`Like the Punchline to a Joke'

A friend knocked on my office door and said I might appreciate the story she wanted to tell. Recently she read War and Peace for the first time, in the new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volohonsky. Like any thoughtful reader, she asked herself afterwards, “Now what?” So she read Anna Karenina. Then she consulted Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov’s posthumously published review of his homeland’s 19th-century writers. In the lecture devoted to Anna Karenina, Melissa was surprised to encounter the name of her former landlady in Ames, Iowa, where she attended Iowa State University. Here’s the pertinent passage:

“Tolstoy stood for the natural life. Nature, alias God, had decreed that the human female should experience more pain in childbirth than, say, a porcupine or a whale. Therefore Tolstoy was violently opposed to the elimination of this pain.

“In Look magazine, a poor relation of Life, of April 8, 1952, there is a series of photos under the heading, `I Photographed My Baby’s Birth.’ A singularly unattractive baby smirks in a corner of the page. Says the caption: Clicking her own camera as she lies on the delivery table, Mrs. A.H. Heusinkveld, a photography writer (whatever that is) of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, records (says the caption) these extraordinary views of the birth of her first baby – from the early labor pains to the baby’s first cry.

“What does she take in the way of pictures? For instance: `Husband [wearing a handpainted philistine tie, with a dejected expression on his simple face] visits wife in the midst of her pains,’ or `Mrs. Heusinkveld shoots Sister Mary who sprays patient with disinfectants.’

“Tolstoy would have violently objected to all this.”

The kitchiness, of course, is funny but what would Nabokov (and Tolstoy) have made of women videotaping childbirth and posting it online? Or half-dressed pregnant celebrities posing for magazine covers? Nabokov obviously relished the vulgarity of documenting intimate moments and publishing the photos in a national magazine – yet another instance of poshlust, the Russian word he defined as “smug philistinism” and “not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” [See his Gogol and the essay “Philistines and Philistinism,” appended to Lectures on Russian Literature.] What’s different 56 years later is that Mrs. Heusinkveld today would congratulate herself on her candor and courage in transgressing oppressive standards of morality and taste, and a sizeable cadre of voices would second her self-praise. Today, vulgar narcissism is rationalized as virtue. Not to broadcast the birth of one’s child is so bourgeois, so 20th-century.

My friend is a tough-minded Iowan, alert to poshlust in all its shadings. She didn’t meet Mrs. Heusinkveld until almost 30 years after the Look magazine incident. Her son, the boy whose birth she photographed, worked as a handyman on his mother’s rental properties. “She was mean, too, the kind of person who thinks she’s so good and liberal-minded but really she’s mean,” my friend said, confirming all my assumptions.

More important than all of this is that Melissa loved Tolstoy’s great novels, and the love surprised her. “War and Peace is like the punchline to a joke – long and difficult. You wouldn’t think anybody would enjoy it,” she said.

The night before, I had read an essay new to me by Marilynne Robinson, “When I Was a Child,” included in The Brick Reader (edited by Linda Spalding and Michael Ondaatje). The first paragraph seems apropos:

“When I was a child I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.”