The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (15 page)

‘
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
' reads the famous opening statement of
Anna Karenina
. Did Tolstoy give in to family life? Despite being married for nearly fifty years and having thirteen (legitimate) children, he did not. Instead, the great man bent family life to fit round him, thus ensuring that his family was not unhappy in its own way but in his. It was a domestic arrangement that was ‘
one of the most miserable in literary history
', according to one biographer.

Of course, for a while it resulted in great work. But the work proved not to be enough for the great man making it. With hindsight, the novel is testimony to its author's growing disenchantment not just with families but with art itself. ‘
The two drops of honey which diverted my eyes from the cruel truth longer than the rest: my love of family, and of writing – art as I called it – were no longer sweet to me
,' he recalled a few years later in the memoir
A Confession
. Shortly after
Anna Karenina
was published, Tolstoy publicly repented of his wasteful life to date, his youthful ambition, the compulsive womanising and novelising.
War and Peace
had been a mistake, so had
Anna
. Fiction itself was as sinful as lust unless directed to a higher purpose. Henceforth, he would turn away from anything that did not glorify Jesus' teachings – or Tolstoy's interpretation of them – and prepare His kingdom on Earth. It was one of the most masochistic mid-life crises imaginable, but Tolstoy being Tolstoy, there was no turning back. For the next three decades he attempted to live as a Christian anarchist, a peasant, a holy man – anything but a writer of fiction or a father, though he could not quite suppress either impulse. The Countess Tolstoy had good reason to complain, which she did, incessantly.

I don't know what Christmas was like in the Tolstoy residence but there was probably some tension between celebrating the birth of Jesus and celebrating the life of Tolstoy. Abandoning art does not seem to have brought much peace to his titanic ego. He knew that his essays and his sermons, though pure in conception and execution, carried only a fraction of the authority of his damnable fiction – his transcendent later stories like
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
and
The Kreutzer
Sonata merely confirmed this. Nabokov relates the story of Tolstoy ‘
picking up a book one dreary day in his old age, many years after he had stopped writing novels, and starting to read in the middle, and getting interested and very much pleased, and then looking at the title – and seeing:
Anna Karenin
by Leo Tolstoy
'.

By now, I had been reading the List for nearly two months. Every book had had something extraordinary about it. Yet
Anna Karenina
was so grand, so all-encompassing, that it seemed to contain all those remarkable books within it. It was as elaborate as
Middlemarch
, as idiosyncratic as
The Sea, The Sea
and, every so often, as brutal as
Post Office
. Its climax was as moving as
Twenty Thousand Streets . . .
and as experimental as
The Unnamable
. It offered a working overview of nineteenth-century agricultural theory which was Melvillian in scope. It even had several characters standing around in wheat fields, leaning on ploughshares and arguing about communism. It had it all.

In other words,
Anna Karenina
made good on the promise I had divined in
The Master and Margarita
. This was the book, or the gap, I had been hunting from the beginning, from before the beginning. It was the perfect balance of art and entertainment – no, not a balance, a union of the two. One was indivisible from the other. The way in which Tolstoy
framed his characters' choices was startlingly contemporary, their psychological dilemma, their suffering and moments of clarity; or maybe it was timeless and therefore always contemporary. Like people, they contradicted themselves. They changed their beliefs, their temper, their appearance. In a lesser writer this might seem like inconsistency but in Tolstoy's hands this changeability was completely lifelike. The scale of the plot and the Russianness of the names soon seemed inconsequential. And when he chose to create a set piece, such as the birth of a child or the lingering death of an invalid, one felt he was aiming to articulate the last word on the subject, so pristine was the detail and so forceful the character behind it. It could not be described as an easy read, and perhaps if I had not just finished Eliot and Melville and Beckett and Toole and Tressell, one after another, I would not have found
Anna Karenina
so beguiling or so straightforward. But I was not intimidated by the book. Like Seurat's painting or
Les parapluies de Cherbourg
or my beloved Kinks records,
Anna Karenina
was like the real world, only better.

Of course, to a small child on Christmas morning, the real world is like the real world, only better. First Father Christmas and his reindeer, then Mummy and Daddy, and Granny and Granddad and Nanny – no, darling, Granddad doesn't live with Granny; no, he doesn't live with Nanny either – showering you with love and, more importantly, piles and piles of parcels containing toys and sweeties and books. It is a day of magical realism. And in a break from peeling vegetables and averting fights, my son and I sat and flicked the pages of a picture book, basking in it all together.

Early that morning, Alex had presented me with a shiny gold envelope containing my Christmas gift. Inside was a pair of tickets for a show called
Sunday in the Park with George
, a Sondheim musical I had never seen, which was at the time being revived in the West End of London. As its starting point, it took the paintings of Georges Seurat, in particular the pointillist masterpiece which followed
Bathers at Asnières
– the view from across the river,
Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte
or
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte
. It was the perfect present.

The attentive reader will have noticed that I love musicals. This, along with a deep-seated dislike of sport, barbecues and cars, is what has led my wife to refer to me as a flamboyant heterosexual. To some, the modern stage musical is hopelessly unserious, inherently camp or detestably bourgeois, like the novel or the family: ‘Thatcherism in action' according to one respected critic. Certain shows struggle to defy the gravity of their source material – I refer you to the scathing reviews that greeted
Moby! A Whale of a Tale
and numbers such as ‘Mr Starbuck' and ‘In Old Nantucket'. But my parents adored Lerner and Loewe, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser
et al.
, and as a child obsessed by pop music and storytelling, I loved how their songs compressed wordplay and emotion and plot into three-minute tunes. Now I am a grown-up, I still do. This is not to say all musicals are good – when they are bad, they are disastrous – but I like the populism of these shows and their vividness and the fact that, when they work, they create more than the sum of many different disciplines and talents. I also love singing. Jacques Demy, speaking of his own musicals, once said singing was ‘a way of communicating that I find more interesting. It can be more tender, more generous, more violent, more aggressive, more gentle, whatever.'

(Another coincidence: while watching the documentary
L'univers de Jacques Demy
again this morning to make a note of the above quote, I was amazed to see that in the mid-1970s Demy and his
Parapluies . . .
collaborator Michel Legrand planned a film musical adaptation of
Anna Karenina
called
Anouchka
. Demy, his wife Agnès Varda and their two children even moved to Moscow and started learning Russian. Demy and Legrand got as far as finishing the score before funding for the picture fell through.)

My
Sunday in the Park with George
tickets were for the end of the month, which meant I would have time to take Alex to see Seurat's painting in London, and show him why Dad was so pleased with his present. And by that time, I might even have ticked off the few remaining books on the List. After
Anna Karenina
, if I stuck to my original target, there were only two to go. Not that I was in any rush to finish it quickly.
Anna Karenina
really was better than Christmas.

I shall not attempt to précis the plot of
Anna Karenina
. The story is long, convoluted and utterly enthralling, and if you have not done so already, my every effort in these few pages is directed towards getting you to read it. But here is a summary of its central theme, taken from Lemony Snicket's
A Series of Unfortunate Events
: ‘
A rural life of moral simplicity, despite its monotony, is the preferable personal narrative to a daring life of impulsive passion, which only leads to tragedy
.' (
Book the Tenth: The Slippery Slope
)

In the middle of the novel, there is an interlude of sorts. Anna has abandoned her husband and young son Seryozha –
her duty – and is touring Europe with her lover, Count Alexei Vronsky. Tolstoy tells us they have passed through Venice, Rome and Naples and are now arrived in ‘
a small Italian town where they meant to make a longer stay
'. Their self-imposed exile from St Petersburg society is placing the relationship under some strain. Vronsky, an army officer, in particular is growing restless. For a while, he takes up painting. The couple make the acquaintance of a notable Russian émigré artist, Mikhaylov, whom Vronsky commissions to paint Anna's portrait. He cannot grasp why Mikhaylov's sketches of Anna capture her essence, ‘
that sweet spiritual expression
', so much better than his own efforts. Nor can he and Anna understand why Mikhaylov does not wish to cultivate their acquaintance as they wish to cultivate his: ‘
His
[Mikhaylov's]
reserved, disagreeable, and apparently hostile attitude when they came to know him better much displeased them, and they were glad when the sittings were over, the beautiful portrait was theirs, and his visits ceased
.'
¹

Mikhaylov is a distant, more productive relation of Ignatius J. Reilly. We are introduced to him in his studio, working at his ‘big picture', a giant canvas of ‘Pilate's Admonition – Matthew, chapter xxvii'. He has just argued with his wife because she has failed to pacify their landlady, who is clamouring for the rent. ‘
He never worked with such ardour or so successfully as when things were going badly with him, and especially after a quarrel with his wife. “Oh dear! If only I could escape somewhere!” he thought as he worked
.' The painting may never be finished; Mikhaylov erases, reworks and chases inspiration as and when it comes to him. A stray grease spot fills him with joy because it suggests a new pose: ‘
Remembering the energetic pose and prominent chin of a shopman from whom he had bought cigars, he gave the figure that man's face and chin
.' In this setting, Anna and Vronsky are ill-educated and intrusive. Mikhaylov craves their opinion and their trade; having secured both, he cannot wait to be rid of them, especially Vronsky's dilettante trifling with art, which pains him dreadfully: ‘
One cannot forbid a man's making a big wax doll and kissing it. But if the man came and sat down with his doll in front of a lover, and began to caress it as the lover caresses his beloved, it would displease the lover. It was this kind of unpleasantness that Mikhaylov experienced when he saw Vronsky's pictures: he was amused, vexed, sorry, and hurt
.'

Shortly after the portrait is completed, Anna and Vronsky return to St Petersburg, and neither they nor we meet Mikhaylov again. But in four short chapters, Tolstoy sums up the never-ending transaction between the eternal values of art and the muddled world of the artist. Plus he makes you laugh. I had just finished this Mikhaylov interlude when I took Alex to look at
Bathers at Asnières
at the National. Seurat's picture had long since escaped the shackles of Seurat's life but it still bore the imprint of his character. Although his technique of painting in thousands of tiny dots had been given a technical name – ‘divisionism' or ‘pointillism' – it remained the product of an individual's vision. And like Mikhaylov reluctantly courting Anna and Vronsky, an artist's posthumous reputation was still subject to the ebb and flow of public opinion and the readiness of galleries and institutions to popularise the image of his painting, and thus their own reputations, via mouse mats or jigsaws, ginger fridge magnets or big wax dolls. The picture was finished years ago but the rent is always due.

The same nagging tension lies at the heart of
Sunday in the Park with George
(which, it hardly needs saying, is a bit more complicated than
Jersey Boys
). As Seurat works on
Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte
, we are first shown the personal sacrifices that go into its creation and then, in the second act, the tricky negotiations with popularity that continue into the present day – the business of art. From my seat in the stalls, not five minutes from the
Bathers
, I watched as both painting and sacrifice were brought miraculously to life.