A long time ago I read Arnold Bennet’s novel The Old Wives’s Tale. I remember only two things about it: I enjoyed reading it, and it was about as sad a story as I could imagine.
This book has not been the only fiction without a happy ending that I have enjoyed. Two short stories by Chekhov, “Gusev” and “A Dreary Story” both center on a character dying of disease, with no hope of a cure. A typical formula in Chekhov’s fiction: place a character in an intolerable situation, close off all avenues of escape, and watch him be destroyed. Generations of readers have found Chekhov good to read. I concur. But why?
Edwin Arlington Robinson similarly celebrated the doomed. His poem “The Gift of God” is about a widow who imagines for her son every virtue, every talent, and every coming success. Everyone else in town knows her son for a dolt, and we wonder how long she can maintain the illusion that protects her from the terrible realities of her life. And “Mr. Flood’s Party” is about a lonely old drunk whose drinking has lost him every form of companionship except his jug.
I am not a masochist. I like life and welcome such happiness as comes my way. But Chekhov and Robinson give me more pleasure than most other writers. I know that it is the same for other readers.
Would be much obliged for explanation.
Books Matter 
No mystery, really. Reading is vicarious experience.From the relative safety of the page, we are guided,relatively unscathed, into all manner of dark places. Of course you know this. Give one a key hole to peepthrough, and you’ll find them crouched before it for hours. Reading E. A Robinson thrilled me initially and onoccasion since. As you say, his characters are doomed, and he casts their fate in relentless iambics. Here wasa poet for my ear back then. Coincidentally, it turned out,we shared the same birth date, December 22, on thefollowing edge of the winter solstice, which, astrologicallyspeaking, made us “children of light,” not darkness. So much for astrology. P.
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That is a good theory. I will mull it over. My theory is that we become the doomed sufferers in our own minds, and have the consolation of knowing that at least our suffering is being noted by someone — by the poet, or the omniscient narrator, or the readers. Your theory is simpler and for that reason is to be preferred. Thanks!
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Yes, that’s a good thought — from one’s place of safety observing people coming to a sad end. We are drawn to it. Especially as we know instinctively that the Buddha was right: existence is suffering. Time and chance happeneth to them all. To us, too, inevitably.
I was pointed to Honoré de Balzac by Barbara Tuchman in her monograph of Thomas B. Reed, the great 19th-century Speaker of the House, whose reading was deep and wide. (“Vanity Fair” was his favorite novel.) Reed taught himself French after the age of forty in order to read Balzac in the original. I can’t remember Reed’s exact words, but they were something like, “There is no book of his that is not sad beyond words.” Reed was onto something there. “Old Goriot” in particular was shattering. I remember that in the introduction to that book, the editor mentioned a story about Balzac’s landlady, who had told her neighbors that she was afraid for Balzac’s sanity as he was finishing the novel, such were the heart-wracking cries and sobs that escaped from behind the door.
Now, that’s sad.
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BTW: There’s an excellent translation of Pere Goriot by the English poet Henry Reed. The Cure of Tours is another sad story. The Cure is a mediocre but harmless priest whose dream is to become chaplain of the local cathedral, not for the prestige of the appointment, but because the chaplain’s apartment is furnished with elegant furniture, and elegant furniture is the one thing that the cure’s prosaic soul can adore. The rich woman in whose gift the chaplaincy is is delighted by cure’s absurdity, invites him to dinner often, raises his hopes, snd then one evening at dinner introduces him to a surprise dinner guest — the new chaplain. The cure, his heart broken, is packed off to an assignment in the poorest part of the city.
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Hardy and Gissing give me the same thrills. Maybe it is because, as Dickinson said “I trust a frown because I know it’s real.”
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Whàt Gissing would you recommend?
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