Thursday 27 August 2009

Keats and Chekhov - Mentshn

When I set out for the Surrey hills on the day commemorated in this post, I found myself with a bag quite heavily laden - what with inordinate quantities of drinking water (I am always thirsty), binoculars, sandwiches, the indispensable Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Ireland by J.A. Thomas, etc - so I needed to keep my reading matter compact and lightweight. I took down my little blue clothbound OUP Selected Letters of John Keats from the shelf... Needless to say, I am now completely hooked again by this greatest, most vivid, fresh, profound, spontaneous, funny, generous and lovable of all letter writers, and the volume has become my daily reading. It is almost a truism that Chekhov is the only great writer who can unequivocally be called a good man, a thoroughgoing mensch. Is this not also true of Keats, who is so endlessly unselfish, resourceful, tough and practically caring (the hardest kind), so cordially concerned about others, so firmly connected to the world by the ties of human affection and obligation, and so careless of himself and his art when those ties take precedence? Surely he too is that rare combination of good man and great artist. Is it coincidence that both he and Chekhov had medical training? I think it probably is - medicine is not a profession noted for the production of good, or even nice, men - though his medical grounding might explain why Keats, even in his airiest flights of fancy, is always intensely - sensuously and tragically - aware of earthy physical reality.

7 comments:

  1. You should try Byron's letters. They are as great an achievement as his poetry; often funny, occasionally profound, usually wonderfully vulgar. He also hated Keats but experience a touching change of heart on hearing of his death.

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  2. Byron and Keats — L'enfer c'est les autres!

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  3. If you jettison the sandwiches, Nige, you could go a bit heavier on the reading material. Personally I never venture into the countryside without at least Chaucer, a few versions of the Bible and the OED. If you ditch the binoculars you could probably also manage Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six leather-bound volumes.

    Your post raises another interesting question: which literary giants would make the worst acquaintances? I reckon Hemingway would be a real pain in the arse.

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  4. Brit, I'm sure that Ayn Rand could give Hemingway a run for his money.

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  5. My money's on Coleridge, Brit. I have the feeling he'd want to change me and share my wife.

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  6. Beckett seems to have been a very decent human being. Coleridge was lovable, but not somebody you'd want on a camping trip. Keats, sure. In his presence, all disagreeables evaporate, but he didn't live long enough to get all sour and cranky--it's like wondering whether Romeo would have made a decent husband. I say jettison a half-sandwich and bring along the letters of William James: great fun.

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  7. Having just spent an evening reading Chekhov's letters, I wanted to mark the occasion by agreeing with you entirely.

    Here he is in 1887, visiting a monastery:

    "The monks, very pleasant people, gave me a very unpleasant room with a pancake for a mattress. I spent two nights at the monastery and gathered a mass of impressions. While I was there some fifteen thousand pilgrims assembled because of St Nicolas' Day, eight-ninths of them were old women. I did not know before that there were so many old women in the world; had I known, I would have shot myself long ago."

    His account of the first performance of 'Ivanov' in Moscow, when almost all the actors were drunk and the rest afflicted by secret sorrows, is also well worth reading...

    A true mensch.

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