`To Start a Conversation Within You'

After long absence, a brief return to Cultural Amnesia. Here’s how Clive James concludes his chapter on the aphorist Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg:

“No writer, not even Chekhov in his short stories, can be Vermeer. A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say. It is the nature of his medium to start a conversation within you that will not stop until your death, and what he is really after is to be among the last voices you will hear.”

My first reaction was to refute a portion of James’ point: A painter – Matisse, say, or Hopper – can leave us with plenty to say. Hopper invites us to fill in the shadows or sun-lit blanks with stories, explanatory narratives from our own shadowed or sunny lives. But James is right. A painting is finite in a way literature is not, at least for print-minded people.

James’ choice of Chekhov is shrewd. In his stories, the Russian colonizes our imaginations as few writers do (Shakespeare, Henry James, Tolstoy, Proust, who else?). His people mingle with ours – that is, those we’ve known in life. From the shelf I pulled at random a book of Constance Garnett’s translations of the stories. It’s Volume 11, The School-Master and Other Stories. I open it to – a minor disappointment from 1886 – “Hush!” Early “humorous” Chekhov, the writer of sketches for Moscow newspapers. I remember it, though – a four-and-a-half-page comic portrait of a writer as tyrannical egotist. We know the type. Here is Ivan Yegoritch Krasnyhin in his own words:

“Shattered, soul-weary, a sick load of misery on the heart….and then to sit down and write. And this is called life! How is it nobody has described the agonizing discord in the soul of the writer who has to amuse the crowd when his heart is heavy or to shed tears at the word of command when his heart is light?”

It’s clownish, of course, but Chekhov (he was 26) is making fun of himself and others who choose to live by the pen then whine about their thankless task. Surely his Russian readers – and fellow writers – got the joke. My favorite moment comes in the middle of the night when Krasnyhin is trying to write but a “monotonous whispering” disturbs him. It’s his lodger in the next room praying:

“`I say!’ cries Krasnyhin. `Couldn’t you, please, say your prayers more quietly? You prevent me from writing!’

“`Very sorry…’ Foma Nikolaevitch answers timidly.”

I hope the last voice I hear is comically stoic like Chekhov’s (or Beckett’s), fully aware of life’s tedium, loneliness and heartbreak, and armed with a joke or well-aimed irony. V.S. Pritchett, addressing Chekhov’s insistence that his plays are not only comedies but farces, writes:

“He is asserting that life is a fish that cannot be netted by mood or doctrine, but continually glides away between sun and shadow.”