The Runaway Soul by Harold Brodkey

This may be the worst book I’ve ever read.

And the freshness of the air, the near-silence, the amendment of suburban life, the immediacy (the nerves and senses were without porches) so set one’s self up in one’s heaviness and near-motionlessness of grief that, without warning, one’s physical self and temper felt the combat between grief and being suitable for entering the morning as irreconcilable. One grieved or lived. Going into the basement, getting one’s bike … do you know what it is to CHEAT on grief? To double-cross the dead? To refuse old love? The great inner hounds are baying with moodedness. All sorts of inner selfhoods are clutching at stillness. Parts of me are sitting on cushions, are motionless with grief … One moves in heavy and resistant air, in one’s mood, one’s own emanation. One can’t escape and move in ordinary glare-torn, dew-wet air, half grief-stricken. I mean the grief takes its places among the committees of the self, the congress of voting and squabbling selves, dealing and bullying, vetoing, bribing … And it tries to regain the tyranny it lost, to reestablish the monarchy of death (and whatnot) among the committees. And some nodule (or seed or pit) of self-and-will which is allied to light -- in spirit and in actual composition -- the flying knot of identity-in-the-motions, one is now this particle, now this wave -- is presidential; I live, heavily, reluctantly, with a stone in my belly and a certain overwhelming and crippling shadow in my spirit, a lament, and a huge, huge private force of regret, but one isn’t chained, overwhelmed, or entirely crippled. One limpingly flies along. One does not grieve openly for oneself -- parentless twice now, with affections frayed, toyed with, born and torn. I slowly force the observatory to observe the real moment, the present moment with its absence in it; but I am not absent from it. And the silent birds within, the boys, the children, child-selves and school-selves, sport-selves and the like, look, they look and see the alley, the tar-paved aisle that goes past the garages and ashpits -- and the glare, black-and-white, and made of revolving and perceptibly demarcated, powdery rays. The fire of the glare and the unfire of the shadows pick out bits of vines, of flowering shrubs, to make black-and-white flags under a wide gray sky without glare in it; the glare doesn’t penetrate it; it is a glareless roof for the revolving spikes and rods which change as the earth tilts -- which turn into a flood of whitish light beginning to be tinted palely as normal light is, which fatten and revolve and thicken and spread into a flood in the more and more lit alley, the walls and trees and ashpits, which are ignited with a glare and shadow in noiseless confrontation with light--

That’s a fairly typical paragraph, the emdash at the end leading into a subordinate paragraph before returning in the following paragraph to complete that thought. This appears on pages 36-37 of this 835-page “novel,” and it’s recorded here because it was the one that prompted me to scribble in the margin.

Dear god. Is it going to be 800 pages of this? Does he think he’s Proust?

I have this raw theory, quite stupid I know; but everything is a sort of flowering and receding whirlwind of nervous time at the edge of a future; everything, including me, a sort of clumsy calculating machine exploring the nature of event, of time, and of time unoccurred-as-yet, of the future.

Short answer: yes.

A Sort of Clumsy Calculating Machine Exploring

This is not a novel. I think that’s what turns me off the most. One of the “chapters” is about the narrator’s sister, Nonie. It’s 57 pages long and it is all over the map.

Am I saying, then, that Nonie was complex enough to be known differently as a fact or facet of nature and not simply an accident of my adoption -- a family accident -- an aberration?

Yes.

But then, in the flickering eyeliddedness of thought -- of private judgment -- the answer is no.

I start in innocence, and shallowly … I have been drawn in to saying these things … The shadows deepen around me in this garden … No: not quite, not quite that. In the shadowy afternoon, one says only that Nonie was not complex enough in regard to me: she was bad to me too often …

But then I am swept along in the current of associations, the slant-footed abruptness of simultaneities, or seeming simultaneities in the strange motions of the moments where I am drenched with the conviction that there is no point in lying about what people are … Why make yet more mysteries and lay up a store of future bad actions when there are real mysteries enough whatever we do? Without the false ones of sentimental maundering about what people are and what innocence is (a device, a technique, not an actuality except as a comparative matter)? Why not be sensible about these matters?

Guilt is not simple … Blame, therefore, ought never to be simple … Stories are not simple at all if they contain any truth in them … any truth in them whatsoever …

Fifty-seven pages of this. Nonie is this. Nonie is not this. Nonie is that. Nonie is not that. Dear god, I felt like screaming. Get to some kind of point already! 

But getting to a point is not the point. Wikipedia tells me that Brodkey is a stylistic writer, known for his attempts to render sensation into language, and in this, his first “novel,” he seems far more interested in exploring than in telling a story. He is either simply “working it out” on the page -- in which case there is nothing here worth noting -- or, more generously, he might be celebrating the “working it out” as the moral foundation of fiction -- in which case there may be something worth noting, but not anything that resembles a novel. And, having suffered through all 835 pages, I can tell you which side of that argument I’d put my chips on.

Sex and Masturbation

Brodkey writes about sex. A lot.

It was both lighter and heavier than I had, when young, expected fucking to be. The second time is not passion, or is a different sort of passion. The terror of caring, was of caring too much and going hurtling along, a noble beast, or an ignoble beast caring too much -- for sex, for pleasure, for myself, for her. The wheels of the moments might then stick and one would go headlong into some then-to-be-obsessed-over-forever moment of loss of this rough forgiveness of this past. The fuck was like a board game with different things happening every moment, but the odds had been prepared, had been tampered with. And it was like a board game in that we were not exploring -- and hurtling -- along, with willful blindness and in an agony that it was real. It was like a game in the various ways it was not happening even while it was happening -- emotionally as well as in the way it touched on sexual depths and offered promise of release, of rising to the surface after the weight of the water and the breathlessness. In the act, you’re sort of painting a portrait of yourself, and of her, slapping paint on genital effigies -- no: that metaphor is impossible, since the genital is the brush. The hell with it. It is happening and it doesn’t mean all that much no matter what depths it reaches -- it is special, it is self-conscious and passionate, some, one is oneself, and one is something one has created. It is folly and swindling play and it is as serious as anything even if you think of it as merely biologically general. Some of it, much of it, has a thing, a quality of not meaning anything -- are you brave enough for that? It doesn’t mean there is no meaning anywhere or even that this is mostly no meaning. It means nothing even if you name it meaninglessness; and meaning lurks and recurs even if you say it doesn’t. Craven dust fucks craven dust. But then in the event’s happening comes a flash of its meaning something. Sincerity is coming round again. We aren’t in a story of no meaning. Yes we are. We are too chic to be sincere. But here is the blushing and ecstatic fool, physical and without time or knowledge for thought, the generous-souled harmdoer, the mean-eyed harmdoer. Who knows what all the shit that is in play here is? Rattle, buck, quiver, seesaw, subside -- and variation. What would we do if all this meant something truly? If the realities of being together overwhelm us? Ora, stage-managing, directing, creating us, actress-fucker, playwright-fuckee, said to me -- tacitly, silently -- that I was too fastidious … too careful … Ham it up … Be cruder, crueler, madder -- be without calculation … Don’t keep accounts … Don’t keep track of things so that you can give an account to yourself later … Do you remember a kind of ecstatic beginner’s rhapsodic brutality of romance, changeable, overexcited, unreliable, human? After childhood? In my version of it -- in my dressing myself in it (as in a red union suit) -- what happened, what she spied on, was that I jerked my hips in an ugly rhythm of assertion and of brute, sly-nostrilled pride. The Minotaur-beast is a runaway. The minus tower in her. Me. Dis. Dis dick … disdain … Hey, dis, dese … dem … Me. My dick and my gruntings ripsaw away. In the webbings of muscle of the not-a-goddess, the not-much-of-a-girl: in the beautiful mess -- her term for herself. Except that her will was like the prow of a liner with a huge curving wake of the possibilities of fullness -- in the webbings of muscle. That she loosened. And a slap -- in the slapstick of the moment -- or a threat would tighten her? Is this a peculiar curvature of love? Her reality extended mine -- my feelings in my back and in the back of my shoulders -- can you call those feelings? -- the small of my back, then my butt (as it was then), and the abdomen and thighs, upper and lower, and in my mind and in my eyes and in my feet, which were braced -- my reality continued on in a kind of hammock of responsive, responsively further extents of me and my body, mirrors and contained in her, permitted and impregnated by her with life, by her body and mind, her wriggling feet, her butt, her cleverness. I’m holding her. Oh, what a sea of effects. Of causes. Of things … Oh, what a rapidly flowing river. Of moments … I was violently shocked by the ugliness and her lack of simplicity, the lack of demure sweetness and of devotion -- by her not being in a state of grace -- and I was at home: shocked: scandalized: continuous in a great span of seconds.

Are you exhausted reading that? I was. And that’s one page out of 835. Brodkey is literally masturbating on the page -- here, perhaps, intellectually; but later, fifteen pages later, still in the same “scene,” somewhat pruriently.

“Christ,” I mutter, and pat and lightly slap her haunches until she tentatively, tremblingly tightens -- coerced by curiosity and good sportsmanship as much as by sexual impulse, if you ask me -- and, see, this within the tight cuntal clasp -- and clapping (sexual, and horrible, and final) of her historical abandonment to the truths of what it mean to satisfy the wills and longings of able and wellborn and monied men and boys and now me, and who knows what others as well -- and within the liquidy, deathly sticky sexual rhythms (such as they were) of her flesh and her pleasure (such as it was) is the incalculably cruel thing of the extraordinary trespass in her of my shareable and slightly far-off (in my head, in my balls, in the small of my back) pleasures, taken from her and burning or reflectant (like Christmas tress ornaments in front of a fire) in relation to the extraordinary and abominable pelvic lovelinesses of her, of us, of love, of lovemaking, pelvic loneliness still present -- still we are of different construction, she and I -- the whole thing abominable with sexual smells and secrecy and a sense of maybe having gone too far even if we did stop short and of youth and too much looseness in her and too much playing around in me and a wild, and wildly racking oiliness and the jerk of far-away (loosened) inward motions, the fisherwoman’s jerking net, in which my fatherliness is trapped, and the surface motions -- ah, what a joke: the pelvic loveliness, pelvic loneliness, the not inconsidarable loveliness of the marvelous head and marvelous hands and wonderful shoulders and marvelous voice and wonderful mind and too big but yet admirable butt and the lovely, lovely, miraculous ladyish musculature and the marvelous inventiness toward daily life -- all of it -- rolling downhill -- while I ascend toward orgasm again.

There is just so much. What’s important? What isn’t? I can’t tell. Should I be dogearing every single page? Or throwing the whole volume into the trash? It has to be one or the other, right?

I’m Jewish

And finally, for me at least, this.

“You think that’s so impossible? Who knows. They were a pair of cold fish. They carried on -- Wiley don’t ask me questions -- I can’t talk and answer questions … I’m Jewish …”

There is a lot of Jewishness in this novel -- with Brodkey often using it, as he does above, as I kind of code language. As something that appears to explain but in fact, at least to me, explains nothing.

I felt heroic -- in a way -- and odd-footed, an insect or a cripple -- I had the feeling she felt as something flying around oddly like light inside her skull and absolutely (and Jewishly and mirroring) known by her -- and pathetically in regard to -- what?

Jewishly?

The imagery of her touching me through the prick, the prick of the Jew, is scary, the van boy who thinks he is so smart …

The prick of a the Jew? Evidently there is a Jewish way of fucking. But it’s not just Jewish that’s used this way.

Taut and faintly hulking shoulders and tautly backwards-curved spine -- and she bore me along and she bore with me with extraordinary Gentile cruelty-companionship: she-loved-a-fool.

You know, companionship, in that unique and cruelly Gentile kind of way.

Johnno held his body very stiffly -- with a Catholic heaven-and-hell elegance -- not of money, but artful in a private way.

Jew. Gentile. Catholic. They are all used as if they were adjectives whose meaning we all understand. Harold. Your book is cryptic enough. Maybe next time go for the universal?

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Essential Edward Hopper by Justin Spring

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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I thought I bought this book at The Art Institute in Chicago, but the tag on the book says Boston, so it must have been there.

Light. Would I have predicted that is what I would have found most interesting about Hopper’s paintings? Or at least what they would have made me observe in a way I never had before? Look at Morning Sun, below.

That’s not light coming in the window. That’s a green square on a brown square. It only looks like light because that’s what our eye is used to seeing. But that’s not what he painted nor what he had to think about in order to paint it. I don’t think I’m ever going to look at a painting the same way again. I mean, I’ve always liked the way light can be made to look in paintings, but there has always been something in my brain which has prevented me from seeing what it really is. It’s only because it’s so obvious in Morning Sun that I’m now able to appreciate other paintings in a whole new way.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The New Spirit by Havelock Ellis

There’s a used bookstore in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin. Ellison Bay, if you’re not familiar with it, is a little town of 150 or so souls, near the tip of Wisconsin’s Door County peninsula, the little finger of land that sticks out into Lake Michigan. Door County, in general, gets really busy in the summer, and has a steady tourist trade even through the fall and winter, but most of the visitors stay well south of Ellison Bay -- drawn to the more picturesque towns of Egg Harbor, Fish Creek, and Sister Bay.

The bookstore has an old-fashioned name. The sign above the wooden facade, painted green and white, says:

Wm Caxton Ltd

Bookseller & Publisher

And inside, a visitor will find narrow aisles and wooden bookshelves stuffed floor to ceiling with musty old books.

It is glorious.

On one trip through there, I picked up an old Scott Library edition of The New Spirit by Havelock Ellis. I had no idea who Havelock Ellis was, and had never heard of the title before. But it attracted my eye. It is small, green, and weathered, and when I pulled it off its shelf and flipped it open to its preface, I read this:

From our earliest days we look out into the world with wide-eyed amazement, trying to discover for ourselves what it is like. Instinctively we must spend a great part of our lives in searching and probing into the nature and drift of the things among which, by a volition not our own, we were projected. To-day, when we stand, as it were, at the beginning of a new era, and when we have been celebrating the centenary of the most significant event in modern history, an individual who, for his own guidance, has done his part in this searching and probing, may perhaps be allowed to present some of the results, not claiming to be an expert, not desiring to impose on others any private scheme of the universe. 

A man trying to understand his world, a world he feels is on the precipice of transformation, moving from what was and into what will be.

A large part of one’s investigations into the spirit of one’s time must be made through the medium of literary personalities. I have selected five such typical individuals; it is the intimate thought and secret emotions of such men that become the common property of after generations.

And as his guide, he will select authors; authors whose works have captured the spirit of his time. But Ellis’s study will be deeper, penetrating through the books and into the men themselves.

I want to get at the motive forces at work in the man; to know what his intimate companions thought of him; how he acted in the affairs of every day, and in the great crises of his life; the fashion of his face and form, the tones of his voice. How he desired to appear is of little importance; I can perhaps learn all that it imports me to know from a single involuntary gesture, or one glance into his eyes.

This is the attitude in which I have recorded, as impersonally as may be, these impressions of the world to-day, as revealed in certain significant personalities; by searching and proving all things, to grip the earth with firmer foothold.

It may be hard to see through all the archaic language and phraseology, but Ellis here sets out to do in The New Spirit very much what I have been attempting to do on this blog for years. Take the written word, mine it for the wisdom it contains, and bring into a clearer rendering the hidden truths that define us and our age.

And later, in his introduction, he even hits on the specific value that fiction plays in fulfilling our shared quest.

It is true, indeed, that we have already an art in which for the great mass of people to-day our desires and struggles and ideals are faithfully mirrored. The great art of the century has been fiction. It is common, among some writers, to speak contemptuously of novels, but the mass of contemporary fiction has a value that is little realized, and perhaps is not likely to be realized, for some time to come. There is a very large and wonderful and little-read collection of fiction, the “Acta Sanctorum,” in which the whole life and soul of a remote period are laid bare to us. It is, like our own fiction, a fiction that is more than half reality, and it has often seemed to me that the novels of this century will in the future be found to have precisely the same value as the “Acta Sanctorum.” For the novel is contemporary moral history in a deeper sense than the De Goncourts meant. Many novels of to-day will be found to express the distinctive features of our age as truly as the distinctive features of another age, its whole inner and outer life, are expressed in Gothic architecture.

Ellis published The New Spirit in 1890, so the century that he is talking about is the 19th, as his selection of authors to focus on will reflect. But note what he is saying here. The truth of an age is best reflected in its fiction. Strange then, that among his selected authors, only one can truly be considered a novelist. The authors are Denis Diderot (1713-1784), a French philosopher, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), a German poet, Walt Whitman (1819-1892), an American poet, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), A Norwegian playwright, and Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), a Russian novelist.

Only two made a deep impression on me. 

Brand

In “Brand” Ibsen produced a poem which for imagination and sombre energy stands alone. It is perhaps the most widely known of all his works; in Germany it has already found four translators, and there is reason to hope that before long a translation will appear in England. “Brand” is the tragedy of will and self-sacrifice in the service of the ideal -- a narrow ideal, but less narrow, Ibsen seems sometimes to hint, than the ideals of most of us. The motto on which Brand acts in all the crises of his life is, “All or nothing;” and with him it means in every case the crushing of some human emotion or relationship for the fulfilment of a religious duty.

One of the things that unifies all of Ellis’s authorial choices is the way each seems to explore more humanist and less monastic themes in the works. And “Brand” appears, from Ellis’s description of it, to explore that shift from the monastic point of view The plot, such as it is, seems grim.

Soon after the commencement of the poem Brand became the pastor of a gloomy little northern valley, between mountains and glaciers, into which the sun seldom penetrates. He is accompanied by his wife Agnes, a pathetic image of love and devotion. A child is born to them, but soon dies in this sun-forsaken valley. There are few passages in literature of more penetrating pathos than the scene in the fourth act in which, one Christmas eve, the first anniversary of the child’s death, Brand persuades Agnes to give her Alf’s clothes -- the last loved relics -- to a beggar-woman who comes to the door with her child during a snowstorm. Soon Agnes also dies. In the end, stoned by his flock, Brand makes his way, bleeding, up into the mountains. Here, amid the wild rocks and his own hallucinations, he is met by a mad girl who mistakes him for the thorn-crowned Christ. This scene, in which, overwhelmed at last by an avalanche, Brand dies amid his broken ideals, attains an imaginative height not elsewhere reached in modern literature, and for the like of which we have to look back to the great scene on the heath in “Lear.”

Brand seems a quixotic character -- patterned perhaps literally on Don Quixote -- but with far less humor, the crash of his ideals against the uncaring universe exposing far more tragedy than devotion. 

Here and elsewhere, however, Ibsen brings in supernatural voices, which scarcely heighten the natural grandeur of the scene, and which seem out of place altogether in a poem so entirely modern. “Brand” brings before us a wealth of figures and of discussions, carries on in brief, clear, musical, though irregular, metrical form, and it would be impossible to analyze so complex a work within moderate compass.

Ibsen seems to be toying with old themes here, casting them in their most unflattering light, on the brink, as Ellis describes, of a new age. Certainly a work to add to my to-read list.

Tolstoy

A much more exciting find for me was the story and works of Leo Tolstoy, whom I referred to above as a novelist, but who was, in actuality, just a little bit more. In Ellis’s telling, Russia is culturally-distinct, a place of competing ideologies, and as such, produced in the 19th century a literature of its own, based on the tensions of that milieu. One dramatic influence on Tolstoy specifically was a religious sect known as the Soutaiefftsky, named after its exemplar.

Basil Soutaieff, an uneducated mason, belonging to the centre of Russia, from his early years pondered and dreamed over the misery of the world. To obtain light he visited the priests, and one referred him to the Gospels. His zeal induced him to learn and read, and he studied the New Testament eagerly. One day he carried to the church the body of a young son for burial. The pope asked fifty kopecks for the ceremony; Soutaieff had only thirty, and the pope began to bargain with him over the corpse. Soutaieff indignantly took up the body and buried it in his own garden. From that time dated his criticism of the Church, and side by side grew up also a criticism of the world. He observed in his own trade the tricks of commerce and the perpetual effort to amass money and to deceive the worker. He abandoned his work as a mason and returned from St. Petersburg to the country to cultivate the earth, distributing to the poor the money he had previously earned. But in the country he found, from pope to peasant, the same vices as in the town, and with no wish to found a new sect, he became, by example as well as by precept, the teacher of a religion of universal love and pity.

Soutaieff is one of Tolstoy’s inspirations and, now that I’ve learned about him, he will be one of mine. Someone who has pondered and dreamed over the misery of the world, and who, disillusioned by the false remedies of existing religions, invents a creed all his own.

Soutaieff rejects all ceremonies, including baptism and marriage (for which he substitutes a simple blessing and exhortation to a just life), and all those external manifestations of religion which render men hypocritical. At the same time he rejects all faith in angels or devils, or in the supernatural generally, and is absolutely indifferent to the question of a future life. We have to occupy ourselves with the establishment of happiness and justice on this earth; what happens above, he says, I cannot tell, never having been there; perhaps there is nothing but eternal darkness.

Perhaps there is nothing but eternal darkness. In good Russian fashion, that might sound like nihilism, but don’t forget about the other realization -- that we have to occupy ourselves with the establishment of happiness and justice on this earth. Like the denizens of Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

He recognizes that the moral regeneration of men is closely connected with social and economic questions. Private property is the source of the hatreds, jealousies, and miseries of men. The proprietors must give up the land of which they have arbitrarily gained possession, and work for their living. But this end is to be gained, not by violence, but by persuasion; men will recognize the hypocrisy and injustice of their lives, and those who persist in evil will be shut out from the fraternal community. Soutaieff refused, at one period at all events, to pay taxes. Once he went to St. Petersburg to explain the state of things to the Emperor; great was his indignation when not only was an interview refused, but he was summarily expelled from the city. Soutaieff and his disciples refuse military service, for them men of all nations and religions are brothers: why should they quarrel?

Not sure I’m on board with the elimination of all private property, but it is interesting the way the seeds of communism are baked this way into the bread that Soutaieff is making. He is right when he says that the moral regeneration of men is closely connected with social and economic questions. Men of different social and economic standings have different moral positions, and indeed, have varying levels of freedom. An equality of morality and freedom should be the goal, and where social or economic disparities prevent that, they should be addressed.

This is the substance of Soutaieff’s teaching. Large numbers of persons come to hear him, sometimes out of curiosity, more often as disciples. He leads the life of a simple peasant. One evening, it is said, on going to his barn, he found several men carrying away sacks of flour. Without saying a word, he entered the barn and found a sack that the robbers had not yet carried off. He pursued them, and on catching up with them, he said: “My brothers, you must be in need of bread; take the sack that you have forgotten.” The following day the robbers brought back the flour, and asked Soutaieff’s forgiveness.

A parable, surely. But the point is made.

He had himself summed up his teaching. “What is truth?” a hearer once asked him. “Truth,” answered Soutaieff with conviction, “truth is love, in a common life.”

Tolstoy, too, is a man who has pondered and dreamed over the misery of the world -- perhaps nowhere more famously than in the pages of Anna Karenina.

“Anna Karenina'' is full of biographic material of intense interest. In Vronsky, doubtless much of [Tolstoy’s] earlier experience, and in Levine, [Tolstoy’s] own inner history at that time, are written clearly enough. From this standpoint the book has the vivid interest of a tragedy; we see the man whose efforts to solve the mystery of life we can trace through all that he ever wrote, still groping, but now more restlessly and eagerly, with growing desperation. The nets are drawn tight around him, and when we close the book we see clearly the inevitable fate of which he is still unconscious.

Anna Karenina is the only work of Tolstoy’s that I have some familiarity with, having listened to it on audiobook way back in 2005. My notes indicate that I did not enjoy that experience, but it may now be worth revisiting.

I once lived on the road to the cemetery of a large northern town. All day long, it seemed to me, the hearses were trundling along their dead to the grave, or gallopping gaily back. When I walked out I met men carrying coffins, and if I glanced at them, perhaps I caught the name of the child I saw two days ago in his mother’s lap; or I was greeted by the burly widower of yesterday, pipe in mouth, sauntering along to arrange the burial of the wife who lay, I knew, upstairs at home, thin and haggard and dead. The road became fantastic and horrible at last; even such a straight road to the cemetery, it seemed, was the whole of life, a road full of the noise of the preparation of death. How daintily soever we danced along, each person, laughing so merrily or in such downright earnest, was merely a corpse, screwed down in an invisible coffin, trundled along as rapidly as might be to the grave-edge.

It was at such a point of view, Ellis tells us, that Tolstoy arrived in his fiftieth year.

“When I had ended my book ‘Anna Karenina,’” he wrote in his “Confessions,” “my despair reached such a height that I could do nothing but think, think, of the horrible condition in which I found myself. … Questions never ceased multiplying and pressing for answers, and like lines converging all to one point, so these unanswerable questions pressed to one black spot. I was nearly fifty years old when these unanswerable questions brought me into this terrible and quite unexpected position. I had come to this, that I -- a healthy and happy man -- felt that I could no longer live. … Bodily, I was able to work at mowing hay as well as a peasant. Mentally, I could work for eighteen hours at a time without feeling any ill consequence. And yet I had come to this, that I could no longer live. … I only saw one thing -- Death. Everything else was a lie.”

The deep reflection prompted by this midlife ennui, and the forging of some kind of path forward takes place initially in Anna Karenina -- although there, according to Ellis, we’ll find more of the struggle and less of the solutions -- and continues more successfully in other works, first his Confessions, and then My Religion.

Tolstoi sums up his own doctrine under a very few heads: -- Resist not evil -- Judge not -- Be not angry -- Love one woman. His creed is entirely covered by these four points. “My Religion” is chiefly occupied by the exposition of what they mean, and in his hands they mean much. They mean nothing less than the abolition of the State and the country. He is as uncompromising as Ibsen in dealing with the State. “It is a humbug, this State,” he remarked to Mr. Stead. “What you call a Government is mere phantasmagoria. What is a State? Men I know; peasants and villages, these I see; but governments, nations, states, what are these but fine names invented to conceal the plundering of honest men by dishonest officials?” Law, tribunals, prisons, become impossible with the disappearance of the State; and with the disappearance of the country, and of “that gross imposture called patriotism,” there can be no more war.

Gosh. He sounds like a libertarian, doesn’t he? But wait…

In place of these great and venerable pillars of civilization, what? The first condition of happiness, he tells us, is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken, that he may enjoy the sky above him, and the pure air and the life of the fields. This involves the nationalization of the land, or rather, to avoid centralizing tendencies, its communalization. “I quite agree with George,” he remarked, “that the landlords may be fairly expropriated without compensation, as a matter of principle.”

No, not a libertarian. No State AND no private property? That sounds like something dangerously close to an anarchist. 

But perhaps not. Because Ellis seems to go out of his way to point out that, at the end of the day, Tolstoy is not a demagogue -- a polemist with a hard-coded set of beliefs and understandings of the world -- but rather a flawed and struggling human being, someone with the imagination needed to ask and explore the tough questions of existence -- both for the individual and for the collective -- but finally and fatally without the wisdom to determine the ultimate answers.

“People say to me, ‘Well, Lef Nikolaivitch, as far as preaching goes, you preach; but how about your practice?’ The question is a perfectly natural one; it is always put to me, and it always shuts my mouth. ‘You preach,’ it is said, ‘but how do you live?’ I can only reply that I do not preach -- passionately as I desire to do so. I might preach through my actions, but my actions are bad. That which I say is not preaching; it is only my attempt to find out the meaning and the significance of life. People often say to me, ‘If you think that there is no reasonable life outside the teachings of Christ, and if you love a reasonable life, why do you not fulfil the Christian precepts?’ I am guilty and blameworthy and contemptible because I do not fulfil them; but at the same time I say,  --not in justification, but in explanation, of my inconsistency, --Compare my previous life with the life I am now living, and you will see that I am trying to fulfil. I have not, it is true, fulfilled one eighty-thousandth part, and I am to blame for it; but it is not because I do not wish to fulfil all; but because I am unable. Teach me how to extricate myself from the meshes of temptation in which I am entangled, --help me, --and I will fulfill all. I wish and hope to do it even without help. Condemn me if you choose, --I do that myself, --but condemn me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is. If I know the road home, and if I go along it drunk, and staggering from side to side, does that prove that the road is not the right one? If it is not the right one, show me another. If I stagger and wander, come to my help, and support and guide me in the right path. Do not yourselves confuse and mislead me and then rejoice over it and cry, ‘Look at him! He says he is going home, and he is floundering into the swamp!’ You are not evil spirits from the swamp; you are also human beings, and you also are going home. You know that I am alone, --you know that I cannot wish or intend to go into the swamp, --then help me! My heart is breaking with despair because we have all lost the road; and while I struggle with all my strength to find it and keep in it, you, instead of pitying me when I go astray, cry triumphantly, ‘See! He is in the swamp with us!’”

It is a remarkable insight. Tolstoy, like all of us, is wandering lost in the philosophical forest. Most of us fear to stray from the well-worn paths, pretending we know where they will lead us, but Tolstoy has the courage to stray into the brush and undergrowth, hoping to find something new and useful. We may not like where he goes, but we shouldn’t fault him for the things that he finds. Remember…

A man takes sides with religion, or with science, or with morals; oftener he spends the brief moments of his existence in self-preservation, fighting now on one side, no on the other. But for a little while we are allowed to enter the house of life and to gather around its fire. Why pull each other’s hair and pinch each other’s arms like naughty children? Well would it be to warm ourselves at the fire together, to clasp hands, to gain all the joy that comes of comradeship, before we are called out, each of us, into the dark alone.

Ellis

I said earlier that I had no idea who Havelock Ellis was. As I prepared for writing this post, I looked him up on Wikipedia.

Henry Havelock Ellis (2 February 1859 – 8 July 1939) was an English physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He is credited with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis.

Ellis was among the pioneering investigators of psychedelic drugs and the author of one of the first written reports to the public about an experience with mescaline, which he conducted on himself in 1896. He supported eugenics and served as one of 16 vice-presidents of the Eugenics Society from 1909 to 1912.

Might be worth finding a few more of his books.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Gettysburg Nobody Knows, edited by Gabor S. Boritt

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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This is a collection of essays about Gettysburg, some of which are good, and others are not.

We started with “The Common Soldier’s Gettysburg Campaign” by Joseph T. Glatthaar, which I didn’t think quite lived up to its name. Its point was interesting, building on Lee’s famous comment that generals have, in reality, very little to do with who wins and who loses battles. All generals can do is get their men to the right place at the right time -- it’s up to the men to slug it out. After building that premise, however, the author seems to focus more on the decisions of generals than the actions of the men they command.

Next was “Joshua Chamberlain and the American Dream” by Glenn LaFantasie, which also kind of missed its mark for me. He argues that we remember Chamberlain as the hero of Little Round Top in exactly the way Chamberlain wanted to be remembered, even though there is some evidence to support the idea that Chamberlain didn’t play the exact role history ascribes to him. The author also admits, however, that there is also no evidence to show that Chamberlain lied or exaggerated his role, or reported it as anything separate from what he believed it to be. I’m left with the conclusion that we remember Chamberlain as he wanted to be remembered, and that way is also likely the truth about him. Not too shocking if you ask me.

“Old Jack Is Not Here” by Harry Pfanz got better in his analysis of Ewell’s actions at Gettysburg and whether or not he deserves the scorn usually heaped upon his name for not taking Cemetery Hill. Pfanz argues no, that although he may have made mistakes at Gettysburg, not attacking Cemetery Hill was not one of them. In fact, by not attacking, Ewell may have been following Lee’s orders not to bring on a general engagement until the entire army was up. His command was divided and tired, and the Federals were heavily fortified on that hill, despite what General Trimble might have said in the movie. I have a biography of Ewell on my shelf by Pfanz. It’ll be interesting to get a more complete analysis there.

“The Chances of War: Lee, Longstreet, Sickles and the First Minnesota Volunteers” by Kent Gramm, is the best one in the book. After reading it, I added another book by Gramm, a biography of Sickles, a biography of Hancock, and the regimental history of the First Minnesota to my reading list. The argument that the First Minnesota did more to save the army and the Union than either the 20th Maine or the regiments who repulsed Pickett’s Charge is a persuasive one. Or even Sickles and his Third Corps for that matter. If he hadn’t advanced to the Peach Orchard and clashed with Longstreet, would the Confederates have had the momentum to carry the Union position that day? Interesting question. The fact that Sickles was such a character makes it even more interesting. Here’s a passage that’s worth transcribing. It has nothing to do with Sickles.

We students of war rightly do not like violence, so we try to eliminate it from battles. It is a matter of maps and movements, in our books; it is a matter of ballistics and tactics, failures and brilliance -- but from Marathon to Gettysburg we are shown men and women who fought, who endured and perpetuated chaotic violence, men and women who sweated and stabbed and bled and were shot, who slashed and screamed and shouted, who lived and died like us, contingent and dependent not on plans or anything we can think through, but dependent on the dark, the beyond, we being not gods but mortals subject to accident or intention or chance or absurdity that we cannot see through. This is how we live, for as Martin Luther said on his deathbed, “We are all beggars.”

“Eggs, Aldie, Shepherdstown, and J.E.B. Stuart” by Emory Thomas comes to Stuart’s defense in his actions during Gettysburg. Much maligned for abandoning Lee, Thomas argues that Stuart may have been too tired to do anything else. His ride from Virginia to Pennsylvania was one continuous battle, evidently, and lasted longer than any similar excursion he’d ever been on. Confused orders, rude behavior at dinner, and a fixation on protecting the captured wagons at all costs when he should’ve left the damn things behind and gotten back in touch with Lee -- they all lead Thomas to believe that Stuart might have been sleepwalking through the entire campaign. And that scene from the movie when Lee confronts Stuart -- “I told you there is no time for that.” -- evidently that never really happened.

The rest of the essays weren’t as interesting. One about Pickett’s Charge that says everything we think we know about Pickett’s Charge is wrong. Another about what the town of Gettysburg was like before and after the battle, and how the battle changed it. Another about the overall Confederate military strategy that led to the circumstances that allowed Gettysburg to happen. This one had some interesting insights. Davis was evidently his own Secretary of War, actively ordering generals and armies around, but had no real control over anything except Virginia because of slow communications, slower travel times, vague orders, and arrogant generals. Without Lee, according to the author, the war might have been a ninety-day fight after all.

Finally an essay about the legacy of Gettysburg which, even after having just read it, leaves no lasting impression on me other than we remember Gettysburg as a turning point it really wasn’t, and our memories are framed more by Roosevelt’s words in 1938 rather than Lincoln’s words in 1863. For Roosevelt it was all about peace and coming together. For Lincoln, war and coming apart.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.