My Life with Tolstoy

I was the only guest in the hotel. The staff had retreated to their homes in nearby towns. There was only the owner, who was a big-chested former policeman, and a bean-pole bartender, who subbed as cook. And me, of course, drifting up and down the hotel steps with War and Peace in my hand. Eating a solitary breakfast in the dining room. Wandering down the road to the beach where bare-breasted Italian girls played volleyball on the sand and I, like that poor prick in Death in Venice, read in the shade and waited for lunch.

It sounds bad but it wasn’t. Because I had War and Peace and it pulled me out of my unhappiness as if I were on a rail. While the girls splashed in the waves (” Tonio! Vieni amore! Vieni!”), I followed the doings of a handful of Russian aristocrats on the eve of the battle of Schongraben. The clumsy, illegitimate Pierre Bezuhov comes into a huge inheritance that transforms him overnight into Moscow’s most attractive bachelor. A teenage Natasha Rostov (after whom men have been naming their daughters for nearly 150 years) thrills at the spectacle of her father’s agile dancing at a court ball:

” Look at papa,” Natasha shouted to all the room (entirely forgetting that she was dancing with a grown-up partner), and ducking down till her curly head almost touched her knees, she went off into her ringing laugh that filled the hall.

Then come the great battles. Sweet-natured Count Nicholas Rostov (Natasha’s softie brother) finds himself in combat for the first time. Who, before Tolstoy, wrote a paragraph like this:

He gazed at the approaching French, and although only a few seconds before he had been longing to get at these Frenchmen and cut them down, their being so near seemed to him now so awful that he could not believe his eyes. “Who are they What are they running for Can it be to me Can they be running to me And what for To kill me Me, whom everyone is so fond of” He recalled his mother’s love, the love of his family and his friends, and the enemy’s intention of killing him seemed impossible.... He snatched up his pistol and instead of firing it, flung it at [a] Frenchman and ran into the bushes with all his might.

Years later, I cemented an intuitive dislike for a television producer who turned her lovely, careerist features toward me one afternoon and claimed that the battle scenes in War and Peace had “bored” her (her ascendancy through the hierarchy of international television remains, depressingly, unchecked), whereas when I put the unforgiving W&P question to her husband, a spiky-haired local personality who had always struck me as an articulate flake, he raised his shoulders in a matter-of-fact gesture and said, “Oh, it’s the greatest novel ever.” I’ve adored him ever since.

Like the acting of Christopher Walken or the movies of Eric Rohmer, Tolstoy’s magnum opus is a magnet for foolish opinions. It always has been. When it came out in 1869, a number of Moscow critics denounced it, some for containing too much French, others for being the self-regarding work of an aristocrat. One rancorous fellow attacked it for not “being either a novel or a novella.” Most surprising, though, was Turgenev, who described the first twenty-eight chapters like this: “The thing is positively bad, boring and a failure.... All those little details so cleverly noted and presented in baroque style, those psychological remarks which the author digs out of his heroes’ armpits and other dark places in the name of verisimilitude—all that is paltry and trivial.” Heroes’ armpits Wow. Talk about missing the boat. Never mind. Joseph Stalin liked W&P so much that during the Nazi invasion, he retooled the country’s military outfits—gilded epaulettes, scarlet and white jackets, trousers with piping—so they might more closely resemble those in the novel.

On a less historical scale perhaps, M and I went shopping for a high school for our by-then-teenage daughter (no longer in pink sweatsuits). We interviewed one gentleman, the head of a reputable English department who, after a gentle prod, announced that he didn’t care for Tolstoy. “None of it,” he said, crossing his legs and folding his arms defiantly. Once, when I was interviewing the English “novelist” Ken Follett, he confided that Anna Karenina was “okay” but that he “didn’t care at all for” War and Peace. All this delivered with a straight face from the man who brought us The Hammer of Eden.

But back to Jamaica. Late afternoons, I trudged home from the beach, two miles, and napped in my little white hot box. In the yard the dogs slept in the shade. When I woke up the sun had set but the room sweltered. I staggered onto the patio with my book and turned on the light and settled into a deck chair. A round moon rose up in the sky as a world-weary Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (the scene gives me goosebumps just recalling it) opens the shutters on a beautiful starry night and overhears the enchanting voice of a young girl, Natasha, on the floor above:

” Just look how lovely it is! Oh, how glorious! Do wake up, Sonya,” and there were almost tears in her voice. “There never, never was such an exquisite night.”