Less Than One: Selected Essays

and where else is one to look, Leaning one's elbows on the edge of the loge, From this—if not to that [the next] from that [the next] If not to the much-suffering this.

And here Tsvetaeva's view literally "plummets" along with the intonation from the '1oge" of paradise to the "orchestra" of reality, to the banality of everyday existence —a banality all the more considerable because it is deco­rated with the "foreign," French name "Bellevue" (literally: "beautiful view"):

In Bellevue I live. A town of nests and branches. To a guide, having exchanged quick glances: Belle-vue. A jail whose window fancies A fine view of chimera-laden Paris, And a little bit beyond, as far as ...

(Translated by Joseph Brodsky)

In this description of her dwelling place, in the "I live" coming after Bellevue, Tsvetaeva for a moment—but only a moment—gives rein to the feeling of the absurdity of everything happening to her. One can hear everything in this phrase: contempt for the place, the feeling of being doomed to stay there, and even—if you will—self-vindica­tion, since: I live. The unbearableness of "In Bellevue I live" is intensified for her in addition because that phrase is the physical embodiment of the incompatibility between her existence and what happened to Rilke. Bellevue for her is the opposite pole of paradise, of the "next world"; perhaps even another version of the "next world," since both poles are fiercely cold and existence there is out of the question. As though refusing to believe her own eyes, refusing to ac­cept the fact of her sojourn in this place, Tsvetaeva chooses its name—Bellevue—as a scapegoat and repeats it aloud twice, balancing on the edge of tautology, on the edge of the absurd. A third repetition of "Bellevue" would verge on hysterics, which Tsvetaeva cannot permit herself in "Novogodnee," first of all as a poet: that would mean shift­ing the poem's center of gravity from Rilke to herself. In­stead of that, with mockery (directed more at herself than at the location) in her voice she gives a direct translation of the name, which sounds even more paradoxical because the beautiful view, as she knows, can be obtained not from here but from there, from paradise, from the '1oge":

With the elbow on the scarlet velvet, What a laugh should be for you (and well must Be for me) from heights where your loge hovers Bellevues and Belvederes of ours.

(Translated by Joseph Brodsky)

That is the ending of the author's one and only descrip­tion in this poem of her own world, from which "where else is one to look" but to where her hero disappeared (not toward "a chimera-laden Paris/And a little bit beyond, as far as . . .").

And in general this is Tsvetaeva's position regarding any concrete reality, especially regarding her ownwn affairs. Real­ity for her is always a point of departure, not a point of support or the aim of a journey, and the more concrete it is, the greater, the farther the repulsion. In her verse Tsvetaeva behaves like a classical utopian: the more un­bearable the reality, the more aggressive her imagination. With the sole difference, however, that in her case acuity of vision does not depend on the object of contemplation.

One may even say that the more ideal—remote—the object, the more scrupulous its depiction, as though distance fosters—develops—the lens of the eye. That is why "'Belle- vues and Belvederes" are laughable, in the first instance, to her—for she is capable of looking at them not only through Rilke's eyes but through her own as well.

And it's right here, naturally—from this end of the uni­verse and from this glance cast cursorily at her own present, at herself—that the most unthinkable and inconceivable subject is introduced; the main, strictly personal theme— the author's love for the addressee. Everything preceding is essentially a gigantic exposition, to some extent propor­tional to the one that in real life too precedes a declaration of strong sentiments. In her elaboration of this topic—or rather, in the process of uttering words of love, Tsvetaeva resorts to means which she has already used in her exposi­tion, specifically, to the spatial expression of qualitative categories (of height, for example). To subject them to a detailed analysis (even despite the presence at times of a significant autobiographical element in them) does not seem expedient in view of the stylistic unity of "Novogodnee." It would be just as inexpedient and reprehensible to indulge —on the basis of a poem—in speculation about the "concrete nature" of Tsvetaeva's relations with Rilke. A poem—any poem—is a reality no less significant than the reality presented in space and time. Moreover, the avail­ability of a concrete, physical reality, as a rule, eliminates the need for a poem. Usually it is not reality but precisely irreality that gives occasion for a poem. In particular, the occasion for "Novogodnee" was an apotheosis of irreality —both in tenns of relations and in the metaphysical sense: Rilke's death. It will therefore be much more sensible to examine the remainder of the poem on the psychological level suggested by the text itself.

The only "reality" important to our understanding of "Novogodnee" is the already mentioned correspondence between Tsvetaeva and Rilke that began in 1926 and was broken off in the same year by Rilke's death (from leu­kemia, in a Swiss sanatorium). Three of Tsvetaeva's letters to Rilke have come down to us (it is possible that there were only three in all, considering the length and intensity of their contents). "Novogodnee," therefore, should be re­garded as the fourth, and, in any case, the last—though the first sent to the next world instead of Switzerland:

The first letter to you in the new . ..

Place . ..

Being a letter, "Novogodnee" naturally contains various references to the contents of previous letters (both Tsve- taeva's to Rilke and Rilke's to Tsvetaeva), on which it seems injudicious to dwell without adducing the letters them­selves. Furthermore, these references, allusions, and para­phrases in "Novogodnee" more likely serve the aims of the poem itself rather than the aims of a continuing correspon­dence, since one of the correspondents is dead. The only thing in this correspondence that might be thought to have a direct bearing on the poetics of "Novogodnee" was Rilke's "Elegy" dedicated to Tsvetaeva, which he sent to her on June 8, 1926 (from all evidence, immediately after he fin­ished writing it). But except for two or three places (one of which we have already cited at the beginning of this essay) that strike the reader of "Novogodnee" as echoing a few lines (the third, twentieth, and forty-fifth) of "Elegy," the similarity between these poems is insignificant, if, of course, we leave aside the common spiritual vector of both authors.

And, finally, one can infer from this correspondence that, all during the time it went on, Tsvetaeva and Boris Paster­nak (on whose initiative it began) made various plans to visit Rilke. At first they intended to do this together; later on, when Pasternak's chances of taking part in this trip began to shrink, Tsvetaeva planned to go by herself. In a certain sense, "Novogodnee" is the continuation of her plans for this meeting; it is a search for the addressee— though now in pure space, an appointment for a rendez­vous we know where. A continuation—if only because the poem is written in private: like a letter. It may also be that "Bellevues and Belvederes of ours," apart from everything else, for all its bitterness and unbearableness, is merely a return address inserted out of inertia—or in blind, senseless hope of an impossible reply.

Whatever the author's feelings may have been that gave rise to this line, Tsvetaeva immediately repudiates it and, as though ashamed of its pettiness, ascribes the emergence of it (and those feelings) to the approaching New Year:

I lose track. Particulars. Noise. Hustle. The New Year's at hand.

And after this, having allowed the poem to warant its title, she continues, giving rein to caesura and swinging her trochee, like a pendulum or a drooping head, from side to side:

. . . za chto? S kern choknus' cherez stol? Chern? Vmesto peny—vaty klok. Zachem? Nu, b'yot. A pri chom ya tut?

.. .To what, whom shall I clink glasses? What with? Wads of cotton For the foam. What for? Yes, chimes. But what's in this for me ... P

The babel of question marks and the trisyllabic clausula that turns the broken rhyme with "vaty" ("cotton") into the coalescent mumble "aprichomyatut" ("butwhat'sinthis- forrne") create the impression of control being lost, reins slackened, of a transition from organized speech to un­conscious lamentation. And although a line lower (but a note higher) Tsvetaeva seems to have a sudden recollection, to restore a likeness of meaning to her words, all of her subsequent discourse is already overpowered by the a priori music of a lamentation, which, while not stifling the meaning of the utterance, does subordinate it to its own dynamics:

What am I to do in this night's triumph With this inner rhyme of Rainer's dying? That is, if you, such an eye, are dimming, Life's not life and death's not death. The meaning Vanishes. When weshall meet, Tll grasp it. There is neither, but a third, some aspect Which is new (and, having spread straw even, What a lark then for the 'twenty-seven, Coming, and for the departing 'twenty- Six—to start with youand to be ending With you). 'Cross this table's boundless island I shall clink my glass to yours with a silent Clink...

(Translated by Joseph Brodsky)

The couplet that opens this excerpt is phenomenal and even in the Tsvetaeva corpus nearly stands alone. It is probably not so much a question of the assonance Rainer— umer ("Rainer's dying") per se heard by an ear accustomed to the utterance of this name because of the proximity of the lips—her o^—that have uttered this name (and precisely by a Russian ear), as of the fractionalized, dis­crete dactylism of vnutrenneyu ("inner"). The palpability of each vowel in this adjective underscores both the in­exorability of the statement and the physiologically inter­nal nature of the word itself. It is no longer a question of internal rhyme but of internal comprehension, of conscious (because of the meaning) and un(supra)conscious (be­cause of the phonetics) spelling/ spilling out of everything to the end, to the acoustic limit of the word.

It is important to take notice of both the internal posi­tion of vnutrenneyu within the line ( S etoi vnutrenneyu rifmoi: Rainer—umer: "With this inner rhyme of Rainer's dying") and the organizing-subordinating role of the line's five "r's," reinforcing the sensation of internal rhyme, for rather than being taken from the Russian alphabet they seem to derive from the name "Rainer." (It is quite possible that more than a minimal role in the organization of this line —as well as in Tsvetaeva's perception of that poet on the whole—was played by his full name, Rainer Maria Rilke, in which, apart from four "r's," the Russian ear detects all three Russian grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. In other words, there is already a definite meta­physical element contained in the very name. For that matter, something that has certainly been drawn from the name and subsequently used for the purposes of the poem is the first syllable of the name "Rainer."* In connection with which Tsvetaeva's ear may be accused of naivete with no more justification than may folklore. Precisely the inertia of folklore, the unconscious imitation of it, is what has prompted subsequent phrases such as takoe oko smerklos' ("you, such an eye, are dimming") and znachit—t'mitsya ("the meaning vanishes"). This also applies in part to solomoy zasteliv ("spreading straw"), not only in the sense of a custom but also in regard to the very nature of the tradi­tional rhyme solomu—sedmomu (or shestomu) ("straw— seven [or sixth]"); this also applies to "I shall clink my glass to yours with silent I Clinking' and partly to kabatskim

· Rai-—pronounced the same way as the Russian word rai, meaning "paradise." ikhnim ("their barroom sort"), immediately foUowing (al­though this expression can also be viewed simply as a man­nerism). The technique of wailing, lamenting, hysterical babbling is most apparent, however, in the lines "if you, such an eye, are dimming, I Life's not life and death's not death. The meaning I Vanishes." One should not be misled by the rationality associated with the verb yest' ("is"), for even if the statements are regarded as formulas, their effec­tiveness is nullified by the subsequent "The meaning I Van­ishes" as well as by the reference to the specific dates in parenthesis.

That parenthesis is a breathtaking lyrical breakthrough of Tsvetaeva's. The generosity of soul invested in

... What a lark then for the 'twenty-seven, Coming, and for the departing 'twenty- Six—to start with you and to be ending With you).

is beyond calculation, for it itself is given in the amplest units—in categories of time.

Starting with this envy—almost jealousy—of time, with this sobbing Kakoye shchaste ("what a lark"), which slips (because of the shift to a non-standard stress on the first syllable in toboi—"with you") into a vernacular pronuncia­tion of "o" as "aw" in the next line, Tsvetaeva begins to speak of love almost overtly. The logic of this transition is both simple and touching: time, after all, the year, was luckier than the heroine. And hence the thought of time— all time—in which she is not to be together with "him." The intonation of this parenthesis is the intonation of a lament for one's betrothed. More important, however, is the role of separative force assigned to time, for here one can detcct a tendency to objectify and animate time. The truth is that at the heart of every tragedy lies the undesirable version of time; this is most obvious in classical tragedies, where the time (the future) of love is replaced by the time (the future) of death. And the content of the standard tragedy, the reaction of the hero or heroine remaining on stage, is a denial, a protest against an unthinkable prospect.

But no matter how high-pitched such a protest may be, it is always a simplification, a domestication of time. Trage­dies, as a rule, are composed by ardent young people when the trail is still hot, or by elders who have substantially forgotten what it was all about, anyway. In 1926 Tsvetaeva was thirty-four, the mother of two children, and the author of several thousand lines of verse. Behind her was the civil war and Russia, love for many, and the death of many, including those she loved. Judging by the parenthesis (as well asby the entire sum of her work, for that matter, start­ing from 1914-15), she already knew something about time which not many of the classics, the Romantics, or her contemporaries had an inkling of. Namely, that life has much less of a relation to time than death (which is longer), and that from the standpoint of time, death and love are the same: the difference can be discerned only by a human being. That is, in 1926 it was as if Tsvetaeva were on an equal footing with time, and her thought did not try to adjust time to it but was trying to adjust itself to time and its frightening needs. "What a lark then ... I ... to start with you, and to be ending I With you" is said in the s^e tone she would have used to thank time, had time granted her a meeting with Rilke. In other words, the degree of her soul's generosity is but an echo of time's possible gener­osity toward her—undemonstrated but no less possible an account of all that.

Moreover, she also knew something else about Rilke himself. In a letter to Boris Pasternak dealing with their joint plans for a trip to visit Rilke she writes: "... and yet I'll tell you that Rilke is overloaded, that he needs nothing, no one . . . Rilke is a hermit . . . The ultimate chill of a possessor comes over me from him, in whose possessions I am included a priori. I have nothing to give him: every­thing's been taken. Yes, yes, despite the ardor of letters, the impeccable ear, and the purity of attunement—he doesn't need me, nor does he need you. He is beyond friends. For me this meeting twists the knife, it's a stab in the heart, yes. Especially since he is right (the chill is not his but that of the protective deity in him!), since I in my best highest strongest most detached hours—am like that myself ..."

And "Novogodnee" is that very best highest strongest most detached hour, and that is why Tsvetaeva yields Rilke to time, with which both poets have too much in common to avoid the semblance of a triangle. Intrinsic to both of them, at least, was a high degree of detachment, which is the main property of time. And the whole poem (as, essen­tially, her oeuvre in general) is a development, an elabora­tion of this theme—better still, of this state, i.e., of drawing nearer to time—expressed in the only palpable spatial categories: height, the next world, paradise. To put it more simply, "Novogodnee" justifies its title first of all because it is a poem about time, one of whose possible embodiments is love, and another death. Both poets, in any case, asso­ciate themselves with eternity, which is merely a fraction of time and not, as is commonly held, vice versa. That is why we hear no resentment in this parenthesis.

^bat's more, knowing the content of the passage from the letter quoted above, one may assume with certainty that had the projected meeting taken place, the parenthesis would have been retained. Time would have remained the object of jealousy and/or of the author's generosity of soul, for the happiest, i.e., the most detached, love is still inferior to the love for detachment instilled in the poet by time. Time is literally an after-word to everything in the world, and the poet, who constantly deals with the self-generating nature of language, is the first to know this. This equation— of language and time—is precisely that "third, new aspect" which the author hopes to "grasp when we shall meet," on account of which "the meaning vanishes" for her, and, post­poning the shedding of the scales, she shifts registers and switches on her vision:

Across the table I look at your cross. How many spots—out of town, and how

much room Out of town! And to whom else if not us— Does a bush beckon? Spots—specifically ours And no one else's! All the leaves! All the needles/ Spots of yours with me (of yours with you). (We could have rendezvoused— Just to chat.) Never mind places/ Think of the

months! And weeks! And rainy suburbs Without people/ And mornings! And everything

altogether Not yet launched into by nightingales!

The field of vision restricted to a cross on a grave or in the hand underscores the ordinariness—the almost mass character of the described sentiment; and the landscape encompassed by this field is, in tum, an ordinary, middle- class landscape. The neutrality, the semi-legality of sub­urbia, is the typical background of Tsvetaeva's lyric love poetry. In "Novogodnee" Tsvetaeva resorts to it not so much for the sake of lowering the pitch, i.e., for antiroman- tic reasons, as from the inertia created by her other, longer poems ("Poem of the Hill" and "Poem of the End"). In essence, the addressless and cheerless character of suburbia is universal if only because it corresponds to the inter­mediate position occupied by a human being himself be­tween total artificiality (the city) and total naturalness (nature). At any rate, an author of modern times, if he wants to be convincing, will not choose either a skyscraper or a glade as a backdrop for his drama or pastoral. It would most likely be a spot out of town, with all three meanings with which Tsvetaeva endows the word "spot": railroad station ("How many spots—out of town"); area, i.e., space ("room I Out of town"); and a trvsting place ("Spots— specifically ours I And no one else's!"). The last meaning is made even more specific by the exclamations "All the leaves! All the needles!" in which we see a citv dweller in the midst of nature looking for a spot to sit or lie down in. Stylistically, this is still a lamentation, but now the rustic, peasant diction yields at this point to "blue-collar" diction— both in vocabulary and in intonation:

(We could have rendezvoused—

Jist to chat.) Never mind places! Think of the months!

Of course, the idea of a rendezvous or clandestine gather­ing is explained by the multifacetedness ( multifacedness) of Hilke, who is present for the author in everyone and in everything. And of course it is Tsvetaeva herself who hears mesta ("places") in mesyatsakh ("months"). But the ver- nacularity of this idiom—"chatting" at a clandestine gath­ering—and "Think of the months!" shouted out by one of "the unwashed" impart to the physiognomy of the heroine a somewhat more common expression than envisaged by the genre of the poem. Tsvetaeva does this not for democratic reasons, not to enlarge her audience (she never committed that sin), or for the purpose of camouflage—to protect her­self from inordinately nosy specialists in dirty linen. She resorts to these "speech masks" solely out of chastity, a chastity that is not so much personal as professional: poetic. She simply tries to lower—and not elevate—the effect cre­ated by the expression of strong sentiments, the effect of an avowal. After all, it should not be forgotten that she is addressing someone "also a poet." That's why she resorts to montage—to listing the characteristic elements that make up the background of the standard love scene—which we learn about only from the last line of that list:

. . . Never mind places! Think of the months! And weeks! And rainy suburbs Without people! And mornings! And everything

altogether Not yet launched into by nightingales!

Whereupon, however, having already marked by means of these nightingales (inevitable attributes of the standard lyric love poem) the nature of the scene and the space at any point of which this scene could have taken place but didn't, she subjects to doubt the quality of her own eye­sight and, consequently, her whole interpretation of space:

Probably I see poorly, being in a pit,

Probably ymi see better, being above . . .

Still audible here is a pang—self-reproach for the impre­cision of her glance? of the heart's churning? of the word in her letter? But her probable aberration and his sera­phic keensightedness are equated by a line that is stag­gering precisely for its banality—yet another instance of her "wail of women in all times":

Nothing ever worked out between us.

What makes this wail all the more heartrending is the role of avowal fulfilled by it. It is not merely a "yes" dis­guised as a "no" by circumstances or by the posturing of the heroine; this is a "no" that overtakes and cancels any possibility of "yes," and therefore the "yes" craving to be pronounced clings to the very denial as the only available form of existence. In other words, "Nothing ever worked out between us" formulates the theme through its denial, and the semantic stress falls on "ever worked out." But no wail is ever the last one; and, most likely, it is precisely because the poem (as well as the situation described in it) ends dramaturgically here that Tsvetaeva, being true to her­self, shifts the center of gravity from "ever worked out" to "nothing." For "nothing" defines her and her addressee to a greater degree than anything that might have ever "worked out":

So much, so purely and simply Nothing, that suits our capacity and size To such a T—there's no need to enumerate it. Nothing except—don't expect anything out of The ordinary . . .

"So much, so purely and simply" is read, at first glance, as something that emotionally develops the preceding line —"Nothing ever worked out between us," for, indeed, the un- or extra-eventful character of the relations between these two poets borders on virginity. In reality, however, this "purely" and especially "simply" relates to "nothing," and the naivete of these two adverbs, in narrowing the grammatical role of the word they modify to a noun, only increases the vacuum created by means of "nothing." For nothing is a nonsubstantive, and it is precisely in this func­tion that it interests Tsvetaeva here—in the function that suits both of them, her and her hero, so well, in "capacity and size"; i.e., the function that arises as nichevo ("noth­ing," "not-having," "absence") changes into nichto ("noth­ing," "nonbeing," "death"). This nichevo is absolute, defies description, is not convertible—into any realia whatsoever, into any concretum at all. It is that degree of not-having and not-possessing wherein envy is roused by what

.. . even a prisoner on death row in chains Endowed with memory has: those lips!

It is quite likely that such a heightened interest in nichevo was motivated by an unconscious translation of the entire construction into German (where "nothing" is much more active grammaticaUy). Most likely, however, it illustrates the author's desire to rid the construction "Nothing ever worked out between us" of its flavor of cliche. Or—to en­hance that flavor, to expand the cliche to the proportions of the truth it contains. In any case, the element in this phrase of domesticating the situation is considerably re­duced as a result of that concern, and the reader suspects that the entire sentence, and perhaps the whole poem, has been written for the opportunity of uttering this simple formula: "between us . . ."

The remaining fifty-eight lines of the poem are a long postscript, an afterword dictated by the energy of the accel­erated verse mass—i.e., by the remaining language, by time that continues beyond the poem. Constantly acting by ear, Tsvetaeva twice tries to end "Novogodnee" with the semblance of a final chord. First, in

From the least built-up outskirt— Happy new place, Rainer, world, Rainer! Happy furthermost cape of provability— Happy new eye, Rainer, ear, Rainer!

—where the very name of the poet plays a purely musical role (which, first and foremost, is played by any name, after all), as though it were heard for the first time and is there­fore repeated. Or repeated because it is uttered for the last time. But the excessive exclamatory character of the stanza is too contingent on the meter to bring about a reso­lution; instead, the stanza requires harmonic, if not didactic, development. And Tsvetaeva initiates one more attempt by changing the meter in order to break free from the metrical inertia:

Everything was an obstacle For you: passion and friend. Ilappy new sound, Echo! Happy new echo, Sound!

But the shift from pentameter to trimeter and from rhymed couplets to alternating rhyme, and, what is more, from feminine to masculine in even lines, creates a perhaps desirable but excessively obvious sensation of abruptness, harshness. This harshness and a concomitant superficial aphoristic quality create the impression that the author is in charge of the situation—which in no way corresponds to reality. The rhythmical contrast of this stanza is so sharp that it not so much performs the role designed for it by the author—to complete the poem—as reminds one of the poem's interrupted music. As if driven back by this stanza, "Novogodnee" slows down for a while and then, like a flood sweeping away an unstable dam or a theme interrupted by a cadence, it returns in its full sonority. And indeed, in the opening lines of the concluding part of the poem, immedi­ately following this stanza, the voice of the poet resounds with a startling ring of emancipation; the lyricism of these lines is pure lyricism, not bound either by thematic devel­opment (since thematically this passage is an echo of pre­vious ones) or even by considerations about the addressee himself. It is a voice disengaging itself from the poem, nearly detaching itself from the text:

How many times on a classroom chair: What are the mountains there? What are the rivers?

Are they lovely, those landscapes without tourists?

Am I right, Raiiwr—paradise is mountainous, Stormy!' Not the one of widows' aspirations— There's M>t jtst one paradise, right? Above it there

must be another Paradise? In terraces? I'm judging by the Tatras— Paradise cannot but be An amphitheater. (And the curtain's been

lowered on someone . . .) Am I right, Rainer, God is a growing Baobab? Not a Golden Louis— There's not just one God, right? Above him there

must be yet another God?

This is again the voice of adolescence, of shedding scales, "at thirteen, in Novodevichy"—or, more precisely, the memory of them through the dulling prism of maturity. That note did not sound in either The Magic Lantern or Evening Album', except forthose poems that talk of separa­tion and in which one can hear—immediately!—the future Tsvetaeva, as though "And passion for breakups entices" were said about her. "How many times on a classroom chair" is, as it were, a recognition of the realized prophecy contained in the helplessness of the tragic notes of her first books, where the diarylike sentimentality and banality are justified if only because they spared her future of their presence. Particularly as this adolescent wit ("What are the mountains there?," "landscapes without tourists," etc.)—

· Ecening Album ( 1910) and Tlie Magic Lantern (1912): Tsvetaeva's first two collections of verse.

irony in general—becomes in her maturity the only possible form of connecting words, when the subject is the "next world" as the destination of a great and beloved poet: when the subject is concrete death.

For all its harshness (better still: youthful cruelty), this irony is nowhere near possessing youthful logic. "Not the one of widows' aspirations— / There's not just one paradise, right? ..."—inquires a voice that, for all its fragility, allows the possibility of another point of view: churchgoing, old- womanish, widows'. Having chosen the word "widows'," most likely un- or subconsciously, Tsvetaeva immediately realizes the possible associations it has for herself and at once cuts them away, shifting to an almost sardonic tone: "Above it there must be another/Paradise? In terraces? I'm judging by the Tatras . . ." And now, when it would seem that open derision is inevitable, we suddenly hear this grandiose statement fusing all of Alighieri's efforts into a single phrase:

Paradise cannot but be

An amphitheater . . .

The Czech Tatras, which in Bellevue Tsvetaeva had every reason to recall fondly, gave rise to the ironic "In terraces?" but also demanded a rhyme. · This is a typical example of the organizing role of language in relation to experience: a role that essentially enlightens. Undoubtedly the idea of paradise as a theater had arisen earlier in the poem ("Lean­ing one's elbows on the edge of the loge"), but there it was presented in an individual and, therefore, tragic key. Pre-

· Tatram: amfiteatrom ("Tatras": amphitheater).

pared with an ironic intonation, however, "amphitheater" neutralizes any emotional coloring and imparts to the image a gigantic, mass (extra-individual) scale. At issue here is no longer Rilke, or even paradise. For "amphitheater," along with its modern, strictly technical meaning, calls forth, above all, associations of antiquity and, in a sense, timelessness.

Apprehensive not so much of the excessively powerful impact that this line might have, as of the author's hubris fed by lucky strikes like this, Tsvetaeva deliberately casts her accomplishment into the banality of the mock-important ("And the curtain's been lowered on someone . . ." )—re­ducing "amphitheater" to "theater." In other words, banal­ity here is used as one of the means in her arsenal that pro­vide the echo of the youthful sentimentality of her early poems requisite for continuing discourse in the key estab­lished in "How many times on a classroom chair . . ." :

Am I right, Rainer, God is a growing

Baobab? Not a Golden Louis—

There's Mt just one God, right? Above him there

must be yet amther God?

"Am I right, Rainer . . . ?" is repeated as a refrain, for— she thought that way, as a child, at least; but, in addition, because the repetition of the phrase is the product of despair. And the more obvious the naivete ("God is a grow­ing I Baobab?") of the question, the more palpable—as is often the case with children's Why?'s—the proximity of the hysterics beginning to boil up in the throat of the speaker. At the same time, the subject in question is not atheism or religious quests but the previously mentioned poetic version of eternal life that has more in common with cosmogony than with standard theology. And Tsvetaeva asks Rilke all these questions not at all in expectation of an answer but in order to "set forth a program" (and the less complicated the terminology the better). Moreover, the answer is kno^ to her—if only because the constant possibility, even inevitability, of the subsequent question is also known to her.

The true mover of speech, let us repeat, is the language itself, that is, the liberated verse-mass milling the theme and almost literally splashing up when it hits a rhyme or an image. The only question Tsvetaeva asks here in earnest, i.e., whose answer is not kno^ to her, is the one that fol­lows "Above him there must be another I God?":

How is writing going in the new place?

Actually, this is not so much a question as an indication —like musical notation—of quarter notes and flats of lyri­cism, an insertion of them into a purely speculative space devoid of musical lineation: into a supravocal existence. The unbearableness and unpronounceableness of this height manifests itself in the already repeated use of the slightly sarcastic "in the new place," in the redonning of the inter­viewer's mask. The answer, however, surpasses the question in its very timbre alone and comes so very close to the es­sence of the matter—

Then again, if you are, verse is: for you yourself are

Verse!

—that her voice, threatening to crack, requires immediate lowering. This lowering is accomplished in the following line, by means that are so familiar, however, that the effect is diametrically opposite to the one intended; what was in­tended was irony, what resulted was tragedy:

How is writing going in the sweet life . . .

Because he himself—Rilke—is verse, "writing" becomes a euphemism for existence in general (which, in fact, this word really is), and instead of being condescending, "in the sweet life" becomes compassionate. Not satisfied with this, Tsvetaeva enhances the picture of the "sweet life" through the absence of details typical of the imperfect life, i.e., the earthly one (developed later on in the cycle "Desk"):

How is writing going in the sweet life Without a desk for your elbow, or brow for

your hand (Palm).

The mutual necessity of these details raises their absence to the status of mutual absence, equivalent, that is, to a literal absence, to the physical annihilation not only of the effect but of the cause as well—which is, if not one of the possible definitions, then, at any rate, one of the most defi­nite consequences of death. In these two lines Tsvetaeva offers the most capacious formula for the "next world," imparting to nonexistence the quality of an active process. The absence of usual (primary in the interpretation of being as writing) signs of being is not equated with non- being but surpasses being in its tangibility. In any case, it is precisely that effect—of negative tangibility—which is achieved by the author through the further qualification of "hand I (Palm)." Absence, in the final analysis, is a crude version of detachment: psychologically it is synony­mous with presence in some other place and, in this way, expands the notion of being. In turn, the more significant the absent object, the more signs there are of its existence. This is especially apparent in the case of a poet whose "signs" are the entire phenomenal and speculative world described (comprehended) by him. Here is where the poetic version of "eternal life" originates. Furthermore: the difference between language (art) and reality is specifi­cally that any itemization of whatever no longer is or does not yet exist is an entirely independent reality in itself That is why nonbeing, i.e., death, consisting utterly and entirely of absence, is nothing but a continuation of language:

Rainer, are you pleased with new rhymes? For, properly interpreting the word "Rhyme," what—if not a whole row of new Rhymes—is Death?

If one takes into account that the concern here is with a poet who addressed the subject of death and being in gen­eral with great regularity, then the linguistic reality of the "next world" is materialized into a part of speech, into a grammatical tense. And it is in favor of this time that the author of "Novogodnee" rejects the present.

This scholasticism is the scholasticism of grief. The more powerful an individual's thinking, the less comfort it af­fords its possessor in the event of some tragedy. Grief as experience has two components: one emotional, the other rational. The distinguishing feature of their interrelation­ship in the case of a highly developed analytical apparatus is that the latter (the apparatus), rather than alleviating the situation of the former, i.e., the emotions, aggravates it. In these cases, instead of being an ally and consoler, the reason of an individual turns into an enemy and expands the radius of the tragedy to an extent unforeseen by its possessor. Thus, at times, the mind of a sick person, instead of painting pictures of recovery, depicts a scene of inevita­ble demise and thereby cripples his defense mechanisms. The difference between the creative process and the clinical one, however, is that neither the material (in the given instance, language) out of which a work is created nor the conscience of its creator can be given a sedative. In a work of literature, at any rate, an author always pays heed to what he is told by the frightening voice of reason.

The emotional aspect of the grief that forms the content of "Novogodnee" is expressed, first of all, in terms of plasticity—in the metrics of this poem, in its caesuras, tro­chaic openings of lines, in the principle of couplet rhyme, which increases the possibilities of emotional adequacy in a line of verse. The rational side is expressed in the seman­tics of the poem, which is so patently dominant in the text that it could quite easily be the object of independent analysis. Such a separation, of course^^ven if it were possible—makes no practical sense; but if one distances oneself from "Novogodnee" for a moment and looks at it from the outside, as it were, one may observe that on the level of "pure thought" the poem is more eventful than on the purely verse level. If what is thus accessible to the eye gets translated into simple language, an impression emerges that the author's feelings, under the weight of what has befallen them, rushed to seek consolation from reason, which has taken them extremely far, for reason itself has no one from whom it can seek consolation. With the ex­ception, naturally, of language—which signified a return to the helplessness of feelings. The more rational, in other words, the worse it is—for the author, anyway.

It is precisely on account of its destructive rationalism that "Novogodnee" falls outside Russian poetic tradition, which prefers to resolve problems in a key that while not necessarily positive is at least consoling. Knowing to whom the poem is addressed, one might assume that the con­sistency of Tsvetaeva's logic in "Novogodnee" is a tribute to the legendary pedantry of German (and, in general, Western) mentality—a tribute all the more easily paid because "German is more native than Russian." There may be a grain of justice in this; but the rationalism of "Novo­godnee" is not at all unique in Tsvetaeva's oeuvre. Pre­cisely the opposite is true: it is typical. The only thing, perhaps, that distinguishes "Novogodnee" from other poems of the same period is its developed argumentation; whereas in "Poem of the End" or in "The Pied Piper," for example, we are dealing with the reverse phenomenon—an almost hieroglyphic condensation of arguments. (It is even possible that the argumentation in "Novogodnee" is so detailed be­cause Russian was somewhat familiar to Rilke, and, as though Tsvetaeva were fearful of the misunderstandings that are especially common when the language barrier is slightly lowered, she intentionally "enunciates" her thoughts. In the end, this letter is the last; it is important to say everything while he has not yet gone "completely," that is, before the onset of oblivion, while life without Rilke has not yet become natural.) In any case, however, we encounter this destructive characteristic of Tsvetaeva's logicality, the premier mark of her authorship.

It might be more reasonable to say that "Novogodnee" does not fall outside Russian poetic tradition but expands it. For this poem—"national in form and Tsvetaevan in content"*—extends, or better yet, refines the understanding of "national." Tsvetaeva's thinking is unique only for Rus­sian poetry; for Russian consciousness it is natural, and even preconditioned by Russian syntax. Literature, how­ever, always lags behind individual experience, for it comes about as its result. Moreover, the Russian poetic tradition always balks at disconsolation—not so much because of the possibility of hysterics implicit in disconsolation as because of the Orthodox inertia in justifying the existential order (by any, preferably metaphysical, means). Tsve­taeva, however, is uncompromising as a poet and in the highest degree uncomfortable. The world and many of the things that happen in it all too often lack any sort of justi­fication for her, including a theological one. For art is something more ancient and universal than any faith with which it enters into matrimony, begets children—but with which it does not die. The judgment of art is a judgment more demanding than the Final Judgment. The Russian poetic tradition by the time "Novogodnee" was written was still in the grip of feelings for the Orthodox version of Christianity, with which it had been acquainted for only three hundred years. It's only natural that against such a background a poet who cries out, "There's not just one God, right? Above him there must be yet another I GodF' proves to be an outcast. The latter circumstance may have played an even greater role in her life than the civil war.

° "National in form and socialist in content," a standard Soviet press definition of a work of art.

One of the basic principles of art is the scrutiny of phe­nomena with the naked eye, out of context, and without intermediaries. "Novogodnee" is essentially one person's tete- a-tete with eternity or—even worse—with the idea of eter­nity. Tsvetaeva has used the Christian version of eternity here not only terminologically. Even if she had been an atheist, the "next world" would have had concrete ecclesi­astical meaning for her: for, having a right to disbelieve in an afterlife for oneself, a person is less willing to deny such a prospect to someone he loved. Furthermore, Tsve­taeva ought to have insisted on "paradise," if only pro­ceeding from the tendency—so typical of her—to dismiss the obvious.

A poet is someone for whom every word is not the end but the beginning of a thought; someone who, having ut­tered rai ("paradise") or tot svet ("next world"), must mentally take the subsequent step of finding a rhyme for it. Thus krai ("edge/realm") and otsvet ("reflection") emerge, and the existence of those whose life has ended is thus prolonged.

Looking in that direction, upward, into the grammatical time and also the grammatical place where "he" is, if only because "he" is not here, Tsvetaeva ends "Novogodnee" as all letters end: with the name and address of the ad­dressee:

—So that nothing spill.s on it I hold it in my palms.—

Above the Rhone and above the Rarogne, Above the clear-cut and total separation To Rainer—Maria—Rilke—into his hands.

(Translated by Joseph Brodsky)

"So that nothing spills on it"—rain, perhaps? Overflow­ing rivers (the Rhone)? Her ownwn tears? Most likely the last, for usually Tsvetaeva omits the subject only in the case of something self-evident—and what could be more self-evident at parting than tears capable of bluring the name of the addressee meticulously inscribed at the end, as though with an indelible pencil on a moist surface. "I hold it in my palms" from a detached viewpoint is a sacri­ficial gesture and, naturally, is beyond tears. "Above the Rhone" that flows from Lake Geneva, above which Rilke had lived in a sanatorium—that is, almost above his former address; "and above the Rarogne," where he was buried, i.e., above his present address. It is remarkable that Tsve­taeva merges both names acoustically, conveying their se­quential order in Hilke's fate. "Above the clear-cut and total separation," the sensation of which is intensified by the reference to the grave site, about which it was said ear­lier in the poem that it is a place where the poet isn't. And finally, the name of the addressee spelled out in full on the envelope, with the further specification "into his hands" (formerly standard postal terminology for "personal")— as previous letters, no doubt, had also been addressed. This last line would be utterly prosaic (reading it, a postman would spring to his bicycle) were it not for the very name of the poet, which is partly responsible for the previous "you yourself are I Verse!" Apart from its possible effect on the postman, the line returns both the author and the reader to what love for that poet began with. The main element of the line—and of the entire poem as well—is the effort to hold someone back—if only by voice alone calling out a name—from nonbeing; to insist, despite the obvious­ness of it, upon his full name, to \vit, presence, the physical sensation of which is supplemented by the specification "into his hands."

Emotionally and melodically this last stanza creates the impression of a voice that has burst through tears and, cleansed by them, takes off from them. In any case, the voice chokes when reading it aloud. This probably happens because there is nothing for anyone (either the reader or the author) to add to what has already been said; to raise the pitch a note higher is not possible. The art of poetry, apart from its numerous functions, bears witness to the vocal and ethical possibilities of man as a species—if for no other reason than that it drains them dry. For Tsvetaeva, who was always operating at the vocal limit, "Novogodnee" served as an opportunity to combine two genres requiring the highest pitch: the love lyric and the funeral lament. It is striking that in the controversy between them the last word rests with the former: "into his hands."

(Translated by Barry Rubin)

1981

Catastrophes zn the Air

IIy a des r^wdes a Ia sauvagerie primitive; il n'y en a point a Ia manie de paraitre ce qu'on nest pas.

Marquis de Custine, Lettres de Russie

1

Because of the volume and quality of Russian fiction in the nineteenth century, it's been widely held that the great Russian prose of that century has automatically, by pure inertia, wandered into our own. From time to time, in the course of our century, here and there one could hear voices nominating this or that writer for the status of the Great Russian Writer, purveyor of the tradition. These voices were coming from the critical establishment and from Soviet officialdom, as well as from the intelligentsia itself, with a frequency of roughly two great writers per decade.

During the postwar years alone—which have lasted, blissfully, so far—a minimum of half a dozen names have filled the air. The forties ended with Mikhail Zoshchenko and the fifties started with the rediscovery of Babel. Then came the thaw, and the cro^ was temporarily bestowed upon Vladimir Dudintsev for his Not by Bread Alone. The

* The Biddle Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on January 31, 1984, under the auspices of the Academy of American Poets.

sixties were almost equally shared by Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and by Mikhail Bulgakov's revival. The better part of the seventies obviously belong to Sol- zhenitsyn; at present what is in vogue is so-called peasant prose, and the name most frequently uttered is that of Valentin Rasputin.

Officialdom, though, it should be noted in all fairness, happens to be far less mercurial in its preferences: for nearly fifty years now it has stuck to its guns, pushing Mikhail Sholokhov. Steadiness paid off—or rather a huge shipbuilding order placed in Sweden did—and in 1965 Sholokhov got his Nobel Prize. Still, for all this expense, for all this muscle of the state on the one hand and agitated fluctuation of the intelligentsia on the other, the vacuum projected by the great Russian prose of the last century into this one doesn't seem to get filled. With every passing year, it grows in size, and now that the century is drawing to its close, there is a growing suspicion that Russia may exit the twentieth century without leaving great prose behind.

It is a tragic prospect, and a Russian native doesn't have to look feverishly around for where to put the blame: the fault is everywhere, since it belongs to the state. Its ubiqui­tous hand felled the best, and strangled the remaining second-rate into pure mediocrity. Of more far-reaching and disastrous consequence, however, was the state-sponsored emergence of a social order whose depiction or even criti­cism automatically reduces literature to the level of social anthropology. Even that presumably would be bearable had the state allowed writers to use in their palette either the individual or collective memory of the preceding, i.e., abandoned, civilization: if not as a direct reference, then at least in the guise of stylistic experimentation. With that tabooed, Russian prose quickly deteriorated into the debili­tated being's flattering self-portrayal. A caveman began to depict his cave; the only indication that this still was art was that, on the wall, it looked more spacious and better lit than in reality. Also, it housed more animals, as well as tractors.

This sort of thing was called "socialist realism" and now­adays it is universally mocked. But as is often the case with irony, mockery here considerably subtracts from one's abil­ity to grasp how it was possible for a literature to plummet, in less than fifty years, from Dostoevsky to the likes of Bubennov or Pavlenko. Was this dive a direct consequence of a new social order, of a national upheaval that overnight reduced people's mental operation to the level where the consumption of garbage became instinctive? (Enter and exeunt Western observers salivating over the Russians' proclivity to read books while riding public transporta­tion. ) Or wasn't there perhaps some flaw in the very liter­ature of the nineteenth century that precipitated that dive? Or was it simply a matter of ups and downs, of a vertical pendulum pertinent to the spiritual climate of any nation? And is it legitimate to ask such questions anyway?

It is legitimate, and especially in a country with an authoritarian past and totalitarian present. For unlike the subconscious, the superego is expected to be vocal. To be sure, the national upheaval that took place in Russia in this century has no parallel in the history of Christendom. Sim­ilarly, its reductive effect on the human psyche was unique enough to enable the rulers to talk about a "new society" and a "new type of man." But then that was precisely the goal of the whole enterprise: to uproot the species spiri­tually to the point of no return; for how else can you build a genuinely new socicty? You start neither with the founda­tion nor with the roof: you start by making new bricks.

What took place, in other words, was an unprecedented anthropological tragedy, a genetic backslide whose net re­sult is a drastic reduction of human potential. To quibble about it, to use political-science mumbo-jumbo here is mis­leading and unnecessary. Tragedy is history's chosen genre. Had it not been for literature's own resilience, we wouldn't have known any other. In fact, it is an act of self- preservation on the part of prose to produce a comedy or a roman a clef. Yet such was the magnitude of what happened in Russia in this century that all the genres available to prose were, and still are, in one way or another, shot through with this tragedy's mesmerizing presence. No matter which way one turns, one catches the Gorgon-like stare of history.

For literature, unlike its audience, this is both good and bad. The good part comes from the fact that tragedy provides a work of literature with a greater than usual sub­stance and expands its readership by appealing to morbid curiosity. The bad part is that tragedy confines the writer's imagination very much to itself. For tragedy is essentially a didactic enterprise and as such it's stylistically limiting. Personal, let alone national, drama reduces, indeed negates, a writer's ability to achieve the aesthetic detachment im­perative for a lasting work of art. The gravity of the matter simply cancels the desire for stylistic endeavor. Nar­rating a tale of mass extermination, one's not terribly keen to unleash the stream of consciousness; and rightly so. However attractive such discretion is, one's soul profits from it more than does one's paper.

On paper, such display of scruples pushes a work of fiction toward the genre of biography, this last bastion of realism (which explains this genre's popularity far more than the uniqueness of its subjects). In the end, every tragedy is a biographical event, one way or another. As such, it tends to exacerbate the Aristotelian art-to-life proximity, to the point of reducing it to a synonym. The common view of prose as being made in the likeness of speech doesn't help matters much either. The sad truth about this equating art to life is that it's always done at the expense of art. Had a tragic experience been a guarantee of a masterpiece, readers would be a dismal minority vis-a-vis illustrious multitudes inhabiting ruined and freshly erected pantheons. Were ethics and aesthetics synonymous, litera­ture would be the province of cherubs, not of mortals. Luckily, though, it's the other way around: cherubs, in all likelihood, wouldn't bother inventing the stream of con­sciousness, being more interested in the steam of it.

For prose is, apart from anything, an artifice, a bag of tricks. As artifice, it has its o^ pedigree, its own dynamics, its own laws, and its own logic. Perhaps more than ever, this sort of thing has been made apparent by the endeavors of modernism, whose standards play a great role in today's assessment of the work of the writer. For modernism is but a logical consequence—compression and concision—of things classical. (And this is why one is hesitant to add to the list of modernism's properties its own ethics. This is also why it's not altogether futile to ask history those questions. For, contrary to popular belief, history answers: by means of today, of the present; and that's what perhaps is the present's main charm, if not its sole justification.) At any rate, if these standards of modernism have any psychologi­cal significance, it is that the degree of their mastery indi­cates the degree of a writer's independence from his ma­terial or, more broadly, the degree of primacy of an individ­ual over his own or his nation's predicament.

It can be argued, in other words, that stylistically at least, art has outlived tragedy, and, with it, so has the artist. That the issue to an artist is to tell the story not on its own but on his own terms. Because the artist stands for an individual, a hero of his own time: not of time past. His sensibility owes more to the aforesaid dynamics, logic, and laws of his artifice than to his actual historical experi­ence, which is nearly always redundant. The artist's job vis-i-vis his society is to project, to offer this sensibility to the audience as perhaps the only available route of depar­ture from the known, captive self. If art teaches men any­thing, it is to become like art: not like other men. Indeed, if there is a chance for men to become anything but vic­tims or villains of their time, it lies in their prompt response to those last two lines from Rilke's "Torso of Apollo" that say:

. . . this torso shouts at you with its every muscle:

"Do change your life!"

And this is precisely where the Russian prose of this century fails. Hypnotized by the scope of the tragedy that befell the nation, it keeps scratching its wounds, unable to transcend the experience either philosophically or stylisti­cally. No matter how devastating one's indictment of the political system may be, its delivery always comes wrapped in the sprawling cadences of fin de siecle religious human­ist rhetoric. No matter how poisonously sarcastic one gets, the target of such sarcasm is always external: the system and the powers-that-be. The human being is always ex­tolled, his innate goodness is always regarded as the guar­antee of the ultimate defeat of evil. Resignation is always a virtue and a welcome subject, if only because of the infinity of its examples.

In the age that read Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Musil, Svevo, Faulkner, Beckett, etc., it's precisely these characteristics that make a yawning and disdainful Russian grab a detec­tive novel or a book by a foreign author: a Czech, a Pole, a Hungarian, an Englishman, an Indian. Yet these same char­acteristics gratify many a Western literary pundit bewail­ing the sorry state of the novel in his own language and darkly or transparently hinting at the aspects of suffering beneficial to the art of letters. It may sound like a paradox, but, for a variety of reasons—chief of which is the low cultural diet on which the nation has been kept for more than half a century—the reading tastes of the Russian public are far less conservative than those of the spokes­men for their Western counterparts. For the latter, oversaturated presumably with modernist detachment, ex­perimentation, absurdity, and so forth, the Russian prose of this century, especially that of the postwar period, is a respite, a breather, and they rave about and expand on the subject of the Russian soul, of the traditional values of Russian fiction, of the surviving legacy of the nineteenth century's religious humanism and all the good that it brought to Russian letters, of—should I quote—the severe spirit of Russian Orthodoxy. (As opposed, no doubt, to the laxness of Roman Catholicism.)

Whatever ax, and whomsoever with, people of this sort want to grind, the real point is that religions humanism is indeed a legacy. But it is a legacy not so much of the nine­teenth cenhiry in particular as of the general spirit of con­solation, of justifying the existential order on the highest, preferably ecclesiastical, plane, pertinent to the Russian sensibility and to the Russian cultural endeavor as such. To say the least, no writer in Russian history is exempt from this attitude, ascribing to Divine Providence the most dismal occurrences and making them automatically subject to human forgiveness. The trouble with this otherwise appealing attitude is that it's fully shared by the secret police as well, and could be cited by its employees on Judgment Day as a sound excuse for their practices.

Practical aspects aside, one thing is clear: this sort of ecclesiastical relativism (which is what the grounded flight of religious humanism boils down to on paper) naturally results in a heightened attention to detail, elsewhere called realism. Guided by this world view, a writer and a police­man rival each other in precision, and, depending on who is gaining the upper hand in a society, supply this realism with its eventual epithet. Which goes to show that the transition of Russian fiction from Dostoevsky to its present state hasn't occurred overnight, and that it wasn't exactly a transition either, because, even for his owri time, Dostoev­sky was an isolated, autonomous phenomenon. The sad truth about the whole matter is that Russian prose has been in a metaphysical slump for quite some time, ever since it produced Tolstoy, who took the idea of art re­flecting reality a bit too literally and in whose shadow the subordinate clauses of Russian prose are writhing indolently till this day.

This may sound like a gross simplification, for indeed, by itself, Tolstoy's mimetic avalanche would be of a limited stylistic significance were it not for its timing: it hit the Russian readership almost simultaneously with Dostoev­sky. Surely for an average Western reader, this sort of dis­tinction between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is of limited or exotic consequence, if any. Reading both of them in transla­tion, he regards them as one great Russian writer, and the fact that they both were translated by the same hand, Constance Garnett's, is of no help. (Even today, it must be noted, the same translator can be assigned to do Notes from the Home of the Dead and The Death of Ivan Ilyich—pre- sumably because the Dead and Death are perceived as enough of a common denominator.) Hence, the pundits' speculation about the traditional values of Russian litera­ture; hence, too, the popular belief in the coherent unity of Russian prose in the nineteenth century and the subsequent expectations of its similar show in the twentieth century. All that is quite far from reality; and, frankly, the proximity of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in time was the unhappiest coincidence in the history of Russian literature. The conse­quences of it were such that perhaps the only way Provi­dence can defend itself against charges of playing tricks with the spiritual makeup of a great nation is by saying that this way it prevented the Russians from getting too close to its secrets. Because who knows better than Provi­dence that whoever follows a great writer is bound to pick things up precisely where the great man left them. And Dostoevsky went perhaps too high for Providence's liking. So it sends in a Tolstoy as if to ensure that Dostoevsky in Russia gets no continuum.

2

It worked; there was none. Save for Lev Shestov, a literary critic and philosopher, Russian prose went with Tolstoy, only too glad to spare itself climbing the heights of Dostoevsky's spiritual pitch. It went down the winding, well-trodden path of mimetic writing, and at several re­moves—via Chekhov, Korolenko, Kuprin, Bunin, Gorky, Leonid Andreev, Gladkov—has reached the pits of social­ist realism. The Tolstoy mountain cast a long shadow, to emerge from which one had to either outdo Tolstoy in pre­cision or offer a qualitatively new linguistic content. Even those who took the second route and fought that engulfing shadow of descriptive fiction most valiantly—authors like Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Babel, and a few others—were paralyzed by it into a telegraph-style tongue-twitching that, for a while, would pass for an avant-garde art. Still, however generously these men were endowed with talent, spiritually they were but products of the aforementioned ecclesiastical relativism; the pressures of the new social order easily re­duced them to outright cynicism, and their works to tantal­izing hors d'oeuvres on the empty table of a lean nation.

The reason Russian prose went with Tolstoy lies of course in his stylistic idiom, with its open invitation to imi­tate it. Hence, an impression that one can beat him; hence, too, a promise of security, since even by losing to him one winds up with a substantial—recognizable!—product. Nothing of the sort emanated from Dostoevsky. Quite apart from the nonexistent chances of beating him in the game, the pure aping of his style was out of the question. In a sense, Tolstoy was inevitable because Dostoevsky was unique. Neither his spiritual quest nor his "means of trans­portation" offered any possibility of repetition. The latter especially, with its plots evolving according to the imma­nent logic of scandal, with its feverishly accelerating sen­tences conglomerating in their rapid progress, bureaucrat- ese, ecclesiastical terminology, lumpen argot, French uto- pists' mumbo-jumbo, the classical cadences of gentry prose —anything! all the layers of contemporary diction—the latter especially constituted an unthinkable act to follow.

In many ways, he was our first writer to tmst the intui­tion of language more than his o^—and more than inti­mations of his system of belief or those of his personal philosophy. And language repaid him a hundredfold. Its subordinate clauses often carried him much farther than his original intentions or insights would have allowed him to travel. In other words, he treated the language not so much as a novelist but as a poet—or as a biblical prophet demanding from his audience not imitation but conversion. A born metaphysician, he instinctively realized that for probing infinity, whether an ecclesiastical one or that of the human psyche, there was no tool more far-reaching than his highly inflected mother tongue, with its convoluted syntax. His art was anything but mimetic: it wasn't imi­tating reality; it was creating, or better still, reaching for one. In this vector of his he was effectively straying from Orthodoxy (or for that matter from any creed). He simply felt that art is not about life, if only because life is not about life. For Dostoevsky, art, like life, is about what man exists for. Like biblical parables, his novels are vehicles to obtain the answer and not goals unto themselves.

There are, roughly, two kinds of men and, correspond­ingly, two kinds of writers. The first kind, undoubtedly a majority, regards life as the one and only available reality. Turned writer, such a person will reproduce this reality in its minutest detail; he'll give you a conversation in the bedroom, a battlefield scene, the texture of upholstery, scents and tangs, with a precision rivaling your senses and the lenses of your camera; rivaling perhaps reality itself. Closing his book is like the end of a movie: the lights go up and you walk out into the street admiring Technicolor and the performance of this or that star whom you may even try to imitate subsequently in accent or deportment. The second kind, a minority, perceives his, and anyone else's, life as a test tube for certain human qualities, the retention of which under extreme duress is crucial for either an ecclesiastical or an anthropological version of the species' arrival. As a writer, such a man won't give you much in the way of detail; instead, he'll describe his char­acters' states and twists of psyche with such thoroughness that you feel grateful for not having met him in person. Closing his book is like waking up with a changed face.

One certainly should decide for oneself with whom to go; and Russian fiction obviously flocked to the former, prodded in that direction, we shouldn't forget, by history and her ironclad agent: the Polizeistaat. And normally it would be unjustifiable to pass judgment on such a choice, made under such circumstances, were it not for several excep­tions, the main one being the career of Andrei Platonov. But before getting to him, it would be only prudent to emphasize once more that at the turn of the century, Rus­sian prose was indeed at a crossroads, at a fork, and that one of those two roads wasn't taken. Presumably too many things were happening on the outside to waste that famous mirror of Stendhal's on scrutinizing the contortions of one's psyche. The vast, corpse-strewn, treachery-ridden historical vistas, whose very air turned solid with howls of ubiquitous grief, called for an epic touch, not for insidious questioning —never mind that that questioning could have prevented this epic sight.

If anything, this idea of a fork, of a road not taken, can be somewhat helpful to an average reader in his distinguish­ing between two great Russian writers, in putting him on alert whenever he hears about the "traditional values" of the Russian literature of the nineteenth century. The main point, though, is that the road not taken was the road that led to modernism, as is evidenced by the influence of Dostoevsky on every major writer in this century, from Kafka on. The road taken led to the literature of socialist realism. To put it differently, in terms of guarding its secrets, Providence suffered some setbacks in the West but it won in Russia. However, even knowing as little as we do about Providence's ways, we have a reason to assume that it may be not entirely happy with its victory. That is at least one explanation for its gift to Russian literature of Andrei Platonov.

3

If I refrain from stating here that Platonov is a greater writer than Joyce or Musil or Kafka, it's not because such ratings are in poor taste or because of his essential unavail­ability through existing translations. The trouble with such ratings is not poor taste (when was that ever a deterrent to an admirer?) but the vagueness of hierarchy that such a notion of superiority implies. As for the inadequacy of available translations, they are that way through no fault of the translators; the guilty party here is Platonov himself, or rather, the stylistic extremism of his language. It's the latter, along with the extreme character of the human predicament that Platonov is concerned with, that makes one refrain from this sort of hierarchical judgment, for the above-mentioned writers were not exposed to either ex­treme. He definitely belongs to this echelon of literature; yet, on those heights there is no hierarchy.

Platonov was bom in 1899 and died in 1951 of tubercu­losis, which he contracted from his son, whose release from prison he had eventually won, only to have his child die in his arms. From a photograph, a lean face with features as simple as a mral landscape looks at you patiently and as though prepared to take in anything. By education a civil engineer (he worked for several years on various irrigation projects), he began to write rather early, in his twenties, which coincided with the twenties of this century. He fought in the civil war, worked for various news­papers, and, although reluctantly published, achieved a great reputation in the thirties. Then came the arrest of his son on charges of anti-Soviet conspiracy, then came the first signs of official ostracism, then came World War II, during which he was in the army working for the army newspaper. After the war he was silenced; a short story of his published in 1946 invited a full-page pogrom by the top critic of Literaturnaya Gazeta, and that was it. After that he was allowed only occasional freelance ghost­writing jobs, such as editing some fairy tales for dildren; beyond that, nothing. But then his tuberculosis worsened and he couldn't do much anyway. He and his wife and their daughter lived on his wife's salary as an editor; he'd moonlight as a street sweeper or a stagehand in a theater nearby.

He wasn't arrested, although that review in Litera- turnaya Gazeta was a clear sign that his days as a writer were numbered. But they were numbered anyway; the top honcho in the Writers' Union administration even refused to endorse the secret police's case against Platonov, both because of his grudging admiration for the man and be­cause he knew that the man was ill. Regaining conscious­ness after a bout with his illness, Platonov would often see by his bedside a couple of men gazing at him very keenly: the state security was monitoring the progress of his illness to determine whether they should bother with this char­acter, and whether the Writers' Union official's stubbornness was justified. So Platonov died of natural causes.

All of this, or most of it, you'll no doubt find in various encyclopedias, forewords, afterwords, in dissertations about his work. By the standards of the time and the place, it was a normal life, if not an idyllic one. However, by the standards of the work Platonov did, his life was a miracle. That the author of The Foundation Pit and Chevengur was allowed to die in his own bed can be attributed only to divine intervention, if only in the guise of a fraction of scruples surviving in the men from the administration of the Writers' Union. Another explanation could be that neither novel had ever been in circulation, since both were presumably, in Platonov's view, works in progress, tem­porarily abandoned, much in the same way as Musil's The Man without Qualities. Still, the reasons for which they were temporarily abandoned also should be regarded as divine intervention.

Chevengur is some six hundred pages long; The Founda­tion Pit is one hundred and sixty. The first is about a man who, in the middle of the civil war, gets it into his head that there is a possibility that socialism has already emerged somewhere in a natural, elemental way; so he mounts his horse, which is named Rosa Luxemburg, and sets off to discover whether or not that is the case. The Foundation Pit takes place during collectivization, in some provincial landscape where for quite some time the entire population has been engaged in digging a vast foundation pit for the subsequent erection of a many-storied brightly lit building called "socialism." If from this idiotically simpleminded description one concludes that we are talking about yet another anti-Soviet satirical writer, with perhaps a sur­realistic bent, one should blame the description's author, as well as the necessity for making the description; the main thing one should know is that one is wrong.

For these books are indescribable. The power of devas­tation they inflict upon their subject matter exceeds by far any demands of social criticism and should be measured in units that have very little to do with literature as such. These books never were published in Soviet Russia and they never will be published there, for they come closest to doing to the system what it has done to its subjects. One wonders whether they will ever be published in Russia, for apart from concrete social evil, their real target is the sensibility of language that has brought that evil about. The whole point about Andrei Platonov is that he is a millenarian writer if only because he attacks the very carrier of millenarian sensibility in Russian society: the language itself—or, to put it in a more graspable fashion, the revolutionary eschatology embedded in the language.

The roots of Russian millenarianism are essentially not very different from those of other nations. This sort of thing always has to do with this or that religious community's anticipation of its oncoming peril (less frequently, but as well, with the presence of a real one) and with that com­munity's limited literacy. The few who read, and the still fewer who write, normally get to run the show, suggesting as a rule an alternative interpretation of Holy Writ. On the mental horizon of every millenarian movement there is always a version of a New Jerusalem, the proximity to which is determined by the intensity of sentiment. The idea of God's City being within reach is in direct proportion to the religious fervor in which the entire journey originates. The variations on this theme include also a version of an apoca­lypse, ideas of a change of the entire world order, and a vague, but all the more appealing because of that, notion of a new time, in terms of both chronology and quality. (Naturally, transgressions committed in the name of get­ting to a New Jerusalem fast are justified by the beauty of the destination.) When such a movement succeeds, it re­sults in a new creed. If it fails, then, with the passage of time and the spread of literacy, it degenerates into utopias, to peter out completely in the dry sands of political science and the pages of science fiction. However, there are several things that may somewhat rekindle soot-covered embers. It's either severe oppression of the population, a real, most likely military peril, a sweeping epidemic, or some sub­stantial chronological event, like the end of a millennium or the beginning of a new century.

If only because the species' eschatological capacity is al­ways one and the same, there is not much point in going on about the roots of Russian millenarianism in great de­tail. Its frnits, too, were not of such great variety, except for their volume and for the influence their volume exerted on the language of the epoch in which Platonov happened to live. Still, talking about Platonov and that epoch, we should bear in mind certain peculiarities of die period that directly preceded the arrival of this epoch in Russia, as well as elsewhere.

The period—the turn of the century—was indeed a peculiar one because of its climate of mass agitation fueled by the incoherent symbolism with which this chronological non-event—the turn of the cenhiry—was invested by a variety of technological and scientific breakthroughs, by the spread of means of communication, causing a qualita­tive leap in the masses' self-awareness. It was the period of great political activization: in Russia alone by the time of the Revolution there were more political parties than in today's America or Great Britain. Along with that, it was the period of a great upsurge in philosophical writing and in science fiction with strong utopian or social-engineering overtones. The air was filled with expectations and proph­ecies of a big change, of a new order of things coming, of restructuring the world. On the horizon there was Halley's comet, threatening to hit the globe; in the news, military defeat at the hands of the yellow race; and in an un­democratic society it's usually one step from a czar to a messiah or, for that matter, to the Antichrist. The period, to say the least, was a bit on the hysterical side. So it's indeed small wonder that when revolution came, many took it for what they had been looking for.

Platonov writes in the language of the "qualitative change," in the language of a greater proximity to New Jeru­salem. More precisely, in the language of paradise's builders —or, as in the case with The Foundation Pit, of paradise's diggers. Now, the idea of paradise is the logical end of human thought in the sense that it, that thought, goes no further; for. beyond paradise there is nothing else, nothing else happens. It can safely be said, therefore, that paradise is a dead end; it's the last vision of space, the end of things, the summit of the mountain, the peak from which there is no­where to step^^xcept into pure Chronos; hence the intro­duction of the concept of eternal life. The same actually applies to hell; structurally at least, these two things have a lot in common.

Existence in the dead end is not limited by anything, and if one can conceive that even there "circumstances con­dition consciousness" and engender their own psychology, then it is above all in language that this psychology is ex­pressed. In general, it should be noted that the first casualty of any discourse about utopia—desired or already attained —is grammar; for language, unable to keep up with this sort of thought, begins to gasp in the subjunctive mood and starts to gravitate toward categories and constructions of a rather timeless denomination. As a consequence of this, the ground starts to slip out from under even the simplest nouns, and they gradually get enveloped in an aura of arbitrariness.

This is the sort of thing that is happening nonstop in Platonov's prose. It can safely be said about this writer that his every sentence drives the Russian language into a se­mantic dead end or, more precisely, reveals a proclivity for dead ends, a blind-alley mentality in the language itself. What he does on the page is approximately as follows: he starts a sentence in a way familiar enough that you almost anticipate the tenor of the rest. However, each word that he uses is qualified either by epithet or intonation, or by its incorrect position within the context, to the extent that the rest of the sentence gives you not so much a sense of sur­prise as the sense that you have compromised yourself by knowing anything about the tenor of speech in general and about how to place these words in particular. You find your­self locked in, marooned in blinding proximity to the mean- inglessness of the phenomenon this or that word denotes, and you realize that you have got yourself into this predicament through your own verbal carelessness, through trusting too much your own ear and the words themselves. Reading Platonov, one gets a sense of the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the language and that with each new— anyone's—utterance, that absurdity deepens. And that there is no way out of that blind alley but to retreat back into the very language that brought one in.

This is perhaps a too laborious—and not terribly accu­rate or exhaustive (far from thatl )—attempt to describe Platonov's writing technique. Perhaps, too, effects of this sort can be created in the Russian language only, although the presence of the absurd in grammar says something not just about a particular linguistic drama but about the human race as a whole. All I have tried to do is to highlight one of Platonov's stylistic aspects that happens to be not so much even a stylistic one. He simply had a tendency to see his words to their logical—that is absurd, that is totally para­lyzing—end. In other words, like no other Russian writer before or after him, Platonov was able to reveal a self- destructive, eschatological element within the language itself, and that, in tum, was of extremely revealing conse­quence to the revolutionary eschatology with which history supplied him as his subject matter.

In casting a sort of myopic, estranged glance at any page of this writer, one gets a feeling of looking at a cuneiform tablet: so densely is it packed with those semantic blind alleys. Or else his pages look like a great department store with its apparel items turned inside out. This by no means suggests that Platonov was the enemy of this utopia, of this socialism, of the regime, collectivization, etc.; not at all. It's just that what he was doing with the language went far beyond the framework of that specific utopia. But then this is what every language inevitably does: it goes beyond history. However, what's interesting about Platonov's style is that he appears to have deliberately and completely sub­ordinated himself to the vocabulary of his utopia—with all its cumbersome neologisms, abbreviations, acronyms, bureaucratese, sloganeering, militarized imperatives, and the like. Apart from the writer's instinct, this willingness, not to say abandon, with which he went for newspeak, indicates, it would seem, his sharing of some beliefs in the promises the new society was so generous with.

It would be false as well as unnecessary to try to divorce Platonov from his epoch; the language was to do this any­way, if only because epochs are finite. In a sense, one can see this writer as an embodiment of language temporarily occupying a piece of time and reporting from within. The essence of his message is languace is a millenariam de­vice, history isn't, and coming from him that would be appropriate. Of course, to get into excavating the genealogy of Platonov's style, one has inevitably to mention the "plaiting of words" of centuries of Russian hagiography, Nikolai Leskov with his tendency to highly individualized narrative (so-called "skaz"—sort of "yarn-ing"), Gogol's satirical epic sway, Dostoevsky with his snowballing, feverishly choking conglomeration of dictions. But with

Platonov the issue is not lines of succession or tradition in Russian literature but the writer's dependence on the syn­thesizing (or, more precisely, supra-analytical) essence of the Russian language itself, conditioning—at times by means of purely phonetic allusions—the emergence of con­cepts totally devoid of any real content. His main tool was inversion; and as he wrote in a totally inverted, highly in­flected language, he was able to put an equals sign between "language" and "inversion." "Version"—the normal word order—came more and more to play a service role.

Again, very much after Dostoevsky's fashion, this treat­ment of language was more befitting a poet than a novel­ist. And, indeed, Platonov, like Dostoevsky, wrote some poetry. But if Dostoevsky, for his Captain Lebyadkin poem about the cockroach in The Possessed, can be considered the first writer of the absurd, Platonov's verses earn him a niche in no pantheon. But then scenes such as the one in The Foundation Pit where the bear-apprentice at some village's smithy is enforcing collectivization and is more politically orthodox than his master put Platonov somewhat beyond the status of a novelist as well. Of course, it could be said that he was our first properly surrealist writer, except that his swealism wasn't a literary category tied in our mind with an individualistic world view but a prod­uct of philosophical madness, a product of blind-alley psy­chology on a mass scale. Platonov wasn't an individualist; quite the contrary: his consciousness was determined pre­cisely by the mass scale and both the impersonal and the depersonalizing character of what was happening. His novels depict not a hero against a background but rather that background itself devouring a hero. And that's why his surrealism, in its turn, is impersonal, folkloric, and, to a certain degree, akin to ancient—or for that matter any— mythology, which, in all fairness, should be regarded as the classical form of surrealism.

It's not egocentric individualists whom both the Al­mighty and literary tradition automatically endow with a crisis-prone sensibility but traditionally inanimate masses that express in Platonov's works the philosophy of the ab­surd; and it is due to the numerical vastness of its carriers that this philosophy becomes far more convincing and ut­terly unbearable in its magnitude. Unlike Kafka, Joyce, and, let's say, Beckett, who narrate quite natural tragedies of their "alter egos,» Platonov speaks of a nation which in a sense has become the victim of its own language; or, to put it more accurately, he tells a story about this very language, which turns out to be capable of generating a fic­titious world, and then falls into grammatical dependence on it.

Because of all this, Platonov seems to be quite untrans­latable, and, in one sense, that's a good thing: for the lan­guage into which he cannot be translated. Still, the body of his work is very substantial and relatively diverse. Cheven- gur and The Foundation Pit were written, respectively, toward the end of the twenties and in the beginning of the thirties; Platonov remained operational for quite some time after that. In this sense, his case could be regarded as that of Joyce in reverse: he produced his Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners a^tcr Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. (And, as we are at this moment on this subject of transla­tion, it is worth recalling that sometime in the late thirties one of Platonov's short stories was published in the United States and that Hemingway was extolling it. So it is not entirely hopeless, although the story was very third-rate Platonov; I think it was his "The Third Son.")

Like every living creature, a writer is a universe unto himself, only more so. There is always more in him that separates him from his colleagues than vice versa. To talk about his pedigree, trying to fit him into this or that tradi­tion of literature is, essentially, to move in a direction ex­actly opposite to the one in which he himself was moving. In general, this temptation of seeing a literature as a co­herent whole is always stronger when it's viewed very much from the outside. In this sense, perhaps, literary criticism indeed resembles astronomy; one wonders, though, if this resemblance is really flattering.

If there is any tradition of Russian literature, Platonov represents a radical departure from it. I, for one, don't see either his predecessors, save perhaps some passages in The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, or his successors. There is a sense of terrific autonomy to this man, and much though I'd like to link him to Dostoevsky, with whom he perhaps has more in common than with anyone else in Russian literature, I'd rather refrain from doing so: it would illumi­nate nothing. Of course, what screams to be pointed out is that both Chevengur and The Foundation Pit thematically, at least, can be regarded as sequels to Dostoevsky's The Possessed because they represent the realization of Dosto- evsky's prophecy. But then again, this realization was supplied by history, by reality; it wasn't a writer's conjec­ture. For that matter, one can see in Chevengur, with its central character's passage through the lands in his search for the organically emerged socialism, and with his long soliloquies to a horse called Rosa Luxemburg, an echo of Don

Quixote or Dead Souls. But these echoes reveal nothing either—except the size of the wilderness in which one cries.

Platonov was very much on his own, and in a big way. His autonomy is the autonomy of an idiosyncratic meta­physician, a materialist, essentially, who tries to compre­hend the universe independently, from his vantage—or disadvantage—point of a small muddy provincial town lost like a comma in the infinite book of a vast, sprawling continent. His pages are studded with people of this sort: provincial teachers, engineers, mechanics, who in their godforsaken places entertain their huge homemade ideas about world order, ideas that are as mind-boggling and fantastic as these men's own isolation.

I have gone on about Platonov at such length partly be­cause he is not very well known in this country, but mainly in order to suggest that the mental plane of regard of con­temporary Russian prose is somewhat different from the rustic view of it generally entertained in the West. The uniformity of the social order doesn't guarantee that of men­tal operation; an individual's aesthetics never completely surrenders to either personal or national tragedy, no more than it surrenders to either version of happiness. If there is any tradition in Russian prose, it is one of searching for a greater thought, for a more exhaustive analysis of the human condition than is at present available, of looking for a better resource to ladle from to endure the siege of reality. But in all that, Russian prose is not that different from the vectors of other Western and Eastern literatures: it's a part of Christian civilization's culture, and neither the best nor most exotic part at that. To regard it otherwise amounts to racism in reverse, to patting the poor relation on the shoulder for his decent conduct, and that should somehow be stopped: if only because this attitude encour­ages sloppy translations.

4

Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of Platonov is that the quality of his work makes it hard to sustain an engaged discourse about his contemporaries and those who came after him. This may even be cited by the powers-that-be as a reason for suppressing both Chevengiir and The Founda­tion Pit. On the other hand, it's precisely the suppression of these two books, resulting in a lack of awareness of their existence, that has allowed a great number of writers—both his and our contemporaries—to go on with their produc­tion. There are crimes the forgiving of which is a crime also, and this is one of them. Suppression of Platonov's two novels not only set back the entire literature some fifty years; it also hampered the development of the national psyche as such by the same number of years. Burning books, after all, is just a gesture; not publishing them is a falsification of time. But then again, that is precisely the goal of the system: to issue its own version of the future.

Now this future has arrived, and although it's not ex­actly what the system bet on, in terms of Russian prose it's far less than it should have been. It's a good prose all right, but both stylistically and philosophically, it's far less enterprising than the prose of the twenties and thirties. It's conservative enough to enable one to talk about "tra­ditions of Russian prose," of course, but it knows in what century it lives. For the latest in that knowledge it has to go, unfortunately, to foreign authors, most of whom still have less to offer than that same Platonov. In the sixties the best of modern Russian writers were taking their cues from Hemingway, Heinrich Boll, Salinger, and, to a lesser extent, from Camus and Sartre. The seventies were the decade of Nabokov, who is to Platonov what a tightrope walker is to a Chomolungma climber. The sixties also saw the first selection in Russian of writings by Kafka, and that mattered a lot. Then Borges came out, and on the horizon looms the Russian translation of Robert Musil's great masterpiece.

There are a great many other foreign authors of lesser stature who, one way or another, today teach Rus­sian writers a lesson in modernism, from Cortazar to Iris Murdoch; but as has already been said, it's only the best of them who are willing to learn this lesson. The ones who really learn this lesson properly are the readers, and today an average Russian reader is much smarter than a promis­ing Russian writer. Also, the trouble with the best is that they are writers of mainly satirical bent, and they face from the outset obstacles of such magnitude that they have to go easy even on that acquired knowledge. Apart from this, in the last decade there has been emerging in the country a largely unpalatable, strong tendency toward nationalistic self-appreciation, and many a writer, consciously or un­wittingly, caters to that tendency, which often has the attraction of asserting the national identity in the face of the depersonalizing mass of the state. Natural and com­mendable as such an aspiration may be, for literature it beats a stylistic and aesthetic retreat and means recoiling with­out firing a destructive salvo, sequestering oneself in narcis­sistic self-pity because of having curbed one's own meta­physical ability. I am talking here obviously of the "peasant prose," which, initsAn taeus-like desire totouch the ground, went a bit too far and took root.

Neither in invention nor in overall world view does the Russian prose of today offer anything qualitatively new. Its most profound perception to date is that the world is radically evil, and the state is but that evil's blind, if not necessarily blunt, instrument. Its most avant-garde device is stream of consciousness; its most burning ambition is to admit eroticism and foul language into print: not, alas, for the sake of the print, but to further the cause of realism. Thoroughly fundamentalist in its values, it employs stylistic devices whose chief attraction lies in their familiar solidity. The name of the game is, in short, classical standards. But here is the rub.

What underlies this concept—classical standards—is the idea of man being the measure of all things. To tie them to a particular historical past, say, to the Victorian era, amounts to the dismissal of the species' psychological de­velopment. To say the least, it's like believing that a seventeenth-century man felt hunger more than his modern counterpart. Thus by harping on the traditional values of Russian fiction, on its "severe spirit of Orthodoxy," and what­not, the critical profession invites us to judge this fiction by standards which are not so much classical as those of yesterday. A work of art is always a product of its time, and it should be judged by this time's standards, by the standards of its century to say the least (especially if that century is about to be over). It is precisely because Russia produced such great prose in the nineteenth century that there is no need for special provisions in evaluation of its contemporary fiction.

As in everything else, in the way of prose this century has seen a lot. What it has come to value, it seems, apart from popular-at-all-times straight storytelling, is a stylistic invention as such, a structural device—montage, hopscotch, whatever. In other words, it has come to like a display of self-awareness, manifested by the narrator's distancing him­self from the narrative. That, after all, is time's own posture toward existence. In still other words, in art, this century (alias time) has come to like itself, the reflection of its own features: fragmentation, incoherence, an absence of content, a dimmed or a bird's-eye view of the human pre­dicament, of suffering, of ethics, of art itself. For lack of a better name, the compendium of these features is com­monly called today "modernism," and it is of "modernism" that contemporary Russian fiction, both published and un­derground, falls markedly short.

By and large, it still clings to an extensive, conventional narrative with an emphasis on a central character and his development, along the lines of a Bildungsroman technique, hoping—and not without good reason—that, by reproduc­ing reality in its minute detail, it may produce a sufficiently surrealistic or absurdist effect. The grounds for such hope, of course, are solid: the quality of the reality of the coun­try; oddly, though, that turns out to be not enough. What thwarts these hopes is precisely the stylistic convention­ality of the means of depiction, which hark back to the psychological atmosphere of these means' noble origins, i.e., to the nineteenth century, i.e., to irreality.

There was one particular moment, for instance, in Sol- zhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, when Russian prose, as well as the writer himself, came within a two- or three-paragraph distance of a decisive breakthrough. Solzhenitsyn describes in one chapter the daily grind of a woman doctor. The description's flatness and monotony definitely matches the list of her tasks, epic in their length and idiocy, yet this list lasts longer than anyone's ability to sustain a dispassionate tone recording it: a reader expects an explosion: it is too unbearable. And this is exactly where the author stops. Had he gone on for two or three paragraphs more with this dis­proportion—of tone and content—we might have gotten a new literature; we might have gotten a real absurdity, en­gendered not by the stylistic endeavor of a writer but by the very reality of things.

So why did Solzhenitsyn stop? Why didn't he go on with those two or three paragraphs? Didn't he feel at the moment that he was on the verge of something? Perhaps he did, although I doubt it. The point is that he had no material to stuff those two more paragraphs with, no other tasks to mention. Why, then, one would ask, didn't he invent some? The answer is at the same time noble and sad: because he is a realist and inventing things would be untrue: both to the facts and to his nature as a writer. A realist, he had a different set of instincts from those that nudge you to make things up when you see an opening. It's for this reason that I doubt that he felt he was on the verge of something: he simply couldn't sense the opening, wasn't poised enough to see it. So the chapter ends on a moralizing, see-how-bad-things-are note. I remember reading it with my fingers almost trembling: "Now, now, now it's going to happen." It did not.

This episode in Cancer Ward is all the more symptomatic since Solzhenitsyn qualifies as both a published and an underground writer. Among many other things that these two categories have in common are their flaws. Unless he has completely crossed over to the experimental side, an underground writer can be distinguished from his col­leagues in the establishment mainly by his subject matter, much less so by his diction. On the other hand, an experi­mentalist tends to go about his experimentation with a real vengeance: having no prospects of being published, he is usually quick to give up didactic concerns altogether, which eventually costs him even his limited audience of a few cognoscenti. Frequently, his only solace is a bottle, his only hope, to be compared by a scholar in some West German magazine to Uwe Johnson. In part because his work is utterly untranslatable, in part because he is usually employed by an institution doing some classified scientific research with military applications, he doesn't entertain thoughts about emigrating. Eventually, he abandons his artistic pursuits.

This is the way it goes, for the middle ground claimed in countries with a better political system by somebody like Michel Butor, Leonardo Sciascia, Giinther Grass, or Walker Percy simply doesn't exist in Russia. It's an either/ or situation in which even publishing abroad is not of de­cisive help, if only because it's invariably detrimental to the author's physical well-being. To produce a work of lasting consequence under these circumstances requires an amount of personal integrity more frequently possessed by tragic heroes than by the authors of those tragedies. Naturally, in this predicament prose fares worse than other forms of art, not only because the process of creating it is of a less mercurial nature, but also because, thanks to prose's didac­tic nature, it's been watched very closely indeed. The mo­ment the prose watcher loses the author, it's curtains for the work; yet efforts to keep the work accessible to its watch­dog render it properly sheepish. As for writing "for the drawer," "for the attic," which an established writer some­times undertakes to clear his conscience, it too fails to bring him a stylistic cure—which became evident during the last decade, which saw almost the entire attic prose swept clean to the West and published there.

A great writer is one who elongates the perspective of human sensibility, who shows a man at the end of his wits an opening, a pattern to follow. After Platonov, the closest that Russian prose came to producing such a writer were Nadezhda Mandelstam with her memoirs and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Alexander Solzhenitsyn with his novels and documentary prose. I permit myself to put this great man second largely because of his apparent inability to discern behind the cruelest political system in the history of Christendom the human failure, if not the failure of the creed itself (so much for the severe spirit of Orthodoxy!). Given the magnitude of the historical nightmare he de­scribes, this inability in itself is spectacular enough to sus­pect a dependence between aesthetic conservatism and resistance to the notion of man being radically bad. Quite apart from the stylistic consequence for one's writing, the refusal to accept this notion is pregnant with the recurrence of this nightmare in broad daylight—anytime.

Aside from these two names, Russian prose for the mo­ment has very little to offer to a man at the end of his wits. There are a few isolated works which in their heartbreaking honesty or eccentricity approximate masterpieces. All they can supply our man with is either a momentary catharsis or comic relief. Though ultimately furthering one's subor­dination to the status quo, this is one of prose's better services; and it's better if the reading public in this country knows the names of Yury Dombrovsky, Vasily Grossman, Venedikt Erofeev, Andrei Bitov, Vasily Shukshin, Fazil Iskander, Yury Miloslavsky, Yevgeny Popov. Some of them authored only one or two books, some of them are already dead; but, together with the somewhat better-known Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Voinovich, Vladimir Maximov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Vladimir Maramzin, Igor Efimov, Eduard Limo- nov, Vasily Aksyonov, Sasha Sokolov, they constitute a reality with which everybody for whom Russian literature and things Russian are of any consequence sooner or later will have to reckon.

Each one of these men deserves a discussion of no lesser length than this lecture already is. Some of them happen to be my friends, some are quite the contrary. Squeezing them into one sentence is like listing air-crash victims; but then that's precisely where a catastrophe has occurred: in the air, in the world of ideas. The best works of these authors should be regarded as this catastrophe's survivors. If asked to name one or two books that stand to outlast their authors and the present generation of readers, I for one would name Voinovich's In Plain Russian and any selection of short stories by Yury Miloslavsky. However, the work that faces, in my view, a really incalculable future is Yuz Aleshkovsky's Kangaroo, soon to come out in English. (God help its translator!)

Kangaroo is a novel of the most devastating, the most terrifying hilarity. It belongs in the genre of satire; how­ever, its net effect is neither revulsion at the system nor comic relief, but pure metaphysical terror. This effect has a lot less to do with the author's rather apocalyptical world view as such than with the quality of his ear. Aleshkovsky, whose reputation in Russia as a songwriter is extremely high (in fact, some of his songs are a part of national folk­lore), hears the language like a prodigy. The hero of Kan­garoo is a professional pickpocket whose career spans the entire history of Soviet Russia, and the novel is an epic yarn spun out in the foulest of language, for which either "slang" or "argot" fails as a definition. Much like a private philosophy or set of beliefs for an intellectual, foul lan­guage in the mouths of the masses serves as an antidote to the predominantly positive, obtrusive monologue of author­ity. In Kangaroo, very much as in everyday Russian dis­course, the volume of this antidote overshoots its curative purpose by a margin capable of accommodating yet an­other universe. While in terms of its plot and structure this book may bear a resemblance to something like The Good Soldier Schweik or Tristram Shandy, linguistically it is ab­solutely Rabelaisian. It is a monologue, nasty, morbid, frightful, rampant with a cadence resembling biblical verse. To drop yet another name, this book sounds like Jeremiah: laughing. For a man at the end of his wits that's already something. However, it is not exactly concern for that anon­ymous yet ubiquitous man that makes one appreciate this particular work, but its overall stylistic thrust in a direction unfamiliar to the Russian prose of today. It goes where the vernacular goes; that is, beyond the finality of a content, idea, or belief: toward the next phrase, the next utterance: into the infinity of speech. To say the least, it strays from the genre of the ideological novel of whatever denomina­tion, absorbing the condemnation of the social order but spilling over it as over a cup too small to contain the flood of language.

Starting with the authors mentioned above, some may find these notes maximalist and biased; most likely they will ascribe these flaws to their author's own metier. Still others may find the view of things expressed here too schematic to be true. True: it's schematic, narrow, superficial. At best, it will be called subjective or elitist. That would be fair enough except that we should bear in mind that art is not a democratic enterprise, even the art of prose, which has an air about it of everybody being able to master it as well as to judge it.

The point, however, is that the democratic principle so welcome in nearly all spheres of human endeavor has no application in at least two of them: in art and in science. In these two spheres, the application of the democratic principle results in equating masterpiece with garbage and discovery with ignorance. The resistance to such an equa­tion is synonymous with recognition of prose as an art; and it's precisely this recognition that forces one to dis­criminate in the most cruel fashion.

Whether one likes it or not, art is a linear process. To prevent itself from recoiling, art has the concept of cliche. Art's history is that of addition and refinement, of extending the perspective of human sensibility, of enriching, or more often condensing, the means of expression. Every new psy­chological or aesthetic reality introduced in art becomes instantly old for its next practitioner. An author disregard­ing this rule, somewhat differently phrased by Hegel, auto­matically destines his work—no matter what good press it gets in the marketplace—to assume the status of pulp.

But if it were only the fate of his work, or his own, that wouldn't be too bad. And the fact that supply of pulp creates a demand for pulp isn't too bad either; to art as such it's not dangerous: it always takes care of its own kind, as the poor or those in the animal kingdom do. The bad thing about prose which is not art is that it compromises the life it describes and plays a reductionist role in the development of the individual. This sort of prose offers one finalities where art would have offered infinities, comfort instead of challenge, consolation instead of a verdict. In short, it betrays man to his metaphysical or social enemies, whose name in either case is legion.

Heartless as it may sound in many ways, the condition Russian prose finds itself in today is of its own doing; the sad thing is that it keeps perpetuating this condition by being the way it is. Taking politics into consideration is therefore an oxymoron, or rather a vicious circle, for poli­tics fills the vacuum left in people's minds and hearts pre­cisely by art. There must be some lesson for other litera­tures in the plight of Russian prose in this century, for it's still a little bit more forgivable for Russian writers to op­erate the way they do, with Platonov dead, than for their counterparts in this country to court banalities, with Beckett alive.

1984

On "September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden

1

The poem in front of you has ninety-nine lines, and time permitting, we'll be going over each one of them. It may seem, and indeed be, tedious; but by doing so we have a better chance to learn something about its author as well as about the strategy of a lyrical poem in general. For this is a lyrical poem, its subject matter notwithstanding.

Because every work of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a seU-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the au­thor's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.

The author of this poem, as you already know, having been made to memorize it, is a critic of his century; but he is a part of this century also. So his criticism of it nearly

· This lecture was delivered as a part of a course in modern lyric poetry at the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. It was taped and transcribed by Miss Helen Handley and Ann Sherrill Pyne, students in the program.

always is self-criticism as well, and this is what imparts to his voice in this poem its lyrical poise. If you think that there are other recipes for successful poetic operation, you are in for oblivion.

We are going to examine this poem's linguistic content, since vocabulary is what distinguishes one writer from an­other. We will also pay attention to the ideas the poet puts forth, as well as to his rhyme schemes, for it's the latter that supply the former with a sense of inevitability. A rhyme turns an idea into law; and, in a sense, each poem is a linguistic codex.

As some of you have observed, there is a great deal of irony in Auden, and in this poem in particular. I hope we'll proceed in a fashion thorough enough for you to realize that this irony, this light touch, is the mark of a most profound despair; which is frequently the case with irony anyway. In general, I hope that by the end of this session, you'll develop the same sentiment toward this poem as the one that prompted it into existence—one of love.

2

This poem, whose title, I hope, is self-explanatory, was written shortly after our poet settled on these shores. His departure caused considerable uproar at home; he was charged with desertion, with abandoning his country in a time of peril. Well, the peril indeed came, but some time after the poet left England. Besides, he was precisely the one who, for about a decade, kept issuing warnings about its—the peril's—progress. The thing with perils, though, is that no matter how clairvoyant one is, there is no way to time their arrival. And the bulk of his accusers were pre­cisely those who saw no peril coming: the left, the right, the pacifists, etc. What's more, his decision to move to the United States had very little to do with world politics: the reasons for the move were of a more private nature. We'll talk about that somewhat later, I hope. Presently what matters is that our poet finds himself at the outbreak of war on new shores, and therefore has a minimum of two audiences to address: those at home and those right in front of him. Let's see what effect this fact has upon his diction. Now, on with this thing . . .

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the c/er;er hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing mir private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.

Let's start with the first two lines: "I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street . . ." Why, in your view, does the poem start in this way? Why, for instance, this precision of "Fifty-second Street"? And how precise is it? Well, it's precise in that Fifty-second Street indicates a place that can't be somewhere in Europe. Good enough. And I think what Auden wants to play here a bit is the role of a jour­nalist, of a war correspondent, if you wish. This opening has a distinct air of reporting. The poet says something like "your correspondent reports to you from . . ."; he is a newsman reporting to his people back in England. And here we are getting into something very interesting.

Watch that word "dive." It's not exactly a British word, right? Nor is "Fifty-second Street." For his posture of re­porter they are obviously of immediate benefit: both things are equally exotic to his home audience. And this introduces you to one aspect of Auden with which we are going to deal for some time: the encroachment of American diction, a fascination with which was, I think, among the reasons for his move here. This poem was written in 1939, and for the five subsequent years his lines became literally strewn with Americanisms. He almost revels in incorporating them into his predominantly British diction, whose texture—the tex­ture of English verse in general—gets considerably ani­mated by the likes of "'dives" and "raw towns." And we'll be going over them one by one because words and the way they sound are more important for a poet than ideas and convictions. When it comes to a poem, in the beginning there is still the word.

And in the beginning of this particular poem there is this "dive," and it's quite likely that this dive is responsible for the rest of it. He surely likes this word if only because he never used it before. But then again he thinks, "Humph, back there in England they might think that I am just kind of slumming, in the sense of language; that I am simply rolling these new American morsels over my tongue." So then, first of all, he rhymes "dives" with "lives," which is in itself telling enough, apart from animating an old rhyme. Secondly, he qualifies the word by saying "one of the dives," thereby reducing the exoticism of "dives."

At the same time, "one of the" increases the humbling effect of being in a dive in the first place, and this humbling effect suits well his reporter's posture. For he positions him­self fairly low here: physically low, which means in the midst of things. That alone boosts the sense of verisimili­tude: the guy who speaks from the thick of things is more readily listened to. What makes the whole thing even more convincing is "Fifty-second Street," because numbers after all are seldom used in poetry. Most likely, his first impulse was to say, "I sit in one of the dives"; but then he decided that "dives" may be too linguistically emphatic for the crowd back home, and so he puts in "on Fifty-second Street." This somewhat lightens the matter, since Fifty- second Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was at the time the jazz strip of the universe. Hence, by the way, all that syncopation that reverberates in the half-rhymes of those trimeters.

Remember: it is the second, and not the first, line that shows where your poem is to go metrically. It also informs an experienced reader as to the identity of the author, i.e., whether he is American or British (an American second line, normally, is quite bold: it violates the preconceived music of the meter with its linguistic content; a Briton, normally, tends to sustain the tonal predictability of the second line, introducing his own diction only in the third or, more likely, in the fourth line. Compare the tetrametric— or even pentametric—jobs of Thomas Hardy with E. A. Robinson, or better still, with Robert Frost). More im­portantly, though, the second line is the line that introduces the rhyme scheme.

"On Fifty-second Street" performs all these jobs. It tells you that it's going to be a poem in trimeters, that the author is hard-hitting enough to qualify as a nativc; that the rhyme is to be irregular, most likely assonant ("afraid" coming after "street"), with a tendency to expand (for it is "bright" that in fact rhymes with "street" via "afraid," which widens into "decade"). To Auden's British audience, the poem starts in earnest right here, with this amusing yet very matter-of-fact air that "Fifty-second Street" creates, in a fairly unexpected fashion. But the point is that by now our author isn't dealing only with Britons; not anymore. And the beauty is that this opening cuts both ways, since "dives" and "Fifty-second Street" inform his American public that he speaks its language as well. If one bears in mind the immediate aim of the poem, this choice of diction is not surprising at all.

Some twenty years later, in a poem written in memory of Louis MacNeice, Auden expresses a desire to "become, if possible, a minor Atlantic Goethe." This is an extremely significant admission, and the crucial word here is, believe it or not, not Goethe but Atlantic. Because what Auden had in mind from the very outset of his poetic career was the sense that the language in which he wrote was transatlantic or, better still, imperial: not in the sense of the British Raj but in the sense that it is the language that made an empire. For empires are held together by neither political nor mili­tary forces but by languages. Take Rome, for instance, or better still, Hellenic Greece, which began to disintegrate immediately after Alexander the Great's own demise (and he died very young). What held them for centuries, after their political centers collapsed, were magna lingua Grecae and Latin. Empires are, first and foremost, cultural entities; and it's language that does the job, not legions. So if you want to write in English, you ought to master all its idioms, from Fresno to Kuala Lumpur, so to speak. Other than that, the importance of what you are saying may not go far be­yond your little parish, which is perfectly commendable, of course; what's more, there is that famous "drop of water" (which reflects the entire universe) approach to comfort you. That's fine. And yet there is every chance for you to become citizens of the Great English Language.

Well, this is, perhaps, demagoguery; but it won't hurt. To get back to Auden, I think, one way or another, the above considerations played their role in his decision to leave England. Also, his reputation at home was already very high and presumably the prospect facing him was to join the literary establishment: for in a carefully stratified society there is nowhere else to go, and nothing beyond. So he hit the road, and the language extended it. In any case, for him that empire was stretched not only in space but in time as well, and he was ladling from every source, level, and period of English. Naturally, a man who was so fre­quently charged with fishing out of the OED very old, obscure, dated words hardly could ignore the safari Amer­ica was offering.

At any rate, "Fifty-second Street" rings enough of a bell on both sides of the Atlantic to make people listen. In the beginning of every poem, a poet has to dispel that air of art and artifice that clouds the public's attitude to poetry. He has to be convincing, plain—the way, presumably, the pub­lic itself is. He has to speak with a public voice, and all the more so if it is a public subject that he deals with.

"I sit in one of the dives I On Fifty-second Street" an­swers those requirements. What we get here is the level, confident voice of one of us, of a reporter who speaks to us in our own tones. And just as we are prepared for him to continue in this reassuring fashion, just as we've recognized this public voice and have been lulled into regularity by his trimeters, the poet plummets us into the very private dic­tion of "Uncertain and afraid." Now, this is not the way reporters talk; this is the voice of a scared child rather than of a seasoned, trench-coated newsman. "Uncertain and afraid" denotes what?—doubt. And this is precisely where this poem—indeed poetry in general, art in general—starts for real: in, or with, doubt. All of a sudden the certitude of that Fifty-second Street dive is gone and you get the feel­ing that perhaps it was displayed there in the first place because he was "uncertain and afraid" in the very begin­ning: that's why he clung to their concreteness. But now the preliminaries are over, and we are in business indeed.

As we go line by line, we should examine not only their content and function in the overall design of a poem but also their individual independence and stability; for if a poem is there to last, it better have decent bricks. In that light, the first line is a bit shaky, if only because the meter is just introduced and the poet knows it. It has an air of natural speech and is quite relaxed and humble because of the activity it describes. The main thing is that it doesn't prepare you for the next line; neither metrically nor in terms of content. After "I sit in one of the dives" everything is possible: pentameter, hexameter, a couplet rhyme, you name it. "On Fifty-second Street," therefore, has a greater significance than its content suggests, for it locks the poem into the meter.

The three stresses of "On Fifty-second Street" render it as solid and straight as Fifty-second Street itself. Although sitting "in one of the dives" doesn't jibe with a traditional poetic posture, its novelty is rather provisional, as is every­thing that has to do with the pronoun ''1.'' "On Fifty- second Street," on the other hand, is permanent because it is impersonal and also because of its number. The combina­tion of these two aspects reinforced by the regularity of the stress gives the reader a sense of confidence and legitimizes whatever may follow.

Because of this, "Uncertain and afraid" strikes you all the more with its absence of anything concrete: no nouns, not even numbers; just two adjectives like two little fountains of panic surging in your stomach. The shift of diction from public to private is quite abrupt, and those open vowels in the beginning of this line's only two words leave you breathless and alone against the concrete stability of the world whose length doesn't stop at Fifty-second Street. The state that this line denotes isn't one of mind, obviously. The poet, however, tries to produce a rationale having, presumably, no desire to slip into whatever abyss his home- lessness may invite him to glance at. This line could just as well have been dictated by the sense of his incongruity with the immediate surroundings (by the sense of one's flesh's incongruity with any surroundings, if you like). I would even venture to suggest that this sense was per­manently present in this poet; it's simply his personal or, as is the case with this poem, historical circumstances that were making it more acute.

So he is quite right here to grope for a rationale for the described state. And the whole poem grows out of these gropings. Well, let's watch what is going on:

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade . . .

To begin with, a considerable portion of his English audi­ence gets it in the neck here. "The clever hopes" stands here for a lot of things: for pacifism, appeasement, Spain, Munich—for all those events that paved the road to Fascism in Europe more or less in the same fashion as the road to Communism is paved there in our time by Hungary, Czech­oslovakia, Afghanistan, Poland. Speaking of the last, Sep­tember 1, 1939, which gave our poem its title, is the day when the German troops invaded Poland and World War II began. (Well, a little bit of history shouldn't hurt, should it?) The war, you see, began over the British guarantees of Polish independence. That was the CMUS belli. Now it's 1981, and where is that Polish independence today, forty years later? So, strictly, legally speaking, World War II was in vain. But I'm digressing ... At any rate, these guarantees were British, and this epithet still meant something to Auden. To say the least, it could still imply home, and hence the lucidity and harshness of his attitude toward "clever hopes."

Still, the main role of this conjunction is the hero's at­tempt to quell the panic by rationalization. And that would do were it not for "clever hopes" being a contradiction in terms: it is too late for a hope if it is clever. The only quell­ing aspect of this expression comes from the word "hope" itself, since it implies a future invariably associated with improvement. The net result of this oxymoron is clearly satirical. And yet under the circumstances, satire is, on one hand, almost unethical and, on the other hand, not enough. So the author lowers his fist with "Of a low dishonest decade," which spans all those aforementioned instances of yielding to brute force. But before we get into this line, note the epigrammatic quality of "dishonest decade": thanks to the similarity of stresses and the common opening con­sonant, "dishonest" constitutes a sort of mental rhyme for "decade." Well, this is perhaps watching things too closely for their own good.

Now, why do you think Auden says "low dishonest decade"? Well, partly because the decade indeed had sunk very low—because as the apprehension about Hitler grew, so did the argument, especially on the Continent, that some­how everything was going to work out all right. After all, all those nations rubbed shoulders too long, not to mention the carnage of World War I still fresh in their memories, to conceive the possibility of yet another shooting session. To many of them that would have seemed sheer tautology. This is the type of mentality best described by the great Polish wit Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (whose Unkempt Thmights Auden adored greatly) in the following observation: "A hero who survived tragedy isn't a tragic hero." Cute as it may sound, the sick thing is that a hero often survives one tragedy to die in another. Hence, in any case, those "clever hopes."

By adding "low dishonest decade" Auden produces the effect of being deliberately judgmental. In general, when a noun gets more than one adjective, especially on paper, we become slightly suspicious. Normally, this sort of thing is done for emphasis, but the doer knows it is risky. This, by the way, raises a parenthetical comment: in a poem, you should try to reduce the number of adjectives to a mini­mum. So that if somebody covers your poem with a magic cloth that removes adjectives, the page will still be black enough because of nouns, adverbs, and verbs. "'hen that cloth is little, your best friends are nouns. Also, never rhyme the same parts of specch. Nouns you can, verbs you shouldn't, and rhyming adjectives is taboo.

By 1939 Auden is enough of an old hand to know this thing about two or more adjectives and yet he does exactly this with these epithets which, on top of everything else, are both pejorative. Why, do you think? In order to condemn the decade? But "dishonest" would have been enough. Be­sides, righteousness wasn't in Auden's character, nor would it escape him that he was a part of that decade himself. A man like him wouldn't employ a negative epithet without sensing a touch of self-portrayal in it. In other words, when­ever you are about to use something pejorative, try to apply it to yourself to get the full measure of the word. Other than that, your criticism may amount simply to getting un­pleasant things out of your system. Like nearly every self- therapy, it cures little . . . No, I think the reason for using the adjectives in a row was the poet's desire to supply the rational revulsion with physical gravity. He simply wants to seal this line for good, and the heavy, one-syllabled "low" does it. The trimeter is employed here in hammer­like fashion. He could have said "sick" or "bad"; "low," how­ever, is more stable and it also reverberates with the seedi- ness of the dive. We deal here not only with the ethical but also with the actual urban topography, as the poet wants to keep the whole thing on street level.

Waves of anger aid fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives . . .

The "waves" are obviously those of radio broadcasts, al­though the position of the word—right after "dishonest decade" and at the beginning of a new sentence—promises you relief, a change of pitch; so originally a reader is in­clined to take "waves" in a romantic key. Well, because a poem sits in the very middle of the page surrounded by the enormity of white margins, each word of it, each comma carries an enormous—i.e., proportionate to the abundance of unused space—burden of allusions and significances. Its words are simply overloaded, especially those at the begin­ning and at the end of the line. It ain't prose. It's like a plane in a white sky, and each bolt and rivet matter greatly. And that's why we are going over each one of them . . . Anyhow, "anger and fear" are presumably the substance of those broadcasts: the German invasion of Poland and the world's reaction to it, including the British declaration of war against Germany. It could be precisely the contrast of those reports with the American scene that made our poet assume his newsman posture here. In any case, it's this allusion to the press that is responsible for the choice of the verb "circulate" in the next line; but only partly.

The party more directly responsible for this verb is the word "fear" at the end of the previous line, and not only because of the generally recurring nature of this sensation but because of the incoherence associated with it. "Waves of anger and fear" is pitched a bit too high above the con­trolled, level diction of the previous lines, and the poet decides to undercut himself with this technical or bureau­cratic, at any rate dispassionate, "circulate." And because of this impersonal, technical verb, he can safely—i.e., without risking an air of emotional superficiality—employ those allusion-laden epithets "bright and darkened," which depict both the actual and the political physiognomy of the globe.

"Waves of anger and fear" clearly echoes the poet's own state of mind in "uncertain and afraid." In any case, it is the latter that conditions the former, as well as "obsessing our private lives." The key word in this line obviously is "ob­sessing" because apart from conveying the importance of those news broadcasts/ rustling tabloids, it introduces a sense of shame that runs through the entire stanza and casts its hissing sibilant shadow upon "our private lives" before we catch the meaning of the statement. Thus the posture of a reporter who speaks to us and about us conceals a self- disgusted moralist, and "our private lives" becomes a eu­phemism for something quite unspeakable; for something that bears responsibility for the stanza's last two lines:

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Here we sense once again British diction, something that smacks of a drawing room: "unmentionable odour." The poet, as it were, gives us two euphemisms in a row: an epithet and an object, and we almost see a wriggled nose. The same goes for "offends." Euphemism, generally, is inertia of terror. ^bat makes these lines doubly horrid is the mixture of the poet's real fear with a roundabout locu­tion, aping his audience's reluctance to call a spade a spade. The disgust that you detect in these two lines has much less to do with the "odour of death" as such and its proximity to our nostrils than with the sensibility that used to render it "unmentionable."

On the whole, this stanza's most important admission, "uncertain and afraid," has at the source not so much the outbreak of war as the sensibility that precipitated it and whose diction the last two lines emulate. Don't make the mistake of regarding them as a parody: not at all. They simply do their job in the author's drive to bring everybody and everything into the focus of collective guilt. He simply tries to show what that civilized, euphemistic, detached dic­tion and everything that is associated with it result in, which is carrion. Now, this is of course a bit too strong a sentiment to end a stanza with, and the poet decides to give you a bit of breathing space; hence that "September night."

And although this "September night" has gone somewhat astray because of what's been done to it, it's still a Septem­ber night and, as such, it evokes rather tolerable allusions. At this point, the poet's strategy is—apart from his overall desire to be historically precise—to pave the road for the next stanza: we shouldn't forget about considerations like this. So he gives us here a mixture of naturalism and high lyricism that stabs you both in the heart and in the plexus. The last thing in the stanza, however, is the voice of the heart, albeit a wounded one: "the September night." It doesn't constitute a great deal of relief: still, one senses that there is someplace to go. Let's see, then, where it is that our poet is taking us, after reminding us with "September night" that what we are reading is a poem.

3

The second stanza starts with a deliberate, I'd say pedantic surprise of "Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the whole offence/From Luther until now/ . . ." Surely you expected anything but this: after "September night." You see, Auden is the most unpredictable poet. In music, his counterpart would be Joseph Haydn. With Auden, you don't foresee the next line even if the meter is the most conventional. And that's the way to do the job . . . Anyway, why do you think he starts here with "accurate scholarship"?

Well, he begins a new stanza, and his immediate concern and purpose is to change the pitch, in order to escape the monotony which the repetition of structural design always promises. Secondly, and more importantly, he is fully aware of the preceding sentence's gravity, of its effectiveness, and he doesn't want to continue in that authoritative fashion: he is simply mindful of the authority of a poet who, in the eyes of the audience, is a priori right. So what he tries to demonstrate here is his capacity for objective, dispassionate discourse. "Accurate scholarship" is evoked here to dispel any possibility of a romantic, poetic shadow supposedly cast by the first stanza's diction over the ethical argument in progress.

This pressure for objectivity, dryness of tone, etc., has been both the curse and the blessing of modem poetry. It choked quite a lot of throats; Mr. Eliot's would be one, al­though the same force made him a superb critic. What's good about Auden, ^ong other things, is that he proved to be capable of manipulating this pressure to suit his lyri­cal ends. Here he is, for instance, speaking in this cool, pedantic voice: "Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the whole offence . . ." and yet you sense under the mask of objectivity the badly controlled anger. That is, the objec­tivity here is the result of controlled anger. Note that. And note also the pause after "can" that sits at the end of this line and rhymes rather faintly with "done," which is too far away to reckon with. After this pause, "unearth" comes as a false emphatic verb; it's a bit too elevated and casts considerable doubt over this scholarship's ability to unearth anything.

The metronome-like distribution of stresses in both lines reinforces the absence of emotion peculiar to scholastic un­dertakings, but a keen ear pricks up at "the whole offence": the dismissal here isn't exactly academic. Perhaps it's done to offset the aforesaid aloofness of "unearth," though I doubt it. The poet resorts to this colloquial dismissive intonation most likely to convey not so much the possible imprecision of this scholarship's findings as its gentlemanly, detached posture, which has very little to do with its very subject; neither with Luther nor with "now." By this time, the entire conceit—Oh yeah, we can be logical—that sus­tains this stanza starts to get on the author's nerves, and in "has driven a culture mad" Auden finally lets himself go and releases the word that twitched for too long on the tip of his tongue: "mad."

:\1y hunch is that he loved this word dearly. As everyone whose mother tongue is English should: this word covers a lot of ground—if not all of it. Also, "mad" is very much English-schoolboy diction, which, for Auden, was a sort of sancta sanctorum; not so much because of his 'happy childhood" or his experience as schoolmaster as due to every poet's craving for laconism. Apart from being apt in de­noting both the state of the world and that of the speaker's mind, "mad" heralds here the arrival of a diction fully de­ployed by the end of this stanza. But let's get to the next line.

"Find what occurred at Linz." I bet you know more about Luther than about what occurred at Linz. Well, Linz is the city in Austria where AdoU Hitler, known also as Adolf Schiklgruber, spent his childhood; i.e., went to school, got his ideas, and so forth. Actually he wanted to become a painter and applied to the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts but was turned down. Too bad for fine arts, considering this man's energy. So he became a Michelangelo in reverse. Well, we'll return to this business of war and painting later. Now let's watch the lexical content of this stanza: here we are on to something interesting.

Let's assume that what we've said about that high- school aspect of "mad" is accurate. The point is that "what occurred at Linz" also refers to a high-school experience: that of young Schiklgruber. Of course, we don't know what exactly did happen there, but by now we all have bought that notion of "formative years." The next two lines, as you probably see, are "What huge imago made/A psychopathic god." Now, "imago" comes straight out of psychoanalytic lingo. It means an image of a father-figure that a child fashions for himself in the absence of the real father— which was young Adolfs case—and that conditions a child's subsequent development. In other words, here our poet grinds scholarship into the fine dust of psychoanalysis which we inhale nowadays unwittingly. Note also the beauty of this triple rhyme connecting "mad" and "god" via the assonant "made." Very subtly but relentlessly the poet is paving the road to the last four lines of this stanza, which every living person has to tattoo in his/her brain.

The whole idea of the stanza is to pit "accurate scholar­ship" (which is yet another version of "clever hopes") against the plain ethics of "Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return." These basics are public knowledge: it's something that even schoolchildren know; i.e., it's some­thing that belongs in the subconscious. In order to hammer this into the heads of his audience, he has to offset one diction with another since contrast is what we comprehend most. So he plays the manifest sophistication of Linz/ Luther/imago versus the breathtaking simplicity of the last two lines. By the time he gets to "a psychopathic god," he is somewhat exasperated with his effort to be fair to the op­posite side's argument as well as with the necessity of con­taining the actual sentiment. And so he breaks into this oratorical "I and the public know," unleashing the vowels and bringing in the word that explains everything: school­children.

No, he isn't juxtaposing cunning and innocence here. Nor does he practice analysis without a license. Of course he knew the works of Freud (as a matter of fact, he read them quite early, before he entered Oxford). He is simply intro­ducing the common denominator that binds us to Hitler, for his audience—or his patient—is not a faceless author­ity but all of us to whom this or that evil was, at some point, done. Hitler, according to Auden, is a human phenomenon: not just a political one. Therefore he uses the Freudian ap­proach, as it promises a shortcut to the root of the problem, to its origin. Au den, you see, is a poet who is interested most of all in cause-and-effect interplay, and Freudianism for him is but a means of transportation: not destination. Also, if not primarily, this doctrine like any other simply expands his vocabulary: he ladles from every puddle. What he achieves here then is more than just a snipe at "accurate scholarship's" ability to explain human evil: he tells us that we all are quite evil, for we empathize with these four lines, don't we? And do you know why? Because this quatrain sounds, after all, like a most coherent rendition of the con­cept of Original Sin.

But there is something else to these four lines. For, by suggesting that we all are capable of becoming Hitlers, they steal somewhat from our resolve to condemn him (or the Germans). There is almost an air, however faint, of "who are we to judge?"—do you sense it? Or is it just my nostrils? And yet I think it is there. And if it is there, how would you explain this air?

Well, first of all, it's only September 1, 1939, and most of the enterprise hasn't yet taken place. Also, the poet could have been hypnotized enough by the effectiveness of those four lines (they also give an impression of having come off easily) to overlook the nuance. But Auden wasn't that kind of a poet, and on the other hand, he knew what modern warfare is like, having been to Spain. The most plausible explanation is that, after Oxford, Auden spent quite a lot of time in Germany. He traveled there several times, and some of his sojourns were long and happy.

The Germany he visited was the Germany of the Weimar Republic—the best Germany there ever was in this century, as far as your teacher is concerned. It was quite unlike England in terms of both misery and vivacity, for the population consisted of those who—defeated, crippled, impoverished, orphaned—survived the Great War, whose first casualty was the old imperial order. The entire social fabric, not to mention economy, was completely undone, and the political climate was that of high volatility. To say the least, it was unlike England, as regards its atmo­sphere of permissiveness, as regards the phenomenon loosely called decadence; especially as regards the visual arts. It was the period of the great outburst of Expressionism: the "ism" of which the German artists of the period are con­sidered the founding fathers. Indeed, speaking of Expres­sionist art, whose chief visual characteristics are broken lines, nervous, grotesque deformity of objects and figures, lurid and cruel vividness of colors, one can't help thinking of World War II as its greatest show. One feels as though the canvases of those artists had wandered out of their frames and projected themselves across the land mass of Eurasia. German was also the language of Freud, and it was in Berlin that Auden got to deal with that great doc­trine at close range. Well, to make a long story short, I'd recommend to you Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, for they capture the atmosphere of both the place and the period a lot better than any movies you might have seen.

Hitler's rise to power, to be sure, spelled an end to nearly all that. In the eyes of European intellectuals, his advent was, at the time, not so much a triumph of will as a triumph of vulgarity. For Auden, who was a homosexual and who originally went to Berlin, I think, simply for boys, the Third Reich was also something like a rape of those youths. The boys were to become soldiers and kill or get killed. Or else they would be ostracized, incarcerated, and so forth. In a sense, I think, he took Nazism personally: as something totally hostile to sensuality, to subtlety. Need­less to say he was right. The cause-and-effect man, he was quick to realize that in order to produce evil, the ground must be fertilized. His perception of the German develop­ments was sharpened and aggravated by his firsthand knowledge that the evil had already been done to all those people before any Nazis ever surfaced. By that I suppose he means the peace of Versailles and that these boys were themselves children of war who had suffered its conse­quences: poverty, deprivation, neglect. And he knew them all too well to be surprised at them behaving nastily, with or without the uniform; he knew them well enough not to be taken aback by their "evil in return," provided there were congenial circumstances in which to do that evil.

Schoolchildren, you see, are the most menacing lot; and both the army and the Polizeistaat repeat the structure of a school. The point is that for this poet school was not only the "formative experience." It was the only social structure he ever went through (as a pupil and as a teacher); there­fore it became for him the metaphor for existence. Once a boy, I suppose, always a boy; especially if you are English. That's why Germany was so clear to him, and that's why on September 1, 1939, he doesn't feel like condemning the Germans in blanket fashion. Besides, every poet is a bit of a Fiihrer himself: he wants to nile minds, for he is tempted to think that he knows better—which is only a step away from thinking that you are better. To condemn is to imply superiority; given this opportunity, Auden chooses to ex­press grief rather than to pass judgment.

These reservations, based in part on offended sensuality, reveal a despairing moralist whose only means of self-control is the iambic trimeter; and this trimeter pays him back with the reticent dignity it contains. Now, one doesn't choose one's meter; it's the other way around, for meters have been around longer than any poet. They start to hum in one's head—partly because they have been used by somebody one has just read; mostly, however, because they are them­selves equivalents of certain mental states (which include ethical states )—or they contain a possibility of curbing a certain state.

If you are any good, you try to modify them formally by, say, playing with a stanzaic design or shifting a caesura around—or through the unpredictability of the content; by what you are going to stuff these familiar lines with. A lesser poet would repeat the meter more slavishly, a better one would try to animate it if only by giving it a jolt. It is possible that what set Auden's pen in motion here was W. B. Yeats's "Easter 1916," especially because of the similarity in subject matter. But it's equally possible that Auden had just reread Swinburne's "In the Garden of Proserpine": one may like tunes in spite of their lyrics, and great men are not necessarily influenced by their equals only. In any case, if Yeats used this meter to express his sentiments, Auden sought to control them by the same means. Hence, for you, not the hierarchy of poets but the realization that this meter is capable of both jobs. And of a lot more. Of practically everything.

Well, back to the mines. Why do you think the third stanza starts this way:

4

Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy . . .

A stanza, you see, is a self-generating device: the end of one spells the necessity of another. This necessity is first of all purely acoustical and, only then, didactical (although one shouldn't try to divorce them, especially for the sake of analysis). The danger here is that the preconceived music of a recurrent stanzaic pattern tends to dominate or even determine the content. And it's extremely hard for a poet to fight the dictates of the tune.

The eleven-line-long stanza of "September 1, 1939," is, as far as I can tell, Auden's own invention, and the irreg­ularity of its rhyme pattern functions as its built-in anti- fatigue device. Note that. All the same, the quantitative effect of an eleven-line-long stanza is such that the first thing on the writer's mind as he starts a new one is to escape from the musical predicament of the preceding lines. Auden, it should be noted, must work here exceptionally hard precisely because of the tight, epigrammatic, spell­binding beauty of the previous quatrain. And so he brings in Thucydides—the name you are least prepared to en­counter, right? This is more or less the same technique as putting "accurate scholarship" next to "the September night." But let's examine this line a bit closer.

"Exiled" is a pretty loaded word, isn't it? It's high-pitched not only because of what it describes but in terms of its vowels also. Yet because it comes right after a distinctly sprung preceding line and because it opens the line which, we expect, is to return the meter its regular breath, "exiled" arrived here in a lower key . . . Now, what in your opinion makes our poet think of Thucydides and of what this Thucy- dides "knew"? Well, my guess is that it has to do with the poet's own attempts at playing historian for his own Athens; all the more so because they are also endangered and be­cause of his realization that no matter how eloquent his message—especially the last four lines—he, too, is doomed to be ignored. Hence this air of fatigue that pervades the line, and hence this exhaling feeling in "exiled"—which he could apply to his own physical situation as well, but only in a minor key, for this adjective is loaded with a possibility of self-aggrandizement.

We find another clue to this line in Humphrey Carpen­ter's splendid biography of Auden, where its author men­tions the fact that our poet was rereading Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War about this time. And the main thing about the Peloponnesian War, of course, is that it spelled the end for what we know as classical Greece. The change wrought by that war was indeed a drastic one: in a sense, it was the real end of Athens and all it stood for. And Pericles, in whose mouth Thucydides puts the most heartbreaking speech about democracy you will ever read —he speaks there as though democracy has no tomorrow, which in the Greek sense of the word it really hadn't—that Pericles is being replaced in the public mind, almost over­night—by whom? By Socrates. The emphasis shifts from identification with community, with the polis, to individual­ism—and it is not such a bad shift, except that it paves the road to subsequent atomization of society, with all the at­tendant ills ... So our poet, who has at least geographical reasons to identify with Thucydides, also realizes what change for the world, for our Athens, if you will, looms on the horizon. In other words, he also speaks here on the eve of war but, unlike Thucydides, not with the benefit of hind­sight but in real anticipation of the shape of things—their ruins, rather— to come.

"All that a speech can say" is, in its wistfulness, a self- contained line. It sustains the fatigue-laden personal link with Thucydides, for speech can be disdained only by those who master it: by poets or historians. I'd even add that every poet is a historian of speech, although I'd resent having to clarify this remark. At any rate, in "speech" we have obvi­ously a reference to the funeral oration that Thucydides put in the mouth of Pericles. On the other hand, of course, a poem itself is a speech, and the poet tries to compromise his enterprise before someone else—a critic or events— would do that. That is, the poet steals from your "so what" reaction to his work by saying this himself before the poem is over. This is not a safeguarding job, though; it's indica­tive neither of his cunning nor of his self-awareness but of humility, and is prompted by the minor key of the first two lines. Auden is indeed the most humble poet of the English language; next to him even Edward Thomas comes off as haughty. For his virtues are dictated not by his conscience alone but by prosody, whose voice is more convincing.

Watch for that "About Democracy," though! How re­ductive this line is! The emphasis here is of course on the limited—or doomed—ability of speech as such: an idea that Auden has dealt with in a thorough fashion already in his "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," where he states that ". . . poetry makes nothing happen." But thanks to this reductive, off-hand treatment of the line, the doom spreads onto "democracy" as well. And this "democracy," on top of everything, rhymes both as consonants and visually with "say." In other words, the hopelessness of a "a speech" is compounded by the hopelessness of its subject, be it "de­mocracy" or "what dictators do."

What's interesting in this line about "dictators" is its more vigorous—by comparison with "about Democracy"—distri- bution of stresses, which, however, highlights less the author's resentment of dictators than his attempt to over­come the gravity of increasing fatigue. Watch also this tech­nique of understatement in "dictators do." The euphemistic nature of this conjunction gets exposed through the almost unbearable syllabic superiority of the noun (dictators) over the verb (do). You sense here the great variety of things a dictator is capable of, and it's not for nothing that "do" (which plays here the role of "unmentionable" in the first stanza) rhymes with "knew."

"The elderly rubbish they talk/To an apathetic grave ..." is certainly a reference to the aforesaid funeral oration of Pericles. Yet it's a bit more worrisome here because the dis­tinction between the historian's (and by the same token, the poet's) speech and what's delivered by tyrants is blurred. And what blurs the distinction is "apathetic," an epithet more suitable for a crowd than for a grave. On second thought, it's suitable for both. On third, it equates "crowd" with "grave." "An apathetic grave" is, of course, your vintage Auden with his definitions' blinding proximity to an object. It's not the futility of dictators, therefore, that the poet is concerned with here but the destination of speech par excellence.

Such an attitude to one's own craft could again, of course, be explained by the author's humility, by his self-effacing posture. But you shouldn't forget that Auden landed in New York just eight months earlier, on December 26, 1938, the very date the Spanish Republic fell. The sense of help­lessness which presumably overcame this poet (who had issued by that time more and better warnings against the onslaught of Fascism than anyone else in the field) on this September night simply seeks solace in the parallel with the Greek historian who dealt with the phenomenon at hand no less extensively, two millennia ago. In other words, if Thucydides failed to convince his Greeks, what chance is there for a modern poet, with his weaker voice and bigger crowd?

The very list of things "analyzed" in Thucydides' book, i.e., the very way in which Auden renders them, suggests a historical perspective: from an old-fashioned "enlighten­ment" via ''habit-forming pain" and down to this very con­temporary "mismanagement." As for "habit-forming pain," this expression, of course, isn't of the poet's own coinage (though it sounds remarkably like being one): he simply lifted it from psychoanalytical lingo. He did this often— and so should you. This is what these lingos are for. They save you a trip and often suggest a more imaginative treat­ment of the proper language. Also, Auden used this corn- pound epithet as a sort of homage to Thucydides: because of Horner, classical Greece is associated with hyphenated definitions . . . Well, at any rate, the succession of these items shows that the poet is tracing the present malaise to its origins: a process that, like every retrospection, renders one's voice elegiac.

Yet there is a more loaded reason for this succession, since "September 1, 1939," is a transitional poem for Auden; i.e., what you've heard about our poet's so-called three stages— Freudian, Marxist, religious—is presented here in a nutshell of two lines. For while ''habit-forming pain" clearly harks back to the Viennese doctor and "mismanagement" to political economy, the monosyllabic "grief' in which the entire succession results, nay, culminates, is straight out of King James and shows, as they say, our man's real drift. And the reasons for that drift, for the emergence of that third, religious stage which this "grief' heralds, are as much personal for this poet as they are historical. Under the cir­cumstances the poem describes, an honest man wouldn't bother to distinguish between the two.

That Thucydides appears here not only because Auden was reading him at the moment, but because of the di­lemma's own familiarity, is, I hope, clear. Nazi Germany indeed had begun to resemble a sort of Sparta, especially in the light of the Prussian military tradition. Under the cir­cumstances the civilized world would thus have amounted to Athens, as it was duly threatened. The new dictator, too, was talkative. If this world was ripe for anything, it was retrospection.

But there is a peculiarity. Once you set the apparatus of retrospection into motion, you get yourself into a jumble of things possessing different degrees of remoteness, since all of them are past. How, and on what basis, does one choose? Emotional affinity with this or that tendency or event? Ra­tionalization about its significance? Pure acoustic pleasure of a word or a name? Why, for instance, does Auden pick up "enlightenment"? Because it stands for civilization, cul­tural and political refinement associated with "Democracy"? In order to pave the road for the impact of "habit-forming pain"? And what is it in "enlightenment's" allusive powers that paves that road? Or maybe it has to do with the very act of retrospection: with its purpose as well as with its reason?

I think that he picked this word because it is enlighten­ment with a capital "E" that houses the origins of the malaise in question, not Sparta. To put it more aptly, what it seems to me was going through the poet's mind or, if you will, through his subconscious (although writing, let me repeat, is a very rational operation that exploits the subconscious to its own ends and not vice versa), was a search, in several directions, for those origins. And the closest thing in sight was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea of a "noble savage" ruined by imperfect institutions. Hence, obviously, the necessity of improving those institutions, hence, then, the concept of the Ideal State. And hence an array of social utopias, bloodshed in order to bring them about, and their logical conclusion, a Polizeistaat.

Because they are so remote, the Greeks are always of an archetypal denomination to us, and this goes for their his­torians too. And in a didactic poem, one is more successful with one's audience if one throws it an archetype to munch. Auden knew this, and that's why he does not mention Mr. Rousseau here by name, although this man is almost solely responsible for the concept of an ideal ruler, i.e., in this instance Herr Hitler. Also, under the circumstances, the poet most likely didn't feel like debunking even this sort of Frenchman. Finally, an Auden poem always tries to estab­lish a more general pattern of human behavior, and for that, history and psychoanalysis are more suitable than their side products. I simply think that the Enlightenment was very much on the poet's mind as he was pondering the situation, and it wandered into the poem in the lower case, the way it wandered into history.

I'd like to allow myself one more digression, though, now that we are on this subject of the "noble savage." The very expression, I suppose, went into circulation because of all those world voyages of the Age of Discovery. I guess the great navigators—people like Magellan, La Perouse, Bou­gainville, et al., were the ones who coined it. They simply had in mind the inhabitants of all those newly discovered tropical islands who presumably greatly impressed them by not eating the visitors alive. This is of course a joke, and in bad taste; literally so, I must add.

The appeal the concept of the "noble savage" enjoyed among the literati and, subsequently, with the rest of society had clearly to do with a very vulgar public notion of para­dise, i.e., with a generally garbled reading of the Bible. It was simply based on the notion that Adam, too, was naked, as well as on the rejection of Original Sin (in this, of course, the ladies and gentlemen of the Enlightenment weren't the first; nor were they the last). Both attitudes—especially the latter—were presumably a reaction against the omnipres­ence and redundancy of the Catholic Church. In France, more particularly, it was a reaction against Protestantism.

But whatever its pedigree, the idea was shallow, if only because it flattered man. Flattery, as you know, doesn't take you too far. At best, it simply shifts the emphasis— i.e., guilt—by telling man that he is inherently good and that it's the institutions which are bad. That is, if things are rotten, it's not your fault but someone else's. The truth is, alas, that both men and institutions are good for nothing, since the latter, to say the least, are the product of the former. Still, each epoch—indeed, each generation—dis­covers this lovely species, the noble savage, for itself and lavishes it with its political and economic theories. As in the days of world voyages, the noble savage of today is mostly of a swarthy shade and dwells in the tropics. At present we call it the Third World and refuse to admit that our enthusiasm to apply there the formulas that failed in our parts is but an obverse form of racism. Having done all it could in the temperate zones, the great French idea in a sense has returned to its source: to breed tyrants al fresco.

Well, so much for "noble savages." Note other rhymes in this stanza which are no less suggestive than "knew-do" and "say-democracy-away": "talk-book," "grave-grief," and finally this "again" enhancing the habit-forming aspect of "pain." Also, I hope you've been able to appreciate the self-contained character of "mismanagement and grief": here you have that enormous distance between cause and effect covered in one line. Just as math preaches how to do it.

5

Why do you think he starts this stanza by mentioning "this neutral air" and why is this air neutral? Well, first of all, he does it in order to disengage his voice from the emo­tionally charged preceding line; any version of neutrality therefore is welcome. It also supports the notion of the poet's objectivity. Mainly, however, "this neutral air" is here because this is a poem about the outbreak of the war and America as yet is neutral; i.e., it hasn't yet entered the war. By the way, how many of you remember when it did? Well, never mind. Finally, "this neutral air" is here because there is no better epithet for air. What could be more apt? Every poet, as you probably know, tries to grapple with this problem: how to describe an element. Of the four, only the earth yields a handful of adjectives. It's worse with fire, desperate with water, and out of the question with air. And I don't think the poet would be able to pull it off here were it not for politics. Note that.

What do you think this stanza is all about, anyway? At least, the first half of it? Well, to begin with, the author here shifts the focus from past history to die present. As a matter of fact, he went this way already in the last two lines of the previous stanza: "Mismanagement and grief:/ We must suffer them all again." This is the way the past closes. Here's how the present opens, and it's a bit ominous:

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers ise Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man . . .

First of all, why are skyscrapers blind? Paradoxically enough, precisely because of their glass, because of their windows; i.e., they are blind in direct proportion to the number of their "eyes." Argus-like, if you wish. Next, right after these more terrifying than majestic blind skyscrapers comes the verb "use," which, apart from everything else, reveals the reason they've been erected. And it comes too soon and too abruptly, in all its inanimate power. And you are fully aware of what "blind skyscrapers" are capable of if they "use." However, they don't use anything or anybody but "their full height." You get here a terrific sense of re­dundant self-reliance very much pertinent to these struc­tures. This description hits you not by its invention but by stealing from your expectations.

For you expect skyscrapers to be animated, presumably in a nasty way, as is the fashion in poetry. This mindless, dildo-display-like "use/Their full height," however, sug­gests that they do not act on the outside: presumably on account of their blindness. Blindness, mind you, is, in its turn, a fonn of neutrality. As a result, you sense the tau­tology of this air and these buildings, an equation neither part of which is responsible for the other.

The poet here, you see, is painting a cityscape, the New York skyline, as it were. Partly for the purposes of the poem, but mostly because of the keenness of his eye, he renders it as a paysage moralise (or demoralise, in this case). The air here is qualified by buildings that jut into it as well as by the politics of their builders and dwellers. Conversely, it qualifies buildings by reflecting on their windows and rendering them blind, neutral. After all, it's literally a tall order: to describe a skyscraper. The only successful job that comes to my mind is that famous line by Lorca about the "gray sponge." Auden is giving you here a psycho­logical equivalent of post-Cubism, for, in fact, what the "full height" of these structures proclaims is not "the strength of Collective Man" but the magnitude of his in­difference, which, for Collective Man, is the only possible emotional state. Keep in mind that this sight is new for the author, and keep in mind also that description and itemiza­tion are fonns of cognition, indeed of philosophy. Well, there is no other way to explain epic poetry.

This inanimate "strength of Collective Man" in a state of frightful passivity is the poet's main concern through­out the poem and surely in this stanza. Much as he appre­ciates the solidity of this republic (Collective Man, I take it, means this as well) into whose "neutral air" "Each lan­guage pours its vain/Competitive excuse," he recognizes in it the features of things that brought the whole tragedy about. These lines just as well could have been written on the other side of the Atlantic. "Competitive excuse" for doing nothing to stop Herr Hitler is, among other things, a snipe at the business world, although what prompts them as well as "Out of the mirror they stare I Imperialism's face I And the international wrong" is rather a terminological inertia that harks back to his Marxonian (from Marx and Oxford) period; more so than the conviction that he has found real culprits. In any case, "Out of the mirror they stare" suggests not so much those looming monstrosities as those who can meet their glances in the mirror. And this means not so much "them," whom it's customary to blame, as "us," who are, after all, not even so smug in this "euphoric dream," which we can afford, having erected these in­vincible structures that grew out of the Depression.

"'September 1, 1939" is first and foremost a poem about shame. The poet himself, as you remember, is under some pressure for having left England. This is what helps him to discem the aforesaid faces in that mirror: he sees there his own. The speaker now is no longer a reporter; we hear in this stanza a voice shot through with the lucidity of despair over everyone's complicity in the events this date unleashed, and over the speaker's own impotence to make that Col­lective Man act. On top of that, Auden, a newcomer to American shores, probably must have felt uncertain as to his moral right to urge the natives to act. Curiously enough, toward the second part of this particular stanza, the rhymes are getting somewhat shabby, less assertive, and the whole tone becomes neither personal nor impersonal, but rhe­torical. What began as a majestic vision dwindles to the aesthetics of John Heartfield's photo-montages, and I think the poet senses it. Hence the deft, muffled lyricism of the opening lines of the next stanza, of this love song for the interior.

6

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The mu&c must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To nwke this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

It's a real morsel, this stanza; a terrific verbal photograph: not Heartfield but Cartier-Bresson. "Out of the mirror they stare" paves the road to "Faces along the bar," because you can see those faces only in a bar mirror. In contrast with the public-placard diction in the last lines of the preceding stanza, this is a private voice: for this is a private, an inti­mate world that doesn't require explanations. An enclosure, an epitome of security: a fort indeed. Someone said about Auden that whatever he was writing about, he always kept an eye on civilization. Well, it would be more accurate to say that he always kept an eye on whether it's safe where he or his subjects are, whether the ground's firm. For every ground is a ground for suspicion, so to speak. And if this stanza is beautiful, it's beautiful because of the underlying uncertainty.

Uncertainty, you see, is the mother of beauty, one of whose definitions is that it's something which isn't yours. At least, this is one of the most frequent sensations accom­panying beauty. Therefore, when uncertainty is evoked, then you sense beauty's proximity. Uncertainty is simply a more alert state than certitude, and thus it creates a better lyrical climate. Because beauty is something obtained al­ways from without, not from within. And this is precisely what's going on in this stanza.

For every description is an externalization of the object: a step aside so as to see it. That's why the comfort that the poet describes in the firs t lines of this stanza is all but gone by its end. "Faces along the bar I Cling to their average day" is quite safe, perhaps with the exception of the verb "cling," but it sits at the beginning of the second line, far away from any emphatic position, so we let it go at that. "The lights must never go out, I The music must always play" are soothing too, except that those two "musts" alert you to a possibility that too much is taken for granted. In "The lights must never go out" one detects not so much a conviction that bars should stay open all night as a fidgeting hope that there won't be military blackouts. "The music must always play," through its combination of understate­ment and naivete, tries to obscure that uncertainty, to prevent it from developing into anxiety that threatens to become audible in the self-conscious, faltering tone of "conventions conspire"—for the piling up of these two lengthy Latinate words indicates too much rationalization for the cozy place that this bar is.

The next line's job is to bring things under control and re­store the original, appropriately relaxed atmosphere of the stanza; and the ironic "this fort" does the job very nicely. Actually, what's interesting here is the way the poet arrives at the intended statement that the bar is "home," dis­heartening as its accuracy may be. It takes him six lines, whose every word makes its hesitant contribution to the erection of the short verb "is" which is required for the emergence of that disheartening notion. This tells you about the complexity behind every "is" as well as about the author's reluctance to admit this equation. Also, you should pay attention to the deliberate assonance of "assume" and "home" as well as to the quiet desperation behind the word "furniture," which is our synonym for "home," isn't it? For this construction, "the furniture of home" in itself is a picture of the min. The moment the job is done, the moment you are lulled by this mixture of predictable meter and recognizable detail, this whole quest for solace goes up in smoke with "Lest we should see where we are," whose rather Victorian 'lest" sweetens the rest of the line's pill. And this Victorian echo takes you into "a haunted wood," where it's audible enough to justify the "never" of "Who have never been happy or good"—which, in its own right, echoes those schoolchildren at the end of the second stanza. This second echo simply reverberates the theme of the sub­conscious, and very timely so, because this theme is per­tinent to the next stanza's understanding. On our way there, however, let's note the fairy-tale-like, distinctly English character of the last two lines, which not only reinforces the admission of human imperfection but helps that echo to fade into the opening of the next stanza. Well, let's have it.

7

The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.

"Windiest" is a very English expression here. But the old- country diction also steals in in the old-country notion of autumn which, to me, is responsible for this line's content, at least in part. Because September in New York, as you all know, is a hot and muggy time. In England, and in English poetic tradition, however, the name of this month is the very synonym of autumn. Only October could be better. The poet, of course, has in mind the political climate, but he sets out to describe it in terms of the actual—for the old country as well as for the rest of the realm in question, i.e., Europe—weather. Somehow this opening reminds me of Richard Wilbur's first stanza in his "After the Last Bul­letins," with its description of the trash blown along the big city's streets by the cold wind. I may be wrong about this line because there is this "militant" that would be hard to fit into my reading of it. Still, something tells me to take this "windiest" first of all literally and only then in its derogatory function.

With "Important Persons shout" we are on the safer ground of externalizing our discontent. Together with "The windiest militant trash," this line, because of its vigorous subordinate clause, contains the always welcome promise of laying the blame on somebody else, on authority. But just when we are ready to fully enjoy its deriding air comes:

Is oot so crude as our wish . . .

which not only robs us of a scapegoat and states our own responsibility for the rotten state of affairs but tells us that we are worse than those we blame to the extent that "wish" assonates with "trash," failing to comfort us even with the equation of an exact rhyme. The next two lines usher in the most crucial statement made by the poet in this poem, and for all he saw in this era. "What mad Nijinsky wrote/ About Diaghilev ..," Well, in this city of ours, where ballet is a highbrow cum bourgeois equivalent of a ball game, it is, I presume, unnecessary to go into who is who here. Still, Nijinsky was the star of the legendary Ballet Russe in Paris in the teens and the twenties of the century, and that troupe was run by Sergei Diaghilev, a famous im­presario responsible for a variety of breakthroughs in modern art, a sort of Renaissance man with a very strong personality, but first of all an aesthete. Nijinsky, whom he discovered, was his lover. Subsequently, Nijinsky got mar­ried and Diaghilev had his contract discontinued. Shortly afterward Nijinsky went mad. I am telling you all this not for its juiciness but in order to explain the pedigree of one word—actually of one consonant—farther down in the stanza. Actually there were several versions of why Dia­ghilev fired Nijinsky: because of dissatisfaction with the quality of his dancing, because there were signs of Nijinsky going mad earlier, because his very marriage illustrated that, and so forth. I simply don't want you holding a sim­plistic view of Diaghilev: partly because of the role his name plays in the poem, mostly because he was a unique man. For the same reasons, I don't want you to simplify Nijinsky either, if only because it's from his diary, which he wrote in a state close to madness, that Auden quotes verbatim at the end of this stanza. I recommend that diary to you very strongly—this book has the Gospels' pitch and intensity. That's why it is important "What mad Nijinsky wrote/ About Diaghilev."

So much for our who-is-who game. What madmen say about sane ones is usually of interest and often valid. "Is true" in "Is true of the normal heart" shows that Auden applies here, albeit unwittingly, the holy-fool principle: i.e., the idea that the holy fool is right. Nijinsky, after all, qualifies for a "fool" because he is a performer; for "holi­ness" we have here his madness as manifested in his writing, which indeed has a strong religious bent. The poet here, as you know, is not free of the latter himself: "the error bred in the bone/Of each woman and each man" denotes not only the subconscious effects of upbringing but also echoes the Bible; "each woman and each man" both confirms and obfuscates that echo. Concreteness here fights allusion. What adds to the validity of Nijinsky's statement, however, is his "foolishness" rather than his "holiness": for, as a performer, he is, technically speaking, an agent of "uni­versal love." I suggest you see Auden's "Ballad of St. Barnaby," where he expands on this subject; it's very late Auden.

The error is of course selfishness that is very deep-seated in each one of us. The poet tries to zero in on the source of the tragedy, you understand, and his argument moves camera-like from the peripheral (politics) to the central (subconscious, instinct), where he encounters this crav­ing not for "universal love I But to be loved alone." The distinction here is not so much between Christian and heathen or spiritual and carnal as between generous and selfish; i.e., between giving and taking; in a word, between Nijinsky and Diaghilev. Better still, between loving and having.

And watch what Auden is doing here. He comes up with the unthinkable: with a new rhyme for love: he rhymes 'love" and "Diaghilev"! Now, let's see how it happens. I bet he had this rhyme in mind for a while. The point is, though, that it's easier if "love" comes first and "Diaghilev" comes second. The content, however, forces the poet to put "Diaghilev" first, which presents several problems. One of them is that the name is foreign, and the reader may misplace the stress. So Auden puts a very short, reductive line, "About Diaghilev," after the regularly stressed "What mad Nijinsky wrote." Apart from the regularity of its beat, this line also acquaints the reader with the possibility of a foreign name and allows him to distribute stresses here whichever way he likes. This liberty paves the road to the trochaic arbitrariness of the next line, where "Diaghilev" goes virtually stressless. A reader then is quite likely to put the stress on the last syllable, which suits the author just fine, for it will amount to rhyming "lev" and 'love": what could be better?

However, the name contains that strange to an English ear, or eye, sound gh, which somehow should be taken care of. The culprit of its strangeness is the position of h after g.

So it appears that the poet should find a rhyme not for "lev" only but for "ghilev" or, rather, "hilev" as well. And so he does, and it is "have" in "Craves what it cannot have." Terrific line, that: the energy of "Craves" hits head- on the wall of "what it cannot have." It's of the same pattern as "For the error bred in the bone," which is awfully strong. Then the author momentarily relaxes his reader in "Of each woman and each man." Then he makes you pay for that relaxation with this monosyllabic "Craves what it cannot have," whose syntax is so tough it's almost strained; i.e., it's shorter than natural speech, shorter than its thought, or more final. Anyway, let's get back to 'have," for it has far- reaching consequences.

You see, to rhyme "Diaghilev" with "love" straight would mean to equate them, about which both the poet and the reader could have some qualms. By interjecting "have" Auden scores a terrific hit. For now the rhyme scheme itself becomes a statement: "Diaghilev-have-love" or rather, "Diaghilev cannot have love." And "Diaghilev," mind you, stands here for art. So the net result is that "Diaghilev" gets equated with "love," but only via being equated with "have," and "having," as we know, is opposite to "loving," which is, as we remember, Nijinsky, which is "giving." Well, the implications of this rhyme scheme are profounc' enough to give you vertigo, and we've spent too much time on this stanza already. I wish, though, that at home you'd analyze this rhyme on your own: it may yield, perhaps, more than the poet himself had in mind to reveal while using it. I don't mean to whet your appetite, nor do I intend to suggest in the first place that Auden was doing all this consciously. On the contrary, he went for this rhyme scheme instinc­tively or, if you like this word better, subconsciously. But this is precisely what makes it so interesting to look into: not because you are getting into someone's subconscious (which in the case of a poet barely exists, being absorbed or badly exploited by the conscious) or his instincts: it simply shows you to what extent a writer is the tool of his language and how his ethical notions are the sharper, the keener his ear is.

On the whole, the role of this stanza is to finish the job of the previous one, i.e., to trace the malaise to its origins, and indeed Auden reaches the marrow.

Naturally enough, after this, one needs a break, and the break comes in the form of the next stanza, which employs less pointed thinking and a more general, more public level of diction.

8

From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life

The dense commuters come,

Repeating their morning vow;

"I will be true to the wife,

I'll concentrate more on my work,"

And helpless governors wake

To resume their compulsory game:

Who can release them now,

Who can reach the deaf,

Who can speak for the dumb?

This is, perhaps, the least interesting stanza in the poem, but it is not without its own jewels. Its most attractive job is the two opening lines describing the journey from the subconscious to the rational, i.e., ethical, existence, from sleep to action, from "dark" not to light but to "life." As for its rhymes, the most suggestive here is "dark-work-wake," which is quite functional considering the stanza's content. It's the assonant rhyme all along, and it shows you the possibilities this sort of rhyming contains, for as you arrive at "wake" after "dark," you realize that you can develop "wake" into something else as well. For example, you can go "wait-waste-west," and so on. As for the purely didactic aspect of this "dark-work-wake," the "dark-work" bit is more interesting because of "dark's" probable double sig­nificance. This reminds me of a couplet in Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron":

Manis no center of the Universe,

And working in an office makes it worse.

Which—I mean the "Letter"—is your only chance to be "happy" if not "good."

Metrically, the first six lines of this stanza are doing a lovely job of conveying the sense of train movement: you have a very smooth ride in the first four of them, and then you are getting jolted first by "will" and again by "more," which reveal the origins of each emphasis as well as the likelihood of delivering on these promises. With "And help­less governors wake," the meter regains equilibrium, and after the wallowing "To resume their compulsory game" the stanza is slowed down by three rhetorical questions, the last of which brings that train to a complete halt: "Who can release them now, I Who can reach the deaf, I Who can speak for the dumb?"

Now "The dense commuters" are presumably what "to be loved alone" results in: a herd. As for "conservative" applied here to "dark," this is yet another example of the typical, for Auden, blinding proximity of definition, like "neutral air" a couple of stanzas before, or "necessary mur­der" in an absolutely marvelous poem of this period called "Spain." These juxtapositions of his are effective and memor­able because of merciless light—or rather dark—their parts normally cast upon one another; i.e., it's not only murder that is necessary, but necessity itself is murderous, and so is conservativeness dark. Therefore the next line's "ethical life" emerges as a double put-down: because you expect "ethical light." The standard positive locution all of a sud­den is defamiliarized by apprehension: 'life" is a leftover of "light." On the whole the stanza depicts a dispirited me­chanical existence where "governors" are not in any way superior to the governed and neither are able to escape the enveloping gloom which they spun themselves.

And what do you think is the source, the root of all these conjunctions of his? Of things like that "necessary murder," "artificial wilderness" in "The Shield of Achilles," "impor­tant failure" in the "Musee des Beaux Arts," and so forth, and so forth? Yes, it is an intensity of attention, of course; but we are all endowed with this ability, aren't we? To yield results like these, this ability clearly should be en­hanced by something. And what does enhance it in a poet, and in this poet in particular? It is the principle of rhyme. What is responsible for these blinding proximities is the same mechanism of instinct that allows one to see or to hear that "Diaghilev" and 'love" do rhyme. Once that mecha­nism is set in motion, there is nothing to stop it, it becomes an instinct. Itshapes your mental operation, to say the least, in more ways than one; it becomes your mode of cognition. And this is what makes the whole enterprise of poetry so valuable for our species. For it is the principle of rhyme that enables one to sense that proximity between seemingly disparate entities. All these conjunctions of his ring so true because they are rhymes. This closeness between objects, ideas, concepts, causes, and effects—this closeness, in itself, is a rhyme-, at times, a perfect one, more frequently an assonance; or just a visual one. Having developed an in­stinct for these, you may have a better time with reality.

9

By now the poem is seventy-seven lines long, and apart from the content, its mass itself requires a resolution. That is, depiction of a world becomes, in its own turn, a world. So when the poet here says "All I have is a voice," it cuts many ways and doesn't just offer a lyrical relaxation to the ethical tension. The seventy-eighth line reflects not only the author's despair over the human condition as it is depicted but his sense of the futility of depiction. Despair alone would be more palatable, for there is always a chance to resolve it through anger or resignation, which are both promising avenues for a poet; well, anger especially. The same holds for futility also, for, by itself, it may be just as rewarding if treated with irony or sobriety.

Stephen Spender once wrote about Auden that good as he was at providing a diagnosis, he'd never presume to offer a cure. Well, "All I have is a voice" cures, because by changing tonality, the poet changes here the plane of regard. This line simply is higher pitched than all its prede­cessors. In poetry, as you know, tonality is content, or content's result. As pitches go, altitude determines attitude.

The important thing about the seventy-eighth line is the shift from impersonal objectivity of description to highly personal, subjective note. After all, this is the second and basically last time that the author employs "1." And this T is no longer wrapped in a newsman's trench coat: what you hear in this voice is incurable sorrow, for all its stoical timbre. This T is sharp and is echoed in a somewhat muffled way by 'lie" in the next line's end. Still, remember that both high-pitched i's come immediately after the "deaf" and "dumb" of the previous stanza, and this creates a considerable acoustic contrast.

The only thing that controls that sorrow here is the beat; and "sorrow controlled by meter" may do for you as a provisional definition of humility, if not of the entire art of poetry. As a rule, stoicism and obstinacy in poets are results not so much of their personal philosophies and preferences as of their experiences in prosody, which is the name of the cure. This stanza, as well as this whole poem, is a search for a reliable virtue which in the end brings the searching party to itself.

This, however, is jumping a bit ahead. Let's proceed in a proper fashion. Well, as far as rhymes are concerned, this stanza is not so spectacular. "Voice-choice-police" and "lie (authority )-sky-die" are all right; a better job is done by the poet in "brain-alone," which is suggestive enough. What's more suggestive, though, is "folded lie I The ro­mantic lie in the brain." Both "folded" and 'lie" are used twice within the space of two lines. Now, this is obviously done for emphasis; the only question is what's emphasized here. "Folded" of course suggests "paper" and "lie" there­fore is the lie of a printed word, most likely the one of a tabloid. But then we are given a qualifier in "the romantic lie in the brain." What's qualified here is not the "lie" itself, although we have here a different epithet preceding it, but the brain that lies in folds.

It is rather sobriety, of course, and its by-products that are audible in "All I have is a voice" than the irony which is, nonetheless, discernible in the controlled anger of "the folded lie." Still, the seventy-eighth line's value lies neither in despair's and futility's separate effects, nor in their interplay; what we hear in this line most clearly is the voice of humility, which has, in the given context, stoic overtones. Auden isn't just punning here; no. These two lines simply paraphrase that "error bred in the bone / Of each woman and each man." In a sense, he opens the bone and shows us that lie (error) inside. Why does he do this here? Because he wants to drive home the idea of "universal love" versus "to be loved alone." "The sensual man-in-the- street" as well as "Authority" and "the citizen" or "the police" are simply elaborations of the "each woman and each man" theme, as well as spin-offs of the argument for the United States' isolationist posture at the time. "Hun­ger allows no choice I To the citizen or the police" is simply a commonsense way of arguing the existence of the common denominator among people, and it is placed appropriately low. Auden goes here for a typically English no-nonsense locution—precisely because the point he tries to make is of a very elevated nature; i.e., he appears to think that you can argue things like "universal love" best if you use down- to-earth logic. Apart from that, he, I believe, enjoys the deadpan, no-exit state of mind whose blinding proximity to the truth creates such a statement. (Actually, hunger allows a choice: to get hungrier; but that's beside the point.) At any rate, this hunger business offsets possible ecclesi­astical association of the next, most crucial for the entire argument, line: "We must love one another or die."

Well, this is the line because of which the author subse­quently scrapped the whole poem from his corpus. Accord­ing to various sources, he did so because he found the line presumptuous and untrue. Because, he said, we must die anyway. He tried to change it but all he could come up with was "We must love one another and die," which would be a platitude with a misleading air of profundity. So he scrapped it from his postwar Collected, and if we have it now in front of our eyes, it's because of his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, who compiled a posthumous Viking edition and whose introduction to it is the best piece on Auden I've ever seen.

Was Auden right about this line? Well, yes and no. He was obviously extremely conscientious, and to be consci­entious in English is to be literal. Also, we should consider the benefit of hindsight in his revising this line: after the carnage of World \Var II, either version would sound a bit macabre. Poetry isn't reportage, and its news should be of a permanent significance. In a sense, it could be argued that Auden pays a price here for his posture at the beginning of the poem. Still, I must say that if this line seemed to him untrue, it was through no fault of his own.