In part, I think, this was the result of his metier. Poetry is a tremendous school of insecurity and uncertainty. You never know whether what you've done is any good, still less whether you'll be able to do anything good tomorrow. If this doesn't destroy you, insecurity and uncertainty in the end become your intimate friends and you almost attribute to them an intelligence all their own. That's why, I think, he showed such interest in the future: of countries, individuals, cultural trends: as though he tried to run the entire gamut of all possible mistakes in advance—not in order eventually to avoid them, but just to know those intimate friends of his better. For the same reason, he'd never make a meal of his past achievements or, for that matter, misfortunes.
XVI
This would give one the impression that he was free of ambition, devoid of vanity. _And that impression, I think, would be by and large correct. I remember one day, many years ago, giving a poetry reading with Stephen in Atlanta, Georgia. Actually, we were raising funds for Index on Censorship—a magazine which, I believe, was essentially his brainchild and about whose fortunes, not to mention the issue of censorship itself, he cared deeply.
We had to spend about an hour and a half onstage and were sitting in the anteroom shuffling our papers. Normally when two poets share a reading, one reads for forty-five minutes solid, then the other. To present the public with a convincing notion of oneself. "Reckon with me" is the idea. So Stephen turns to me and says, "Joseph, why don't we do fifteen minutes each, and then have an interval with questions and answers, and then read for fifteen minutes each again. This way they won't be bored. How does that sound to you?" Marvelous, I say. For it was; it gave the whole undertaking the air of an entertainment. Which is what a poetry reading is in the first place, rather than an ego trip. It's a show, a piece of theater—especially if it's a fund-raiser.
That was Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. Where the public, even a well-meaning one, knows precious little about its own, American poetry, let alone about the Brits. The procedure he suggested wouldn't advance his reputation, nor would it sell his books. Which is to say, he was not in it for himself, and he didn't read anything topical, either. I can't imagine anyone from among his American brethren (of his age, especially) deliberately short-changing himself—either for the sake of an issue or for the public's sake. There were about eight hundred people in that room, if not more.
"I suppose American poets all fall to pieces," he used to say (referring to the famous suicides in the profession), "because the stakes over there are so high. In Great Britain one is never paid so much and a national reputation is out of the question, although the place is much smaller." Then he would giggle and add, "Actually, precisely because of that."
XVII
It's not that he held himself in low esteem; he was simply genuinely humble. That virtue, too, I should think, was metier-inspired. If you are not born with some organic disorder, poetry—writing it as well as reading it—will teach you humility, and rather quickly at that. Especially if you are both writing and reading it. The dead alone will set you straight fast, not to mention your peers. Second-guessing yourself will become your second nature. You may be enamored with your own endeavors for some time, of course, provided your peers are worthless; but if in your undergraduate days you meet Wystan Auden, your self-infatuation is bound to be short.
After this encounter, nothing was easy: neither writing nor living. I may be wrong, but my impression is that he discarded far more than he printed. In living, however, where you can discard nothing, this unease resulted in extraordinary subtlety as well as in terrifying sobriety (with Auden becoming now and then its target but never a casualty). This mixture—of subtlety and sobriety—is what makes a gentleman, provided their ratio favors subtlety.
xviii
And that is what he was, in a largely uncouth literary crowd on both sides of the Atlantic. He stood out, both literally and figuratively speaking. And the crowd's response, left and right, was predictable. X would chide him for being a pacifist in World War II (though he was nothing of the sort, having been turned down on medical grounds, after which he served as a fireman—and being a fireman during the Blitz in London is a far cry from being a conscientious objector at the time elsewhere). Y would accuse him of editing the CIA-financed Encounter in the fifties (although Stephen resigned this job once he learned the nature of the magazine's purse, and anyway, why didn't these people who were so squeamish about CIA money throw in any of their own to keep the publication afloat?). A righteous Z would jump on him for declaring his readiness to go immediately to Hanoi while it was being bombed but inquire who was to pay the fare. A man living by his pen—over thirty books, not to mention innumerable reviews by Stephen, tells one how he made his living—seldom has money to enact his convictions; on the other hand, he presumably didn't want to manifest his scruples at the expense of the Hanoi government. Well, that's only the end of the alphabet. Curiously—or predictably— enough, those reproaches and remonstrations were most often American in origin; i.e., they were coming from a place where ethics enjoys a greater proximity to cash than elsewhere. On the whole, the postwar world was a pretty crude show, and he would take part in it now and then, not for its applause and flowers, but—the way it appears in retro- spect—as its saving grace.
I notice I am editorializing; the genre begins to dictate the content. This is acceptable, but not under the circumstances. Under the circumstances, the content should determine the genre—even if the net result is fragments. For that's what one's life becomes once it is entrusted to its beholder. So let me shut my eyes, and behold: an evening in some theater in Milan, ten or twelve years ago; lots of people, glitter, candelabra, TV, etc.; onstage—a bunch of Italian professors and literary critics as well as Stephen and myself; we are all members of a jury for some big award in poetry. Which goes this year to Giorgio Caproni, a creaky, crusty octogenarian of rustic appearance, bearing some resemblance to Frost. The old man shuffles awkwardly along the aisle and with great difficulty starts to climb the stage, mumbling something inaudible to himself. Nobody moves; the Italian professors and literary critics in their chairs watch an old man struggling up the steps. At this point Stephen gets up and starts to applaud; I join him. Then comes an ovation.
Or else it's an empty, windswept square in downtown Chicago, well past midnight, some twenty years ago. We crawl out of somebody's car into the winter rain and march toward some gigantic arrangement ofcast iron and steel cables sitting there, dimly lit on a pedestal in the middle of the square. It's a Picasso sculpture; a woman's head, as it turns out, and Stephen wants to see it now because he leaves town in the morning. "Very Spanish," he says. "And very warlike." And suddenly, for me, it's 1938, the Spanish Civil War—to which he went, paying, I believe, out of his own pocket, because it was the last quest for the Just City on human record, not the superpowers' chess game, and we lost, and then the whole thing was dwarfed by World War Il's carnage. The night is grainy with rain and wind, cold and thoroughly black- and-white. And the tall man with absolutely white hair, looking like a schoolboy with his hands stretching out from the sleeves ofhis old blackjacket, is slowly circling these random pieces of metal twisted by the Spanish genius into a work of art that resembles a ruin.
XXI
Or it is the Cafe Royal, London, where I insist on taking him and Natasha for lunch each time I am there. For their memories' sake as well as for mine. So it's hard to tell what year it is—but not that long ago. Isaiah Berlin is with us, and also my wife, who cannot take her young eyes away from Stephen's face. For indeed, with that snowy-white hair of his, shining gray-blue eyes, and apologetic grin presiding over the six-foot-tall, stooping frame, he looks in his eighties like an allegory of some benevolent winter visiting the other seasons. Even when he is among his peers or his family, to say nothing oftotal strangers. Besides, it's summer. ("What's good about summer here," I hear him saying while uncorking a bottle in his garden, "is that you don't have to chill the wine.") We are making "the century's great writers" list: Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, Faulkner, Beckett. "But that's only up to the fifties," says Stephen, and turns to me. "Anyone that good now?" "Perhaps John Coetzee," I say. "A South African. He is the only one who has a right to write prose after Beckett." "Never heard of him," says Stephen. "How do you spell his name?" So I get a piece of paper, spell the name, and add Life and Times of Michael K and pass it on to Stephen. Then the conversation reverts to gossip, a recent production of Cosifan tutte, with the singers doing the arias prostrate on the floor, current knighthoods—after all, this is a lunch with two knights. Suddenly Stephen grins widely and says, "The nineties is a good time to die."