Writing War and Peace was a happy time for Tolstoy. You can feel it in the prose, in the ineffable lift of some of the book’s 125 scenes. He was already a bit of a literary star when he started it in 1862. Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854), Youth (1857), and The Cossacks (1862), all novellas, had already come out in literary journals and made quite the splash. And unlike his contemporary, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (pronounced by Russian speakers with the emphasis on the second vowel) didn’t have any money worries; he was an independently wealthy aristocrat who lived on an inherited four-thousand-acre estate with a woman who, at that point anyway, adored him and believed ardently in his gifts. Writing in her diary, Sofya confided, “Are there any couples more united and happier than we Sometimes, when I am alone in my room, I begin to laugh and cross myself,” and elsewhere, “Nothing affects me as strongly as his ideas and his talent.” Sofya also, and this seems almost unimaginable today, copied out most of the 1,400-page W&P manuscript at least seven times. “Have I changed,” she wrote, “or is the book really very good” Tolstoy was never so joyful again and, for my money, never wrote so well again.
One morning I zoomed into the hotel restaurant and spotted an inordinately good-looking young man sitting at a table, having coffee. I had just finished the section where Rostov takes a nighttime sleigh ride with the young Sonya, the moon hanging in the sky, bells on the horses jingling. It was a scene that had so exhilarated me, so excited my faith in romantic love, the notion that all things were still possible, even for me, that I had been unable to sit still and had finally shot out of the room. And now, look, a human being! Tanned, with a Roman nose and perfect teeth, he looked like a movie star. When he opened his mouth to return my greeting, I heard a soft Australian accent. I plied him with questions. He was a musician, taking a holiday. That’s nice. And is your band doing well Quite well. Do you play at dances and stuff No, we play stadiums. Stadiums “I’m with Midnight Oil,” he said, and rather shyly too.
He stayed for three days; we had breakfast together each morning, on the last of which I read him the passage about Natasha and the starry night. I never saw him again, but I’ve always remembered his fresh good looks, his patient interest in Tolstoy. Years and years later I interviewed the lead singer for Midnight Oil, I forget his name, the bald guy, and I asked him about the young man in Jamaica, the bass guitarist, and I heard he’d quit the band after only a year or two, hadn’t liked the life and had gone off and opened up a surf shop somewhere on the Queensland Coast—which made me like him even more.
One afternoon, as I flopped soft-tummied and sweating in a beach chair not fifty feet from the Italians (” Ciao! Mia, Ciao!”), a pair of big-toothed California girls (they stayed at an all-inclusive, miles down the beach) struck up a conversation with me. Seeing that I was reading Tolstoy, one of them said, “What do you do”
“I’m a model,” I said. And they stayed; they stayed the whole afternoon and when they left they invited me to meet them later that evening. What excitement. Company! Conversation! (I had taken to eating my lunch in front of the mirror.) But when I turned up later that night, fluffy-haired and chirpy, at a cliffside restaurant, I saw them stealing their way across the patio. (It irritates me to this day.) The one in the lead caught sight of me; her fingers reached guiltily for an earlobe, an involuntary gesture Tolstoy would have enjoyed, and she told me, get this, that they had already eaten. Already eaten Embarrassed, shocked, speechless, and then enraged, I said, “I’m going over there for a drink,” and hurried to the empty bar. I drank several ice-cold Red Stripes so fast they made my eyes burn. I felt like I was putting out a fire.
I walked home that night under a beautiful moon. On the main floor of the hotel, behind a metal grille and curtains, I could make out the blue glare of a television set. The owner, that big ex-cop, was watching Scarface with Al Pacino. I coughed into my hand, then again with the vague hope that he might call me in for a visit—his wife was teaching school in Kingston—but no luck. I heard a murmur of confidential laughter. The girl who did the housecleaning was in there.
Later that night, Tolstoy just about finished me off. (Never get too comfortable with a Russian writer.) Natasha—my Natasha—is being seduced by a worthless playboy at the opera:
When she was not looking at him, she felt that he was looking at her shoulders, and she could not help trying to catch his eyes that he might rather look in her face. But as she looked into his eyes she felt with horror that, between him and her, there was not that barrier of modest reserve she had always been conscious of between herself and other men. In five minutes she felt-she did not see how-that she had come fearfully close to this man.
News gets back to her fiancé, Prince Andrei, and the marriage is off.
