Sensibility, Not Technique

I’ve been hop scotching among Chekhov’s stories, and an observation by one his admirers, Howard Moss, pursues me:

“The truest changes in art are not changes of technique but of sensibility. And so the real pioneers are rarely recognized as such. They are too subtle to make good copy. Examples: Henry Green and Elizabeth Bishop.”

Moss was a poet and longtime poetry editor of The New Yorker. His reviews and essays are “occasional” in the best sense, and have a charming, unsystematic, thrown-away quality. He’s never cloying but Moss pays his readers the compliment of confiding in us. His taste is nearly perfect and he is by nature a shrewd celebrator – ever a dwindling species.

The passage above is drawn from a sampler titled “From a Notebook,” collected in Whatever is Moving. Both Green and Bishop admired Chekhov extravagantly. The work of both is new and different, but not eccentrically so – like Chekhov’s. Both bring novel ways of seeing and feeling into literature. Neither was a self-declared revolutionary nor were they perceived as such by their contemporaries. Both had respectable reputations, often rooted in misunderstanding, during their working lives, and both were taken for granted as reliable talent, off-center talents, but their influence was time-released and largely posthumous. Both rank among the major writers of the last century, a notion that would have surprised them. And most of these observations apply to Chekhov. Here’s how he begins his next-to-last story, “The Bishop,” written in 1902, two years before his death:

“The evening service was being celebrated on the eve of Palm Sunday in the Old Petrovsky Convent. When they began distributing the palm it was close upon ten o'clock, the candles were burning dimly, the wicks wanted snuffing; it was all in a sort of mist. In the twilight of the church the crowd seemed heaving like the sea, and to Bishop Pyotr, who had been unwell for the last three days, it seemed that all the faces -- old and young, men's and women's -- were alike, that everyone who came up for the palm had the same expression in his eyes. In the mist he could not see the doors; the crowd kept moving and looked as though there were no end to it.”

Inconspicuously, clinical third-person observation morphs into the workings of an individual mind. Inner experience merges with the world it takes in and riffs upon. We are on the cusp of literary stream of consciousness (a phrase coined 12 years earlier by William James in The Principles of Psychology). Likening worshipers to a heaving sea is new, surprising and appropriate to a sick man who will die within a week – Holy Week. He vision is hallucinatory. Here is the next paragraph:

“How stifling, how hot it was! How long the service went on! Bishop Pyotr was tired. His breathing was laboured and rapid, his throat was parched, his shoulders ached with weariness, his legs were trembling. And it disturbed him unpleasantly when a religious maniac uttered occasional shrieks in the gallery. And then all of a sudden, as though in a dream or delirium, it seemed to the bishop as though his own mother Marya Timofyevna, whom he had not seen for nine years, or some old woman just like his mother, came up to him out of the crowd, and, after taking a palm branch from him, walked away looking at him all the while good-humouredly with a kind, joyful smile until she was lost in the crowd. And for some reason tears flowed down his face. There was peace in his heart, everything was well, yet he kept gazing fixedly towards the left choir, where the prayers were being read, where in the dusk of evening you could not recognize anyone, and -- wept. Tears glistened on his face and on his beard. Here someone close at hand was weeping, then someone else farther away, then others and still others, and little by little the church was filled with soft weeping. And a little later, within five minutes, the nuns' choir was singing; no one was weeping and everything was as before.”

How different this is from the conventions of earlier 19th-century fiction. How might Dickens or Turgenev have treated this scene? Chekhov blurs inner and outer, comic and tragic. His most successful characters are the opposite of cartoons or Dickensian caricatures. The bishop is revealed as weak, frightened, baffled by life and death, and utterly human. In a review of Ronald Hingley’s biography of Chekhov, Moss calls the Russian “the man who invented a way of revealing everything about character through the seeming miracle of making character inarticulate.”

Remember, too, that a dying man (Chekhov) is writing about a dying man (Bishop Pytor). After the bishop’s death, Chekhov concludes his story like this:

“A month later a new suffragan bishop was appointed, and no one thought anything more of Bishop Pyotr, and afterwards he was completely forgotten. And only the dead man's old mother, who is living to-day with her son-in-law the deacon in a remote little district town, when she goes out at night to bring her cow in and meets other women at the pasture, begins talking of her children and her grandchildren, and says that she had a son a bishop, and this she says timidly, afraid that she may not be believed. . . .

“And, indeed, there are some who do not believe her.”

This, in Moss’ terms, represents a sensibility new to literature: “The moral complexity of the stories and plays stems from this undercurrent of ambiguous sympathy, this withholding of judgment.” Elsewhere, Moss describes Jane Austen as “a wild-eyed experimentalist.” On this basis, might we not construct a new canon dedicated to writers who bring original sensibilities to literature?