"Gooseberries" by Anton Chekhov, Never Let Me Go, Death, and Sadness.

2/6/22

Dear Friends,

(can we accept that, in general, there will be triggery material in this newsletter? Take care as you read)

This post has a paywall, way way down. While I’m trying to keep my newsletter open to all, I’ve decided to keep my personal writing behind a paywall in order to preserve its worth, because I believe it takes a lot out of me. If you’d like to read it all, please become a paying subscriber.

Ah, here is a story, the one I was going to write about. Published first in 1898, “Gooseberries” is a simple story on its surface. Two men get stuck in a rainstorm and seek refuge at their friend’s house. Sometimes stories appear simple along their edges but expand upon closer inspection, blurring their edges and melting outwards. This is one of those stories, as relevant as any story written today, and philosophically aligned with many of the movies and television shows produced today.

Imagine it: Ivan Ivanych, a veterinarian, and his friend Burkin, a high-school teacher, are tramping through a field in fine weather. Rain comes. A downpour. They decide to head to their friend Alyokin’s place, Sofino, where they find their friend in a dirty shirt and underpants, unwashed. He invites them into his large house.

Chekhov.

The men, given soap and new clothes by “the beautiful Pelageya,” whose beauty is remarked upon by the narrator each time she appears in the story (which is the first hint that this is a story of class, not simply of friendship), go to the washhouse. Burkin and Alyokhin wash, but Ivan Ivanych washes, then jumps into the pond and swims joyfully in the rain.

Here, Alyokhin and Burkin grow uncomfortable, watching their friend swim.

“Ivan Ivanych came out of the cabin [washhouse], dived in with a loud splash and swam in the rain, making broad sweeps with his arms and sending out waves with white lilies bobbing about on them.”

Ivan Ivanych: “‘Oh, good god,’ he kept saying with great relish.” He says a few words to the peasants, who only appear in the story here, now, when his attention is cast upon them. Ivan Ivanych continues his joyous swim unti Burkin shout, “Now that’s enough.”

Ivan Ivanych has a story to tell, and all three men sit in the warm, comfortable drawing room.

“…while his beautiful Pelageya glided silently over the carpet and gently smiled as she served tea and jam on a tray…”

Pelageya, ephemeral and beautiful, is an important character in this story though she never speaks. The narrator presses her into our consciousness and makes sure we see her, yet doesn’t animate her beyond serving the men. Some may call this sexist on Chekhov’s part, but I believe it’s entirely intentional. Here are three men relaxing, all of them comfortable and above the level of peasants, and this silent beautiful, seemingly empty woman serves them. She has no needs, and yet she appears in Ivanych’s story, which is about his brother, Nikolay Ivanych (these two characters are the only in the story given last names).

Nikolay longs for a country life. A simple country life. And gooseberries. He’s obsessed with gooseberries. So Nikolay saves his money. But it’s not enough. He wants more money. He strips his life of all joy in order to live frugally and, according to Ivan, turns mean. He marries a woman for her money and then refuses to grant her any luxuries. She dies within three years “half-starved” by Nikolay’s frugality. At this point in the story Ivan strays:

“Of course, my brother didn’t think that he was to blame — not for one minute! Like vodka, money can make a man do the most peculiar things. There was once a merchant living in our town who was on his deathbed. Just before he dies, he asked for some honey, stirred it up with all his money and winning lottery tickets, and swallowed the lot to stop anyone else from laying their hands on it. And another time, when I was inspecting cattle at some railway station, a dealer fell under a train and had his leg cut off. We took him to the local casualty department. The blood simply gushed out, a terrible sight, but all he did was ask for his leg back and was only bothered about the twenty roubles he had tucked away in the boot. Scared he might lose them, I dare say!”

“‘But that’s neither here nor there,’ Burkin said.” And yet, reader! Is it neither here nor there? No! It is both here and there.

This deviation from the story about Ivan’s brother is another dip in the story, where Burkin resists what he sees as a non sequitur. The first was Ivan’s swimming in the pool. Now it’s this deviation from the “main story” about his brother, into the commentary about how money can steal people’s attention away from what, to Ivan, seems to matter more. Instead of the merchant seeking to spend his dying day with family or friends, he mixes his money with honey and eats it, though clearly he can’t take it with him where he is going. When a cattle dealer loses his leg, he immediately searched for the roubles tucked away in his boot— either because he cares too much about money, or because he is living in such poverty that the thought of losing the money is more extreme than that of losing his leg.

When Ivan, in his story, visits his brother, he finds a lazy dog who resembles a pig, a plump cook resembling a pig (I shall avert my eyes from the fatphobia but ew, I hate it). He finds his brother flabby and haggard looking. They embrace and cry at the thought of their younger selves.

His brother, he says, is now a gentleman. He gets upset “when the villagers didn’t call him sir.” As a community service “he doled out bicarbonate of soda and castor oil to his villagers — no matter what they were suffering from — and on his name day held a thanksgiving service in the village, supplying vodka in plenty, as he thought this was the right thing to do.”

Ivan changes the course of the story, though, and instead of simply criticizing his brother turns the story’s attention to himself. Upon seeing his brother so happy, he’s overcome by sadness “close to utter despair.” That evening, hearing his brother eating the sour gooseberries in the neighboring room, he can’t help but think of those who suffered so that his brother can live such a contented life.

“It’s obvious that the happy man feels contented only because the unhappy ones bear their burden without saying a word: if it weren’t for their silence, happiness would be quite impossible. It’s a kind of mass hypnosis. Someone ought to stand at the door of every happy contented man, continually banging upon it to remind him that there are unhappy people around and that however happy he may be at the time, sooner or later life will show him its claws and disaster will overtake him in the form of illness, poverty, bereavement, and there will be no one to hear and see him.”

Ivan realizes: he is too happy and contented. Since seeing his brother he’s been miserable. Why aren’t people clamoring for change? He ends his story on this note and implores his friends not to be “lulled into complacency.” Neither friend is satisfied with the story. They all go to bed, their sheets readied by Pelageya.

This story provides no answers. It direct’s the readers attention but doesn’t insist that the reader come to any specific conclusion. This is why I love Chekhov, and so many writers who have followed along in his lineage— I think specifically of Toni Morrison and the way she lays her stories out, shows all sides of her characters, and yet never tries to force the reader to feel a certain way, which is in itself a resistance to the labels of “good” or “bad.”

Is Ivan Ivanych better than his friends and brother for seeing a problem and letting it corrupt his happiness? What has he accomplished by telling his story? And what of his pond swimming, the joy he felt in the water?

These questions, I think, feel very relevant to me, especially when many of us living “privileged” lives are inundated with news of the less-privileged, and yet all of us inhabit different levels of privilege, many of those intricacies and nuance aren’t always perceptible by an outsider looking in. I struggle to pay my rent each month, yet I live in a country with people generous enough to pay me for my writing. I have been homeless and yet I am no longer homeless.

It’s all so complex. What did you think of this story?

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Last night I watched Never Let Me Go (spoilers ahead). I ate an edible weed candy and let myself be the soaring and crashing of the story. Not gonna lie— I cried a lot.

Kazuo Ishigiro’s book is one of my favorites— I’ve read it many times and now want to reread it again. The story follows the lives of three people who at first appear to be regular children, but the viewer finds out about their “specialness” as the children themselves find out, from a teacher who can’t keep the secret of their lives anymore, that they have been birthed into the world as organ donors for “real” humans, whose life expectancy has skyrocketed to over 100 years-old.

Ruth, Kathy H., and Tommy.

Kathy H., Ruth, and Tommy enter into a love triangle with heartbreaking repercussions. It’s clear that Kathy and Tommy love each other, yet when they’re very young Ruth decides to be with Tommy. From Hailsham, their primary school, they head to the cottages for a year, before they’ll become donors. After they leave the cottages, the three separate.

“It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.” -Kathy H.

The three separate and then coalesce again; Kathy is a carer, caring for donors, and Ruth has completed her second donation and is likely to die after her third. Tommy is in better shape after his second donation. The three drive out to a boat that’s washed up onshore. After Tommy runs out to the boat, visibly weak because of his surgeries, they all gather on the sand (pictured above.)

Ruth, knowing she is going to “complete,” tells Tommy and Kathy that she wants their forgiveness for separating them — she was jealous of their love and took Tommy from Ruth. She begs them to ask for a “deferment,” a rumored way to defer completion so that a couple in love can be together for a little longer. But when Kathy H. and Tommy, heartbreakingly hopeful, ask the former headmistress of their school for a deferment (Ruth has given them the address), presenting Tommy’s artwork as proof of their love for each other, they’re told that deferments aren’t real. That the art they used to gather from students when they were younger wasn’t to decide which of them deserved deferments, but to convince society that these creatures, created as donors to prolong the lives of humans, had souls. It didn’t work.

The film ends after Kathy H. has lost Tommy. She’s come to a field lined with a barbed wire fence. Small pieces of plastic have accumulated in the wire and their loose parts dance in the wind, as if trying to break free and fly away.

“I come here, and imagine that this is the spot where everything I’ve lost since my childhood has washed up. I tell myself, if that were true, and I waited long enough, then a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I’d see it was Tommy. He’d wave. And maybe call. I don’t let the fantasy go beyond that. I can’t let it. I remind myself I was lucky to have had any time with him at all.

What I’m not sure about is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.”