Back to the Russians, Chekhov, Turgenev

It is the ragweed season. I feel like an old man, weak, little energy, and I could almost want to cry out for some vague undefined pain within and all over. My Labor Day celebrations consisted of lamenting over the truly lousy shift that Sunday night was, where I am, as usual left to endure making polite conversation with regular customers and being left holding the bag of all the long work that is the lonely misery of closing time. I wonder about my sanity on such nights, and such is the extent of my misery that there is no option but to drink wine, just to numb the pain.

A big rain came through, and I hope I feel better today, as later on I must go face another crowd of regulars, the wine tasters who come in to be entertained by the famous wine tasting night. I'll get the first customers, I'll be left with the last, thrown to the dogs as usual.

But at least I have a book, though any book would take serious effort today, by short story master Frank O'Connor.

Periodically, when life is shit, one turns to the Russians. Who else will prop you up, support that wordy part of the brain? And when Autumn rolls around, somehow, out comes the Chekhov and the Turgenev. Dusts jackets allude to it simply, that such works, with sketched out the tyranny and barbarism of the system of which serfdom was a part, were enough to get you placed under house arrest. And indeed, there are some sketches of landowners and miserable serfs that one will find in Sketches From A Hunter's Album.

But were such works simple polemics? Where they intended that way?

Well, we are long removed from the historical period, and the record of that period also recedes, as we are left with our own problems. Perhaps in need for a little fantasy life in our minds, given such contemporary problems, one is left with a sense of the history of the form of that great work of empathy, the short story.

Reading a great story, we don't cast judgment so much as embrace the lot of truth a story brings, complicated truths that embrace sympathy for people we might not in life get to know so well or simply draw a quick moralizing conclusion. A richer picture, we are brought, of the human being. We might even see both sides of an issue, or rather, how it's hard to place blame, moving being our tendencies to judge based on certain preliminary information.

That's what a great work does. It gives you a picture of something like human loneliness, like the loneliness of old age and poverty.

And we might maybe admit that in our hurried instant byte times that we are growing less sensitive rather then more? Studies show the college kid of today is not all that great about being empathetic, as a general statement, given that we haven't saved him and her from the environment they are submersed in. (Maybe like the modern beef cow, they just need to be let out of the factory feeding zone to return to the green pasture, to eat some green grass to get the diseases out of their system.)

Okay, yes, a story is supposed to tell us an entertaining yarn, but come to find out, our attention spans and normal curiosity is quite adept at enjoying simple stories that are real about real people in real situations confronting life's issues. These are things that give stories actual content, content we learn and grow from, as children learn to read by reading about things that interest them (in contrast to the philosophies of No Child Left Behind/teach to the test.) If we really want to learn about Empathy and Sympathy and that sort of thing, it comes from reading.

O"Connor gives us a lovely picture (we are not being ironic, nor sarcastic here) of a Chekhov who had a fondness for doctors and teachers, underpaid servants of humanity. Not a religious person, he had a sense of real day to day saintliness.

And so, this evening, this great writer, who has tried to be empathetic to creatures and written a sensitive but maybe tedious tale against a background of failed adolescent romance, (painful, awkward, who can bear actually reading more than a sentence without cringing, without wanting to shoot the idiot main character) will go off to work, set up the bar for famous wine tasting night, and then deal with actual people from the storerooms of city life, listening to them patiently, serving them with hospitality, and then, when they are all done, this great writer will be finally left alone, but greatly irritated by the whole thing such that all he wants to do is go home and numb himself with wine and bad television, too tired to read. They, the customers, will have some inkling, of a basically kind, though maybe grumpy person, serving them, trying to deal with the shame of being 'nothing more than a service sector employee in the hospitality industry,' but, taking things at more or less surface value--and hey, you are what you eat, you make your own bed and must lie in it--regard you not much as a great writer. And if they were to see you as a writer, would see it as some strange obscure habit, even if when considered briefly it might somehow seem admirable in some small way, but not really amounting to much in the course of human events.

And I, the great writer, am a bit sick of my own literary efforts, and finding myself far too exhausted at the end of the week of those efforts spent in a restaurant trying to make a living to really feel very happy about the paying job.

Melville was right. Become a customs agent. Forget poetry and prose and sensitivity toward fellow human creatures.


But, yes, poor old Anton, long dead now and in the soil, what can one do against that ultimate good night but write and write and thereby erect a forest of words, even if that forest scares and leaves most fearful at studying its fringes. ( Indeed, is that not how a schoolboy might view a large book?) Rage, rage and write against the dying of the light.

Anton, you achieved your true stature through this great empathy, bringing before people and situations we would not be comfortable with, as if you had climbed into them with your own self and your own life. What a brave man to do all that.

O'Connor presents a beautiful picture of that guy Gogol, who sort of started it all. In his poor clerk, bereft of overcoat, do we not see a Christian statement, 'I am your brother, why do you persecute me,' that moves the story quite beyond the entertaining grotesque it might otherwise seem to be at first. (That is all O'Connor, not me; I simply paraphrase from lazy recent reading memory.)

How awkward would it be for one to suggest that he too was, like Chekhov, a great writer? How preposterous? That would be to suggest that it is a great soul who stands there pouring wine, clearing a low table of dirty plates. That would be to admit that you have some crazy truly insane vision of how you present yourself as a Christ-like figure, amongst, truly, publicans and sinners, the modern wining and dining set, a picture complete with your own sufferings and martyrdom for artistic ideals of saying that you a writer, but not really doing much about it except one book that took you twenty years to write and few haphazard blog entries that the world happily zooms right by without as much as a twitch of noticing. Great man, sure, right.

But then, where, when, how does one take, if not the first step, toward being a writer, but that equally difficult one, the second?



"No, I am not worthy of biography,"
quoth he.
"I am a sick man, an ill man,
as Dostoevsky.
A case of bi-polar,
a jumbled brain."
Talent enough to write
about all the worlds' great issues,
but no follow through.
We live in a democracy after all,
a business world economy;
what need have we
of miniscule empathy?

Ahh, but Turgenev, how can you miss his beauty, even if to modern reader the prose initially seems a bit 19th Century, overly-detailed, slowly paced... Anyone who can bring you a story like that of Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District, as mystifyied as it may leave you, absolutely superb achievement. Good old Penguin classics.