When
I last week announced the prospect of an essay about “the world’s greatest
novel,” I still felt somewhat tentative about actually writing it, but I soon
felt forced to do so under the goading of an eminent reader who immediately
emailed me “Ah, finally, we’ll have a blog post about The Count of Monte
Cristo!” Comments like that make it
difficult to maintain the intended air of bloggatorial pomposity for which I
aim. In fact, I lack the credentials to
write anything of general interest about
Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the novel to which I was of course
alluding. I do not know Russian, and I
am no expert in Russian literature even in translation. But I have read the Maude translation of War
and Peace several times over the years, with each reading bringing
augmented appreciation and admiration. So
I am a mere Tolstoy enthusiast, not a Tolstory scholar. But
what I shall talk about here is my association with a particular edition of War
and Peace in the frequently published English translation by Aylmer and
Louise Maude.
There are of course many translations in English, and perhaps one who does not read Russian should be shy of pontificating about translations; but just watch me. The Maude translation of Tolstoy reads, as it obviously should, like other great door-stopper novels of the Victorian period, like Vanity Fair (1847), or The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) or Les Miserables (1862) or Middlemarch (1871). Long resident in Russia, the Maudes were fluent speakers of its language as spoken by Tolstoy himself in his own social milieu. Both translators were highly educated and both were widely read in the European fiction of their age. Both of them were personal friends of Tolstoy. Aylmer Maude was a close friend. Both were on Tolstoy’s elevated ethical plain. Both had literary interests of their own. Those credentials impress me.
But I am talking about not merely a particular translation but a particular edition. I refer to the “Inner Sanctum” edition of the novel published in New York in 1942 by Simon and Schuster. Everything about this book is pleasing to me. It is physically imposing. Its 1370 pages make a paper block two and a half inches thick. It is heavy enough to serve as a door-stopper. The typeface (Electra, in ten point) was one of the two most famous faces created by the brilliant American typographer William Addison Twiggins (the other being Caledonia).
I first read War and Peace in this edition by serendipity, having borrowed it from an Arkansas neighbor, whose father had picked it up at the end of the War on a military base in the Philippines! At that time I had no particular interest in typography, and didn’t even read the introduction or note the name of its author. But education is a continuous process, and I was destined later to find myself interested both topics—printing and Clifton Fadiman, editor of the Inner Sanctum edition. Fadiman’s name is no longer as famous as it was in the days when I was becoming a serious reader and encountered it in essays and reviews everywhere, or listened to his popular radio game show, “Information, Please.” He was a polymath literary intellectual in the Edwardian style. Such popularizing “super readers” are no longer in the national cultural sphere. He died at a great age in 1999. A line from his Times obituary: “In the1940's and 50's, Mr. Fadiman's presence in and influence on American intellectual life were ubiquitous. He prided himself on his skill as a popularizer and on his ability to make lofty subjects accessible to people who lacked his education and acuity.” He was among the extraordinary influential group of Columbia University professors, students, and drop-outs and “adjacents” (including Whittaker Chambers, Mark Van Doren, and Lionel Trilling) famous in the mid-twentieth century.
Fadiman had to have written his long and illuminating introductory essay on War and Peace no later than the very beginning of 1942. By then the German army was at the gates of Moscow, but still distant from Stalingrad to the east and south, with the outcome of the titanic struggle far from certain. But nearly half the essay is devoted to the parallels (at the date of its writing) between Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812—which is course the principal event of the war part of War and Peace-- and the Wehrmacht’s advance in late 1941. Fadiman’s essay—illustrated by an extraordinary map on the volume’s endpapers, is thus, in retrospect, an astonishing if only implicit historical prophecy. I don’t have exact sales figures for this hugely successful book, but judging from the comparatively large numbers still available on the second-hand market over the years (40 on Abebooks at the moment), they must have been very good. There were many successive press runs. Over the years I myself have bought at least fifteen used copies to give to friends. Unfortunately even battered copies are no longer dirt cheap, as they were thirty years ago. But my point here is that many Americans must have been reading it during the six months (August 1942 to February 1943) of the Battle of Stalingrad, the beginning of the end of Hitler. The defeat of the German Sixth Army under Friedrich Paulus was even more catastrophic than that of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. A good number of Frenchmen did return to their homeland alive, if barely. Readers of Fadiman’s “Foreword” might rightly regard him as a prophet.
By the time I was writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos (2009) I knew a good deal about Fadiman, who was peripherally involved with some of the Thirties intellectuals with whom I dealt. I concluded that by 1941 he was “gracefully sloughing off, without any dramatic gestures of political conversion, the hard leftism of the mid-thirties.” I don’t believe that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, but he certainly was very far left; and like so many other Western leftists he had been deeply shaken by the Hitler-Stalin “Devil’s Pact” of 1939.
This Inner Sanctum edition of War and Peace has several special features. Though not “illustrated” it has a striking jacket, end papers and title page art. The table of contents is unusually detailed. At the end of the book is a detailed dramatis personae or list of its myriad characters as they appear sequentially in the text. Don’t buy—or at least don’t pay more than ten bucks for-- a copy unless it includes the separate twelve-page brochure (“A Readers’ Guide and Bookmark”) containing this same list of characters and maps of Napoleon’s campaigns of 1805 and 1812.
I don’t know that War and Peace, a novel of three quarters of a million words, can be called a “subtext” or a sub-anything, but it, the novel, Tolstoy’s majestic creation, is what has stimulated me to my curious historical discussion of one of what are probably dozens of its English language editions. I feel justified in this odd approach not merely because of the book’s genre (historical fiction) but also because history might be said to be an active character in it. Many readers, including me, find a challenge if not a stumbling block at the novel’s end: two substantial final chapters, more than a hundred pages in all, dealing with the philosophy and at times it seems theology of history. Among several major themes of the first epilogue is the role of chance in history. It suggests a sort of cosmic capriciousness very different from such common Providential (God is mysteriously in charge) or Marxist (“dialectical materialism” is scientifically in charge) theories of historical purposefulness.
In case my own essay is not yet sufficiently perplexing, I shall add a comment illustrating the strange byways that history can take by mentioning two old bed frames—a twin set of once beautiful Scandinavian maplewood Thirties “modern” design—that have been mouldering in our musty crawlspace for the last thirty years. They were given to us (perhaps “unloaded on” would be the better phrase) in an early stage of our married life by Joan’s one-time employer, Hans Rosenhaupt. He was at the time the head of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation. They had come into the possession of the Rosenhaupts in an earlier unloading in the 1940s by their friend and neighbor in Leonia, NJ—one Clifton Fadiman!
