''There is Nothing Easier Than to Destroy a Book'

 This blog has been around for more than twenty years and I could easily devote the next twenty to replying to the complaints I often receive. Some are deserved. I appreciate readers who correct errors of fact, point out typos and suggest alternatives to stylistic infelicities or misused words. Such replies to posts are encouraged, especially if they are given politely and respectfully. Less helpful are ad hominem attacks (Racist! Sexist! Fascist!) and complaints rooted in fashionable politics. This week I got a doozy. A reader – a male – complained I have seldom devoted posts to female writers. “You seem to really hate women,” he wrote. This will come as a surprise to my wife, former bosses and colleagues, and female friends. 

I write with regularity (I have no quota system) about some of my favorite writers – Rebecca West, Stevie Smith, Olivia Manning, Janet Lewis, Marguerite Yourcenar, George Eliot, Elizabeth Taylor, Helen Pinkerton, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Kay Ryan. And then there’s a writer for whom love and admiration seem almost inadequate – Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980), widow of the great murdered poet Osip Mandelstam. She was tough, smart and resourceful. She has stayed with me, in memory and in moral inheritance, for more than half a century. Her two volumes of memoirs document the persecution and final destruction of her husband by Stalin and his goons and the final forty-two years of her own harassed and impoverished life in the Soviet Union.

 

Here is a passage from her first autobiographical volume, Hope Against Hope (trans. Max Hayward, 1970), lines retained since I first read the book in 1974: “To think that we could have had an ordinary life with its bickering, broken hearts and divorce suits! There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that this is normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. What wouldn’t we have given for such ordinary heartbreaks!”

 

The human craving for immunity to life’s unpleasantness is blind and eternal, while the gratitude we owe for our “ordinary heartbreaks” is bottomless. And another: “The coming of a new book into [her husband’s] life was like a first encounter with someone destined to be a friend.” That passage is from Chapter 49 of Hope Against Hope, “The Reader of One Book,” which begins like this:

 

“In his youth M. always carefully weighed his words—it was only later that he tended toward levity. In 1919, when he was still very young, he once told me that there was no need at all to have a lot of books, and that it was best to read one book all one’s life. ‘Do you mean the Bible?’ I asked. ‘Why not?’ he replied.”

 

Nadezhda thinks of the “splendid graybeards of the East who read the Koran throughout their lives.” She says of Osip, “I could scarcely picture my light-hearted companion as one of them.” Knowing what was soon to come in the Soviet Union, it’s poignantly difficult to think of Mandelstam as ever having been “light-hearted.” She goes on: “A real poet is always recognized immediately—by his enemies as well as by his well-wishers. It seems inevitable that a poet should arouse enmity.”

 

Mandelstam refers not to poetasters masquerading as agents provocateurs, anti-bourgeois poseurs and “activists,” but the real thing, dedicated writers. The two breeds are instantly distinguishable on the page. Nadezhda writes:

 

“M. never tried to commit what he read to memory, but rather to check it against his own experience, always testing it in the light of his own basic idea—the one which must underlie any real personality. It is reading of the passive type, which has always made it possible to propagate predigested ideas, to instill into the popular mind slick, commonplace notions. Reading of this kind does not stimulate thought, but has an effect similar to hypnosis—though it must be said that the modern age has even more powerful means for dominating people’s minds.”

 

The manner of reading Mandelstam describes, weighing what one reads against one’s experience of life, seems commonsensical but in fact is rare almost to the point of being exotic. Her volumes, in addition to chronicling one of literature’s great love stories (many of Osip’s poems once existed only in Nadezhda’s devoted memory), are, as Clive James writes of her in Cultural Amnesia (2007), “key chapters in the new bible that the twentieth century had written for us.”

 

In the second volume, Hope Abandoned (trans. Hayward, 1974), Mandelstam goes on writing as an acidic truth-teller, no respecter of the despotism that had murdered her husband. She writes:

 

“We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.”

 

Mandelstam abominates any naively rosy understanding of human nature: “Everything we have been through here was the result of succumbing to the temptations of our era—to which no one is immune who has still to be struck down by the disease of putting his faith in force and retribution. Vengeance and envy are the prime motives of human behavior.”

 

Mandelstam may be the most bitterly ironic writer (and she is a writer, not merely a documentarian) since Swift. Her narrative is unrelenting, and she leaves us—her oh-so-fortunate Western readers -- feeling like callow teenagers: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and cultured—things will be different.” No human, she reminds us, is immune to the seductions of evil. Read the final paragraph of Chap. 41 of Hope Abandoned, “The Years of Silence,” in full:

 

“This book, which I have now nearly finished, may never see the light of day. There is nothing easier than to destroy a book, unless it already circulates in samizdat or has found it ways into print (as used to happen to books in the Gutenberg period of Russian history). But even if it is destroyed, it may, perhaps, not have been entirely in vain. Before being consigned to the flames, it will be read by those whose expert task it is to destroy books, to eradicate words, to stamp out thought. They will understand none of it, but perhaps somewhere in the recesses of their strange minds the idea will stick that this crazy old woman fears nothing and despises force. It will be something if they understand that much. The thought of it will be like a little pinch of salt to sprinkle on their privileged rations, or a garnishing to whet their appetite for that other literature designed to edify and instruct people of their kind, functionaries to whom nothing matters, neither life, nor man, nor the earth, nor anything—dimmed by their breath—that lights our way. Heaven help them. But will they really succeed in their task of universal destruction?”