Sainthood

It said here, I think, years ago now that there were only two titles I'd like, professor and saint. Not any more, though. Professor's only a job and not one I'd like. Adorning one's name with epithets like titles before or letters after weighs one down like a royal wearing lots of medals at a ceremony. My name is a common enough one but it's all I need. The B.A. (Hons) need only appear on a CV if ever I had to provide one, which I won't.

Sainthood's odd, though. Plenty of people still think it's a good thing, like righteousness, but the language continues to move on and shift its meanings further. Sainthood is conferred by the Catholic church as a reward for work in its service like a Conservative party donor given a place in the House of Lords. While saints are usually credited with miracles, it is similarly a miracle that anybody would want to sponsor that ramshackle racket of self-interest except, of course, self-interest is why they do it.

I finished A.N. Wilson's weighty and impressive life of Tolstoy today. Wilson himself would possibly be deserving of some sort of honour were it not for his woeful dismissals of Seamus Heaney. It is a blind spot that makes him human and thus flawed. There are no saints, we are all who we are and we all think what we want to think. But Tolstoy was regarded as a saint in his lifetime, mostly for good reasons but, as ever, he couldn't provide the necessary unblemished record.

It took him some time to emerge from a ruinous gambling habit, a huge appetite for debauchery and a rich young man's lack of purpose. But Wilson quotes a number in the many millions of pages of writing he went on to produce that is industrial on a vast scale, with War and Peace and Anna Karenina being such achievements and only counting less than a thousand pages each. Put alongside his thirteen children and political and religious concerns, it is evidence of enormous energy. His mass popularity and the crowds he gathered were something far beyond literary significance and Wilson points out that his two big masterpiece novels weren't the cause of it. Like Saint Albert Camus later, it's hard to think that such a great novelist wasn't necessarily most importantly a novelist.

I took some satisfaction from the handful of times Wilson made comparisons with Alexander Solzhenitsyn who I spent some teenage years reading in the mid-1970's and now sometimes wonder if I should have been reading something else. Dickens, for instance, who was so admired by Tolstoy. But I was also pleased to see a few references to Larkin edging their way in, showing that Larkin is a part of the Wilson firmament even if one hardly thinks of him as Tolstoyan.

Tolstoyan comes to mean a Christian faith and devotion, despite the doubts anybody would have, that went beyond any church into the pursuit of a simple, rustic life, as he saw it, anti-war, valuing some impossible idyll of life, and revolutionary at a time in Tsarist Russia when revolution would have seemed to us the very least objective. But he was ex-communicated by the Orthodox Church and Lenin's 1917 revolution, being industrial and genocidal, was anything but Tolstoyan.

But as self-styled genius with all too much regard for itself can often be, Tolstoy's practice didn't follow all that it preached. As with many such men, his marriage was a catastrophe, he seems severly unhappy struggling with his malevolent demons and he is cruel to those close to him. In the closing chapters, anybody and everybody, knowing that they are living in such important times, is keeping diaries in order that their side of the story will be on record. It is madness and maybe it did drive Sofia mad.

In one telling vignette, Tolstoy asks a guest if he would empty his own chamber pot as he regards it as beneath the dignity of a servant to have to do so. Sofia has no such qualms and doesn't understand what they pay servants for if it's not to do that and informs the guest otherwise. But the guest is English and does what an Englishman, one might hope, would do at least in those days in those circumstances and makes no use of the chamber pot but uses the extensive garden instead.

But sainthood is beyond us, just another ludicrous invention of the imagination. The more one knows about a saint, the less they prove to be one.

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So, tempted by the new, highly recommended (by A.N. Wilson in The Times) biography of Dante, I find I can wait until later for that because there's more Balzac and Gogol on the shelves, waiting. And, moving a few books about to accommodate Tolstoy upstairs, I found John Steinbeck. I must have had that for 40-odd years and not read it yet. But Dead Souls is up next.