Eleven years ago—I remember the date because of an occurrence which is not pertinent to this account—an old friend, that is, someone who used to be an old friend (“he used to be a very good ex-friend of mine”) mentioned the name Oblomov. I had heard the name before; its mention now (eleven years ago) struck a chord familiar but unclear. I knew, for example, that the name related to a book, but I was not sure whether Oblornov was the title of the book or the name of the author. I knew it to be the name of a person rather than a place, and so if it were the name of the book, would refer (presumably) to the main character in that book. Because of the Paperback Revolution (which I will come to in a moment), my readers undoubtedly know that Oblornov is the title of a book, even that he is the main character in that book. It is not unusual, by the way, for the title of a book (even where the author is known) to be more familiar to the public than the name of that author. Is not Don Quixote better known than Cervantes? And would it be too surprising if, say five hundred years from now, Hamlet were better known than Shakespeare? Explanations take one far afield, but this phenomenon—of the created object becoming more memorable than the creator—has some bearing on the value that mankind puts on the process of creation. So many worship the world over the God who made it, forgetting His name. But explanations take one far afield.

A little more than a century and-a-half after the French Revolution came the Paperback Revolution. Books that you could buy for a quarter, put in your pocket, read on train or bench, and then throw away if you felt like it, now began to sell for $2.45, and mostly too big to fit a pocket. That was the Paperback Revolution. True, all sorts of books began to be published (Out-of-Prints, Hard-to-Gets, and so on), and among these books was Oblornov. There were dozens of copies of the book in a store in which I was browsing, for the economics of the situation demanded that these books be printed in five, even six figures. At any rate, I bought a copy. (There is no better price in buying more than one copy.) Though my ex-old friend had praised the book rapturously, he had not offered to lend it to me, and I did not ask to borrow it, because I am the kind of person who finds it difficult to return books and does not like to be asked for them, which the admirer of Oblornov never hesitated to do. I remember asking for the book along Fourth Avenue (the one they have not yet succeeded in calling Park Avenue South, at least they have not succeeded in having people call it Park Avenue South), but the booksellers had never heard of it, or it was out of stock, out of print, and so time wore on and I more or less forgot about the book, which joined that group of books which one plans to read. Many books are praised, and, generally speaking, books praised by those who know what they are talking about should be read, and the recommendations of friends are generally more interesting than the recommendations of reviewers and critics. One thing leads to another, circumstances and situations change, there came the Paperback Revolution, and I bought Oblornov, at an airport newsstand, where the choice of books is beyond understanding, almost beyond confusion. I was on my way to St. Louis on a business trip.

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I started to read the book on the plane, and after a few chapters, I fell asleep. That was the perfect physiological, even aesthetic reaction to this work, and I am sure the author, I forget his name at the moment, would have been pleased at my behavior. I do not mean that he was a propagandist for somnolence, but he surely saw it as a kind of Lesser Evil.

To those of you who are acquainted with this book, the idea of reading it in a jet plane, traveling at a speed of five hundred miles an hour, is preposterous enough. I do not want to spoil the work for those who have not yet read it (“don’t tell me how it ends”), but I can’t be giving much away by pointing out that Oblornov is of the essence of inertia, procrastination, the very apotheosis of ennui—that French neurological ailment—of a kind of golden boredom. Not altogether to my surprise, I discovered in the introduction, before I fell asleep, that “Oblomovism” has a generic meaning in the Soviet Union, that the theoretician, Bukharin (I am not quite sure whether he has achieved post-humorous, that is, posthumous retaliation, I mean rehabilitation, or not), used the word in criticizing the bureaucracy.

True, sleep was an ideal bit of criticism, but I was exhausted too, for I’d been on a very rough schedule for weeks. I am a keen contender in our famed rat-race, but understand the importance of the cat nap, which is one of the marks of the successful man of affairs. Because of the time elapsed and the intensity involved, this sleep of mine turned out to be much longer than the typical cat nap. Indeed, I was plainly asleep, and it was the instruction of the stewardess—a charming girl with a delicate Irish accent, from Kerry maybe or the Aran Islands themselves—“safety belts on, we’re about to land,” that woke me from my stupor, which is to sleep what sleep is to a cat nap. We were circling over the landing field, and it was quite a beautiful sight. This was a night flight; I had completed a busy day, and my appointment in St. Louis was for nine in the morning. It would have been more sensible to leave earlier in the day, but the press of business forbade. I could have taken the train, too, slept the night in pullman or roomette, but the fact is that I travel only by plane, become very restless in the slower vehicles of communication. The sight of the city not-quite-asleep was impressive, to say nothing of the circling lights, those searchlight rays on the field itself. My plan was to get right to the hotel and go to bed, and that I did. However, I was not able to fall asleep (because of the long nap, or short sleep, on the plane), so I picked up the Oblomov book again. But it was not a good choice, because the author writes so engagingly of somnolence, one becomes entranced (my sleep on the plane was due, basically, to exhaustion); the way a master describer of the state of boredom puts the reader in a state of excited awareness.

Oblomov does not like to move, he has plans that he shelves, he gets into ridiculous arguments with his manservant about this detail or that, he thinks of his house and serfs in the province, of work that must be done, of letters that must be written (the way they had to be written yesterday and the day before). He smiles and falls back in a benign coma of indifferentism—one of the better kinds of coma. This is a task that can wait—if not today, tomorrow will do just as well. Here is a task that must be taken care of immediately, he lifts up his pen, is baffled by the demands of grammar, sentence-structure, puts down his pen, the message loses its urgency, it too can be put off till tomorrow (but no later!). He is happily somnolent again, has made a clear decision to procrastinate, a powerful exertion of will, something to be proud of. How nice that matters can wait, and then, if they wait long enough, can be forgotten. Oblomov dozes, dreams cozily of a shelter, a utopian childhood, but I realize—there in that St. Louis bed—that I have neglected some necessary work, work that I should have taken care of on the plane, that I had planned to take care of on the plane, but instead I had started to read the book, and then the cat nap had turned into a nap, and the nap into the genuine article. . . . I leaned over and picked up my briefcase, which I always keep at the side of my bed, just in case I should wake up in the middle of the night with a business thought which I might have to check against the figures, for if one goes back to sleep, it is difficult, in the morning, to remember just what it was you thought, you might forget a given number, or the commercial complex in which the number has a meaning, and these night-thoughts, so often forgotten, can be the most significant ones, so I have trained myself to wake, jot down the thought or number, and go right back to sleep. I don’t require much sleep anyway. Thomas Edison’s four hours are about my speed, too much sleep dazes me, puts me at a disadvantage for the exigencies of the day. I took the papers out of my briefcase and began to work on them.

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Then, before I knew it—I am among those who generally know when they are falling asleep—I fell asleep. I fell off into sleep with a suddenness which would have surprised me had I known that I was doing it. Then I went immediately into a dream which proved to me, even while dreaming, that I had read Oblomov, all of it, and very likely before it had been so highly recommended to me. There was Olga, in the dream, and Andrei Stolz (my somewhat altered ego), the not-very-bright, selfless Agafya, her villainous brother, Ivan—all these, and others, appearing not at all according to the contours of the book, but in my own form of distribution. And, this night, on the plane, I had only read to a point where some of these characters had not even appeared! So I had either read the book before, or, in the dream, created characters similar, names and all, to those in the book. A quick look at the book, past my place-mark, showed me that the names I had dreamed were indeed the names of the people in the book, that I had not, as we say, dreamed them “up.”

I do not consider myself a mystical personality, I stayed with the laws of probability, and the overwhelming evidence was that I had read the book before and forgotten that I had read it. Either it had had no effect on me, or more likely, it had had a powerful effect which I was interested in burying. But now the return had come in a dream. I moved (in the dream) among those maddeningly familiar figures in an atmosphere of anxiety. Oblomov was sadly reclining, removing himself from life’s responsibilities, from its pettiness, coldness, and horrors. And there was Stolz, running through Europe like a madman, promoting one deal and another. I saw him in Prague, around a conference table (one of those covered with green baize, in fact it was a pool table), driving home a point, for the deal was in the balance, the crushing point had to be made. It was just then that I awoke, and looked at my travel-clock, with its phosphorescent face. The time was ten after two, and I was wide awake.

Then I did something quite unprecedented (for me). I got out of bed, dressed, and went downstairs to the hotel bar. I had stopped in this hotel before, and knew its bar. Had it been necessary to leave the hotel in order to get to a bar, I should probably not have dressed and left the room, because it was chilly out, but since there was a bar in the hotel I did not hesitate for a moment, and made my way down there. I felt that a change of scene might help me to think more clearly, and I did want to understand why Oblomov had been so completely erased from my mind; the fact is that I knew perfectly well, but wanted the comfort of whisky and a few strangers.

There were a few strangers down there, a precious few (as though a remnant, and therefore precious) and given the day (Monday), and the hour (already given), that was no surprise. There was a moody chap in the corner—they do tend to move to the corners—and a couple of men, either friends who had nothing much to say to one another (either because they never had, or out of exhaustion of the subject), or men who had met for the first time that night, and now had nothing much left to say to one another. At the one occupied table behind me a man and woman were discussing personal matters in rather loud voices—“You never did love me,” “Don’t tell me who to marry.” It was warm, and comfortable, the way I had expected it to be.

The thing is—did I need this whisky to tell it to me?—that I am by nature indolent; to this day I must make an effort to get up in the morning, to get started. Once moving, I never stop, my reputation as a ball of fire is well deserved. But I move, as do so many of us who do not know the meaning of change of pace, out of anxiety, out of a fear that if I don’t start I’ll never move, that if I don’t move I’ll never start, and if I don’t keep moving I’ll just stay put. As a kid, I was as lazy as they came, returned from school (on days that I wasn’t able to beg off, feign illness, etc.) and liked nothing better than to lie down, with a book or magazine—something to incite my dreams—and spend the afternoon that way. My mother often tried to get me out of the house. I was, and remain, an only child, and she was pretty busy during the day, didn’t mind having someone in the house, but at the same time she had my interest at heart, made efforts to get me out, where I could move around, mix in the life of the street, that perpetual movement from which I recoiled. Out on the street—for my mother sometimes struck a kind of insistent note which I was bound to obey—I usually ended up sitting on the stoop steps, or on the curb (as a last resort, for there was no support for the back), watching the mad whirl. I never wanted to be chosen in, the kids alter a while didn’t want to choose me in, accepted my laziness, not without jibe and stricture, but now and then, out of desperation, where an extra man was essential, I was forced into the action, to the chagrin of the team to which I was assigned. I was not the stuff out of which the immortal heroes of the playing fields are made. My Eton would have led to our Waterloo. I was lazy in school, too, kept looking out the windows toward the freedom, not of movement in far places, but the freedom to dream undisturbed, for here in class I was sometimes brought up sharply, by the insistent, even the insolent questionings of the teacher. . . .

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My father worked hard, six days a week, often not arriving home till late at night, and he took it pretty easy on Sundays. At first he used not to be upset by my Sunday indolence, thinking maybe I needed rest, the way he certainly did. He wasn’t looking for trouble, but then things began to get to him—remarks by the neighbors, made directly or overheard, a note from the school which he happened to see, though my mother tried to protect him from these difficulties. One day, he came home early from work, and found me fast asleep. Another day, he watched in amazement from our apartment window as I sat dreamily on the stoop steps, watching a punchball game from which I had artfully extricated myself. I had to explain to my father that I had come out into the street late (homework to do), after the sides had been chosen. I was getting to be kind of fat, something hard to imagine if you look at me today.

Well, my father slowly came to understand what was going on, and finally he raised the roof. He accused my mother of protecting me, indulging me, said I would become a drone, a parasite, and they got into a furious fight, my mother taking a position which she didn’t altogether believe, that I had my own special way of doing things, that not all kids were alike, more about “specialness.” “No kid of mine is going to turn into a bum!” he shouted, “I’ll see to that.” Since I was his only child, he must have been referring to me. And he certainly did see to it. He had to get up before I did, but he made sure that I was up and dressed before he left the house. When he came home, he demanded to see my homework, cuffed me sharply if he was not pleased, was not averse to putting the belt to me. He wanted to know how I had spent the day, and applied the corrective measures if he didn’t like what he heard, or didn’t believe what I told him. That went on for six months, maybe a year, and it certainly got me moving. I haven’t stopped since. And all on my own, too, for I have up to now avoided marriage.

So it was not difficult to understand my forgetting Oblomov. It was a fear of returning to that old indolence, those golden hours of forgetfulness, all that avoidance of growth and responsibility, which the author of Oblomov has so unforgettably described. That is one way to develop hot shots, demon salesmen, promoters, wheelers & dealers, operators forever on the way, that is one of the elements in the creation of the rat-race, the orgy of restlessness with which we are all too familiar.

I suppose Oblomov is a kind of secret hero of mine; one must admire the courage, so to say, of his laziness, to say nothing of the lovable qualities with which his creator endowed him—his sweetness, his innocence, his absolutely unconniving nature, his loyalty, his infinite trust.

Not difficult, I thought, to understand why it was that I had read a book, forgotten that I had read it, and then realized (through the mechanism of a dream) that I had indeed read that book. But, for the life of me (though my life was not at stake in the matter), I could not remember when. I no longer had a copy of that book (could I have loaned it to the friend who had so unreservedly recommended it to me?), couldn’t remember the shape, the texture, the color, or binding of it. Was it a library book? Maybe. But what difference did it make? Yet, I was puzzled. One doesn’t like to imagine that whole areas of experience have disappeared, like islands into a sea. Why, I thought, that is a kind of death, to unremember what it is that has happened; it makes experience unreal, almost meaningless, means that what I am doing now may well be forgotten, that this moment at the bar, trying to remember, may itself disappear. And why shouldn’t it be forgotten? Do you call this experience? Here, a stranger among strangers? The couple at the table behind me were making a phony effort at reconciliation. It was probably because the man (maybe husband) wanted a little action in bed, that he was coming to agree to matters in which he didn’t have much interest, meaning: we’re together, we’re friends. What if they were making a phony effort at reconciliation? I mean what difference did it make whether these strangers got along or didn’t? Somebody else’s experience. We oughtn’t to live off the experiences of others. The moral note.

It was pretty late, and I had to get up pretty early. The fact is that it is not easy for me to get up in the morning. I have trained myself to let the alarm wake me, but at the moment of waking there is a powerful urge to return to sleep. Now this is not uncommon, and we most of us give in to another few minutes’ sleep. These tend to be the most delicious moments. But my habit is to throw the covers off immediately and jump out of bed as though there were a demon beside me. There is such a demon, the imp of indolence, urging me to return to dream, to the softness of bed and sheet, to the warmth and darkness. Prenatal, you say, and I would not deny it. But I am a true son of the West, my father saw to it, I am deaf to the siren murmur of prenatality, to the charm of Oblomovism, but at the same time I take no chances, and go right for the cold shower (nothing like a cold shower to destroy the morning remnants of prenatality), rub myself vigorously, look out the window to see what the weather has in store for me, so that I may choose from my carefully chosen wardrobe. Of course, the weather is only one element in this choice—it is more a matter of who it is I am going to see, the impression I feel I ought to make, and so on. Then downstairs for a quick but nourishing breakfast (for I have come to believe what the sellers of breakfast foods want me to believe, that breakfast is a key meal, sets me up for the day). Many a day I have completed my business in the first hours of the morning, taking advantage perhaps of the somnolence of the man across the table; the sleep is still in his eyes, I lay out the papers, I talk fast, convincingly, his mind is off somewhere, he is shaking out the night-memories, the night-horrors, and I am fresh as a daisy—the shower has paid off, also the brisk rubdown, the intelligent breakfast.

But here—in this bar—it is close to three in the morning, and I am not sleepy. I must be up at eight in the morning. How nice it would be if I could sleep through the day. And then I hear Stolz say: “Where are you? What have you become? You must come to your senses! Is this the life you prepared yourself for—to sleep like a mole in a burrow?”

But why is Stolz talking to me this way? Why is he saying that “in another four years there will be a railroad station” [where the estate was] “and that your peasants will be working on the line, your grain will be carried by rail to the landing stage? And after that school education. . . .”

My peasants—what an idea. I, who log seventy or eighty thousand miles a year of air travel! Well, of course, Stolz is not talking to me, he is talking to Oblomov, thinking about Oblomov; it is time for me to get to bed, for I have a rough day ahead. How come that ex-old friend, that old ex-friend, hadn’t offered me a copy of Oblomov (assuming, of course, that he hadn’t borrowed the book from me in the first place)? Not too nice of him, was it? Water under the bridge, ships that pass in the night.

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In reading a book where an “I” is telling a story, I have often wondered how it is that the writer expects his readers to believe that a person who is not a writer by profession should be able to write in such a persuasive, even brilliant manner. The narrator may be a worker, a farmer, a merchant, a lawyer, and yet (as in Dostoevsky) one is quite carried away by the style. The writer, of course, is acting, and we the readers must accept the double role—we know that there is a writer behind the farmer, and we more or less accept the convention, wondering meanwhile (for we forget that there is a writer behind the narrator) how a merchant, or a lawyer, could write in such a persuasive, even brilliant manner. Sometimes the writer, recognizing that his narrator is not a professional author, tries to write clumsily, the way a farmer, or engineer, trying to be a writer, might write. But that effort at complete identity rarely works, it is somehow better when the writer treats the narrator as though he were a writer, recognizing that he is not a writer, doubling up, so to say, on the fiction.

Sometimes the “I” is the writer himself, writing in an autobiographical way, an as-if autobiographical way, an imaginative autobiographical way, and so on.

Sometimes, too, the “I” is indeed the writer himself, but he is not a professional writer, in the sense that he does not work steadily at writing (though all those who work steadily are not necessarily professionals). He can be one who “wants” to write, or a blocked writer, or a failed writer, or even what I believe the Italians have called a “ceased” writer, one who has tried and given up, who does not plan to return.

I bring these matters up because I am not a professional writer, though indeed like so many in my line of work, I fall among the as-ifs, the blocked, failed, and ceased. I am in the book business; yes, I am in that line (it is abundantly clear by my manner of expression that I am not a professional writer), am a salesman of books, and, as I’ve pointed out, a very successful one. I knock down 25, 30 G’s a year, even more in an exceptionally good year. I suppose that I was drawn to the book business because I’ve always wanted to write, have worked up a few things on and off, but in a very sporadic way, and never with any sense of the work having any real worth. Unfortunately, I deal in classic texts a good deal, sell to the colleges and universities, so I am always comparing my work to the best (that may be an error, perhaps it is proper to compare your work to the best you can do). At any rate, I’ve faded away from writing, done nothing at all for ten years, but this Oblomov business somehow stirred up my writing interests, and I’ve been moved to set down these happenings.

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I left the bar just a few minutes before it closed (don’t like to be in places when they close), and going through the lobby on my way to the elevators, I saw a great automatic book-vending machine, lit up like a jukebox. This machine was filled, it goes without saying, with paperbacks selling mostly for $2.45. The machine makes all manner of change (may even, for all I know, accept checks, money orders, letters of credit), and the book comes zooming down at you. It is not quite like picking a dusty book off a shelf in a used-book store. That book you can examine at your leisure and return. This book you must choose and buy before touching. No browsing here. And no way of returning it. How is it possible to return a book to a machine? The title Literature and Revolution, the author Leon Trotsky, caught my eye, caught both of them in fact. One of our serious competitors—I mean a competitor who publishes serious books—had issued this volume, which was not calculated, sales-wise, to make furrows on the brows of the publishers of Ian Fleming. I felt that I ought to read this book, and went to the hotel cashier, conveniently located near the machine, and got the necessary change, (for the change-mechanism on the machine looked tricky, and I prefer to do business with people). The book came down at a terrific speed, all fresh, new, absolutely sanitary. It seemed to me that the vending-machine manufacturers had missed a bet. Why not a strain of music corresponding to the work purchased?

I then went upstairs to my room (having first to waken the drowsy elevator man, slumped over his stool in the corner of the cab, next to the controls. In this hotel, the selling of books was automated before the elevator). I went into bed and glanced at the book I had just bought.

I was nine years old at the time of Trotsky’s death, so he is for me a figure out of history. Any person about whom you have not read in the daily papers, where his current activities are described, is a figure out of history. Russian politics have never particularly intrigued me, but I was, of course, aware of the significant, even tragic role of this man. Some of my older friends have a passionate attachment to him, though they seem to have slowly given up any political allegiance, and even seem to have lost interest in his political position, or meaning. But I had heard a great deal about his literary style and verve, and I felt that he would create a dialectical opposition to the Oblomovism in whose quiet backwaters I was somewhat fearful of being immersed. A little too much of that immersion would make me a dead duck (by drowning) in my country, in my time.

I looked through the book idly, and there, sure enough, was the statement: “One has to put an end to the romanticism of Oblomov and Tolstoy’s Karataiev.”

I was not familiar with the name Karataiev, obviously not an outstanding fictional figure because the name of his author had to be mentioned. But the name Oblomov stood alone—no need there for the author’s name.

Then, a little earlier in the book, this passage drew my attention, because it was what I wanted to read:

Futurism is against mysticism, against the passive deification of nature, against the aristocratic and every other kind of laziness, against dreaminess, and against lachrymosity—and stands for scientific organization, for the machine, for planfulness, for willpower, for courage, for speed, for precision, and for the new man, who is armed with all these things.

True, true, just what I wanted to read, just what it was necessary for me to read, to avoid the perils of Oblomovism, this feudal swamp into which one can sink and vainly struggle, and slowly die. This was modernity, even “futurism,” which I vaguely recognized as a literary movement of the past. Of course, there is no need for an American to struggle to write this way, for we have no tradition of Oblomovism. That is a social phenomenon, a laziness approaching sloth, even sloth itself; here laziness is an individual matter, not a social, nor even a group characteristic. In our business-world, the qualities of willpower, speed, precision, are taken for granted (only the word “courage” strikes an odd note). These qualities have been, so to say, internalized, and coming out in favor of such qualities would be, in the U.S.A., a tautological absurdity—if all tautologies are not absurd—telling people what they have been brought up not to believe but to live. Dreaminess and lachrymosity are not serious problems in our land, it is indeed the excesses of speed and precision that draw the criticism of some of our social observers.

But the Russians had Oblomovism to contend with, and after (even while) putting down the book, and turning off the bed-light, I thought of this problem as an individual, if not a social, hazard. There were hints of it in my own psyche, a tendency toward the vegetative.

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The attraction of Oblomov is, however, more than that of stupefaction and death, for he was, to repeat, a kind of hero—he was trusting, he recoiled from all conniving, the working of the angles, the sly washing of one another’s hands, the subterfuges, the psychological elisions which go along with the speed and the scientific organization.

Yes, I thought, staring up at the hotel ceiling, hearing through the window (so I imagined) the flow of the mighty Mississippi, ours is a society of the morning, most of our work is done before noon, we rise swiftly from our beds at the sound of an alarm clock (think of it, having to be roused by an alarm), while Oblomov, fearful of this tricky morning speed, rose late and fell back, worried about those intricate responsibilities not yet internalized, then shaking off the worry in a species of somnolence, as though what is put off does not exist. He was a good fellow, ready to do anything for a friend, but seriously deficient in a sense of responsibility to the immediate. He almost achieved the responsibility of love, but not quite, and that drove him back to the fantasies and comforts of childhood, if not of prenatality. He found a wife who was also a mother—more a mother than a wife—an angelic creature, and she, in her own innocence, cradled him against the storms of reality. And so he died:

However vigilantly the loving eye of his wife watched over every moment of his life, the perpetual peace and quiet, with one day sluggishly moving on to the next, gradually brought the mechanism of his life to a halt. Ilya Ilych apparently died without pain, without suffering, like a clock that stops because someone has forgotten to wind it. No one witnessed his last moments or heard his dying breath.

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My eyes closed, the long day took its toll, I wooed sleep, found and conquered sleep, then fell into dream. I was in a pine glade, shady and warm, as comfortable as could be, half-asleep, looking up into a patch of blue sky. I had no place to go, nothing in prospect (I had in fact buried my appointment book deep in an unmarked place in the forest), I was quite unanxious about the passing of time. A little way through the woods was a lake, whose gray glint I could glimpse. Then I walked to that lake, which was frozen, and I skated on it, first gliding at my ease, then with mounting anxiety as the ice began to crack under me. “What an absurd mechanical dream,” I thought to myself in my dream, very critical of my dream, as though I were a movie critic unhappy at what was being shown. Meanwhile, the ice continued to crack, very insistently, and I woke to the insistent demand of my alarm clock. I jumped out of bed and tore into the shower, rubbed myself vigorously, then swiftly dressed, for I wanted a good breakfast before my early appointment. I put the two books on the bureau, the one by Trotsky, the other, Oblomov (by Ivan Goncharov, translated by Ann Dunnigan, with a foreword by Harry T. Moore, a Signet Classic paperback, published by the New American Library, 1963. 95¢).

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