'When You Grow Old and Need to Expand Your World'

From an email the late Helen Pinkerton sent to me on May 28, 2015: 

“I have been devoting the last few months to reading what they call ‘Gulag Literature.’ I realized recently that while I was growing up in Butte [Montana], and experiencing what one thought of as ‘Depression’ hardship, I really had no idea that events going on in the other part of the world were beyond belief.”

 

At the time she is writing, Helen was eighty-eight. I had by then been corresponding with her for five years and read her published work in poetry and prose. Like all of us, she had strengths among her reading interests – the American Civil War, Melville, Yvor Winters and the Stanford School, Etienne Gilson – and I knew she seemed to have read almost everything worth reading, but still I was impressed by her ambitiousness and humility. How many of us recognize our pockets of ignorance and resolve to correct them? When it comes to reading history, how many acknowledge our privileged status as Americans and strive to understand what others have endured? Helen continues:

 

“So I went to work on Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman and Varlam Shalamov. But I think I've had enough of prison camps, torture, starvation, hard labor, criminal morals, human inhumanity, totalitarian politics--all taking place during my comparatively bucolic youth in the 20th century. I need now to turn to something else. So, I am reading Trollope’s Barchester series. I couldn't ask for a more different world to dwell in imaginatively than Barchester in the mid-19th century, after spending so many months in Soviet Siberia, in Moscow prisons, in prison camps in Stalingrad, Germany, and Kazakhstan, and labor camps far north in Siberia at Kolyma.”

 

Perhaps you’ve had similar experiences as a reader. I’ve known the need to escape the black claustrophobia of human nature at its most depraved. In the mid-eighties, before interviewing Raul Hilberg, I read the recently revised edition of his Destruction of the European Jews, a meticulous accounting of the Holocaust. Afterwards, I read P.G. Wodehouse at his frothiest. Helen goes on:  

 

“The authors I've been reading, you will recognize are the three great Russians: Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, Solzhenitsyn, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales. Grossman’s marvelous novel is one of the finest I've ever read. The Russians really do know how to compose true novels. Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales is a series of extraordinary short stories, each reading with the sharpness and brevity of a poem, focused on a single character or revelatory event. Solzhenitsyn’s more famous record of his experience in Soviet camps is a complete filling out of the details of day by day life  in an inhuman environment. I know you don’t read many novels these days, but if and when you grow old and need to expand your world, you might give those I mention a try.”

 

I had read them. At the time, Helen would have read John Glad’s early-eighties  translations of Shalamov’s short fiction. Since then we have Donald Rayfield’s versions of Kolyma Stories (2018) and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories (2020), which I reviewed here and here. What I find most exhilarating about Helen’s six-year-old email is that single phrase: “when you grow old and need to expand your world.”

Helen died on December 28, 2017, at age ninety.