'How Does Shakespeare Seem to Contain Us All?'

“I divide all works into two categories: those I like and those I don’t. I have no other criterion.”

That clears things up except for one qualification: there is another category or sub-category – works we don’t especially like but that must be acknowledged as worthy of an intelligent person liking them. Take Robert Browning’s and Wallace Stevens’ poetry or the novels of Albert Camus and John Updike. Trust me, I have worked for decades trying to appreciate and value these writers. My dismissal has never been impulsive. Readers I trust admire them extravagantly. The failure is mine.

 

Reading tastes are as ineffable as everything else about us. I have no interest in launching a critical lambasting at these writers. Indifference should never be confused with critical dismissal. We all rationalize our judgments and tastes, and sometimes dress them up with fancy arguments. Snobbery plays a part. In fact, I like Updike’s poetry, some of his early short stories and many of his literary essays and reviews (he’s good on Nabokov and Henry Green). Guiltlessly, I acknowledge the rest is lost on me.

 

The great category-maker quoted above is Anton Chekhov writing to Ivan Leontyev (Schcheglov) on March 22, 1890. Here are the sentences preceding those at the top:  

 

“As to the word ‘artistic,’ it frightens me the way brimstone frightens merchants’ wives. When people speak to me of what is artistic and anti-artistic, of what is dramatically effective, of tendentiousness and realism and the like, I am at an utter loss, I nod to everything uncertainly, and answer in banal half truths that aren’t worth a brass farthing.”

 

Di Nguyen at the little white attic has been reading Chekhov and his natural complement among contemporary writers, Gary Saul Morson. She admits: “I find it hard to write about Chekhov, probably because it’s difficult to pinpoint the moments of greatness in his works—or to steal Woolf’s words about Jane Austen, he is ‘the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.’” 

There’s nothing flashy in Chekhov and little melodrama. He’s the poet laurate of quotidian mysteries, deceptively subdued. He wouldn’t be of much use in an English Lit. graduate seminar. In his Lectures on Russian Literature (1980), Vladimir Nabokov writes:

“[I]n spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the-street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was. He did it by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray, a tint between the color of an old fence and that of a low cloud.”

 

Those of us who savor the lush prose of Henry James and Nabokov are sometimes puzzled by our love of Chekhov. I’m old enough to know I’m inconsistent and let it go at that. In her post on Tuesday, “Some idle thoughts on writers and range,” Di pulls back from close reading and weighs some of the acknowledged giants of fiction – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov – tallying their strengths, the reasons we read them, and musters another name:  

 

“But then I think about Shakespeare, and all the things that these supreme writers seem unable to do can be found in Shakespeare. . . . Shakespeare really is the ‘biggest’ of writers. All-knowing, to use my friend Tom’s word. But how? How does Shakespeare seem to contain us all?”

 

Loving Shakespeare, acknowledging the miracle of his gift, is not to dismiss Tolstoy, Chekhov & Co. Our literary inheritance is bigger and more various than any feeble presumptuousness about “liking” or “disliking.” We judge works of literature while they are intently judging us.

 

[The letter to Schcheglov can be found in Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary (trans. Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky, 1973).]