'I See Only Their Marvelous Works'

“How pleasant it is to respect people! When I see books, I am not concerned with how the authors loved or played cards; I see only their marvelous works.” 

A reader reprimands me for dismissing Ezra Pound from serious consideration. “We can’t imagine modernism without him,” he writes. True, and I wish I could always find it easy to demarcate a writer’s work from the stupid and repellent things he said. Often I can but I'm inconsistent.

 

I still read and admire, for instance, Charles Lamb and George Santayana, both of whom were on occasion anti-Semitic. At an even higher level of accomplishment, I can say the same of T.S. Eliot. On the other hand I’ll never again read Pablo Neruda, a communist who was awarded the Lenin Prize for Peace by the Soviet Union in 1953, though it helps that I never cared for his flatulent  poetry so I find him easy to dismiss. Others are more difficult -- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for example. He wrote the novel Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), a precursor of the black-humor school, but also the rabidly anti-Semitic Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937).

 

The passage at the top is from the Notebook of Anton Chekhov (trans. S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, 1921). Of course, Chekhov had his own problems with anti-Semites. He formed a seventeen-year friendship with Alexy Suvorin, publisher of the influential St. Petersburg newspaper New Times, who championed Chekhov’s work while attacking Alfred Dreyfus and his leading defender, Emile Zola. Suvorin was a reactionary and anti-Semite while Chekhov remained an ardent Dreyfusard and, in the context of late-nineteenth-century Russia, a liberal.

 

On February 6, 1898, Chekhov wrote a letter from Nice to Suvorin. His understanding of and compassion for conflicted human nature is unrivalled, but the friendship was strained by the Dreyfus Affair. Chekhov writes:

 

“It is quite clear to me what lies behind Zola’s stance. The main thing is that he is acting honestly, by which I mean his judgements are based not on the chimeras of others but on what he has seen for himself. It is, of course, possible to be both sincere and wrong, but the errors of the sincere do less harm than the consequences of the deliberately insincere, the prejudiced or the politically calculating. Even if Dreyfus is guilty, Zola is still right, because the writer’s task is not to accuse or pursue, but to defend even the guilty once they have been condemned and are undergoing punishment. The question will be asked: what about politics, or the interests of the state? But great writers and artists should have nothing to do with politics except insofar as they themselves need protection from it.”

 

Dreyfus was finally pardoned in 1899 after spending four and a half years on Devil’s Island. He petitioned for a retrial and on July 12, 1906 his verdict was formally annulled. Zola had died in 1902, Chekhov in 1904. Suvorin would die in 1912. Dreyfus lived until 1935.

 

[The letter is collected in Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (Penguin, 2004), edited by Rosamund Bartlett and translated by Barlett and Anthony Phillips.]