I’m looking out at the submarine base. In 1940, here, in Saint-Nazaire, a port town on the French Breton coast, the German Kriegsmarine erected this enormous base for building submarines. The famous U-boats, as they are called in English, or U-Boote, in German, an abbreviation of Unterseeboote. I look down through the window and I can see, directly opposite, the gray-brown block, oblong, dismal, vast (three hundred meters long, eighteen meters tall); then I turn my gaze to the pieces of paper scattered over my desk, photocopies of the correspondence between Chekhov and his friend Pleshcheev.
It is January 1888. In a letter to poet Alexei Pleshcheev, Anton Chekhov remarks on the process of writing “The Steppe,” his first long story. He tells him that writing long things is extremely tedious and much more difficult than writing trivial things. He also tells him that, in order to earn a little money, he is considering writing something short for one of the newspapers, perhaps for the Novoye Vremya, perhaps for the Peterburgskaya Gazeta. His friend Pleshcheev writes back at once, dismayed. He tries to dissuade him. He insists that it would be a great shame to put his long story aside and write something trivial just for the money, for newspapers that are read one day, he writes, and used as wrapping paper the next.
I watch a group of children running around on the roof of the submarine base. An outing from some French school, I think, and I think about the word trivial, about the importance of the trivial in art, in literature. Isn’t the trivial, after all, the raw material of the short story writer? Aren’t anecdotes that seem trivial—that is to say, insignificant—the very clay with which the short story writer carries out his craft and shapes his art? All of life, I think, is codified in these trivial, minuscule, transparent details—details that seem not to contain anything of importance (a leaf of grass, wrote Walt Whitman, is no less than the journey-work of the stars). A great short story writer, I think as the children play on the old submarine base, knows how to make something immense of the brief, something transcendent of the insignificant, knows how to transform nothing at all into a few pages that contain everything. I recall now a story about Chopin that Ingmar Bergman told when somebody asked him why he made intimate movies, movies about couples, why he made chamber cinema instead of bigger, more epic productions. At the end of a concert, said Bergman, a lady asked Chopin a similar question—why he didn’t write operas or symphonies instead of his short preludes and nocturnes. And Chopin replied: Well, madame, mine is a small kingdom, but there I am king.
I turn my gaze back to the papers on my desk.
It’s January 1888. Chekhov receives that letter from his friend Pleshcheev, arguing against triviality, insisting that he continue with his long, serious story. And Chekhov writes back to him: Many thanks for your kind, sweet note. What a shame it didn’t come three hours earlier. Just imagine, I was scribbling a poor tale for the Peterburgskaya Gazeta. As the first of the month is approaching, with debts to be paid, I played the coward and sat down to write a piece of work in haste. But it doesn’t matter: the story took me no more than half a day.
This rather poor tale, this triviality that was a mere six folios in length, this piece of work written in haste that only took half a day’s work and seemingly no effort at all, ended up being one of his masterpieces, the story “Sleepy”.
I look at the pieces of paper in disarray on my desk, some of them already crumpled, some of them stained with coffee rings. I see the Chekhov book, open to the first page of that story. Night. That simple, that dry. With a single word, he begins this story about dreams and delirium, violence and poverty, crying out for life and crying out for death; about the nameless boy and the nursemaid Varka, who lulls him in his cradle; about children.
I look outside again, down from this tenth-floor window. There are seagulls in the air. At the Loire docks, I watch the coming and going of yachts, sailboats, tugboats, small fishing vessels, cargo ships. There’s a drawbridge, which at the sound of a bell is raised and opens the way to the locks. There is a grand-looking white cruise ship (Norwegian Epic, it says in sky blue letters), anchored down, surrounded by cranes, in the final stages of construction. I think about another cruise ship (the Champlain), which, setting out from this same port, transported another Russian writer, in 1939, to New York (Nabokov recalled with nostalgia the gardens of this Breton town). But the only thing that interests me is the old submarine base. I look at it, and it’s easy to imagine the black submarines coming in and out beneath the Loire’s waters. Multiple swastikas fluttering in the sea breeze. And my Polish grandfather, still a young man, still skinny after his release from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, close to Berlin (there’s a black-and-white photograph of my grandfather in Berlin, soon after his release from Sachsenhausen: young, thin, dressed in jacket and tie, riding a bicycle on some deserted Berlin street; he isn’t smiling, but the expression on his face is serene), getting ready to weigh anchor from here, from Saint-Nazaire, to America: first to New York, where he spent a few weeks, where he bought the black-stone ring he would wear for the rest of his life, on the pinkie finger of his right hand, as a sign of mourning; and then, just because he had an uncle there, to Guatemala. And it’s also easy to imagine my Polish grandfather walking over and around that imposing gray-brown cement structure—a structure, in fact, that proved indestructible. It could never be knocked down. Not by the constant bombardments of the Allied aircraft (which did manage to flatten most of the town of Saint-Nazaire). Nor later by the French themselves, who continue to insist that its demolition would have been extremely costly, almost impossible, due to the roof and walls of reinforced concrete, which in some places are up to nine meters thick.
The longer you look at one object, wrote Flannery O’Connor, the more of the world you see in it. And so I keep looking at the submarine base outside my window. I can’t help it. Or I don’t want to help it. I know there’s something important in that old submarine base, something symbolic or perhaps poetic, something at once ephemeral and indestructible. Like in a story. Like in a good story. I see there’s nobody there anymore, no children playing on the roof, no children anywhere, no longer any life.