Chekhov escaped serfdom, and almost didn’t become a human being. Like—almost didn’t achieve the awareness. You know, he got enough education to bust out of conventionality.

For all the subtlety, all of which is present, there’s a very, very simple thing underneath there. You know, to be aware and to try to be free if possible.

And he talks about that, that his life has been a process of trying to wring the peasant blood out of himself. But even there—and I think you’re absolutely right—freedom, for him, he says, is “my holy of holies”…but then he does this very adult thing, which is say, “OK, you guys, be free.” And then see that you—that you’re not.

Freedom is also to choose not, too.

Right, but it’s laden with cost.

There’s that line in the first story: “Ah freedom, freedom! A mere hint, the faintest hope of its possibility gives wings to the soul. Isn’t that true?” Yeah.

That’s it.

* * *

Brooklyn Transcript

Proceedings of the Chekhov-Saunders Voltron/Humanity Kit Test Drive, held in Brooklyn on November 15th 2016. Participants: Sarah Miller (SM), Ryan Bradley (RB), David Lipsky (DL), and Maria Bustillos (MB).

Sarah Miller is the author of Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl and lives in Nevada City, CA.

David Lipsky’s cultural history of American climate is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster; he is the author of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.

Ryan Bradley is a writer in Los Angeles.

Maria Bustillos is a journalist and critic living in Los Angeles.

* * *

DL was asked to comment on his writing classes at NYU; he said, “I’m teaching The Hunger Games this week,” provoking bitter, election-related laughter. “And I taught Saunders last week, just by chance. I think In Persuasion Nation is literally a perfect collection, so… I taught that.”

There was a lot of heated literary disputation aside from Chekhov, regarding among other things Martin Amis, E.M. Forster, and the film, “Don’t Look Now.” (SM: “If only this were how we did our battles in America. Wouldn’t it be great? If the Senate and House fought, with like: ‘Your interpretation of The Red Badge of Courage is totally off, and that’s why we will—’”)

* * *

SM and MB confessed to a general preference for novels over stories.

MB: I don’t want to live on potato chips. It’s just… it’s over too soon.

DL: There’s a certain amount of lying you have to do to make any piece of fiction work, don’t you think? You have to compress, you have to exaggerate. What I mean by ‘lying’ is: the odds of Ivan Ivanovich being at the shitty estate on the day that [his brother] Nikolay gets his first taste of his own gooseberries?—they’re extremely low. Do you know what I mean? There’s a certain amount of exaggeration…

So if the story is a few pages, let’s say there’s going to be a certain amount of lying or compression just to make the story work. And you only get—like out of the thirteen pages—you’ll get maybe five or six just really good things that come out of all the other work. Whereas for a novel, you don’t have to do that much. You have the characters set up, right? You have the situation; you have the few basic things that are not believable or that have to be kind of shifted, to make it go. And then you’ve got . . . if it’s two hundred pages, you’ve got a hundred and twenty pages of great product. And that’s why I think it’s more fun to read novels than stories.

* * *

DL: One of the weird things about the literature that lasts? It’s obsessive, and it’s personal . . . .You can pick up Jane Austen; she is fucking pissed off. Doesn’t matter how polite she is. And Flaubert! Flaubert is so pissed off — Flaubert would have found our election funny, Flaubert hated conventionality, he spent thirty years compiling a dictionary of shitty phrases people repeated to be friendly: it’s called The Dictionary of Received Ideas. That’s somebody who is, in this delightful way, full of hate.

MB: That’s like Wallace, yeah.

DL: Yeah, exactly. I mean the stuff that actually sticks is obsessive. And might not have been that likeable –

MB: Petty and terrible.

DL: Exactly.

RB: So what do you think Chekhov was obsessed about?

MB: Freedom.

DL: Chekov is obsessed about—I’ll go with freedom. And he’s obsessed with indeterminacy. Saying, “Look, you guys want there to be big stories. You want characters to be heroic. It’s just these fucking people.”

RB: Yeah! Right?

MB: Yeah!

SM: Yeah…

DL: [In “The Lady With the Dog”] this guy’s just a pretty good philanderer. And he likes to sleep with a new someone while he’s on vacation. He sleeps with someone, he likes her, pretty much. And she really feels upset about the adultery—and while she’s in bed after they’ve had sex he just picks up a watermelon and cuts off a slice and just is eating it. And then he goes home and he realizes: “I really like that person—wait!” And he starts organizing his life towards her. Then they are just completely stuck in love, and the story ends when they both realize that the hard part is just beginning. And the story is over. Like that is a ballsy, cool thing, he’s saying “I’m not going to resolve it.” Right?

MB: I love that.

DL: And he uses the same joke that you love so much from “Gooseberries.” He takes a friend of his out to some club or whatever and says, “You know, this amazing thing happened when I was on vacation: I met a great girl.” And he’s kind of confessing the adultery, and the friend doesn’t say anything. But they walk out to get a cab and as the friend gets into the cab he’s like, “Oh, I wanted to say . . . ” and then [the philanderer] thinks, “Ah, now he’s going to respond!” And the guy says “You were right!—the fish in that restaurant—”

* * *

RB: Chekhov had a day job, right, where he saw a lot of people—he had this like really good ear. And probably heard a lot of half-finished stories that people tell all the time. All the time! Because he has this amazing ear, being able to realize that people start stories that they never finish, they tell themselves stories they don’t really know the meaning of—they’ve not thought about why they’re telling the story, it’s just the story they tell—this is how people pass the day, all the time.

SM: Right, right.

MB: Not the day…

RB: Their—their lives.

MB: Their lives.

RB: But like—

MB: Our lives—

RB: —he’s seen them in glimpses in his practice, in between the horrible life-and-death shit that he’s dealing with.

* * *

SM: At the end of the stories there’s the two men, sort of bored by [Alyohin’s] story. And then there’s Ivan saying, “I want to tell you a story” and Burkin says, “Not right now.” Game over! And there’s another instance of somebody sort of expressing their sort of lack of interest in someone else’s narrative or—

MB: Oh, many!

SM: —fending them off from telling them another story.

RB: In “Gooseberries,” there are several—before the story happens—“No, no, we’re doing other things.”

SM: Yeah. It’s so funny, really his whole message is, like: No one cares!

[Uproarious laughter]

RB (shouts): Yeah!

MB: I know!

RB: It’s so true!

SM: Long, long stories about how nobody cares.

RB: Yeah! It’s just so fitting with his life experience, he’s in his office day in and day out, a doctor, listening to people’s dumbass stories all the time.

MB: Yeah! You guys ever read The Interpretation of Dreams? Ever? Of Freud?

DL: He’s really gone out of fashion.

MB: It’s so good!

RB: Yeah?

MB: I was thinking of it because here’s this titan of 20th century thought, and he’s going on about how your mind works itself out while you sleep, and The Unconscious and all this, and how part of the function of dreams is to keep you sleeping. So he tells this story, he had a boil on his testicle, and in the dream he’s riding a horse. There’s no way he can have this boil on his testicle and also be riding a horse; therefore he doesn’t have a boil and he can keep sleeping.

[slight pause to digest this]

DL: You’re saying all of this is like having a boil on your testicle?

MB: Yeah.

[That is, a story is like a dream that allows you to live through the truth.]

DL: Making sure I heard this properly: So . . . he’s saying the dream is like the brain’s in-flight movie

MB: Yes.

* * *

RB: Chekhov’s descriptions of landscape really are beautiful. And quick

SM: Yeah, even of a really squalid landscape.

RB: Way more than like—Flaubert gets a ton of props for his amazing descriptions of landscape, but these are like sketches of the natural world that are really efficient, but gorgeous.

DL: That was Baudelaire who said that Flaubert “gets a ton of props,” wasn’t it?

* * *

DL: I have a question: who tells the third story? Alyohin is talking—but someone else is telling it.

RB: You’re right! That’s something I totally missed… you’re so aware of the voice coming through the characters in the other two stories, and then it’s abstracted in the third one.

DL: They’re all frame stories—like Frankenstein is a frame story. They’re all sitting there and someone says “Here’s something bad that happened: ‘I really just wanted to reanimate the dead, and it all went wrong.’”

[laughter]

DL: There’s Burkin and Ivan—and then the third [story] shifts, and there’s an “I” who’s saying, “We were all sitting around and I was looking at Alyohin, and he started speaking.” I was curious about that. Did Saunders talk about that?

MB: He did, he said he thinks there’s maybe an inconsistency in it, a mistake.

RB: Even though it’s told by this third party, you get internal stuff from [Alyohin], but you don’t get anything about the woman he is in love with, aside from her reactions to him; you don’t get any internal stuff from her. But then you get that wonderful… after they have their declaration of love, he just like, goes into the other train compartment and cries while the train is already… which you wouldn’t…

MB: Oh. I loved that so much because it seemed like exactly like what would happen, something so freaking awkward and ridiculous.

* * *

MB: So George goes: if somebody tells you, you know,“I don’t like dogs.” And you think: What a jerk!” But then somebody else says: “You don’t really mean that.”

DL: Oh, that’s very clever.

MB: So compact. When the answer comes back: “You don’t really mean that.” “Yeah! Yeah, I do, I do mean that.” Or: “Well… I guess maybe I don’t.” Or maybe afraid to answer, now, because I don’t really want to admit that I don’t like dogs; I’ve been shamed. It’s this huge mise en abyme… you know, like when you look between facing mirrors and you see a million of you?

DL: What’s the phrase for that?

MB: Mise en abyme.

* * *

A long talk about the politics; generalized confusion and sadness.

SM: I just don’t even know what to do.

MB: We’re going to figure something out.

* * *

SM to DL: You’ve written one novel? I’ve written two. One okay one, and one okay-plus one.

[RB and MB have only dabbled in fiction.]

RB: I I don’t even know necessarily how to pay attention to the craft of storytelling. I know what I like, and I definitely steal all my best moves in my nonfiction from fiction, from short stories I like. And I think about structural moves. But these minutiae that you were pointing out—

DL: I think all that comes from rereading. The weird thing . . . when you’re going through high school and college, you tend to look at stories always as an audience member, and you just keep getting more and more adept as a member of the audience, you can catch more stuff.

And one of the nice things about a class like George’s, is that it allows you to be on the other side of the desk. Where you’re looking out at the reader from the writer’s side . . . Because when you do, then you understand what’s going on. The first time you’re just like “Wow, that’s really cool: Katniss ended up in the Hunger Games?!!? Who’d have seen that coming?! I was so worried about Primrose, I didn’t see Katniss coming.”

[uproarious laughter]

* * *

[After a description of George’s class is read aloud.]

RB: It makes me think a lot, [George’s] background as an engineer… let’s diagram this [story], the shape: there’s one guy in darkness, one in light. One’s awake, one’s asleep and then—switch. I was like—very attentive to the sudden turns in tone, and—

MB: There’s a stillness to [Chekhov], it’s static, it’s boring, in a way! There’s no effects, there’s not like, gorgeous clothes or witty women, or—

SM: That’s kind of funny, because that’s what they say they wish they were talking about… “This is boring. can we talk about chicks?”

DL: What was your favorite of the stories?

SM: “About Love.”

DL: Just Sarah? Because you like adultery stories.

[laughter]

DL: There are so many adultery stories. Because it’s an immediate secret—it’s immediately dramatic. You can’t tell your friends, for better or worse. You can’t tell your partner most of the time when you are committing adultery: “Here’s the way I fooled you: isn’t this pretty cool?” The only time you can get good data about what it feels like to be an adulterer is from fiction. So it is a natural writer’s subject.

SM: It wasn’t just that! I said this in my piece (which you should memorize): I also liked that I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and the other ones were a little still, for me. I felt like the characters were, like from Forster, the difference between flat and round characters: these characters were all kind of flat characters. I like more story; I’m not super interested in “ideas”… in fact, I find ideas kind of… I have kind of a knee-jerk anti-sexist feeling—a misandrist reaction to “ideas.” “Oooh, let’s talk about this, are we all in shells?” Who gives a shit.

DL: So when Maria was quoting George talking about the structure—and how at the end, they’re walking into sunlight—were you kind of rolling your eyes and internally thinking, “That seems kind of bullshit, and what does it matter?”

SM: No, no no.

DL: Oh, because I have to say that I kind of was.

[lols]

DL: Just talking about the twists and all that, and about how different people are responding at the end of the story? That to me doesn’t seem to have much to do with how the story works. And I don’t think it even is how Chekhov was composing it. That to me is the kind of stuff where I’m like Sarah: I don’t care about that.

SM: I wasn’t really paying that much attention. Like… I went to college in the late 80s early 90s and I had this guy [REDACTED], was my professor, and he was kind of… such a dick.

DL: He’s an Updike scholar.

SM: And everything he talked about was like [pompous voice] How Does This Story Work. And I was like “Literally, who gives a shit.” But I was also like seventeen and I went to public school, and everyone just clearly had been at Exeter and Andover, so this had been a thing. And at my high school, we didn’t do this. How does a story work? Who cares? But I also didn’t understand it.

So I’m interested in the form of things. And as someone who writes fiction, the form is the only thing abut it that really matters. That’s why people like things. I mean you have to write it well, but if you don’t have a good form—if the puzzle does not fit together well—you don’t have anything.

RB: How does a story work? Do you want to keep reading after every sentence? Answer yes or no. If the answer is yes every time, then the story works.

[Back to “round” and “flat” characters, according to E.M. Forster’s definition in Aspects of the Novel.]

DL asked each to name a favorite novel.

SM: The Cazalet Chronicle by Elizabeth Jane Howard. All five of them. She was Kingsley Amis’s [second] wife.

DL: Yeah I remember, of course, there’s that lovely photo of them looking glamorous.

MB: She’s not the one who wrote on his back in lipstick?

[No—that was his first wife, Hilly.]

SM: I’m not sure…

DL: Yeah. Then his first wife moved back in to see him to the grave, btw, with her second husband.

DL: So what is your favorite book of fiction? One of your favorite books of fiction.

MB:            Tom Jones

RB:            The Left Hand of Darkness

SM:            The Cazalet Chronicle

DL: I’ve never read Elizabeth Jane Howard, but I know at least in [Tom Jones and The Left Hand of Darkness], those characters aren’t round or flat, so those distinctions are kind of bullshit, pretty much. It’s just what works. And I love George’s work, I think George is the best short story writer now. But his characters are not what you’re there for, do you know what I mean?

SM: Yes!

MB: Yes!

RB: Yes!

DL: The degree to which people are spending time thinking about whether their characters are round or flat? We are misleading them, and taking their time away. If they actually watched The Simpsons, or an okay movie on Hulu, they would spend their time better, in terms of learning to write stories, than in thinking about whether or not their characters are round or flat.

MB: But like… I feel that way about, hmm… Anna Karenina, definitely.

DL: Of course! There are some stories where you’re there for the characters, and others where you’re not at all.

SM: But in Chekhov, in these stories? You’re not there for the characters.

MB: You’re there for the characters they’re talking about, not the ones they are.

DL: Well said. I’d go with that. Because Belikov I’m curious about; I’m curious about Varenka. And I’m really curious about Nikolay and the berries.

MB: You know what, I think that’s almost the brilliance of it. The people who are telling the stories are like us and with us in a potent, intimate way. All are looking, watching.

RB: And these are stories about people whom they vaguely know, and who are also in the village? Like… the truest form of human social bonding there is, is telling each other stories about people you know.

* * *

DL chose a favorite book: Pale Fire.

RB: The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I went to Iowa City with the Young Writers program… My teacher—a student, I guess—was a poet, and he assigned us only two books to read before the class: Moby-Dick and Pale Fire.

MB: David carries John Shade’s poem in his telephone.

DL (shyly): On my phone, yeah.

RB: That’s so awesome.

DL: Because it’s a really good poem.

RB: Because it is!!

MB: It’s so good. I find it so insulting that people don’t understand that he is the best poet ever to live.

SM: Who?!

MB: John Shade.

DL: Nabokov spent about ten years doing really elaborate annotations for the English translation of Eugene Onegin, and it must have told him that would be a really cool way to do a novel. Because once Lolita came out, and he was kind of freed up from ever doing anything again for money, the next thing he wrote was the novel, Pale Fire. Which is a 999-line poem, and then the annotations on it, and the annotations end up telling the story.

[Chekhov was an early innovator in this exact technique. “Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town,” for example, is an 1881 short story consisting bits of telegrams, notes, excerpts from letters. (“FROM NADIA N. TO KATYA H. Dear Katya. Last night I went to the theater and saw Sera Burnyard. Oh Katya, how many diamonds that woman has! All night I cried at the thought that I’ll never ever own such a heap of diamonds.”]

* * *

Which was your favorite story in the Little Trilogy? SM loves “About Love” best; the others choose “Gooseberries.”

RB: “Gooseberries” is the weirdest, and has the most going on. Also—about how I believed about the U.S.—I am going to reread this story and come to it in a very different way, and focus on a different part of it.

MB: This is the weirdest thing that has happened [after the election]. What happened last week is going to color how you think about everything henceforth. And that’s sad.

SM: Yeah. That’s what I hate about it so much. Like: Why do I have to carry this around with me.

MB: Just one more note about the flat character thing. Chekhov to me is the opposite of what Forster is talking about. I feel like Chekhov leveled up from Forster.

[Because there are no rules, as DL suggests, other than “what works.” Like George Saunders—both writers anticipate what you’ve been thinking, moment by moment: MB brings this up specifically.]

SM: Hmm.

MB: It’s a rare, amazing beautiful thing, and it’s too little remarked. I asked George about this directly and he said, “That’s the goal, to know where my reader is at any moment and do the next thing with that in mind.”

SM: That’s a really good way to think about… an interesting way to think about how you would proceed.

DL: Can I respond to that? One of the things that Wallace said is that you shouldn’t do that, right? Wallace said that if you’re always thinking about what the reader’s going to like, you’re not going to do anything good . . .

MB: That’s different.

DL: The aim is not just to write stuff, but to be able to project what an alien consciousness might make of it, right? Obviously both those thoughts can’t co-exist? So let’s put that aside for a second.

MB: It’s very easily resolved –

DL: Yeah, yeah, but one of the . . . wait, why is it easily resolved?

MB: The question of liking doesn’t enter into it. You just know where they are.

DL: Martin Amis, do you like his stuff?

MB: No!

DL: OK. I think he’s great.

RB: Really? You don’t?

MB: No.

DL: I’m getting, I’m getting a real fix on Sarah’s face.

[inaudible uproar]

DL: Amis had a great thing—

SM: Elizabeth Jane Howard was his stepmom… and his mentor.

DL: That’s right: actually, without Elizabeth Jane Howard he wouldn’t even have gone to school.

[“When Jane took me on I was averaging an O-level a year, and read nothing but comics, plus the occasional Harold Robbins and (for example) the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley’s Lover; I had recently sat an A-level in English – the only subject in which I showed the slightest promise – and I failed.”]

SM: That’s right.

DL: He’d still be a fucked up kid at—

SM: Exactly. Thank you, now we’re getting somewhere.

* * *

[A long exchange here on the theme, roughly speaking, of anticipating the reader’s needs. Must we like the author. Is he doing a sales job on us? A con job?]

RB: What I love about fiction is the dealing in the ambiguities; that to me is where fiction is a much better mirror for reality. Where non-fiction really fails, so often, you’re very clear who the heroes you’ve developed are; the non-fiction I really like is [saying], these are people who are making deeply complex choices, and I do not know if I would like to be around them.

DL: I can read Chekhov and think, “This guy might not like me. I like his work a lot, but he might meet me and might not like me, I might not like him”. I can read Joan Didion and I might think, “She might think I was too easy on people, or she might think I’m a dick, right?” You can read Pauline Kael (who I really love) and think: “She might think my taste was all wet.”

SM: She’s a terrifying person.

DL: Yeah.

RB: Totally.

MB: I love her so much.

SM: Which is why, like, whenever you’re mean—I can be so mean. sometimes. And whenever I’m mean it’s because I just… feel bad, right? Whatever. It’s like, so Lorrie Moore is someone who you go, “This person feels fucking awful sometimes.”

DL: That’s right.

RB [laughing]: Ye-heh!

SM: Actually I can’t deal with people who I never think feel awful? I don’t really care if people are mean, I only care if they are mean and then ask, like, “What are you talking about?”

* * *

DL: “Gooseberries,”—anyone else could have written the story where he’s a dick. But then they wouldn’t have allowed him to murder his wife for the cash. Make him actually culpable.

RB: It took literally a paragraph in the story. Crazy.

DL: Or, it would be like “OK, like, he never actually buys the farm.” That would be the ironic ending, right? Or he buys the farm and the gooseberry bushes don’t yield.

[general assent]

DL: But the thing that’s surprising, it’s a double surprise, is that only Chekov would have the really dirty human truth he’s giving us—he buys the farm. The bushes yield, the berries are sour. He eats them anyway, thinking they’re sweet. Both Updike and Raymond Carver said the same thing about fiction. Which is: it’s always bringing news from one world to another. And they’re such different kinds of writers—if those two guys say the same thing, it’s kind of worth thinking about. (And this is news, a deeper, sadder headline: that our tastes might not even be our tastes at all.)

Did you ever have a thing—like, with your boyfriend or your parents, and they’re really wanting to like, have a good holiday? Thanksgiving is coming, it’s more like for family, and you’re really just hoping that the fight won’t get that bad this time, right? Or the food will be okay. And so we can class this thing, this day, as successful, when it’s over, and just ignore all the shit that’s going on.

And that’s kind of like the “Gooseberries” story. Which is: he’s going to grow those gooseberries, he wants them to be good. And even though they suck, he’s going to eat them.

RB: And enjoy ’em!

DL: Yes. He keeps getting up in the middle of the night, to have more of these shitty berries.

RB: Yeah!

DL: And that is dirty, useful, jubilant—the “jubilant awful truth” that Updike is talking about. And that’s why I love that story.

RB: Like, there’s zero, like real come-uppance to him.

MB: No, not a bit.

RB: Right, his brother gets everything that he wants, it’s only, it’s only in that, it’s through the lens of, of, Ivan, telling it—

DL: Yeah.

RB: That will tell you, “These gooseberries were gross.” And bad.

DL: And the second joke—which is your joke, Sarah—when it’s over? He tells the story, and the story is a great thing to have told somebody. And the listeners, the other people didn’t get it: “That wasn’t the kind of story I wanted to hear.”

MB: God yeah. “Uh… I wasn’t digging that.”

DL: And that’s great. That’s the reverse. They were served, those three people were served a really sweet plate of gooseberries. And they didn’t realise they were sweet, they thought they were hard and sour, and that’s the third joke.

MB: Yeah. The brother had this whole other concept. He was so disgusted by the idea that you would be taken in by these shitty…

DL: Yeah.

MB: Like, what the hell? You know, you gave up everything. And this is what you got.

RB: In my re-reading of it I really latched on to… in the politics section, in his rant, his notion of… like, if only there were a guy behind the door with a hammer reminding you of all the tragedy. I think that is the problem of being a free person in the world.

There are people who accept the constant horribleness of reality; that people are suffering really tragic, really unjust deaths, not just people but animals, like there is tragedy all around us, but [caustic laugh] just to get by, most of us… ignore it.

MB: Have to.

RB: Have to. Just to exist in the world, we have to ignore it. But in order to be a good person and make the right choice, always, you need the guy behind the door, the dude with the gun pointed at you, like, you know, because… we’re constantly making choices that are not [sardonic laugh] morally the perfect choice.

MB: Or even… vaguely defensible.

RB: Or even defensible! Right! You’re right! Like, I’m constantly making choices that are not defensible, really morally.

SM: Really?

RB: Oh yeah. Like…

MB: Like flying here in an airplane.

RB: Yeah. Exactly.

SM: Ah. Okay.

MB: Yeah, it’s almost like… The artificial structures that you create in order to be able to, uh, sort of posit the idea of a good answer… This is why I love Chekhov, I didn’t realize… he doesn’t create the scenario by which you even could decide that there’s a good answer. He just creates a scenario and says, “I’m sorry, you’re on your own now. I have absolutely no idea. Sorry! That’s all I got.”

DL: Sarah, what were you about to say just now?

SM: Oh. It just reminds me of Grizzly Man, how—does this guy deserve to get eaten by a bear because he’s so fucking dumb?

RB: Right.

SM: That’s kind of what that movie’s about, isn’t it?

RB: No, yeah. Like, a dude made a choice to hang out with bears a lot, and he got eaten.

* * *

DL: Czeslaw Milosz said, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. . . . ” But the reality is the reverse. If you think about that Updike thing, Updike’s early work—his family is still sitting at that table in the stories, even though everybody is dead. If you write honestly and directly, right? When a family is born, when a writer is born into the family, the family is saved.

SM: I should tell my parents that when they write me and say—

[general hilarity and noise]

SM: “You guys are going to live forever on the page.”

* * *

MB: I had such an affinity with Ivan, because I am boycotting my family holidays this year because of the election, and I told them, I can’t come to this party, I can’t do it, you know, it’s unfortunate, but I can’t, when so many of you guys voted for someone who has directly threatened harm to me and mine. And my niece wrote back and said “I understand and I respect your decision blah blah,” and I’m like, you know what? If I never see you again, and I love you, I—I have very confused feelings about this, so I kind of feel like that’s that’s… that’s how Ivan feels. He’s basically saying to his brother: “You have ruined what I thought was good by being such a dick.”

RB: It’s funny though, because he never told the brother off.

MB: You can’t! What good would it do, I feel the same way. It’s like what am I going to say: “You’re an idiot.”

DL: Maria, there’s this Flannery O’ Connor story called “Revelation.” This woman who thinks really well of herself—she’s in a waiting room for her doctor, and she’s congratulating herself on her politeness and her model behaviour at all times. And there’s like a kid who like obviously has some control issues. And she’s like judging this girl, and is being in her own eyes very Christian. And at one point the girl says “Oh get away from me, you old warthog from hell.” And she realizes, “I am a warthog,” and that’s how the story ends. So it can be useful, actually, to tell somebody off.

* * *

MB: This is one of the best nights of my life.

DL: I feel you might be exaggerating because of the pleasure of the moment.

MB: That’s all there is! As Chekhov teaches us.

* * *

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

In this week’s Top 5, read a letter from Coretta Scott King and stories by Lizzie Presser, Kathryn Schulz, Michael Friscolanti, and Mitchell Sunderland.

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