Literary Summits

The end is near . . . I’m in Book 14, less than 200 pages still to go!

[To get you up to speed, the French are retreating as quickly as possible from Moscow and the Russian army is trying to chase them out. Pierre, my favorite character, has been dragged along by the French as a prisoner of war. He’s bare-footed with threadbare clothes and meager rations. The weather is turning cold, and people are dropping left and right — French and Russian alike — from sickness, cold and exhaustion.]

Pierre, always seeking, always learning, has come to a hard-fought realization: in spite of the horrible situation, he’s found a measure of peace and contentment. Pierre finds he’s grateful for the little food, clothes, and companionship he has. Tolstoy writes:

Pierre passed through hardships almost up to the extreme limit of privation that a man can endure. . . . And now without any thought of his own, he had gained that peace and that harmony with himself simply through the horror of death, through hardships, through what he had seen in [his fellow prisoner] Karataev.

Peace through pain . . .

Recently I visited a Lutheran worship service where the pastor preached on truth and pain. He said:

“To seek the truth is to subject yourself to pain — the pain of change or the pain of regret.”

This line rings true with what Pierre is going through. He’s finding truth — about his privilege, his limits, his vulnerability — and he’s enduring physical pain in a way that’s new to him. And in the process, he finds truth.

Yet this moment of clarity is just that — a moment. As the prisoners are driven farther through rain and mud, Pierre loses some of his “fresh perspective” and settles into survival mode.

That’s something I like about Tolstoy. The characters have ebbs and flows. Earlier in the book, Pierre sees himself as the Russian counterpart to Napoleon. And by this point in the book, Tolstoy isn’t shy about telling readers that the historians got it wrong: Napoleon was not great hero of history, no “grand homme.”

As Book 14 winds down, Tolstoy inverts one of Napoleon’s favorite phrases — “Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas” which I’d translate as “The sublime is only a step away from the ridiculous” — and declares Napoleon nothing more than a stupid, conceited fool.

In Tolstoy’s game of Chutes & Ladders, Napoleon has fallen, and Pierre is on the path to redemption. He finishes the chapter with:

“And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness and truth.”

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So yesterday I was on track to have the perfect day…

• cozy breakfast at home
• a morning of skiing in the Kettle Moraine trails in southern Wisconsin
• a relaxing bath afterwards with time to read
• an afternoon walk with Joy and our dogs
• supper with friends and evening conversation over tea

Everything was pointing toward Sabbath.

But… on the way home, we were driving and this horrible noise started coming from our VW Beetle. Joy was driving and figured out that it was coming from the front left — probably a flat tire. We exited as soon as we could and stopped at the first gas station, on the corner of a very busy intersection (North and Western).

I should mention that it was 11:30 p.m.

Fortunately (?), Chicago had been warming up all day, so by the time I was crouching in front of the left-front tire, it was about 50 degrees — a far cry from the sub-zero temperatures the last time I had changed a flat on this car.

As I was struggling to get the lug nuts loose with Joy offering advice and counsel, a guy came over to “offer help.” He said he was a professional tire-changer, but in a glance we could see that he was simply looking for a quick buck. I let him try his hand at the lug nuts, but they held tight.

We were apparently making quite a scene, because another guy came over. He offered me a “warmer” — vodka in a plastic cup — and watched as I kept tugging on the wrench.

Finally, I got some purchase and the nuts budged, one by one. By this time, the second guy had offered Joy a notepad with his business info on it — boarding and wrecking services — while the first guy was keeping up a nonstop banter.

It wasn’t until we had put the spare tire on, stowed the other tire away, and were driving off that I realized (with Joy’s help) how precarious our situation was. My shirt was soaked with sweat, my hands were grimy and I felt fortunate that we hadn’t been mugged in that dark corner of the gas station.

And this is the part where “War and Peace” comes in…

The section I’ve just read follows Pierre — the clueless Russian aristocrat who is bumbling his way through Moscow as the French occupy the capital. He has survived the battle of Borodino, and now he is taken prisoner and tried for starting the fires that are consuming Moscow. It’s only at the last moment — when he is facing the French commander who has his life in the balance — that he stands up and makes a plea for his life.

For some reason (I still don’t fully understand why), Pierre’s life is spared. Yet he has to witness the other five men who are executed by firing squad.

OK, so my life is not nearly that dramatic. (Thank God!)

But as I read it, I’m reminded of how life thrusts itself on you in ways you don’t expect. I’m having a perfect day and then the tire blows out. Pierre’s living a complicated, but comfortable, upperclass existence when a war comes through his country. And everything is turned upside down.

Know what I mean?

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This week, I plowed through the remainder of Part Ten, which focuses on the Battle of Borodino from French and Russian perspectives. It’s the heaviest war section so far, and I suspect it is the climax of the war section of “War and Peace.”

I was captivated by parts of it — Pierre wandering and watching it all happen from the epicenter of the chaos, Napoleon struck by unfamiliar doubts, and Kutuzov (the Russian commander-in-chief) caught up in the spirit of the Russian army. It also reminded why “good” war stories are so difficult to find.

First, what makes a war story “good”?

It’s got to be more than a matter of the right side prevailing against the wrong side. In this case, it’s clear that Tolstoy wants us to think that “Russian” equals “good” and “Napoleon” equals “bad.” But he goes beyond that, by showing the depths to which Napoleon has twisted his perspective so that 50,000 deaths are a sign of progress, not a massive tragedy. And simply showing carnage and chaos doesn’t make it a “good” story for me — I remember walking out of Saving Private Ryan because even if it was “true to life” as all the critics were saying, I was overwhelmed by having to sit and watch without being able to respond in any other way.

Even the recent film Letters from Iwo Jima was an example of the difficulty of showing the hell of war, in this case, from a Japanese perspective; one friend and co-worker argued that it was simply too much blood, too many explosions, too many flying body parts — “gorifying war,” if you will. No matter how empathetic/beautiful the story behind the combat scenes is, it’s marred by the ugliness of war.

I read an article last year about the resurgence of war stories on Broadway and in screens that have failed — failed to bring audiences in spite of earning critical acclaim and awards galore. The article stated that at a time when people are seeing snippets of real war on TV and documentaries, there’s little incentive to pay extra to be exposed to another “humanizing” war story, no matter how heartwrenching.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we cut out the heart and just tell a “jolly good war romp.” It is good that you care about the people involved — I mean, when I saw Star Wars Episodes 2: Attack of the Clones, I couldn’t appreciate the battle scenes — I couldn’t feel much of anything when row after row of faceless droids were mown down. There is nothing at stake, no tension.

Another parallel — peewee hockey. Nobody goes to watch preteens play hockey because they want to see the game played at its finest. The people who shiver in the stands game after game are there because they care about someone — their son or daughter is on the ice. That’s what makes the game exciting. You’re pulling for someone.

That’s probably Tolstoy’s biggest accomplishment with this book — he’s brought me ringside to the battlefield of a war that seems pointless, in the scope of history. Yet I care about the outcome because I care about Pierre, about Prince Andrei, and about what’ll happen to the other families whose lives I’ve followed during the uneasy peace. And that keeps me reading.

So does that make this a good war story?

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I have to admit that at the halfway point of War & Peace, the character that I like most is Pierre, Count Bezuhov.

He’s got his quirks, for sure; and my first impression of him was not favorable. But it’s a tribute to Tolstoy’s power of persuasion that I find Pierre the most endearing one of the cast.

I like that he’s a skeptic who’s also gullible at times. He like the smart-aleck friend who forgets to bring his passport to the airport.

The scene that cracked me up today was when Pierre is feeling vaguely stirred by the news that Napoleon is threatening to attack Moscow, and the whole town is aflutter. He seems to remember, deep within, his youthful admiration for Napoleon and starts to think that maybe this turn of events is the start of something big — very big, perhaps even the Apocalypse. Thanks to the suggestion of one of his friends in the Masonic Lodge, Pierre starts dabbling in numerology (ascribing values to each letter of the alphabet) and discovers that the phrase “L’empereur Napoleon” adds up to exactly 666. Amazing!

It gets better when he asks himself: Who will be able to “put an end to the power of the beast, that is, of Napoleon”? And he starts trying to make his own name numerologically significant — Pierre gets within 5 points of the magic sum with a mangled version of his name, “Le russe Besuhof”; he decides to drop the “e” (creating “l’russe,” just like “l’empereur”) and — VOILA! — it adds up to 666. So he imagines a face-off between the French beast and “l’russe Besuhof,” hoping that he will be led “to some great achievement and great happiness.”

I suppose some might be annoyed by this passage, but I think it’s funny. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent whole afternoons huddled with my cabin mates during torrential rainstorms at summer camp, reading the Book of Revelations (as we called it) from start to finish, and speculating at which of the dragons was Hitler, which Stalin, etc. Everything John of Patmos describes, someone had an explanation: the large locusts — “helicopters!” It was great fun and it scared me at the same time. That same kind of apocalyptic satisfaction found in the R.E.M. song, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine…”

And then there’s Pierre’s size — he reminds me of Quoyle in The Shipping News. Tolstoy can’t help but remind us about every third scene that Pierre is no lithe officer like Bolkonsky. Rather, writes Tolstoy, Pierre is “so stout that he would have been grotesque, had he not been so tall, so broad-shouldered, and so powerfully built that he carried off his bulky proportions with evident ease.” And morally, Pierre is suspect. He is swept away by the Masons and their esoteric practices. He is not swayed by what everyone else in court is doing, yet he lives in easy dissipation from day to day. He keeps up casual acquaintances with most everyone, but is hardly involved in anything.

And finally, Pierre is shortsighted, literally. His glasses fall off at critical moments, and he can’t quite make out people’s expressions at key moments.

Right now he’s in love, and I think it’s doomed. But that’s part of his charm, isn’t it? I as the reader can see what he can’t.

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