I just returned from an amazing week in Anguilla, a Caribbean island about 150 miles east of Puerto Rico. Any pictures you have seen of the Caribbean cannot do it justice; you have to be there, living the colors and the crystal power of the ocean, to take in its awe-inspiring beauty. Kurt and I were planning how to get back to Anguilla before we left. It's that kind of place.
We stayed with Kurt's cousin Paul and his wife Donna. Donna is one of my favorite relatives by marriage. She's a fun, intelligent, funny woman, Italian and proud of it, who shares my love of history. We talk about books and the Doberstein men, two areas with plenty of source material for long conversations. I brought her some of my non-fiction history books to keep and I thought she was going to hug me to death. Somebody who gets that excited about my kinds of books is way up on my "I like you" list.
Cousin Paul, on the other hand, is someone I have never known how to approach prior to this island getaway. He's a nice enough person in his way. Reserved, yet with a sense of humor that flashes once about every third family get together to remind me that he possesses it. He's an engineer and fits that stereotype quite well: observant, orderly, quietly certain of everything he thinks or believes. I don't think the man has ever experienced one moment of doubt in his 63 years. He was born completely self-possessed and probably crawled out of the womb holding The Baby's Guide to Linear Equations in his neatly-manicured fingers. I wouldn't want to have to see him as my therapist, but if I were ever trapped in a high-rise fire I'd be damn glad he was around to get me out of it.
He spends most of his time on Anguilla watching television and sitting on the terrace of his villa gazing silently at the ocean. Donna, on the other hand, is always venturing out to enjoy the scenery and people of the island; she runs a book club, belongs to countless committees, and knows just about everybody in the ex-pat community. People naturally love her, they way children naturally love an adult they perceive to be just like them. She says that she can't get Paul to go out. All he wants to do is stay at home, getting no closer to the vibrant life pulsing on that island than the isolation of his balcony. It's a source of constant frustration for her, but she can console herself with the stunning turquoise of the Atlantic as she snorkels from her property to the nearest white sand beach.
Knowing what I did about Cousin Paul, imagine my surprise when this reserved and stoic man announced that he loves Russian literature! He took a course in college and came to admire the Russian classical masters: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky...I was utterly stunned hearing this confession. To me, Russian literature is full-blooded passion on the page, the heart and soul of a naturally turbulent people, where order and calm is longed for but rarely attained except as a facade. I had trouble comprehending that he could be serious about something that seems so opposed to his personality, that a man who lives for steady, unchanging calm in his everyday life is capable of understanding the pulsing heart that flowed from Russian pens in the 18th and 19th centuries, but Cousin Paul apparently is.
Or is he? The more I reviewed our conversation (which ended with me proclaiming the glories of my favorite novel ever, Crime and Punishment, a book that he --gasp! -- absolutely hated and didn't even finish) the more I realized that Cousin Paul loves Russian literature for the flip side of the reason I do. I get so caught up in the passionate blood of the Russian classics every time I think of them that there is no room for anything else where they are concerned. Love-starved Anna Karenina, the violent and sensual Dmitri of The Brothers Karamazov, the lost and tormented characters swirling around Dostoevsky's Idiot are what leap into my head and begin bashing around in it every time the subject arises. I forget that in a Russian classic there is always a fair share of "rational men" to counteract the ardent, troubled souls on the pages of the same novels. They slip from my consciousness with alarming ease, dismissed by my over-heated brain as inconsequential and annoyingly dull, the minor, dim stars around which the passionate Anna's sun rotates. They don't even register with me until someone forces them back into my consciousness.
I realized after the fact that those are the characters who appeal to Cousin Paul. He is not Anna Karenina; he is Karenin, the staid, emotionally stifled country squire, whose coldness contrasts so terribly with his wife's Russian passion. He is Luzhin in Crime and Punishment and Feyodor Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, the so-called rational man, the logical fellow in control, although without their cracks that let their vices drip onto the page. He is, in fact, the perfected version of the flawed gentleman so often written about by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and other classical Russian writers. He has achieved what they never could: complete mastery over any internal passion that may have once crept around inside him, content to live in paradise without venturing much beyond his landscaped driveway.
The only time he falters in that sterility is when he consumes too much wine. Suddenly, sitting across from me at the table, is not the in-control Karenin but the emotional, strong-willed, even blunt Anna, or Levin from the same book, or Dmitri in Karamazov; in short, the Russian characters who so appeal to me because of their inability to accept the restrictions that society imposes upon them, whose hearts and mouths always overflow with a rush of emotions that they cannot keep inside. Three glasses of wine and Cousin Paul is a tumultuous character in any Russian tavern ever written about by the masters; four glasses and he's re-enacting the passionate arguments of Tolstoy's intellectuals; five glasses and he's headed for a place right next to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, the one character in all of classical Russian literature he says he cannot stand. I've never known him when he's ventured to six glasses, but if I ever see him do so I imagine he'll be graduating to the persona of every gloriously sloppy, emotional, pathos-crazed literary Russian drunk, or perhaps he'll leap straight to becoming the living incarnation of every tortured Russian writer he's ever read.
I'm still reeling from this whole episode. Not only has it made me feel more comfortable around Cousin Paul (have an intelligent discussion with me about classical literature and we're intellectually connected for life), it has also reminded me that writing can be many different things to many different people, that what I perceive as so patently obvious in a classic novel from any country does not necessarily even occur to other people who read the same book. At first I was a little upset about that, but now that I've had time to think about it I've decided that I'm pretty happy with the realization. That's what writing is about, right? The ability to be all things and nothing at the same time, to be molded by the brain and heart and soul of your reader into whatever they need from you. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy did that. I hope I can.
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