The Poet of `In-Betweenness'

Yesterday’s post was a trick question and I won’t apologize for it. I wished to draw attention to a common assumption made about American presidents, especially current and recent ones, and also about our tendency to think cynically and in a self-congratulatory manner. The author was Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), the greatest Russian writer not known for fiction or poetry (though he dabbled in both). He was a journalist and political writer, who lived in embattled exile in England for 12 years. All the right people hated him, including Marx and Lenin, and even the narcissistic Tolstoy was grudgingly impressed.

The passage comes from Herzen’s masterpiece, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen. I’m reading the four-volume work as translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgens, and with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin. Knopf published this edition in 1968.

Herzen’s subject in the passage I quoted (which appears in Vol. I, page 165) is not an American president but Mikhail Fedorovich Orlov, a minor figure in 19th-century Russian political history. Herzen describes him as “one of the founders of the celebrated League of Welfare, and that he had not found himself in Siberia was not his own fault, but was due to his brother, who enjoyed the special friendship of Nicholas and had been the first to gallop with his Horse Guards to the defence of the Winter Palace on December the Fourteenth.”

Even from this brief excerpt you get a suggestion of Herzen’s incisively ironic style (“not his own fault”). He typically views a person or situation from all sides simultaneously, at the same time admitting the inadequacy of his knowledge. His is the old-fashioned liberal spirit of tolerance and open-mindedness, a spirit characterized by Keith Gessen in his article about Herzen in The New Yorker last October as “the crisis of in-betweenness”:

“Alexander Herzen, the most noble, humane, passionate, and touching figure of the Russian nineteenth century, gets dusted off every fifty years or so, when liberalism feels that it is in crisis. This happened in 1912, his centenary, when Lenin fought over him with those he called `the knights of liberal verbiage,’ and again in the nineteen-fifties, when Isaiah Berlin produced the essays about Herzen that later formed the core of his classic Russian Thinkers. And this is fair enough: Herzen was one of the first to experience fully, in both his personal and his political life, the crisis of in-betweenness that was to characterize the best of progressive thought for the next century and a half.”

We can see this characteristic in-betweenness in the passage I quoted yesterday. When I read the paragraph beginning “Careless and incontinent of speech, he was continually making mistakes…,” I thought immediately of our current president (who delivered his State of the Union Address on Tuesday) and many of his predecessors, especially his father and his father’s predecessor. But Herzen won’t let us congratulate ourselves on our superiority of speech, thought and education. He considers the other sides of Orlov and reminds us that “people are so superficial and inattentive that they look more to words than to actions, and attach more weight to separate mistakes than to the combination of the whole character.”

This is not Herzen making excuses for Orlov or me making excuses for inarticulate presidents. One reader guessed the quote was penned by H.L. Mencken on one of his favorite bete noirs, Warren G. Harding, but Herzen’s prose contains none of the savagery Mencken reserved for “Dr. Harding,” “Dr. Hoover” and their ilk. Even when Mencken is right in his assessment, he enjoys his own inarguable superiority, of intellect and expression, a little too much. I never get that feeling from Herzen. He’s no powderpuff but somehow he mingles irony with humility. It’s a rare combination of human qualities. Isaiah describes him aptly as “civilized, imaginative, self-critical,” and continues:

“He had an acute, easily stirred and ironical mind, a fiery and poetical temperament, and a capacity for vivid, often lyrical writing…”

Herzen has recently gained currency from his appearance in Tom Stoppard’s trilogy of plays, The Coast of Utopia. I first saw his name in The Adventures of Augie March, where Saul Bellow’s title character works as a book thief in Chicago and steals volumes by Herzen. A few years later, after reading that Edward Dahlberg found him an essential writer, I read an edition of My Past and Thoughts abridged by Dwight Macdonald and published in 1973. I pegged him, wrongly, as a mere nonfiction addendum to Tolstoy and the other Russian fiction writers of his century.

Herzen was the bastard son of a Russian landowner, Ivan Yakovlev, and a German woman, Henriette Wilhelmina Luisa Haag. His mother christened him with a surname rooted in Herz, the German word for heart – we might say “love child.” He was born in Moscow shortly before the city was occupied by Napoleon’s troops. His father met with Napoleon, and he and his family were permitted to leave Moscow in exchange for agreeing to deliver a letter to the Russian emperor. The first sentences of his great memoir evoke those cataclysmic events as a species of family history, and inevitably recall War and Peace:

“`Vera Artamonovna, come tell me once more how the French came to Moscow,’ I used to say, rolling myself up in a quilt and stretching in my crib, which was sewn round with canvas that I might not fall out.

“`Oh! What’s the use of telling you? You’ve heard it so many time; besides it’s time to go to sleep. You had better get up a little earlier to-morrow,’ the old woman would usually answer, although she was as eager to repeat her favourite story as I was to hear it.

“`But do tell me a little bit. How did you find out? How did it begin?”
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