Things Written Randomly in Doubt Read online

  I am not an expert on Tolstoy’s life, and too much knowledge can hinder as much it can assist understanding of the texts. However, I know enough to be impressed to find that a man of such privileged background could in the nineteenth century identify not only with the virtuous and hardworking amongst the downtrodden poor, but also those who had drifted into crime and prostitution. More notably still, he understood that for the rural poor this distinction did not exist – nor did it in reality. One random, apparently minor misfortune could push them from one group to the other.

  My relationship with this novel is not, however, that of an impartial critic; this is a book with which I have a close emotional relationship.

  When I was thirteen or thereabouts, my mother would drive to some shops at the back of a wonderfully shabby hotel in Dhaka called the Shaghbagh (and renamed the “Shag-Bag” by my sister, as we had previously lived there for more than a year). On these trips, she would disappear for an hour or so, and my sanity was saved by something amongst the dusty greyness of the mini-arcade and the beggars that inhabited it. I knew the beggars well: a smiling little girl apparently healthy but for the pus that oozed from both ears – presumably only a short course of antibiotics away from a cure – a boy also smiling and the shadow of his elder companion, and a determined old lady who approached more slowly, bent by her years and a growth the size of a head dangling from her chin (I learnt much later that it could have been removed with a minor operation long before it took on those disconcerting proportions). She used her growth as a powerful weapon and if you did not close your window in time, she could hang it into the car interior, by which time you were utterly at her mercy. Smiling back at the children and fleeing the old woman, too terrified to consider her plight and the misery of her life, I could reach the sanctuary in which to lose an hour of my time more usefully. It was an English-language bookshop whose dimensions and aspect I have difficulty reconstructing in my mind. I’m sure that, like the other shops in the row, it had its name painted on a framed piece of plywood above the door and it was small. It was dusty and books were not organised in any kind of order; some were on shelves and others in teetering piles. If I remember correctly, the owner had little or no English and there were few customers – mostly Bengalis who could read English and couldn’t afford new books.

  It was here that I came across an American edition of Resurrection. It had a misleadingly romantic cover of a dashing nineteenth-century army officer whose extravagant military hat had an enormous plume. He was on horseback and a woman who looked as though she had dressed for a society ball was holding his hand and clinging to his leg in an act of utter subservience and devotion. Clearly the cover designer had not read the book and very probably nor had the editor who explained the storyline to him. I considered the book for a long time – almost certainly on more than one visit. Money was short and the cover put me off, but with time on my hands I read a chunk of it and was hooked. The book has stayed in my possession and my mind.

  Not every book I read at that age I could understand, but this one I did. I have reread some books, such as Sartre’s Nausea, several times and each time they have felt like different books. Yet when I reread Resurrection for the first time as preparation for this essay, I felt that it is now for me exactly as it was, except for the strange, disappointing disappearance of an episode in which an odious aristocratic boy considers his superiority to the poor who surround his carriage in Moscow, affecting me profoundly. Whether it was deleted from the Penguin edition I have just read or I read the episode in another book by Tolstoy or even another Russian writer I do not know. Nearly fifty years have passed, and my memory was never good. That it feels unchanged is due to the nature of this book: it is simple and complex; it is focused on certain truths and is written with the intention of putting them across as clearly as possible; it goes straight to the most important things in human existence, about which it is often difficult to say anything very original. Surely this was one of Tolstoy’s works that influenced Gandhi and through him the world.

  Of course the impact is different now. When I first read at the beginning that one of the women in a remote Russian township would drown her unwanted babies, I was profoundly shocked in a way that perhaps I can no longer be, although there is much that shocks me today. Then I looked around at the poverty that devastated the country now called Bangladesh and Tolstoy’s world did not seem so far away. There was much that could rekindle your faith in humanity; poor societies often display more human dignity than affluent ones, but at the same time I could observe the blindness of the middle classes, particularly the European expatriates. I remember hearing people discussing the strikes that regularly occurred in Dhaka’s factories, which included some owned by Western corporations. They said that the owners were using the gundas, a local mafia that specialised in assassination, to kill the strike leaders. There was no outrage in their voices; these were necessary but inconvenient events. A Bengali friend of mine had seduced the family maid and made her pregnant: sent off with a couple of months’ salary she could only turn to prostitution. Like Nekhlyudov, he felt guilty but could not do anything about it. Life, Resurrection explains, is a serious affair: our actions have consequences, often out of proportion with the pleasures that originally caused them. It’s true that Tolstoy’s attitude to sex is out of date, and rightly so. You feel that Nekhlyudov and perhaps Tolstoy himself never switched off for a moment, unlike Martin Buber who understood that we cannot maintain the same seriousness in all situations, nor should we. There is a scene in which Nekhlyudov has to plead the case of two of his proteges with an obnoxious and vicious prison officer. Nekhlyudov congratulates himself on his restraint following his conversion, but if you follow the dialogue you cannot help noticing that he treats the officer with contempt and obstinacy. He actually obtains what he wants, but you feel that Nekhlyudov and perhaps Tolstoy never really cease to be aristocrats, even though they have turned against them. But life is a serious affair, and a life spent in the pursuit of comfort and wealth is a life wasted. Tolstoy’s principal arguments are as valid now as they were then, perhaps more so, given the shallowness of our times, although the credit crunch has gradually woken up many souls that slept through the previous two decades.

  The surprising and for me slightly depressing thing that emerges from my rereading of this work is that so many of my ideas have grown towards Tolstoy’s – most significantly his religious ideas, although I do not share his certainties. They are not identical: Tolstoy is still troubled by an afterlife, but the book, including its tone and documentary analysis, is about this world and how it functions, and that is where its strength lies. Did it take me nearly half a century to catch up with this book and my thirteen-year-old self?

  Certainly, the only part of the book that stayed with me very clearly was Tolstoy’s classism – but a classism that was not based on hate. That in itself was a very good lesson. You can only improve the lives of those who have too little by taking something from those who have too much and are afflicted too by their exuberant wealth. A political system requires its citizens to become complicit in its crimes, and by so doing it degrades them so much that the better ones have to seek solace in alcohol. This is a point that Tolstoy makes again and again, and it is an essential truth – not a bad point to start out on life. I am indebted to that little shop.

  Another aspect I have always been aware of is that the motivation for being a socialist should be empathy and moral outrage at how other human beings are being treated, and not some analytical formula called “scientific socialism”. For this reason I was always been much more at home with the label “communist” than “Marxist”. Marx was right on so many important points, but I would not want to define myself by a single man’s thoughts, as clearly I do not agree with him on everything and, more importantly, even if those analyses were wrong, I would still rebel against the way our economic system grinds people down and destroys the better part of their being.

  By �
�communist” I do not mean any particular regime, but the holding of most assets in common, and in recent years I have become increasingly convinced that landownership has to be completely abolished as a prerequisite for any good society (some forms of private property may very well be acceptable; I do not claim to be a political scientist and I doubt anyone yet has the blueprint for a perfect society, but we can determine which things obstruct a good society: landownership and corporations). I was influenced in this opinion by Linbaugh’s The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All which, along with a long period living in the country made me think that the land question is often neglected today. It might also be worth quoting the Gaelic proverb “Firewood from wood, a salmon from the river and a deer from the forest are never theft for a Gael” to demonstrate that such concepts have always had their roots in peasant society. I had forgotten how prominent the land issue is in this novel. Tolstoy deals with it almost exhaustively through a series of very effective dialogues expressing the different viewpoints of the different classes and within the different classes.

  When I first read the book, I ignored the religious ideas because I was an atheist and could see no corner of this world where God could hide. The author’s religious ideas did not spoil my first reading, but I sifted them out. I did remember them, but I did not remember exactly what they were. I don’t believe that they sedimented in my brain and worked their way through very slowly, but who knows? We have little understanding of how the human brain works and retains or discards information, although I’m told that this new frontier is going to be opened up in the coming decades. The influences are more likely to be my reading much later about the “free spirits” of the sixteenth century who distinguished themselves from the equally unpalatable Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Nevertheless there is the hint of an interesting idea here: influences during our teens, particularly our early teens, are decisive in laying out the framework for our later intellectual development almost unconsciously. This would certainly help to explain why generations are such cohesive identities – more so perhaps than nations and political credos.

  Marx and Tolstoy had one thing in common: they both were impractical when it came to the all-important question of how change could come about, although they pointed to entirely different routes. Marx put his faith in working-class organisation and Tolstoy in moral example. Working-class organisation did bring about changes, the most important of which were universal suffrage and greater freedom of debate, now claimed as an achievement of the middle class, which actually fought against them and has resumed its hostilities. Unfortunately for Marxists, the industrial working class proved to be a gradualist class on the whole, except in the period of early industrialisation. The truly revolutionary class capable of any sacrifice was the peasantry, and the peasantry is now a disappearing class.

  Tolstoy believed society could be improved through example. Example is powerful (much more powerful than rational persuasion), and a more caring society can be built up slowly, but it can never go the whole way. Hobbes was right on this point: humanity is not as inherently depraved as he imagined, but neither is it wholly perfectible. A small part of humanity is always irredeemable: there will always be the psychopathic. It is also true that many, perhaps nearly all, people who engage in violent behaviour can be changed through careful rehabilitation. There is good in almost everyone, but not everyone and that is a fact that cannot be wished away. Let us shift for a moment to the more familiar paradigms of pacifism. There are three categories of pacifist: personal pacifist, moral pacifist and legal pacifist. The personal pacifist quite sensibly opts out and says, “The world can do what it wants; I will not personally or through others engage or assist in any act of violence.” This is utterly commendable, but does not solve the problem. The moral pacifist sets out to persuade the whole of humanity of the benefits of pacifism, in the hope that eventually everyone will be persuaded and there will be no more war. The legal pacifist argues that such an event will never occur or come near to occurring, and that it is only by developing international law and the means to impose that law through force that war between nations can finally be overcome. Tolstoy wanted to achieve through the first two not only peace but the reorganisation of society. It cannot be said that he didn’t have a powerful influence, but ultimately the state and the law, which he correctly identifies as the source of corruption, must be used to overcome the corruption they originally created.

  This leads us to another thinker who did exactly the opposite: Machiavelli. He was obsessed with how the state could reform itself from inside, and he believed a little naively that good laws could be set up in perpetuity by a good lawmaker, and for that reason a good lawmaker – and only a good lawmaker – could be justified in using less than moral behaviour to achieve the situation whereby he could introduce good laws. Machiavelli was not the immoral man some people consider him to be, but he was mistaken. He and Tolstoy approach the problem from opposite ends: Tolstoy believed that change comes from the individual and Machiavelli thought that it comes from the state. Both are right and both are wrong. The two need to be merged, but they are almost irreconcilable opposites. For literature, this is a great gift, but for humanity it is an insuperable and tragic obstacle – a cruel sentence that reality has passed on humanity.

  This does not mean that we should give up and it does not mean that we couldn’t quite quickly achieve a much better society than the one we have today, but “heaven on earth” cannot transcend the Lord’s Prayer, as Tolstoy contemplates in Resurrection. He sets a fine example, and analyses society quite brilliantly, and yet he cannot provide a credible way to achieve change – not because of any lack of intelligence, but because there isn’t one or rather there isn’t one that doesn’t to some extent compromise Tolstoy’s very high principles.

  The question of how change should be brought about was of great importance to the politicals, who appear at the end of the book. These were mainly the Narodniks, whose ideas are considered an early form of terrorism, although terror had always been used by power and goes back at the very least to the ancient and medieval siege, which used starvation and threatened annihilation of civilian populations to achieve desired results. The Narodniks could argue that they were merely using the same methods against the state as the state used against them. In purely rational terms, they were right, but the acts of terror had devastating effects on their own psyches. Tolstoy is particularly effective in his characterisation of the politicals and their inherent weaknesses, but at the same time he is respectful of their motivations. On the whole, they bear their sufferings lightly and show great courage, but theirs is a pointless exercise.

  As an alternative, Tolstoy suggests in the final pages the implementation of a Christian ethic of non-violence, which has largely been ignored throughout the history of Christianity. At this stage he introduces the English proselytiser, who is a foil to the Nekhlyudov character. There is nothing preachy about Nekhlyudov, while the Englishman is irrepressible in his attempts to change people with simple arguments, even though he knows and understands little about the society he is visiting. He presumably did not take a pith helmet to Siberia, but he does wear a metaphorical one. There is an element of uncertainty about this Englishman: to us he is obnoxious, but Tolstoy may have looked on him more kindly. He provides Nekhluydov with the bible that completes the process of his conversion. In Tolstoy there is an appealing acceptance of the variety of human life, and he is not, one feels, like the English proselytiser who wished to homogenise humanity. In spite of himself, he remained a primarily literary figure, and not a political and religious one, although here he drifts in that direction. This was because he chose fiction as the most effective way of putting his ideas across, and this entails a degree of uncertainty and an acceptance of the irresolvable, which by definition cannot be resolved. Resurrection is further proof, if further proof be needed, of fiction’s efficacy in analysing complex situations, even in a book like this that aims
to put across important ideas the author is keen to propagate.

  On Aphorisms

  The aphorism is a very limited form. That is what gives it potential. It is a dishonest form, because it makes a bold statement without any attempt to justify it or consider possible consequences.

  It may then appear to be a lazy way to pontificate, but it isn’t or isn’t when it has been done well. In some languages, another word for aphorism has the same root as “sententious”, and the great danger to be avoided in writing aphorisms is sententiousness. No preacher or demagogue has ever taken to the aphorism in the West, but they’ve tried their hand at almost every other form.1

  The aphorism is a scattergun and does not necessarily have a viewpoint. It can be, like satire, indiscriminate and vicious. It can be gentle, humorous and urbane. It can be philosophical, but in that case it is best supported by other prose works that don’t have the limitations we’ve mentioned. It can be political, and I have published an excellent collection of aphorisms by the American Marxist Renzo Llorente.2

  Oscar Wilde was not an aphorist, but his writings and conversations were extremely aphoristic and have been mined to create collections of aphorisms. When he said, “Youth is wasted on the young,” he created the perfect aphorism (amongst many others). Why? First the brevity. Second the humour in the apparent contradiction, so the reader or listener is first struck by the impossibility of the statement and it takes a second or two to understand the actual meaning. Youth/young is being used in two different senses. The energy, health, strength, intelligence and ability to experience and feel of those who have not lived too many years are wasted on those who, because they have not lived long enough, are too innocent and lacking in experience to exploit those advantages. Thirdly there is the vagueness. The lists are mine, and other people might interpret “youth” and “young” in other ways. It could be to do with the beauty of youth, or its capacity for sex and partying. It might be that youth, being constrained by work and lack of wealth and other resources, is unable to enjoy its advantages, but I doubt that Wilde would have been motivated by such a mundane and practical consideration.