William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Lika’s life was in disarray: abandoned and impoverished (and noticeably plumper) she returned to Moscow. The birth of Christina seemed to have made Chekhov resolve to see her no more. Yet in early 1896 Lika was once again at Melikhovo, as Masha’s guest. Old feelings stirred in Chekhov. Despite everything, the love affair resumed. The next few months seem to have been the happiest the two of them shared. But as the year moved on the old pattern re-established itself. Mutual happiness provoked Chekhovian insecurity. Chekhov seems to have promised marriage and then reneged. Meetings were arranged and cancelled — Lika began to grow angry again. She was unaware that her character was about to be exposed on the Moscow stage in The Seagull.

Chekhov was understandably worried about the opening of the play (in October 1896). Both Potapenko and his wife — and Lika — were all naturally most eager to see the first performances and Chekhov had genuine reason to think that Potapenko’s wife might attack Lika. In the event he contrived to keep the parties separate. The first night was one of the most epic flops in the history of Moscow theatre, but, despite the huge controversy, Lika did not take against the portrayal of her character. A few days later she was back at Melikhovo and once again there was talk of marriage. And once again, Chekhov balked — he asked her to wait “two or three years.” Lika had had enough — and she still had other suitors of her own. She ruefully conceded that marriage — or “bliss” as they termed it — was unlikely to come about. She signed herself, “Goodbye. Your twice rejected L. Mizinova.”

And that really should have been the end of the affair. It had lasted seven years, but life was about to calamitously imitate art. Just as in The Seagull Chekhov had Nina’s child die, so too, now, Lika’s child sickened and died. Lika came to Melikhovo for comfort and to grieve, playing patience at a desk in Chekhov’s study as he worked. There seemed a kind of inevitability that she should seek him out in her darkest hour.

But Lika wound up the affair herself shortly after a final meeting: Chekhov’s prevarications eventually convincing her that nothing would come of it. Lika went back to Paris to pursue her career as an opera singer. She wrote to Chekhov: “To dear Anton Pavlovich, in kindly memory of eight years’ good relations.” Then she quoted some lines of poetry:

Whether my days are clear or mournful,

Whether I perish, destroying my life,

I only know this: to the grave

Thoughts, feelings, songs, strength

All for you!

“I could have written this eight years ago,” she added, “and I write it now and I shall write it in ten years’ time.”

They still corresponded with each other but Chekhov, now terminally ill, had met the actress Olga Knipper who was ultimately to become his wife (in 1901, much to the shock and initial outrage of his family). Lika remained close to Masha and to Chekhov’s younger brother and found some sort of domestic happiness with the theatre director Aleksandr Sanin-Schoenberg. Chekhov died in 1904. Lika outlived him by thirty-three years, dying in Paris in 1937.

What is one to make of such a relationship, as passionate and as stormy as they come, it would seem? Donald Rayfield, Chekhov’s best biographer (and to whom this chronology is much indebted) speculates that Chekhov’s sexuality was stimulated by newness, by strangeness — lovers who became familiars lost their appeal. My own feeling is that Chekhov genuinely loved Lika — his sister Masha felt the same — but that something to do with his own impending mortality (he knew he had tuberculosis from an early age) and the need — like the writer Trigorin in The Seagull —not to be distracted from his work in the years he had left to live made him pull away from any romantic commitment that would be all-encompassing. His eventual marriage was full of love and affection but it was one of long separations and it misses the sturm und drang of the Lika years.

And Lika? Clearly, when she met Chekhov she was a young woman of tremendous beauty and incandescent sex-appeal, coupled with an unaffected, bohemian nature. She started as a teacher, failed as an opera singer and a milliner, worked as a secretary, tried to be an actress, had too many love affairs, smoked too much, put on weight and lost it again. Masha speculated that the fastidious Chekhov might not have been able to cope with such a rackety personality. And maybe Chekhov sensed that. He wrote to her once explaining his persistent reticence: “A huge crocodile lives in you, Lika, and as a matter of fact I’m doing the wise thing in obeying common sense and not my heart, which you’ve bitten into.” The crocodile bit Chekhov’s heart and he recoiled, reluctant to go there again. What would life have been like with the lovely, dangerous crocodile Lika? Chekhov decided to play safe. One wonders what regrets he lived with.

2004

“Mostly we authors repeat ourselves,” Scott Fitzgerald observed late in his life. “We learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories … as long as people will listen.” There’s a lot of truth in this remark (though some authors have more than two or three stories to tell), but in the case of the American writer Richard Yates, subject of this fascinating biography, there was only one story that obsessed him and Yates, essentially, told it again and again in both his long and short fiction whether people were listening or not.

Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, NY, in 1926 into a thoroughly dysfunctional family and his own tortured psyche and that of his mother and relatives provided him with the raw material of his fiction for his working life. Yates was mentally unstable and an alcoholic (as was his only sister). Their mother was a self-appointed “Bohemian” sculptress who divorced her dull, middle-management husband as soon as was feasible and took her children off on a series of flits through pre-Second World War New England and Greenwich Village, somehow managing to keep one step ahead of the bailiffs and the creditors but royally messing up her children in the process (in her cups, she was in the habit of slipping into bed with her pubescent son).

A scholarship pupil at private school, Yates was the talented poor boy who wanted to be a writer and he achieved relatively early success with his short stories. After graduating he served briefly with the US Army at the tail end of the war, married early and spent some time learning his trade, as Scott Fitzgerald put it, in France and London. The trouble with Yates was that he wanted to be a writer — and a “writer.” The ghost of Scott Fitzgerald haunts his life both as an artistic exemplar and as a ruinous role-model. Yates’s writing career was lived out against a background of eighty cigarettes a day, prodigious boozing and manic depression. The handfuls of pharmaceuticals he took to keep himself relatively sane were never designed to be washed down with Jack Daniels and it has to be said that, very early on, Yates placed his finger squarely on the self-destruct button and held it there. Marriages and relationships collapsed with regularity and the literary career that he embarked on so promisingly with his first novel Revolutionary Road (1960) soon evolved itself into a long, slow slide of falling sales, missed deadlines, alienated publishers and the law of diminishing returns.

Yet throughout his life Yates was sustained by grants, prizes, spells in Hollywood writing scripts, temporary creative-writing teaching posts (with a brief, unlikely period as a speech writer for Bobby Kennedy) and the affection and support of steadfast friends and colleagues. As a young man he was tall and moodily good-looking. Yet for all his charisma he was, I suppose, that sad literary figure the “one book wonder.” His first novel, Revolutionary Road, turned out to be his chef d’oeuvre. It was written to be the Great Gatsby of the 1960s and it still has its fervent adherents. Reading Yates’s fiction today one has to say that, looking at the work as a whole (six novels and two collections of short stories), there don’t really seem to be grounds for resurrecting him as a forgotten master. His style is classically realistic and elegantly turned but the one-note tango of his inspiration finally enervates. John Updike — who one might argue overtook and outshone Yates as the pre-eminent chronicler of middle-class American angst and adultery — is in a different league. Yates is like many figures in twentieth-century American literature: an early flowering of an intriguing talent rendered nugatory by crowding, tormenting demons — drink, drugs, self-doubt, self-loathing, burn-out and so on. Fitzgerald is the obvious precursor but Hemingway was equally undone, as were writers like Berryman, Capote, Kerouac, Cheever and many more.