Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on the Need to ‘Seize the Moments of Happiness’)

"Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing we are interested in here." ― Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), War and Peace (1869)

Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on Transitions and Reflections)

"At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future." ― Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), War and Peace (1869)

Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on Smiles and Beauty)

“It seems to me that what we call beauty in a face lies in the smile: if the smile heightens the charm of the face, the face is a beautiful one; if it does not alter it, the face is ordinary, and if it is spoilt by a smile, it is ugly.” ― Russian novelist Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1856)

I had a really hard time coming up with an image associated with Leo Tolstoy that would epitomize what he was talking about in this quote.

The problem was this: no Tolstoy character, I believe, embodies beauty quite like the title character of Anna Karenina, and especially in the early pages of that novel, which gives a sense of her vivacity with this: “Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.”

When she has her fateful meeting with the man who becomes her lover, Count Vronsky, the animation in that smile comes to the fore, even as it is at war with the social and moral restraints that eventually doom her:

“In that brief glance Vronsky had time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile.”

But I came up blank in my online search for an image that would capture the startling illumination of Anna. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the images I saw of the actresses who have played her (including Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh, Jacqueline Bisset, and Keira Knightley) emphasized pensiveness and depression—not a surprise, when you consider the guilt, ostracism and suicide that Anna ultimately endured because of her affair with Vronsky.

So I had to venture far afield to find someone who shows how a smile “heightens the charm of a face”: 1930s Hollywood—or, to be exact, in the case of the photo accompanying this post, the actress Irene Dunne.

This weekend, in reading reviews about the new documentary about the personal and creative partnership of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, it struck me that Ethan Hawke was partly motivated in creating this tribute because younger viewers already had little sense of what this couple meant.

I’m afraid that’s even more the case with Dunne, whose heyday occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, before the use of color became commonplace in film. Consequently, at least a couple of generations of movie fans will not even bother to sample the classic films in which she appeared.

What a pity. As I discussed in this prior post, Dunne was a versatile actress as adept in musicals as in dark dramas.

But she glowed especially in the screwball comedy genre, in films like The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife and Theodora Goes Wild, where her smile could be marvelously adaptable: loving, understanding, or just radiant with unbounded joy. She was well worth the winning in these films for the likes of onscreen partners Cary Grant and Melvyn Douglas.

Particularly in his later years, when he became increasingly consumed with his spiritual quest and his own marriage deteriorated, Tolstoy himself was given very little to smiling.

But, in his youth and early middle age, he understood concretely that a smile made all the difference in beauty—marring a face when twisted by forces of destruction and evil, but heightening it if filled with inner grace.

Irene Dunne epitomized grace. If you ever meet someone with a similar life force, don’t take for granted how much your life has been enriched by that encounter. The memory of a smile can linger a lifetime.

Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on ‘The Highest Degree of Human Wisdom’)

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”― Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), War and Peace (1869)

Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on Kindness)

“The kinder and more intelligent a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy and dull things become cheerful.” – Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World's Sacred Texts, edited by Peter Sekirin (1997)

Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on the ‘Strongest of All Warriors’)

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”― Russian novelist Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), War and Peace (1867)

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 (Leo Tolstoy, on ‘True Religion’)

“True religion consists in establishing the relation of each of us towards the infinite life that surrounds us, the life that unites us to the infinite, and guides us in all our acts.” ― Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1910)