Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on Anna Karenina at the Ball)

"Anna was not in lilac, as Kitty had so urgently wished, but in a black, low-cut, velvet gown, showing her full throat and shoulders, that looked as though carved in old ivory, and her rounded arms, with tiny, slender wrists. The whole gown was trimmed with Venetian guipure. On her head, among her black hair - her own, with no false additions - was a little wreath of pansies, and a bouquet of the same in the black ribbon of her sash among white lace. Her coiffure was not striking. All that was noticeable was the little wilful tendrils of her curly hair that would always break free about her neck and temples." ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

I’m not sure why I chose this quote for today, except that the image it creates in the mind is unforgettable—and that it offers ample evidence of the considerable storytelling power of Leo Tolstoy, as well as a hint of the title character’s passion, charm and noncomformity that will lead to her illicit affair and growing isolation from Russian society.

Not for Anna the pastel-like tones that other women (including Kitty) are wearing at the ball.  Black, so simple, nevertheless makes her stand out. She has taken no extra pains on her appearance; her natural beauty is enough to guarantee she’ll draw stares. The only unusual word about this passage is “willful”—suggesting her eventual defiance of norms, along with the phrase that quickly confirms this hint: “break free.”

Anna Karenina is a novel whose enormous size makes it appear intimidating. But it is one of the most memorable books I have ever read, and even short passages like the one above are so rich in color and meaning that it illustrates why.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 2012 version of the novel. Keira Knightley, shown here, is just one of a number of actresses who have played this unforgettable heroine on the big and small screen, including Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Jacqueline Bisset, Nicola Pagett, Sophie Marceau, and Helen McCrory.)

This Day in Literary History (Trollope Ices Favorite Reader Character)

Sept. 15, 1866—Anthony Trollope, well into the serialization of his latest novel, overheard two readers carping about one of his most popular characters. Now in her fifth book, Mrs. Proudie, the domineering wife of the Bishop of Barchester, struck this pair of clergymen as tiresome and clichéd. The big, bearded, bellowing author walked across the drawing room of the Atheneum Club to assure the astonished ministers that he would “go home and kill her before the week is over.” And so he did.

One of the most feared mob hit men was nicknamed “The Ice Man” for his lack of emotion in dispatching victims. I’m afraid that many Victorians felt that one of their favorite authors had displayed similar callousness toward a character they looked forward to reading about in The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Trollope would not be the last Victorian author to kill off a popular character. When Arthur Conan Doyle tired of Sherlock Holmes, he sent the detective hurtling off the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, helplessly entangled in a seemingly fatal fall with arch-villain Professor Moriarty.

But the manner of the passing allowed Doyle to revive his creation when readers demanded Holmes’ return: The fall, it was revealed nearly a decade later, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, had all been staged for Dr. Watson’s benefit, to allow his friend to evade Moriarty’s still-at-large, dangerous confederates.

No such plausible way out existed for Trollope: The death of Mrs. Proudie was irrevocable, the result of a heart attack. Her demise robbed readers of coming to grips with the kind of domineering, annoying, but all-too-human character they were likely to encounter in real life. 

Trollope had enjoyed a highly popular run with his series about the imaginary county of Barset (which previously had included The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington). But Mrs. Proudie possesses such intrinsic power—a moral busybody still utterly convinced that her actions will benefit her more restrained husband, Dr. Proudie—that her end can lead to only one logical conclusion: the last installment of this novel sequence.

What made Mrs. Proudie so compelling? It strikes me that certain aspects of Trollope’s gift for characterization are shared by Leo Tolstoy. In Anna Karenina, for instance, the Russian sets the stage for the title character's infidelity by contrasting her warmth and spontaneity with the cold-blooded intelligence and ironic speech of her husband Alexei, then tops it off with a detail that captures perfectly why she now finds him tiresome: he cracks his knuckles.  Yet, when she appears to be on her deathbed, Tolstoy allows Alexei an unexpected dimension: the cuckold forgives Anna for her adultery.

With Mrs. Proudie, Trollope employed similar details. In church, she wears a “dark brown silk dress of awful stiffness and terrible dimensions.” But at the moment when her husband turns on her with the most awful words he has ever expressed in their marriage—“You have brought on me such disgrace that I cannot hold up my head”—Trollope plumbs her psyche to allow a moment of sympathy:

“At the bottom of her heart she knew that she had been a bad wife. And yet she had meant to be a pattern wife! She had meant to be a good Christian; but she had so exercised her Christianity that not a soul in the world loved her, or would endure her presence if it could be avoided! She had sufficient insight to the minds and feelings of those around her to be aware of this. And now her husband had told her that her tyranny to him was so overbearing that he must throw up his great position, and retire to an obscurity that would be exceptionally disgraceful to them both, because he could no longer endure the public disgrace which her conduct brought upon him in his high place before the world! Her heart was too full for speech; and she left him, very quietly closing the door behind her.”

How hasty and impulsive exactly was Trollope’s decision to knock off Mrs. Proudie? Perhaps the seeds of his decision had been planted for awhile: The Saturday Review, for instance, had made a complaint similar to the two clergymen’s when Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington appeared. 

But the novelist could certainly have set the stage for his nasty surprise a bit better. Readers did not even know, for instance, that Mrs. Proudie even had a heart condition before her fatal attack. Moreover, the bishop has already endured so much at the hands of his wife that this breaking point here seems anti-climactic.

In a prior appreciation of Trollope on his 200th birthday, I discussed how the novelist hurt his critical standing by revealing his working method in his Autobiography (writing three hours each day before breakfast, itemizing how many words and pages he produced each hour as well as how much he was paid for his various works). I’m afraid that his discussion in the same memoir of how he came to dispatch Mrs. Proudie reinforced this critical disdain. What careful artist could be so thoughtless as to kill off a character on the mere say-so of two people he overheard in a London men’s club? 

Even the author came to feel pangs of regret over his decision: “I have never dissevered myself from Mrs. Proudie,” he wrote a decade later, “and still live much in company with her ghost.”

No matter how much he rued that decision, however, Trollope was prepared for similar ruthlessness toward a major female character—one a good deal more beloved than Mrs. Proudie—in his next series of books. At the start of the sixth novel in his “Palliser” series, The Duke’s Children, readers learn that Lady Glencora Palliser, the vivacious wife of the reticent politician the Duke of Omnium, has died. 

While the decision to eliminate her from the series allowed Trollope to explore different dramatic possibilities—i.e., how the Duke would cope alone with the coming of age of their three children without her mediation and sympathy—it came at a cost that his most devoted readers could hardly bear.

Quote of the Day (Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina,’ on Forgiveness)

“Lord, forgive me everything.”― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

He does.

(The image accompanying this post is of Greta Garbo, who played the role twice—once, in the silent film Love, and the second time in the far finer 1935 talkie.)

Happy Birthday to Pop Music’s Anna Karenina!

In Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us, a collective biography of songstresses Joni Mitchell, Carol King, and Carly Simon, a friend relates that the latter “has read Anna Karenina about ten times.” Aside from the terrific taste in great literature shown by Simon, the anecdote also suggests an intense identification with Tolstoy’s heroine.

That feeling might evoke alarm among the legion of admirers of Simon, who celebrates her 64th birthday today. Wasn’t Anna Karenina suicidal?

Well, yes—a condition that Simon, despite the dysfunctional family life of her childhood, her adult stage fright, and disappointment in love over the years, does not appear to have developed, thank God.

But Anna Karenina is (and I use the present tense advisedly, because in the hands of the Russian master, she lives as much now as she did in Czarist Russia) far more than a despairing wife. She is also intelligent, funny, warm, loving to her children, and, of course, passionate. Seemingly everyone is drawn to her. All of these qualities shine through Simon’s four decades as a recording artist.

What’s a blog for if it can’t be personal? So, here are a fan’s notes on two close encounters with the woman who helped pioneer the confessional singer-songwriter movement of the Seventies in songs like “No Secrets,” “Anticipation,” “That’s the Way I Always Heard It Should Be,” and (of course!) “You’re So Vain.”

In the early 1990s, on a lunch break from work, I slipped into the now-defunct Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue (where Scribners’ publishing house used to be) in New York. When I reached the center of the landmark, I was startled to hear cascades of applause on either side of me.

At the moment, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. After all, I’m not accustomed to cheering whenever I enter an establishment—not even at the bookstores I frequent, and certainly not before I’ve purchased anything.

Then I turned around. A lithe woman in her mid-to-late ‘40s, weighed down by a satchel full of books and trailed by what looked like an eager young female publicist, was walking a yard or two behind me. She was thinner than I had expected from all those album covers and Rolling Stone pictures of the prior two decades, making her appear somewhat lankier than she actually is.

But once she flashed that smile at the crowd, with the most famous lips in rock ‘n’ roll this side of Mick Jagger, there was no doubt that I was beholding one half of what had once been pop music’s answer to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as the most glamorous, talented, and rich couple in the world.

I needed to buy the book that had lured me to the store in the first place, not to mention get back to the office, so I had no time to linger to watch the singer autograph the children’s book she was promoting.

But nearly 10 years later, I had a longer, more satisfying encounter with her, at the Tower Records outlet at Lincoln Center, where Simon had come to promote—not just autograph, but sing songs from—her new holiday CD, Christmas Is Almost Here.

When she appeared, the crowd went wild. The singer recalled how she had once lived in the neighborhood in the Seventies, before she’d moved up to Martha’s Vineyard.

Simon was appearing that day with her son, Ben Taylor. While she was telling the crowd about his recent CD, she inquired of the store employee on hand where copies of his CD were and how many there were. There were about a half dozen in the whole store. “Only six?” Simon asked, shaking her head and smiling ironically, leaving the distinct impression that when the appearance was over, a long, serious, perhaps not always pleasant pow-wow would take place.

But that was all part and parcel of her intense mother love. As she sang with her son (who, in voice and looks resembled his dad), whatever stage fright she felt must have melted away. She was relaxed and in fine voice. It made me regret the many years and potential appearances that fans were deprived of because of her phobia.

After a few songs, Simon sat down to autograph the CD for her horde of fans, not saying so much that the line would crawl to a standstill but just enough to make people feel they interested her and she was grateful for their support. I still treasure that album and that encounter.

(As long as we’re talking about birthdays, I want to extend best wishes for the day to my friend Brian, who shares with Simon a great love of music.)