On (Almost) Finishing War and Peace

This post is dedicated to my friends Theresa and Danielle – for encouraging me to keep writing these little puppies!

My apologies for the long delay since my last blog post! Was it really last April? In the interim, I’ve been to France a couple of times to help out with my French family. I’ve also hiked in the Spanish Pyrenees and discovered that I adore that part of the world. I’ve also tried to keep things going on the theater, instructional design, and house fixer-upper fronts. So I’ve been a busy bee!

In fact, I was just outside admiring our work in getting the first coat of paint down on the beams that adorn the front of our beloved Eichler home. It’s a very light and pleasant green to offset the rich, dark “coffee” brown of the house. We’re debating whether we need a second coat. After having Béatrice fall off the ladder and really hurting her shoulder, and after wrenching my knee and hobbling around like Captain Ahab without his peg leg, I am pretty much in the “It looks good enough to me” camp… but we’ll see….

BTW, we bought ourselves some peace of mind by investing in the most expensive paint we could find. It’s from Sherwin Williams. It’s called “Duration” because it has a lifetime guarantee. Whose life is that anyway? I wonder! Does that mean the paint will be here long after I’ve slipped off this mortal coil? Ugh! Nothing like staring into a can of paint to remind you of your own mortality!

Anyway, another reason why I’ve been grossly arrears in posting is that I have been spending a good deal of my free time reading “War and Peace". I just hit page 1400! Only 44 more to go! Yowza! Technically, I’ve just started Part Two of the Epilogue. So the “finish line” is very much in sight.

Well, it’s such a cliché to say “I’ve read War and Peace.” Like big whoop for me, right? So I’ve been entertaining the thought of stopping right where I am. It’s a little like Tom Courtney at the end of “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” I don’t know if you remember that old British black and white flick. A very young Tom plays a kid in a kind of Juvenile Detention center who discovers he has a tremendous talent for running. The creepy warden puts him in a race against the swells at the local academy for rich kids with the promised that if Tom wins he’ll get all sorts of cushy privileges and liberties. Anyway, the race starts and….

Oh, no! Spoiler Alert! Skip the next paragraph (all in italic type) if you want to watch the film…

So young Tom just obliterates the opposition. He gets right to the finish line and there isn’t a competitor in sight. Instead of crossing the line though and claiming his prize, he just stops and stands there. In a kind of, “Screw you and the horse you rode in on” gesture, he stays two feet in front of the Finish Line and waves to the kids who eventually catch up and “win” the race.

If you’re interested, you can get a flavor of the flick here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQJsE4dJmG0

So I’m thinking of doing the same thing with W and P. Why make a fetish about “finishing” something? Can’t I just stand here a few paces from the end and just wave as Tolstoy makes his way to the conclusion? Is it possible? Can anyone “almost” finish War and Peace? Maybe it would be fun to “almost” read a lot of gy-normous classic books. Don Quixote? Middlemarch! Tristram Shandy? Remembrance of Things Past? The Great Gatsby? Oh, wait. That’s a shortie. But, in general, I wonder…

In the meantime, though, here are my thoughts as I stand (near) the Finish Line of Tolstoy’s magnum opus….

First off, what’s the quote from Samuel Johnson about Paradise Lost? “A very great work certainly - but no one has ever wished it any longer.” That’s kind of true here too I’m afraid. There are long stretches where you feel like saying,

“Umm… I believe I’ve read that already… “
“Ehh… I think I got the point here. Can we move on now?”
“Ahh… haven’t we covered that ground before?”
“Urrr… I guess everybody does need an editor after all….”

This is especially true in the last quarter of the novel where Tolstoy seems to forget that he’s writing a piece of fiction at all. Instead, he turns historian and decides to share (and share and share and share) his thoughts on the great struggle between Napoleon’s Grand Army and the Russian people. So why did the French lose the campaign of 1812? Was the battle of Borodino really a Russian victory? Was Napoleon a bit of a poser, wanker, and fraud? Well, old Leo has all the answers for you!

As with many an armchair general, Tolstoy makes his share of good points. He totally debunks the “great man” theory of history (especially when the “great man” in question is French.) He also sees the end results of historical events as the accumulation of many small decisions and actions rather than as the result of one “maestro” of genius waving his baton. In doing so, Tolstoy certainly anticipated many of the trends of modern historical writing. You have to give him his props for that. On the other hand, he seems to believe that, just as the heavens and planets obey the universal laws of physics, gravity, and so forth, so too do historical events correspond to some as yet undefined “laws of history”. Given our current understanding of modern physics, this seems a naïve view born of a mid 19th century feeling that Newton and Darwin had pretty much “explained it all” for us in their domains.

At least, I think that's what Tolstoy is up to. I'm really too tired to know for sure! All in all the last part of the book gives you the feeling that there is an equivalence between reading this novel and being in the French army yourself slogging your way back to Poland from Moscow – freezing your tookus off and wishing desperately for the whole thing to come to an end. Either that or to fall down face first in the snow and just not get up again until some Cossack comes along and turns you into a human shish-ka-bob. And the fact that Tolstoy is totally, absolutely, utterly lacking in any sense of humor whatsoever makes it even more of a "long march" here.

All that being said, there’s still a tremendous power in the book. That’s especially so when Tolstoy focuses on the lives of the individual characters (as opposed to what Napoleon was having for breakfast the morning of the battle of Austerlitz and whether the Russian General staff really knew what they were doing in evacuating Moscow without a fight). That’s the great theme of the novel for me – how we still have to live our individual lives even though we understand we’re in the grip of these tremendous impersonal historical movements which basically treat us like bugs. That’s certainly a theme that resonates with us all now too, isn’t it? We still have to live and endure even though everything around us (our fortunes, our freedom, our retirement savings) looks like they could/will be taken away in an instant.

So I go back and forth between being really gripped by the novel and often being really, really bored and even angry. That’s when continuing with the book really becomes a chore. I have to say that I just can’t learn to love Tolstoy. Deep down, for me, he’s one of those “world embracing enormous geniuses that we must all admire and who totally eclipses everyone else so there.” I sometimes feel that he is a bit of a bully. At times, reading Tolstoy feels like you’re trapped in a cab with a driver who is a brilliant, cranky autodidact. Realizing that you have something to do with being a writer yourself, he decides to bombard you with everything he knows about the role of the Freemasons and the Vatican in controlling the world money supply. And as he continues his tirade, you hear on the radio that the Freeway to your hotel is blocked for miles ahead because of an overturned big rig with chickens running on the road. So there is absolutely no escape.

Help!

Which also makes me think that in the arts there often seems to be s a funny kind of pairing/balance between the “Tolstoys” and the “anti-Tolstoys”; e.g., the “blowhards/bullies” on one side of the equation and the “whisperers/seducers” on the other. For example, consider the following list of matched pairs. If you had to choose, which would you prefer?

Tolstoy vs. Chekhov
Beethoven vs. Mozart
Michelangelo vs. Donatello
Picasso vs. Matisse
Rembrandt vs. Vermeer
Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald
Whitman vs. Dickinson
Milton vs. Donne
D.H. Lawrence vs. Virginia Woolf

As I look this list over, I feel like, “Oh, heck! I respect the people on the left hand side of the equation but I love the people on the right.” What accounts for this difference? Is it because one type kind of grabs you around the throat and says: “I have something terribly important to tell you! Something that will change you utterly! Something that will make you better understand the meaning of life itself”? Meanwhile the second type seems so much more modest, seductive, and insinuating. Like they’re just saying, “I’m working on this little story. It’s kind of interesting. What do you think?”

But I better stop here! This posting is starting to feel as long as W and P itself! Yikes! Oh, well! Maybe everybody does need an editor after all!