The Outsider (28 page)

‘
There
’
s no adventure
’
: there is no need to press the parallel. Tolstoy has found a parable that brings home to the full
the Outsider
’
s attitude to other men: he cites an Eastern fable of a man who clings to a shrub on the side of a pit to escape an enraged beast at the top and a dragon at the bottom. Two mice gnaw at the roots of his shrub. Yet while hanging, waiting for death, he notices some drops of honey on the leaves of the shrub, and reaches out and licks them.
⁶
This is man, suspended between the possibilities of violent accidental death and inevitable natural death, diseases accelerating them, yet still eating, drinking, laughing at Fernandel in the cinema. This is the man who calls the Outsider morbid because he lacks appetite for the honey!

At this point, we can turn from Tolstoy
’
s
Confession
to a fictional account he wrote of the crisis in the short story,
‘
Memoirs of a Madman
’
. This will make the case even clearer. The hero of this short story explains that he has just been examined by a board to be certified insane. He was not certified, but only because he restrained himself and did not give himself away. He goes on to tell how he went
‘
mad
’
. As a child, he had once had an
‘
attack
’
when he heard the story of the Crucifixion: the cruelty made a deep impression:
‘
I sobbed and sobbed and began knocking my head against the wall.
’

There follows on account of his growing-up, his teens and
‘
sexual impurities
’
(the later Tolstoy had an obsession about sexual impurity that Kierkegaard or Nietzsche would have found funny). Then the Civil Service, marriage and managing his estates; finally, he becomes a Justice of the Peace. He is now entering middle age.

Then the first attack comes. He is on a journey to buy a far-distant estate when he wakes up in the carriage
‘
with a feeling that there was something terrifying
’
. It is like Henry James Sr.
’
s attack, striking into the middle of contentment and health. Its effect is rather like Roquentin
’
s nausea; it fixes itself on certain objects, a wart on the cheek of an innkeeper, the corners of a whitewashed room.

In the night, the terror comes again, and he thinks:
‘
Why have I come here ? Where am I taking myself? ... I am running away from something dreadful and cannot escape it.
I
am always
with myself and it is I who am my tormentor
…
Neither the Penza
or any other property will add anything or take anything from me: and it is myself I am weary of and find intolerable and a
torment. I want to fall asleep and forget myself and cannot. I cannot get away from myself.
’
⁶
[Italics mine.]

Here, in one passage, we can hear echoes of T. E. Lawrence (
‘
...
I did not like the
‘‘
myself
⁵
’
I could see and hear
’
), Roquentin, Nijinsky, William James (
‘
nothing I possess can save me ...
’
).

The story details several of these attacks. The idea of death troubles him, and the meaninglessness of life.

What is life for? To die? To kill myself at once? No, I am afraid. To wait for death till it comes? I fear that even more. Then I must live.
But what for?
In order to die? And I could not escape from that circle. I took up the book, read, and forgot myself for a moment, but then again, the same question and the same horror. I lay down and closed my eyes. It was worse still.
⁷

He tries prayer, prayer in the doubting sense, as in
‘
Ash Wednesday
’
.
‘
If Thou dost exist, reveal to me why and what I am.
’
No result.

The ending of the story is rather disconcerting. On a hunting expedition he gets lost in the forest, and is again attacked by
‘
the horror
’
. But he is closer to an
intuitive
understanding of the way out. At home again, he begins to pray for forgiveness of his sins. A few days later, when a nearby estate is for sale on terms that would give great advantage to the landlord and none to the peasants, he realizes that
‘
all men are sons of the same father
’
and decides not to buy it. Later, at the church door he gives away all his money to beggars, and walks home with the peasants, talking of religion. (Again the curious parallel with Nijinsky.)

After this, we assume, his relatives try to have him certified.

Now up to a point we can follow what happens to the
‘
madman
’
because we have seen it happening to other Outsiders. But all this praying, studying the Old Testament ? The story was written when Tolstoy was seventy, but its conclusion does not seem a great advance on Peter Bezukhov
’
s solution, written when he was half that age, of becoming a Freemason and adopting actively the doctrine of the brotherhood of all men. Yet Tolstoy was no fool. There must be something valid in the conclusion, something that follows from the Outsider
’
s premises.

Before we press the question, there is another treatment by Tolstoy of the same theme that will give us more to go on. At the beginning of
A Confession,
he speaks of the increasing frequency of the attacks:

‘
There occurred that which happens to everyone sickening with a mortal internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition occur
...
then these signs reappear more and more often and merge into one uninterupted period of suffering.
...
The suffering increases, and before the sick man can look round ... it is death.
’
⁸

Tolstoy
’
s
Death of Ivan Ilytch
follows this plan. It shows the once-born petty official, Ivan Ilytch, as he advances to become a Justice of the Peace (
‘
judge not that ye be not judged
’
was one of Tolstoy
’
s favourite sermon texts), with home, children, admiring colleagues, a club, etc. Then, the first
‘
slight indisposition
’
. The cancer begins to eat into his being, and as the realization that he is going to die breaks upon him, he begins to ask himself:
‘
What if my whole life has really been wrong?
’
A realization, foreshadowing that of Roquentin, of the meaningless of his life, of all other people
’
s, dawns on him. But
how
should he have lived? he asks himself. There he can find no answer. There were moments, but they were just flashes, impulses he suppressed or forgot. And his wife and children, they don
’
t care for him really, and if they did it wouldn
’
t matter. All his life he has lived with other people; now he is dying alone. But a sudden impulse of charity towards his wife—he has come to hate her insincerity and shallowness—suddenly illumines the darkness, and gives him a glimpse of
selflessness.
And in a flash, the fear of death has gone:

In place of death there was light...

‘
It is finished
’
somebody said near him.

He heard the words and repeated them in his soul
.

‘
Death is finished.
’
⁹

The words that released him from his wretchedness were:
‘
Forgive me.
’

We now have four versions of religious awakening from Tolstoy.
All of them begin by the person
’
s becoming an Outsider.
They are to be divided into two types: Peter Bezukhov, the
‘
madman
’
and Tolstoy himself all suffered from
‘
attacks
’
, like
Roquentin. Ivan Ilytch lived an
‘
unreal life
’
and only realized its unreality when facing death, like Meursault. In all four cases, the main symptom was self-hatred, a desire to escape oneself. In all four cases, the escape is achieved by seizing on the essence of Christianity as
selflessness.
The aim is to escape oneself. Other people are a means to this end: but the end is still to escape oneself. If the end became to love other people and practical charity, its result could easily be a new form of self-love.

It will be seen at once that there is not such a wide divergence between this view and Nietzsche
’
s teaching in
Z
^arat
hustra.
Zarathustra says
‘
What is the greatest thing a man can experience? It is the hour of great [self-] contempt.
’
The
means
are different for Nietzsche, but the end is the same.

Tolstoy cannot take us a great deal further where the Outsider
’
s problems are concerned. He can take us a great distance, but if we stick to our original intention, not to plunge into any religious conclusion, then we had better stop short of Tolstoyan Christianity. Admittedly, it is a rational Christianity, that finds the meaning of Christ
’
s message in His life and teachings, not in His
‘
atoning death
’
. But it also wanders to limits that can throw no light on the subject of this study, into a sort of Manicheism, for instance, where the spirit world is good and of God and the material world is evil and of the devil. In the Middle Ages, Manicheans carried their belief to its logical conclusion, and condemned even reproduction of the species; the sex-act itself was evil (as with Tolstoy); when someone was dying, they helped him on his way by starvation, assuring him that he was leaving all evil behind him with the flesh. Tolstoy pulls up short of this extremity, but his later beliefs as to what was sinful and what not suggest a religion of Talmudic law and dogma that can hardly be reached from our Existentialist premises of Chapter I.

* * *

Who am I ?—This is the Outsider
’
s final problem. Well, who precisely is he?
‘
Man is a bourgeois compromise
’
, a half-way house. But a half-way house towards what? The superman? We have seen that the superman is not a gigantic piece of Nietzschean crankery, but a valid poetic concept that develops from the same urges as the saint and spiritual reformer. But
‘
the great man is a play-actor of his own ideals
’
, and you cannot act well unless you have a clear idea of the part you are going to play. So when Tolstoy
’
s madman wakes up in his carriage with a nightmare sense of horror, and the question What am I? then the road towards the superman, or the saint or the artist of genius, is temporarily blocked up. The question of Identity lies across it.

An interesting point, this; for what is identity? These men travelling down to the City in the morning, reading their newspapers or staring at advertisements above the opposite seats, they have no doubt of who they are. Inscribe on the placard in place of the advertisement for corn-plasters, Eliot
’
s
lines:

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

and they would read it with the same mild interest with which they read the rhymed advertisement for razor blades, wondering what on earth the manufacturers will be up to next. Some of them even carry identity cards—force of habit—that would tell you precisely who they are and where they live.

They have
aims,
these men, some of them very distant aims: a new car in three years, a house at Surbiton in five; but an aim is not an ideal. They are not play-actors. They change their shirts every day, but never their conception of themselves. Newman confessed that, when he looked at the world, he couldn
’
t see the slightest evidence for the existence of God.
¹⁰
We, who may have known Vaslav Nijinsky
’
s instinctive certainty in some intuition—listening to music, perhaps— can understand that the idea of God is associated with the dynamic,
‘
spirit breaking on the coasts of matter
’
, and understand what Newman meant, looking at this sea of static personality.