Julian Jaynes’ book is long and in some places hard to understand, and it has been very controversial. Professors of psychology, of whom Jaynes was one, have for the most part not liked it. But read the book and make up your own mind. I can guarantee that you will be enormously interested if not entirely persuaded, as I am myself.
Jaynes died on Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1990. He had suffered a massive stroke, which unsettled all the arrangements he had made in his mind over the previous seventy years.
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
1918–
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic
The First Circle
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in Russia in 1918, the son of well-off liberal parents. His father, a politician who was opposed to the Soviet takeover of the government, was killed in a hunting accident in 1925. His mother died in 1940. Solzhenitsyn criticized Stalin in a private letter in 1945; he was arrested and sentenced to a labor camp and then to “permanent internal exile,” which meant Siberia. He had begun to write in secret some years before and was able to continue writing despite his punishment.
He managed to send a manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic to the literary magazine Novi Mir, which in turn was able to export it. It was published in 1962.
The book is based on his experiences in the winter wilderness of Siberia, where the two enemies are cold and forced labor. I have never forgotten the beginning of the book, when Ivan and a troop of fellow prisoners are forced to march through snow in temperatures just above zero Fahrenheit in shoes that are inadequate and clothes that are not warm. In the distance they perceive a single light shining in the otherwise total darkness; it is the searchlight or beacon of a walled encampment where they will spend the next few years if they survive the march. Solzhenitsyn does, and learns to wake before dawn, cover himself with as many clothes as he can find (some from mates who have frozen to death), eat as much as he can find (never enough), and try to survive another day in labor that is unnecessary except as a punishment.
Despite the conditions of their life, they form friendships that do not involve frank discussions of their dreadful conditions, since no one can be trusted not to repeat anything they might say in the hope of thereby gaining some pitifully small advantage.
The hope of a reprieve is not out of the question, and Solzhenitsyn received a kind of release that permitted him to return to Moscow and his wife and family. But he was not safe and knew he never would be safe, and in fact he was trapped again in circumstances that are described in The First Circle, the great book that he had begun to write in Siberia and now completed and again managed to give to Novi Mir. The book tells of a certain man who, because he has overheard some news about a friend whose life might be saved if he knew it, makes what he believes is a “safe” telephone call from a public phone far distant from his home, speaking in a voice that he tries to disguise. He says only a few words, then hangs up, but the call is traced—the description of how this is done is mesmerizing—and he is arrested, imprisoned, and interrogated continuously for weeks and months, then tried and sentenced to the Gulag.
Things were changing in the Soviet Union in those days. Solzhenitsyn was allowed to return to Moscow and continued to write. A manuscript of The First Circle was spirited out of the country and published in 1968, to immediate international acclaim, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature two years later. Unlike Boris Pasternak, who had been awarded the prize twelve years before for Doctor Zhivago but had refused to accept it in the fear that he would at best be exiled for life, Solzhenitsyn did accept the prize but, because he continued to write gripping and therefore unacceptable historical accounts of the Gulag, was soon exiled himself. He went to the United States and, after living for a few years in Vermont, returned to his home land, where he remains to this day.
I will never forget The First Circle, particularly the account, in a long chapter early in the book, of a meeting in the office of Stalin when several high officials enter to report on their recent activities. They are all extremely powerful men who in their own realms can do whatever they please to forward their careers. But being in the presence of a man who can condemn them in an instant to be beaten to death for some failure of omission or commission they have no way of knowing about in advance makes them tremble as they approach the Generalissimo, hoping against hope that he will not notice because even being afraid may be construed by him as a capital offense. And I remember reading the accounts of other absolute tyrants throughout history, including the emperors Augustus and Nero, Louis XIV, Hitler, and Mao, and I wonder as I always do why a people ever willingly accepts such a leader for the sake, as Thomas Hobbes posited, of security or some other dubious good.
I wonder if we are on the verge of accepting such a fate.
chapter fifteen
Only Yesterday
Most of the authors treated in Chapter 14 produced their best-known work before or during World War II or, in a few cases, before 1980. The authors discussed in this chapter are definitely children of the last half of the twentieth century. If they wrote about World War II, it was in the past for them but perhaps not in their novels. Many of them had been in the service, but they emerged from that experience with new ideas about the world they were inheriting. For a while the Cold War haunted their dreams, but then the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the United States emerged as apparently the only great power of the future. Of course no one was watching China at the time, but what would history be without surprises?
I began my reading career at the age of seven, which was in 1933. I read many of the books discussed in the previous chapters when I was young—in my forties or early fifties at the latest. In 1965, when I was thirty-nine, I moved to Chicago to take a position at Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., and for the next twenty years I didn’t read much (although I did reread many of the “classics” as part of my work). I retired in 1982, when I was fifty-six, and began to read at a frantic pace in order to catch up with the literature of my time. In the past twenty-five years I may have read five hundred or so books just because I had the time, and it was a great pleasure to be free to read whatever I wanted and not what I had to. This chapter includes the books that I have most enjoyed in those years.
FRED BODSWORTH
1918–
Last of the Curlews
Fred Bodsworth was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1918. He is an amateur naturalist and has had a long career of studying and writing about the natural world. He is a very good writer as is manifest in his best-known book, Last of the Curlews, which was first published in 1954. A new edition was issued in 1995 with a foreword by the poet M.S. Merwin and an afterward by the Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann. They were as impressed and moved as I was by this remarkable little book.