Maybe the real civility, Mr. President, is not to create illusions. "New understanding," "global responsibilities," "pluralistic metaculture" are not much better at the core than the retrospective utopias of the latter-day nationalists or the entrepreneurial fantasies of the nouveaux riches. This sort of stuff is still predicated on the premise, however qualified, of man's goodness, of his notion of himself as either a fallen or a possible angel. This sort of diction befits, perhaps, the innocents, or demagogues, running the affairs of industrial democracies, but not you, who ought to know the truth about the condition of the human heart.
And you are, one would imagine, in a good position not only to convey your knowledge to people but also to cure that heart condition somewhat: to help them to become like yourself. Since what made you the way you are was not your penal experience but the books you've read. I'd suggest, for starters, serialization of some of those books in the country's major dailies. Given the population figure of Czechia, this can be done, even by decree, although I don't think your parliament would object. By giving your people Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Platonov, Camus, or Joyce, you may tum at least one nation in the heart of Europe into a civilized people.
That may do more good for the future of the world than emulating cowboys. Also, it would be a real post-Communism, not the doctrine's meltdown, with the attendant "hatred of the world, self-affirmation at all costs, and the unparalleled flourishing of selfishness" that dog you now. For there is no other antidote to the vulgarity of the human heart than doubt and good taste, which one finds fused in works of great literature, as well as your own. If man's negative potential is best manifested by murder, his positive potential is best manifested by art.
Why, you may ask, don't I make a similar crackpot suggestion to the President of the country of which I am a citizen? Because he is not a writer; and when he is a reader, he often reads trash. Because cowboys believe in law, and reduce democracy to people's equality before it: i.e., to the well-policed prairie. Whereas what I suggest to you is equality before culture. You should decide which deal is better for your people, which book it is better to throw at them. If I were you, though, I'd start with your own library, because apparently it wasn't in law school that you learned about moral imperatives.
Yours sincerely,
Joseph Brodsky
On Grief and Reason
i
I should tell you that what follows is a spinoff of a seminar given four years ago at the College International de Philos- ophie, in Paris. Hence a certain breeziness to the pace; hence, too, the paucity of biographical material—irrelevant, in my view, to the analysis of a work of art in general, and particularly where a foreign audience is concerned. In any case, the pronoun "you" in these pages stands for those ignorant of or poorly acquainted with the lyrical and narrative strengths of the poetry of Robert Frost. But, first, some basics.
Robert Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963, at the age of eighty-eight. One marriage, six children; fairly strapped when young; farming, and, later, teaching jobs in various schools. Not much traveling until late in his life; he mostly resided on the East Coast, in New England. If biography accounts for poetry, this one should have resulted in none. Yct he published nine books of poems; the second one, North of Boston, which came out when he was forty, made him famous. That was in 1914-
After that, his sailing was a bit smoother. But literary fame is not exactly popularity. As it happens, it took the Second World War to bring Frost's work to the general public's notice. In 1943, the Council on Books in Wartime distributed fifty thousand copies of Frost's "Come In" to United States troops stationed overseas, as a morale-builder. By 1955, his Selected Poems was in its fourth edition, and one could speak of his poetry's having acquired national standing.
It did. In the course of nearly five decades following the publication of North of Boston, Frost reaped every possible reward and honor an American poet can get; shortly before Frost's death, John Kennedy invited him to read a poem at the Inauguration ceremony. Along with recognition naturally came a great deal of envy and resentment, a substantial contribution to which emerged from the pen of Frost's own biographer. And yet both the adulation and resentment had one thing in common: a nearly total misconception of what Frost was all about.
He is generally regarded as the poet of the countryside, of rural settings—as a folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer, generally of positive disposition. In short, as American as apple pie. To be fair, he greatly enhanced this notion by projecting precisely this image of himself in numerous public appearances and interviews throughout his career. I suppose it wasn't that difficult for him to do, for he had those qualities in him as well. He was indeed a quintessential American poet; it is up to us, however, to find out what that quintessence is made of, and what the term "American" means as applied to poetry and, perhaps, in general.
In 1959, at a banquet thrown in New York on the occasion ofRobert Frost's eighty-fifth birthday, the most prominent literary critic at that time, Lionel Trilling, rose and, goblet in hand, declared that Robert Frost was "a terrifying poet." That, of course, caused a certain stir, but the epithet was well chosen.
Now, I want you to make the distinction here between terrifying and tragic. Tragedy, as you know, is always afait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of his o^ negative potential—with his sense of what he is capable of. And it is the latter that was Frost's forte, not the former. In other words, his posture is radically different from the Continental tradition of the poet as tragic hero. And that difference alone makes him— for want of a better term—American.
On the surface, he looks very positively predisposed toward his surroundings—particularly toward nature. His fluency, indeed, his "being versed in country things" alone can produce this impression. However, there is a difference between the way a European perceives nature and the way an American does. Addressing this difference, W. H. Auden, in his short essay on Frost (perhaps the best thing on the poet), suggests something to the effect that when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. Ifhe encounters a tree, it's a tree made familiar by history, to which it's been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, laying down this or that law—something of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed but unchanged by that encounter, returns to his inn or cottage, finds his friends or family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up. Basically, it's epidermis meeting bark. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror.