Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

She begins a soliloquy that could be lifted out of the book as a novella in itself. Flaubert complained in his early writings that language is inadequate to depths of feeling. This is over whelmingly disproved by himself in Marie’s telling of her story. One might doubt whether a woman of her brutally humble background could have such a command of words to embody feelings. What can’t be questioned, only received with amazement, is how a male writer could enter identity with a woman out of his class and kind, so utterly. This is the writer’s clairvoyance, that all writers share to a certain extent, which this time is beyond what inevitably comes to mind in comparison — James Joyce’s creation of inner musings of Molly Bloom. The twenty-year-old Flaubert achieved close to the great Hungarian writer-critic Georg Lukács’s definition of the fiction writer’s unachievable ultimate aim: wholeness; how to express all . Flaubert’s narrator says he is ‘like a bee gathering everything to nourish me and give me life’. Flaubert, creating him and the woman Marie, attains this — for his work . The brief novel, with its hurtingly fresh evocation of passion for nature and sexual love as two fused expressions of the same primal source, its implicit social critique, linking individuals to their time, is shocking, yes — not in the sense of offensive but of awakening as you read, areas of thought evaded, hidden. I leave it to you, the reader, to reach The End — at what point the author puts aside his account of his narrator’s life, turns away to begin the novels of his celebrated maturity, including Madame Bovary .

Gustave Flaubert’s famously cryptic remark of that period: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ Madame Bovary is myself. In this early novel, all the manifestations of life revealed are somewhere buried in all of us. We were or are young. C’est nous . It’s us.

2004

Tolstoy plunges the reader directly into his stories; no ponderous scene-setting used by other nineteenth-century writers. War and Peace begins with the broadside announcement by a St Petersburg socialite, Napoleon has taken Genoa and Lucca — the era of the Napoleonic wars is instantly stage-set. The opening of Anna Karenina is a calm bombshell: ‘Everything had gone wrong in the Oblonsky household.’ The Death of Ivan Ilyich thrusts the reader into the office of the court among lawyers to hear ‘Gentlemen! Ivan Ilyich has died.’

The story begins at its end. But this is not just a familiar novelistic device, followed by a rewind of a life. The intention is to shock — and in an unconventional way. It succeeds. These are Ilyich’s lawyer colleagues and friends; and their unspoken reaction to the sad news is, ‘What about that, he’s dead; but I’m not.’ His intimate colleague Pyotr Ivanovich is anxious to be done with the obligatory visit to pay respects to the corpse lying in the deceased’s home and get away to his game of cards. To make up for this irreverence he crosses himself repeatedly until the formula seems excessive as he gazes at the dead man’s face; he sees there a ‘reproach or a reminder to the living’ but it has ‘no relevance’ to him. So tolls an ominous note that resounds throughout the story: no one wants to face the mystery of death as inevitable in his or her own person. The note resonates with a prevailing materialism that makes a brassy travesty of life’s final event. Praskovya Fyodorovna, Ivan’s wife, weeps while she enquires ‘most thoroughly’ about the price of the burial plot and whether she could not somehow extract more compensation money for her husband’s demise from the government in which he had a prestigious position as a member of the Chamber of Justice. Only the peasant servant Gerasim, handing Pyotr Ivanovich his fur coat, remarks innocently, ‘It’ll be the same for all of us.’

What did Ivan Ilyich die of? — the gentlemen asked.

Will it be the same for all? Tolstoy has a devastating diagnosis which will be revealed through his unflinching genius in this short novel which encompasses such great themes.

Ivan Ilyich was the son of a civil servant who ‘made the sort of career … that gets people to a position in which … though it proves clear they are unfit to do any real job, nonetheless, due to their … rank, they … are given fabricated, fictitious posts and non-fictitious thousands …’ of roubles. Ivan consequently ‘assimilated … their ways, their outlooks on life, and established friendly relations with them’. His acquired characteristics Tolstoy lists as sensuality, vanity and — somewhat misplaced, it would seem, in the same category as something reprehensible? — liberalism. But that may be explained when the reader comes to understand that the story is being told in the context of the writer’s convictions when he wrote it in 1886.

After law school, Ivan is provided by his father with a post as an officer in a provincial government for which he is kitted out materially from the most luxurious shops. He is urbane, suitably obsequious to the Governor, popular with the men and has amorous liaisons in accordance with what is manly and fashionable. I’m tempted to quote directly from Tolstoy time and again, since his castigation in the form of wry wit makes his observations so succinct in comparison with any lame attempt at paraphrase. ‘Everything took place with clean hands, in clean shirts, with French words … in the very highest society.’ Five years later, Ilyich’s career takes off with the new judicial initiatives put in place as a result of the freeing of the serfs in 1861. He becomes examining magistrate in a different province. The higher post brings within him a sense of the power of the ruling class. He doesn’t directly abuse this power; more subtly, its seduction lies in trying to ‘emolliate its manifestations’: the classic ethos of liberalism exposed by Tolstoy, as when Ilyich dismisses ‘from his mind all circumstances ’ (my italics) relating to a case; but Tolstoy’s infallible skill implants in the reader’s subconscious what will be recalled when exposition comes later, as one realises that Tolstoy is accusing society of creating criminals out of unjust social conditions. The implication follows that in accordance with the general hypocrisy of his way of life Ilyich was not dispensing justice.

Outward form is what he follows in everything.

‘Indeed, why on earth shouldn’t I get married?’ He marries an attractive, intelligent girl of the right class. Not a great love. But suitable. Marriage in that milieu is, like death, a matter of accoutrements. ‘Conjugal caresses’ are simply an adjunct to the right furnishings and objects d’art to keep up with the Tsarist high society Joneses. But with pregnancy and the advent of crying babies, the suitable wife becomes fractious and there are vulgar scenes between the couple. The pleasant decorum of bourgeois life seems to be unfairly disrupted by primal reality. To escape it — though Ilyich does not or will not see this as a retreat from reality — he devotes himself obsessively to his work. There, too, there is no satisfaction, only an insufficient salary and, after seventeen years at middle-level posts, the evidence that he has been passed over for advancement to a presiding judgeship. The angry single purpose of his life, now, is to ‘get a post with a salary of five thousand roubles’. Again, as his father managed for him when he was a youth, he finds such a post through knowing the right people. Pride and pocket rejoice: ‘Ivan Ilyich was completely happy.’ This is expressed the only way he knows how. He sets about furnishing the finest house he’s ever had with the luxuries which will surely please his wife and cushion the hell he has found in marriage. Supervising the interior decorating himself, he falls while adjusting the drape of a curtain and hurts his side, but, in the general euphoria, ignores the mishap as trivial.