40 years ago at University, somebody, not me, got 80% for an essay on Chekov. It was unheard of at Lancaster when a first began at 70. My effort on Larkin was in the right area but 2:1 was my station in life. Returning to my one book of Chekov stories last weekend I can see he might be easy enough to write about. We were advised not to attempt the Joyce of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake so I enjoyed myself hugely with Dubliners. The parallels between Chekhov and Dubliners are as obvious now as the essay I did when asked to compare a Shakespeare play with one by Marlowe. Okay, Richard II and Edward II. I bet nobody else thought of that. I took few chances with essays in those days.
Having reached the inexorable end of Doktor Faustus, something had suggested Chekhov so I had a very successful Sunday with The Kiss and other stories (Penguin Classics, 1982, £1.95) which very soon led to a trip to Amazon to find more.
Perhaps it's always ourselves we find in books, either prizing the bits we find ourselves reflected back in or taking as favourites those that show us what we knew already only better. I can't see literature as escapism or changing us much. The reason why there's not much Wagner, Bruckner or even Mahler in the house and no Tolkien, science fiction and only Mansfield Park of Jane Austen is that they're not me. And this was a stand-out line, among many, from Chekhov, from Concerning Love,
But I'd only be taking her away from an ordinary, pedestrian life into one that was just the same, just as prosaic, even more so, perhaps. etc. etc.
In his introduction, Ronald Wilks sees it is a critique of Aloykhin that 'his mistake was waiting for love and happiness to come to him of their own accord' but I'm not convinced we want literature to be as didactic as that, certainly not Chekhov. It was perceptive and an act of kindness and probably wisdom to let it pass.
He was, of course, the big name that the likes of Geoege Moore, Dubliners and, more lately, William Trevor owed so much to. He is a very important name I haven't read enough of and that will be remedied this Autumn.
Along with Mendelson's Early Auden once I've finished the temporarily suspended Later Auden and the new poetry by Michael Hofmann and Paul Muldoon will be on their way. So I'll tell you about them when the time comes.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
