Stories and Living a Life by Robert Coles
When I was in high school, and beginning to wonder what I'd be doing with my life, I'd often turn to my parents with questions, concerns, and sometimes, complaints or criticisms with respect to what they had said or done in the past. We were a reasonably happy family, but of course, most teenagers, almost by definition, have a rebellious side to them, and I certainly was no exception to that generalization. When I was especially moody or irritable or sullenly silent, my mother or dad responded with a respectful quiet of their own - interrupted, however, often enough, by a brief suggestion or two: that I read this book, or that one. One dark summer day, as a matter of fact, my mother took note of my edgy nature not by saying something, but with the concreteness a book provides: she placed on my bedroom table, which also served as a study desk, a copy of Tolstoy's War and Peace, and too, a book with his short stories.
I immediately got annoyed with her: I had no time for reading - only athletics, for my friends. But I did start reading War and Peace, and in time its world became mine - not so much the objective situation (the Russian nobility, the Napoleanic War) but the human subjectivity Tolstoy explores so shrewdly, knowingly, subtly: how people get on with each other, come to trust one another or disappoint one another; the vicissitudes, the ups and downs of human relatedness. I didn't so much "identify" with any of Tolstoy's characters (they lived in a far off place and time) as learn from them: realize that their struggles with their affections and their troublesome moments of self-doubt or anger or resentment were in some rock-bottom way very much like mine.
By the end of that summer I had finished a long novel with great regret: I wanted more, much more. I had also learned several courses worth of psychology - but without the heavy-handed, self-important, portentous language that on occasion comes with the study of that discipline. I had learned a lot of history, too - and very important, learned an interesting, suggestive theory of history, because Tolstoy's epilogue to War and Peace helps explain a lot about the ways particular individuals known as "leaders" connect with particular moments in history that enable (or discourage) their initiatives and strategies.
Later, I'd tackle such Tolstoy stories as "The Death of Ivan Ilych" and "Master and Man," and through them begin to understand what we all come to realize: this life is finite, and at any moment can leave us, so to speak. In those stories, Tolstoy tells us that how we live matters more than that we live; and indeed, our days on this earth can be pointless and useless - a living death - if we haven't come to some moral understanding of our nature, our responsibilities with respect to ourselves and the "others" with whom we share our finite time: friends and neighbors, husbands and wives and children, coworkers, colleagues, fellow citizens.
In "The Death of Ivan Ilych," the lawyer Ilych is successful, yet strangely alone. He has given himself to his work, and in so doing, becomes a distant, aloof husband and father. Now, a fatal illness seems to cut him off completely from others. But Tolstoy wants us to know that no one's fate is sealed until the last breath - hence a miraculous transformation, enabled by a humble servant, Gerasim. The attentive, compassionate nature of Gerasim connects with Ilych in such a way that the story's title takes on a new meaning. The death of old Ilych gives way to the birth of a new person: the transfiguration that sometimes comes about through suffering.
Similarly, in "Master and Man" - a powerful, Tolstoyan parable - a busy, self-centered, all too ambitious and greedy businessman presses ahead, his servant at his side, despite a threatening Russian winter storm. Gradually the "master" realizes that he will not survive the storm, even as his horse, Dapple, and "servant" patiently and stolidly await their fate. Again, Tolstoy uses the end of life, the threat of death, as an occasion for profound, unselfconscious moral introspection. The "master" offers his coat, even his dying but still warm body to his servant, a final (and first-time) acknowledgment of human solidarity. The author reminds us that barriers of class and culture, of race and nationality, ought to yield, finally, to our common vulnerability - what we all share in our brief stay here.
Many years after I had read that long novel and those two short stories of Tolstoy, I would discover the fiction of an American writer who was born poor, rather than, like Tolstoy, rich, and who died at fifty, not at 82, the age Tolstoy was when he said good-bye to the world. Raymond Carver's last collection of stories, Where I'm Calling From, addresses, as the title suggests, our psychological and spiritual lives in contemporary America. Most of his characters are ordinary people, struggling each day to get by - to make do in a world that always seems to threaten them. Indeed, around every corner, in a Carver story, disaster threatens. Yet, in most of his stories the men and women also manage to stay afloat - if barely; and their creator writes them with an interest, an attentiveness that conveys his essential compassion.
My favorite Carver story is "Cathedral," a tale of communion, ultimately - though, of course, plenty of misunderstanding has to be overcome. A blind man arrives as a guest of a couple; he is afraid of the wife. Soon enough, a triangle of sorts has developed, with the husband not at all anxious to be a friendly host. But in the end, the triangle gives way to a pair of men, sitting up, late at night, trying to fathom one another's interests, attitudes. Ultimately, the blind man teaches his new sighted friend how to draw a cathedral, helps his visual (and moral) imagination grow, assert itself: as in the Biblical phrase, "the blind leading the blind," though now with a decidedly more hopeful and promising outcome, a greater sense of trust. All is rendered without sentimentality or rhetoric by a master storyteller, who has an uncanny sense of of the loneliness and melancholy so many of us experience, yet yearn to overcome through friendships we seek, but often fear to let happen.
Carver's genius was his shrewd candor given the flesh of powerfully and persuasively connected characters, their every word true to life, the reader begins to realize. He had a way of entering his character's inner life, without becoming explicitly "psychological." Put differently, he probed our private torments, obsessions, aspirations (the last, often, failed ones), without resort to the mannerisms of the clinic. Similarly with Toni Morrison, in her first and extraordinary novel The Bluest Eye, a brilliant rendering of a child's dissatisfaction with herself, her fate, her future as she senses it;and similarly, too, with Zora Neale Hurston, in her by now well-known Their Eyes Were Watching God, a powerfully suggestive evocation of a woman's search for herself, her own values and purposes, through the involvements she pursues with various others, the men in her life, the people with whom she works. A novel ostensibly about the world of the poor, vulnerable migrant farm workers turns out to be a novel about human relatedness - what happens to us as we engage ourselves with love's possibilities, and too, its discontents or impasses. Morrison's novel, too, has its larger lesson to tell. A story about the child Pecola, who dreams of looking "white," who dreams of being someone other than who she is, reminds what happens when children learn to feel worthless, unlovable. Alas, they curry favor with their oppressors, whether individuals or a category (white) of people - a melancholy turn of events, indeed.
It is no far walk, actually, from Carver's working class Americans, from Morrison's child, from Hurston's Florida farm workers to Tolstoy's Russian nobility or gentry (or, of course, his peasants): they are all fellow human beings, young or old, black or white, men or women - trying hard to make sense of this life, figure out a direction for themselves, some meaning which will help them get through the day, then another.
All fiction helps us, the readers, to join the company of the characters whose lives we get to meet on the pages of a book - to become, really, companions on a search, a journey within ourselves that often can prompt all sorts of valuable questions about how we are spending the precious time allotted us. A story becomes a friend, a guide, a source of entertainment and enlightenment both, even, sometimes, a shaping influence on how we think, what we try to do, as we move along, day after day, on our journey.
ADDITIONAL READINGS
Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle (1956). Four works of short fiction capturing the heroic in the lives of ordinary people.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952). The African-American as underground man explores his invisibility in white society and reaffirms the roots of black experience.
Flannery O'Conner, The Complete Stories (1971). Thirty-one short stories which bear witness to the way fate and the needs of the spirit mingle in one's life.
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (1960). One man's search to understand why his routine life has suddenly and irrevocably changed.
William Carlos Williams, The Doctor Stories (1984). Thirteen short stories and a handful of poems recounting, in unsentimental terms, Williams' work with his patients.
Tobias Wolff, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981). Twelve short stories dealing with moral predicaments in which characters confront tough questions about their lives.
Robert Coles, whose special interest is field work in social psychiatry, is a research psychiatrist for the Harvard University Health Services, as well as Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at the Harvard Medical School. Since 1961, Dr. Coles has published 50 books, including Children of Crisis, Walker Percy: An American Search, The Spiritual Life of Children, and The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination.