'A Lesson in Calmness, Actually, in Fatalism'

“My concept of what I call a story obviously has nothing to do with expressing myself or recording drama that I have been involved in. My life has been exemplarily dull, charmingly dull. I love routine. Boredom is not boredom for me. My life has not been adventurous in any way, so there’s probably a raw element of romantic distance; writing about something that is far more interesting than anything you have experienced.” 

This week I’ve been reading stories again, a few each night before bed, something I did early in the pandemic. There’s comfort in the familiar, of course: Chekhov, Babel, Malamud, Singer. I started with Babel’s Odessa Stories in Boris Dralyuk’s translation because I wanted to feel some connection to Ukraine, even if merely literary. Writer and translator both are natives of the title city. In “Odessa” (1916) I found a sentence that made me nostalgic for a place I have never been: “Odessa has sweet and wearying evenings in springtime, the spicy aroma of acacia, and a moon overflowing with even, irresistible light above a dark sea.”

 

Speaking at the top is Guy Davenport in a 1994 interview I recently discovered. Davenport’s stories are unlike those of the writers named above. From the earliest in Tatlin! (1974), the impact is less emotional than intellectual or admiringly aesthetic. We read stories for various reasons and they can supply mutually exclusive pleasures. There is no universal story template. In conversation, a lousy storyteller showcases himself. Even if he’s not the main character, the hero of his tale, he dominates the telling, crafts the narrative to make himself look good, even when he feigns humility. That’s not Davenport’s way nor, in general, the practice of Chekhov and company. Few of their stories are overtly autobiographical in the banal sense. Davenport says in the interview:

 

“I’m not an exile. I feel perfectly at home in the United States. But I think I’m a kind of internal exile in that I don’t write about the United States. Someone once figured out that there are only three pages in all six of my books of stories so far that are set in the United States, and those are not contemporary.”

 

I’ve been rereading one of the essential twentieth-century books, My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual, edited and translated in 1988 by Richard Lourie from transcripts of conversations Wat had late in life with Czesław Miłosz. Wat is recounting his own experience which, unlike Davenport’s, was painfully “adventurous.” After fleeing the Nazis he was arrested by the Soviets and spent more than two years in various jails and prisons in Poland and the Soviet Union, and eventually was exiled to Kazakhstan. He is a spontaneous and spirited storyteller. Listen to this:

 

“There were refugees from Byelorussia and Odessa in the hostel. One of them caught my eye, a middle-class person around forty-five; he looked very glazed and sad. His features weren’t especially Jewish. Very sad. I asked one of the others why that man was so depressed. His sadness was obvious, but he was also very calm. I was told that yesterday he had received word that his wife and three children had been evacuated from Odessa by ship and the ship had sunk. But he was so calm. A lesson in calmness, actually, in fatalism."

 

Singer might have devoted a passing digression to the refugee’s story, a bit of backstory. Babel, too. Chekhov might have had his stand-in speak to the refugee and draw out his story. It too would have been “a lesson in calmness.”