158
MARTIN GREENBERG
out of the author's feelings as
Homage to Blenholt.
And it makes an
about-face at the end to conclude on a false, perfunctory note of af·
firmation. The man who is the novel's moral consciousness, and its
palest character, realizes that he has been wrong "simply to hate Neptune
Beach and seek escape from it. . . . He had known the people at Ann's
I
[the soda parlor] in their lowness and had been repelled by them, but
now it seemed to him that he understood how their evil appeared
in
their impoverished dingy lives and, further, how miserable their
own
evil rendered them. . . . He decided to go back to his own rooms
in
Neptune." Was the author finally intimidated by the times, with their
demand that one should go to the people?
Mr. Fuchs' introduction moved me. In it he says that his novels
didn't sell: "400 copies, 400, 1200." When he sold a story to the
Saturday Evening Post
for $600, he "decided to become rich. I was
in
the middle of a fourth novel but broke it up and swiftly turned it into
three or four short stories." Realism! I hope we may still see that fourth
novel, and more. There may be no end to the making of books, but
how many good ones are there?
My last volume is Nikolai Leskov's
Selected Tales
and I find that
I
am exhausted. Yet I must say a few words about this fine writer.
Leskov, V. S. Pritchett tells us in his introduction, was ostracized during
his life time (1831-1895) by Russian criticism, which the Left dominated,
because, "although a man of the Left, he was religious and unable to
attach himself as a partisan." His religion was Quakerism; later he be- •
came a Tolstoyan.
His "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District" is a story of the most
powerful and simple truth; it describes the young wife of an elderly
Russian merchant whom sexual love seizes absolutely; it makes her
commit murder after murder, but we do not lose our sympathy for her.
Her passion
is
utter fate; one stares at it helplessly, unsheltered by
morality. I also liked "The Sentry," an ironical tale about the Russian
bureaucracy. Oddly enough considering its subject matter, it has great
I
sweetness. Or perhaps this is not so odd, for sweetness seems to be a
distinguishing characteristic of Leskov's writing. There are other good
stories, all well translated by David Magarshack. One story, and the
longest one by far-"The Enchanted Wanderer"-escaped me, though
Mr. Pritchett and the translator speak very highly of it. I notice it
seems to have escaped other reviewers. Perhaps it has a peculiarly
Russian quality that is unable to survive the passage into another
language.
Martin Greenberg
