Slipping out
William Trevor
A New Life of Chekhov Ronald Hingley (Oxford University Press £8.75) The old cliché that everyone has a story to tell is true, and more often than not it's a life-story. No one has ever lived whose story is not worth retailing, provided it is done with sympathy and imagination and of course by someone who knows how to do it. Fame, notoriety or achievement aren't among the vital ingredients: the tale of a sewage operator can be a great deal less tedious than the tale of ex-President Nixon.
It seems to me that biographers too often miss this somewhat obvious truth. They are tireless in their search for the man behind the heart transplants or the man behind the nine bean rows or the woman behind Scott Fitzgerald. It is as if they believe that, by pinning a person securely down, light will be shed on mysterious cunning with the scalpel or on the nature of artistic genius. But in their pursuit of the man they often bewilderingly discover only ordinary vanities, or an agreeable personage who in no way matches the work that has dragged him into the limelight. The personage in question, Dr Anton Chekhov, would have found it hard to disagree: `By and large my life is boring,' he wrote in 1888. 'And I'm beginning to feel hatred at times: something new to me. Long, stupid conversations, guests, people who want something out of me . . . such bedlam, in other words, it's enough to make you leave home. People borrow money from me and don't pay me back; they run off with my books; they waste my time. All I need is an unhappy love affair.' He suffered from tuberculosis and piles, defective vision, scotoma, dizzy spells, the stupidity of reviewers, the insensitivity of StanislavskY, the greed of publishers, the arrogance of editors, and the censorship of the State. All of which, of course, is unnecessary to remember as you watch The Cherry Orchard. Nor is it relevant to anything of value that common-room arguments are still pursued about the precise year in which The Wood Demon became Uncle Vanya or if the Smagin farm near Sorochintsy contributed to the setting for the short story Gooseberries. What's more important than this matchbox information is what the plays and stories themselves state about the man who wrote them: that Chekhov was never quite certain whether to laugh or cry when beautiful dreams were made to seem silly by the demands of everyday life. Trivialities survive, aspirations Lill to pieces: is it tragedy enough '? The quiet understatement, that whit] of enigma (hal gives a unique kind of life to chekhov.,
best writing, seems a reflection of the man himself—yet it defies investigation. The nearest one can get is to say that Chekhov, fastidious and pernickety and private, might haveslipped out of the shadows of one of his own plays, a hesitant minor character.
Ronald Hingley, with a vast knowledge of his unsatisfactory subject, pleasantly reasserts the known facts. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, the grocer's son from Taganrog, bore the stamp of the true provincial all his life. He despised his native town and yet retained affection for it, reserving in the end his deeper aversion for Moscow. Had he settled into medical practice it would surely have been as a provincial doctor, a role in which he would scarcely have interested Dr Hingley or any other busy academic. And he might well have done so, for there was little that was attractive about Moscow's Grub Street, where he produced unfunny comic sketches that occasionally reached the level of cracker-box jokes: 'My motherin-law is seventy-five years old and my wife is forty-two; what time is it ?'
'The hackneyed epistolary style is not redeemed by originality or humour,' wrote the editor of Strekoza when he might more kindly have answered the young practitioner's efforts with a rejection slip. 'You are withering without having flowered.' And on the evidence before him the editor of Strekoza could hardly be blamed for making one of the greatest literary blunders of all time. 'Vacuous balderdash,' he added for good measure.
From these unpromising beginnings Chekhov progressed slowly, assisted by a craftsmanlike skill in hanging words together. His short novel, The Shooting Party, anticipated Agatha Christie's more celebrated Murder of Roger Ackroyd and shares with it the failure to guard closely enough its central, vital secret. Yet something other than murder mysteries and comic cuts drove him on, some unrevealed intuition which assured him that his slight literary ability had in it somewhere the seeds of an unlikely genius.
'Did Chekhov enjoy practising medicine?' Dr Hingley enquires, leaving genius to look after itself. 'Was he gregarious? Was he solitary ? An optimist; or a pessimist ? We shall learn not to leap in with a bald yes or no whenever such questions arise, as they frequently do.' Dr Hingley is wise to eschew easy answers, especially since there are still many unpublished letters, but even more so because Chekhov is not a figure to pigeon-hole. He has been called antiSemitic, yet he almost married a Jewish girl. He believed--so he said—in the cultured, the honourable. the educated, in the oldfashioned notion of the gentleman. Such men 'can't sleep in their clothes, bear the sight of bug-tilled cracks in the walls; breathe dirty air, walk on a floor covered with spit. . They don't swig vodka all the time . . . They need a melts sana in corpore sow.' Yet often he denied that image, just as he often spoke impatiently of women, likening one to a marsh frog, another to greasy meat, and pointing out that the most beautiful ballerinas smelt like horses after their performances. But in particular circumstances he clearly delighted in women's company and few authors have written as sensitively about them. What he disliked, in fact—with domestic squalor, personal untidiness and filth—were certain aspects of sex, particularly lecherous excess and its aftermath. It is true that there was some talk of 'earthly bliss' in Room 5 of the Grand Hotel, Moscow, but it came from his companion in that room, Lydia Yavorsky, rather than from him. `Women rob men of their youth,' was his own verdict after the sojourn in Room 5. 'Silk nighties mean nothing to me.' Even so, he eventually married, albeit unromantically. `Well, I've gone and got married,' he briskly reported.
Dr Hingley does not attempt to reconcile these natural human contradictions. Nor does he, through academic study, arrive at conclusions that only a more complete picture of the man himself could supply. What territory there is he charts neatly. His scholarship has a delicate, unpushing quality that particularly suits the subject, and his writing is constantly a pleasure to read. That Chekhov remains elusive in this book is not Dr Hingley's failure. Indeed it signals his success, because elusive is what Chekhov—both as a man and as a writer— most essentially was and wished to be.
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