Chekhov Was A Funny MoFo

I'm reading some of Anton Chekhov's stories. You wouldn't think a Russian author would be comedic, but he weaves his smart-ass dark humor into many of his stories; but also, he seems to write about disease and death quite a bit too. Maybe that's because he trained to be a doctor first.

Here's a funny opening line from Rothschild's Fiddle, a story about a casket maker: "The town was small, worse than a village, and in it lived almost none but old people, who died so rarely it was even annoying."

Another story called, Sleepy really draws you in, your eyelids may get heavy, but then he just shocks you at the end with a horrifying act. Chekhov had a wonderfully sick mind, and he could write with such vividness that it makes his writing very powerful.

In New Orleans when I was talking with the novelist Richard Ford, he talked about teaching a writing class at NYU, and that he really didn't talk about writing; he just had the students read good writing, like Chekhov. So that piqued my interest in reading him -- even if it did sound highfalutin at first.

Another thing Richard Ford said, "You have to leave a place to write about it." He went on to say that when you live in a place you are "too locked in to the grid of it" and that when you get away you remember only the important details, with the proper perspective. I thought about it and figured he was right. Since I was writing my New Orleans novel (something he said he'd never write about because it was "just too hard, too difficult to capture any better than has already been done") I decided I'd leave, for the sake of the work.

And he was right.

Chekhov died young of tuberculosis -- being a doctor he delayed going to one -- and it reminds me of Walker Percy, who also had TB, and wrote most of his works lying down.

Walker Percy, the Pulitzer-prize winner who edited A Confederacy of Dunces, like Ford, said you had to leave New Orleans to write (he moved across the lake into the country) and that the French Quarter was great for inspiration, but you couldn't get anything done there, succumbing to "French Quarter disease," meaning the alcoholic-artistic inertia that hits most people there keeps them from producing.

And he was right.