XI
I lived happily in that mental family. The wall-thick English- Russian dictionary was in fact a door, or should I say a window, since it was often foggy and staring through it required some concentration. This paid off particularly well because it was poetry, for in a poem every line is a choice. You can tell a lot about a man by his choice of an epithet. I thought MacNeice chaotic, musical, self-indulgent, and imagined him moody and reticent. I thought Auden brilliant, resolute, profoundly tragic, and witty; I imagined him quirky and gruff. I thought Spender more lyrical and ambitious with his imagery than either, though rather conspicuously modernist, but I couldn't picture him at all.
Reading, like loving, is a one-way street, and all that was going on unbeknown to any of them. So when I ended up that summer in the West, I was a total stranger indeed. (I didn't know, for instance, that MacNeice had already been dead for nine years.) Less so perhaps to Wystan, since he wrote the introduction to my Selected and must have realized that my "In Memory of T. S. Eliot" is based on his "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." But certainly to Stephen and Natasha, no matter what Akhmatova could possibly have told them. Neither then nor in the course of the subsequent twenty-three years did I talk to him about his poems, or vice versa. The same goes for his World Within World, The Thirties and After, Love-Hate Relations, Journals. Initially, I suppose, the culprit was my timidity, saddled with my Elizabethan vocabulary and shaky grammar. Eventually, it would be his or my transatlantic fatigue, public places, people around, or matters more absorbing to us than our own writings. Such as politics or press scandals, or Wystan. Somehow from the threshold it was assumed that we had more in common than not, the way it is in a family.
XII
Aside from our respective mother tongues, what would keep us apart were more than thirty years of life in this world, Wystan's and Stephen's superior intelligence, and their— with Wystan more and less with Stephen—private lives. That might seem like a lot; actually it wasn't much. I wasn't aware of their varying affections when I met them; besides, they were in their sixties. What I was aware of then, am now, and will be to my dying day is their extraordinary intelligence, to which thus far I've seen no approximation. Which of course puts my intellectual insecurity somewhat to rest, though it doesn't necessarily close the gap. As for their private lives, they came into focus, I believe, precisely for the reasons of their perceived intellectual superiority. In plain words, because in the thirties they were on the left, with Spender joining the Communist Party for a few days. What's done in a totalitarian state by the secret police in an open society presumably is the province of one's opponents or critics. Still, the reverse ofthis—attributing one's achievement to one's sexual identity—is perhaps even more silly. On the whole, the insistence on man's definition as a sexual being is breathtakingly reductive. If only because the ratio of one's sexual activity to other pursuits—say, earning a living, driving a car—is dismal even in one's prime. Theoretically, a poet has more time on his hands, but considering the way poetry is paid, his private life warrants less scrutiny than it gets. Especially if he writes in a language as cool about gender as English. And if the language is not concerned, why should its speakers be? Well, perhaps they are precisely because it isn't. At any rate, I indeed felt we had far more in cgmmon than not. The only gap I wouldn't be able to close was that of age. As for the difference in intelligence, at my best moments, I may convince myself I am getting near to their plane of regard. What remained was the language gap, and now and then I've tried to close it as best I could, though that required prose.
XII I
The only time I spoke to Stephen directly about his work, I am afraid, was when his Temple was published. By that time, I must admit, novels had ceased to be my preferred reading, and I wouldn't have talked to him about it at all, were it not for the book's being dedicated to Herbert List, a great German photographer with whose niece I was once in love. Spotting the dedication, I ran to him with the book in my teeth—I think this was in London—declaring triumphantly, "See, we are related!" He smiled wanly and said that the world is a small place, Europe in particular. Yes, I said, the world is a small place, and no next person makes it bigger. And no next time, he added, or something to that effect, and then asked whether I actually liked the book. I told him I'd always thought an autobiographical novel is a contradiction in terms; that it disguises more than it reveals even if the reader is partial. That to me, in any case, there was more of the author in the book's heroine than in its hero. He replied that this had a lot to do with the period's mental climate in general and with censorship in particular, and that he perhaps should have rewritten the whole thing. To that I protested, saying that disguise is the mother of literature and that censorship might even claim its fatherhood, and that there is nothing worse than when Proust's biographers scribble away to prove that Albertine was in fact Albert. Yes, he said, their pens move in a direction diametrically opposed to the author's: they are undoing the fabric.
XIV
I see the past tense creeping in, and I wonder whether I should really fight it. He died on July 16; today is August 5. Still, I can't think of him summarily. Whatever I may say about him will be provisional or one-sided. Definitions are always reductive, and his ability to escape them at the age of eighty-six is not surprising, even though I caught up with only a quarter of it. Somehow it's easier to question one's own presence than to believe he's gone.
This is so because gentleness and civility are most lasting. And his are of the most durable kind, borne as they were by the grimy, cruel, either/or era. To say the least, his manner of deportment—in verse as in life—appears to have been a matter of choice as much as temperament. In sissy times—like these—one, a writer especially, can afford to be brutal, lean, mean, etc. In fact, in sissy times one practically has to peddle gore and garbage, for otherwise one won't sell. With Hitler and Stalin around, one goes the other way . . . Ah, all this paperback brutal talent! So numerous and so unnecessary, and so awash in money. That alone can make you feel nostalgic for the thirties and play havoc with your affinities. In the final analysis, though, what matters in life as well as on paper—with deeds as well as with epithets—is what helps you to retain your dignity, and gentleness and civility do. For that reason alone he is, and will remain, palpable. More and more so, as days go by.
XV
My fanciful notions (affinity, mental family, etc.) aside, we got along very well. This partly had to do with the total unpredictability of his mind and its turns. With people around, he was terribly amusing—not so much for their sake as because he was organically incapable of banality. A received idea would appear on his lips only to get entirely subverted by the end of the sentence. However, he wasn't trying to amuse himself, either: it's simply that his speech was trying to catch up with the perpetually running train of his thought and therefore was rather unpredictable to the speaker himself. Given his age, the past was remarkably infrequently his subject; much less so than the present or the future, on which he was especially big.