The Gentle Barbarian (31 page)

Of course, mountains and forest can be said to exist for themselves too and it is only here that Turgenev shows his own hand. The act of love, like the act of dying, is part of Nature in a different cycle. Gemma may be forgotten. Maria enslaves Sanin. But Nature enslaves even Maria who pursues power and her own freedom, regardless of others. When they leave the woodman's hut, Maria says to Sanin:

“Where are you going, darling? To Frankfurt or to Paris?”

He says: “I am going where you will be and I'll be with you till you drive me away.”

He writes a shabby note to Gemma.

Maria grasped his hair with her ten fingers. She slowly fingered and twisted his unresisting hair, drew herself up to her full height, her lips curled with triumph and her eyes, wide and bright, almost white, merely repressed the ruthless insensitivity and the satiety of conquest. A hawk holding a captured bird in its claw, has eyes like that.

We notice that pull of the hair: Turgenev's own initiation into sexual love came when the serf girl pulled him by the hair at Spasskoye.

Sanin hasn't the courage to travel back to Gemma's shop and collect his things. He sends Polozov's footman. He remembers every
shameful detail of the life that followed: how he actually peeled a pear for the greedy, complaisant Polozov as the carriage rolled along the main street of Wiesbaden on the way to Paris, the humiliations there: the hideous tortures of the slave who is not allowed to be jealous or to complain, until in the end, he is cast off.

These late stories are profoundly Russian stories of bewitchment and of being possessed. It is a mistake to dismiss them as lesser works simply because they are not directly concerned with the Russian social question: the Russian “calypso's isle” has its own native force. Maria is an example of a contemporary Russian type: the girl who is half-peasant, half-aristocrat. Her belief in freedom is Nihilism without the politics. Sanin is uninterested in politics, but he notices for the first time that selling one's estate means selling human beings as well and that love makes him gloss over a fact which is shocking to Gemma and her family. The Italians are comical, but their young son will be a revolutionary: his honour grows, as Sanin's is lost. Such references are oblique. The epilogue which completes the frame of the story is discomforting and, on the whole, one could do without it (as we could also do without the literary references to Virgil and Hoffmann), although, since Turgenev never quite disentangles himself from the influences of shadow-autobiography, these are interesting. In his remorse before the shameful detail of his memories, Sanin at the age of fifty-two sets out to trace Gemma and her history. In Frankfurt, the old shop where in youth he had proposed to stand behind the counter selling sweets has gone. Even the street has gone. Frankfurt has been rebuilt. He does at last get a letter from Gemma. The sweet sentimental German girl was practical. She is married to a rich American businessman in New York, happy in her life. It has all turned out well, despite her tears at the time. At least the Sanin affair had made her break with Kluber who in fact went bankrupt and was sent to prison. Easily she forgives and is sorry for the wretchedness of Sanin's life.

The last we hear of Sanin is that he is talking of going to America. The cynical reader suspects that Sanin-Turgenev is going to attach himself once more to Gemma's family as in the 1860s Turgenev had re-attached himself to the Viardots. There is one sentence, buried in the story, that comes back to one with new force:

Weak people never bring anything to an end themselves: they always expect things to come to an end.

Sanin's will was weak in dealing with Maria Polozov: it was strong only in pursuing illusions.

It is said that Turgenev did not show this story to Pauline Viardot before it was published, though he may have read it to her in French afterwards. Her mind may have wandered to what was always more important to her—her own art. She was too extroverted and practical to share his pessimism and may easily have seen herself as the dark-haired Gemma, comfortably married, with her children.

The Viardots had been generous to Turgenev when he was a young man; now their fortunes had been shaken badly by the war and Pauline's singing engagements were fewer and she was obliged to take pupils who were not among the very rich. Turgenev repaid the Viardots and did so with the greatest tact. He had, as we have seen, built up a sizable dowry for Didie. They had consented to letting him have a flat in their house in the rue de Douai and, with Louis, he bought a country property near Paris, on which he built a small chalet for himself in the grounds, close to their house. After its vicissitudes, the peculiar friendship had become a sort of marriage which was taken for granted and which left them indifferent to gossip. The glow of Baden had gone and was followed by a sort of contentment. In his
Life,
David Magarshack says that for a short time in her fifties Pauline took another lover, but does not say any more about it. She was certainly fond of Turgenev's clever young friend Pietsch, a hapless borrower, who adored her in a child-like way: she used to stroke his head, but she stroked Turgenev's head also. It is true—as far as one knows—that there is a gap of a year in Turgenev's letters to Pauline when he was away in Russia.

When they first fled to London in 1870 and after he had settled them in, Turgenev went off to be honoured by Cambridge University
and to shoot in Scotland. His fame in England had been founded by W.R.S. Ralston, a Cambridge don and translator. The extent of Turgenev's reading in English literature was as extraordinary as his reading in French, German and Spanish and he amused himself eagerly in translating. He even translated Burns. But he did not speak English well. He pitied the English, as Herzen had done, for their mania for work and rushing to the office; he despised English painting but he deeply admired English political institutions. And then there was the shooting and the hospitality of the great country houses. He was invited to Edinburgh to the celebrations of the birth of Sir Walter Scott—the Scottish papers called him Toogueneff, and when he mentioned Pushkin the name of the poet was spelt Tourhaine. His short speech was conventionally flattering and neat and contained one of Pushkin's excellent critical insights:

He used to say of Scott, among other things, that if he treated with so much calmness and simplicity the Kings and heroes and other historical personages of the past, it was because he felt himself their equal before posterity—and they formed for him his natural and every day society.

Afterwards he went off to the grouse shooting at Pitlochry. He ate quantities of strawberries, but the shoot wore him out. It was a sport for the young, he said, he panted after an hour with a a young man who kept shouting “Come on” and was a dead shot, whereas Turgenev missed all the first birds and in the end only shot eleven against the young man's seventy-six. Also he injured his foot and dreaded an attack of gout would follow, but he escaped it. His host sent him a horse on the second day. Robert Browning and his son were staying there. He found Browning vain, pompous and boring. The son had a huge spot on the tip of his nose. (Turgenev had always been a collector of grotesque faces: his letters often contain caricatures. There is the woman whose nose beats time to the music she is listening to and which ends by curling up like a snail; and another, seen in the train on the way to Ghent, whose chin had a vermillion beard and who was constantly addressed as
“Mon ange”
by her husband.)

In 1874 he was fifty-six. His rooms in the rue de Douai were small and crowded with objects. The walls of the little salon were green and draped with “stuff,” not papered—Henry James reported—there were few books and all signs of writing were put out of sight. There were some pictures: a Corot and one or two of the Barbizon school, for he had taken to Louis Viardot's passion for collecting in the hope that prices would rise, but his taste was uncertain and dealers found him a credulous buyer. There was a marble bust of Pauline and a model of her right hand: he followed the mid-nineteenth-century cult of the hand, for it seemed to celebrate the chaste philandering game of touch. Less effusive, Pauline would offer what she called “an English good shake-hand.” It makes a difference.

Crowds of young Russians, generally would-be authors or revolutionaries of varying degrees, would climb up the stairs to show the great man their manuscripts, beg him to find publishers for them and often to borrow money, for he was known never to refuse his time, his help or his pocket. Pauline found the Russian visitors barbarous. Turgenev was usually seen lying on a divan large enough to bear his huge sleepy body, dressed in a Caucasian jacket with red lapels and talking marvellously by the hour and, when he was excited, got up and paced the little room in the manner which had maddened Tolstoy. As the years went on, worshipping Russians noted that he was always running messages for the Viardots and that the room was shabby and neglected. There was a broken window-blind, never repaired. Others of the anti-Viardot school were shocked that the master's room was not quiet, for it was immediately above the room where Pauline was giving her singing lessons, but he would point to the speaking tube he had installed in order to hear her voice more clearly and be transported into memories of times when it had put its spell upon the opera houses of Europe and upon himself, an emanation also of her will as an artist and a woman. He did not fail to be present at her fashionable Thursdays, when the distinguished guests sat in a bare simple room with its piano and its jars of cornflowers and poppies, or went to look at Louis Viardot's little gallery of pictures. Dressed in a black lace gown the stout hostess played and sang and the blood of the select audience would freeze with terror when she sang her tragic parts. She had her
Sundays, which were less austere. Charades and forfeits were played by the talented family. At a hint, Turgenev would eagerly be led into telling his fantastic stories. George Sand who loved such entertainments at Nohant watched the scene with the complacency of the one who had brought about the convenient bourgeois marriage of the young girl she had idealised in
Consuelo.

Turgenev wrote little in Paris. He was always out and about on the affairs of the Russian Club which drained his pocket, at the Salon of the Princesse Mathilde where he met all the important French writers, Daudet, Zola, the Goncourts and, above all, Flaubert, the only one whose work he profoundly admired. Turgenev was generous in getting French writers published in Russia and, in fact, became an amateur literary agent for them. With Zola he had considerable success. He arranged for the translation of Tolstoy's
War and Peace.
He became friends with the young Maupassant, but his closest friendship was with Flaubert. He translated Flaubert's
La Légende de Saint-Julien-L ‘Hospitalier
into Russian. He had corresponded with him for years and went eventually to visit him at Croisset. It was a friendship of physical giants. Flaubert had the trumpeting voice and the gait of a red-faced Norman conqueror; he was the masculine figure in a kind of marriage, Daudet said, whereas Turgenev “the nervous, languid, passionate Russian yet as torpid as an Oriental” was the feminine one. But this is far from the impression we have from Turgenev's letters in which he appears as the strong, practical, compassionate figure, urging Flaubert to ignore his failure with the critics, anxious about his health. When Flaubert was ruined by the bankruptcy of his niece's husband, it was Turgenev who tried to get Gambetta to get Flaubert a pension. Turgenev used to go up to the room Flaubert kept at the end of the Faubourg Saint Honoré on Sundays if—Flaubert said—the Viardots would let him. But the two gourmets met at the Magny dinners and in other restaurants, particularly one opposite the Opéra Comique known for its bouillabaisse. Turgenev said he could talk for a week on end with his friend and laughed when Flaubert said he was liquefying like an old Camembert and called Turgenev “a soft pear.”

In the summer Turgenev went with the Viardots to the small estate on a wooded hill overlooking the Seine below the Aqueduct of Marly. It was called Les Frênes. There were fountains and mossy statues in the gardens, everywhere the sound of water under the ash
trees. He had his two-storey chalet there in the gardens. The rooms were large and luxuriously furnished and there he dressed in his red dressing-gown and wandered about in heavy Russian boots. Here he wrote
A Desperate Man,
his
Song of Triumphant Love, Clara Mi-lich,
the
Poems in Prose
and
Old Portraits.

When Henry James visited him there, he found him tall, robust, “the expression of a magnificent manhood … with a frame that would have made it perfectly lawful and even becoming, for him to be brutal; but there was not a grain of brutality in his composition.” His intellect was beautiful. His thick hair was straight and white, so was his short beard and there was an air of “neglected strength, as if it had been part of his modesty never to remind himself that he was strong… His noble appearance was in itself a manner, but whatever he did he did very simply and he had not the slightest pretension to not being subject to rectification.” The strongest impression was of goodness. James concluded that he was not Galli-cised; the French capital was an accident for him. He had, with “that great tradition of ventilation of the Russian mind,” windows open into distances which stretched far beyond the banlieue. The “ventilations” were marvellous but had their eccentric effect on his daily habits. He was one of those who breakfast at lunch-time, whose sense of time was all his own. He was beautifully late for engagements; hours would go by during which the host or guest would have to guess whether he was going to arrive or had forgotten. Clock time, despite all his watches, did not exist, indeed the watches could be said to have been a metaphysical guarantee. His life was a stream of apologies for unexpected absences and sudden appearances. This drove Pauline mad, but she could do nothing about it. The young people laughed when they heard first Turgenev and then Viardot snoring after dinner.