'It Would Be Strange Not to Forgive'

In her 1985 biography of Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Frank tells us the poet read William Gerhardie’s Anton Chekhov: A Critical Study (1923), the first book not written in Russian devoted to the Russian master. In it she found a passage from Chekhov’s Notebook “that she cherished for the rest of her life”: 

“Essentially all this is crude and meaningless, and romantic love appears as meaningless as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people. But when one listens to music, all this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one woman is alive—gray-haired, she is sitting in a box in the theatre, quiet and majestic, and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless, since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive.”

 

“Strange,” perhaps, but definitely human. Frank reports this in the context of Bogan’s separation and eventual divorce after twelve years of marriage, in 1937, from her second husband, the poet Raymond Holden. She sees Bogan distancing herself from Holden’s betrayals and the resulting pain. “With detachment and perspective,” Frank writes, “came the complete view, the proportioned view . . .” Those are words better left unsaid when the hurt is raw. “Forgive and forget” is glibly stupid advice. The missing element is time. Even burns slowly stop hurting. In A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan (2005), the editor Mary Kinzie includes a 1961 entry from Bogan’s journal in which she misquotes Chekhov’s line:

 

“‘And all things are forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive’--this Chekhov knew. Forgiveness and the eagerness to protect: these keep me from putting down the crudest shocks received from seven on. . . . Now, in my later years, I have no hatred or resentment left. But I still cannot describe some of the nightmares lived through, with love. . . . How do we survive such things? But it is long over. And forgiven . . .”

 

Stories are not self-help. We don’t read them for answers to our troubles. By giving us others, inside and out, they dispel that lingering sense of uniqueness. Perhaps Bogan saw in that that gray-haired woman in the theater box a refracted image of herself. In 2004, the Scottish novelist William Boyd published “A Chekhov Lexicon.” Under “R” for “real lives” he writes:

 

“[T]he great and lasting allure of all fiction: if we want to know what other people are like we turn to the novel or the short story. In no other art form can we take up residence in other people's minds so effortlessly. Chekhov tells us a great deal about his characters but, however, resists full exposure: there always remains something ‘blurry’, something secret about them. This is part of his genius: this is what makes his stories seem so real.”

 

[The Chekhov passage can be found in Notebook of Anton Chekhov (trans. S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, B.W. Huebsch, 1921; Ecco Press, 1987). ]