George
R. Clay, a fiction writer, literary essayist, and reviewer, will
deliver a lecture at MHC titled "A String for His Pearls: Tying
Together War and Peace," Wednesday afternoon, April 12.
When George R. Clay delivers
a lecture at MHC titled "A String for His Pearls: Tying Together
War and Peace," Wednesday, April 12, he will be greeted by an
old friend, Edwina Cruise. Clay, a fiction writer, literary essayist,
and reviewer, first met Cruise, MHC professor of Russian, in 1979. At
the time, he was examining narrative method in Tolstoy's War and
Peace as a means of jump-starting his new novel. Thus began a
close scholarly relationship. Cruise was then teaching at
Williams College. In 1984, she invited Clay to speak on Tolstoy at
MHC. In his recent book, Tolstoy's Phoenix : From Method to
Meaning in War and Peace (Northwestern University Press, 1998),
he credits Cruise with lending constant encouragement as he searched
for insight into Tolstoy's distinctive techniques. Clay's critical
text, which has won praise for its original and "jargon-free"
analysis, is dedicated to Cruise. The book provides the substance for
his MHC lecture. Cruise, who teaches an MHC
course called Leo Tolstoy, recalls meeting Clay during a time when
she was "heavily into Dostoyevsky." Over dinner with friends, Clay
talked to Cruise about Tolstoy translations. Cruise, who was unaware
of Clay's accomplishment as a published novelist (Random House had
published Family Occasions in 1978), did not take the writer's
remarks seriously, especially when she learned that Clay did not
speak Russian, but offered to look at his work. The following week, one
hundred pages arrived from Clay, and Cruise, her purple pen at the
ready, was met with a surprise. "I was ready to do a nasty number,
but at the end of the second page I realized I was reading very
creative, very original observations," she says. She was particularly
taken with the material's unique perspective; it was not that of "an
academic trained in Russian literature, but rather the work of a
fiction writer who was engaged in trying to understand how another
fiction writer did it." That initial reading began "exchanges of
hundreds and hundreds of pages of text," says Cruise. Clay received further
encouragement in a Harvard graduate course on literary theory taught
by Sven Birkerts, who became an MHC lecturer. Work that Clay
submitted to Birkerts for the course would eventually become the
first chapter of Tolstoy's Phoenix. But the project would take
some years before completion, and Clay went on to get his master of
fine arts degree in fiction at Vermont College, where he finished the
book. The jacket includes Cruise's
enthusiastic praise: "... a magnificent achievement ranking among the
most illuminating and engaging commentaries on War and Peace
that I have ever read in Russian or English ..." The text has already
been incorporated into a graduate-level course at Princeton
University. Clay, who teaches a course on War and Peace at
Cambridge Adult Education Center, has lectured previously at the
University of Washington, Seattle. He is now working on essays, short
fiction, and, just in the past few months, poetry, a "new language"
for him. Previous work has appeared in the New Yorker, The
Best American Short Stories, Persephone, and other
publications. His essay "In Defense of Flat Characters" is
forthcoming in the International Literary Journal. Clay will speak at 4:30 pm in
Mary Woolley Hall's New York Room.
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