ESSAYS Farrar Straus Giroitx
NEW YORK
Copyright © 1995 by Joseph Brodsky
"Homage to Marcus Aurelius," originally published in Cam- pidoglio, is reprinted with permission of Random House, Inc. Text copyright © 1994 by Joseph Brodsky. "Wooing the Inanimate," originally published as the introduction to The Essential Thomas Hardy, is reproduced by permission of The Ecco Press. Introduction copyright © 1995 by Joseph Brodsky.
To Roger W. Straus, with gratitude
Contents
Spoils of War I 3 The Condition We Call Exile I 22 A Place as Good as Any I 35 Uncommon Visage I 44 Acceptance Speech I 59 After a Journey I 62 Altra Ego I 81 How to Read a Book I g6 In Praise of Boredom I 104
Profile of Clio I 114 Speech at the Stadium I 138
Collectors Item I 149 An Immodest Proposal I 198 Letter to a President I 212 On Grief and Reason I 223 Homage to Marcus Aurelius I 267 A Gat's Meow I 299 Wooing the Inanimate I 312 Ninety Years Later I 376 Letter to Horace I 428 In Memory of Stephen Spender I 459
Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self. — W. H. AUDEN
On Grief and Reason
Spoils of War
i
In the beginning, there was canned corned beef. More accurately, in the beginning, there was a war, World War II; the siege of my hometown, Leningrad; the Great Hunger, which claimed more lives than all the bombs, shells, and bullets together. And toward the end of the siege, there was canned corned beef from America. Swift, I think, was the brand name, although I may be wrong; I was only four when I tasted it for the first time.
It was perhaps the first meat we had had in a while. Still, its flavor was less memorable than the cans themselves. Tall, square-shaped, with an opening key attached to the side, they heralded different mechanical principles, a different sensibility altogether. That key skeining a tiny strip of metal to get the can open, was a revelation to a Russian child: we knew only knives. The country was still nails, hammers, nuts, and bolts: that's what held it together, and it was to stay that way for most of our lives. That's why, there and then, nobody could explain to me the sealing method used by these cans' makers. Even today, I don't grasp it fully. Then and there, I'd stare at my mother detaching the key, unbending the little tab and sticking it into the key's eye, and then turning the key time and again around its axis, in sheer bewilderment.
Long after their contents vanished into the cloaca, these tall, somewhat streamlined around the corners (like cinema screens!), dark red or brown cans with foreign lettering on their sides survived on many families' shelves and win- dowsills, partly as aesthetic objects, partly as good containers for pencils, screwdrivers, film rolls, nails, etc. Often, too, they would be used as flowerpots.
We were not to see them ever again—neither their jellied contents nor their shapes. With the passage of years, their value increased: at least they were becoming more and more coveted in schoolboys' trade. For a can like this, one could get a German bayonet, a navy belt buckle, a magnifying glass. Their sharp edges (where the can was opened) cost us many a cut finger. In the third grade, however, I was the proud owner of two of them.
II
If anybody profited from the war, it was us: its children. Apart from having survived it, we were richly provided with stuff to romanticize or to fantasize about. In addition to the usual childhood diet of Dumas and Jules Verne, we had military paraphernalia, which always goes well with boys. With us, it went exceptionally well, since it was our country that won the war.
Curiously enough, though, it was the military hardware of the other side that attracted us most, not that of our own victorious Red Army. Names of German airplanes—Junkers, Stukas, Messerschmidts, Focke-Wulfs—were constantly on our lips. So were Schmeisser automatic rifles, Tiger tanks, ersatz rations. Guns were made by Krupp, bombs were courtesy of I. G. Farben-Industrie. A child's ear is always sensitive to a strange, irregular sound. It was, I believe, this acoustic fascination rather than any actual sense of danger that attracted our tongues and minds to those words. In spite of all the good reasons that we had to hate the Germans— and in spite of the state propaganda's constant exhortations to that end—we habitually called them "Fritzes" rather than "Fascists" or "Hitlerites." Presumably because luckily we'd never knowi them in any other capacity than as PO\Vs.
Similarly, we saw quite a lot of German military equipment in the war museums, which cropped up in the late forties everywhere. Those were our best outings—far better than the circus or the movies; and especially if our demobilized fathers were taking us there (those of us, that is, who had fathers). Oddly enough, they were quite reluctant to do so; but they'd answer in great detail our inquiries about the firepower of this or that German machine gun or the types of explosives used in this or that bomb. This reluctance was caused, not by their desire to spare gentle imaginations the horrors of war, or themselves the memories of dead friends and the guilty feeling of being alive. No, they simply saw through our idle curiosity and didn't approve of that.
I I I
Each one of them—our alive fathers, that is—kept, of course, some memento of that war. It could be a set of binoculars (Zeiss!), or a German U-boat officer's cap with appropriate insignia, or an accordion inlaid with mother-of- pearl, or a sterling-silver cigarette case, a gramophone, or a camera. When I was twelve, my father suddenly produced to my great delight a shortwave-radio set. Philips was the name, and it could pick up stations from all over the world, from Copenhagen to Surabaja. At least that was what the names on its yellow dial suggested.
This Philips radio was rather portable—by the standards of the time—a 10-by-14-inch brown Bakelite affair, with said yellow dial and a catlike, absolutely mesmerizing green eye indicating the quality of reception. It had, if I remember things correctly, only six tubes, and two feet of simple wire would do as its aerial. But here was the rub. To have an aerial sticking out of a window could mean only one thing to the police. To try to attach your radio to the building's main antenna required a professional's help, and that professional, in his turn, would pay unneeded attention to your set. One wasn't supposed to have a foreign radio, period. The solution was a web-like arrangement under the ceiling of your room, which is what I made. That way, of course, I couldn't get Radio Bratislava or, moreover, Delhi. But then I knew neither Czech nor Hindi. And as for the BBC, the Voice of America, or Radio Free Europe broadcasts in Russian, they were jammed anyway. Still, one could get programs in English, German, Polish, Hungarian, French, Swedish. I knew none of those languages; but then there was the VOA's Time for Jazz, with the richest-in-the-world bass-baritone of Willis Conover, its disc jockey!
To this brown, shining-like-an-old-shoe Philips set, I owe my first bits of English and my introduction to the Jazz Pantheon. When we were twelve, the German names on our lips gradually began to be replaced by those of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Clifford Brown, Sidney Bechet, Django Reinhardt, and Charlie Parker. Something began to happen, I remember, even to our walk: the joints of our highly inhibited Russian frames harkened to "swing." Apparently I was not the only one in my generation who knew how to put two feet of plain wire to good use.