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Overview
The unique Bevington way of autobiography recreates lessons and insights of other lives, historical figures, and compelling incidents, and combines them in a narrative that follows the emotional currents of her life. Evoking a wide range of historical and literary figures, including Chekhov, Marcus Aurelius, Flannery O’Connor, Simone de Beauvoir, Thoreau, Beatrix Potter, Sappho, Yeats, Alexander the Great, Montaigne, Saint Cecilia, Virginia Woolf, Liv Ullmann, and many others, Bevington finds in these lives a path that has guided her search away from solitude. Through her reflections on the ten years that followed her son’s death, we become aware of how far she has traveled, how the search has brightened, how she has eloquently evolved into old age. In the end she is sitting, like the Buddha, under her own fig tree, waiting not for death but for further illumination.
An original contemplation of the universal dilemmas and tragedies of existence, The Third and Only Way is at once warm, funny, and inspiring—full of learning and wisdom.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822378723 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 545 KB |
About the Author
Helen Bevington’s many books include The World and the Bo Tree and The Journey Is Everything, both published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
The Third and Only Way
Reflections On Staying Alive
By Helen Bevington
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7872-3
CHAPTER 1
Chekhov's Way
Chekhov, so soon to die, stayed a happy man. The letters he wrote, some four thousand that survive, show him cheerful, basically a man who liked wine, pretty women, and the sound of church bells. In the end, church bells were all that remained of his faith.
You would call his life hard. He wrote, "There was no childhood in my childhood" — a time of poverty with beatings from a harsh father, son of a serf. Chekhov had his first hemorrhage at twenty-four, the year he graduated in medicine from Moscow University. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, three years after marrying the actress Olga Knipper of the Moscow Art Theatre, from whom he lived apart, forced to seek a warm climate in the Crimea. From his thousand stories and five plays of Russian life, one is easily deceived into thinking him melancholy, depressed by life and despairing of the people in it. Tolstoy told him, "As you know I detest Shakespeare. Well, your plays are worse than his." Chekhov laughed. Aware of the pathos of existence, the loneliness, the boredom, he said, "I only wished to tell people honestly, 'Look at yourselves, see how badly and boringly you live!'" His story "Happiness," a favorite of his, says there is happiness enough in the world if you know how to find it.
In the country, where he loved to stay, he would announce, "I am a man who enjoys life," "I am thriving to the marrow of my bones." The birds sang indefatigably, the smell of freshly cut hay intoxicated him: "One has only to sit beside a haystack in order to imagine oneself in the embraces of a naked woman." In his thirties he bought a rundown estate of 675 acres in Melikhovo to escape an apartment in Moscow and the solitude he hated. ("When I'm alone, for some reason I become terrified.") Here he brought his parents, brothers, beloved sister Masha, and endless guests; here he planted cherry trees, felt joy: "At moments I am so happy that I pull myself up and remind myself of my creditors." But he spent his nights coughing.
Chekhov loved the theater, the characters in his plays and the actors who portrayed them: "So I, after dining with the star, was aware of a halo round my head for two days afterward." His wit never failed him, his love of laughter that saved him from despair. Much as he believed in the necessity of work ("You must work, you know, and never stop your whole life through"), he would drop it for a party, gathering a company of revelers round him. "When I become rich," he wrote, "I shall have a harem in which I shall keep fat naked women, with their buttocks painted green."
He had no intention of marrying, kept hidden the fact that he was coughing up blood. In 1899 he was condemned to stay most of the year in Yalta, from which with the success of The Seagull he wrote, "If I did not have to live in Yalta, this winter would be the happiest of my life." He knew he had not long to live: "My friend, you forget I'm a doctor." When he relented and became the husband of Olga Knipper, he addressed her in hundreds of letters, pouring out endearments to my unusual wife, my exquisite missus, my sweet delightful Knippschitz. "And you, why are you depressed?" he asked her. "What are you depressed about? You are living, working, hoping, drinking.... What more do you want?"
Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard, written in 1904 while he struggled to stay alive, was performed as a tragedy of empty, trivial lives, a fact that hurt him, a misinterpretation of its meaning: "I call the play a comedy, in places even a farce" (though he also cried, "One must not live such a life!") An hour before his death he improvised a story that made Olga laugh heartily. The doctor came in and ordered champagne. "Ich sterbe," he whispered to the doctor. To Olga he said smiling, "It's a long while since I have drunk champagne," drained his glass to the last drop, lay back in his bed, and died.
The Happy Life
Martial, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind,
The equal friend, no grudge, no strife;
No charge of rule nor governance;
Without disease the healthy life;
The household of continuance,
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom joined with simpleness;
The night discharged of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress;
The chaste wife, wise, without debate;
Such sleep as may beguile the night;
Contented with thine own estate,
Nor wish for death nor fear his might. — Surrey
Henry Howard, proud, haughty, fiery-tempered Earl of Surrey — not a word of this beautiful poem fitted his tragic life. As a translation of Martial, who wrote in favor of the simple life (and in disgust with Rome retired at forty-eight to the country), it corrects Martial's stoical epigram XLVII, "Ad Seipsum," reminding him that the joys of such a life include the possession of a chaste wife, which Martial almost certainly never had.
An aristocrat of royal blood who was intended to marry Princess Mary, future queen of England, Surrey was more elegant than simple, more arrogant than wise, "the most foolish and proud boy that is in England." As courtier he witnessed the downfall of his cousin Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife; saw his other cousin Catherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife, put to death; and with reason trembled for his own fate. ("Too dearly had I bought my green and youthful years.") The powerful family of Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour, whom Surrey treated as vulgar upstarts, successfully plotted his downfall as another victim of the king's wrath. Before he was thirty he was trapped among enemies in court intrigue that, through his hauteur and pride, caused his death. On frivolous, trumped-up charges — that he favored Catholics, that he had eaten meat during Lent, that he had recklessly broken windows in London — he was imprisoned in the Tower, accused of a plot to murder the king, tried for high treason, and condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. Finally, in a more honorable kind of death which befitted his rank, he was beheaded on Tower Hill.
In 1557, ten years after his death, forty of Surrey's love songs and sonnets, including this poem, "The Happy Life," were published in TotteVs Miscellany "to the honor of the English tongue." "We resteth here," he wrote, "that quick could never rest."
Saint Francis of Assisi. Maybe because it's April, now eight months since Philip's death, I think of this man. He was happy, the Poverello, so in love with life that the legends surrounding him ought to be true. One story has him singing duets with a nightingale. The bird would trill a phrase and he would repeat it, two jongleurs de Dieu lifting their voices antiphonally till Francis ran out of breath. A nightingale can outsing a saint.
Born eight hundred years ago, he was a little man with black eyes who wore bells on his ankles to warn crickets to avoid being stepped on. He talked to stones and trod on them with care, removed the worms from his path and set them by the wayside, ordered honey and wine for the bees to see them through the winter, invited a cicada into his cell and chirped to encourage her. A lamb followed him to church and together they heard the Mass.
The quality of courtesy in Saint Francis was not strained. Because he loved fire, he wouldn't extinguish a candle. He showed marked civility toward all things great and small: people, animals, trees, flowers, stones, the wind and the rain. He exhorted the cornfields and vineyards to love God. He taught Sister Cow to genuflect. He preached to the sparrows of Alviano; Giotto painted him informing the birds of the gospel of love.
He reproved the Wolf of Gubbio for eating people. "Come to me, Brother Wolf," he said; and the hungry wolf that had terrorized the town of Gubbio (near Assisi) lay down at his feet, put its paw in his hand, and solemnly promised to behave itself and become a Christian. J. R. H. Moorman says in his bookSaint Francis of Assisi, "What could be more convincing than the story of the Wolf of Gubbio?"
The Confessions. I wonder what Wallace Stevens meant when he said, "I would sacrifice a great deal to be a Saint Augustine." My own reason for revering this man is that he asked God in the days before his conversion, "Make me chaste and continent, but not yet." Till now I'd never read The Confessions or known the extent of his dallying — this bishop of Hippo, church father and saint, who hadn't wanted to give up the flesh too soon.
He was born in 354 in a Roman town, Tagaste, when the Roman Empire had become officially Christian under the mighty Constantine. The days of persecution were over and his mother Monica was a practicing Christian, his father a pagan baptized on his deathbed. In this story of his sensuality and his penitence, written when he was about forty-five, Augustine wants you to believe that at sixteen he was already a sinner, wild and licentious and free, who looked at the girls and, my goodness, "boiled over" and "seethed as does the sea" with wanton desire. Moreover, he was a thief who once stole some pears from an orchard. He recalls with shame how, late one night in Tagaste, he and his friends invaded a nearby orchard and plucked the fruit, not to eat but to throw at the swine merely for the fun of it.
Then, he continues, "to Carthage I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves bubbled up all around me." Augustine's father sent him at seventeen to school in Carthage to study rhetoric. There, "inflated with arrogance and the madness of lust," he sought to learn about love, going to stage plays which only added to the fire of his passions when the lovers displayed their own. "Such was my life!" he cries of it, one spent in ungodly yearnings, "in love with loving." He took a mistress, and they unintentionally had a son whom he named Adeodatus, meaning "by God given." For fifteen years he lived with her unwed, and the insistent need "to love and be loved was sweet to me." Meanwhile he taught rhetoric and eloquence in Carthage, in Rome, and in Milan. It was in Milan that the miracle of conversion happened when, deeply troubled, one day in the year 387 at thirty-three, Augustine rushed into the garden, flung himself under a fig tree, and, in a passion of weeping, poured out his guilty heart to God: "But thou, O Lord, how long? How long, Lord? wilt thou be angry forever?"
And a voice said to him, "Take up and read." And he took up and read the letter of Paul to the Romans (13:13-14): "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its lusts."
The endearing part is that it took him so long.
Marcus Aurelius. He will tell me. The end to seek in life is not happiness, he said. It is peace of mind. Years ago when I came across the Meditations, I copied out passages that made sense to me. They make sense to me now. He wrote his one book, not in Latin but in Greek and called it To Myself — a strangely detached yet intimate diary for man or emperor to keep, to remind himself, "Let it be in no man's power to say that in you there is no simplicity and no goodness. Make it a lie for anyone to think this of you, for who can hinder you from being both simple and good?"
Though he adhered throughout his days to the Stoic doctrine — one of reason, impassivity, restraint, self-discipline — Marcus Aurelius kept intact a belief in the essential goodness of life. In a time of universal corruption he was virtuous, with a sense of decency that led him to be indulgent of the lack of it in others. He rid himself of anger. So real was his tolerance, so sparing of rebuke, that he blamed himself for his own indignation. "Why am I troubled in spirit?" he asked. "Why should I be indignant?"
Forbearance carried him far toward an insolent wife, Faustina, a wanton who disgraced him openly with her lusts and infidelities (while in his book he thanked the gods for so obedient and faithful a wife). Toward Commodus, his incurably vicious son, he was too forgiving, too indulgent. According to Lemprie?re, Commodus in his degenerate youth corrupted his own sisters and, as emperor at nineteen upon his father's death in 180 A.D., "kept three hundred women, and as many boys, for his licentious pleasures." "The intervals of lust," said Gibbon, "were filled up with the basest amusements." When his debauchery and drunkenness led to insanity, Commodus proclaimed himself Hercules the god, carried a club, and wore a lions skin over his purple and gold-embroidered robes. He fought gladiators and killed wild beasts in the Roman arena. Herodian of Antioch, who in his history of Rome asserts that he was an eyewitness, claims that Commodus killed one hundred lions with one hundred javelins, never missing a throw. He walked naked in public to the shame and horror of his people, becoming so hated for his demented antics and cruelty that his sister Lucilla conspired with a group of senators to assassinate him — a plot that failed. At thirty-one Commodus was poisoned by Marcia, the favorite of his mistresses, then strangled to death by a wrestler of the court. His reign of thirteen terrible years began the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
Yet Marcus Aurelius's diary is without complaint of his bestial son (whom possibly he may not have fathered). Instead it is a record of a man's philosophy, concerned with his inner life and filled with communings to steady himself to be the way he wanted to be. They are his day-to-day thoughts hastily noted for his study and reflection, often on the battlefield during the years spent fighting the barbaric Germanic tribes who attacked the frontiers. He hated war and loved peace. He sought understanding of others with compassion in his heart, a modest man to whom goodness was simply a matter of obeying reason. He has been likened to Saint Francis of Assisi. But Francis lived with God. Matthew Arnold called Marcus Aurelius "perhaps the most beautiful figure in history." John Stuart Mill likened him to Jesus Christ — a dubious comparison that made Marcus seem holy, a very god, as he was not, and a Christian when in fact he disliked Christians. He was born a century after Christ was crucified.
Withal, in spite of his charity he was not a saint, not blind to the ways of the world and the people in it, who, he once wrote, are like little dogs biting one another. "Every morning repeat to yourself, today I shall meet with a talebearer, an ingrate, and a bully; with treachery, envy, and selfishness. It is no surprise men are like this. How can any of them harm me? For none can involve me in shame save myself."
Short is the time that remains to you of life, he told himself — a mere hairbreadth of time before you are dust, without hope of eternal life after death, consigned to nothingness, to oblivion. Therefore, always take the short way, for the way of nature is short. Live as on a mountain, it matters not whether here or there. Nothing can make you think what is false or do what is wrong. And if the forces of evil finally become too many and too imperious so that you are not free, "kill yourself," he said. "No one can prevent that."
"Very little," he wrote, as if to give himself more assurance, "very little is needed to make a happy life."
Happy Pepys. Three hundred years ago Pepys was a man who played the flageolet and lute, took physic, took a bribe, had a boil under his chin, buried his pet canary, fondled the girls, kissed Mary Mercer and Bagwell the carpenter's pretty wife, dreamed of Lady Castlemaine in his arms, sang madrigals, and wrote, "I think I may reckon myself as happy a man as any is in the world."
Hospitable, too. For breakfast one New Year's Day, he gave his guests "a barrel of oysters, a dish of neat's tongues, a dish of anchovies, wine of all sorts and Northdown ale. And now, I am in good esteem with everybody, I think!" He got nits in his periwig, caught cold from having his ears washed, lived through the bubonic plague ("God preserve us all!") and the Great Fire, which reached his lane and singed the cat. Dalliance with the housemaid Deb Willet, for which his little wife came at him with a poker, caused "the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world." As one who hated to be unquiet at home, he sometimes wished himself single, and sorely regretted the time he blacked his wife's eye.
Having made peace with her and acquired a leather coach with coachman and two black horses, gained prosperity plus a worrisome pain in his eyes, on May 31, 1669, aged thirty-six, Pepys closed his book halfway through his life, closing a door on the rest of life and death still left to tell. A world of his own disappeared from view. Elizabeth died the following November — the pretty French girl he married when she was fifteen, he twenty-two, penniless and in love. She died six months after he stopped taking note of her teasing, her jealous fury, her pies and tarts in the house in Seething Lane. And he never told his grief.
When I remarked to the librarian of Magdalene College, Cambridge — Pepys's college where the six volumes of his diary and his three thousand books are kept in his own carved bookcases — that I had been coming to this room off and on since 1936, he said in surprise, "Is there something you are looking for?"
"I don't know," I said. "Whatever it is, I always find it." And Pepys as well.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Third and Only Way by Helen Bevington. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
I: The Third Way,1: Chekhov's Way,
2: Ways to Love,
3: Uncommon Women and Their Ways,
4: The Way with Words,
II: The Only Way,
And Yet,
When I Was Born and Full of Beans,
The Woman Whose Birthday Was Charlemagne's,
One Goes Abreast,
5: Reunion,
6: Colette's Way,
7: Looking Back,
8: Ways of Travel,
9: The Laughter Must Be Kept,
Postscript: End of Story,
And Things Are As I Think They Are,