John Bayley (1) (1925–2015)

This book reads like a highly entertaining series of lectures - and is none the worse for it (if true). Bayley in person could be unassuming and quietly spoken and that somehow made his acute and innovative insights more surprising. I can imagine the interests of students being piqued right at the start when Bayley doesn't begin with any of the great 19th century short story writers but with poets and the concept of the poem as a short story which he brilliantly illustrates with a discussion of Larkin's 'Dockery and Son'. The whole book is an understated treat in this vein - he is wonderful on Henry James for example and manages to talk about Todorov on James without ever becoming obscure. My only disappointment is that when he comes to 'Dubliners' he concentrates very largely on 'The Dead' and doesn't talk very much about the rest of the collection. You can't have everything though. This book is as much a pleasure to read as the primary sources and in some cases more so!

In the edition I borrowed (which is not on Goodreads) Harvester seem happy to connive with Bayley's stealth approach to quality and original criticism. The cover image (a Guy Malet wood engraving) is designed to convey I think that herein is a useful but unremarkable student crib. It is a lot more than that.… (altro)

When John Bayley's Tolstoy and the Novel was published in 1966, it was marketed as the first full-length study of Tolstoy as a writer. An earlier study, which Bayley acknowledges, contained only 128 pages, so it was not "full-length." In addition, I think truth in advertising would have added the qualifier "in English."
In the opening chapter, Bayley situates Tolstoy's work in the context of Tsarist Russia, which Bayley likens to a severe boarding school (15). Literature, he suggests, was a substitute for free institutions (16), at least for young men from aristocratic families who chose to do something more with their time than drinking, gambling, and affairs of the heart and who knew there was no use in devoting their talents to political reform.
Their situation (unsurprisingly) was akin to that of the protagonists of their writings, "superfluous men," a type created by Pushkin in Eugene Onegin, a "hero whose intelligence and aspiration can find nothing to work on and through in the objective social world (18)."
The second chapter contrasts Tolstoy with Dostoevsky (Bayley calls it "the inevitable comparison"). Although both, coming on the heels of Pushkin, who opened the era of modern Russian literature and created the language in which to fashion it, are influenced by him, they differ in their reception. Tolstoy has absorbed Pushkin yet distrusts him, while Dostoevsky looks to him not only as a literary master but as a prophet, while he, Dostoevsky, is "the epiphanist," the one who "will show forth Pushkin's secret" (31).
More than a third of Bayley's book is devoted to War and Peace, which Bayley praises for its "extraordinary breadth of reality . . . as a microcosm of human consciousness" (65). Yet he notes the curious phenomenon that readers who can recall plot points and characters in David Copperfield or other novels have trouble remembering what happens in War and Peace. Bayley's explanation: Tolstoy is like the current of life itself (98). While not as extensive, Bayley’s treatment of Anna Karenina is also insightful. Bayley touches on the rest of Tolstoy's novels and novellas as well. His reaction to the late work Hadji Murad, singled out by Harold Bloom as Tolstoy's greatest achievement, is temperate by comparison. In particular, he calls the metaphor of the Tartar thistle, which appears at the beginning and the end of the tale, an "artificial clamp," yet acknowledges that apart from this, "the story expands and diversifies with superb power" (273).
Bayley devotes attention to Tolstoy's gift for characterization, relating it to Tolstoy's nature as a great solipsist. This seems counter-intuitive, but Bayley convincingly argues that Tolstoy's self-absorption enabled him to recognize in himself a wide range of human experience, which he then apportions to his characters. Notably, he adopts a woman's point of view as powerfully as he does a man's.
Bayley also finds a key to Tolstoy's strength of characterization in the Russian concept of "samodovolnost" (self-sufficiency, self-esteem). This seems closely related to the life force itself. When this departs from a character, death is near.
Death, by the way, is Tolstoy's great enemy, as Bayley points out. Tolstoy's reticence in depicting male sexuality is noted as well. In addition, Bayley covers other aspects of Tolstoy's style, such as the technique of "making strange" that he appropriated from two of his favorite authors, Voltaire and Swift. Unlike them, however, he doesn't employ it solely for satire but also for dramatization.
Bayley devotes a section to Tolstoy's theory of war in War and Peace. Famously, Tolstoy rejected the "great man" theory, according to which such men influence events "when in reality they are in the grip of forces they cannot understand or control" (164). Napoleon is "the arch-villain of war because he thinks he is its master" (169). Yet Tolstoy's view of war is "inconsistent, slanted and downright perverse" (171), achieved only by filtering out contrary evidence. But not totally. Tolstoy acknowledged Stendhal as his master in describing war. Still, unlike Stendhal, Tolstoy knows that "the actualities of war . . . can appear in every possible form," even in the way it is depicted on heroic battle canvases (167).
Bayley concludes the book with a brief chapter on Boris Pasternak's novel Dr. Zhivago, which had appeared in English eight years earlier. For Bayley, this novel is part of Tolstoy's legacy. However, he concedes that it is not very obviously in the Tolstoy tradition, owing more to the Russian symbolist poets, with whom Tolstoy had little in common. Bayley sees the most significant similarity in the depiction of Yuri Pasternak as a good man, much like Pierre in War and Peace or Levin in Anna Kerenina. To me, this chapter felt tacked on.
The book assumes familiarity with the major writings and some awareness of Tolstoy's life and philosophy. As such, it's not an introductory text. Yet, for the breadth of insight and assured, well-founded judgments, it remains well worth reading a half-century after appearing.… (altro)

A lovely, sad, funny book, in which Bayley shares with us both his happy memories of married life with Iris Murdoch and some of the day to day realities of living with her now that she has Alzheimer's. Peter Capaldi was working on Murdoch's official biography already when Bayley was writing this memoir, so he doesn't say much about her career and novels, but focusses on the things they shared: swimming in rivers, holiday trips, friends, houses (he stakes a strong claim for the title of "least house-proud couple in Oxford..."), and occasional literary cooperation. And on the story of how they came to get together in the first place, of course. Bayley is modest, deprecatingly witty, and obviously intensely grateful for all these experiences, and for the odd moments of joy he's still able to share with his wife in her current condition, even if it's only watching Teletubbies together.

One odd aspect of Bayley's obvious generosity is the way he refrains from naming anyone mentioned in the book whom he dislikes. This sometimes leads him to tell us everything about that person apart from the name — one person who gets this treatment is Dorothy Bednarowska, a well-known Fellow of St Anne's College, whose only offence seems to have been getting in the way of Bayley's attempts to chat up Iris at the party where they first met; another is Elias Canetti, one of Iris's occasional lovers, who is described down to his Nobel Prize and the title of his best-known book, but named only as "the Dichter". But that's a minor quirk, and you couldn't have such a very Oxfordish book without some sort of puzzle in it...… (altro)