Claudine in School, by Colette
Sandbag Shuffle, by Kevin Marc Fournier
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, by Anton Chekhov
Two months ago, I hosted a game of Diplomacy. I am sure I wasn’t the ideal moderator in a lot of respects (especially for letting the whole game lapse when players disappeared), but I tried to provide interest and make it fun by contributing tiny period pieces. Not a history scholar myself, this necessitated reading a few period pieces myself, set at the time of the game, in 1900. So I asked around, and Kevin gave me recommendations for both Colette and Chekhov, (my fifth-rate Colette micro-pastiche can be found here, my awful Chekhov impersonation here; and although I read it for the same reason, Winston Churchill didn’t fit the present theme–you can read my review of that one here if you’re interested). As it happened, I finished reading his (Kevin’s) book to my daughter a couple months earlier, and I noticed a lot in common with the authors he’d suggested. In particular, none of them rely overmuch on a plot, or on heavy themes, or on structure, but rather on a careful or playful observation of setting and character.
My reading background has some gaps, and as I’ve been jabbering about for a couple months, my feelings for the art in the stretch between the Gilded Age and the Lost Generation had been pretty sketchy. All those Victorian monstrosities and thick Russian tomes, brought me up close to the turn of the century, but just around that corner Colette, new to me, came across like a breath of libidinous air after all that repressed energy and unremitting exposition. I don’t think the contrast is just the times moving on, the author is also irrepressibly French, and unlike the Russians publishing about this time, I’d never be tempted to mistake the Claudine stories for anything American, not in 1900. Popular from the start, the French came to regard the novels as national treasures.
The most obvious thing to mention about Claudine in School is that it’s sensual. I don’t mean to tell you that it’s some kind of depraved sinful boudoir romp, quite the opposite. We first meet Claudine as a truant (independent and yet accountable) coming to class scratched and refreshed from the woods, revived by some natural commune. She’s not the type to observe the forest and write poetry about it, but her first five paragraphs have her living the experience, immersing herself in the scents and the textures of leaves and moss, the tastes of scarfed berries, the sounds of birdsong. Her time in the school, which is (of course) most of the novel, is much the same. At one point, the girls bring a snowball into the class, and take turns joyously chomping on it. Everywhere there is a loving taste of something, a feel, scent, or a song. Claudine revels in the feelings about her, even the controversial feelings, even some of the unethical ones, without shame. She loves exerting herself on the playground, she loves manipulating the romantic attention of her peers and superiors (male and female). She languors through her classes, gifted at writing and extemporization, succeeds effortlessly, sticks around for the amusement. She’s liberated, she disrespects the system, she thinks. It’s nearly impossible for the reader not to be fascinated by her too.
All of this sensuality is pre-sexual, but only just barely. If this story were told from another point of view, young Claudine would have been a temptress, totally corrupt. Indeed, people fall into ruin all around her. (To contrast against the previous century’s literature, I could imagine Dickens telling this story–he’d have had a field day with the lecherous administrator Dutrerte, and if they weren’t women, with the uncomfortable triangle of the teacher, assistant, and gifted student. He’d play up the dirty foibles of the power figures with many thousands more words. The kid’s innocence would be less true.) Claudine is certainly indiscriminate in her attractions, but it would be incorrect to call her nice. She’s got a protege that she treats abominably, teasing her with alternate rejection and affection. I try to imagine what separates Claudine in School from the innumerable examples of scandalous teen crap that’s published in modern America. (You know, other than the quality of the writing.) I think the Victorians have left there mark in too many places even today, and the Sweet Valley High (or whatever) version of Claudine would cover the same territory but profer an overlarge helping of moralizing, a big sense of consequences, awareness, and growth. You could describe Claudine, on the other hand, as benevolently amoral, and she succeeds at life (at school anyway) with what she is. It’s an innocence that’s shown in every chapter, every sentence of the book.
Like the other books in this grouping, Claudine moves about with little in the way of plot. The stagings are a series of evocative vignettes. Claudine gets through a year of school, her affections come and go, and where power and romance shifts above and around her shifts. She takes her exam with little tolerance or attention for the formality of it, and looks forward to the next phase of her life. The conflicts don’t involve herself much, but provide a vehicle for her light, mocking opinion, and enjoynment of the human experience. It’s infectious.
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The absence of that reflexive highblown pretense is exactly what makes Sandbag Shuffle a keeper too. I remember the young adult books of my day, of the S. E. Hinton or M. E. Kerr vintage (initials-only must have been the key to authenticity in those days), that tried to get it real by introducing some heavy urban grit and some over-the-top drama that would take a young person to forgive for its ham-handedness. Even though Owen and Andrew, the protagonists of this novel, are escaped orphans, even though one of them is legless and both are quite capable of being devilish little pricks, Fournier avoids all of that high drama, and the two boys would no doubt flip a heartfelt finger at your sympathy, or else take advantage of it. The characters don’t suffer deep lessons, they don’t hit bottom (although they skim it awhile), they don’t find true love or any of that. Instead, we follow them around as they bicker and scheme and survive. Theirs is not a voyage of self-discovery, but a presentation of characters that are fully realized from the start. Plotwise, you can say a bunch of stuff happens, but the point isn’t unfolding a masterpiece of structure, it’s taking a good ride with a couple of likable people.
The two of them are a lot like the boys I knew growing up: little ur-bastards, the good-parts combination of those little shits who were great friends (to the small degree you could break into the circle) and horrible influences. Owen and Andrew have no respect for authority, nor for charity, but they have each other, and if they’re not trained for society, they’re teeming with streetwise instincts and a feral charm that–and this is important–comes across in the writing. Their faults of knowledge are profound, and when they bicker over them, Fournier elevates it to comic art. He’s got a good trick with breaking the fourth wall too, adressing the reader at times (“now you and I know…”), and shifting to the present where-are-they-now tense when it fits to do so.
Young Adult, I’ve been told, is hard to do well, and I imagine that it’s got to be hard to avoid the condescension. I can offer my own opinion on that, but the ultimate of arbiter of something like this, of course, is my daughter, who I read it to. Must have been a trip for her. She got a whole lot of embarrassed cursing when I couldn’t think of an on-the-fly edit (PG-13 gets you exactly one “fuck” and unlimited shits and damns so long as they stay appropriate). It’s the sort of thing I’d have rather left for her own discovery because, hey, if there’s a lesson here, it’s how to be a good person while still giving authority the (dis)respect it deserves, but, like, I’m the alleged authority here. A recommended read, if you don’t mind subjecting Junior to that level of suversion. Or just enjoy it yourself.
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Chekhov is known for his plays and short stories, and this volume is a “Barnes and Noble Classics” collection of the latter. I don’t know whether these were collected because they were comprehensive or exemplary, but they do hold together pretty well. As a rule, I don’t like reviewing short story collections, never quite knowing how to approach the task. A paragraph or two for each entry goes on too long, and reviewing the collection itself gives short shrift to the individual stories. And as long as I’m complaining, I’m not a big fan of reading translated works either, because I never can tell who to credit for the success (or the failure) of the language. This volume worked out fortuitiously well in that regard: Constance Garnett also translated my copy of Crime and Punishment (also a B&N classic, but she is the first popular English translator of most of the famous Russians), and my distaste for Dostoyevsky’s arrogant blather doesn’t seem to be her fault. Because Chekhov’s fiction is great.
Any critique of Chekhov must begin by noting his penchant for honest, objective bits, short stories as literary photography. There’s not much plot in most of ‘em, but they still work as complete thoughts of context or of character. It’s very interesting as far as technique goes, because his accurate pen doesn’t spend a lot of time inside the heads of the characters, not looking much through their eyes. He’s not the sensualist that Colette is, but he does describe a lot of what the senses perceive. He doesn’t coax out ten varieties of mental circumlocution, but he describes clearly what characters think, much of which could be called complex. With all the present-day authors going for so many levels of cognitive masturbation, Chekhov’s style is downright refreshing. It makes me want to read his plays.
If you’re looking to, you can follow the arc as they move through time. You can see technology develop for one thing (there are no telephones in his earlier pieces, nor factories), but stylistically, he becomes more like himself over the twenty years or so of story publications. His earlier pieces have more subjective points of view, and some look to have been chosen for their challenge, almost as if the author were showing off how unusually could he frame it (the three-year-old “Grisha” was the most egregious, and also the best) but I found I liked better his later, and more subtle, vignettes.
I grew up in the seventies and eighties, knowing Russia as a freezing soulless, cynical, wintry hellhole, and it’s unusual here to see the country as an open, cosmopolitan, religious place. Chekhov’s Russia seemed very European in culture, if a little more austere. One thing that struck me in his stories was the nineteenth-century Russian’s sense of spectacle. It’s hard for me to imagine the church’s finery as a draw, as the foremost cultural touchstone in the provinces, as a viable professional path. For all his objectivity, Chekhov has, I think like his two famous contemporaries, morality hanging heavily over him, and what ironies he constructs hinge on this mix of honesty and chaste, deep-rooted Christian ethics. When I read Tolstoy, I thought he read like an American novelist, and I got a little of that same sense from Chekhov too, daring honesty fighting Puritan restraint. It fits.
All of the short stories were very good, but my favorite ones went a little deeper than a photograph. It takes a little more than observation to make the reader care about these people, and usually a little dramatic tension is the thing. Chekhov’s best stories retained a little bit of extra structure, either something resembling a plot resolution, or an obvious irony, or showcased the more entertaining conflict. The title story was great for that, about a doctor’s relationship with a man in his asylum, about how close their positions really were. The Princess was the closest he came to preaching, but it’s a wonderful rant just the same. The conflicts in The Witch and The Dependents were hilarious and bittersweet. Rothschild’s Fiddle is as close as he gets to a plot and a moral, and is probably his most deeply touching.
On the whole though, it’s not a bad way to approach literature. A structured plot is the biggest difference between literature and reality, and it’s impressive to see the fiction succeed without it. I think I’d have been happier not thinking of that as Chekhov’s personal mission, but then most art contains a lot of hidden effort.
