My Life with Tolstoy

There are ways, of course, to put lipstick on the corpse, to get it up and dancing, however grotesquely. Get married, buy a house, have a baby, that’s what some couples do. But there’s a fourth, less binding option: take a holiday together. And that’s what we did. At 5:30 on a black, snowy morning in Toronto, a limousine picked up me and X and my old hardback of Anna Karenina and drove us to oblivion.

By the time we got to the hotel in Bangkok, it was as if I had taken two hits of old-fashioned blotter acid. The world shimmered—all those hours on the plane. (She had slept like a child, her long beautiful eyelashes twitching. What was she dreaming about Beside her, like the troll under the bridge, I glared at six films, one after the other.)

It was a lovely hotel, the river winding below our window. At night you could see long boats moving on the water. But nothing could save us, not sex or gin or Santa Claus.

“Is anything wrong”

“No. You”

“No, I’m fine.”

Ugh.

(Anna Karenina, in four lines.)

I stayed in the hotel room, the city a smoggy, uninteresting blur outside, and started Anna K. for the second time. X walked through the city, visited the university, I’m not sure what else. There’s a way you read when you travel; it is, in itself, a kind of transport, the purity with which you pay attention. You never read like that at home. In fact, as the years have gone by and with them a dozen other trips, it has occurred to me that reading, all on its own, may well be the best reason to travel. This time out, I was so entranced with Anna Karenina, the story of an unfaithful woman getting fed, however beautifully, into Tolstoy’s lawnmower, that the events in the book became more real to me, more important to me, than Bangkok’s foul air, my girlfriend’s unreachable unhappiness, or the bar upstairs where one evening I encountered an old friend from university, a professional traveller who, like many professional travellers, had no curiosity about anything he encountered and talked about himself with an almost autistic insistence.

I hurried back to my room downstairs—back to Tolstoy, back to Levin’s unhappy thwarting at the hands of young Dolly. Tolstoy had such excitement about romantic love (at least for a while). You can feel him purr during his great love scenes. He adored the red-light, green-light nature of it, its democratic stranglehold. You’re never too rich, too beautiful, too stupid, too broke, too anything to resist its crooking finger. Unlike Chekhov, whose unhappy characters tend to stay unhappy, Tolstoy believed (once again, for a while) that romantic, sexualized love had the power to transform people, to make them happy. It lured Prince Andrei from a pit of malignant self-absorption; made Pierre Bezuhov into an adult, thrilled Anna Karenina for the only time in her life. Eventually it ripened and completed Levin as a man.