I was trying to explain that to Stephen on the way back in the car, but he kept giggling. It was around midnight. As we crossed Westminster Bridge, he looked out the window and said, "They are still sitting." And to me: "Are you tired?" I said no. "Then let's go in." Natasha stopped the car; we got out and walked to the Houses ofParliament. We climbed several flights of stairs, entered a large hall, and landed in the gallery chairs. It was, I believe, the House ofCommons, and some tax debate was in full swing. Men of more or less similar height and complexion would rise, deliver vehement- sounding tirades, and sit down, to rise again in a short while. Stephen tried to whisper in my ear what this was all about;
still, it remained, to me, largely impenetrable, practically a pantomime. For a while I sat scrutinizing the rafters and stained-glass windows. Here I was, face-to-face with the most sacred notion of my youth, and I found the proximity blinding. I began to shake with silent laughter. The disparity between my mental and physical realities suddenly gaped vast: while the latter was occupying a green leather seat in the heart of Westminster, the former dragged its feet, as it were, somewhere behind the Urals. So much, I thought, for air travel, and looked at Stephen. Apparently osmosis worked.
VII
The Poetry International was a large, somewhat messy affair held on the Thames's South Bank, in Queen Elizabeth Hall. Few things could be worse than the mixture of poverty and concrete, but the mixture of concrete and frivolity is one of them. On the other hand, it matched what was transpiring inside. The West Germans in particular got into the spirit of the place, taking vers libre one step further by resorting to plain body language, and I remember Wystan saying morosely into the backstage TV monitor, "This is not what you were paid for." The pay was measly, but for me these were the first pound notes I ever held in my hands, and I felt thrilled at putting into my pocket practically the same tender that was used by Dickens's and Joseph Conrad's characters.
The opening party was on the top floor of some high- rise on Pall Mall; New Zealand House, I think, was the name. As I write this, I look at a photograph taken there that day: Stephen is saying something funny to Wystan, who laughs heartily back, while John Ashbery and I look on. Stephen is much taller than any ofus, and there is an almost detectable tenderness in his profile as he faces Wystan, who, hands in his pockets, is immensely cheered. Their eyes meet; at this juncture, they have known each other for forty years, and they are happy in each other's company. Ah, this unbearable snapshot laughter! That's what one is left with— with these arrested instants stolen from life without any anticipation of the far greater theft ahead that will render your hoard the source of utter despair. A hundred years ago one would be spared at least that.
VIII
Stephen read on a different night than Wystan and I, and I wasn't present at the reading. But I know what he read because I have the Selected he gave me when he got back that night. There are seven pieces he had marked in the table of contents—the way we all do before a reading. The edition was a twin of what I'd had back home, courtesy of an English exchange student, and I knew it well enough to notice that my favorites—"Air Raid Across the Bay at Plymouth" and "Polar Exploration"—were not included. I believe I asked him why, although I could partly foresee the answer, since both poems were fairly old. Perhaps it's for this reason that I don't remember his reply. What I remember, however, is that the conversation very quickly ran to Henry Moore's Shelter Drawings of the London Underground, and Natasha produced their dog-eared paperback edition, which I took with me to bed.
He mentioned Moore's Drawings, I suppose, because I mentioned the "Air Raid" poem. It had astounded me in my previous, Russian incarnation (in spite of my dim English) with its searchlight imagery's progression from the visual to the visionary. I thought the poem owed a lot to the contemporary, post-Cubist (what we called in Russia Constructivist) paintings, to somebody like Wyndham Lewis. Needless to say, searchlights were an integral part of my childhood: my earliest memory, in fact. So much so that till this day when I see Roman numerals I immediately recall the wartime night sky over my hometown. So I suppose I'd said something to that effect to Stephen, and the next thing was Henry Moore's little book of drawings.
IX
I'll never know now whether that was just a shift in conversation or a part of Stephen's osmosis game plan vis-a-vis my innocent self. Either way, the impact of the sketches was extraordinary. I'd seen a fair number of reproductions of Moore's work: all those reclining microcephalics, single or in groups. Mostly on postcards, though a couple of catalogues passed through my hands as well. I'd heard enough about pre-Columbian influences, organic forms, the hollow-versus- solid-mass concept, etc., and wasn't very much taken by any of it. The usual modern-art palaver, the song of insecurity.
Shelter Drawings had very little to do with modern art, and everything to do with security. If the sequence had any root, it must have been Mantegna's Agony in the Garden. Moore, evidently, was similarly obsessedwith ellipsoids, and the Blitz provided him with a veritable safari. The whole thing takes place in the Underground, which is an apt word in more ways than one. Thus, no airborne angel carrying the cup is in sight here, though "Let it pass from me" is presumably on all lips. To paraphrase Wystan, Shelter Drawings is not a graphic work but a study. Above all, in ellipsoids, from the swaddled bodies covering platforms to the stations' vaults. But it is also a study in submission, since a body reduced to its generic form for reasons of safety won't forget this reduction, won't straighten up fully. Once you've crouched in submission to fear, the future of your vertebrae is set: you'll crouch again. Anthropologically speaking, war results in a backslide—unless of course you are a witless babe.
And that's what I was when Moore was busy with his study of ellipsoids and Stephenwith his exploration of searchlights. As I looked at the Drawings I practically remembered the crypt-turned-bomb-shelter of our nearby cathedral, with its vaults and shrouded or swaddled bodies, my mother's and mine among them. While outside "Triangles, parallels, parallelograms,Iwere experimenting with hypotheses/on the blackboard sky . . ." At this rate, I said to myself as I was turning the obsessively penciled pages, I may remember even my own birth, perhaps even the time before; in fact, I may—perish the thought—go English.
X
Something of the sort had been well under way since I'd laid my hands on the Penguin anthology Poetry in the Thirties. If you are born in Russia, nostalgia for an alternative genesis is inevitable. The thirties were close enough, as I was born in 1940. What made the decade even more congenial was its grimy, monochrome denomination, owing chiefly to the printed word and black-and-white cinema: my native realm was of the same shade and stayed that way long after the Kodak invasion. MacNeice, Auden, and Spender —I mention them in the order I found them—made me feel at home at once. It wasn't their moral vision, since my enemy, I believe, was more formidable and ubiquitous than theirs; it was their poetics. It unshackled me: above all, metrically and stanzaically. After "Bagpipe Music," the good old tetrametric, quatrain-bound job seemed—initially at least—less tempting. The other thing I found terribly attractive was their common knack for taking a bewildered look at the familiar.
Call this influence; I'll call it affinity. Roughly from the age of twenty-eight on, I regarded them as my relatives rather than as masters or "imaginary friends."They were my mental family—far more so than anybody among my own contemporaries, inside or outside of Russia. Chalk this up to my immaturity or to disguised stylistic conservatism. Or else simply to vanity: to some puerile desire to be judged under a foreign code of conscience. On the other hand, consider the possibility that what they did could be loved from afar. Or that reading poets writing in a foreign tongue bespeaks one's appetite for worship. Stranger things have happened: you've seen the churches.