Joseph Brodsky In a Room and a Half To L. K.

The room and a half (if such a space unit makes any sense in English) in which t he three of us lived had a parquet floor, and my mother strongly objected to the men in her family, me in particular, walking around with our socks on. She insi sted on us wearing shoes or slippers at all times. Admonishing me about this mat ter, she would evoke an old Russian superstition; it is an ill omen, she would s ay, it may bode a death in the family. ... The parquet's affinity with wood, ear th, etc., thus extended in my mind to any ground under the feet of our close and distant relatives who lived in the same town. No matter what the distance, it w as the same ground. ... 4 Our room and a half was part of a huge enfilade, one-third of a block in lengt h, on the northern side of a six-story building that faced three streets and a s quare at the same time. The building was one of those tremendous cakes in so-cal led Moorish style that in Northern Europe marked the turn of the century. Erecte d in 1903, the year of my father's birth, it was the architectural sensation of the St. Petersburg of that period, and Akhmatova once told me that her parents t ook her in a carriage to see this wonder. ... After the revolution, in accordanc e with the policy of densening up the bourgeoisie, the enfilade was cut up into pieces , with one family per room. Walls were erected between the rooms - at first of p lywood. Subsequently, over the years, boards, brick, and stucco would promote th ese partitions to the status of architectural norm. If there is an infinite aspe ct to space, it is not its expansion but its reduction. If only because the redu ction of space, oddly enough, is always more coherent. It's better structured an d has more names: a cell, a closet, a grave. Expanses have only a broad gesture. 5 ... Of course, we all shared one toilet, one bathroom, and one kitchen. But th e kitchen was fairly spacious, the toilet very decent and cozy. As for the bathr oom, Russian hygienic habits are such that eleven people would seldom overlap wh en either taking a bath or doing their basic laundry. The latter hung in the two corridors that connected the rooms to the kitchen, and one knew the underwear o f one's neighbors by heart.

... For all the despicable aspects of this mode of existence, a communal apartme nt has perhaps its redeeming side as well. It bares life to its basics: it strip s off any illusions about human nature. By the volume of the fart, you can tell who occupies the toilet, you know what he/she bad for supper as well as for brea kfast. You know the sounds they make in bed and when the women have their period s. It's often you in whom your neighbor confides his or her grief, and it is he or she who calls for an ambulance should you have an angina attack or something worse. It is he or she who one day may find you dead in a chair, if you live alo ne, or vice versa. What barbs or medical and culinary advice, what tips about go ods suddenly available in this or that store are traded in the communal kitchen in the evening when the wives cook their meals! This is where one learns life's essentials: by the rim of one's ear, with the corner of one's eye. What silent d ramas unfurl there when somebody is all of a sudden not on speaking terms with s omeone else! What a school of mimics it is! What depths of emotion can be convey ed by a stiff, resentful vertebra or by a frozen profile! What smells, aromas, a nd odors float in the air around a hundred-watt yellow tear hanging on a plaitli ke tangled electric cord. There is something tribal about this dimly lit cave, s omething primordial evolutionary, if you will; and the pots and pans hang over the g as stoves like would-be tom-toms. 8 Our ceiling was some fourteen, if not more, feet high, adorned with the same m oorishstyle plaster ornamentation, which, combined with cracks and stains from o ccasionally bursting pipes upstairs, turned it into a highly detailed map of som e nonexisting superpower or archipelago. There were three very tall arched windo ws through which we could see nothing except a high school across the street, we re it not for the central window, which also served as a door to the balcony. .. . 9 Oddly, the furniture we had matched the exterior and the interior of the build ing. It was as busy with curves, and as monumental as the stucco molding on the faade or the panels and pilasters protruding from the walls inside, skeined with p laster garlands of some geometrical fruits. Both the outside and the inner decor were of a light-brown, cocoa-cummilk shade. Our two huge, cathedral-like chests of drawers, however, were of black varnished oak; yet they belonged to the same period, the turn of the century, as did the building itself. This was what perh aps favorably disposed the neighbors toward us from the outset, albeit unwitting ly. And this was why, perhaps, after barely a year in that building, we felt we had lived there forever. The sensation that the chests had found their home, or the other way around, somehow made us realize that we, too, were settled, that w e were not to move again.

Those ten-foot-high, two-story chests (you'd have to take off the corniced top f rom the elephant-footed bottom when moving) housed nearly everything our family had amassed in the course of its existence. The role played elsewhere by the att ic or the basement, in our case was performed by the chests. My father's various cameras, developing and printing paraphernalia, prints themselves, dishes, chin a, linen, tablecloths, shoe boxes with his shoes now too small for him yet still too large for me, tools, batteries, his old navy tunics, binoculars, family alb ums, yellowed illustrated supplements, my mothers' s hats and scarves, some silv er Solingen razor blades, defunct flashlights, his military decorations, her mot ley kimonos, their mutual correspondence, lorgnettes, fans, other memorabilia all that was stored in the cavernous depths of these chests, yielding, when you' d open one of their doors, a bouquet of mothballs, old leather, and dust. On the top of the lower part, as if on a mantelpiece, sat two cristal carafes containi ng liqueurs, and a glazed porcelain figurine of two tipsy Chinese fishermen drag ging their catch. My mother would wipe the dust off them twice a week. With hind sight, the content of these chests could be compared to our joined, collective s ubconscious; at the time, this thought wouldn't have crossed my mind. To say the least, all these things were part of my parents' consciousness, tokens of their memory: of places and or times by and large preceding me; of their common and s eparate past, of their own youth and childhood, of a different era, almost of a different century. With the benefit of the same hindsight, I would add: of their freedom, for they were born and grew up free, before what the witless scum call the Revolution, but what for them as for generations of others, meant slavery. 19 The biggest item of our furniture-or rather, the one that occupied the most s pace-was my parents' bed, to which I think I owe my life. It was a large, king-s ized affair whose carvings, again, matched to a certain degree the rest, yet the y were done in a more modern fashion. The same vegetation motif, of course, but the execution oscillated somewhere between Art Nouveau and the commercial versio n of Constructivism. This bed was the object of my mother's special pride, for s he had bought it very cheaply in 1935, before she and my father got married, hav ing spotted it and a matching dressing table with three mirrors in some second-r ate carpenter shop. Most of our life gravitated toward this low-sitting bed, and the most momentous decisions in our family were made when the three of us gathe red, not around the table, but on that vast surface, with myself at my parents' feet. By Russian standards, this bed was a real luxury. I often thought that it was Precisely this bed that persuaded my father to get married, for he loved to tarry in it more than anything else. Even when he and my mother were engaged in the bitterest possible mutual acrimony, mostly on the subject of our budget ("Yo u are just hell-bent to dump all the cash at the grocer's comes his indignant vo ice over bookshelves separating my "half" from their "room." "I am poisoned, poi soned by thirty years of your stinginess!" replies my mother), even then he'd be reluctant to get out of it, especially in the morning. Several people offered u s very good money for that bed, which indeed occupied too much space

in our quarters. But no matter how insolvent we were, my parents never considere d this option. The bed was clearly an excess, and I believe they liked it precis ely for that. I remember them sleeping in it on their sides, backs turned to eac h other, a gulf of crumpled blankets in between. I remember them reading there, talking, taking their pills, fighting this or that illness. The bed framed them for me at their most secure and most helpless. It was their very private lair, t heir ultimate island, their own inviolable, by no one except me, place in the un iverse. Wherever it stands now, it stands as a vacuum within the world order. A seven-by-five-foot vacuum. It was of light-brown polished maple, and it never cr eaked. 20 My half was connected to their room by two large, nearly ceiling-high arches which I constantly tried to fill with various combinations of bookshelves and su itcases, in order to separate myself from my parents, in order to obtain a degre e of privacy. One can speak only about degrees, because the height and the width of those two arches, plus the Moorish configuration of their upper edge, ruled out any notion of complete success. Unless, of course, one could fill them up wi th bricks or cover them with wooden boards. But that was against the law for thi s would result in our having two rooms instead of the one and a half that the bo rough housing order stated we were entitled to. Short of the fairly frequent ins pections of our building's super, the neighbors, no matter how nice the terms we were on with them, would report us to the appropriate authorities in no time. O ne had to design a palliative, and that was what was what I was busy at from the age of fifteen on. I went through all sorts of mind-boggling arrangements, and at one time even contemplated building-in a twelve-foot-high aquarium, which wou ld have in the middle of it a door connecting my half with the room. Needless to say, that architectural feat was beyond my ken. The solution, then, was more an d more bookshelves on my side, more and thicker layers of drapery on my parents' . Needless to say, they liked neither the solution nor the nature of the problem itself. Girls and friends, however, grew in quantity more slowly than did the b ooks; besides, the latter were there to stay. We had two armoires with full-leng th mirrors built into their doors and otherwise undistinguished. But they were r ather tall, and they did half the job. Around and above them I built the shelves , leaving a narrow opening, through which my parents could squeeze into my half, and vice versa. My father resented the arrangement, particularly since at the f arthest end of my half he had built himself a darkroom where he was doing his de veloping and printing, i.e., where the large part of our livelihood came from. . .. Still later, when books and the need for privacy increased dramatically, I pa rtitioned my half further by repositioning those armoires in such a way that the y separated my bed and my desk from the darkroom. Between them, I squeezed a thi rd one that was idling in the corridor. I tore its back wall out, leaving its do or intact. The result was that a guest would have to enter my Lebensraum through two doors and one curtain. The first door was the

one that led into the corridor; then you'd find yourself standing in my father's darkroom and removing a curtain; the next thing was to open the door of the for mer armoire. Atop of the armoires, I piled all the suitcases we had. They were m any; still, they failed to reach the ceiling. The net effect was that of a barri cade; behind it, though, the gamin felt safe, and a Marianne could bare more tha n just her breast. 21 The dim view my mother and father took of these transformations brightened so mewhat when they began to hear from behind the partition the clatter of my typew riter. The drapery muffled it considerably but not fully. The typewriter, with i ts russian typeface, was also part of my father's China catch, little though he expected it to be put to use by his son. I had it on my desk, tucked into the ni che created by the bricked-up former door once connecting our room and a half wi th the rest of the enfilade. That's when that extra foot came in handy! Since my neighbors had their piano on the opposite side of this door, I fortified my sid e against their daughter's Chopsticks with a walled bookcase that, resting on my desk, fit the niche perfectly. Two mirrored armoires and the passage between them on one side; the tall draped window with the windowsill just two feet above my rath er spacious brown cushionless couch on the other; the arch, filled up to its Moo rish rim with bookshelves behind; the niche-filling bookcase and my desk with th e Royal Underwood in front of my nose - that was my Lebensraum. My mother would clean it, my father would cross it on his way back and forth to his darkroom; oc casionally he or she would come for refuge in my worn out but deep armchair afte r yet another verbal skirmish. Other than that, these ten square meters were min e, and they were the best ten square meters I've ever known. If space has a mind of its own and generates its own distribution, there is a chance some of these square meters, too, may remember me fondly. Now especially, under a different fo ot.

Altra Ego I The idea of the poet as an inveterate Don Giovanni is of relatively recent coina ge. Like many concepts enjoying great currency .in the popular imagination, it a ppears to be a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, which, through its quantum leaps in human accumulation and literacy, gave birth to the very phenomenon of the popular imagination. To put it differently, this image of the poet appears t o owe more to the public success of Lord Byron's Don Juan than to its author's o wn romantic record awe-inspiring perhaps, but unavailable to the public at the tim e. Besides, for every Byron we always get a Wordsworth. As the last period of social coherence and its attendant philistinism, the ninet eenth century is responsible for the bulk of notions and attitudes we entertain or are guided by today. In poetry, that century squarely belongs to France; and perhaps the expansive gesturing and exotic affinities of the French Romantics an d Symbolists contributed to the dim view of the poet no less than the general lo wbrow notion of the French as certified immoralists. On the whole, underneath thi s bad-mouthing of poets lies the instinctive desire of every social order--be it a democracy, autocracy, theocracy, ideocracy, or bur eaucracy to compromise or belittle the authority of poetry, which, apart from riva ling that of the state, hoists a question mark over the individual himself, over his achievements and mental security, over his very significance. In that respe ct the nineteenth century simply joined the club: when it comes to poetry, every bourgeois is a Plato. II Antiquity's attitude toward a poet was, however, by and large both more exalted and more sensible. That had to do as much with polytheism as with the fact that the public had to rely on poets for entertainment. Save for mutual sniping usual in the literary trade of any age disparaging treatment of poets in antiquity is rare . On the contrary, poets were revered as figures of divine proximity: in the pub

lic imagination they stood somewhere between soothsayers and demigods. Indeed, d eities themselves were often their audience, as is evidenced by the myth of Orphe us. Nothing could be further from Plato than this myth, which is also particularly i lluminating about antiquity's view of a poet's sentimental integrity. Orpheus is no Don Giovanni. So distraught is he by the death of his wife, Eurydice, that hi s lamentations rend the ears of the Olympians, who grant him permission to go do wn into the netherworld to bring her back. That nothing comes of this trip (foll owed in poetry by similar descents in Homer, Virgil, and, above all, in Dante) o nly proves the intensity of the poet's feeling for his beloved, as well, of cour se, as the ancients' grasp of the nitty-gritty of guilt. III As much as the subsequent fate of Orpheus (he was torn apart by a crowd of angry maenads for his refusal because of his vow of chastity, made in mourning for Eury dice to submit himself to their bared charms), this intensity points up the monoga mous nature of at least this poet's passion. Although, unlike the monotheists of later periods, the ancients didn't put much of a premium on monogamy, it should be noted that they didn't run to the opposite extreme either, and reserved fidel ity as the particular virtue of their premier poet. In general, apart from the b eloved, the only feminine presence on a poet's agenda in antiquity was that of h is Muse. The two would overlap in the modern imagination; in antiquity they didn't becaus e the Muse was hardly corporeal. The daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory), she had nothing palpable about her; the only way she would reveal he rself to a mortal, particularly a poet, was through her voice: by dictating to h im this or that line. In other words, she was the voice of the language; and wha t a poet actually listens to, what really does dictate to him the next line, is the language. And it is presumably the language's own gender in Greek (glossa) t hat accounts for the Muse's femininity. With the same allusive consequences, the noun for language is feminine in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and German. In English, however, language is an "it"; in Russian it is "he." Yet whatever language's gender happens to be, a poet's at tachment to it is monogamous, for a poet, by trade at least, is a monoglot. It c ould even be argued that all one's capacity for fidelity gets spent on one's Mus e, as is implied in the Byronic version of the poet's romantic program but that wo uld be true only if one's language were indeed one's choice. As it is, language is the given, and knowledge of which hemisphere of the brain pertains to the Mus e would be of value only if one could control that part of one's anatomy. Iv The Muse, therefore, is not an alternative to the beloved but precedes her. In f act, as an "older woman," the Muse, n?e language, plays a decisive part in the s entimental development of a poet. She is responsible not only for his emotional m akeup but often for the very choice of his object of passion and the manner of i ts pursuit. It is she who makes him fanatically single-minded, turning his love into an equivalent of her own monologue. What amounts in sentimental matters to o bstinacy and obsession is essentially the dictate of the Muse, whose choice is a lways of an aesthetic origin and discards alternatives. In a manner of speaking, love is always a monotheistic experience. Christianity, of course, hasn't failed to capitalize on this. Yet what really bi nds a religious mystic to a pagan sensualist, Gerard Manley Hopkins to Sextus Pr opertius, is emotional absolutism. The intensity of that emotional absolutism is such that at times it overshoots anything that lies near, and often one's very target. As a rule, the nagging, idiosyncratic, self-referential, persistent voic e of the Muse takes a poet beyond imperfect and perfect unions alike, beyond utt er disasters and paroxysms of happiness at the expense of reality, with or without a real, reciprocating girl in it. In other words, the pitch gets higher for its own sake, as if the language propels a poet, especially a romantic, whence it c ame, where in the beginning there was a word, or a discernible sound. Hence many

a broken marriage, hence many a lengthy poem, hence poetry's metaphysical affin ities, for every word

wants to return to where it came from, if only as an echo, which is the mother o f rhyme. Hence, too, the reputation of the poet as a rake. V Among the many agents of the public's spiritual debilitation, it is the voyeuris tic genre of biography that takes the cake. That there are far more ruined maide ns than immortal lyrics seems to give pause to nobody. The last bastion of reali sm, biography is based on the breathtaking premise that art can be explained by life. To follow this logic, The Song of Roland should have been penned by Bluebe ard (well, by Gilles de Rais, at least) and Faust by Frederick of Prussia or, if y ou like him better, Humboldt. What a poet has in common with his less articulate fellows is that his life is h ostage to his metier, not the other way around. And it is not just that he gets paid for his words (seldom and meagerly): the point is that he also pays for the m (often horrifically). It is the latter that creates confusion and spawns biogr aphies, because this payment takes the form not only of indifference; ostracism, imprisonment, exile, oblivion, self-disgust, uncertainty, remorse, madness; a va riety of addictions is also acceptable currency. These things are obviously desc ribable. They are, however, not the cause of one's penmanship but its effect. To put it crassly, in order to make his work sell, as well as to avoid cliche, our poet continually has to get where nobody has ever been before mentally, psycholo gically, or lexically. Once he gets there, he discovers that indeed there's nobo dy about, save perhaps the word's original meaning or that initial discernible s ound. This takes its toll. The longer he is at it at uttering something hitherto unutter able the more idiosyncratic his conduct becomes. Revelations and insights obtained by him in the process may lead him either to an upsurge of hubris or more likely to a deepening of his humility before the force that he surmises behind those insi ghts and revelations. He may also be afflicted by a belief that, older and more viable than anything, language imparts to him, its mouthpiece, its wisdom and the knowledge of the future alike. No matter how gregarious or humble he is by natu re, this sort of thing boxes him even further out of the social context, which d esperately tries to reclaim him by running its common denominator through his gro in. VI This is done on account of the Muse's alleged femininity (even when the poet hap pens to be a woman). The real reason, though, is that art survives life, and thi s unpalatable realization lies behind the lumpen desire to subordinate the forme r to the latter. The finite always mistakes the permanent for the infinite and nu rtures designs upon it. That, of course, is the permanent's own fault, for it ca nnot help at times behaving like the finite. Even the most misogynistic or misan thropic poet produces a spate of love lyrics, if only as a token of allegiance t o the guild, or as an exercise. This is enough to occasion research, textual exe gesis, psychoanalytical interpretation, and whatnot. The general scheme goes like this: the femininity of the Muse presupposes the masculinity of the poet. The m asculinity of the poet presupposes the femininity of the lover. Ergo: the lover i s the Muse, or could be called that. Another ergo: a poem is the sublimation of t he author's erotic urges and should be treated as such. Simple. That Homer must have been fairly frail by the time he wrote the Odyssey and that Goethe, when he got to the second part of Faust, definitely was, is of no conse quence. What, on the whole, should we do with epic poets? And how can one sublimating so much remain a rake? Since we seem to be saddled with the term, perhaps it would be civilized to assume that both artistic and erotic activities are expressions

of one's creative energy, that both are a sublimation. As for the Muse, that ang el of language, that "older woman," it would be best if biographers and the publ ic left her alone, and if they can't they should at least remember that she is o lder than any lover or mother, and that her voice is more implacable than the mo ther tongue. She's going to dictate to a poet no matter where, how, or when he l ives, and if not to this poet, then to the next one partly because living and writ ing are different occupations (that's what the two different verbs are for) and to equate them is more absurd than to separate them, for literature has a richer past than any individual, whatever his pedigree. VII "To a man, a girl's visage is of course a visage of his soul," wrote a Russian poet, and that's what lies behind the exploits of Theseus or St. George, the quests of Orpheus and Dante. The sheer cumbersomeness of those undertakings bespeaks a motive other than lust alone. In other words, love is a metaphysical affair whose goal is either accomplishing or liberating one's soul: winnowing it from the chaff of exis? tence. That is and always has been the core of lyric poetry. A maiden, in short, is one's soul's stand-in, and one zeroes in on her precisely because one is not given an al? ternative, save perhaps in a mirror. In the era we call mod? ern, both a poet and his public have grown accustomed to short takes. Still, even .in this century there have been enough exceptions whose thoroughness in treating the sub? ject rivals that of Petrarch. One can cite Akhmatova, one can cite Montale, one can cite the "dark pastorals" of Robert Frost or Thomas Hardy. These are quests for the soul, in the form of lyric poetry. Hence the singularity of the addressee and the stability of the manner, or style. Often the career of a poet, if he li ves long enough, emerges as a genre variation on a single theme, helping us to d istinguish the dancer from the dance in this case, a love poem from love as such. If a poet dies young, the dancer and the dance tend to merge. This leads to an a wful terminological confusion and bad press for the participants, not to mention their purpose. VIII If only because a love poem is more often than not an applied art (i.e., it's wr itten to get the girl), it takes an author to an emotional and, quite likely, a linguistic extreme. As a result, he emerges from such a poem knowing himself his p sychological and stylistic parameters better than before, which explains the popula rity of the genre among its practitioners. Also, sometimes the author gets the gi rl. Practical application notwithstanding, what makes love lyrics abound is simply t hat they are a product of sentimental necessity. Triggered by a particular addre ssee, this necessity may stay proportionate to that addressee, or develop an auto nomous dynamic and volume, prompted by the centrifugal nature of language. The c onsequence of the latter may be either a cycle of love poems addressed to the sa me person or a number of poems fanning out, as it were, in different directions. The choice here if one can speak of choice where necessity is at work is not so muc h moral or spiritual as stylistic, and depends on a poet's longevity. And here's where a stylistic choice if one can speak of choice where chance and the passage of time are at play starts to smell of spiritual consequences. For ultimately a lo ve lyric, by necessity, is a narcissistic affair. It is a statement, however ima ginative, of the author's own feeling, and as such it amounts to a self-portrait rather than to one of his beloved or her world. Were it not for sketches, oils, miniatures, or snapshots, having read a poem, we often wouldn't have known what o r more to the point, whom it was all about. Even provided with them, we don't lear n much about the beauties they depict, save that they looked different from thei r bards and that not all of them qualify in our eyes as beauties. But then a pic ture seldom complements words, or vice versa. Besides, images of souls and magaz ine covers are bound to have different standards. For Dante, at least, the notio n of beauty was contingent on the beholder's ability to discern in the human fac

e's oval just seven letters comprising the term Homo Dei. Ix The crux of the matter is that their actual appearances are irrelevant and were not supposed to be registered. What was supposed to be registered is the spiritu al accomplishment which is the ultimate proof of the poet's existence. A picture is a bonus only to him, perhaps to her; to a reader it is practically a minus, f or it subtracts from the imagination. For a poem is a mental affair: for its rea der as much as for its author. "Her" portrait is the poet's state conveyed throu gh his tune and choice of words; a reader would be a fool to settle for less. Wh at matters about "her" is not her particularity but her universality. Don't try t o find her snapshot and position yourself next to it: it won't work. Plain and s imply, a love lyric is one's soul set in motion. If it's good, it may do the sam e to you. It is otherness, therefore, that provides the metaphysical opportunity. A love l yric may be good or bad but it offers its writer an extension of himself or, if a lyric is exceptionally good, or an affair is long, self-negation. What is the Mus e up to while this is going on? Not much, since a love lyric is dictated by exis tential necessity and necessity doesn't care much about the quality of articulat ion. As a rule, love lyrics are done fast and don't undergo much revision. But o nce a metaphysical dimension is attained, or at least once self-negation is atta ined, one indeed can tell the dancer from the dance: a love lyric from love and, thus, from a poem about, or informed by, love. X Now, a poem about love doesn't insist on the author's own reality and seldom emp loys the word "I." It is about what a poet is not, about what he perceives as di fferent from himself. If it is a mirror, it is a small one, and placed too far aw ay. To recognize oneself in it requires, apart from humility, a lens whose power of resolution doesn't distinguish between observing and being mesmerized. A poem about love can have for its subject practically anything: the girl's features, ribbons in her hair, the landscape behind her house, the passage of clouds, star ry skies, some inanimate object. It may have nothing to do with the girl; it can describe an exchange between two or more mythic characters, a wilted bouquet, s now on the railroad platform. The readers, though, will know that they are readi ng a poem informed by love thanks to the intensity of attention paid to this or that detail of the universe. For love is an attitude toward reality usually of som eone finite toward something infinite. Hence, the intensity caused by the sense of the provisional nature of one's possessions. Hence, that intensity's need for articulation. Hence, its quest for a voice less provisional than one's own. And in walks the Muse, that older woman, meticulous about possessions . XI Pasternak's famous exclamation "Great god of love, great god of details!" is poi gnant precisely because of the utter insignificance of the sum of these details. A ratio could no doubt be established between the smallness of the detail and th e intensity of attention paid to it, as well as between the latter and one's spi ritual accomplishment, because a poem any poem, regardless of its subject is in itse lf an act of love, not so much of an author for his subject as of language for a piece of reality. If it is often tinged with an elegiac air, with the timbre of pity, this is so because it is the love of the greater for the lesser, of the p ermanent for the transitory. This surely doesn't affect a poet's romantic conduc t, since he, a physical entity, identifies himself more readily with the provisi onal than with the eternal. All he may know is that when it comes to love, art i s a more adequate form of expression than any other; that on paper one can reach a higher degree of lyricism than on bedroom linen. Were it otherwise, we would have far less art on our hands. The way martyrdom or sainthood prove not so much the substance of a creed as the human potential for belief, so love poetry speaks for art's ability to overshoot reality or to escape it entirely. Perhaps the true measure of this kind of poetry is precisely its i napplicability to reality, the impossibility of translating its sentiment into a ction for want of physical equivalence to abstract insight. The physical world m

ust take offense at this kind of criterion. But, then, it has photography not quit e an art yet, but capable of arresting the abstract in flight, or at least in pr ogress. XII And a while ago, in a small garrison town in the north of Italy, I chanced on an attempt to do precisely this: to depict poetry's reality by means of the camera . It was a small exhibition consisting of photographs of thirty or so great twent ieth-century poets' beloveds wives, mistresses, concubines, boys, men. It started in fact with Baudelaire and ended with Pessoa and Montale; next to each beloved, a famous lyric was attached, in its original language and in translation. A for tunate idea, I thought, shuffling past the glass-covered stands that contained t he black-and-white full faces, profiles, and three-quarter profiles of bards and of what amounted to their own or their languages' destinies. There they were a fl ock of rare birds caught in the net of that gallery, and one could indeed regard them as art's points of departure from reality, or better still, as reality's m eans of transportation toward that higher degree of lyricism, toward a poem. (Aft er all, for one's fading and generally moribund features, art is another kind of future.) Not that the women (and some men) depicted there lacked the psychological, visua l, or erotic qualities required to forge a poet's happiness: on the contrary, th ey appeared sufficiently if variously endowed. Some were wives, others mistresse s and lovers, still others lingered in a poet's mind while their appearance in h is quarters may have been rather fleeting. Of course, given the mind-boggling va riety of what nature can paint into a human oval, one's choice of a beloved appe ars arbitrary. The usual factors-genetic, historical, social, aesthetic narrow the range, for the poet as for everyone else. Yet perhaps the particular prerequisi te for a poet's choice is the presence in that oval of a certain nonfunctional a ir, an air of ambivalence and open-endedness, echoing, as it were, in flesh and blood the essence of his endeavor. That's what such epithets as "enigmatic," "dreamy," or "otherworldly" normally s truggle to denote, and what accounts for the preponderance in that gallery of vis ually aleatoric blondes over the excessive precision of brunettes. By and large, at any rate, this characteristic, vague as it is, did apply to the birds of pass age caught in that particular net. Conscious of the camera or taken unawares, th ose faces appeared to carry in one way or another a common expression of being el sewhere, or having their mental focus somewhat blurred. The next moment, of cour se, they would be energetic, alert, supine, lascivious, bearing a child or eloping with a friend, bloody-minded or suffering a bard's infidelity in short, more defi nite. For an instant of exposure, though, they were their tentative, indefinite s elves, which, like a poem in progress, didn't yet have a next line or, very ofte n, a subject. Also like poems, they were never finished: they were only abandone d. In short, they were drafts. It is mutability, then, that animates a face for a poet, that reverberates almos t palpably in Yeats's famous lines: How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of yo ur changing face. That a reader can empathize with these lines proves him to be as susceptible to the appeal of mutability as the poet. More exactly, the degree of his lyrical ap preciation here is the degree to which he is removed from that very mutability, the degree to which he is confined to the definite: features or circumstances or both. With the poet, he discerns in that changing oval far more than just the s even letters of Homo Dei; he discerns there the entire alphabet, in all its corn binations, i.e., the language. That is how in the end the Muse perhaps indeed be comes feminine, how she gets photographed. The Yeats quatrain sounds like a momen t of recognition of one form of life in another: of the poet's own vocal cords' tremolo in his beloved's mortal features, or uncertainty in uncertainty. To a vi brating voice, in other words, everything tentative and faltering is an echo, pr

omoted at times to an alter ego or, as gender would have it, to an altra ego. XIII Gender imperatives notwithstanding, let's keep in mind that an altra ego is no M use. Whatever solipsistic depths a carnal union may avail him, no poet ever mist akes his voice for its echo, the inner for the outer. The prerequisite of love i s the autonomy of its object, preferably within arm's reach. The same goes for a n echo that defines the range of one's voice. Those depicted in the exhibition wom en and, moreover, men were not themselves Muses, but their good stand-ins, inhabit ing this side of reality and sharing with the older women their language. They w ere (or ended up being) other people's wives; actresses and dancers, schoolteach ers, divorc?es, nurses; they had a social station and thus could be defined, whil e the Muse's main trait let me repeat it is that she is undefinable. They were neuro tic or serene, promiscuous or strict, religious or cynical, great dressers or slo venly, highly sophisticated or barely literate. Some of them couldn't care less f or poetry and would embrace a common cad more eagerly than an ardent admirer. On top of that, they lived in different lands, though at about the same time, spok e different tongues, and didn't know of each other. In short, nothing bound them together save that something they said or did at a certain moment triggered and set in motion the machinery of language, and it rolled along, leaving behind on paper "the best words in the best possible order." They were not Muses, because they made the Muse, the older woman, speak. Caught in the gallery's net, I thought, these birds of bards' paradise had at le ast got their proper identification, if not actual rings. Like their bards, most of them were gone now, and gone were their guilty secrets, moments of triumph, s ubstantial wardrobes, protracted malaises, and peculiar affinities. What remained was a song owing to the birds' capacity to flutter off no less than to the bard s' to chirp, yet outlasting both the way it will outlast its readers, who, for the moment of reading at least, share in a song's afterlife. XIV Herein lies the ultimate distinction between the beloved and the Muse: the latte r doesn't die. The same goes for the Muse and the poet: when he's gone, she find s herself another mouthpiece in the next generation. To put it another way, she always hangs around a language and doesn't seem to mind being mistaken for a pla in girl. Amused by this sort of error, she tries to correct it by dictating to h er charge now pages of Paradiso, now Thomas Hardy's poems off 1912-13; that is, those where the voice of human passion yields to that of linguistic necessity but apparently to no avail. So let's leave her with a flute and a wreath of wildflow ers. This way at least she might escape a biographer. 1990 How to Read a Book The idea of a book fair in the city where, a century ago, Nietzsche lost his min d has, in its own turn, a nice ring to it. A Mobius strip (commonly known as a v icious circle), to be precise, for several stalls in this book fair are occupied by the complete or selected works of this great German. On the whole, infinity is a fairly palpable aspect of this business of publishing, if only because it e xtends a dead author's existence beyond the limits he envisioned, or provides a living author with a future which we all prefer to regard as unending. On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among t hem outlast their authors mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust l ong after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust. Yet even this fo rm of the future is better than the memory of a few surviving relatives or frien ds on whom one cannot rely, and often it is precisely the appetite for this post humous dimension which sets one's pen in motion. So as we toss and turn these rectangular objects in our hands those in octavo, in quarto, in duodecimo, etc., etc. we won't be terribly amiss if we surmise that we fondle in our hands, as it were, the actual or potential urns with our returning ashes. After all, what goes into writing a book be it a novel, a philosophical tre atise, a collection of poems, a biography, or a thriller is, ultimately, a man's on

ly life: good or bad but always finite. Whoever said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book nobody gets younger. Nor does one become any younger by reading one. Since this is so, our natural pr eference should be for good books. The paradox, however, lies in the fact that i n literature, as nearly everywhere, "good" is not an autonomous category: it is d efined by its distinction from "bad." What's more, in order to write a good book , a writer must read a great deal of pulp otherwise he won't be able to develop th e necessary criteria. That's what may constitute bad literature's best defense a t the Last Judgment; that's also the raison d'?tre of the proceedings in which w e take part today. Since we are all moribund, and since reading books is time-consuming, we must de vise a system that allows us a semblance of economy. Of course, there is no denyi ng the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; s till, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake but to learn. Hence the need for concisi on, condensation, fusion for the works that bring the human predicament, in all it s diversity, into its sharpest possible focus; in other words, the need for a sh ortcut. Hence, too as a by-product of our suspicion that such shortcuts exist (and they do, but about that later) the need for some compass in the ocean of availabl e printed matter. The role of that compass, of course, is played by literary criticism, by reviewe rs. Alas, its needle oscillates wildly. What is north for some is south (South A merica, to be precise) for others; the same goes in an even wilder degree for eas t and west. The trouble with a reviewer is (minimum) threefold: (a) he can be a hack, and as ignorant as ourselves; (b) he can have strong predilections for a c ertain kind of writing or simply be on the take with the publishing industry; an d (c) if he is a writer of talent, he will turn his review writing into an indep endent art form Jorge Luis Borges is a case in point and you may end up reading revi ews rather than the books themselves. In any case, you find yourselves adrift in the ocean, with pages and pages rustl ing in every direction, clinging to a raft whose ability to stay afloat you are not so sure of. The alternative, therefore, would be to develop your own taste, t o build your own compass, to familiarize yourself, as it were, with particular s tars and constellations dim or bright but always remote. This, however, takes a he ll of a lot of time, and you may easily find yourself old and gray, heading for the exit with a lousy volume under your arm. Another alternative or perhaps just a part of the same is to rely on hearsay: a friend's advice, a reference caught in a text you happen to like. Although not institutionalized in any fashion (which wouldn't be such a bad idea), this kind of procedure is familiar to all of us fr om a tender age. Yet this, too, proves to be poor insurance, for the ocean of av ailable literature swells and widens constantly, as this book fair amply testifie s: it is yet another tempest in that ocean. So where is one's terra firma, even though it may be but an uninhabitable island ? Where is our good man Friday, let alone a Cheetah? Before I come up with my suggestion nay! what I perceive as being the only solutio n for developing sound taste in literature I'd like to say a few words about this solution's source, i.e., about my humble self not because of my personal vanity, b ut because I believe that the value of an idea is related to the context in whic h it emerges. Indeed, had I been a publisher, I'd be putting on my books' covers not only their authors' names but also the exact age at which they composed thi s or that work, in order to enable their readers to decide whether the readers c are to reckon with the information or the views contained in a book written by a man so much younger or, for that matter, so much older than themselves. The source of the suggestion to come belongs to the category of people (alas, I can no longer use the term "generation," which implies a certain sense of mass an d unity) for whom literature has always been a matter of some hundred names; to the people whose social graces would make Robinson Crusoe or even Tarzan wince; to those who feel awkward at large gatherings, do not dance at parties, tend to find metaphysical excuses for adultery, and are finicky about discussing politic

s; the people who dislike themselves far more than their detractors do; who still prefer alcohol and tobacco to heroin or marijuana those who, in W. H. Auden's wor ds, "one will not find on the barricades and who never shoot themselves or their lovers." If such people occasionally find themselves swimming in their blood on the floor of prison cells or speaking from a platform, it is because they rebel against (or, more precisely, object to) not some particular injustice but the o rder of the world as a whole. They have no illusions about the objectivity of th e views they put forth; on the contrary, they insist on their unpardonable subje ctivity right from the threshold. They act in this fashion, however, not for the purpose of shielding themselves from possible attack: as a rule, they are fully aware of the vulnerability pertinent to their views and the positions they defe nd. Yet taking the stance somewhat opposite to Darwinian they consider vulnerability the primary trait of living matter. This, I must add, has less to do with masochi stic tendencies, nowadays attributed to almost every man of letters, than with t heir instinctive, often firsthand knowledge that extreme subjectivity, prejudice, and indeed idiosyncrasy are what help art to avoid clich?. And the resistance t o clich? is what distinguishes art from life. Now that you know the background of what I am about to say, I may just as well s ay it: The way to develop good taste in literature is to read poetry. If you thi nk that I am speaking out of professional partisanship, that I am trying to adva nce my own guild interests, you are mistaken: I am no union man. The point is th at being the supreme form of human locution, poetry is not only the most concise , the most condensed way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the h ighest possible standards for any linguistic operation especially one on paper. The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity , be it in political or philosophical discourse, in history, social studies, or t he art of fiction. Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed , and laconic intensity of poetic diction. A child of epitaph and epigram, conce ived, it appears, as a shortcut to any conceivable subject matter, poetry is a g reat disciplinarian to prose. It teaches the latter not only the value of each wo rd but also the mercurial mental patterns of the species, alternatives to linear composition, the knack of omitting the self-evident, emphasis on detail, the te chnique of anticlimax. Above all, poetry develops in prose that appetite for met aphysics which distinguishes a work of art from mere belles lettres. It must be admitted, however, that in this particular regard, prose has proven to be a rath er lazy pupil. Please, don't get me wrong: I am not trying to debunk prose. The truth of the ma tter is that poetry simply happens to be older than prose and thus has covered a greater distance. Literature started with poetry, with the song of a nomad that predates the scribblings of a settler. And although I have compared somewhere the difference between poetry and prose to that between the air force and the infant ry, the suggestion that I make now has nothing to do with either hierarchy or th e anthropological origins of literature. All I am trying to do is to be practical and spare your eyesight and brain cells a lot of useless printed matter. Poetry , one might say, has been invented for just this purpose for it is synonymous with economy. What one should do, therefore, is recapitulate, albeit in miniature, t he process that took place in our civilization over the course of two millennia. It is easier than you might think, for the body of poetry is far less voluminou s than that of prose. What's more, if you are concerned mainly with contemporary literature, then your job is indeed a piece of cake. All you have to do is arm, yourselves for a couple of months with the works of poets in your mother tongue, preferably from the first half of this century. I suppose you'll end up with a dozen rather slim books, and by the end of the summer you will be in great shape . If your mother tongue is English, I might recommend to you Robert Frost, Thomas H ardy, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bisho p. If the language is German, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Peter Huchel, and Gottfried Benn. If it is Spanish, Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, Juan Ramon Jimenez, and Octavio Paz will do. If the lang uage is Polish or if you know Polish (which would be to your great advantage, beca

use the most extraordinary poetry of this century is written in that language) I'd like to mention to you the names of Leopold Staff, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herb ert, and Wistawa Szymborska. If it is French, then of course Guillaume Apollinair e, Jules Supervielle, Pierre Reverdy, Blaise Cendrars, some of Paul Eluard, a bi t of Aragon, Victor Segalen, and Henri Michaux. If it is Greek, then you should read Constantine Cavafy, George Seferis, Yannis Ritsos. If it is Dutch, then it s hould be Martinus Nijhoff, particularly his stunning -Awater." If it is Portugue se, you should read Fernando Pessoa and perhaps Carlos Drummond de Andrade. If t he language is Swedish, read Gunnar Ekelei, Harry Martinson, Tomas TranstrOmer. If it is Russian, it should be, to say the least, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandels tam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Vladislav Khodasevich, Veleniir Khlebnikov, Nikolai Klyuev. If it is Italian, I don't presume to submit any name to this au dience, and if I mention Quasimodo, Saba, Ungaretti, and Montale, it is simply be cause I have long wanted to acknowledge my personal, private gratitude and debt to these four great poets whose lines influenced my life rather crucially, and I am glad to do so while standing on Italian soil. If after going through the works of any of these, you drop a book of prose picke d from the shelf, it won't be your fault. If you continue to read it, that will be to the author's credit; that will mean that this author has indeed something to add to the truth about our existence as it was known to these few poets just mentioned; this would prove at least that this author is not redundant, that his language has an independent energy or grace. Or else, it would mean that readin g is your incurable addiction. As addictions go, it is not the worst one. Let me draw a caricature here, for caricatures accentuate the essential. In this caricature I see a reader whose two hands are occupied with holding open books. In the left, be holds a collection of poems; in the right, a volume of prose. L et's see which he drops first. Of course, he may fill both his palms with prose volumes, but that will leave him with self-negating criteria. And, of course, he may also ask what distinguishes good poetry from bad, and where is his guarantee that what he holds in his left hand is indeed worth bothering with. Well, for one thing, what he holds in his left hand will be, in all likelihood, lighter than what he holds in the right. Second, poetry, as Montale once put it, is an incurably semantic art, and chances for charlatanism in it are extremely l ow. By the third line a reader will know what sort of thing he holds in his left hand, for poetry makes sense fast and the quality of language in it makes itsel f felt immediately. After three lines he may glance at what he has in the right. This is, as I told you, a caricature. At the same time, I believe, this might be the posture many of you will unwittingly assume at this book fair. Make sure, a t least, that the books in your hands belong to different genres of literature. Now, this shifting of eyes from left to right is, of course, a maddening enterpr ise; still, there are no horsemen on the streets of Turin any longer, and the si ght of a cabbie flogging his animal won't aggravate the state you will be in whe n you leave these premises. Besides, a hundred years hence, nobody's insanity wil l matter much to the multitudes whose number will exceed by far the total of lit tle black letters in all the books at this book fair put together. So you may as well try the little trick I've just suggested. In Praise of Boredom But should you fail to keep your kingdom And, like your father before you come W here thought accuses and feeling mocks, Believe your pain .. . W. H. Auden, "Alonso to Ferdinand" A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to be claimed by boredom. The reason I'd like to talk to you about it today, on this lofty occasion, is th at I believe no liberal arts college prepares you for that eventuality; Dartmout h is no exception. Neither humanities nor science offers courses in boredom. At best, they may acquaint you with the sensation by incurring it. But what is a cas ual contact to an incurable malaise? The worst monotonous drone coming from a le ctern or the eye-splitting textbook in turgid English is nothing in comparison t o the psychological Sahara that starts right in your bedroom and spurns the hori zon. Known under several aliases anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs,

apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, accidie, etc. boredom is a comp lex phenomenon and by and large a product of repetition. It would seem, then, th at the best remedy against it would be constant inventiveness and originality. T hat is what you, young and newfangled, would hope for. Alas, life won't supply y ou with that option, for life's main medium is precisely repetition. One may argue, of course, that repeated attempts at originality and inventivenes s are the vehicle of progress and in the same breath civilization. As benefits of hi ndsight go, however, this one is not the most valuable. For should we divide the history of our species by scientific discoveries, not to mention ethical concept s, the result will not be in our favor. We'll get, technically speaking, centuri es of boredom. The very notion of originality or innovation spells out the monot ony of standard reality, of life, whose main medium nay, idiom is tedium. In that, it life differs from art, whose worst enemy, as you probably know, is clich e. Small wonder, then, that art, too, fails to instruct you as to how to handle boredom. There are few novels about this subject; paintings are still fewer; and as for music, it is largely nonsemantic. On the whole, art treats boredom in a self-defensive, satirical fashion. The only way art can become for you a solace f rom boredom, from the existential equivalent of cliche, is if you yourselves bec ome artists. Given your number, though, this prospect is as unappetizing as it i s unlikely. But even should you march out of this commencement in full force to typewriters, easels, and Steinway grands, you won't shield yourselves from boredom entirely. If repetitiveness is boredom's mother, you, young and newfangled, will be quickl y smothered by lack of recognition and low pay, both chronic in the world of art . in these respects, writing, painting, composing music are plain inferior to wo rking for a law firm, a bank, or even a lab. Herein, of course, lies art's saving grace. Not being lucrative, it falls victim to demography rather reluctantly. For if, as we've said, repetition is boredom' s mother, demography (which is to play in your lives a far greater role than any discipline you've mastered here) is its other parent. This may sound misanthrop ic to you, but I am more than twice your age, and I have lived to see the popula tion of our globe double. By the time you're my age, it will have quadrupled, and not exactly in the fashion you expect. For instance, by the year z000 there is g oing to be such cultural and ethnic rearrangement as to challenge your notion of your own humanity. That alone will reduce the prospects of originality and inventiveness as antidot es to boredom. But even in a more monochromatic world, the other trouble with or iginality and inventiveness is precisely that they literally pay off. Provided t hat you are capable of either, you will become well off rather fast. Desirable a s that may be, most of you know firsthand that nobody is as bored as the rich, f or money buys time, and time is repetitive. Assuming that you are not heading fo r poverty for otherwise you wouldn't have entered college one expects you to be hit by boredom as soon as the first tools of self-gratification become available to you. Thanks to modern technology, those tools are as numerous as boredom's synonyms. I n light of their function to render you oblivious to the redundancy of time their ab undance is revealing. Equally revealing is the function of your purchasing power , toward whose increase you'll walk out of this commencement ground through the click and whirr of some of those instruments tightly held by your parents and re latives. It is a prophetic scene, ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1989, for you are entering the world where recording an event dwarfs the event itself the w orld of video, stereo, remote control, jogging suit, and exercise machine to kee p you fit for reliving your own or someone else's past: canned ecstasy claiming raw flesh. Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom. That applies to mon ey in more ways than one, both to the banknotes as such and to possessing them. That is not to bill poverty, of course, as an escape from boredom although St. Fran cis, it would seem, has managed exactly that. Yet for all the deprivation surrou nding us, the idea of new monastic orders doesn't appear particularly catchy in this era of video-Christianity. Besides, young and newfangled, you are more eage

r to do good in some South Africa or other than next door, keener on giving up y our favorite brand of soda than on venturing to the wrong side of the tracks. So nobody advises poverty for you. All one can suggest is to be a bit more apprehe nsive of money, for the zeros in your accounts may usher in their mental equival ents. As for poverty, boredom is the most brutal part of its misery, and the departure from it takes more radical forms: of violent rebellion or drug addiction. Both are temporary, for the misery of poverty is infinite; both, because of that infi nity, are costly. In general, a man shooting heroin into his vein does so largel y for the same reason you buy a video: to dodge the redundancy of time. The diff erence, though, is that he spends more than he's got, and that his means of esca pe become as redundant as what he is escaping from faster than yours. On the who le, the difference in tactility between a syringe's needle and a stereo's push b utton roughly corresponds to that between the acuteness and dullness of time's im pact upon the have-nots and the haves. In short, whether rich or poor, sooner or later you will be afflicted by this redundancy of time. Potential haves, you'll be bored with your work, your friends, your spouses, you r lovers, the view from your window, the furniture or wallpaper in your room, you r thoughts, yourselves. Accordingly, you'll try to devise ways of escape. Apart from the self-gratifying gadgets mentioned before, you may take up changing jobs , residence, company, country, climate; you may take up promiscuity, alcohol, tr avel, cooking lessons, drugs, psychoanalysis. In fact, you may lump all these together; and for a while that may work. Until t he day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amid a new family and a diff erent wallpaper, in a different state and climate, with a heap of bills from you r travel agent and your shrink, yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring through your window. You'll put on your loafers only to discover they're lacking bootstraps to lift yourself out of what you recognize. Depending on your temperament or the age you are at, you will either panic or resign your self to the familiarity of the sensation; or else you'll go through the rigmarol e of change once more. Neurosis and depression will enter your lexicon; pills, your medical cabinet. Ba sically, there is nothing wrong about turning life into the constant quest for a lternatives, into leapfrogging jobs, spouses, surroundings, etc., provided you ca n afford the alimony and jumbled memories. This predicament, after all, has been sufficiently glamorized on screen and in Romantic poetry. The rub, however, is t hat before long this quest turns into a full-time occupation, with your need for an alternative coming to match a drug addict's daily fix. There is yet another way out of it, however. Not a better one, perhaps, from you r point of view, and not necessarily secure, but straight and inexpensive. Those of you who have read Robert Frost's "Servant to Servants" may remember a line o f his: "The best way out is always through." So what I am about to suggest is a variation on the theme. When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bot tom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here, to paraphrase another great poet of the English language, is to ex act full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous sp lendor. In a manner of speaking, boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one's mental equilibrium. In short , it is your window on time's infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance i n it. That's what accounts, perhaps, for one's dread of lonely, torpid evenings, for the fascination with which one watches sometimes a fleck of dust aswirl in a sunbeam, and somewhere a clock tick-tocks, the day is hot, and your willpower i s at zero. Once this window opens, don't try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide ope n. For boredom speaks the language of time, and it is to teach you the most valua

ble lesson in your life the one you didn't get here, on these green lawns the lesson of your utter insignificance. It is valuable to you, as well as to those you ar e to rub shoulders with. "You are finite," time tells you in a voice of boredom, "and whatever you do is, from my point of view, futile." As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count; yet the sense of futility, of limited significa nce even of your best, most ardent actions is better than the illusion of their consequences and the attendant self-aggrandizement. For boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existen ce into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own s ize, the more humble and the more compassionate you become to your likes, to tha t dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much lif e went into those flecks! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that's why they look so small. And do you k now what the dust says when it's being wiped off the table? "Remember me," whispers the dust. Nothing could be farther away from the mental agenda of any of you, young and ne wfangled, than the sentiment expressed in this two-liner of the German poet Pete r Huchel, now dead. I've quoted it not because I'd like to instill in you affinity for things small seeds and plants, grains of sand or mosquitoes small but numerous. I've quoted these lines because I like them, because I recognize in them myself, and, for that matter, any living organism to be wiped off from the available su rface. " 'Remember me,' whispers the dust." And one hears in this that if we lea rn about ourselves from time, perhaps time, in turn, may learn something from us . What would that be? That inferior in significance, we best it in sensitivity. This is what it means to be insignificant. If it takes will-paralyzing boredom to bring this home, then hail the boredom. You are insig nificant because you are finite. Yet the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion. For infinity is not terribl y lively, not terribly emotional. Your boredom, at least, tells you that much. B ecause your boredom is the boredom of infinity. Respect it, then, for its origins as much perhaps as for your own. Because it is the anticipation of that inanimate infinity that accounts for the intensity of human sentiments, often resulting in a conception of a new life. This is not to say that you have been conceived out of boredom, or that the finite breeds the f inite (though both may ring true). It is to suggest, rather, that passion is the privilege of the insignificant. So try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all , is a remedy against boredom. Another one, of course, is pain physical more so th an psychological, passion's frequent aftermath; although I wish you neither. Sti ll, when you hurt you know that at least you haven't been deceived (by your body or by your psyche). By the same token, what's good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of the meaninglessness of your own, of everything else's existenc e, is that it is not a deception. You also might try detective novels or action movies something that leaves you whe re you haven't been verbally/ visually/mentally before something sustained, if onl y for a couple of hours. Avoid TV, especially flipping the channels: that's redu ndancy incarnate. Yet should those remedies fail, let it in, "fling your soul up on the growing gloom." Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom a nd anguish, which anyhow are larger than you. No doubt you'll find that bosom smo thering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don't think you've goofed somewhere along the line, don't try to retrace your s teps to correct the error. No, as the poet said, "Believe your pain." This awful

bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that t here is no embrace in this world that won't finally unclasp. If you find all this gloomy, you don't know what gloom is. If you find this irre levant, I hope time will prove you right. Should you find this inappropriate for such a lofty occasion, I will disagree. I would agree with you had this occasion been celebrating your staying here; but it marks your departure. By tomorrow you'll be out of here, since your parents p aid only for four years, not a clay longer. So you must go elsewhere, to make yo ur careers, money, families, to meet your unique fates. And as for that elsewher e, neither among stars and in the tropics nor across the border in Vermont is th ere much awareness of this ceremony on the Dartmouth Green. One wouldn't even be t that the sound of your band reaches White River Junction. You are exiting this place, members of the class of 1989. You are entering the w orld, which is going to be far more thickly settled than this neck of the woods and where you'll be paid far less attention than you have been used to for the l ast four years. You are on your own in a big way. Speaking of your significance, you can quickly estimate it by pitting your 1,1oo against the world's 4.9 billi on. Prudence, then, is as appropriate on this occasion as is fanfare. I wish you nothing but happiness. Still, there is going to be plenty of dark and , what's worse, dull hours, caused as much by the world outside as by your own m inds. You ought to be fortified against that in some fashion; and that's what I' ve tried to do here in my feeble way, although that's obviously not enough. For what lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisome journey; you are boarding today , as it were, a runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least of all those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it' s not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort from the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may turn out to be, the train doe sn't stop there for good. Therefore, you are never stuck not even when you feel yo u are; for this place today becomes your past. From now on, it will only be rece ding for you, for that train is in constant motion. It will be receding for you even when you feel that you are stuck . . . So take one last look at it, while i t is still its normal size, while it is not yet a photograph. Look at it with al l the tenderness you can muster, for you are looking at your past. Exact, as it were, the full look at the best. For I doubt you'll ever have it better than her e. Condition We Call Exile As we gather here, in this attractive and well-lit room, on this cold December e vening, to discuss the plight of the writer in exile, let us pause for a minute and imagine some of those who, quite naturally, didn t make it to this room. Let u s imagine, for instance, Turkish gast-arbeiters prowling the streets of West Ger many, uncomprehending or envious of the surrounding reality. Or let us imagine V ietnamese boat people bobbing on high seas or already settled somewhere in the A ustralian outback. Let us imagine Mexican wetbacks crawling the ravines of south ern California, past the border patrols into the territory of the United States. Or let us imagine shiploads of Pakistanis disembarking somewhere in Kuwait or S audi Arabia, hungry for menial jobs the oil-rich locals won t do. Let us imagine m ultitudes of Ethiopians trekking some desert on foot into Somalia or is it the oth er way around? escaping the famine. Well, we may stop here because that minute of imagining has already passed, although a great many could be added to this list. Nobody ever counted these people and nobody, including the UN relief organizati ons, ever will: coming in the millions, they elude computation and constitute wh at is called for want of a better term or a higher degree of compassion migration. Whatever the proper name for these people, whatever their motives, origins, and destinations, whatever their impact on the societies which they abandon and to w hich they come may amount to one thing is absolutely clear: they make it very diff icult to talk about the plight of the writer in exile with a straight face. Yet talk we must; and not only because literature, like poverty, is known for ta

king care of its own kind, but more because of the ancient and perhaps as yet un founded belief that should the masters of this world be better read, the mismana gement and grief that make millions take to the road could be somewhat reduced. Since there is not much on which to rest our hopes for a better world, since eve rything else seems to fail one way or another, we must somehow maintain that lit erature is the only form of moral insurance a society has; that it is the perman ent antidote to the dog-eat-dog principle; that it provides the best argument ag ainst any sort of bulldozer-type mass solution if only because human diversity is literature s lock and stock, as well as its raison d ?tre. We must talk because we m ust insist that literature is the greatest - surely greater than any creed - tea cher of human subtlety, and that by interfering with literature's natural existe nce and with people's ability to learn literature's lessons, a society reduces i ts own potential, slows down the pace of its evolution, ultimately, perhaps, put s its own fabric in peril. If this means we must talk to ourselves, so much the better: not for ourselves but perhaps for literature. Whether he likes it or not, Gastarbeiters and refugees of any stripe effectively pluck the orchid out of an exiled writer's lapel. Displacement and misplacement are this century's commonplace. And what our exiled writer has in common with a Gastarbeiter or a political refugee is that in either case a man is running awa y from the worse toward the better. The truth of the matter is that from a tyran ny one can be exiled only to a democracy. For good old exile ain't what it used to be. It isn't leaving civilized Rome for savage Sarmatia anymore, nor is it se nding a man from, say, Bulgaria to China. No, as a rule what takes place is a tr ansition from a political and economic backwater to an industrially advanced soc iety with the latest word on individual liberty on its lips. And it must be adde d that perhaps taking this route is for an exiled writer, in many ways, like goi ng home because he gets closer to the seat of the ideals which inspired him all al ong. If one were to assign the life of an exiled writer a genre, it would have to be tragicomedy. Because of his previous incarnation, he is capable of appreciating the social and material advantages of democracy far more intensely than its nativ es do. Yet for precisely the same reason (whose main by-product is the linguisti c barrier), he finds himself totally unable to play any meaningful role in his n ew society. The democracy into which he has arrived provides him with physical sa fety but renders him socially insignificant. And the lack of significance is wha t no writer, exile or not, can take. For it is the quest for significance that very often constitutes most of his care er. To say the least, it is very often a literary career's consequence. In the c ase of the exiled writer, it is almost invariably the cause of his exile. And on e is terribly tempted to add here that the existence of this desire in a writer is a conditioned response on his part to the vertical structure of his original society. (For a writer living in a free society, the presence of this desire bes peaks the atavistic memory every democracy has of its unconstitutional past.) In this respect, the plight of an exiled writer is indeed much worse than that o f a Gastarbeiter or the average refugee. His appetite for recognition makes him restless and oblivious to the superiority of his income as a college teacher, le cturer, small-magazine editor or just a contributor for these are the most frequen t occupations of exiled authors nowadays over the wages of somebody doing menial w ork. That is, our man is a little bit corrupt, almost by definition. But then th e sight of a writer rejoicing in insignificance, in being left alone, in anonymi ty is about as rare as that of a cockatoo in Greenland, even under the best poss ible circumstances. Among exiled writers, this attitude is almost totally absent. At least, it is absent in this room. Understandably so, of course, but saddening nonetheless. It is saddening because if there is anything good about exile, it is that it tea ches one humility. One can even take it a step further and suggest that the exil e's is the ultimate lesson in that virtue. And that it is especially priceless f or a writer because it gives him the longest possible perspective. "And thou art far in humanity," as Keats said. To be lost in mankind, in the crowd crowd?--amon

g billions; to become a needle in that proverbial haystack but a needle someone is searching for that's what exile is all about. Put down your vanity, it says, you are but a grain of sand in the desert. Measure yourself not against your pen pal s but against human infinity: it is about as bad as the inhuman one. Out of that you should speak, not out of your envy or ambition. Needless to say, this call goes unheeded. Somehow a commentator on life prefers his position to his subject and, when in exile, considers it grim enough not to aggravate it any further. As for such appeals, he considers them inappropriate. H e may be right, although calls for humility are always timely. For the other tru th of the matter is that exile is a metaphysical condition. At least, it has a v ery strong, very clear metaphysical dimension; to ignore or to dodge it is to ch eat yourself out of the meaning of what has happened to you, to doom yourself in to remaining forever at the receiving end of things, to ossify into an uncomprehe nding victim. It is because of the absence of good examples that one cannot describe an altern ative conduct (although Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Musil come to mind). Maybe jus t as well, because we are here evidently to talk about the reality of exile, not about its potential. And the reality of it consists of an exiled writer constan tly fighting and conspiring to restore his significance, his leading role, his au thority. His main consideration, of course, is the folks back home; but he also wants to rule the roost in the malicious village of his fellow ?migr?s. Playing ostrich to the metaphysics of his situation, he concentrates on the immediate an d tangible. This means besmirching colleagues in a similar predicament, bilious p olemics with rival publications, innumerable interviews for the BBC, Deutsche We lle, ORTF [French Radio-Television], and the Voice of America, open letters, sta tements for the press, going to conferences you name it. The energy previously spe nt in food lines or petty officials' musty anterooms is now released and gone ra mpant. Unchecked by anyone, let alone his kin (for he is himself now a Caesar's w ife, as it were, and beyond suspicion how could his literate, perhaps, but aging s pouse correct or contradict her certified martyr?), his ego grows rapidly in dia meter and eventually, filled with CO2, lifts him from reality especially if he res ides in Paris, where the Montgolfier brothers set the precedent. Traveling by balloon is precipitous and, above all, unpredictable: too easily one becomes a plaything of the winds, in this case, political winds. Small wonder, then, that our navigator keenly listens to all the forecasts, and on occasion ve ntures to predict the weather himself. That is, not the weather of wherever he s tarts or finds himself en route, but the weather at his destination, for our bal loonist is invariably homeward bound. And perhaps the third truth of the matter is that a writer in exile is, by and l arge, a retrospective and retroactive being. In other words, retrospection plays an excessive (compared with other people's lives) role in his existence, overshad owing his reality and dimming the future into something thicker than its usual p ea soup. Like the false prophets of Dante's Inferno, his head is forever turned backward and his tears, or saliva, are running down between his shoulder blades. Whether or not he is of elegiac disposition by nature is beside the point: doom ed to a limited audience abroad, he cannot help pining for the multitudes, real or imagined, left behind. Just as the former fill him with venom, the latter fue l his fantasy. Even having gained the freedom to travel, even having actually do ne some traveling, he will stick in his writing to the familiar material of his past, producing, as it were, sequels to his previous works. Approached on this s ubject, an exiled writer will most likely evoke Ovid's Rome, Dante's Florence, a nd after a small pause Joyce's Dublin. Indeed, we've got a pedigree, and a much longer one than that. If we want, we ca n trace it all the way back to Adam. And yet we should be careful about the plac e it tends to occupy in the public's and our own minds. We all know what happens to many a noble family over generations, or in the course of a revolution. Fami ly trees never make or obscure the forest; and the forest is now advancing. I am mixing metaphors here, but perhaps I can justify this by remarking that to expe ct for ourselves the kind of future that we constitute for the above-mentioned f ew is imprudent rather than immodest. Of course a writer always takes himself pos

thumously: and an exiled writer especially so, inspired as he is not so much by the artificial oblivion to which he is subjected by his former state but by the way the critical profession in the free marketplace enthuses about his contempora ries. Yet one should go carefully about this type of self-estrangement, not for any other reason than a realization that, with the population explosion, literat ure, too, has taken on the dimensions of a demographic phenomenon. Per reader, t here are simply too many writers around today. A couple of decades ago a grown m an thinking about books or authors yet to be read would come up with thirty or f orty names; nowadays these names would run in the thousands. Today one walks int o a bookstore the way one enters a record shop. To listen to all these groups an d soloists would overshoot a lifetime. And very few among those thousands are ex iles, or even particularly good. But the public will read them, and not you, for all your halo, not because it is perverse or misguided, but because statistical ly it is on the side of normalcy and trash. in other words, it wants to read abo ut itself On any street of any city in the world at any time of night or day the re are more people who haven't heard of you than those who have. The current interest in the literature of exiles has to do, of course, with the rise of tyrannies. Herein perhaps lies our chance with the future reader, though that's the kind of insurance one would like to do without. Partly because of th is noble caveat, but mainly because he can't think of the future in any other th an the glowing terms of his triumphant return, an exiled writer sticks to his gu ns. But then why shouldn't he? Why should he try to use anything else, why shoul d he bother probing the future in any other fashion, since it is unpredictable a nyhow? The good old stuff served him well at least once: it earned him exile. An d exile, after all, is a kind of success. Why not try another tack? Why not push the good old stuff around a bit more? Apart from anything else, it now constitut es ethnographic material, and that goes big with your Western, Northern, or (if you run afoul of a right-wing tyranny) even Eastern publisher. And there is alwa ys the chance of a masterpiece in covering the same turf twice, which possibilit y doesn't escape the eye of your publisher either, or at least it may provide fu ture scholars with the notion of a "myth-making" element in your work. But however practical-sounding, these factors are secondary or tertiary among tho se that keep an exiled writer's eyes firmly trained on his past. The main explan ation lies in the aforementioned retrospective machinery that gets unwittingly t riggered within an individual by the least evidence of his surroundings' strange ness. Sometimes the shape of a maple leaf is enough, and each tree has thousands of these. On an animal level, this retrospective machinery is constantly in moti on in an exiled writer, nearly always unbeknownst to him. Whether pleasant or dis mal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already experienc ed; and the species' capacity to revert, to run backward especially in its thoughts or dreams, since there we are safe as well is extremely strong in all of us, quit e irrespective of the reality we are facing. Yet this machinery has been built in to us, not for cherishing or grasping the past (in the end, we don't do either), but more for delaying the arrival of the present for, in other words, slowing dow n a bit the passage of time. See the fatal exclamation of Goethe's Faust. And the whole point about our exiled writer is that he, too, like Goethe's Faust , clings to his "fair," or not so fair, "moment," not for beholding it, but for postponement of the next one. It's not that he wants to be young again; he simpl y doesn't want tomorrow to arrive, because he knows that it may edit what he beh olds. And the more tomorrow presses him, the more obstinate he becomes. There is terrific value in this obstinacy: with luck, it may amount to intensity of conc entration and then, indeed, we may get a great work of literature (the reading p ublic and the publishers sense that, and this is why as I've already said they keep an eye on the literature of exiles). More often, however, this obstinacy translates itself into the repetitiveness of nostalgia, which is, to put it bluntly, simply a failure to deal with the reali ties of the present or the uncertainties of the future. One can, of course, help matters somewhat by changing one's narrative manner, by making it more avant-garde, by spicing the stuff with a good measure of erotici sm, violence, foul language, etc., after the fashion of our free-market colleague

s. But stylistic shifts and innovations greatly depend on the condition of the l iterary idiom "back there," at home, the links with which have not been severed. As for the spice, a writer, exiled or not, never wants to appear to be influenc ed by his contemporaries. Perhaps an additional truth about the matter is that e xile slows down one's stylistic evolution, that it makes a writer more conservat ive. Style is not so much the man as the man's nerves, and, on the whole, exile provides one's nerves with fewer irritants than the motherland does. This conditi on, it must be added, worries an exiled writer somewhat, not only because he reg ards existence back home as more genuine than his own (by definition, and with a ll attendant or imagined consequences for normal literary process), but because in his mind there exists a suspicion of a pendulum-like dependency, or ratio, be tween those irritants and his mother tongue. One ends up in exile for a variety of reasons and under a number of circumstance s. Some of them sound better, some worse, but the difference has already ceased to matter by the time one reads an obituary. On the bookshelf your place will be occupied, not by you, but by your book. And as long as they insist on making a distinction between art and life, it is better if they find your book good and y our life foul than the other way around. Chances are, of course, that they won't care for either. Life in exile, abroad, in a foreign element, is essentially a premonition of you r own book-form fate, of being lost on the shelf among those with whom all you h ave in common is the first letter of your surname. Here you are, in some giganti c library's reading room, still open ... Your reader won't give a damn about how you got here. To keep yourself from getting closed and shelved you've got to te ll your reader, who thinks he knows it all, about something qualitatively novel abo ut his world and himself. If this sounds a bit too suggestive, so be it, because suggestion is the name of the whole game anyhow, and because the distance exile puts between an author and his protagonists indeed sometimes begs for the use of astronomical or ecclesiastical figures. This is what makes one think that "exile" is, perhaps, not the most apt term to describe the condition of a writer forced (by the state, by fear, by poverty, by boredom) to abandon his country. "Exile" covers, at best, the very moment of dep arture, of expulsion; what follows is both too comfortable and too autonomous to be called by this name, which so strongly suggests a comprehensible grief. The very fact of our gathering here indicates that, if we indeed have a common denom inator, it lacks a name. Are we suffering the same degree of despair, ladies and gentlemen? Are we equally sundered from our public? Do we all reside in Paris? No, but what binds us is our book-like fate, the same literal and symbolic lying open on the table or the floor of the gigantic library, at various ends, to be trampled on or picked up by a mildly curious reader or worse by a dutiful librarian. The qualitatively novel stuff we may tell that reader about is the autonomous, s pacecraft-like mentality that visits, I am sure, every one of us, but whose visi tations most of our pages choose not to acknowledge. We do this for practical reasons, as it were, or genre considerations. Because t his way lies either madness or the degree of coldness associated more with the p ale-faced locals than with a hot-blooded exile. The other way, however, lies and c lose, too banality. All of this may sound to you like a typically Russian job of i ssuing guidelines for literature, while, in fact, it's simply one man's reaction s to finding many an exiled author Russian ones in the first place on the banal side of virtue. That's a great waste, because one more truth about the condition we call exile is that it accelerates tremendously one's otherwise professional flig ht or drift into isolation, into an absolute perspective: into the condition at whic h all one is left with is oneself and one's language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go . If this sounds to you like a commercial, so be it, because it is about time to sell this idea. Because I indeed wish it got more takers. Perhaps a metaphor wi ll help: to be an exiled writer is like being a dog or a man hurtled into outer space in a capsule (more like a dog, of course, than a man, because they will ne ver retrieve you). And your capsule is your language. To finish the metaphor off, it must be added that before long the capsule's passenger discovers that it gra

vitates not earthward but outward. For one in our profession the condition we call exile is, first of all, a lingui stic event: he is thrust from, he retreats into his mother tongue. From being,hi s, so to speak, sword, it turns into his shield, into his capsule. What started as a private, intimate affair with the language in exile becomes fate even before it becomes an obsession or a duty. A living language, by definition, has a centr ifugal propensity and propulsion; it tries to cover as much ground as possible and a s much emptiness as possible. Hence the population explosion, and hence your aut onomous passage outward, into the domain of a telescope or a prayer. In a manner of speaking, we all work for a dictionary. Because literature is a d ictionary, a compendium of meanings for this or that human lot, for this or that experience, It is a dictionary of the language in which life speaks to man. Its function is to save the next man, a new arrival, from falling into an old trap, or to help him realize, should he fall into that trap anyway; that he has been hit by a tautology. This way he will be less impressed and, in a way, more free. F or to know the meaning of life's terms, of what is happening to you, is liberati ng. It would seem to me that the condition we call exile is up for a fuller expl ication; that, famous for its pain, it should also be known for its pain-dulling infinity, for its forgetfulness, detachment, indifference, for its terrifying hu man and inhuman vistas for which we've got no yardstick except ourselves. We must make it easier for the next man, if we can't make it safer. And the only way to make it easier for him, to make him less frightened of it, is to give hi m the whole measure of it that is, as much as we ourselves can manage to cover. We may argue about our responsibilities and loyalties (toward our respective contem poraries, motherlands, otherlands, cultures, traditions, etc.) ad infinitum, but this responsibility or, rather, opportunity to set the next man however theoretic al he and his needs may be a bit more free shouldn't become a subject for hesitati on. If all this sounds a bit too lofty and humanistic, then I apologize. These d istinctions are actually not so much humanistic as deterministic, although one sh ouldn't bother with such subtleties. All I am trying to say is that, given an op portunity, in the great causal chain of things, we may as well stop being just i ts rattling effects and try to play causes. The condition we call exile is exact ly that kind of opportunity. Yet if we don't use it, if we decide to remain effects and play exile in an oldfashioned way, that shouldn't be explained away as nostalgia. Of course, it has to do with the necessity of telling about oppression, and of course, our conditio n should serve as a warning to any thinking man toying with the idea of an ideal society. That's our value for the free world: that's our function. But perhaps our greater value and greater function are to be unwitting embodimen ts of the disheartening idea that a freed man is not a free man, that liberation is just the means of attaining freedom and is not synonymous with it. This high lights the extent of the damage that can be done to the species, and we can feel proud of playing this role. However, if we want to play a bigger role, the role of a free man, then we should be capable of accepting or at least imitating the man ner in which a free man fails. A free man, when he fails, blames nobody. A Place as Good as Any I The more one travels, the more complex one's sense of nostalgia becomes. In a dre am, depending on one's mania or supper or both, one is either pursued or pursues somebody through a crumpled maze of streets, lanes, and alleyways belonging to several places at once; one is in a city that does not exist on the map. A panic ky flight originating as a rule in one's hometown is likely to land one helpless under the poorly lit archway in the town of one's last year's, or the year befo re's, sojourn. It is so much so that eventually your traveler finds himself unwit tingly sizing up every locale he encounters for its potential value as a backdrop for his nightmare. The best way to keep your subconscious from getting overburdened is to take pict ures: your camera is, as it were, your lightning rod. Developed and printed, unf amiliar fa?ades and perspectives lose their potent three-dimensionality and their air of being an alternative to one's life. Yet one can't click nonstop, one can'

t constantly put things in focus what with clutching the luggage, the shopping ba gs, the spouse's elbow. And with a particular vengeance the unfa? miliar three-dimensional invades the senses of unsuspecting innocents at railway stations, airports, bus stations, in a taxi, on a leisurely evening stroll to o r from a restaurant. Of these, railway stations are the most insidious. Edifices of arrival for you an d those of departure for the locals, they insinuate travelers, tense with excite ment and apprehension, straight into the thick of things, into the heart of an al ien existence, pretending to be precisely the opposite by flashing their giganti c CINZANO, MARTINI, COCA-COLA signs the fiery writing that evokes familiar walls. Ah, those squares in front of railway stations! With their fountains and statues of the Leader, with their feverish bustle of traffic and cinema billboards, wit h their whores, hypodermic youths, beggars, winos, migrant workers; with taxicab s and stocky cabdrivers soliciting in loud snatches of unfathomable tongues! The deep-seated anxiety of every traveler makes him register the location of the ta xi stand in this square with greater precision than the order of appearance of t he great Master's works in the local museum because the latter won't constitute a way of retreat. The more one travels, the richer one's memory gets with exact locations of taxi stands, ticket offices, shortcuts to platforms, phone booths, and urinals. If no t often revisited, these stations and their immediate vicinities merge and superi mpose on each other in one's mind, like everything that's stored for too long, r esulting in a gigantic brick-cum-castiron, chlorine-smelling octopal ogre, submer ged in one's memory, to which every new destination adds a tentacle. There are apparent exceptions: the great mother, Victoria Station in London; Nerv a's masterpiece in Rome or the garish monumental monstrosity in Milan; Amsterdam 's Central with one of its fronton's dials showing the direction and speed of the wind; Paris's Gare du Nord or Gare de Lyon with the latter's mind-boggling, res taurant, where, consuming superb canard under frescoes a la Denis, you watch thr ough the huge glass wall trains departing down below with a faint sense of metab olic connection; the Hauptbahnhof near Frankfurt's red-light district; Moscow's Three-RailroadStations Square the ideal place to ladle despair and indirection even for those whose native alphabet is Cyrillic. These exceptions, however, do not s o much confirm the rule as form the core or kernel for subsequent accretions. Th eir Piranesean vaults and staircases echo, perhaps even enlarge, the seat of the subconscious; at any rate, they remain there in the brain for good, waiting for add ition. II And the more legendary your destination, the more readily this gigantic octopus comes to the surface, feeding equally well on airports, bus terminals, harbors. Its real dainty, though, is the place itself. What constitutes the legend artifice or edifice, a tower or a cathedral, a breathtaking ancient ruin or a unique lib rary goes first. Our monster salivates over these nuggets, and so do travel agenci es' posters, jumbling Westminster Abbey, the Eifel Tower, St Basil, the Taj Maha l, the Acropolis, and some pagodas in an eye-catching, mind-skipping collage. We know these vertical things before we've seen them. What's more, after having se en them, we retain not their three-dimensional image but their printed version. Strictly speaking, we remember not a place but our postcard of it. Say "London" and your mind most likely will flash the view of the National Gallery or Tower B ridge with the Union Jack logo discreetly printed in a corner or on the opposite side. Say "Paris," and . . . There is perhaps nothing wrong with this sort of r eduction or swapping, for had a human mind indeed been able to cohere and retain the reality of this world, the life of its owner would become a nonstop nightma re of logic and justice. At least its laws imply as much. Unable or unwilling to be held accountable, man decides to move first and loses either count or track of what he experiences, especially for the umpteenth time. The result is not so m uch a hodgepodge or a jumble as a composite vision: of a green tree if you are a painter, of a mistress if you are a Don Giovanni, of a victim if you are a tyra nt, of a city if you are a traveler. Whatever one travels for to modify one's territorial imperative, to get an eyeful

of creation, to escape reality (awful tautology though this is), the net result of course is feeding that octopus constantly hungry for new details for its nigh tly chow. The composite city of your subconscious sojourn nay! return will therefore permanently sport a golden cupola; several bell towers; an opera house a la Fen ice in Venice; a park with gloom-laden chestnuts and poplars, incomprehensible in their post-Romantic swaying grandeur, as in Graz; a wide, melancholy river span ned by a minimum of six well-wrought bridges; a skyscraper or two. After all, a city as such has only so many options. And, as though semiconscious of that, your memory will throw in a granite embankment with its vast colonnades from Russia's former capital; Parisian pearl-gray facades with the black lace of their balcon ies' grillwork; a few boulevards petering out into the lilac sunset of one's ado lescence; a gothic needle or that of an obelisk shooting its heroin into a cloud y muscle; and, in winter, a well-tanned Roman terra-cotta; a marble fountain; po orly lit, cave-like caf? life at street corners. Your memory will accord this place a history whose particulars you probably won' t recall but whose main fruit will most likely be a democracy. The same source w ill endow it with a temperate climate adhering to the four-seasons routine and s egregating palm trees to railway stations' grill-rooms_ It will also give your c ity Reykjavik-on-Sunday-type traffic; people will be few if any; beggars and chi ldren, however, will speak the foreign tongue fluently. The currency will carry i mages of Renaissance scholars, the coins feminine profiles of the republic, but the numbers will still be recognizable, and your main problem not of paying, but of tipping can, in the end, be solved. In other words, regardless of what it says on your ticket, of whether you'll be staying at the Savoy or the Daniell, the momen t you open your shutters, you'll see at once Notre-Dame, St. James's, San Giorgi o, and Hagia Sophia. For the aforesaid submerged monster digests legends as eagerly as reality. Add t o that the latter's aspiration for the glory of the former (or the former's clai m to enjoying, at least once upon a time, the status of the latter). Small wonde r, then, that your city should, as though it's been painted by Claude or Corot, have some water: a harbor, a lake, a lagoon. Smaller wonder still that the medie val ramparts or molars of its Roman wall should look like an intended background for some steel-cum-glass-cum-concrete structures: a university, say, or more like ly an insurance company headquarters. These are usually erected on the site of s ome monastery or ghetto bombed out of existence in the course of the last war. S mall wonder, too, that a traveler reveres ancient ruins many times over the mode rn ones left in the center of your city by its fathers for didactic purposes: a traveler, by definition, is a product of hierarchic thinking. In the final analysis, however, there is no hierarchy between the legendary and the real, in the context of your city at least, since the present engenders the past far more energetically than the other way around. Every car passing through an intersection makes its equestrian monument more obsolete, more ancient, tele scoping its great local eighteenth-century military or civic genius into some sk in?clad William Tell or other. With all four hooves firmly on the plinth (which, in the parlance of sculpture, means that the rider has died not on the battlefi eld but in his own, presumably four-poster bed), this monument's horse would sta nd in your city more as an homage to an extinct means of transportation than to anyone's particular valor. The birds' ca-ca on the bronze tricorn is all the mor e deserved, for history long since exited your city, yielding the stage to the m ore elementary forces of geography and commerce. Therefore, your city will have n ot only a cross between a bazaar in Istanbul and Macy's; no, a traveler in this city, should he turn right, is bound to hit the silks, furs, and leather of via Condotti and, if he turns left, to find himself buying either fresh or canned ph easant at Fauchon (and the canned one is preferable). For buy you must. As the philosopher would have put it, I purchase, therefore I am. And who knows that better than a man in passage? In fact, every well-mapped trip is in the end a shopping expedition: indeed, one's whole passage through th e world is. In fact, next to taking pictures, shopping comes in second at sparing one's subconscious an alien reality. In fact, that's what we call a bargain, an d with a credit card you can go on infinitely. In fact, why don't you simply cal

l your whole city it surely ought to have a name American Express? This will make it as legal as being included in the atlas: no one will dare to challenge your des cription. On the contrary, many would claim they've been there, too, a year or s o ago. To prove this, they'll produce a bunch of snapshots or, if you are stayin g for a meal, even a slide show. Some of them have known Karl Malden, that city' s dapper old mayor, personally for years and years. III It is an early evening in the town of your memory; you are sitting in a sidewalk caf? under drooping chestnuts. A traffic light idly flashes its red-amber-green eye above the empty intersection; higher up, swallows crisscross a platinum, cl oudless sky. The way your coffee or your white wine tastes tells you that you ar e neither in Italy nor in Germany; the bill tells you that you are not in Switze rland, either. All the same, you are in Common Market territory. On the left, there is the Concert Hall, and on the right there is the Parliament . Or it is the other way around: with architecture like this, it's hard to tell the difference. Chopin came through this town, so did Liszt, and so did Paganini . As for Wagner, the book says he went through this place three times. So did, i t seems, the Pied Piper. Or maybe it's just Sunday, vacation time, midsummer. su mmer," the poet said, "capitals grow empty." An ideal season for a coup d'etat, then, for introducing tanks into these narrow cobblestone streets almost no traffic whatsoever. Of course, if this place is indeed a capital .. . You have a couple of phone numbers here, but you've tried them already twice. As for the goal of your pilgrimage, the National Museum, justly famous for its Ita lian Masters, you went there straight from the train, and it closes at five. And anyhow, what's wrong with great art with Italian Masters in particular is that it ma kes you resent reality. If, of course, this is a reality .. . So you open the local Time Out and consider theater. It's Ibsen and Chekhov all over the place, the usual Continental fare. Luckily, you don't know the language. The National Ballet appears to be touring Japan, and you won't sit through Madam a Butterfly for the sixth time even if the set was designed by Hockney. That lea ves movies and pop groups, yet the small print of these pages, not to mention th e bands' names, makes you briefly nauseous. On the horizon looms further expansio n of your waistline in some Lut?ce or Golden Horseshoe. It is actually your widen ing diameter that narrows your options. The more one travels, though, the better one knows that curling up in a hotel ro om with Flaubert won't do either. The sounder solution is a stroll in an amuseme nt park, half an hour in a shooting gallery, or a video game something that boosts the ego and doesn't require knowledge of the local tongue. Or else take a taxi to the top of the hill that dominates the view and offers a terrific panorama of your composite city and its environs: the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, Westmins ter Abbey, St. Basil the whole thing. This is yet another nonverbal experience; a "wow" will suffice. That's, of course, if there is a hill, or if there is a taxi. Return to your hotel on foot: it's downhill all the way. Admire shrubs and hedge s shielding the stylish mansions; admire the rustling acacias and somber monolit hs of the business center. Linger by well-lit shop windows, especially those sel ling watches. Such a variety, almost like in Switzerland! It's not that you need a new watch; it's just a nice way of killing time looking at the watches. Admire t oys and admire lingerie: these appeal to the family man in you. Admire the clean -swept pavement and perfect infinity of avenues: you always had a soft spot for geometry, which, as you know, means "no people." So if you find somebody in the hotel bar, it's most likely a man like yourself, a fellow traveler. "Hey," he'll say, turning his face toward you. "Why is this pl ace so empty? Neutron bomb or something?" "Sunday," you'll reply. "It's just Sunday, midsummer, vacation time. Everyone's gone to the beaches." Yet you know you'll be lying. Because it is neither Sunday nor the Pied Piper, nor the neutron bomb nor beaches that make your composite city empty . It is empty because for an imagination it is easier to conjure architecture th an human beings.

Acceptance Speech Members of the Swedish Academy, Your Majesties, ladies and gentlemen, I was born and grew up on the other shore of the Baltic, practically on its opposite gray, rustling page. Sometimes on clear days, especially in autumn, standing on a bea ch somewhere in Kellomaci, a friend would point his finger northwest across the sheet of water and say: See that blue strip of land? It's Sweden. He would be joking, of course: because the angle was wrong, because according to the law of optics, a human eye can travel only for something like twenty miles in open space. The space, however, wasn't open. Nonetheless, it pleases me to think, ladies and gentlemen, that we used to inhale the same air, eat the same fish, get soaked by the same at times radioactive rain, swim in the same sea, get bored by the same kind of conifers. Depending on the w ind, the clouds I saw in my window were already seen by you, or vice versa. It p leases me to think that we have had something in common before we ended up in th is room. And as far as this room is concerned, I think it was empty just a couple of hour s ago, and it will be empty again a couple of hours hence. Our presence in it, m ine especially, is quite incidental from its walls' point of view. On the whole, from space's point of view, anyone's presence is incidental in it, unless one p ossesses a permanent and usually inanimate characteristic of landscape: a moraine, sa y, a hilltop, a river bend. And it is the appearance of something or somebody unp redictable within a space well used to its contents that creates the sense of oc casion. So being grateful to you for your decision to award me the Nobel Prize for liter ature, I am essentially grateful for your imparting to my work an aspect of perm anence, like that of a glacier's debris, let's say, in the vast landscape of lit erature. I am fully aware of the danger hidden in this simile: of coldness, uselessness, eventual or fast erosion. Yet if that debris contains a single vein of animated ore as I, in my vanity, believe it does then this simile is perhaps prudent. And as long as I am on the subject of prudence, I should like to add that throug h recorded history the audience for poetry seldom amounted to more than i percen t of the entire population. That's why poets of antiquity or of the Renaissance g ravitated to courts, the seats of power; that's why nowadays they flock to unive rsities, the seats of knowledge. Your academy seems to be a cross between the tw o; and if in the future in that time free of ourselves that i percent ratio is susta ined, it will be, not to a small degree, due to your efforts. In case this strik es you as a dim vision of the future, I hope that the thought of the population explosion may lift your spirits somewhat. Even a quarter of that 1. percent woul d make a lot of readers, even today. So my gratitude to you, ladies and gentlemen, is not entirely egotistical. I am grateful to you for those whom your decisions make and will make read poetry, to day and tomorrow. I am not so sure that man will prevail, as the great man and my fellow American once said, standing, I believe, in this very room; but I am quite positive that a man who reads poetry is harder to prevail upon than one who doesn't. Of course, it's one hell of a way to get from St. Petersburg to Stockholm; but th en, for a man of my occupation, the notion of a straight line being the shortest distance between two points lost its attraction a long time ago. So it pleases m e to find out that geography in its own turn is also capable of poetic justice. Thank you. Profile of Clio I never thought it would come to this, to my speaking on history. But as concess ions to one's age go, a lecture on the subject appears inevitable. An invitation to deliver it suggests not so much the value of the speaker's views as his perce ptible moribundity. "He is history" goes the disparaging remark, referring to a has-been, and it is the proximity of an individual to this status that turns him, sometimes in his own eyes, into a sage. After all, those to whom we owe the ver y notion of history the great historians as well as their subjects are the dead. In

other words, the closer one gets to one's future, i.e., to the graveyard, the be tter one sees the past. I accept this. The recognition of mortality gives birth to all sorts of insights and qualifiers. History, after all, is one of those nouns that can't do without epithets. Left to its own devices, history stretches from our own childhood all the way back to the fossils. It may stand simultaneously for the past in genera l, the recorded past, an academic discipline, the quality of the present, or the implication of a continuum. Every culture has its own version of antiquity; so does every century; so should, I believe, every individual. Consensus on this no un's definition is, therefore, unthinkable and, come to think of it, unnecessary . It is always used loosely as an antonym to the present and is defined by the c ontext of discourse. Given my age as well as my m?tier, I should be interested i n those antonyms, in each one of them. At my age and in my line of work, the les s palpable a notion, the more absorbing it is. If we have anything in common with antiquity, it is the prospect of nonbeing. Th is alone can engender the study of history, as perhaps it did, because what hist ory is all about is absence, and absence is always recognizable much more so than presence. Which is to say that our interest in history, normally billed as the q uest for a common denominator, for the origins of our ethics, is, in the first p lace, an eschatological, and therefore anthropomorphic, and therefore narcissistic , affair. This is proved by all sorts of revisionist quarrels and bickerings tha t abound in this field, thus recalling a model arguing with an artist over her de piction or a bunch of artists in front of an empty canvas. Further proof of this is our predilection for reading and the historians' for prod ucing the lives of Caesars, pharaohs, satraps, kings, and queens. These have nothin g to do with the common denominator, and often not much with ethics either. We g o in for this sort of reading because of the central position that we believe we occupy in our own reality, because of the illusion of the individual's paramoun t consequence. To that one must add that, like biographies, those lives are, sty listically speaking, the last bastions of realism, since in this genre stream-of -consciousness and other avant-garde hopscotch techniques won't do. The net result is the expression of uncertainty that bedevils every portrait of h istory. That's what the model fights over with the artist, or the artists among themselves. For the model let us call her Clio may think herself, or her agents, mor e resolute and clear-cut than the way historians paint her. Yet one can understa nd historians projecting their own ambiguities and subtleties upon their subject : in the light or rather, the dark of what awaits them, they don't wish to seem like simpletons. Generally known for their longevity, historians, by showing scruple and doubt, turn their discipline into a kind of insurance policy. Whether he realizes it or not, the historian's predicament is to be transfixed be tween two voids: of the past that he ponders and of the future for whose sake he ostensibly does this. For him, the notion of nonbeing gets doubled. Perhaps the voids even overlap. Unable to handle both, he strives to animate the former, si nce by definition the past, as a source of personal terror, is more controllable than the future. His opposite number, then, should be the religious mystic or the theologian. Adm ittedly, the structuring of the afterlife involves a greater degree of rigidity than that of the pre-life. What makes up for this difference, however, is their respective quests for causality, the common denominator, and the ethical consequ ences for the present so much so that in a society in which the authority of the c hurch is in decline, and the authority of philosophy and the state are negligibl e or nonexistent, it falls precisely to history to take care of ethical matters. In the end, of course, the choice that one's eschatological proclivity makes betw een history and religion is determined by temperament. Yet regardless of the comm andments of one's bile, or whether one is retrospective, introspective, or prosp ective by nature, the inalienable aspect of either pursuit is the anxiety of its validity. In this respect, the fondness of all creeds for citing their pedigree and their general reliance on historical sources is particularly worth noting. F or when it comes to the burden of proof, history, unlike religion, has nobody to turn to but itself.

(Also, unlike creeds, history to its credit stops cold at geology, thus demonstr ating a degree of honesty and its potential for turning into a science.) This makes history, I believe, a more dramatic choice. An escape route trying to prove every step of the way that it is an escape route? Perhaps, but we judge t he effectiveness of our choices not so much by their results as by their alternat ives. The certitude of your existence's discontinuity, the certitude of the void , makes the uncertainties of history a palpable proposition. In fact, the more u ncertain it is, the greater its burden of proof, the better it quells your eschat ological dread. Frankly, it is easier for an effect to handle the shock of its i nconsequence, easier to face the unavoidable void, than the apparent lack of its cause (for instance, when one's progenitors are gone). Hence that vagueness in the looks of Clio, whether she is decked out in ancient or in fairly modern garb. Yet it becomes her, not least because of her femininit y, which makes her more attractive to the eye than any bearded Pantocrator. It sh ould also be noted that, younger though she is than her sister Urania (who, bein g the Muse of Geography, curbs many of history's motions significantly), Clio is still older than any being. As large as one's appetite for infinity may be, thi s is a good match for the life everlasting, should it go in for numerical expres sion. What's particularly unpalatable about death is that it negates numbers. So it is as Clio's admirer that I stand before you today, not as a connoisseur o f her works, let alone as her suitor. Like anyone of my age, I may also claim th e status of her witness; but by neither temperament nor metier am I prepared to g eneralize about her deportment. The metier especially conspires against my expand ing on any particularly any absorbing subject. It trains one, albeit not always succ essfully, to make one's utterances succinct, sometimes to the point of appearing hermetic and losing either one's audience or, more often, the subject itself. So should you find some of what is to follow too breezy or inconclusive, you'll kn ow whom to blame. It's Euterpe. Now, Clio of course also has a knack for brevity, which she displays in a murder or in an epitaph. Those two genres alone give the lie to Marx's famous adage ab out history occurring first as tragedy, then as farce. For it is always a differe nt man who gets murdered; it is always a tragedy. Not to mention that once we're employing theatrical terminology, we shouldn't stop at farce: there is also vaud eville, musical, theater of the absurd, soap opera, and so on. One should be ver y careful about metaphors when dealing with history, not only because they often breed either unwarranted cynicism (like the example I just quoted) or groundless enthusiasm, but also because they obscure almost without exception the singular natu re of every historical occurrence. For Clio is the Muse of Time, as the poet said, and in time nothing happens twic e. Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of that theatrical metaphor is that it ush ers into one's mind the sense of being a spectator, of observing from the stalls what transpires on the stage, be it a farce or a tragedy. Even if such a state of affairs were really possible, that in itself would be a tragedy: that of comp licity; that is, a tragedy of the ethical kind. The truth, however, is that hist ory does not provide us with distance. It does not distinguish between the stage and the audience, which it often lacks, since murder, for one thing, is almost s ynonymous with the absence of witnesses. Let me quote the poet's W. H. Auden's inv ocation of Clio a bit more fully: Clio, Muse of Time, but for whose merciful silence Only the first step would count and that Would always be murder .. Since everything that happens in time happens only once, we, in order to grasp w hat has occurred, have to identify with the victim, not with the survivor or the onlooker. As it is, however, history is an art of the onlookers, since the victi ms' main trait is their silence, for murder renders them speechless. If our poet is referring to the story of Cain and Abel, then history is always Cain's versi on. The reason for putting this so drastically is to assert the distinction betwe en fact and its interpretation, which we fail to make when we say "history." This failure leads to our belief that we can learn from history, and that it has a purpose, notably ourselves. For all our fondness for causality and hindsight,

this assumption is monstrous, since it justifies many an absence as paving the way to our own presences. Had they not been bumped off, this benefit of hindsigh t tells us, it would be somebody else sitting here at our table, not exactly our selves. Our interest in history, in that case, would be plain prurience, tinged perhaps with gratitude. And perhaps that's exactly what it is, which would put us on a somewhat bland et hical diet; but then we were never gluttonous that way to begin with (for we acc ept the erasure of our predecessors to the point at which we should perhaps take history out of the humanities altogether and place it squarely with the natural sciences). The other option is to distinguish between fact and description, tre ating each historical event as Clio's unique appearance in human quarters, trigge red not by our formal logic but by her own arbitrary will. The drawback in this case is that, placing as high a premium on rationality and linear thought as we do, we may panic, and either collapse as ethical beings or, more likely, dash fo r a further Cartesian rigidity. None of this is desirable or satisfactory. To accept history as a rational proce ss governed by graspable laws is impossible, because it is often too carnivorous. To regard it as an irrational force of incomprehensible purpose and appetite is equally unacceptable, and for the same reason: it acts on our species. A target cannot accept a bullet. Characteristically, the voice of our instinct for self-preservation comes out as a cry: What are we to tell our young? Because we are the products of linear thou ght, we believe that history, whether it is a rational process or an irrational force, is to dog the future. Linear thinking, to be sure, is a tool of the insti nct for self-preservation; and in the conflict between this instinct and our esc hatological predilection, it is the former that always wins. It is a Pyrrhic vic tory, but what matters is the battle itself, and our notion of the future amount s to an extension of our own present. For we know that every bullet flies in fro m the future, which, in order to arrive, has to wipe out the obstacle of the pre sent. That's what our notion of history is for, that's why interpretation is pre ferred to fact, that's why the irrational version is always dismissed. It is hard to argue with an instinct; in fact, it is futile. We simply crave the future, and history is here to make that claim, or the future itself, legitimat e. If indeed we care so much about what we are to tell the young, the following should be clone. First, we should define history as a summary either of known ev ents or of their interpretations. In all likelihood, we'll settle for the latter , since every event's name is itself an interpretation. Since interpretations ar e unavoidable, the second step should be the publication of a chronological canon of world history, in which every event would be supplied with a minimum number of interpretations say, conservative, Marxist, Freudian, structuralist. This may r esult in an unwieldy encyclopedia, but the young about whom we seem to worry so much will at least be provided with a multiple choice. Apart from enabling them to think more enterprisingly, such a canon will render Clio more stereoscopic, and thus more easily recognizable in a crowd or a drawin g room. For portraits in profile, three-quarters, or even full face (down to the last pore, in the manner of the Annales school) invariably obscure what one may hold behind one's back. This sort of thing lowers one's guard, and this is how h istory usually finds us: with our guard down. The main attraction of such a canon is that it would convey to the young the ate mporal and arrhythmic nature of Clio. The Muse of Time cannot, by definition, be held hostage to one's homemade chronology. It's quite possible that from time's own point of view the murder of Caesar and World War II occurred simultaneously , in reverse order, or not at all. By throwing many interpretations at any given event simultaneously, we may not hit the jackpot, but we will develop a better grasp of the slot machine itself. The cumulative effect of using such a canon ma y have peculiar consequences for our psyche; but it surely will improve our defe nses, not to mention our metaphysics. Every discourse on history's meaning, laws, principles, and whatnot is but an at tempt to domesticate time, a quest for predictability. This is paradoxical, beca use history nearly always takes us by surprise. Come to think of it, predictabil

ity is precisely what precedes a shock. Given the toll it normally takes, a shoc k can be regarded as a sort of bill one pays for comforts. The benefit of hindsi ght waxing metaphysical will explain this preference as an echo of time's own ti ck-tock monotony. Regrettably, time also has a tendency to sound shrill, and all we've got to echo that with is mass graves. In this sense, the more one learns history, the more liable one is to repeat its mistakes. It's not that many a Napoleon wants to emulate Alexander the Great; i t's just that rationality of discourse implies the rationality of its subject. Wh ile the former may be possible, the latter is not. The net result of this sort o f thing is self-deception, which is fine and absorbing for a historian but is of ten lethal for at least a part of his audience. The case of the German Jews is a good example, and perhaps I should dwell on it a bit. Above all, however, what tricks us into making mistakes by learning from history is our growing numbers. One man's meat may prove to be a thousand men's poison, or else it may prove not to be enough. The current discourse on the origins of black slavery is a good i llustration. For if you are black, unemployed, live in a ghetto, and shoot drugs, the precisi on with which your well-heeled religious leader or prominent writer apportions th e blame for the origins of black slavery, or the vividness with which they depic t the nightmare it was, does little to alter your plight. It may even cross your mind that were it not for that nightmare, neither they nor you would be here now . Perhaps this sounds preferable, but the genetic scramble in such a case would be unlikely to end in oneself. Anyhow, what you need now is a job, also some hel p to kick the habit. A historian won't help you with either. In fact, he dilutes your focus by supplanting your resolve with anger. In fact, it may cross your m ind well, it crosses mine that the entire discourse on who's to blame might be simpl y a white man's ploy to prevent you from acting as radically as your condition r equires. Which is to say, the more you learn from history, the less efficiently you are likely to act in the present. As a data bank for human negative potential, history has no rival (save, perhaps , the doctrine of original sin, which is, come to think of it, that data's succi nct summary). As a guide, history invariably suffers from numerical inferiority, since history, by definition, doesn't procreate. As a mental construct, it is a lso invariably subject to the unwitting fusion of its data with our perception o f it. This leaves history as a naked force an incoherent, nonetheless convincing, animistic notion; between a natural phenomenon and Divine Providence; an entity t hat leaves a trail. As we proceed, we better give up our high Cartesian pretense s and stick to this vague animistic notion for want of anything more clear-cut. Let me repeat: whenever history makes her move, she catches us unawares. And sin ce the general purpose of every society is the safety of all its members, it mus t first postulate the total arbitrariness of history, and the limited value of a ny recorded negative experience. Second, it must postulate that, although all it s institutions will strive to obtain the greatest measure of safety for all its members, this very quest for stability and security effectively turns society in to a sitting duck. And third, that it would, therefore, be prudent for society a s a whole, as for its members individually, to develop patterns of motional irre gularity (ranging from erratic foreign policy to mobile habitats and shifting re sidences) to make it difficult for a physical enemy or a metaphysical enemy to t ake aim. If you don't wish to be a target, you've got to move. "Scatter," said t he Almighty to His chosen people, and at least for a while they did. One of the greater historical fallacies that I absorbed with my high-school ink was the idea that man evolved from a nomad to a settler. Such a notion, echoing rather nicely both the intent of the authoritarian state and the realm's own hig hly pronounced agrarian makeup, immobilizes one completely. For nailing one down, it is second only to the physical comforts of a city dweller, whose brainchild t his notion actually is (and so is the bulk of historical, social, and political theories of the last two centuries: they are all the products of city boys, all are essentially urban constructs). Let us not go overboard: it is obvious that, for a human animal, settled existen ce is preferable and, given our growing numbers, inevitable. Yet it is quite poss

ible to imagine a settled man hitting the road when his settlement is sacked by invaders or destroyed by an earthquake, or when he hears the voice of his God pr omising him a different place. It is equally possible to imagine him doing so wh en he detects danger. (Isn't God's promise an articulation of a danger?) And so a settled man gets moving, becomes a nomad. It is easier for him to do this if his mind is not stamped all over with evoluti onary and historical taboos; and as far as we know, the ancient historians, to t heir great credit, produced none. Becoming a nomad again, a man could think of hi mself as imitating history, since history, in his eyes, was itself a nomad. With the advent of Christian monotheism, however, history had to get civilized, whic h it did. In fact, it became a branch of Christianity itself, which is, after al l, a creed of community. It even allowed itself to be subdivided into B.C. and A .D., turning the chronology of the B. c. period into a countdown, from the fossi ls on, as though those who lived in that period were subtracting their age from birth. I'd like to add here because I may not have another opportunity that one of the sadd est things that ever transpired in the course of our civilization was the confron tation between Greco-Roman polytheism and Christian rnonotheism, and its known o utcome. Neither intellectually nor spiritually was this confrontation really nec essary. Man's metaphysical capacity is substantial enough to allow for the creed s' coexistence, not to mention fusion. The case of Julian the Apostate is a good example, and so is the case of the Byzantine poets of the first five centuries A.D. Poets on the whole provide the best proof of the compatibility, because the centrifugal force of verse often takes them well beyond the confines of either doctrine, and sometimes beyond both. Were the polytheism of the Greeks and Roman s and the monotheism of the Christians really that incompatible? Was it necessar y to throw out of the window so much of B.c.'s intellectual achievement? (To fac ilitate the Renaissance later?) Why did what could have been an addition become an alternative? Could it be true that the God of Love could not stomach Euripide s or Theocritus, and if He couldn't, then what kind of stomach did He have? Or w as it really, to use the modern parlance, all about power, about taking over the pagan temples to show who was in charge? Perhaps. But the pagans, though defeated, had in their pantheon a Muse of Histor y, thereby demonstrating a better grasp of its divinity than their victors. I am afraid that there is no similar figure, no comparable reach, in the entire well -charted passage from Sin to Redemption. I am afraid that the fate of the polyth eistic notion of time at the hands of Christian monotheism was the first leg of humanity's flight from a sense of the arbitrariness of existence into the trap o f historical determinism. And I am afraid that it is precisely this universalism in hindsight that reveals the reductive nature of monotheism reductive by definiti on. That we've broken their statues, that we've driven them out of their temples, doesn't mean at all that the gods a re dead .. So wrote a Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, two thousand years after the reductio n of history from--let's think of the young in this room! stereo to mono. And let us hope that he is right. And yet even before history got secularized in order to become merely scientific the damage was done: the upper hand that was gained by historical determinism in the course of those two thousand years gripped the modern conscience tightly and, it seems, irreversibly. The distinction between time and chronology was lost: firs t by historians, then by their audience. One can't blame either of them, since t he new creed, having grabbed the places of pagan worship, shanghaied time's meta physics, too. And here I must go back to where I sidetracked myself with my own aside, to nomads and settlers. -Scatter, said God to His chosen people; and for a long time they did. That was actually the second time He spoke to them about moving. Both times they obeyed, albeit reluctantly. The first time, they had been on the road for forty years; th e second time, it took them a bit longer, and in a manner of speaking, they are

still in progress. The drawback of being in progress for so long is that you sta rt to believe in progress: if not in your own, then in history's. It is about th e latter that I'd like to comment here, on one of its recent examples; but first I must issue a few disclaimers. The historical literature about the fate of Jews in this century is vast, and on e shouldn't aspire to add anything qualitatively new to it. What prompts the fol lowing remarks is precisely the abundance of that history, not its want. More po intedly, the reason for these remarks is a few books on the subject that recentl y came my way. They all deal with the whats and the whys of the wrong that was d one to the Jews by the Third Reich; and they are all written by professional hist orians. Like many books before them, they are rich in information and hypothesis ; moreover, like many that will no doubt come after them, they are stronger on o bjectivity than on passion. This, one should hope, expresses the authors' profess ionalism as historians rather than the distance from these events accorded to th e authors by their own age. Objectivity, of course, is the motto of every histor ian, and that's why passion is normally ruled out since, as the saying goes, it bl inds. One wonders, however, whether a passionate response, in such a context, wouldn't amount to a greater human objectivity, for disembodied intelligence carries no w eight. Moreover, one wonders whether in such a context the absence of passion is nothing but a stylistic device to which writers resort in order to emulate the h istorian or, for that matter, the modern cultural stereotype, a cool, thin-lippe d, soft-spoken character inhabiting the silver screen for the better part of the century in a sleuthing or slaying capacity. If that's the case and all too often the imitation is too convincing to feel otherwise then history, which used to be th e source of ethical education in society, has indeed come full circle. In the end, however, most of these thin-lipped folk of the silver screen pull th e trigger. A modern historian doesn't do anything of the sort, and he would cite science as the explanation for his reserve. In other words, the quest for objec tivity of interpretation takes precedence over the sentiments caused by what is i nterpreted. One wonders, then, what is the significance of interpretation: Is hi story simply an instrument for measuring how far we can remove ourselves from eve nts, a sort of anti-thermometer? And does it exist independently, or only insofa r as historians come and go, i.e., solely for their sake? I'd rather let these questions hang for a while; otherwise I'll never get throug h with my disclaimers, let alone with what they are meant to precede. To begin w ith, I'd like to point out that the following remarks are in no way motivated by my identification with the victims. Of course, I am a Jew: by birth, by blood, but not alas, perhaps by upbringing. That would be enough for a sense of affinity, e xcept that I was born when they, those Jews, were dying, and I was not very cogn izant of their fate until quite late into my teens, being pretty much absorbed b y what was happening to my race, and to many others, in my own country, which ha d just defeated Germany, losing in the process some zo million of its own. In ot her words, I had plenty to identify with as it was. Now, I mention this not because I have caught the bug of historical objectivity. On the contrary, I speak from a position of strong subjectivity. As a matter of fact, I wish it were greater, since for me what happened to the Jews in the Thi rd Reich is not history: their annihilation overlapped with the burgeoning of my existence. I enjoyed the dubious comfort of being a witless babe, bubbling swee t bubbles while they were going up in smoke in the crematoria and the gas chambe rs of what is known these days as Eastern or Central Europe, but what I and some friends of mine still regard as Western Asia. I am also cognizant that, bad it not been for those zo million dead Russians, I could have identified with the Jew ish victims of the Third Reich in more ways than one. So if I sometimes peruse books on this subject, I do it largely for egotistical reasons: to get a more stereoscopic picture of what amounts to my life, of the w orld in which found myself a half century ago. Because of the close, indeed over lapping parallelism of the German and Soviet political systems, and because the penal iconography of the latter is rather scarce, I stare at the piles of corpse s in my life's background with, I believe, a double intensity. How, I ask myself

, did they get there? The answer is breathtakingly simple: because they were there. In order to become a victim, one ought to be present at the scene of the crime. In order to be pre sent at the scene of the crime, one ought either to disbelieve its probability o r to be unable or unwilling to flee .the premises. Of the three, it is the last, I'm afraid, that played the major role. The origins of this unwillingness to move are worth pondering. This has been don e many times over, yet less than the origins of the crime. This is so partly bec ause the origins of the crime appear, to historians, to be an easier proposition . It is all ascribed to German anti-Semitism, whose lineage is habitually traced , with varying degrees of enterprise, to Wagner, Luther, and further down, to Er asmus, the Middle Ages, and generally to the Jews-versusgentiles business. Some hi storians are prepared to take their audience all the way back to dark Teutonic u rges, straight into Valhalla. Others are content with the aftermath of World War I, the Peace of Versailles, and Jewish "usury" against the backdrop of Germany' s economic collapse. Still others lump all these things together, adding at time s an interesting wrinkle, such as linking the virulence of the Nazis' anti-Jewis h propaganda, rich in vermin imagery and references to Jewish hygienic habits, t o the history of epidemics and their relatively small toll among the Jews in com parison to the main ethnic stock. They are Lamarckians, these historians; they are not Darwinists. They appear to believe that affiliation to a creedmcan be passed on genetically (thus approxima ting one of Judaism's main tenets), that the same goes for attendant prejudices, i ntellectual patterns, and so on. They are biological determinists moonlighting a s historians. Hence a straight line out of Valhalla into the bunker. Had the line been that straight, however, the bunker could have been averted. Th e history of a nation, like the history of an individual, consists more of what' s forgotten than of what's remembered. As a process, history is not so much an a ccretion as a loss: otherwise we wouldn't need historians in the first place. No t to mention that the ability to retain doesn't translate itself into the abilit y to predict. Whenever this is done by a philosopher or a political thinker the tran slation almost invariably turns into a blueprint for a new society. The rise, the crescendo, and the fall of the Third Reich, as much as those of the Communist s ystem in Russia, was not averted precisely because it was not expected. The question is, can the translation be blamed for the quality of the original? The answer, I am tempted to say, is yes; and let me succumb to this temptation. Both the German and the Russian versions of socialism sprang from the same latenineteenth-century philosophical root, which used the shelves of the British Mus eum for fuel and Darwinian thought for a model. (Hence their subsequent confront ation, which wasn't a battle between good and evil but a clash of two demons a fam ily feud, if you will.) An earlier fertilizer, of course, was the splendid French showing in the eightee nth century, which kept the Germans flat on their back militarily and intellectu ally long enough to develop a national inferiority complex, which took the form of German nationalism and the idea of German Kultur. With its incoherence of ele vation, German Romantic idealism, initially a cri de coeur, pretty soon turned i nto a cri de guerre, especially during the Industrial Revolution, since the Brit ish were better at it. Consider, then, Russia, which had even less to show for itself than Germany, and not only in the eighteenth century. It was a case of an inferiority complex squa red, since it proceeded to emulate Germany in every conceivable no, available manner , producing along the way its own Slavophiles and the notion of a specifically R ussian soul, as though the Almighty distributed souls geographically. To put it cutely, the cri de coeur and the cri de guerre merged in the Russian ear into le dernier cri; and it was out of an inferiority complex, out of provincialism alway s keen on the latest that Lenin set out to read Marx, not out of a perceived neces sity. Capitalism in Russia, after all, was just raising its first smokestacks; t he country was predominantly agrarian. But then you can hardly reproach either one of them for not reading other philos ophers say, Vico. The mental pattern of the epoch was linear, sequential, evolutio

nary. One falls into that pattern unwittingly, tracing a crime to its origins ra ther than to its purpose. Yeah, we are that kind of hound: we would rather sniff out ethics than demography. The real paradox of history is that its linear patt ern, a product of the self-preservation instinct, dulls this very instinct. Be t hat as it may, however, both the German and the Russian versions of socialism we re informed by precisely this pattern, by the principle of historical determinis m echoing, after a fashion, the quest for the Just City. Literally so, one must add. For the chief trait of the historical determinist is his disdain for the peasantry, and the setting of his sights on the working clas s. (That is why in Russia they still refuse to decollectivize agriculture, puttin g literally, again the cart before the horse.) A by-product of the Industrial Revolut ion, the socialist idea was essentially an urban construct, generated by deracin ated minds that identified society with the city. Small wonder, then, that this brainchild of mental lumpen, maturing with an enviable logic into the authoritar ian state, amplified the basest properties of the urban lower middle class, antiSemitism first of all. This had little to do with the religious or cultural histories of Germany or Russ ia, which couldn't be more different. For all the vehemence of Luther's rhetoric, I honestly doubt that his largely illiterate audience bothered much about the s ubstance of his ecclesiastical distinctions; and as for Russia, Ivan the Terribl e in his correspondence with the runaway Prince Kurbsky proudly and sincerely pr oclaimed himself a Jew and Russia, Israel. (On the whole, had religious matters really been the root of modern anti-Semitism, its ugliest head would have been n ot German but Italian, Spanish, or French.) And so for German revolutionary thoug ht of the nineteenth century, no matter how wildly it oscillated on the subject of the Jewish expulsion or Jewish emancipation, the legal result, in 1871, was th e latter. Now, first and foremost, what happened to the Jews in the Third Reich had to do with the creation of a brand-new state, a new social and existential order. The thousand-year-long Reich had a distinctly millenarian, fin-de-siecle ring to it a bit premature, perhaps, since the si?cle was only the nineteenth. But postwar Ger many's political and economic rubble was a time as good as any for starting from scratch. (And history, as we remarked, doesn't set much store by human chronolog y.) Hence the emphasis on youth, the cult of the young body, the purity-of-the-r ace spiel. Social utopianism meets blond bestia. The offspring of such an encounter, naturally, was social bestiality. For nothin g could be less utopian than an Orthodox or even an emancipated and secularized Jew; and nothing could be less blond. One way to build something new is to raze the old, and the New Germany was that sort of project. The atheistic, future-bound, thousand-year-long Reich couldn't regard three-thousand-year-old Judaism as anyt hing but an obstacle and an enemy. Chronologically, ethically, and aesthetically , anti-Semitism just came in handy; the aim was larger than the means larger, I am tempted to add, than the targets. The aim was nothing less than history, nothin g less than remaking the world in Germany's image; and the means were political. Presumably their concreteness, as well as that of their targets, was what made t he aim less abstract. For an idea, the attraction of its victim lies in the latt er's helping it to acquire mortal features. The question is, Why didn't they run? They didn't run because, first, the dilemm a of exodus versus assimilation was not new, and fairly recently, only a few gen erations before, in 1871, it seemed to have been solved by the emancipation laws . Second, because the Weimar Republic's constitution was still binding and the a ir of its freedoms was still in their lungs, as well as in their pockets. Third, because the Nazis at the time could be regarded as an understandable discomfort, as a party of reconstruction, and their anti-Semitic outbursts as a by-product o f that reconstruction's hardship, of its straining muscle. After all, they were the National Socialist Workers Party, and the swastika-clutching eagle could be s een as a provisional phoenix. Any one of these three reasons taken separately wo uld be sufficient not to flee the premises; but the inertia of assimilation, of integration, lumped them all together. The general idea, I imagine, was to huddl e together and wait until it all blew over.

But history is not a force of nature, if only because its toll is usually much h igher. Correspondingly, one can take out no insurance policy against history. Ev en the apprehensiveness of a people with a long record of persecution turned out to be a lousy premium: its funds were insufficient, at least for a Deutschebank . The claim submitted by both the doctrine of historical determinism and by the creed-sponsored mental climate of Providence's general benevolence could be sett led only in human flesh. Historical determinism translated itself into a determi nation of extermination; and the notion of Providence's general benevolence, into a patient waiting for a Storm Trooper. Wouldn't it have been better to benefit less from civilization and become a nomad? The dead would say yes, though one can't be certain. The living will certainly c ry, No! The ethical ambiguity of the latter response could be glossed over, were it not based on the false perception that what happened in the Third Reich was unique. It wasn't. What took twelve years in Germany lasted for seventy in Russia , and the toll in Jews and non-Jews was almost exactly five times higher. With a lit tle industry, one may presumably establish the same ratio for revolutionary Chin a, Cambodia, Iran, Uganda, and so on: the ethnicity of human loss makes no diffe rence. But if one is loath to continue with this line of reasoning, it is becaus e the similarity is too obvious for one's liking, and because it is too easy to commit the common methodological error of promoting this similarity to the rank of admissible evidence for a subsequent law. The only law of history, I am afraid, is chance. The more ordered the life of a society or an individual, the more chance gets elbowed out. The longer this goes on, the greater the accumulation of disfranchised chance, and the likelier, one would think, that chance will claim its own. One should not attribute a human p roperty to an abstract idea, but "Remember that the fire and the ice/Are never mo re than one step away/From a temperate city; it is/But a moment to either," said the poet, and we must heed this warning, now that the temperate city has grown too big. As the spelling out of the laws of history goes, this one is the closest. And if history is to be admitted into the ranks of science, which it craves, it should be aware of the nature of its inquiry. The truth about things, should it exist, is likely to have a very dark side. Given the humans' status as newcomers, i.e., given the world's precedence, the truth about things is bound to be unhuman. Th us any inquiry into that truth amounts to a solipsistic exercise, varying only i n intensity and industry. In this sense, scientific findings (not to mention the language to which they resort) that point toward human inconsequence are closer to that truth than the conclusions of modern historians. Perhaps the invention of the atom bomb is closer to it than the invention of penicillin. Perhaps the sam e applies to any state-sponsored form of bestiality, particularly to wars and ge nocidal policies, as well as to spontaneous national and revolutionary movements . Without such awareness, history will remain a meaningless safari for historian s of theological bent or theologians with historical proclivities, ascribing to their trophies a human likeness and a divine purpose. But humanity of inquiry is not likely to render its subject human. The best reason for being a nomad is not the fresh air but the escape from the r ationalist theory of society based on the rationalist interpretation of history, since the rationalist approach to either is a blithely idealistic flight from hum an intuition. A nineteenth-century philosopher could afford it. You can't. If on e can't become a nomad physically, one should at least become one mentally. You can't save your skin, but you can try for your mind. One should read history the way one reads fiction: for the story, for the characters, for the setting. In s hort, for its diversity. In our minds we do not usually hook up Fabrizio del Dongo and Raskolnikov, David Copperfield and Natasha Rostova, jean Valjean and Clelia Conti, though they bel ong to roughly the same period of the same century. We don't do this because the y are not related; and neither are centuries, except perhaps dynastically. Histor y is essentially a vast library filled with works of fiction that vary in style more than in subject. Thinking of history in a larger manner is pregnant with ou

r own self-aggrandizement; with readers billing themselves as authors. Catalogui ng these volumes, let alone trying to link them to one another, can be clone onl y at the expense of reading them; in any case, at the expense of our own wits. Besides, we read novels rather erratically; when they come our way, or vice vers a. We are guided in this activity by our tastes as much as by the circumstances of our leisure. Which is to say, we are nomads in our reading. The same should a pply to history. We should simply keep in mind that linear thinking, while it is de rigueur for the historian's trade a narrative device, a trope it is, for his aud ience, a trap. It is awful to fall into the trap individually, but it is a catas trophe when it happens collectively. An individual, a nomadic individual especially, is more on the lookout for dange r than the collectivity. The former can turn 360 degrees; the latter can look in only one direction. One of the greatest joys of a nomad, of an individualist, is in structuring history in one's own personal fashion in cobbling one's own antiqu ity, one's own Middle Ages or Renaissance in a chronological or achronological, wholly idiosyncratic order: in making them one's own. That is really the only way to inhabit the centuries. We should remember that rationalism's greatest casualty was individualism. We sho uld be careful with the supposedly dispassionate objectivity of our historians. For objectivity does not mean indifference, nor does it mean an alternative to s ubjectivity. It is, rather, the sum total of subjectivities. As murderers, victi ms, or bystanders, men in the final analysis always act individually, subjective ly; and they and their deeds should be judged likewise. This robs us of a certitude, of course, but the less of that the better. Uncerta inty keeps an individual on guard, and is generally less bloodthirsty. Of course , all too often, it makes him agonize. But it is better to agonize than to organ ize. On the whole, uncertainty is more true to life itself; the only certain thi ng about which is that we are present in it. Again, the main trait of history, a nd of the future, is our absence, and one cannot be certain of something one was never a part of. Hence that vague look on the face of the Muse of Time. It is because so many eye s have stared at her with uncertainty. Also, because she has seen so much energy and commotion, whose true end only she knows. And ultimately, because she knows t hat had she stared back openly, she would have rendered her suitors blind, and s he is not without vanity. It is partly owing to this vanity, but mainly to the f act that she has nowhere else in this world to go, that on occasion, with that v ague look on her face, she walks into our midst and makes us absent. Speech at the Stadium Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose. At any rate, if this place is the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, t hat I remember, it's fairly safe for me to assume that you, its graduates, are e ven less familiar with the Good Book than those who sat on these benches, let's say, sixteen years ago, when I ventured afield here for the first time. To my eye, ear, and nostril, this place looks like Ann Arbor; it goes blue or feel s blue like Ann Arbor; it smells like Ann Arbor (though I must admit that there is less marijuana in the air now than there used to be, and that causes momentary c onfusion for an old Ann Arbor hand). It seems to be, then, Ann Arbor, where I sp ent a part of my life the best part for all I know and where, sixteen years ago, you r predecessors knew next to nothing about the Bible. If I remember my colleagues well, if I know what's happening to university curri cula all over the country, if I am not totally oblivious to the pressures the so -called modern world exerts upon the young, I feel nostalgic for those who sat i n your chairs a dozen or so years ago, because some of them at least could cite the Ten Commandments and still others even remembered the names of the Seven Dea dly Sins. As to what they've done with that precious knowledge of theirs afterwa rd, as to how they fared in the game, I have no idea. All I can hope for is that in the long run one is better off being guided by rules and taboos laid down by

someone totally impalpable than by the panel code alone. Since your run is most likely to be fairly long, and since being better off and having a decent world around you is what you presumably are after, you could do worse than to acquaint yourselves with those commandments and that list of sins. There are just seventeen items altogether, and some of them overlap. Of course, you may argue that they belong to a creed with a substantial record of violence . Still, as creeds go, this one appears to be the most tolerant; it's worth your consideration if only because it gave birth to the society in which you have th e right to question or negate its value. But I am not here to extol the virtues of any particular creed or philosophy, no r do I relish, as so many seem to, the opportunity to snipe at the modern system of education or at you, its alleged victims. To begin with, I don't perceive yo u as such. After all, in certain fields your knowledge is immeasurably superior to mine or anyone's of my generation. I regard you as a bunch of young, reasonab ly egotistical souls on the eve of a very long journey. I shudder to contemplate its length, and I ask myself in what way I could possibly be of use to you. Do I know something about life that could be of help or consequence to you, and if I do, is there a way to pass this information on to you? The answer to the first question is, I suppose, yes not so much because a person o f my age is entitled to outfox any of you at existential chess as because he is, in all probability, tired of quite a lot of the stuff you are still aspiring to . (This fatigue alone is something the young should be advised on as an attendan t feature of both their eventual success and their failure; this sort of knowled ge may enhance their savoring of the former as well as a better weathering of th e latter.) As for the second question, I truly wonder. The example of the aforem entioned commandments may discourage any commencement speaker, for the Ten Comman dments themselves were a commencement address literally so, I must say. But there i s a transparent wall between the generations, an ironic curtain, if you will, a see-through veil allowing almost no passage of experience. At best, some tips. Regard, then, what you are about to hear as just tips of several icebergs, if I ma y say so, not of Mount Sinai. I am no Moses, nor are you biblical Jews; these ar e a few random jottings scribbled on a yellow pad somewhere in California not tabl ets. Ignore them if you wish, doubt them if you must, forget them if you can't h elp it: there is nothing imperative about them. Should some of it now or in the time to be come .in handy to you, be glad. If not, my wrath won't reach you. 1. Now, and in the time to be, I. think it will pay for you to zero in on being precise with your language. Try to build and treat your vocabulary the way you a re to treat your checking account. Pay every attention to it and try to increase your earnings. The purpose here is not to boost your bedroom eloquence or your p rofessional success although those, too, can be consequences nor is it to turn you i nto parlor sophisticates. The purpose is to enable you to articulate yourselves a s fully and precisely as possible; in a word, the purpose is your balance. For t he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis. On a daily basis, a lot is happening to one's psyche; the mode of on e's expression, however, often remains the same. Articulation lags behind experi ence. That doesn't go well with the psyche. Sentiments, nuances, thoughts, percep tions that remain nameless, unable to be voiced and dissatisfied with approximat ions, get pent up within an individual and may lead to a psychological explosion or implosion. To avoid that, one needn't turn into a bookworm. One should simply acquire a dictionary and read it on the same daily basis and, on and off, books o f poetry. Dictionaries, however, are of primary importance. There are a lot of th em around; some of them even come with a magnifying glass. They are reasonably ch eap, but even the most expensive among them (those equipped with a magnifying gl ass) cost far less than a single visit to a psychiatrist. If you are going to vi sit one nevertheless, go with the symptoms of a dictionary junkie. 2. Now, and in the time to be, try to be kind to your parents. If this sounds to o close to "Honor thy mother and father" for your comfort, so be it. All I am tr ying to say is, try not to rebel against them, for, in all likelihood, they will die before you do, so you can spare yourselves at least this source of guilt if not of grief. If you must rebel, rebel against those who are not so easily hurt

. Parents are too close a target (so, by the way, are sisters, brothers, wives, or husbands); the range is such that you can't miss. Rebellion against one's par ents, for all its I-won't-take-a-single-penny-from-you, is essentially an extrem ely bourgeois sort of thing, because it provides the rebel with the ultimate in comfort, in this case, mental comfort: the comfort of one's convictions. The lat er you hit this pattern, the later you become a mental bourgeois; i.e., the long er you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you. On the other hand, of course, this not-a-single-penny business makes pr actical sense, because your parents, in all likelihood, will bequeath all they'v e got to you, and the successful rebel will end up with the entire fortune intac t in other words, rebellion is a very efficient form of savings. The interest, tho ugh, is crippling; I'd say, bankrupting. 3. Try not to set too much store by politicians not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of their job, which is too big even for the best among them, by this or that politi cal party, doctrine, system, or a blueprint thereof. All they or those can do, a t best, is to diminish a social evil, not eradicate it. No matter how substantia l an improvement may be, ethically speaking it will always be negligible, becaus e there will always be those say, just one person who won't profit from this improve ment. The world is not perfect; the Golden Age never was or will be. The only th ing that's going to happen to the world is that it will get bigger, i.e., more p opulated while not growing in size. No matter how fairly the man you've elected will promise to cut the pie, it won't grow in size; as a matter of fact, the por tions are bound to get smaller. In light of that or, rather, in dark of that you oug ht to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius. Still, in doing this, you must also prepare yourselves for the heartrending realization t hat even that pie of yours won't suffice; you must prepare yourselves that you'r e likely to dine as much in disappointment as in gratitude. The most difficult l esson to learn here is to be steady in the kitchen, since by serving this pie ju st once you create quite a lot of expectations. Ask yourself whether you can aff ord a steady supply of those pies, or would you rather bargain on a politician? Whatever the outcome of this soul-searching may be however much you, think the worl d can bet on your baking you might start right away by insisting that those corpor ations, banks, schools, labs, and whatnot where you'll be working, and whose pre mises are heated and policed round the clock anyway, permit the homeless in for the night, now that it's winter. 4. Try not to stand out, try to be modest. There are too many of us as it is, an d there are going to be many more, very soon. Thus climbing into the limelight i s bound to be done at the expense of the others who won't be climbing. That you must step on somebody's toes doesn't mean you should stand on their shoulders. B esides, all you will see from that vantage point is the human sea, plus those wh o, like you, have assumed a similarly conspicuous and very precarious at that positi on: those who are called rich and famous. On the whole, there is always somethin g faintly unpalatable about being better of than one's likes, and when those lik es come in billions, it is more so. To this it should be added that the rich and famous these days, too, come in throngs, that up there on the top it's very cro wded. So if you want to get rich or famous or both, by all means go ahead, but d on't make a meal of it. To covet what somebody else has is to forfeit your uniqu eness; on the other hand, of course, it stimulates mass production. But as you a re running through life only once, it is only sensible to try to avoid the most obvious clich?s, limited editions included. The notion of exclusivity, mind you, also forfeits your uniqueness, not to mention that it shrinks your sense of rea lity to the already-achieved. Far better than belonging to any club is to be jos tled by the multitudes of those who, given their income and their appearance, re present at least theoretically unlimited potential. Try to be more like them than li ke those who are not like them; try to wear gray. Mimicry is the defense of indi viduality, not its surrender. I would advise you to lower your voice, too, but I am afraid you will think I am going too far. Still, keep in mind that there is always somebody next to you, a neighbor. Nobody asks you to love him, but try no

t to hurt or discomfort him much; try to tread on his toes carefully; and should you come to covet his wife, remember at least that this testifies to the failur e of your imagination, to your disbelief in or ignorance of reality's unlimited pote ntial. Worse comes to worse, try to remember how far away from the stars, from the depths of the universe, perhaps from its opposite end came this request not to do it, as well as this idea of loving your neighbor no less than yourself. Maybe th e stars know more about gravity, as well as about loneliness, than you do; covet ing eyes that they are. 5. At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim. Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame -thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim's logo the opposite of the V sign and a syn onym for surrender. No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to b lame anything or anybody: history, the state, superiors, race, parents, the phas e of the moon, childhood, toilet training, etc. The menu is vast and tedious, and this vastness and tedium alone should be offensive enough to set one's intellig ence against choosing from it. The moment that you place blame somewhere, you und ermine your resolve to change anything; it could be argued even that that blamethirsty finger oscillates as wildly as it does because the resolve was never gre at enough in the first place. After all, victim status is not without its sweetn ess. It commands compassion, confers distinction, and whole nations and continen ts bask in the murk of mental discounts advertised as the victim's conscience. T here is an entire victim culture, ranging from private counselors to internation al loans. The professed goal of this network notwithstanding, its net result is that of lowering one's expectations from the threshold, so that a measly advanta ge could be perceived or billed as a major breakthrough. Of course, this is ther apeutic and, given the scarcity of the world's resources, perhaps even hygienic, so for want of a better identity, one may embrace it but try to resist it. Howeve r abundant and irrefutable is the evidence that you are on the losing side, nega te it as long as you have your wits about you, as long as your lips can utter "N o." On the whole, try to respect life not only for its amenities but for its har dships, too. They are a part of the game, and what's good about a hardship is th at it is not a deception. Whenever you are in trouble, in some scrape, on the ve rge of despair or in despair, remember: that's life speaking to you in the only language it knows well. In other words, try to be a little masochistic: without a touch of masochism, the meaning of life is not complete. If this is of any help , try to remember that human dignity is an absolute, not a piecemeal notion; tha t it is inconsistent with special pleading, that it derives its poise from denyi ng the obvious. Should you find this argument a bit on the heady side, think at least that by considering yourself a victim you but enlarge the vacuum of irresp onsibility that demons or demagogues love so much to fill, since a paralyzed wil l is no dainty for angels. 6. The world you are about to enter and exist in doesn't have a good reputation. It's been better geographically than historically; it's still far more attractiv e visually than socially. It's not a nice place, as you are soon to find out, an d I rather doubt that it will get much nicer by the time you leave it. Still, it's the only world available: no alternative exists, and if one did, the re is no guarantee that it would be much better than this one. It is a jungle ou t there, as well as a desert, a slippery slope, a swamp, etc. literally but what's w orse, metaphorically, too. Yet, as Robert Frost has said, "The best way out is a lways through." He also said, in a different poem, though, that "to be social is to be forgiving." It's with a few remarks about this business of getting throug h that I would like to close. Try not to pay attention to those who will try to make life miserable for you. T here will be a lot of those in the official capacity as well as the self-appointed . Suffer them if you can't escape them, but once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible. Above all, try to avoid telling stories about the unjust treatment you received at their hands; avoid it no matter how r eceptive your audience may be. Tales of this sort extend the existence of your a ntagonists; most likely they are counting on your being talkative and relating y

our experience to others. By himself, no individual is worth an exercise in inju stice (or for that matter, in justice). The ratio of one-to-one doesn't justify the effort: it's the echo that counts. That's the main principle of any oppresso r, whether state-sponsored or autodidact. Therefore, steal, or still, the echo, so that you don't allow an event, however unpleasant or momentous, to claim any more time than it took for it to occur. What your foes do derives its significance or consequence from the way you react. Therefore, rush through or past them as though they were yellow and not red lig hts. Don't linger on them mentally or verbally; don't pride yourself on forgiving or forgetting them worse come to worse, do the forgetting first. This way you'll spare your brain cells a lot of useless agitation; this way, perhaps, you may ev en save those pigheads from themselves, since the prospect of being forgotten is shorter than that of being forgiven. So flip the channel: you can't put this ne twork out of circulation, but at least you can reduce its ratings. Now, this sol ution is not likely to please angels, but then again, it's bound to hurt demons, and for the moment that's all that really matters. I had better stop here. As I said, I'll be glad if you find what I've said usefu l. If not, it will show that you are equipped far better for the future than one would expect from people of your age. Which, I suppose, is also a reason for re joicing not for apprehension. In either case well equipped or not I wish you luck, beca use what lies ahead is no picnic for the prepared and the unprepared alike, and you'll need luck. Still, I believe that you'll manage. I'm no gypsy; I can't divine your future, but it's pretty obvious to any naked e ye that you have a lot going for you. To say the least, you were born, which is in itself half the battle, and you live in a democracy this halfway house between nightmare and utopia which throws fewer obstacles in the way of an individual than its alternatives. Last, you've been educated at the University of Michigan, in my view the best sch ool in the nation, if only because sixteen years ago it gave a badly needed brea k to the laziest man on earth, who, on top of that, spoke practically no English t o yours truly. I taught here for some eight years; the language in which I addre ss you today I learned here; some of my former colleagues are still on the payro ll, others retired, and still others sleep the eternal sleep in the earth of Ann Arbor that now carries you. Clearly this place is of extraordinary sentimental value for me; and so it will become, in a dozen years or so, for you. To that ext ent, I can divine your future; in that respect, I know you will manage, or, more precisely, succeed. For feeling a wave of warmth coming over you in a dozen or so years at the mention of this town's name will indicate that, luck or no luck, as human beings you've succeeded. It's this sort of success I wish to you above all in the years to come. The rest depends on luck and matters less. Collector's Item If you sit long on the bank of the river, you may see the body of your enemy flo ating by. Chinese proverb I. Given the lunacy this piece deals with, it ought to be written in a language oth er than English. The only option available to me, however, is Russian, which is the very source of the lunacy in question. Who needs tautology? Besides, several of the assertions I am going to make are, in their turn, quite loony, and best checked by a language that has a reputation for being analytical. Who wants to h ave his insights ascribed to the vagaries of some highly inflected language? Nob ody, perhaps, save those who keep asking what language I think or dream in. One dreams in dreams, I reply, and thinks in thoughts. A language gets into the pict ure only when one has to make those things public. This, of course, gets me nowh ere. Still (I persevere) since English isn't my mother tongue, since my grip on its grammar isn't that tight, my thoughts, for example, could get quite garbled. I sure hope that they don't; at any rate I can tell them from dreams. And belie ve it or not, dear reader, this sort of quibbling, which normally gets one nowhe

re, brings you straight to the core of our story. For no matter how its author s olves his dilemma, no matter what language he settles for, his very ability to c hoose a language makes him, in your eyes, suspect; and suspicions are what this piece is all about. Who is he, you may wonder about the author, what is he up to ? Is he trying to promote himself to the status of a disembodied intelligence? I f it were only you, dear reader, inquiring about the author's identity, that wou ld be fine. The trouble is, he wonders about his identity himself--and for the s ame reason. Who are you, the author asks himself in two languages, and gets star tled no less than you would upon hearing his own voice muttering something that amounts to "Well, I don't know." A mongrel, then, ladies and gentleman, this is a mongrel speaking. Or else a centaur. II. This is the summer of 1991, August. That much at least is certain. Elizabeth Tay lor is about to take her eighth walk down the aisle, this time with a blue-colla r boy of Polish extraction. A serial killer with cannibalistic urges is apprehen ded in Milwaukee; the cops find three hard-boiled skulls in his fridge. Russia's Great Panhandler makes his rounds in London with cameras zeroing in, as it were , on his empty tin. The more it changes, the more it stays the same: like the we ather. And the more it tries to stay the same, the more it changes: like a face. And judging by the "weather," this could easily be 1891. On the whole, geograph y (European geography in particular) leaves history very few options. A country, especially a large one, gets only two. Either it's strong or it's weak. Fig. 1: Russia. Fig. 2: Germany. For most of the century, the former tried to play it b ig and strong (at what cost is another matter). Now its turn has come to be weak : by the year 2000 it will be where it was in 1900, and about the same perimeter . The latter, Germany, will be there, too. (At long last it dawned on the descen dants of Wotan that saddling their neighbors with debt is a more stable and less costly form of occupation than sending in troops.) The more it changes, the mor e it stays the same. Still, you can't tell time by weather. Faces are better: th e more one tries to stay the same, the more it changes. Fig. 1: Miss Taylor's. F ig. 2: one's own. The summer of 1991, then, August. Can one tell a mirror from a tabloid? III. And here is one such, of humble strikebreaking origins. Actually it is a literar y paper, The London Review of Books by name, which came into existence several y ears ago when the London Times and its Literary Supplement went on strike for a few months. In order not to leave the public without literary news and the benef its of liberal opinion, lrb was launched and evidently blossomed. Eventually the Times and its Literary Supplement resumed operation, but lrb stayed afloat, pro of not so much of the growing diversity of reading tastes as of burgeoning demog raphy. No individual I know subscribes to both papers, unless he is a publisher. It's largely a matter of one's budget, not to mention one's attention span or o ne's plain loyalty. And I wonder, for instance, which one of these--the latter, I should hope--prevented me from purchasing a recent issue in a small Belsize Pa rk bookstore, where I and my young lady ventured the other day on our way to the movies. Budgetary considerations as well as my attention span--alarming as it m ay be of late--must be ruled out: the most recent issue of the lrb sat there on the counter in full splendor, its cover depicting a blown-up postal stamp: unmis takably of Soviet origins. This sort of thing has been enough to catch my eye si nce I was 12. In its own turn, the stamp depicted a bespectacled man with silver neatly parted hair. Above and underneath the face, the stamp's legend, in now-f ashionable Cyrillic, went as follows: "Soviet Secret Agent Kim Philby (1912-1988 )." He looked indeed like Alec Guinness, with a touch perhaps of Trevor Howard. I reached into my pocket for two one-pound coins, caught the salesboy's friendly glance, adjusted my vocal chords for some highly pitched, civilized "May I have ," and then turned 90 degrees and walked out of the store. I must add that I did n't do it abruptly, that I managed to send the boy at the counter a "just change d my mind" nod and to collect, with the same nod, my young lady. IV. As we had some time to kill before the show, we went into a nearby cafe. "What's

the matter with you?" my young comrade-in-arms asked me once we sat down. "You look like " I didn't interrupt her. I knew how I felt and actually wondered what it might look like. "You look, you look sideways," she continued hesitantly, ten tatively, since English wasn't her mother tongue either. "You look as if you can 't face the world any longer, can't look straight in the world's eye," she manag ed finally. "Something like that," she added just in case, to widen the margin o f error. Well, I thought, one is always a greater reality for others than for on eself, and vice versa. What are we here for but to be observed. If that's what " it" really looks like from the outside, then I am doing fine--and so, perhaps, i s the bulk of the human race. For I felt like throwing up, like a great deal of barf was welling up in my throat. Still, while I wasn't puzzled by the situation , I was surprised by its intensity. "What's the matter?" asked my young lady. "W hat's wrong?" And now, dear reader, after trying to figure out who the author of this piece is and what its timing, we've got to find out also who is its audien ce. Do you remember, dear reader, who Kim Philby was and what he did? If you do, then you are around 50 and thus, in a manner of speaking, on your way out. What you are going to hear, therefore, will be of little import to you, still of les ser comfort. Your game is up, you are too far gone; this stuff won't change anyt hing for you. If, on the other hand, you've never heard of Kim Philby, this mean s that you are in your 30s, life lies ahead, all this is an ancient history and of no possible use or entertainment value for you, unless you are some sort of a spy buff. So? So where does all this leave our author, the question of his iden tity still hanging? Can a disembodied intelligence rightfully expect to find an able-bodied audience? I say, hardly, and I say who gives a damn. V. All of this leaves our author at the close of the twentieth century with a very bad taste in his mouth. That, of course, is to be expected in a mouth that is in its 50s. But let's stop being cute with each other, dear reader, let's get down to business. Kim Philby was a Briton, and he was a spy. He worked for the Briti sh Intelligence Service, for MI5 or MI6, or both--who cares about all that arcan a and whatever it stands for--but he spied for the Russians. In the parlance of the trade, he was a mole, though we are not going to use that lingo here. I am n ot a spy buff, not an aficionado of that genre, and never was; neither in my 30s nor even in my 50s, and let me tell you why. First, because espionage provides a good plot, but seldom palatable prose. In fact, the upsurge of spy novels in o ur time is the byproduct of modernism's emphasis on texture, which left literatu re in practically all European languages absolutely plotless: the reaction was i nevitable, but with few exceptions, equally execrable. Still, aesthetic objectio ns are of little consequence to you, dear reader, aren't they, and that in itsel f tells the time as accurately as the calendar or a tabloid. Let's try ethics, t hen, on which everyone seems to be an expert. I, for one, have always regarded e spionage as the vilest human pursuit, mainly, I guess, because I grew up in a co untry the advancement of whose fortunes was inconceivable to its natives. To do that, one indeed had to be a foreigner; and that's perhaps why the country took such pride in its cops, fellow travelers, and secret agents, commemorating them in all manner of ways, from stamps to plaques to monuments. Ah, all those Richar d Zorges, Pablo Nerudas, and Hewlett Jonsons, and so on, all that pulp of our yo uth! Ah, all those flicks shot in Latvia or in Estonia for the "Western" backdro p! A foreign surname and the neon lettering of "Hotel" (always put vertically, n ever horizontally), sometimes the screeching brakes of a Czech-made motorcar. Th e goal was not so much verisimilitude or suspense as the legitimization of the s ystem by the exploits on its behalf outside of it. You could get a bar scene wit h a little combo toiling in the background, you could get a blonde with a tin-ca n taffeta skirt and a decent nose job looking positively non-Slavic. Two or thre e of our actors, too, looked sufficiently gaunt and lanky, the emphasis being al ways on a thoroughbred beak. A German-sounding name for a spy was better than a French one, a French one was better than a Spanish one, a Spanish one was better than an Italian one (come to think of it, I can't recall a single Italian Sovie t secret agent). The English were tops, but hard to come by. In any case, neithe r English landscapes nor street scenes were ever attempted on our big screens, a

s we lacked vehicles with steering wheels on the right. Ah, those were the days-but I've digressed. VI. Who cares what country one grows up in, and whether it colors one's view of espi onage? Too bad if it does, because then one is robbed of a source of entertainme nt--perhaps not of the most delectable kind, but entertainment nonetheless. In v iew of what surrounds us, not to mention what lies ahead, this is barely forgiva ble. Dearth of action is the mother of the motion picture. And if one indeed loa thes spies, there still remains spy-catching, which is as engrossing as it is ri ghteous. What's wrong with a little paranoia, with a bit of manifest schizophren ia? Isn't there something recognizable and therefore therapeutic to their paperb ack and Bakelite video versions? And what's any aversion, including this aversio n toward spies, if not a hidden neurosis, an echo of some childhood trauma? Firs t therapy, then ethics. VII. The face of Kim Philby on that stamp. The face of the late Mr. Philby, Esq., of Brighton, Sussex, or of Welwyn Garden, Herts, or of Ambala, India--you name it. The face of an Englishman in the Soviet employ. The pulp writer's dream come tru e. Presumably, the rank of general, if the poor sod cared for such trifles; pres umably, highly decorated, maybe a Hero of the Soviet Union. Though the snapshot used for the stamp shows none of that. Here he appears in his civvies, which is what he donned for most of his life: the dark coat and the tie. The medals and t he epaulets were saved for the red velvet cushion of a soldier's funeral, if he had one. Which I think he did, his employers being suckers for top-secret solemn ity. Many moons ago, reviewing a book about a chum of his for the tls, I suggest ed that, considering his service to the Soviet State, this now aging Moscow deni zen should be buried in the Kremlin wall. I mention this since I've been told th at he was one of the few tls subscribers in Moscow. He ended up, though, I belie ve, in the Protestant cemetery, his employers being sticklers for propriety, alb eit posthumously. (Had Her Majesty's government been handling these matters, it could hardly have done better.) And now I feel little pangs of remorse. I imagin e him interred, clad in the same coat and tie shown on the stamp, wearing this d isguise--or was it a uniform?--in death as in life. Presumably he left some inst ructions concerning this eventuality, although he couldn't have been fully certa in whether they would be followed. Were they? And what did he want on his tombst one? A line of English poetry, perhaps? Something like "And death shall have no dominion"? Or did he prefer a matter-of-fact "Soviet Secret Agent Kim Philby (19 12-1988)"? And did he want it in Cyrillic? VIII. Back to hidden neurosis and childhood trauma, to therapy and ethics. When I was 24, I was after a girl, and in a big way. She was slightly older than I, and aft er a while I began to feel that something was amiss. I sensed that I was being d eceived, perhaps even two-timed. It turned out, of course, that I wasn't wrong, but that was later. At the time I simply grew suspicious, and one evening I deci ded to track her down. I hid myself in an archway across the street from her bui lding, waited there for about an hour, and when she emerged from her poorly lit entrance, I followed her for several blocks. I was tense with excitement, but of an unfamiliar nature. At the same time I felt vaguely bored, as I knew more or less what I might discover. The excitement grew with every step, with every evas ive action I took; the boredom stayed at the same level. When she turned to the river, my excitement reached its crescendo, and at that point I stopped, turned around, and headed for a nearby cafe. Later I would blame my abandoning the chas e on my laziness and reproach myself, especially in the light--or, rather, in th e dark--of this affair's denouement, playing an Actaeon to the dogs of my own hi ndsight. The truth was less innocent and more absorbing. The truth was that I st opped because I had discovered the nature of my excitement. It was the joy of a hunter pursuing his prey. In other words, it was something atavistic, primordial . This realization had nothing to do with ethics, with scruples, taboos, or anyt hing of the sort. I had no problem with conferring upon the girl the status of p rey. It's just that I hated being the hunter. A matter of temperament, perhaps?

Perhaps. Perhaps had the world been subdivided into the four humors, or at least boiled down to four humor-based political parties, it would be a better place. Yet I think that one's resistance to turning into a hunter, the ability to spot and to control the hunting impulse, has to do with something more basic than tem perament, upbringing, social values, received wisdom, ecclesiastical affiliation , or one's concept of honor. It has to do with the degree of one's evolution, wi th the species' evolution, with reaching the stage marked by one's inability to regress. One loathes spies not so much because of their low rung on the evolutio nary ladder, but because betrayal invites you to descend. IX. Dear reader, if this sounds to you like an oblique way of bragging about one's o wn virtues, so be it. Virtue, after all, is far from being synonymous with survi val; duplicity is. But you will accept, dear reader, won't you, that there is a hierarchy between love and betrayal. And you also know that it is the former tha t ushers in the latter, not vice versa. What's worse, you know that the latter o utlasts the former. So there is not much to brag about, even when you are absolu tely smitten or besotted, is there? If one is not a Darwinist, if one still stic ks to Cuvier, it is because lower organisms seem to be more viable than complex ones. Look at moss, look at algae. I understand that I am out of my depth here. All I am trying to say is that to an advanced organism duplicity is, at worst, a n option; for a lower one, however, it is the means of survival. In this sense, spies don't choose to be spies any more than a lizard chooses its pigmentation: they just can't do any better. Duplicity, after all, is a form of mimicry; it is this particular animal's maximum. One could argue with this proposition if spie s spied for money, but the best of them do it out of conviction. In their pursui t, they are driven by excitement, better yet by instinct unchecked by boredom. F or boredom interferes with instinct. Boredom is the mark of a highly evolved spe cies; a sign of civilization, if you will. X. Whoever it was who ordered this stamp's issue was no doubt making a statement. E specially given the current political climate, the warming of East-West relation s and all. The decision must have been made on high, in the Kremlin's own hallow ed chambers, since the Foreign Ministry would have been up in arms against it, n ot to mention the Ministry of Finances, such as they are. You don't bite the han d that feeds you. Or do you? You do if your teeth are those of the CSS--the Comm ittee for State Security (a.k.a., the KGB)--which is larger than both those mini stries to begin with, not only in the number of employees but in the place it oc cupies in the conscience and the subconscious of the powerful and the powerless alike. If you are that big, you may bite any hand you like, and, for that matter , throats too. You may do it for several reasons. Out of vanity: to remind the j ubilant West of your existence. Or out of inertia: you're used to biting that ha nd anyway. Or out of nostalgia for the good old days, when your diet was rich in the enemy's protein because you had a constant supply of it in your compatriots . Still, for all the grossness of the CSS's appetite, one senses behind this sta mp initiative a particular individual: the head of a Directorate, or perhaps his deputy, or just a humble case officer who came up with the idea. He might simpl y have revered Philby, or wanted to get ahead in his department; or, on the cont rary, he may have been approaching retirement and, like many people of that gene ration, truly believed in the didactic value of a postage stamp. None of these t hings contradicts one another. They are fully compatible: vanity, inertia, nosta lgia, reverence, careerism, naivete; and the brain of the CSS's average employee is as good a place for their confluence as any, including a computer. What's pu zzling about this stamp, however, is the promptness with which it has been issue d: only two years after Mr. Philby's demise. His shoes, as well as the gloves th at he always wore on account of a skin allergy, were, so to speak, still warm. I ssuing a stamp in any country takes a hell of a lot of time, and normally it is preceded by national recognition of its subject. Even if one skips this requirem ent (the man was, after all, a secret agent), the speed with which the stamp was produced is amazing, given the thick of bureaucratic hurdles it ought to have g one through. It obviously didn't; it was evidently rushed into production. Which

leaves you with this sense of personal involvement, of an individual will behin d this four-centimeter-square piece of paper. And you ask yourself about the mot ive behind that will. And you understand that somebody wanted to make a statemen t. Urbi et orbi, as it were. And, as a part of the orbus, you wonder what sort o f statement that was. XI. The answer is: menacing and spiteful; also profoundly provincial. One judges an undertaking, I'm afraid, by its result. The stamp subjects the late Mr. Philby t o the ultimate ignominy, to the final slight: it proclaims a Briton to be Russia 's own, not so much in spirit--what's so special about that?--but precisely in b ody. No doubt Philby asked for that. He spied for the Soviet Union for a good qu arter of a century. For another quarter of a century he simply lived in the Sovi et Union, and wasn't entirely idle either. On top of that, he died there, and wa s interred in Russian soil. The stamp is essentially his tombstone's replica. Al so we shouldn't discount the possibility that he might have been pleased by his masters' posthumous treatment: he was stupid enough, and secrecy is a hotbed of vanity. He could even have approved (if not initiated himself) the stamp project . Yet one can't help feeling some violation here, something deeper than the dese cration of a grave: a violation that is elemental. He was, after all, a Briton, and the Brits are used to dying in odd places. What's revolting about this stamp is its proprietary sentiment; it's as though the earth that swallowed the poor sod licks its lips with profound satisfaction and says, he is mine. Or else it l icks the stamp. XII. Such was the statement that a humble case officer, or a bunch of them at CSS, wi shed to make, and did, and that a liberal literary paper of humble strikebreakin g origins has found so amusing. Well, let's say point taken. What should be done about it, if anything? Should we try to disinter the unholy remains and bring t hem back to Britain? Should we petition the Soviet government or offer it a larg e sum? Or should Her Majesty's Postmaster issue perhaps a counterstamp, with a l egend something like "English Traitor, Kim Philby, 1912-1988," in English, of co urse, and see whether some Russian paper reprints it? Should we try to retrieve the idea of this man, despite himself, from the collective psyche of his masters ? And anyway who are these "we" who provide your author, dear reader, with such rhetorical comfort? No, nothing of the sort could, or for that matter should, be done. Philby belongs there, body and soul. Let him rot in peace. But what one-and I emphasize this "one"--can do, and therefore should do, is rob the aforemen tioned collective psyche of its ownership of that unholy relic, rob it of the co mfort it thinks it enjoys. And in fact it's easy to do this. For, in spite of hi mself, Kim Philby wasn't theirs. Considering where we are today, and especially where Russia is, it is obvious that, for all its industry, cunning, human toil, and investment of time and currency, the Philby enterprise was a bust. Were he a British double-agent, he couldn't inflict a greater damage on the system whose fortunes he was actually trying to advance. But double or triple, he was a Briti sh agent through and through, for the bottom line of his quite extraordinary eff ort is a sharp sense of futility. Futility is so hideously British. And now for the fun part. XIII. In the few spy novels that I read as a child, the role of the postage stamp was as grand as the item itself was small, and would yield only to that of a torn ph otograph, the appearance of the other half of which often would clinch the plot. On the stamp's sticky side, a spy in those novels would convey in his chicken s crawl, or on a microfilm, the secret message to his master, or vice versa. The P hilby stamp is thus a fusion of the torn man with the medium-is-the-message prin ciple; as such, it is a collector's item. To this we might add also that the pri ciest things in the stamp-collecting world are those issued by political or geog raphical ephemera--by short-lived or defunct states, negligible potentates or sp ecks of land. (The most sought-after item in my childhood, I recall, was a stamp from Pitcairn Island--a British colony, as it happens, in the South Pacific.) S o, to use this philatelist logic, the issue of the Philby stamp appears to be a

cry from the Soviet Union's future. At any rate, there is something in its futur e that, in the guise of the CSS, asks for that. Actually, this is a fine time fo r philatelists, and in more ways than one. One even can speak of philatelist jus tice here--the way one speaks of poetic license. For half a century ago, when th e CSS warriors were deporting people from the Baltic states that the ussr invade d and rendered defunct, it was precisely philatelists who clinched the list of s ocial categories subject to removal. (In fact, the list ended with the Esperanti sts, the philatelists being the penultimate category. There were, if memory serv es me right, sixty-four such categories; the list began with the leaders and act ive members of political parties, followed by university professors, journalists , teachers, businessmen, and so on. It came with a highly detailed set of instru ctions as to how to separate the provider from his family, children from their m others, and so forth, down to the actual wording of sentences like "Your daddy w ent to get hot water from the station boiler." The whole thing was rather well t hought through and signed by CSS General Serov. I saw the document with my own e yes; the country of application was Lithuania.) This, perhaps, is the source of a retiring case officer's belief in the didactic power of a stamp. Well, nothing pleases the tired eyes of an impartial observer so much as the sight of things coming full circle. XIV. Let's not dismiss, though, the didactic powers of the stamp. This one at least c ould have been issued to encourage the CSS's present and future employees, and w as no doubt distributed among the former for free, a modest fringe benefit. As f or the latter, one can imagine the stamp doing rather well with a young recruit. The establishment is big on visuals, on iconography, its monitoring abilities b eing justly famous for their omniscience, not to mention omnivorousness. When it comes to didactic purposes, especially among its own brethren, the organization readily goes the extra mile. When Oleg Pen'kovsky, a gru man who betrayed Sovie t military secrets to the British in the 1960s, was finally caught, the establis hment (or so I was told) filmed his execution. Strapped to a stretcher, Pen'kovs ky is wheeled into the Moscow city crematorium's chamber. An attendant opens the furnace door and two other attendants start to push the stretcher and its conte nts into the roaring furnace; the flame is already licking the screaming man's s oles. At this point a voice comes over the loudspeaker interrupting the procedur e because another body is scheduled for this time slot. Screaming but unable to kick, Pen'kovsky is pulled back; another body arrives and after a small ceremony is pushed into the furnace. The voice comes over the loudspeaker again: now it' s Pen'kovsky's turn, and in he goes. A small but effective skit. Beats Beckett h ands down, boosts morale, and can't be forgotten: it brands your wits. A kind of stamp, if you will: for intramural correspondence. XV. Before we set out for the fun part in earnest, dear reader, let me say this. The re is a distinction between the benefit of hindsight and having lived long enoug h to see heads' tails. This is not a disclaimer; quite the contrary, most of you r author's assertions are borne out by his life, and if they are wrong then he b lew it, at least partially. Still, even if they are accurate, a good question re mains. Is he entitled to pass judgment upon those who are no longer around--who have lost? Outlasting your opponent gives you the sense of membership in a victo rious majority, of having played your cards right. Aren't you then applying the law retroactively? Aren't you punishing the poor buggers under a code of conscie nce foreign to them and to their times? Well, I am not troubled by this, and for three reasons. First, because Kim Philby kicked the bucket at the ripe age of 7 6; as I write this, I am still 26 years behind him in the game, my catching-up p rospects being very dim. Second, because what he believed in for most of his lif e, allegedly to its very end, has been utter garbage to me at least since the ag e of 16, though no benefit of foresight can be claimed here, let alone obtained. Third, because the baseness of the human heart and the vulgarity of the human m ind never expire with the demise of their most gifted exponents. What I must dis claim, however, is any pretense to expertise in the field I am wading through. A s I say, I am no spy buff. Of Philby's life, for instance, I know only the bare

bones, if that. I've never read his biography, in English or in Russian, nor do I expect I ever will. Of the options available to a human being, he chose the mo st redundant one: to betray one set of people to another. This sort of subject i s not worthy of study; intuition will suffice. I am also not terribly good with dates, though I normally try to check them. So the reader should decide for hims elf at this stage whether he is going to proceed with this stuff any further. I certainly will. I suppose I should bill the following as a fantasy. Well, it isn 't. XVI. On Marchember umpteenth, Nineteen Filthy Fine, in Brooklyn, New York, agents of the FBI arrested a Soviet spy. In a small apartment filled with photo equipment, on a floor strewn with microfilm, stood a little middle-aged man with beady eye s, an aquiline profile, and a balding forehead, his Adam's apple moving busily: he was swallowing a scrap of paper containing some top-secret information. Other wise the man offered no resistance. Instead he proudly declared: "I am Colonel o f the Red Army Rudolph Abel, and I demand to be treated as such in accordance wi th the Geneva Convention." Needless to say, the tabloids went ape, in the States and all over the place. The colonel was tried, got donkey years, and was locked up, if I remember correctly, in Sing-Sing. There he mostly played pool. In Nine teen Sissy Through or thereabouts he was exchanged at Checkpoint Charlie in Berl in for Gary Powers, the unlucky U-2 pilot who made headlines for the last time j ust a few years ago when he went down again, this time near l.a., in a helicopte r, and for good. Rudolph Abel returned to Moscow, retired, and made no headlines , save that he became the most feared pool shark in Moscow and its vicinity. He died in Nineteen Cementy and was buried, with scaled-down military honors, at No vodevichie Cemetery in Moscow. No stamp was issued for him. Or was one? I may ha ve missed it. Or the British literary paper of humble origin missed it. Perhaps he didn't earn a stamp: what's four years in Sing-Sing to a lifelong record? And besides, he wasn't a foreigner, just another displaced native. In any case, no stamp for Rudolph Abel, just a tombstone. XVII. But what do we read on this tombstone? We read: "Willie Fischer, a.k.a Rudolph A bel, 1903-1971," in Cyrillic, of course. Now that's a bit too long for a stamp's legend, but not for us. (Ah, dear reader, look at what we've got here: spies, s tamps, cemeteries, tombstones! But wait, there's more: poets, painters, assassin ations, exiles, Arab sheikhs, murder weapons, stolen cars, and more stamps!) But let's try to make this long story short. Once upon a time--in 1936-38 in Spain, to be precise--there were two men: Willie Fischer and Rudolph Abel. They were c olleagues and they were close friends. So close that other employees of the same enterprise called them "Fischerabel." But nothing untoward, dear reader, they w ere simply inseparable, partly because of the work they did. They were a team. T he enterprise for which they toiled was the Soviet intelligence outfit that hand led the messy side of the Spanish Civil War's business. That's the side where yo u find bullet-riddled bodies miles away from the trenches. Anyway, the outfit's boss was a fellow by the name of Orlov, who prior to his Spanish assignment head ed the entire Soviet counterintelligence operation for Western Europe out of an office in the Soviet Embassy in the French capital. We'll play with him later--o r, as the case may be, he will play with us. For the moment let's say that Orlov was very close with Fischerabel. Not as close as they were with each other, but very close. Nothing untoward there either, since Orlov was married. He was just the boss, and Fischerabel were his right and his left hand at once. Both hands were dirty. XVIII. But life is cruel, it separates even the best of friends. In 1938 the Spanish Ci vil War is ending, and Fischerabel and Orlov part ways. They check out of the Ho tel Nacional in Madrid, where the entire operation was run, and travel--some by air, some by boat, still others by the submarine that carried the Spanish Gold R eserve, which was handed over to the Soviets by Juan Negrin, the Republican gove rnment's finance minister--in opposite directions. Orlov disappears into thin ai r. Fischerabel return to Moscow and continue to work for the old establishment,

filing reports, training new recruits--the kind of thing that field men do when they are out of the field. In 1940, when Rudolph Abel gets transferred to the Fa r East, where trouble is brewing on the Mongolian border, he makes a wrong move, and gets killed. Then comes World War II. Throughout it Willie Fischer remains in Moscow, trains more recruits--this time perhaps with greater gusto, since Ger man is his father tongue--but he generally feels fallen by the wayside, bypassed for promotion, aging. This fretful state of affairs ends only in Nineteen Fault y Ape, when he's suddenly taken out of mothballs and given a new assignment. "Th e kind of assignment," he remarks cryptically on the eve of his departure to one of his former sidekicks from the old Spanish days, "the kind of assignment that a field man's entire life is the preparation for." Then he takes off. The next time his pals hear of him is X years later when, nabbed by the feds in that Broo klyn apartment, good old Willie sings, "I am Colonel of the Red Army Rudolph Abe l, and I demand " XIX. Of the many virtues available to us, dear reader, patience is best known for bei ng rewarded. In fact, patience is an integral part of every virtue. What's virtu e without patience? Just good temper. In a certain line of work, however, that w on't pay. It may, in fact, be deadly. A certain line of work requires patience, and a hell of a lot of it. Perhaps because it is the only virtue detectable in a certain line of work, those engaged in it zero in on patience with a vengeance. So bear with us, dear reader. Consider yourself a mole. XX. The twang of a guitar, the sound of a shot fired in a poorly lit alley. It's Spa in, shortly before the end of the Civil War (not ending through neglect on the p art of Orlov's good offices, of course, but in Moscow they may see things differ ently). On this night Orlov has been summoned to see a certain official from Mos cow aboard a ship lying at anchor in Barcelona. As the head of Soviet intelligen ce in Spain, he reports only to Stalin's own secretariat: directly. Orlov senses a trap and runs. He grabs his wife, takes the elevator down, tells a bellboy in the lobby to get him a taxi. Cut. Panorama of the ragged Pyrenees, roar of a tw o-engine airplane. Cut. Next morning in Paris, sound of an accordion, panorama o f, say, the Place de la Concorde. Cut. An office in the Soviet Embassy on the ru e de Varennes. Stalin's whiskers above the door of a Mosler safe flung wide open ; a pin-striped wrist with cuffs stuffing a satchel with French bank notes and f iles. Cut. Blackout. XXI. Sorry, no close-ups. Orlov's disappearing act offers none. Still, if one stares at the blackout intently enough, one can make out a letter. This letter is addre ssed to Comrade Stalin, and it says something to the effect that he, Orlov, now severs his links with godless communism and its hateful, criminal system; that h e and his wife choose freedom, and should a single hair fall from the heads of t heir aging parents, who are still in the clutches of this system, then he, Orlov , will spill urbi et orbi all the dirty top secret beans in his possession. The letter goes into an envelope, the address on that envelope is that of the office s of Le Monde, or maybe Figaro. At any rate, it's in Paris. Then the pen dips in to the ink pot again: another letter. This one is to Leon Trotsky, and it goes s omething like this: I, the undersigned, am a Russian merchant who just escaped w ith my life from the Soviet Union via Siberia to Japan. While in Moscow and stay ing in a hotel, I overheard, by pure chance, a conversation in the next room. Th e subject was an attempt on your life, and through the crack in the door I even managed to espy your would-be assassin. He is young, tall, and speaks perfect Sp anish. I thought it my duty to warn you. The letter is signed with an alias, but Don Levin, the Trotsky scholar and biographer, has positively identified its au thor as Orlov, and, if I am not mistaken, the scholar has received Orlov's perso nal confirmation. This letter is postmarked Nagasaki and the address on it is in Mexico City. It, too, however, ends up in a local tabloid (La Prensa Latina? El Pais?), since Trotsky, still smarting from the second attempt on his life (in t he course of which his American secretary was murdered by a would-be world-famou s muralist--David Alfaro Siqueiros--with the assistance of a would-be world-famo

us, indeed a Nobel Prize-winning, poet, Pablo Neruda), habitually forwards all t hreats and warnings he receives to the press. And Orlov must be aware of this, i f only because for the last three years he has been in the habit of perusing qui te a few periodicals in Spanish. While having his coffee, say. In the lobby of t he Nacional, or in his suite there on the sixth floor. XXII. Where he used to entertain all sorts of people. Including Ramon Mercader, Trotsk y's third and successful assassin. Who was simply Orlov's employee, much the sam e as Fischerabel, working for the same outfit. So if Orlov really wanted to warn Trotsky, he could have told him a lot more about Ramon Mercader than that he wa s young, tall, handsome, and spoke perfect Spanish. Yet the reason for the secon d letter was not Trotsky, the reason was the first letter, whose addressee wasn' t Stalin. To put it more neatly, the Stalin letter, printed in Le Monde, address ed the West, while the Trotsky letter, though it went literally to the Western H emisphere, addressed the East. The purpose of the first was to win Orlov good st anding abroad, preferably in the intelligence community. The second was a letter home, informing his pals in Moscow headquarters that he was not spilling the be ans, though he could: about Mercader, for instance. So they, the pals, could go ahead with the Trotsky job if they cared to. (They did, though no tear should be shed, since Trotsky, who drowned the only genuine Russian Revolution that ever took place--the Kronstadt Uprising--in blood, wasn't any better than the spawn o f hell who ordered his assassination. Stalin, after all, was an opportunist. Tro tsky was an ideologue. The mere thought that they could have swapped places make s one wince.) Moreover, should the authorship of the second letter ever come to light, as it did in Don Levin's research, it could only enhance Orlov's credenti als as a true anti-Stalinist. Which is precisely what he wasn't. He had no ideol ogical or any other disagreement with Stalin. He was simply running for his dear life, so he threw the dogs a bone to munch on. They munched on it for a couple of decades. XXIII. Blackout. Time for the credits. Ten years ago an emigre Russian publishing house in France published a book called A Hunter Upside Down. The title suggests one of those cartoon puzzles in which you have to look for the hidden figures: hunte rs, rabbits, farmers, birds, and so on. The author's name was Victor Henkin. He was Willie Fischer's sidekick from the good old Spanish days, and the Fischerabe l story is what the book is all about, although it aims to be an autobiography. Some of the Orlov tidbits also hail from there. The book should have been a hit, if only because people in the know on the longer side of the Atlantic still bel ieved that they had Rudolph Abel. By the same token, they still believed that Or lov, who had joined them, truly worked for that side whose decorations one may s ee proudly displayed on his chest in one of Orlov's rare close-ups, in a book pu blished with great fanfare in the States well after Orlov's death in 1972. But n o fanfare for Henkin's book. When an American publisher tried to get a contract for it, he ran into a copyright wall. There were also some minor scandals over a lleged plagiarism in the German or French edition, it was in the courts, and for all I know Henkin lost. Now he works for a radio station in Munich that broadca sts into Russia--almost the flip side of the job he had for donkey years at Radi o Moscow broadcasting in French. Or else he is retired. A Russian emigre, with a highly checkered record . Not trustworthy, presumably paranoid . Living in the past , ill-tempered . Still, he is free now, he's got the right papers. He can go to th e Gare de Lyon, board a train, and just like fifty years ago, after a night-long journey, he can arrive in Madrid, the city of his youth and adventure. All he h as to do is to cross the large station square and he'll be standing in front of the Nacional; he could do it with his eyes closed. Still with his eyes closed he can enter a lobby that teemed fifty years ago with Orlovs, Fischers, Abels, Hem ingways, Philbys, Orwells, Mercaders, Malrauxs, Negrins, Erhenburgs, and lesser lights like himself: with all those who have taken part in our story thus far or to whom we, one way or another, owe credits. Should he open his eyes, however, he'll discover that the Nacional is closed. It's been closed, according to some-mostly the young--for the last ten years; according to others, for the last fif

ty. Neither the young nor the old seem to know who pays the property tax, but ma ybe in Spain they do things differently. XXIV. And in case you think, dear reader, that we've forgotten him, let's extract Kim Philby from the crowd in the lobby, and let's ask him what he's doing there. "I' m with the paper, actually," we'll hear. "Covering the war." Let's press him as to whose side he's on, and let's imagine that, just for an instant, he'll talk s traight. "Switching at the moment. Orders." He may as well motion slightly upwar d with his chin, toward the sixth floor of the Nacional. For I am absolutely con vinced that it was Orlov who told Kim Philby in 1937 in Madrid or thereabouts to change his tune in the Times from pro-Republican to pro-Franco, for reasons of deeper cover. If, as the story goes, Philby was meant to be a long shot aimed at the sancta sanctorum of British intelligence, he had better go pro-fascist. It' s not that Orlov foresaw which way the Spanish show might go, though he could ha ve had an inkling; he simply thought, or knew, that Philby should be played for keeps. And he could think this way, or know this, only if he were privy to the f ile that the Russians by then had on Philby, who was recruited in 1933, or to th e actual recruitment of Philby. The first is certain, the second is possible. In any case Orlov knew Philby personally, which is what he tried to tell the haple ss FBI man who interviewed him in 1944, in Iowa I think, where he then dwelled, having immigrated to the United States from Canada. At that point, it seems, Orl ov was finally ready to spill the beans; but the FBI man paid no attention to th e mention of some Englishman with a stutter who worked for the Soviet Union, whi ch, on top of everything, was at that time an American ally. So Orlov decided no t to press this any further, and Kim Philby headed for the stamp. XXV. With these beans still intact in his hippothalamus on the one hand, and on the o ther having penned a couple of novels filled with the standard field-man yarn, b ut of the Russian variety, Orlov was no doubt of some interest to the budding CI A in the late 1940s. I have no idea, dear reader, who approached whom: I haven't studied Orlov's life, or its available record. Not my line of work. I am not ev en an amateur; I am just piecing all these things together in my spare time, not out of curiosity even, but to quell the sensation of utter disgust caused by th e sight of that literary paper's cover. Self-therapy, then, and who cares about sources so long as it works. At any rate, regardless of who approached whom, Orl ov seems to have been retained by the CIA from the 1950s onward. Whether he was on the payroll or just free-lancing is hard to say; but to judge by his decorati ons, as well as by the marginal evidence of his subsequent penmanship, it's a fa ir assumption. Most likely, he was engaged by the agency in an advisory capacity ; nowadays this sort of thing is called consultancy. A good question would be wh ether the fellows back in Moscow knew of his new affiliation. Assuming, for Orlo v's sake, that he didn't notify them himself, for that would still be suicidal, and assuming that the newly born agency couldn't be penetrated--if only for the sake of definitions--the fellows in Moscow were in the dark. Still, they had rea son to believe that Orlov was around, if only as an aspiring thriller writer. As they had no news of him for a couple of decades, they may have wondered. And wh en you wonder, you imagine the worst. In a certain line of work, it's only prude nt. They might even have wanted to check. XXVI. And they had the wherewithal. So they took it out of mothballs and put it in pla ce. Still, they were in no hurry. Not until Nineteen Filthy Fine, that is. Then they suddenly felt pressed. And on Marchember Umpteenth, Willie Fischer gets him self arrested in Brooklyn, New York, by those FBI men and declares, urbi et orbi : I am Rudolph Abel. And the tabloids go ape, in the States and all over the pla ce. And Orlov doesn't squeak. Evidently he doesn't want to see his old pal again . XXVII. What was so special about Nineteen Filthy Fine, you may ask, and why was it impe rative now to check the state of the beans in Orlov's hippothalamus? Even if the y were still all there, hadn't they gone stale and useless? And who says old pal

s must be seen? Well, dear reader, brace yourself for loony assertions. For now we are going to show you, in a big way, that we haven't forgotten our subject. N ow we are cooking literally with oil. XXVIII. Contrary to popular demonology, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union was, from the beginning of its existence, always opportunistic. I am using this term in i ts literal, not its derogatory, sense. Opportunism is the core of any foreign po licy, regardless of the degree of confidence a state may have in itself. It mean s the use of opportunity: objectively present, imagined, or created. For most of its sorry history, the Soviet Union remained a highly insecure customer, trauma tized by the circumstances of its birth, its deportment vis-a-vis the rest of th e world fluctuating between caution and hostility. (Nobody fitted the width of t hat margin better than Molotov, Stalin's foreign minister.) As a consequence, th e Soviet Union could afford only objectively present opportunities. Which it sei zed, notably in 1939, grabbing the Baltic states and half of Poland, as offered to Stalin by Hitler, and in the final stages of the war, when the Soviet Union f ound itself in possession of Eastern Europe. As for the opportunities imagined-the 1928 march on Warsaw, the 1936-39 adventure in Spain, and the 1940 Finnish C ampaign--the Soviet Union paid dearly for these flights of fancy (though in the case of Spain it was reimbursed with the country's gold reserve). The first to p ay, of course, was the General Staff, almost entirely beheaded by 1941. Yet the worst consequence of all these fantasies, I suppose, was that the Red Army's per formance against a handful of Finnish troops made Hitler's temptation to attack Russia absolutely irresistible. The real price for the pleasure of playing with imagined opportunities was the total number of divisions assigned to Operation B arbarossa. XXIX. Victory in the war didn't change Soviet foreign policy much, since the spoils of war hardly matched the gigantic human and industrial losses the war inflicted. The scale of the devastation was extraordinary; the main postwar cry was reconst ruction. This was carried out mainly by means of stripping the conquered territo ries of their technology and transplanting it into the ussr. Psychologically sat isfactory, this however could not put the nation ahead industrially. The country remained a second-or third-rate power, its only claim to consequence being its sheer size and its military machine. Formidable and state of the art as the latt er tried to be, the comfort the nation could derive from it was largely of the n arcissistic sort, given the cumulative strength of its supposed adversaries and the emergence of nuclear weapons. What really fell under the onslaught of that m achine, however, was the Soviet Union's foreign policy--its options defined, as it were, by its legions. To this reversal of Clausewitz one must add the growing rigidity of a state apparatus petrified by the fear of personal responsibility and imbued with the notion that the first word and the last word on all matters, above all on matters of foreign policy, belonged to Stalin. Under the circumsta nces, diplomatic initiatives, let alone attempts at creating opportunities, were unthinkable. What's more, the distinction between a created opportunity and an imagined one can be galling. It takes a mind accustomed to the dynamics of a wel l-heeled economy (to the accumulation of wealth, surplus production, and so on) to tell one from another. If you are short on that sort of expertise, you may co nfuse the one thing for the other. And well into the 1950s, the Soviet Union was short on it. It still is. XXX. And yet in the late 1950s the Soviet Union undertakes something rather spectacul ar, something that leaves you with the sense that, with the death of Stalin in 1 953, Soviet foreign policy comes to life. After the Suez debacle in the autumn o f 1956, the ussr undertakes an unusually well-coordinated and well-sustained pus h toward the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. This departure is as sudden as it is successful. Its goal, as hindsight avails us, is control of the Middle East, or, more pointedly, of its oil fields. The logic behind this move is simp le and fairly Marxist: whoever controls energy resources controls production. In other words, the idea is to bring the Western industrial democracies to their k

nees. Whether to do it directly, by sending troops into the region, or by proxy, by supporting the local Arab regimes and turning them pro-Soviet, is, for the m oment, a matter of circumstance and logistics; the proxy option is obviously pre ferable. And initially this works: a number of Arab states in the region go proSoviet, and so fast that one may think that these societies were ripe for Commun ist ideology, or at least accustomed to that sort of discourse. They were not. T he few existing CP cells in King Farouk's Egypt, for instance, were wiped out un der Nasser entirely, their members turned into cellmates or dangled from the rop e. An even greater Marxist dearth marked--still does--the rest of the Islamic wo rld, east and west of Cairo: the culture of the Book won't abide another one, es pecially one written by a Jew. Still, the first Soviet steps in the region met w ith success, the degree of which could be explained only by the newcomer's recou rse to some sort of network within those societies, and with access to all its l evels. Such a network couldn't be of German origin (not even in Egypt), since Re inhard Gehlen, the postwar head of West German intelligence, sold his entire fil e cabinet in the late 1940s to the United States. Nor could it be French, who we re a marginal presence in the region to begin with, and then fiercely loyal to F rance. That left the local pro-British element, presumably taking its cue--in th e vacuum left by the master race's withdrawal--from some local resident (station ed, say, in Beirut). Out of nostalgia, perhaps, out of the hope for the Empire's return. At any rate, it certainly wasn't the novelty of the Russian version of the infidel that nearly delivered the region to the Soviets in the late 1950s; i t was a created opportunity. XXXI. Imagine this blueprint on a drawing board somewhere in Moscow thirty-five or for ty years ago. It says: there is a vacuum left in the Middle East by the British. Fill it up. Support new Arab leaders: one by one, or bundle them together into some sort of confederation, say, into a United Arab Republic or League. Give the m arms, give them anything. Drive them into debt. Tell them that they can pay yo u back if they hike their oil prices. Tell them that they can be unreasonable ab out that, that you'll back them up all the way; and you've got nukes. In no time , the West cries uncle, the Arabs get rich, and you control the Arabs. You becom e top dog, as befits the first socialist country in the world. As for how to get your foot in the door, it's all taken care of. You'll get along with these guys just fine, they don't like Jews either. XXXII. And imagine this blueprint being not of your own manufacture. For it simply coul d not have been. In order to conceive of it, you would have to be acquainted wit h the region, and intimately so. You ought to know who is who there, what this s heikh or that colonel is up to, his pedigree and hang-ups. In Moscow and its vic inity, there is nobody with that sort of data. Furthermore, you ought to know ab out oil revenues, the market, its fluctuations, stocks, this or that industrial democracy's annual intake of crude, tankers' fleets, refineries, stuff like that . There is nobody acquainted with this sort of thing on your staff, or moonlight ing elsewhere either. And even if to imagine that such a fellow existed, a doctr inaire Marxist and a bookworm, with the clearance to read Western periodicals--e ven if such a fellow existed, and came up with such a blueprint, he would have t o have a godfather in the Politburo to place this blueprint on the drawing board ; and placing it there would give that member of the Politburo an edge that his colleagues wouldn't tolerate for a split second. Ultimately this plan could not have been conceived by a Russian, if only because Russia herself has oil; actual ly plenty of it. You don't regard as a source of energy something you waste. Had it been homemade, this blueprint would never have seen the light of day. Beside s, it's too damn close to an imagined opportunity. The very reason that it is on your drawing board, though, is that it has nothing to do with the native imagin ation. That alone should be enough to qualify it as a created opportunity. For i t comes from without, and its main attraction is that it is foreign-made. To mem bers of the Soviet Politburo in the 1950s, this blueprint was what blue jeans ar e to their kids. They liked it very much. Still, they wanted to check the label. And they had the wherewithal.

XXXIII. And while they are checking the label, dear reader, let me give you something st raight, without the author's interference. Harold Adrian Russell Philby, "Kim" t o his chums in England and especially in Russia, where this nickname rang no Kip ling bell, being instead a brand-new Soviet name, popular especially in the 1930 s, since it was the acronym of Kommunisticzeskii Internatzional Molodezhi (Commu nist International of Youth), was born in Ambala, India, in--as the stamp rightl y says--1912. His daddy was Harry St. John Philby, a great English Arabist and e xplorer who subsequently converted to Islam, and became an adviser to King Ibn S aud of guess which country. The boy was educated at Westminster and Trinity Coll ege, Cambridge, where he read history and economics and was a member of the Apos tles. After Cambridge he free-lanced for various London publications, and in thi s capacity he went in 1937 to Spain to cover the Civil War and later on was take n up by the Times, for which he covered the initial stages of World War II. That 's essentially what was known about the 28-year-old man by 1940, when he was emp loyed by MI6, the counterintelligence branch of the fabled British SIS, and give n the job of handling anti-Communist counterespionage matters. Presumably at his own request. During the war years he moves rapidly through the ranks, gets stat ioned in Istanbul, and becomes, in 1946, the head of Soviet counterintelligence. That's a big job, which he abandons only three years later, having been posted as first secretary of the British Embassy in Washington, that is, as chief liais on officer between the SIS and the CIA, where, among other things, he becomes a close friend of James Angleton, the CIA's head of counterintelligence. On the wh ole, it is a marvelous career. The man is awarded the obe for his wartime servic es, he is greatly respected by the foreign office and the gentlemen of the press , and is groomed to become the head of the SIS. That, essentially, is what was k nown to his peers and his superiors about this 39-year-old man in 1951, when som ething rather untoward occurs. Two of his old pals, way back from Cambridge days , Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, turn out to be Soviet spies, and flee to the S oviet Union. What's worse, a suspicion lurks in the heads of people-in-the-know on both sides of the Atlantic that it was Philby who warned them off. He is inve stigated, nothing is proved, doubt persists, and he is asked to resign. Life is cruel, the best of pals can bring you down. Such was the verdict of many, includ ing the Foreign Office. He resumes his journalistic career--after all, he is sti ll in his 40s--but the inquiries continue. Some people just don't give up. In 19 55 Harold Macmillan, then the British foreign secretary, in a statement before t he Commons, fully exonerates Philby of any wrongdoing. His slate wiped clean, Ph ilby obtains, through the Foreign Office's misty-eyed assistance, the job of for eign correspondent for The Economist and The Observer in Beirut, whereto he sail s in 1956, never to see the chalk cliffs of Sussex again. XXXIV. It's three years later that the fellows in Moscow click their tongues admiring t he blueprint. Still, they want to check the label. For what is a clean slate to some is the writing on the wall to others. They figure that the Brits couldn't g et any goods on a Brit because they were searching the Brits; they were doomed b ecause they were engaged in a tautology. For the job of a mole is to outsmart th e natives. As for the Russian end--should they ever gain access to it, which is highly unlikely--it would reveal nothing either. The identity of a mole, especia lly a mole so highly placed, wouldn't be known even to the case officer running him, it would be only a code name or a bunch of digits at best. That's as much a s even the most knowledgeable defector can tell you, not to mention the fact tha t he would be defecting straight into the arms of the SIS counterintelligence se ction, and guess who is in charge of that. The only two people who might know hi s identity would be the present Soviet head of counterintelligence, and that far no Brit could ever go, or the counterintelligence officer who recruited the man initially. A sergeant, by definition, is older than his recruit, and since we a re talking here about the 1950s, that sergeant should by now be either dead or i ndeed running the whole Soviet counterintelligence show. Most likely though he i s dead, since the best way to protect the recruit's identity is to kill the serg eant. Still, in 1933, when a 21-year-old Cambridge graduate was recruited, thing

s were not as watertight as they are now in the 1950s, when we are checking the label, and the good old--no, dead--sergeant might have said something to his sup erior (who was presumably dead, too: those purges of the state security apparatu s in the late 1930s were not for nothing) or had a witness to the recruitment, o r the poor young witless recruit himself might have rubbed shoulders with somebo dy who later went bad. After all, his choice of pals is what brought him down, t hough for a while they delivered all the comings and goings of the Anglo-America n Atomic Energy Commission. (Good flies on the wall they were, but now look at t hem coming here to roost!) Let bygones be bygones, of course; but if we are to c arry out this blueprint, we need something tighter than an exoneration by Harold Macmillan--bless his heart--in Commons, we need complete immunity for our man a gainst any whistle-blowers. No surprises, no voices from the past, no skeletons in the closet. So who are those guys he might have rubbed shoulders with before they went bad? Where are their death certificates? XXXV. And they can't find Orlov's. And Willie Fischer sings his world famous Abel lyri c. And Orlov doesn't want to see his old pal. And they conclude that he is eithe r dead or not suicidal. And so they move into the Middle East, into Egypt, Syria , Yemen, Iraq, Libya; they seize the created opportunity. They shower new Arab l eaders with planeloads and shiploads of military surplus, advisers, and whatnot; they drive those nations into debt. And the advisers advise the leaders to hike oil prices to pay them back. And the leaders do just that: by high margins and with impunity, backed by this new set of infidels with nukes. And the West start s to kowtow and cry "UN"--but that's just the first syllable of uncle. And now t he faithful, the fidel and the infidel, hate the Jews together. It all works jus t like the man said it would. XXXVI. But life is cruel, and one day the new oil-producing pals get greedy. They creat e a cartel, OPEC by name, and start filling up their own coffers. They put the s queeze on the West, but not for our sake! They also quarrel among themselves. An yhow, they get richer than their old masters, not to mention us. That wasn't in the blueprint. The architect of our Middle East policy, the son of King Ibn Saud 's adviser, an observer and economist to boot, our great and unexposed--well, te chnically speaking--secret agent should have been able to foresee this turn of e vents! Thus far everything went according to the plan: he delivered, and now thi s. Well, he better tell us what to do next. Basically, we need him here now, on a day-to-day basis. Anyway, it's safer for him here in Moscow; fewer temptations as well. He can concentrate better. It ain't Beirut. XXXVII. It certainly was much colder. At least for the spy who came in from the warmth. At long last. Actually, exactly thirty years after he was recruited. Whatever th at means, except that he is 51 years old now and has to start a new life. Which, after all, isn't that hard, since the local lads go out of their privileged way s to assist you; and besides, at 51 no life is that new, no country is that fore ign. Especially if you have spied for that country all your adult life. And espe cially if you did it not for money, but out of conviction. So the place should b e familiar to you, at least mentally. For it's the conviction that is your home, your ultimate comfort: you blow all your life savings on furnishing it. If the world around you is poor and colorless, then you stuff this place with all manne r of mental candelabra and Persian carpets. If that world used to be rich in tex ture, then you'll settle for mental monochrome, for a few abstract chairs. XXXVIII. And, as we are on our last leg, dear suffering reader, let's get a bit anachroni stic. There is a certain type of Englishman that appreciates frugality and ineff iciency: the one who nods contentedly at a stalled elevator or at one boy being caned for another boy's prank. He recognizes botch and bungle the way one recogn izes one's relatives. He recognizes himself in a peeling, wobbly railing, damp h otel sheets, slovenly trees in a soot-laden window, bad tobacco, the smelly carr iage of a delayed train, bureaucratic obstacles, indecision and sloth, impotent shrugs; certainly in poorly cut serge clothes, in gray. So he loves Russia; main

ly from a distance, as he cannot afford the trip, except perhaps later in life, in his 50s or 60s, when he retires. And he'd do a lot for Russia, for his ineffi cient yet dramatic, soulful, Doctor Zhivago-like (the movie, not the book) Russi a, where the twentieth century hasn't yet set its Goodyear tire, where his child hood still continues. He doesn't want his Russia to go American. He wants her to stay intense and awkward, in brown woolen stockings with broad pink garters: no nylons, and please no pantyhose. It is his equivalent of rough trade, of the wo rking-class lads for whom his old Cambridge pals will be prowling London pubs fo r the rest of their lives. He is straight, though; and it's Russia for him, if i t's not Germany or Austria. XXXIX. And if Russia is Communist, so much the better. Especially if it is 1933 and Ger many is out of the question. And if somebody with a slight accent asks you to wo rk for Russia, and you are just 21, you say yes, because it's unlike anything el se, and it sounds subversive. If school teaches you anything, it is to belong to a party, or at least to a club, and to form a cell. The CP is just another Apos tles, a sort of frat, and it preaches brotherhood. At any rate, you go for what your pals do, and to them "the world proletariat" conjures up rough trade on a g rand scale. And in a while you hear that slight accent again, and you are asked to do a job--nothing big, though faintly foul. And you do it; and now the slight accent has goods on you. If he is smart, the next time he asks you to do someth ing, he doesn't mention the world proletariat, he mentions Russia. Because you w on't do it, say, for India, though India, technically speaking, is part of the w orld, not to mention the proletariat. Fifty years ago social fiction was still e thnocentric, and so were spies. More Chekhov for you, then; more of Constance Ga rnett's Tolstoy on the train ride to Spain, for it's the time. It is also the pl ace. A bright young thing can sample that brotherhood here: its blood, lice, hop e, despair, defeat, apathy. Instead he hangs around in the lobby of the Nacional , sees some scum upstairs, and is told--to his secret relief, no doubt--to switc h sides, for the sake of the greater good. That's how a bright young thing learn s about the big picture, a.k.a. the future. The next time he hears the slight ac cent he knows it is a voice from the future. The accent will be different, since the first slightly accented throat has already been cut for the bright young th ing's eventual safety; and if that throat had a beloved, she's already digging t he permafrost of her twenty-five-year sentence in the Russian Far East, against the majestic snowy backdrop of a would-be Zhivago movie. Yet by the time the voi ce from the future enters your ear, there is wwii on your hands, Russia is an al ly, and the SIS wants you to take part in the war effort. The big picture barges into view, and you ask for a Russian job. And since you are a gentleman, you ar e welcomed to it by senior gentlemen who can be identified as such, however, mai nly by which door they push in a loo. Well, not even then. XL. So you know the country where you end up thirty years later at the ripe age of 5 1. Full of beans, no doubt, but past your prime. Ah, the chalk cliffs of Sussex! Ah, the accursed island! Ah, the whole Pax Britannica! They'll pay dearly for r uining such a brilliant career, for putting a clever man out to grass at the apo gee of his ascent! A clever man knows how to get even with an empire: by using a nother empire. Never the twain shall meet. That's what makes a big picture grow bigger. Not a tooth for a tooth, but a mouthful for a tooth! Perhaps the greates t satisfaction of every spy is the thought that he is playing Fate, that it's he who pulls strings. Or else, cuts them. He fashions himself after Clotho, or per haps after Arachne. A deus in machina that runs on petrol, he may not even catch the irony of being situated in Mazoutny Lane--well, not initially. At any rate, deus or deuce, controlling oil fields is a greater game than betraying the secr ets of British intelligence to the Russians. There is not much left to betray in London anyway, whereas here the stakes are huge. The entire world order is at s take. Whoever wins here, it will be his victory. He, an observer and economist t o boot, didn't read Das Kapital and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom for nothing. Not to mention that the victory will be Russia's, since what can you expect of demo cracies: no resolve. Imagine Russia, his slovenly brown-woolen-stockings-cum-pin

k-garters-clad Russia, as the world's master, and not because of the nukes or th e ballistic missiles only: imagine her, soulful and slothful, with all the Arabi an peninsula's oil revenues under her pillow--uncertain, Chekhovian, anti-ration alist! A far better master (nay, mistress) of the world than his own Cartesian W est, so easy to fool, himself being a good example. And should worse come to wor st, should it be not Russia but some local, some sheikh or dictator, it's fine b y him too. In fact, daddy would be proud of him if it should go all to the Saudi s. XLI. And there it went, practically all of it. So much of it, in any case, that it sh ould be the Saudis issuing this stamp, not the Russians. Well, perhaps one day t hey will. Or the Iraqis, or the Iranians. Whoever is to master the oil monopoly should issue the stamp. Ah, Muslims, Muslims! Where would they be now, were it n ot for the Soviet foreign policy of the 1960s and 1970s, that is, were it not fo r the late Mr. Philby? Imagine them unable to purchase a Kalishnikov, let alone a rocket launcher. They'd be unfit for the front page, they wouldn't make even t he backdrop for a pack of camels . Ah, but life is cruel, and beneficiaries don't remember their benefactors; nor, for that matter, do victims remember the villai n. And perhaps they shouldn't. Perhaps the origins of good and bad are better of f remaining obscured--especially the latter. Does it really matter what clouds t he godhead: the concept of dialectical materialism or the Prophet's turban? Can we tell one from another? In the final analysis, there is no hierarchy between t he cherry orchard and the triviality of the sand; it is only a matter of prefere nce. For men, as well as for their money. Money, evidently, lacks a conscience o f its own, and the jackpot goes to the desert simply out of its kinship for mult itudes. On the whole, like a certain kind of Englishman, money has an eastward l onging, if only because that realm is extremely populous. A secret agent, then, is but an early bird, a big bank's harbinger. And if he settles there, in the Ea st, and goes native, helped along by local liquor, or a willing maiden, well, so what? Have Noah's pigeons returned? Ah, dear reader, imagine a letter sent toda y or in the near future from Moscow to Riyadh. What do you think it will contain ? A birthday greeting, vacation plans, news of a loss in the family, complaints about the cold climate? No, more likely a request for money. Say, for an investm ent in the well-being of Riyadh's fellow Muslims on Soviet territory. And it wil l be written in English, this letter, and it won't be worth perlustration. A pos tmaster, perhaps, having glanced at its return address, may lift the crescent of the eyebrow obscured by his traditional headgear, but after a momentary hesitat ion he'll shove this envelope into an appropriate slot: an envelope with a Philb y stamp on it. XLII. Aglum thought, nods the exhausted reader. But wouldn't things have come to this juncture anyway, even without our English friend's assistance? Sure they would h ave, given the so-called dynamics of the modern world, which means the populatio n explosion and the industrial gluttony of the West. These two would suffice; no need for a third party, let alone for an individual agency. At best, our Englis h friend just articulated what was in the air or, as it were, afoot. Other than that, he was utterly insignificant. Sooner or later this was bound to happen, Ki m or no Kim, Russia or no Russia. Well, without Russia perhaps it would have tak en a touch longer, but so what. Individuals are incidental, it's all economics, isn't it? In this sense, even if an individual exists, he doesn't. Sounds a bit solipsistic, in a Marxist way; but our English friend would be the first to appr eciate that. After all, historical necessity was his motto, his credo, his occas ional rebuke to pangs of conscience. And after that, for all the professional ha zards of one's trade, a belief in the imminent triumph of one's cause is safe be tting, isn't it? (What if your cause triumphs in your lifetime, eh?) At any rate , from the standpoint of historical necessity, our man was of no use, at best he was redundant. For the objective of history was to make the Arabs rich, the Wes t poor, and the Russians bob and bubble in limbo. This is what the bottom line s ays in that true bel canto of necessity, and who is the author to argue with it? A penny, then, for our friend's sense of mission; but not much more for the aut

hor's flight of fancy either. Anyway, what are his sources? XLIII. "Sources?" shrugs the author contemptuously. Who needs them? Who can trust sourc es? And since when? And does the reader realize what he is getting into by suspe cting his author of being wrong, not to mention by proving it? Aren't you afraid , dear reader, that your successful refutation of the author's little theory mig ht boil down to an unescapable conclusion on your part that the dark brown subst ance in which you find yourself up to your nostrils in the world today is immane nt, preordained on high, at the very least sponsored by Mother Nature? Do you re ally need that? Whereas the author aims to spare you this anguish by proving tha t the aforementioned substance is of human manufacture. In this respect, your au thor is a true humanist. No, dear reader, you don't need sources. Neither source s nor tributaries of defectors' evidence; not even electronic precipitation rain ing unto your lap from the satellite-studded heaven. With our sort of flow, all you need is an estuary, a mouth really; and beyond that a sea with the bottom li ne for a horizon. Well, that much you've already seen. XLIV. Nobody, though, knows the future. Least of all those who believe in historical d eterminism; and next to them, spies and journalists. Perhaps that's why the form er often disguise themselves as the latter. Of course, when it comes to the futu re, any occupation is good cover. Still, information-gathering beats them all, s ince any bit of information, including a secret one, is generated by the past: a lmost by definition, information deals with faits accomplis. Be it a new bomb, a planned invasion, or a shift in policy, you can learn only about what has alrea dy happened, what has already taken place. The paradox of espionage is that the more you know about your adversary, the more your own development is stunted, si nce this knowledge forces you into trying to catch up with him, to thwart his ef forts. He keeps you occupied, by altering your own priorities. The better your s pies, therefore, the more you fall into dependence on what you learn. You are no t acting any longer: you are reacting. This maroons you in the past, with little access to the present and none to the future. Well, not to a future of your own design, let alone your own making. Imagine the Soviets not stealing American at omic secrets and thus spending the last four decades with no nukes to brandish. It could have been a different country; not much more prosperous, perhaps, given the doctrine, but at least the fiasco that we have recently witnessed might hav e occurred much earlier. If worse came to worst, they might have built a viable version of their socialism. But when you steal something, the catch possesses yo u, or at least your faculties. Considering the industry of our English friend an d his pals, it went far beyond faculties; both hands of their Russian fence were , for quite some time, too busy to build socialism, they were hoarding goods. It could be argued that by betraying the Empire in such volume, the boys in fact s erved the Empire in a far more substantial manner than its most ardent standardbearers. For the wealth of secret intelligence passed to the Soviets by the Camb ridge class of 1931 mesmerized its recipients to the point of making at least th eir foreign policy thoroughly contingent on the harvest yielded by their own pla nts. For the men in Moscow Center, it's been like reading the Sunday papers nonstop seven days a week instead of doing the dishes or taking the kids to the zoo . XLV. So you can't say it was all in vain, dear reader, can you? Even though you may b e as tired of the subject as the author himself. Let's claim fatigue, dear reade r, and reach no conclusion, and spare ourselves the distrust, not to say the acr imony. On the whole, there is nothing wrong with intricacy of thought except tha t it's always achieved at the expense of thought's depth. Let's get into your Ja panese Toyota, which doesn't consume a lot of the Arab oil-product, and go for a meal. Chinese? Vietnamese? Thai? Indian? Mexican? Hungarian? Polish? The more w e bungle abroad, the more varied our diet. Spanish? Greek? French? Italian? Perh aps the only good thing about the dead spies was that they had a choice. But as I write this, the news comes over the wireless that the Soviet Union is no more. Armenian, then? Uzbek? Kazakh? Estonian? For some reason, we don't feel like ea

ting at home tonight. We don't want to eat English. XLVI. Why should one bother so much about dead spies? Why can't one contain the repuls ion that rises at the sight of a literary magazine's cover? Isn't this an overre action? What's so new about someone's belief that a just society exists elsewher e, so special about this old Rousseauist lunacy, enacted or not? Every epoch and every generation is entitled to its own utopia, and so was Philby's. Surely the ability to cling to that sort of garbage beyond the age of down payment (not to mention the age of retirement) is puzzling; but one can easily put this down to temperament or to some organic disorder. A Catholic, a lapsed Catholic especial ly, can appreciate the predicament, and make a meal out of it if he is a writer; and so can a heathen. Or did I feel queasy simply because of the violation of s cale, because of the printing enlargement of something small, a stamp really, as a result of which the perforation line takes on the dimension of a cloth fringe : a hanky's, a pillowcase's, a bedspread's, a petticoat's? Maybe I have a proble m with fringed linen--a childhood trauma again? The day was hot, and for a momen t it felt like the enlargement of the stamp on the magazine's cover would go on and on, and envelop Belsize Park, Hampstead, and keep growing, larger and larger . A vision, you know. Too much reading of surrealist poets. Or else too many pla cards with the Politburo members' faces on the old retina--and the man on the st amp looks like one of them, for all his resemblances to Alec Guinness and Trevor Howard. Plus, of course, the Cyrillic enough to get dizzy. But it wasn't like t hat. There was no vision. There was just a face, of the kind you wouldn't pay at tention to were it not for the caption, which, apart from anything else, was in Cyrillic. At that moment I regretted that I knew Russian. I stood there groping for an English word to shield my wits from the familiarity that the Cyrillic let ters exuded. As is often the case with mongrels, I couldn't come up with the rig ht word instantly, and so I turned and left the store. I only remembered the wor d well outside, but because of what it was, I couldn't get myself back to the st ore to buy the issue. The word was "treachery." XLVII. A wonderful word, that. It creaks like a board laid over a chasm. Onomatopoeical ly, it beats ethics. It has all the euphony of a taboo. For the ultimate boundar y of a tribe is its language. If a word doesn't stop you, then a tribe isn't you rs. Its vowels and its sibilants don't trigger your instincts, don't send your n erve cells into revulsion, don't make you wince. Which is to say, your command o f this tribe's language is just a matter of mimicry. Which, in turn, points at y our belonging to a different evolutionary order. Sublingual or supralingual, at least as regards the language that contains the word "treachery." Which is to pr event the sudden reversal of a bone to jelly. Which is to say, evolution never e nds: it still continues. The Origin of Species ain't the end of the road; at bes t a milestone. Which is to say, not all people are people. Might as well add thi s stamp to the Shells and Mollusks series. It's still a seabed. XLVIII. You can only enlarge a stamp, you can't reduce it. That is, you can but reductio n will serve no purpose. That is the self-defense of small items, or, if you wil l, their raison d'?tre. They can only be enlarged. That is, if you are in the gr aphics department of a literary paper of humble strikebreaking origins. "Blow it up," says the editor, and you cheerfully trot off to the lab. Can't reduce it, can you? Simply wouldn't cross your mind. Nowadays just push a button, and it ei ther grows or shrinks. To life-size, or to the size of a louse. Push it once mor e, and the louse is gone. Extinct. Not what the editor asked for, though. He wan ts it life-size: large. The size of his fantasy, if not his dilemma. "Would you buy this man a drink or shake hands with him?" The old English pickle, except no w it's grown chic, with perhaps a touch of retro to it. Ah, these days you push a button, and the whole mental swamp gets heaving and gurgling, from Pas de Cala is to the Bering Strait, from the 1930s onward. For that's what history is for t he generation currently active: for lapsed Catholics, editors in chief, and the like. For nowadays everything is chic and retro: this isn't the fin de siecle fo r nothing. There is little to look forward to save your bank statement. Whom wou

ld you spy for nowadays if you had access to secret information, if you still ac hed to defy your class or your country? For the Arabs? For the Japanese? Whose p lant, let alone mole, could you be? The village has gone truly global; there is a dearth of allegiance, a dearth of affinity. Ay, you can't betray Europe to Asi a any longer, nor, I'm afraid, the other way around. It's goodbye to conviction, goodbye to the good old godless communism. From now on, it's all nostalgia for you, old boy, all retro. From your baggy pants to the matte black of your video, stereo, or dashboard echoing the burnished steel of a gun barrel. That's about how radical, how chic it's going to be: in Europe, but in Asia too. So go ahead, blow up that louse from the 1950s, for reducing it might rob you of your emotio nal history: What would you be without that, without a big-time traitor never ca ught and never recanting in your past? Just a cipher in tax bracket hell, not di ssimilar to that of the old wretch when he still drew his salary in pounds. Go a head and blow it up; pity it can't be made three-dimensional. Pity, too, that yo u have no idea, as you are pressing "enlarge," that in less than three weeks the whole thing on whose behalf your man toiled all his life will go bust. XLIX. In a dream. A cross between a meadow and a communal garden somewhere in Kensingt on, with a fountain or a statue in the middle of it. A sculpture, anyway. Modern , but not very modern. Abstract, with a big hole in the center and a few strings across it: like a guitar but less feminine. Gray. Sort of like by Barbara Hepwo rth, but made of discarded thoughts and unfinished sentences. Lacelike. On the p linth there is an inscription: "To Beloved Spider. Grateful Cobwebs." L. Twangs of balalaika, the crackle of atmospherics. A hand fiddling with an eye-bl inking wireless. It's Moscow, Russia, anytime between 1963 and 1988. More atmosp herics and balalaika. Then the first bars of Lilliburlero and an upright female voice: "This is the BBC World Service. The news. Read to you by " In her 30s, per haps. Well-scrubbed face, almost no makeup. A chiffon blouse. White. And a cardi gan. Most likely beige, the tea-cum-milk color. A broadcloth skirt, knee-high. B lack or dark blue, like the evening sky outside. Or maybe it's gray; but knee-hi gh. Knee-high knee-high knee-high. And then there is a slip. Oh my oh my oh my. Another Boeing is blown up in a desert. Pol Pot, Phnom Penh. Mister--a split-sec ond pause--Mugabe. Knee-high. Main thing, the lace. Fragile and intricate like c ircumlocution. Minuscule dotty flowers. That never see the light of day. And tha t's why they are so white. Oh blast! Sihanouk, Pinochet, Rudi Deutchke. Chile, C hile, Chile, Chile. Dotty little pansies smothered to death by light-brown tight s from a shop in Islington. That's what the world came down to. From the step-by -step approach, from the silks/flesh/garter/bingo system to the either/or of pan tyhose. Detente, sygint, icbms. New tricks but the dog's too old. For these, and for the old ones too. Well, looks like. And going to end up here after all. Pit y. Can't win them all, can you? Another whiskey then. "The main points again " In her 30s, if you ask me, and on the plump side. Dinnertime anyway. Methuselah fa ncies dotty little pansies. Methuselah fancies All that matters in this life is that cobwebs outlive the spider. How does that thingummy--Tyutchev's! Tyutchev i s the name--lyric go? We are not given to appraise In whom or how our word may live on. And we are vouchsafed oblivion The way we once were given grace. Dushen'ka! Dushen'ka! What's for dinner? "Ah, dahrleeng, I thought we would eat English tonight. Boiled beef."

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 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 togethe r. And toward the end of the siege, there was canned corned beef from America. S wift, 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 wh ile. Still, its flavor was less memorable than the cans themselves. Tall, square -shaped, with an opening key attached to the side, they heralded different mecha nical principles, a different sensibility altogether. That key skeining a tiny st rip of metal to get the can open, was a revelation to a Russian child: we knew o nly knives. The country was still nails, hammers, nuts, and bolts: that's what he ld it together, and it was to stay that way for most of our lives. That's why, t here 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 mot her detaching the key, unbending the little tab and sticking it into the key's e ye, and then turning the key time and again around its axis, in sheer bewilderme nt. Long after their contents vanished into the cloaca, these tall, somewhat streaml ined around the corners (like cinema screens!), dark red or brown cans with fore ign lettering on their sides survived on many families' shelves and windows ills, partly as aesthetic objects, partly as good containers for pencils, screwdriver s, 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 (wher e 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 sur vived it, we were richly provided with stuff to romanticize or to fantasize abou t. In addition to the usual childhood diet of Dumas and Jules Verne, we had mili tary paraphernalia, which always goes well with boys. With us, it went exception ally well, since it was our country that won the war. Curiously enough, though, it was the military hardware of the other side that at tracted us most, not that of our own victorious Red Army. Names of German airpla nes Junkers, Stukas, Messerschmidts, Focke-Wulfs were constantly on our lips. So wer e Schmeisser automatic rifles, Tiger tanks, ersatz rations. Guns were made by Kr upp, bombs were courtesy of I. G. Farben-Industrie. A child's ear is always sensit ive 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 t hose 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 becaus e luckily we'd never known them in any other capacity than as POWs. Similarly, we saw quite a lot of German military equipment in the war museums, wh ich cropped up in the late forties everywhere. Those were our best outings far bet ter 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 wer e quite reluctant to do so; but they'd answer in great detail our inquiries abou t the firepower of this or that German machine gun or the types of explosives us ed in this or that bomb. This reluctance was caused, not by their desire to spar e gentle imaginations the horrors of war, or themselves the memories of dead fri ends and the guilty feeling of being alive. No, they simply saw through our idle curiosity and didn't approve of that. Ill Each one of them our alive fathers, that is kept, of course, some memento of that wa r. It could be a set of binoculars (Zeiss!), or a German U-boat officer's cap wi th appropriate insignia, or an accordion inlaid with mother-of- pearl, or a ster ling-silver cigarette case, a gramophone, or a camera. When I was twelve, my fat her 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 mesmerizi ng green eye indicating the quality of reception. It had, if I remember things c orrectly, only six tubes, and two feet of simple wire would do as its aerial. Bu t here was the rub. To have an aerial sticking out of a window could mean only o ne thing to the police. To try to attach your radio to the building's main anten na 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, per iod. The solution was a web-like arrangement under the ceiling of your room, whi ch is what I made. That way, of course, I couldn't get Radio Bratislava or, more over, Delhi. But then I knew neither Czech nor Hindi. And as for the BBC, the Vo ice of America, or Radio Free Europe broadcasts in Russian, they were jammed anyw ay. 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 J azz, with the richest-in-the-world bass-baritone of Willis Conover, its disc joc key! To this brown, shining-Iike-an-old-shoe Philips set, I owe my first bits of Engl ish and my introduction to the Jazz Pantheon. When we were twelve, the German na mes on our lips gradually began to be replaced by those of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Clifford Brown, Sidney Bechet, Django Reinhardt, an d Charlie Parker. Something began to happen, I remember, even to our walk: the jo ints of our highly inhibited Russian frames harkened to "swing." Apparently I wa s not the only one in my generation who knew how to put two feet of plain wire t o good use. Through six symmetrical holes in its back, in the subdued glow and flicker of the radio tubes, in the maze of contacts, resistors, and cathodes, as incomprehensi ble as the languages they were generating, I thought I saw Europe. Inside, it al ways looked like a city at night, with scattered neon lights. And when at the ag e of thirty-two I indeed landed in Vienna, I immediately felt that, to a certain extent, I knew the place. To say the least, falling asleep my first nights in V ienna felt distinctly like being switched off by some invisible hand far away, i n Russia. It was a sturdy machine. When one day, in a paroxysm of anger at my incessant fi ddling with various frequencies, my father threw it on the floor, its frame came apart, but it kept receiving. Because I wouldn't dare take it to a professional radio mechanic, I tried to repair that Oder-Neisse- like crack as best I could, using all sorts of glue and rubber bands; but from then on, it existed in the fo rm of two somewhat loosely connected bulky halves. Its end came when the tubes ga ve out, although once or twice I managed to track down their analogues through t he grapevine of friends and acquaintances. Yet even when it became just a mute b ox, it still remained in our family as long as the family itself existed. In the l ate sixties, everyone bought a Latvian-made Spidola, with its telescopic antenna and all sorts of transistors inside. Admittedly, it had better reception and wa s more portable. Still, I saw it once in a repair shop with its back removed. Th e best I can say about the way it looked inside was that it resembled some geogr aphic map (roads, railroads, rivers, tributaries). It didn't look like anything in particular; it didn't even look like Riga. iv But the greatest spoils of war were, of course, films! There were lots of them, and they were mostly of Hollywood prewar production, with (as we were able to de termine two decades later) Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Tyrone Power, Johnn y Weissmuller, and others. They were mostly about pirates, Elizabeth I, Cardinal Bichelieu, et cetera nothing to do with reality. The closest they approached to o ur time was in Waterloo Bridge with Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh. Since our go vernment wasn't keen on paying for the rights, no credits were given and, as a r ule, no names of characters or actors either. The show would start in the follow ing fashion. The light dimmed, and on the screen, in white letters against a blac k background, this message would appear: this film was captured as a military tr

ophy in the course of the great war for our motherland. It would flicker there f or a minute or so; then the film started. A hand with a candle in it lit up a pi ece of parchment with the royal pirates, captain blood, or robin hood in Cyrilli c on it. That might be followed by an explanatory note indicating time and place of action, also in Cyrillic but often fashioned after Gothic script. Surely thi s was theft, but we in the audience couldn't care less. For that, we were too ab sorbed in reading subtitles and following the action. Perhaps just as well. The absence of who was who on the screen imparted to these films the anonymity of folklore and the air of universality. They held us in gr eater sway and thrall than all the subsequent output of the neorealists or the n ouvelle vague. The absence of credits made them openly archetypal at the time the early fifties: the last years of Stalin's rule. The Tarzan series alone, I dares ay, did more for de-Stalinization than all Khrushchev's speeches at the Twentiet h Party Congress and after. One should take into account our latitudes, our buttoned-up, rigid, inhibited, w inter-minded standards of public and private conduct, in order to appreciate the impact of a long-haired naked loner pursuing a blonde through the thick of a tr opical rain forest with his chimpanzee version of Sancho Panza and lianas as mea ns of transportation. Add to that the view of New York (in the last bit of the s eries that was played in Russia), with Tarzan jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge and almost an entire generation's opting out will become understandable. The first thing that came in was, of course, the haircut. We all turned long-hai red at once. That was immediately followed by stovepipe trousers. Ah, what pains , what subterfuge, what effort it cost to convince our mothers/sisters/ aunts to convert our invariably black ballooning postwar pants into straight-leg precurso rs of yet unknown Levi's! But we were adamant and so were our detractors: teachers , police, relatives, neighbors, who'd kick us out of school, arrest us on the st reet, ridicule us, call us names. That's why a man who grew up in the fifties an d the sixties despairs today trying to buy a pair of pants; all this ridiculous, fabric- wasting, baggy stuff! v There was, of course, something more crucial to these trophy movies; it was thei r "one-against-all" spirit, totally alien to the communal, collective-oriented s ensibility of the society we grew up in. Perhaps precisely because all these Sea Hawks and Zorros were so removed from our reality, they influenced us in a way contrary to that intended. Offered to us as entertaining fairy tales, they were received rather as parables of individualism. What would be regarded by a normal viewer as a costume drama with some Renaissance props was regarded by us as historical proof of mdividualism's precedence. Showing humans against the backdrop of nature, a film always has documentary val ue. Connoting a printed page, a black-and-white film does all the more so. Given our closed, better yet our tightly shut, society, we were thus more informed tha n entertained. With what keenness did we scrutinize turrets and ramparts, vaults and moats, grilles and chambers that we'd seen on the screen! For we'd seen them for the first time in our lives! So we took all those papier- mache, cardboard Hollywood props for real, and our sense of Europe, of the West, of history, if y ou will, always owed a great deal to those images. So much so that some among us who later would have landed in the barracks of our penal system frequently impr oved their diet by retelling plots and remembered details of that West to both g uards and fellow inmates who'd never seen those trophy movies. vi Among those trophies one could occasionally bump into a real masterpiece. I reme mber, for instance, That Hamilton Woman with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Also, I seem to recall Gaslight with the then very young Ingrid Bergman. The und erground industry was very alert, and in no time one could buy, from a shady cha racter in the public lavatory or in the park, a postcard-sized print of this or that actress or actor. Errol Flynn in his Sea Hawk outfit was my most sacred pos session, and for years I tried to imitate the forward thrust of his chin and the autonomous motion of his left eyebrow. With the latter, I failed. And before the twang of this sycophantic note dies away, let me mention here som

ething else something that I have in common with Adolf Hitler: the great love of m y youth, whose name was Zarah Leander. I saw her only once, in what was called, then and there, Road to the Scaffold (Das Herz einer Konigin), a story about Mar y, Queen of Scots. I remember nothing about this picture save a scene where her young page rests his head on the stupendous lap of his condemned queen. In my vi ew, she was the most beautiful woman who ever appeared on the screen, and my sub sequent tastes and preferences, valid though they were in themselves, were but de viations from her standard. As attempts to account for a stunted or failed romant ic career go, this one feels to me oddly satisfactory. Leander died two or three years ago, I think, in Stockholm. Shortly before that, a record came out with several Schlagers of hers, among which was a tune called "Die Rose von Nowgorod." The composer's name was given as Rota, and it couldn't be anyone else but Nino Rota himself. The tune beats by far the Lara theme from Doctor Zhivago; the lyrics well, they are blissfully in German, so I don't bother. The voice is that of Marlene Dietrich in timbre, but the singing technique is f ar better. Leander indeed sings; she doesn't declaim. And it occurred to me seve ral times that had the Germans listened to that tune, they would not have been i n the mood to march nach Osten. Come to think of it, no other century has produc ed as much schmaltz as ours; perhaps one should pay closer attention to it. Perh aps schmaltz should be regarded as a tool of cognition, especially given the vas t imprecision of our century. For schmaltz is flesh of the flesh a kid brother ind eed of Schrnerz. We have, all of us, more reasons for staying than for marching. W hat's the point in marching if you are only going to catch up with a very sad tu ne? vii I suppose my generation was the most attentive audience for all that pre- and po stwar dream factories' production. Some of us became, for a while, avid cineaste s, but perhaps for a different set of reasons than our counterparts in the West. For us, films were the only opportunity to see the West. Quite oblivious of the action itself, in every frame we tried to discern the contents of the street or of an apartment, the dashboard of the hero's car, the types of clothes worn by heroines, the sense of space, the layout of the place they were operating in. So me of us became quite adept at determining the location in which a film was shot, and sometimes we could tell Genoa from Naples or, to say the least, Paris from R ome, on the basis of only two or three architectural ensembles. We would arm ours elves with city maps, and we would hotly argue about Jeanne Moreau's address in this film or Jean Marais's in another. But that, as I said, was to happen much later, in the late sixties. And later st ill, our interest in films began to fade away, as we realized that film director s were increasingly of our own age and had less and less to tell us. By that tim e, we were already accomplished book readers, subscribers to Foreign Literature monthly, and we would stroll to the cinema less and less willingly, having realiz ed that there is no point in knowing a place you are not going to inhabit. That, I repeat, was to happen much later, when we were in our thirties. viii One day, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I sat in the courtyard of a huge apartme nt complex driving nails into the lid of a wooden box filled with all sorts of g eological instruments which were to be shipped to the (Soviet) Far East where I my self was about to follow, to join my team. It was early May, but the day was hot and I was bored out of my wits and perspiring. Suddenly, out of one of the top f loors open windows, came "A-tisket, a-tasket" the voice was that of Ella Fitzgerald . Now this was 1955 or 1956, in some grimy industrial outskirt of Leningrad, Rus sia. Good Lord, I remember thinking, how many records must they have produced fo r one of them to end up here, in this brick-cum-concrete absolute nowhere, amid not so much drying-up as soot- absorbing bedsheets and lavender underpants! That 's what capitalism is all about, I said to myself: winning through excess, throu gh overkill. Not through central planning, but through grapeshot. ix I knew the tune, partly because of my radio, partly because in the fifties every city youth had his own collection of so- called bone music. "Bone music" was a

sheet of X-ray film with a homemade copy of some jazz piece on it. The technology of the copying process was beyond my grasp, but I trust it was a relatively sim ple procedure, since the supply was steady and the price reasonable. One could purchase this somewhat morbid-looking stuff (speak of the nuclear age! ) in the same fashion as those sepia pictures of Western movie stars: in parks, in public toilets, at flea markets, in the then-famous "cocktail halls," where y ou could sit on a tall chair sipping a milkshake and think you were in the West. And the more I think of it, the more I become convinced that this was the West. For on the scales of truth, intensity of imagination counterbalances and at time s outweighs reality. On that score, as well as with the benefit of hindsight, I may even insist that we were the real Westerners, perhaps the only ones. With our instinct for individualism fostered at every instance by our collectivist so ciety, with our hatred toward any form of affiliation, be that with a party, a b lock association, or, at that time, a family, we were more American than the Amer icans themselves. And if America stands for the outer limit of the West, for whe re the West ends, we were, I must say, a couple of thousand miles off the West C oast. In the middle of the Pacific. X Somewhere in the early sixties, when the power of suggestion, headed by garter be lts, began its slow exodus from the world, when we found ourselves increasingly reduced to the either/or of pantyhose, when foreigners had already started to ar rive in planeloads in Russia, attracted by its cheap yet very sharp fragrance of slavery, and when a friend of mine, with a faintly contemptuous smile on his li ps, remarked that perhaps it takes history to compromise geography, a girl I was courting gave me for my birthday an accordionlike set of postcards depicting Ve nice. They belonged, she said, to her grandmother, who went to Italy for a honeymoon s hortly before World War I. There were twelve postcards, in sepia, on poor qualit y yellowish paper. The reason she gave them to me was that, at about that time, I was full of two books by Henri de Regnier I'd just finished; both of them had for their setting Venice in winter: Venice thus was then on my lips. Because the pictures were brownish and badly printed, and because of Venice's la titude and its very few trees, one couldn't tell for sure what season was depict ed. People's clothes were of no help, since everyone wore long skirts, felt hats , top hats, bowlers, dark jackets: turn-of-the-century fashions. The absence of color and the general gloom of the texture suggested what I wanted them to sugge st: winter, the true time of the year. In other words, the texture and the melancholy it conveyed, because so familiar t o me in my own hometown, made these pictures more comprehensible, more real. It was almost like reading relatives' letters. And I read them and reread them. And the more I read them, the more apparent it became that this was what the word "W est" meant to me: a perfect city by the winter sea, columns, arcades, narrow pas sages, cold marble staircases, peeling stucco exposing the red-brick flesh, putt i, cherubs with their dust-covered eyeballs: civilization that braced itself for the cold times. And looking at these postcards, I made a vow that, should I ever get out of my n ative realm, I'd go in winter to Venice, rent a room on the ground nay, the water f loor, sit down there, write two or three elegies, extinguishing my cigarettes on the damp floor, so that they'd hiss; and when the money was up, I'd purchase not a ticket back but a Saturday-Night Special and blow my brains out on the spot. A decadent fantasy, of course (but if you are not decadent at twenty, then when?) . Still, I am grateful to the Parcae for allowing me to act out the better part of it. True, history is doing a rather brisk job at compromising geography. The o nly way to beat that is to become an outcast, a nomad; a shadow briefly caressin g lace-like porcelain colonnades reflected in crystal water. xi And then there was the Renault zCV that I saw one day parked on an empty street in my hometown, by the Hermitage's caryatided portico. It looked like a flimsy ye t self- contained butterfly, with its folded wings of corrugated iron: the way W orld War II airfield hangars were and French police vans still are.

I was observing it without any vested interest. I was then just twenty, and I ne ither drove nor aspired to drive. To have your own car in Russia in those days, one had to be real scum; or that scum's child: a Parteigenosse, an academician, a famous athlete. But even then your car would be only of local manufacture, for all its stolen blueprints and know-how. It stood there, light and defenseless, totally lacking the menace normally assoc iated with automobiles. It looked as if it could easily be hurt by one, rather t han the other way around. I've never seen anything made of metal as unem- phatic . It felt more human than some of the passersby, and somehow it resembled in its breathtaking simplicity those World War II beef cans that were still sitting on my win- dowsill. It had no secrets. I wanted to get into it and drive off not bec ause I wanted to emigrate, but because to get inside it must have felt like putt ing on a jacket no, a raincoat and going for a stroll. Its side-window flaps alone r esembled a myopic, bespectacled man with a raised collar. If I remember things c orrectly, what I felt while staring at this car was happiness. xii I believe my first English utterance was indeed "His Master's Voice," because on e started to learn languages in the third grade, when one was ten, and my father returned from his tour of duty in the Far East when I was eight. The war ended for him in China, yet his hoard was not so much Chinese as Japanese, because at that end of the story it was Japan that was the loser. Or so it seemed at the ti me. The bulk of the hoard was records. They sat in massive but quite elegant car dboard albums embossed with gilded Japanese characters; now and then the cover w ould depict a scantily attired maiden led to a dance by a tuxedoed gent. Each al bum would contain up to a dozen black shiny disks staring at you through their t hick shirts, with their gold-and-red and gold-and-black labels. They were mostly "His Master's Voice" and "Columbia"; the latter, however, although easily pronou nced, had only letters, and the pensive doggy was a winner. So much so that its presence would influence my choice of music. As a result, by the age of ten I wa s more familiar with Enrico Caruso and Tito Schipa than with fox-trot and tangos , which also were in abundance, and for which in fact I felt a predilection. Ther e were also all sorts of overtures and classical hits conducted by Stokowski and Toscanini, "Ave Maria" sung by Marian Anderson, and the whole of Carmen and Loh engrin, with casts I no longer recall, though I remember how enthusiastic my mot her was about those performances. In fact, the albums contained the whole prewar musical diet of the European middle class, which tasted perhaps doubly sweet in our parts because of the delay in its arrival. And it was brought to you by thi s pensive doggy, practically in its teeth. It took me at least a decade to reali ze that "His Master's Voice" means what it does: that a dog is listening here to the voice of its owner. I thought it was listening to the recording of its own b arking, for I somehow took the phonograph's amplifier for a mouthpiece too, and s ince dogs normally run before their owners, this label all my childhood meant to me the voice of the dog announcing his master's approach. In any case, the dogg y ran around the world, since my father found those records in Shanghai after th e slaughter of the Kwangtong Army. Needless to say, they arrived in my reality f rom an unlikely direction, and I remember myself more than once dreaming about a long train with black shining records for wheels adorned with "His Master's Voic e" and "Columbia," trundling along a rail laid out of words like "Kuomintang," " Chiang Kai-shek," "Taiwan," "Chu Teh" or were those the railroad stations? The de stination was presumably our brown leather gramophone with its chromium- steel ha ndle powered by my measly self. On the chair's back hangs my father's dark blue Navy tunic with its golden epaulets, on the hat rack there is my mother's silver fox clasping its tail; in the air: "Una furtiva lagrima." xiii Or else it could be "La Comparsita" the greatest piece of music in this century, a s far as I am concerned. After this tango, no triumph is meaningful, either your nation's or your own. I've never learned to dance, being both self-conscious an d truly awkward, but I could listen to these twangs for hours and, when there wa s no one around, move. Like many a folk tune, "La Comparsita" is a dirge, and at the end of that war a dirge rhythm felt more suitable than a boogie- woogie. On

e didn't want acceleration, one craved restraint. Because one vaguely sensed wha t one was heading for. Put it down, then, to our dormant erotic nature that we c lung so much to things that as yet hadn't gone streamline, to the black-lacquere d fenders of the surviving German BMWs and Opel-captains, to the equally shining American Packards and bearlike windshield-squinting Studebakers, with their doub le rear wheels Detroit's answer to our all-absorbing mud. A child always tries to get beyond his age, and if one can't picture oneself defending the motherland, s ince the real defenders are all around, one's fancy may fly one into the incoher ent foreign past and land one inside a large black Lincoln with its porcelain-kn ob-studded dashboard, next to some platinum blonde, sunk to her silk knees in th e patent- leather cushions. In fact, one knee would be enough. Sometimes, just to uching the smooth fender was enough. This comes to you via one of those whose bi rthplace went up in smoke, courtesy of a Luftwaffe air raid, from one of those w ho tasted white bread for the first time at the age of eight (or, if this idiom is too foreign for you, Coca-Cola at thirty- two). So put this down to that dorm ant eroticism and check in the yellow pages where they certify morons. xiv There was that wonderful khaki-green American thermos made of corrugated plastic , with a quicksilver, mirrorlike glass tube, which belonged to my uncle and whic h I broke in 1951. The tube's inside was an optical infinity-generating maelstro m, and I could stare at its reflections of itself in itself forever. That's pres umably how I broke it, inadvertently dropping it on the floor. There was also my father's no less American flashlight, also brought from China, for which we pre tty soon ran out of batteries, but its shining refractor's visionary clarity, va stly superior to the properties of my eye, kept me in thrall for most of my scho ol years. Eventually, when rust started to fray its rim and its button, I took i t apart and, with a couple of magnifying lenses, turned its smooth cylinder into a totally blind telescope. There was also an English field compass, which my fa ther got from somebody with one of those doomed British PQs he'd meet off Murmans k. The compass had a phosphorescent dial and you could read its degrees under a blanket. Because the lettering was Latin, the indications had the air of numeral s, and my sense was that my position's reading was not so much accurate as absolu te. That's perhaps what was making that position unpalatable in the first place. And then there were my father's Army winter boots, whose provenance (American? C hinese? certainly not German) I can't recall now. They were huge, pale yellow bu ckskin boots lined with what looked to me like coils of lamb's wool. They stood more like cannonballs than shoes on his side of the king-size bed, although their brown laces never were tied, since my father wore them only at home, instead of slippers; outside, they'd call too much attention to themselves and therefore t heir owner. Like most of that era's attire, footwear was supposed to be black, d ark gray (boots), or, at best, brown. Up to the 1920s, I suppose, even up to the thirties, Russia enjoyed some semblance of parity with the West as regards exis tential gadgetry and know-how. But then it snapped. Even the war, finding us in a state of arrested development, failed to fish us out of this predicament. For all their comfort, the yellow winter boots were anathema on our streets. On the other hand, this made these shizi-like monsters last longer, and as I grew up, t hey became a point of contention between my father and me. Thirty-five years aft er the war they were good enough for us to argue at length about whose right it was to wear them. In the end he won, because he died with me far away from where they stood. xv Among flags we preferred the Union Jack; among cigarette brands, Camel; Beefeate r among liquors. Clearly our choice was dictated by sense of form, not substance . We can be forgiven, though, because our familiarity with the contents was marg inal, because what circumstances and luck were offering didn't constitute choice , $esides, we weren't so much a mark vis-a-vis the Union Jack and, moreover, vis -a- vis Camels. As for Beefeater gin bottles, a friend of mine observed upon rec eiving one from a visiting foreigner that perhaps in the same way we get kicks f rom their elaborate labels, they get their kicks from the total vacancy on ours. I nodded in agreement. He then slid his hand under a pile of magazines and fishe

d out what I seem to remember as a Life magazine cover. It depicted the upper de ck of an aircraft carrier, somewhere on the ocean. Sailors in their white tops s tood on the deck looking upward presumably at a plane or chopper from which they h ad been photographed. They stood in formation. From the air, the formation read: E = mc2. "Nice, isn't it?" said my friend. "Uh-huh," I said. "Where was it take n?" "Somewhere in the Pacific," he said. "Who cares?" xvi Let's turn the light off, then, or let's shut our eyes tight. What do we see? A U.S. aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific. And it's me there on the dec k, waving. Or by the aCV's wheel, driving. Or in the "green and yellow basket" r hyme of Ella's singing, etc., etc. For a man is what he loves. That's why he lov es it: because he is a part of it. And not a man only. Things are that way, too. I remember the roar produced by the then newly opened, imported from Lord- know s-where, American-made laundromat in Leningrad when I threw my first blue jeans into a machine. There was joy of recognition in that roar; the entire queue hear d it. So with eyes shut let's admit it: we recognized something in the West, in the civilization, as our own; perhaps even more so there than at home. What's mo re, it turned out that we were prepared to pay for that sentiment, and quite dea rly with the rest of our lives. Which is a lot, of course. But anything less than that would be plain whoring. Not to mention that, in those days, the rest of our lives was all we had. 1986

A Cat's Meow I I dearly wish I could begin this monologue from afar, or at least preface it wit h a bunch of disclaimers. However, this dog s ability to learn new tricks is inf erior to its tendency to forget old ones. So let me try to cut straight to the b one. Many things have changed on this dog's watch; but I believe that a study of phen omena is still valid and of interest only as long as it is being conducted from without. The view from within is inevitably distorted and of parochial consequenc e, its claims to documentary status notwithstanding. A good example is madness: the view of the physician is of greater import than that of his patient. Theoretically, the same should apply to "creativity"; except that the nature of this phenomenon rules out the possibility of a vantage point for studying it. He re, the very process of observation renders the observer, to put it mildly, infe rior to the phenomenon he observes, whether he is positioned without or within th e phenomenon. In a manner of Delivered at a symposium organized by the Foundation for Creativity and Leadershi p and held in Zermatt, Switzerland, in January 1995.speaking, the report of the physician here is as invalid as the patient s own ravings. The lesser commenting upon the greater has, of course, a certain humbling appeal , and at our end of the galaxy we are quite accustomed to this sort of procedure . I hope, therefore, that my reluctance to objectify creativity bespeaks not a la ck of humility on my part but precisely the absence of a vantage point enabling me to pronounce anything of value on the subject. I don't qualify as a physician; as a patient I am too much of a basket case to b e taken seriously. Besides, I detest the very term "creativity," and some of thi s detestation rubs off on the phenomenon this term appears to denote. Even if I were able to shut down the voice of my senses revolting against it, my utterance on the subject would amount at best to a cat's attempt to catch its own tail. A n absorbing endeavor, to be sure; but then perhaps I should be meowing. Given the solipsistic nature of any human inquiry, that would be as honest a res ponse to the notion of creativity as you can get. Seen from the outside, creativ ity is the object of fascination or envy; seen from within, it is an unending ex ercise in uncertainty and a tremendous school for insecurity. In either case, a m eow or some other incoherent sound is the most adequate response whenever the no tion of creativity is invoked. Let me, therefore, get rid of the panting or bated breath that accompanies this term, which is to say, let me get rid of the term altogether. Webster's Collegia te Dictionary defines creativity as the ability to create, so let me stick to thi s definition. This way, perhaps, at least one of us will know what he is talking about, although not entirely. The trouble begins with "create," which is, I believe, an exalted version of the verb "to make," and the same good old Webster's offers us "to bring into existe nce." The exaltation here has to do presumably with our ability to distinguish bet ween familiar and unprecedented results of one's making. The familiar, thus, is made; the unfamiliar, or unprecedented, is created. Now, no honest craftsman or maker knows in the process of working whether he is making or creating. He may be overtaken with this or that incoherent emotion at a certain stage of the process, he may even have an inkling that he is manufactu ring something qualitatively new or unique, but the first, the second, and the l ast reality for him is the work itself, the very process of working. The process takes precedence over its result, if only because the latter is impossible witho ut the former. The emergence of something qualitatively new is a matter of chance. Hence there i s no visual distinction between a maker and a beholder, between an artist and hi s public. At a reception, the former may stand out in the crowd at best by virtu

e of his longer hair or sartorial extravagance, but nowadays the reverse may be true as well. In any case, at the completion of the work, a maker may mingle wit h beholders and even assume their perspective on his work and employ their vocab ulary. It is unlikely, however, that upon returning to his study, studio, or, fo r that matter, lab, he would attempt to rechristen his tools. One says "I make" rather than "I create." This choice of verb reflects not only humility but the distinction between the guild and the market, for the distincti on between making and creating can be made only retroactively, by the beholder. Beholders are essentially consumers, and that's why a sculptor seldom buys anoth er sculptor's works. Any discourse on creativity, no matter how analytical it ma y turn out to be, is therefore a market discourse. One artist's recognition of a nother's genius is essentially a recognition of the power of chance and perhaps of theother's industry in producing occasions for chance to invade. This, I hope, takes care of the "make" part of Webster's definition. Let's addre ss the "ability" part. The notion of ability comes from experience. Theoretically , the greater one's experience, the more secure one may feel in one's ability. I n reality (in art and, I would think, science), experience and the accompanying expertise are the maker's worst enemies. The more successful you've been, the more uncertain you are, when embarking on a new project, of the result. Say, the greater the masterpiece you just produced, the smaller the likelihood of your repeating the feat tomorrow. In other words: the more questionable your ability becomes. The very notion of ability acquires in your mind a permanent question mark, and gradually one begins to regard one' s work as a nonstop effort to erase that mark. This is especially true among tho se engaged in literature, particularly in poetry, which, unlike other arts, is b ound to make detectable sense. But even adorned with an exclamation mark, ability is not guaranteed to spawn ma sterpieces each time it is applied. We all know plenty of uniquely endowed artis ts and scientists who produce little of consequence. Dry spells, writer's blocks, and fellow stretches are the companions of practically every known genius, all lamenting about them bitterly, as do much lesser lights. Often a gallery signs u p an artist, or an institution a scientist, only to learn how slim the pickings may get. In other words, ability is not reducible either to skill or to an individual's e nergy, much less the congeniality of one's surroundings, one's financial predica ment, or one's milieu. Had it been otherwise, we would have had by now a far gre ater volume of masterpieces on our hands than is the case. In short, the ratio o f those engaged throughout just this century in art and science to the appreciab le results is such that one is tempted to equate ability with chance.Well, it lo oks as if chance inhabits both parts of Webster's definition of creativity rather cozily. It is so much so that it occurs to me that perhaps the term "creativity " denotes not so much an aspect of human agency as the property of the material t o which this agency now and then is applied; that perhaps the ugliness of the te rm is, after all, justified, since it bespeaks the pliable or malleable aspects of inanimate matter. Perhaps the One who dealt with that matter first is not cal led the Creator for nothing. Hence, creativity. Considering Webster's definition, a qualifier is perhaps in order. Denoting a ce rtain unidentified resistance, "the ability to make" perhaps should be accompani ed by a sobering "war on chance." A good question is, of course, what comes first t he material or its maker? For all our professed humility, at our end of the gala xy the answer is obvious and resounds with hubris. The other and a much better que stion is, whose chance are we talking about here, the maker's or the material's? Neither hubris nor humility will be of much help here. Perhaps in trying to answ er this question, we have to jettison the notion of virtue altogether. But then we always have been tempted to do just that. So let's seize this opportunity: no t for the sake of scientific inquiry so much as for Webster's reputation. But I am afraid we need a footnote. II Because human beings are finite, their system of causality is linear, which is t o say, self-referential. The same goes for their notion of chance, since chance

is not cause-free; it is but a moment of interference by another system of causa lity, however aberrant its pattern, in our own. The very existence of the term, not to mention a variety of epithets accompanying it (for instance, "blind"), sho ws that our concepts of order and chance are both essentially anthropomorphic. Had the area of human inquiry been limited to the animal kingdom, that would be fine. However, it's manifestly not so; it's much larger and, on top of that, a h uman being insists on knowing the truth. The notion of truth, in its own right, is also anthropomorphic and presupposes, on the part of the inquiry's subject i.e. , the world a withholding of the story, if not outright deception. Hence a variety of scientific disciplines probing the universe in the most minute manner, the intensity of which especially of their language could be likened to to rture. In any case, if the truth about things has not been attained thus far, we should put this down to the world's extraordinary resilience rather than to a l ack of effort. The other explanation, of course, is truth's absence; an absence t hat we don't accept because of its drastic consequences for our ethics. Ethics or, to put it less grandly but perhaps more pointedly, pure and simple esch atology as the vehicle of science? Perhaps; at any rate, what human inquiry indeed boils down to is the animate interrogating the inanimate. Small wonder that the results are inconclusive; smaller wonder still that the methods and the language we employ in the process more and more resemble the matter at hand itself. Ideally, perhaps, the animate and the inanimate should swap places. That, of cou rse, would be to the liking of the dispassionate scientist, who places such a pr emium on objectivity. Alas, this is not likely to happen, as the inanimate doesn' t seem to show any interest in the animate: the world is not interested in its h umans. Unless, of course, we ascribe to the world divine provenance, which, for several millennia now, we've failed to demonstrate. If the truth about things indeed exists, then, given our status as the world's l atecomers, that truth is bound to be nonhuman. It is bound to cancel out our notions of causality, aberrant or not, a s well as those of chance. The same applies to our surmises as to the world's pr ovenance, be it divine, molecular, or both: the viability of a concept depends o n the viability of its carriers. Which is to say that our inquiry is essentially a highly solipsistic endeavor. F or the only opportunity available for the animate to swap places with the inanim ate is the former's physical end: when man joins, as it were, matter. Still, one can stretch matters somewhat by imagining that it is not the inanimat e which is under the animate's investigation but the other way around. This ring s a certain metaphysical bell, and not so faintly. Of course, it's difficult to build either science or a religion on such a foundation. Still, the possibility shouldn't be ruled out, if only because this option allows our notion of causali ty to survive intact. Not to mention that of chance. What sort of interest could the infinite take in the finite? To see how the latt er might modify its ethics? But ethics as such contains its opposite. To tax hum an eschatology further? But the results will be quite predictable. Why would the infinite keep an eye on the finite? Perhaps out of the infinite's nostalgia for its own finite past, if it ever had one? In order to see how the poor old finite is still faring against overwhelmin g odds? How close the finite may come to comprehending, with its microscopes, te lescopes, and all, with its observatories' and churches' domes, those odds' enor mity? And what would the infinite's response be, should the finite prove itself capabl e of revealing the infinite's secrets? What course of action might the infinite take, given that its repertoire is limited to the choice between being punitive or benevolent? And since benevolence is something we are less familiar with, wha t form might it assume?If it is, let's say, some version of life eternal, a para dise, a Utopia where nothing ever ends, what should be done, for instance, about those who never make it there? And if it were possible for us to resurrect them , what would happen to our notion of causality, not to mention chance? Or maybe the opportunity to resurrect them, an opportunity for the living to meet the dea d, is what chance is all about? And isn't the finite's chance to become infinite

synonymous with the animate becoming inanimate? Is that a promotion? Or perhaps the inanimate appears to be so only to the eye of the finite? And if there is indeed no difference, save a few secrets thus far not revealed, where, once they get revealed, are we all to dwell? Would we be able to shift from the infinite to the finite and back, if we had a choice? What would the means of tra nsportation between the two be? An injection, perhaps? And once we lose the dist inction between the finite and the infinite, would we care where we are? Wouldn' t that be, to say the least, the end of science, not to mention religion? Have you been influenced by Wittgenstein? asks the reader. Acknowledging the solipsistic nature of human inquiry shouldn't, of course, resu lt in prohibitive legislation limiting that inquiry's scope. It won't work: no l aw based on the recognition of human shortcomings does. Furthermore, every legisl ator, especially an unacknowledged one, should be, in turn, aware all the time o f the equally solipsistic nature of the very law he is trying to push. Still, it would be both prudent and fruitful to admit that all our conclusions a bout the world outside, including those about its provenance, are but reflection s, or better yet articulations, of our physical selves.For what constitutes a dis covery or, more broadly, truth as such, is our recognition of it. Presented with an observation or a conclusion backed by evidence, we exclaim, "Yes, that's true !" In other words, we recognize something that has been offered to our scrutiny as our own. Recognition, after all, is an identification of the reality within w ith the reality without: an admission of the latter into the former. However, in order to be admitted into the inner sanctum (say, the mind), the guest should p ossess at least some structural characteristics similar to those of the host. This, of course, is what explains the considerable success of all manner of micr ocosmic research, with all those cells and particles echoing nicely our own self -esteem. Yet, humility aside, when a grateful guest eventually reciprocates by in viting his gracious host over to his place, the latteroften finds himself quite comfortable in those theoretically strange quarters and occasionally even benefi ts from a sojourn in the village of Applied Sciences, emerging from it now with a jar of penicillin, now with a tankful of gravity-spurning fuel. In other words, in order to recognize anything, you've got to have something to recognize it with, something that will do the recognizing. The faculty that we b elieve does the recognizing job on our behalf is our brain. Yet the brain is not an autonomous entity: it functions only in concert with the rest of our physiol ogical system. What's more, we are quite cognizant of our brain's ability not on ly to absorb concepts as regards the outside world but to generate them as well; we are also cognizant of that ability's relative dependence on, say, our motor or metabolic functions.This is enough to suspect a certain parity between the inqu irer and the subject of the inquiry, and suspicion is often the mother of truth. That, at any rate, is enough to suggest a perceptible resemblance between what' s getting discovered and the discoverer's own cellular makeup. Now that, of cours e, stands to reason, if only because we are very much of this world at least accor ding to the admission of our own evolutionary theory. Small wonder, then, that we are capable of discovering or discerning certain tru ths about it. This wonder is so small that it occurs to one that "discovery" is quite possibly a misnomer, and so are "recognition," "admission," "identification ," etc. It occurs to one that what we habitually bill as our discoveries are but the pro jections of what we contain within upon the outside. That the physical reality o f the world/ nature/you-name-it is but a screen or, if you like, a wall with our ow n structural imperatives and irregularities writ large or small upon it. That th e outside is a blackboard or a sounding board for our ideas and inklings about o ur own largely incomprehensible tissue. That, in the final analysis, a human being doesn't so much obtain knowledge from the outside as secrete it from within. That human inquiry is a closed-circuit s ystem, where no Supreme Being or alternative system of intelligence can break in . Were they to, they wouldn't be welcome, if only because He, or it, would becom e one of us, and we have had enough of our kind. They had better stay in the realm of probability, in the province of chance. Bes

ides, as one of them said, "My kingdom is not of this world." No matter how scand alous probability's reputation is, it won't thrust either one of them into our mi dst, because probability is not suicidal. Inhabiting our minds for want of a bet ter seat, it surely won't try to destroy its only habitat. And if infinity indee d has us for its audience, probability will certainly try its best to present in finity as a moral perspective, especially with a view to our eventually entering it.To that end, it may even send in a messiah, since left to our own devices we have a pretty rough time with the ethics of even our manifestly limited existen ce. As chance might have it, this messiah may assume any guise, and not necessar ily the guise of human likeness. He may, for instance, appear in the form of some scientific idea, in the shape of some microbiological breakthrough predicating individual salvation on a universal chain reaction that would require safety for all in order to achieve eternity for one, and vice versa. Stranger things have happened. In any case, whatever it is that makes life safer or gives it hope of extension should be regarded as being of supernatural origi n, because nature is neither friendly nor hope-inspiring. On the other hand, bet ween science and creeds, one is perhaps better off with science, because creeds have proven too divisive. All I am trying to suggest is that, chances are, a new messiah, should he really emerge, is likely to know a bit more about nuclear physics or microbiology and ab out virology in particular than we do today. That knowledge, of course, is bound to be of greater use for us here than in the life everlasting, but for the moment, we may still settle for less. Actually, this could be a good test for probability, for chance in particular, s ince the linear system of causality takes us straight into extinction. Let's see whether chance is indeed an independent notion. Let's see whether it is some- ti ling more than just bumping into a movie star in a suburban bar or winning the l ottery. Of course, this depends on how much one wins: a big win may come close t o personal salvation. But have you been influenced by Wittgenstein, perseveres the reader. No, not by Wittgenstein, I reply. Just by Frankenstein. End of footnote.in So if we are a part of the natural world (as our cellular makeup suggests), if t he animate is an aspect of the inanimate, then chance pertaining to a maker pert ains to matter. Perhaps Webster's "ability to create" is nothing more (or less) than matter's attempts to articulate itself. Since a maker (and with him the who le human species) is an infinitesimal speck of matter, the latter's attempts at articulation must be few and far between. Their infrequency is proportionate to the availability of adequate mouthpieces, whose adequacy, i.e., the readiness to perceive an unhuman truth, is known in our parlance as genius. This infrequency is thus the mother of chance. Now, matter, I believe, comes to articulate itself through human science or huma n art presumably only under some kind of duress. This may sound like an anthropom orphic fantasy, but our cellular makeup entitles us to this sort of indulgence. Matter's fatigue, its thinning out, or its oversaturation with time are, among a host of other less and more fathomable processes, what further enunciates chanc e and what is registered by the lab's instruments or by the no less sensitive pe n of the lyric poet. In either case, what you get is the ripple effect. In this sense, the ability to make is a passive ability: a grain of sand's respo nse to the horizon. For it is the sense of an opened horizon that impresses us i n a work of art or a scientific breakthrough, isn't it? Anything less than that qualifies not for the unique but for the familiar. The ability to make, in other words, depends on the horizon and not on one's resolve, ambition, or training. T o analyze this ability only from our end of the story is therefore erroneous and not terribly rewarding. "Creativity" is what a vast beach remarks when a grain of sand is swept away by the ocean. If this sounds too tragic or too grand for you, it means only that yo u are too far back in the dunes. An artist's or a scientist's notion of luck or chance reflects essentially his proximity to the water or, if you will, to matte r.

One can increase one's proximity to it in principle by will; in reality, though, it happens nearly always inadvertently. No amount of research or of caffeine, ca lories, alcohol, or tobacco consumed can position that grain of sand sufficiently close to the breakers. It all depends on the breakers themselves, i.e., on matt er's own timing, which is solely responsible for the erosion of its so-called be ach. Hence all this loose talk about divine intervention, breakthroughs, and so forth. Whose breakthrough? If poetry fares somewhat better in this context, it is because language is, in a manner of speaking, the inanimate's first line of information about itself rele ased to the animate. To put it perhaps less polemically, language is a diluted a spect of matter. By manipulating it into a harmony or, for that matter, disharmo ny, a poet by and large unwittingly negotiates himself into the domain of pure matt er or, if you will, of pure time faster than can be done in any other line of work. A poem and above all a poem with a recurrent stanzaic design almost inevitably devel ops a centrifugal force whose ever-widening radius lands the poet far beyond his initial destination. It is precisely the unpredictability of the place of one's arrival, as well perh aps as one's eventual gratitude, that makes a poet regard his ability "to make" as a passive ability. The vastness of what lies ahead rules out the possibility of any other attitude toward one's regular or irregular procedure; it certainly r ules out the notion of creativity. There is no creativity vis-a-vis that which i nstills terror.

Wooing the Inanimate Four Poems by Thomas Hardy i A decade or so ago, a prominent English critic, reviewing in an American magazin e a collection of poems by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, remarked that that poet 's popularity in Britain, in its academic circles particularly, is indicative of the English public's stolid reading tastes, and that for all the prolonged phys ical presence of Messieurs Eliot and Pound on British soil, modernism never took root in England. The latter part of his remark (certainly not the former, since in that country not to mention that milieu where everyone wishes the other worse off , malice amounts to an insurance policy) got me interested, for it sounded both wistful and convincing. Shortly afterward, I had the opportunity to meet that critic in person, and alth ough one shouldn't talk shop at the dinner table, I asked him why he thinks mode rnism fared so poorly in his country. He replied that the generation of poets wh ich could have wrought the decisive change was wiped out in the Great War. I found this answer a bit too mechanistic, considering the nat ure of the medium, too Marxist, if you will subordinating literature too much to h istory. But then the man was a critic, and that's what critics do. I thought that there must have been another explanation if not for the fate of mode rnism on that side of the Atlantic, then for the apparent viability of formal ve rse there at the present time. Surely there are plenty of reasons for that, obvi ous enough to discard the issue altogether. The sheer pleasure of writing or rea ding a memorable line would be one; the purely linguistic logic of, and need for , meter and rhyme is another. But nowadays one's mind is conditioned to operate c ircuitously, and at the time, I thought only that a good rhyme is what in the en d saves poetry from becoming a demographic phenomenon. At the time, my thoughts went to Thomas Hardy. Perhaps I wasn't thinking so circuitously, after all, or at least not yet. Perha ps the expression "Great War" triggered something in my memory, and I remembered Thomas Hardy's "After two thousand years of Mass / We got as far as poison gas." In that case, my thinking was still straight. Or was it perhaps the term "modern ism" that triggered those thoughts. In that case ... A citizen of a democracy sh ouldn't be alarmed, of course, to find himself belonging to a minority; though h e might get irritable. If a century can be compared to a political system, a sig

nificant portion of this one's cultural climate could well qualify as a tyranny: that of modernism. Or, to put it more accurately, of what sailed under that pen nant. And perhaps my thoughts went to Hardy because at about that time a decade ag o he habitually began to be billed as a "pre-modernist."As definitions go, "pre-mo dernist" is a reasonably flattering one, since it implies that the so defined has paved the road to our just and happy stylistically speaking times. The drawback, th ough, is that it pensions an author off squarely into the past, offering all the fringe benefits of scholarly interest, of course, but robbing him in effect of r elevance. The past tense is his equivalent of a silver watch. No orthodoxy, especially not a new one, is capable of honest hindsight, and mode rnism is no exception, While modernism itself presumably benefits from applying this epithet to Thomas Hardy, he, I am afraid, does not. In either case, this def inition misleads, for Hardy's poetic output, I daresay, has not so much foreshad owed as overshot, and by an awfully wide margin at that, the development of mode m poetry. Had T. S. Eliot, for instance, at the time he read Laforgue, read Thom as Hardy instead (as I believe Robert Frost did), the history of poetry in Engli sh in this century, or to say the least its present, might be somewhat more abso rbing. For one thing, where Eliot needs a handful of dust to perceive terror, fo r Hardy, as he shows in "Shelley's Skylark," a pinch is enough. II All this no doubt sounds to you a touch too polemical. On top of that, you may w onder whom it is that the man in front of you is arguing with. True, the literat ure on Thomas Hardy the poet is fairly negligible. There are two or three fulllength studies; they are essentially doctoral-dissertations- turned-books. There are also two or three biographies of the man, including one he penned himself, though it bears his wife's name on the cover. They are worth reading, especially the last if you believe as I expect you do that the artist's life holds the key for the understanding of his work. If you believe the opposite, you won't lose much by giving them a miss, since we are here to address his work.I am arguing, I su ppose, against seeing this poet through the prism of those who came in his stead . First, because, in most cases, those who came in his stead were operating in r elative or absolute ignorance of Hardy the poet's existence on this side of the Atl antic particularly. The very dearth of literature about Hardy the poet is both t hat ignorance's proof and its present echo. Second, because, on the whole, there is little point in reviewing the larger through the prism of the smaller, howeve r vociferous and numerous; our discipline is no astronomy. Mainly, however, beca use the presence of Hardy the novelist impairs one's eyesight from the threshold , and no critic I know of can resist the temptation to hitch the prose writer to the poet, with the inevitable diminution of the poems as a consequence if only be cause the critic's own medium isn't verse. So to a critic, the prospect of dealing with Hardy's work should look quite mess y. To begin with, if one's life holds the key to one's work, as received wisdom claims, then, in Hardy's case, the question is: Which work? Is this or that mish ap reflected in this novel, or in that poem, and why not in both? And if a novel , what then is a poem for? And vice versa? Especially since there are about nine novels and roughly a thousand poems in his corpus. Which of these is, should yo u wax Freudian, a form of sublimation? And how come one keeps sublimating up to the ripe age of eighty- eight, for Hardy kept writing poems to the very end (his last, tenth collection came out posthumously)? And should one really draw a lin e between novelist and poet, or isn't it better to lump them together, echoing M other Nature?I say, let's separate them. At any rate, that's what we are going t o do in this room. To make a long story short, a poet shouldn't be viewed throug h any prism other than that of his poems. Besides, technically speaking, Thomas Hardy was a novelist for twenty-six years only. And since he wrote poetry alongs ide his novels, one could argue that he was a poet for sixty years in a row. To say the least, for the last thirty years of his life; after Jude the Obscure his l ast and, in my view, his greatest novel received unfavorable notices, he quit fict ion altogether and concentrated on poetry. That alone the thirty years of verse wr iting should be enough to qualify him for the status of a poet. After all, thirty years in this field is an average length for one's career, not to mention life.

So let's give Mother Nature short shrift. Let's deal with the poet's poems. Or, to put it differently, let's bear in mind that human artifice is as organic as a ny natural masterpiece, which, if we are to believe our naturalists, is also a p roduct of tremendous selection. You see, there are roughly two ways of being nat ural in this world. One is to strip down to one's un- derthings, or beyond, and get exposed, as it were, to the elements. That would be, say, a Lawrentian approa ch, adopted in the second half of this century by many a scribbling dimwit in our parts, I regret to inform you, especially. The other approach is best exemplifi ed by the following four-liner, written by the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam : Mandelstam is a Russian, as I said. Yet this quatrain comes in handy because odd ly enough it has more to do with Thomas Hardy than anything by D. H. Lawrence, a Brit.Anyway, at the moment I'd like to go with you through several poems by Mr. Hardy, which by now I hope you have memorized. Well go through them line by lin e, so that, apart from whetting your appetite for this poet, you'll be able to s ee the process of selection that occurs in the course of composition, and that e choes and if you don't mind my saying so outshines the similar process described in the Origin of Species, if only because the latter's net result is us, not Mr. Ha rdy's poems. So let me succumb to the perfectly Darwinian, logical as well as chr onological temptation to address the poems belonging to the aforementioned thirt y- year period, i.e., to the poems written by Thomas Hardy in the second part of his career, which also means in our century: this way, we leave the novelist beh ind. Ill Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 and died in 1928. His father was a stonemason and could not afford to support him in a scholarly career, apprenticing him instead to a local church architect. He studied Greek and Latin classics on his own, how ever, and wrote in his off-hours until the success of Far from the Madding Crowd allowed him to quit the job at the age of thirty-four. Thus, his literary caree r, which started in 1871, allows itself to be fairly neatly divided into two alm ost even parts: into the Victorian and modern periods, since Queen Victoria conv eniently dies in 1901. Bearing in mind that both terms are but catchwords, we'll nevertheless use them for reasons of economy, in order to save ourselves some br eath. We shouldn't scrutinize the obvious; as regards our poet, the word "Victor ian" catches in particular Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, both Rossettis, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Tennyson of course, and, conceivably, Ge rard Manley Hopkins and A. E. Housman. To these you might add Charles Darwin him self, Carlyle, Disraeli, John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Walter Pater. But let's stop here: that should give you the general idea of the mental and sty listic parameters or pressures pertinent at the time for our poet. Let's leave Cardinal Newman out of it, because our man was a biological determinist and agno stic; let's also leave out the 1 sisters, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Robert Louis S tevenson, and other fiction writers, because they mattered to Mr. Hardy when he was one of them but not, for instance, when he set out to write "The Darkling Th rush," which is our first poem. Now, although this thirty-two-line job is Thomas Hardy's most anthologized poem, it is not exactly the most typical of him, being extremely fluent. And that's w hy perhaps it's so frequently anthologized; although, save for one line in it, i t could have been written by practically anyone of talent and, well, insight. Th ese properties are not so rare in English poetry, at the turn of the century esp ecially. It is a very fluent, very lucid poem; its texture is smooth and its str ucture is conservative enough to hark back to the ballad; its argument is clear a nd well sustained. In other words, there is very little here of vintage Hardy; a nd now is as good a time as any to tell you what vintage Hardy is like.Vintage H ardy is a poet who, according to his own admission, "abhorred the smooth line." T hat would sound perverse were it not for six centuries of verse writing predating his, and were it not for somebody like Tennyson breathing down his neck. Come t o think of it, his attitude wasn't very dissimilar from that of Hopkins, and the ways they went about it were, I daresay, not that different, either. At any rat e, Thomas Hardy is indeed by and large the poet of a very crammed, overstressed

line, filled with clashing consonants, yawning vowels; of an extremely crabby sy ntax and awkward, cumbersome phrasing aggravated by his seemingly indiscriminate vocabulary; of eye/ear/mind-boggling stanzaic designs unprecedented in their nev er-repeating patterns. So why push him on us? you may ask. Because all this was deliberate and, in the light of what transpired in the English poetry of the rest of this century, quit e prophetic. To begin with, the intended awkwardness of Hardy's lines wasn't jus t the natural striving of a new poet toward a distinct diction, although it play ed that role, too. Nor should this roughness of surface be seen only as a rebell ion against the tonal loftiness and polish of the post-Romantics. In fact, these properties of the post-Romantics are quite admirable, and the whole thesis that Hardy, or anyone else for that matter, "rebelled against" them should be taken with a grain of salt, if taken at all. I think there is another, more down-to-ea rth as well as more metaphysical explanation for Hardy's stylistic idiom, which in itself was both down-to-earth and metaphysical. Well, metaphysics is always down-to-earth, isn't it? The more down-to-earth it i s, the more metaphysical it gets, for the things of this world and their interpl ay are metaphysics' last frontier: they are the language in which matter manifes ts itself. And the syntax of this language is very crabby indeed. Be that as it may, what Hardy was really after in his verse was, I think, the effect of verisi militude, the sense of veracity, or, if you will, of authenticity in his speech. The more awkward, he presumably thought, the more true it sounds. Or, at least, the less artful, the more true. Here, perhaps, we should recall that he was also a novelist though I hope we bring this up for the last time. And novelists think of such things, don't they? Or let's put it a bit more dramatically: he was the k ind of man who would think of such things and that's what made him a novelist. H owever, the man who became a novelist was, before and after that, a poet. And here we come close to something crucial for our understanding of Hardy the p oet; to our sense of what kind of man he was or, more exactly, what kind of mind he had. For the moment, I am afraid, you have to take my assessment for granted ; but I hope that within the next half hour it will be borne out by his lines. S o here we go: Thomas Hardy, I think, was an extraordinarily perceptive and cunni ng man. I say "cunning" here without negative connotations, but perhaps I should say "plotting." For he indeed plots his poems: not like novels, but precisely as poems. In other words, he knows from the threshold what a poem is, what it shou ld be like; he has a certain idea of what his lines should add up to. Nearly eve ry one of his' works can be fairly neatly dissected into exposition/argument/deno uement, not so much because they were actually structured that way as because st ructuring was instinctive to Hardy. It comes, as it were, from within the man an d reflects not so much his familiarity with the contemporary poetic scene as as is often the case with autodidacts his reading of the Greek and Roman classics.The s trength of this structuring instinct in him also explains why Hardy never progres sed as a stylist, why his manner never changed. Save for the subject matter, his early poems might sit very comfortably in his late collections, and vice versa, and he was rather cavalier with his dates and attributions. His strongest facul ty, moreover, was not the ear but the eye, and the poems existed for him, I beli eve, more as printed than as spoken matter; had he read them aloud, he himself w ould have stumbled, but I doubt he would have felt embarrassed and attempted imp rovements. To put it differently, the real seat of poetry for him was in his min d. No matter how public some of his poems seem, they amount to mental pictures o f public address rather than ask for actual delivery. Even the most lyrical of h is pieces are essentially mental gestures toward what we know as lyricism in poe try, and they stick to paper more readily than they move your lips. It's hard to imagine Mr. Hardy mouthing his lines into a microphone; but then, I believe, mi crophones hadn't yet been invented. So why push him on you, you may persist. Because precisely this voicelessness, th is audial neutrality, if you will, and this predominance of the rational over em otional immediacy turn Hardy into a prophetic figure in English poetry: that's wha t its future liked. In an odd way, his poems have the feeling of being detached from themselves, of not so much being poems as maintaining the appearance of bei

ng poems. Herein lies a new aesthetics, an aesthetics insisting on art's convent ions not for the sake of emphasis or self- assertion but the other way around: a s a sort of camouflage, for better merging with the background against which art exists. Such aesthetics expand art's domain and allow it to land a better punch when and where it's least expected. This is where modernism goofed, but let's l et bygones be bygones. You shouldn't conclude, though, because of what I've told you, that Hardy is hea dy stuff. As a matter of fact, his verse is entirely devoid of any hermetic arca na. What's unique about him is, of course, his extraordinary appetite for the in finite, and it appears that, rather than hampering it, the constraints of conven tion only whet it more. But that's what constraints do to a normal, i.e., not se lf-centered, intelligence; and the infinite is poetry's standard turf. Other than that, Hardy the poet is a reasonably easy proposition; you don't need any speci al philosophical warm-up to appreciate him. You may even call him a realist, beca use his verse captures an enormous amount of the physical and psychological reali ty of the time he lived in, of what is loosely called Victorian England. And yet you wouldn't call him Victorian. Far more than his actual chronology, th e aforesaid appetite for the infinite makes him escape this and, for that matter , any definition save that of a poet. Of a man who's got to tell you something a bout your life no matter where and when he lived his. Except that with Hardy, wh en you say "poet" you see not a dashing raconteur or a tubercular youth feverish ly scribbling in the haze and heat of inspiration but a clear-eyed, increasingly crusty man, bald and of medium height, with a mustache and an aquiline profile, carefully plotting his remorseless, if awkward lines upstairs in his studio, occa sionally laughing at the achieved results. I push him on you in no small part because of that laughter. To me, he casts a ve ry modern figure, and not only because his lines contain a higher percentage of e xistential truth than his contemporaries', but because of these lines' unmistakab le self-awareness. It is as though his poems say to you: Yes, we remember that w e are artifacts, so we are not trying to seduce you with our truth; actually, we don't mind sounding a bit quaint. If nevertheless, boys and girls, you find this poet hard going, if his diction appears to you antiquated, keep in mind that th e problem may be with you rather than with the author. There is no such thing as antiquated diction, there are only reduced vocabularies. That's why, for exampl e, there is no Shakespeare nowadays on Broadway; apparently the modem audience h as more trouble with the bard's diction than the folks at the Globe had. That's progress for you, then; and there is nothing sillier than retrospection from the point of view of progress. And now, off to "The Darkling Thrush." IV "The Darkling Thrush" is, of course, a turn-of-the-century poem. But suppose we didn't look at the date beneath it; suppose we opened a book and read it cold. People normally don't look at the dat es beneath poems; on top of that, Hardy, as I said, wasn't all that systematic a bout dating his work. Imagine, then, reading it cold and catching the date only in the end. What would you say it's all about? You'd say it's a nature poem, a description of a landscape. On a cold gray winter day a man strolls through a landscape, you would say; he stops and takes in the view. It's a picture of desolation enlivened by the sudden chirping of a bird, and that lifts his spirits. That's what you would say, and you would be right; m oreover, that's what the author wants you to think; why, he practically insists on the ordinariness of the scene. Why? Because he wants you eventually to learn that a new century, a new era anythi ng new starts on a gray day, when your spirits are low and there is nothing eye- a rresting in sight. That in the beginning there is a gray day, and not exactly a Word. (In about six years you'll be able to check whether or not he was right.) For a turn-of-the-century poem, "The Darkling Thrush" is remarkably unemphatic a nd devoid of millenarian hoopla. It is so much so that it almost argues against its own chronology; it makes you wonder whether the date wasn't put below the po em afterward, with the benefit of hindsight. And knowing him, one can easily ima gine this, for the benefit of hindsight was Hardy's strong suit.

Be that as it may, let s go on with this nature poem, let's fall into his trap. It all starts with "coppice" in the first line. The precision in the naming of t his particular type of growth calls the reader's especially a modern one's attention to itself, implying the centrality of natural phenomena to the speaker's mind as well as his affinity with them. It also creates an odd sense of security at the poem's opening, since a man familiar with the names of thickets, hedges, and pla nts can't, almost by definition, be fierce or, in any case, dangerous. That is, the voice we are hearing in the first line is that of nature's ally, and this na ture, his diction implies, is by and large human-friendly. Besides, he is leanin g on that coppice gate, and a leaning posture seldom bodes even mental aggressio n; if anything, it's rather receptive. Not to mention that the "coppice gate" it self suggests a nature reasonably civilized, accustomed, almost of its own accord , to human traffic. The "spectre-gray" in the second line might perhaps put us on alert, were it not for the run-of-the-mill alternation of tetrameters with trimeters, with their b alladlike, folk-tune echo, which plays down the ghostliness of "spectre" to the point that we hear "spectrum" more than "spectre," and our mind wanders to the r ealm of colors rather than homeless souls. What we get out of this line is the s ense of controlled melancholy, all the more so since it establishes the poem's m eter. "Gray," sitting here in the rhyming position, releases, as it were, the tw o e's of "spectre" into a sort of exhaling sigh. What we hear is a wistful eih, which, together with the hyphen here, turns "shade" into a tint.The next two lin es, "And Winter's dregs made desolate/ The weakening eye of day," clinch, in the same breath, the quatrain pattern which is going to be sustained throughout thi s thirty-two-line poem and tell you, I am afraid, something about this poet's ge neral view of humanity, or at least of its habitats. The distance between that w eakening eye of day, which is presumably the sun, and those winter dregs makes t he latter hug, as it were, the ground and take on "Winter' "s implied white or, as the case may be, gray color. I have the distinct feeling that our poet behold s here village dwellings, that we have here a view of a valley, harking back to the old trope of the human spectacle distressing the planets. The dregs, of cour se, are nothing but residue, what's left when the good stuff has been drunk out of the cup. On top of that, the "Winter's dregs" conjunction gives you a sense o f a poet resolutely exiting Georgian diction and standing with both feet in the twentieth century. Well, at least with one foot, as befits a poem written at the turn of the centur y. One of the additional pleasures of reading Hardy is observing the constant tw o-step of the contemporary (which is to say, traditional) and his own (which is t o say, modern) diction. Rubbing these things against one another in a poem is ho w the future invades the present and, for that matter, the past to which the lan guage has grown accustomed. In Hardy, this friction of stylistic tenses is palpa ble to the point of making you feel that he makes no meal of any, particularly h is own, modern, stylistic mode. A really novel, breakthrough line can easily be followed by a succession of jobs so antiquated you may forget their antecedent al together. Take, for instance, the second quatrain of the first stanza in "The Da rkling Thrush": The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The relatively advanced imagery of the first line (similar, in fact, to the open ing passage in Frost's "Woodpile") quickly deteriorates here into a fin-de-siecl e simile that even at the time of this poem's composition would have given off a stale air of pastiche. Why doesn't our poet strive here for fresher diction, wh y is he settling for obviously Victorian even Wordsworthian tropes, why doesn't he t ry to get ahead of his time something he is clearly capable of? First, because poetry is not a rat race yet. Second, because at the moment, the p oem is at the stage of exposition.The exposition of a poem is the most peculiar part, since at this point poets by and large don't know which way the poem will go. Hence, expositions tend to be long, with English poets especially, and in th e nineteenth century in particular. On the whole, that side of the Atlantic they

have a greater set of references, while over here we've got to look mainly afte r ourselves. Add to this the pure pleasure of verse writing, of working all sorts of echoes into your texture, and you'll realize that the notion of somebody bei ng "ahead of his time," for all its complimentary ring, is essentially the benef it of hindsight. In the second quatrain of the first stanza, Hardy is squarely b ehind his time, and he doesn't mind this in the least. In fact, he loves it. The chief echo here is of the ballad, a term derived from hallare, to dance. This is one of the cornerstones of Hardy's poetics. Somebody should calculate the percentage of ballad-based meters in this poet's output; it may easily pass fifty. The explanation for this is not so much young Thomas Har dy's habit of playing the fiddle at country fairs as the English ballad's procli vity for gore and comeuppance, its inherent air of danse macabre. The chief attr action of ballad tunes is precisely their dancing playful, if you insist denominatio n, which proclaims from the threshold its artifice. A ballad and, by extension, a ballad- based meter announces to the reader: Look, I am not entirely for real; and poetry is too old an art not to use this opportunity for displaying self-awarene ss. So the prevalence of this sort of tune, in other words, simply coincides "overl aps" is a better verb in Hardy with the agnostic's world- view, justifying along t he way an old turn of phrase ("haunted nigh") or a trite rhyme ("lyres"/"fires") , except that "lyres" should alert us to the self-referential aspect of the poem . And as that aspect goes, the next stanza is full of it. It is a fusion of exposi tion and statement of theme. The end of a century is presented here as the death of a man lying, as it were, in state. To appreciate this treatment better, we h ave to bear in mind Thomas Hardy's other trade; that of ecclesiastical architect . In that respect, he undertakes here something quite remarkable when he puts th e corpse of time into the church of the elements. What makes this undertaking con genial to him in the first place is the fact that the century's sixty years are his own. In a sense, he owns both the edifice and a large portion of its content s. This dual affinity stems not only from the given landscape at the given seaso n but also from his practiced self-deprecation, all the more convincing in a six ty-year-old. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. That he had some twenty-eight years to go (in the course of which, at the age of seventy-four, he remarried) is of no consequence, as he couldn't be aware of su ch a prospect. An inquisitive eye may even zero in on "shrunken" and perceive a euphemistic job in that "pulse of germ and birth." That would be both reductive and irrelevant, however, since the mental gesture of this quatrain is far grande r and more resolute than any personal lament. It ends with "I," and the gaping c aesura after "fervourless" gives this "as I" terrific singularity. Now the exposition is over, and had the poem stopped here, we'd still have a goo d piece, the kind of sketch from nature with which the body of many a poet's wor k swells. For many poems, specifically those that have nature as their subject, are essentially extended expositions fallen short of their objective; sidetracke d, as it were, by the pleasure of the attained texture. Nothing of the sort ever happens in Hardy. He seems always to know what he is af ter, and pleasure for him is neither a principle nor a valid consideration in ver se. He is not big on sonority and orchestrates his lines rather poorly, until it comes to the punch line of the poem, or to the main point the poem is trying to score. That's why his expositions are not particularly mellifluous; if they are a s is the case in "The Darkling Thrush" it is more by fluke than by intent. With Ha rdy, the main adventure of a poem is always toward its end. By and large, he giv es you the impression that verse for him is but the means of transportation, jus tified and perhaps even hallowed only by the poem's destination. His ear is seldo m better than his eye, but both are inferior to his mind, which subordinates the m to its purposes, at times harshly. So what we've got by now is a picture of utter desolation, of a man and a landsc ape locked in their respective mori- bundity. The next stanza offers a key: At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small In blast-beruffled plume Has chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloo m.This is a treasure trove of a stanza for anyone interested in Hardy. Let's tak e its story line at face value and see what our poet is up to. He is up to showi ng you an exit out of the previous stanza's dead end. Dead ends can be exited on ly upward or by backing out. "Arose" and "overhead" tell you the route our poet chooses. He goes for a full-scale elevation here; in fact, for an epiphany, for a complete takeoff with clear-cut ecclesiastical connotations. But what is remar kable about this takeoff is the self-consciousness accompanying the lyrical rele ase of "In a full-hearted evensong/Of joy illim- ited." This self-consciousness is apparent in the dactylic undercutting you detect in both "evensong" and "illim ited": these words come to you prefaced by a caesura and as though exhaled; as t hough these lines that begin as assertions dissipate in his throat into qualifier s. This reflects not so much the understandable difficulty an agnostic may have wit h ecclesiastical vocabulary as Hardy's true humility. In other words, the takeoff of belief is checked here by the gravity of the speaker's reservations as to hi s right to use these means of elevation. "An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and smal l,/In blast-beruffled plume" is, of course, Hardy's self-portrait. Famous for hi s aquiline profile, with a tuft of hair hovering above his bald pate, he had ind eed a birdlike appearance in his old age especially, judging by the available photo graphs. ("Gaunt" is his pet word, a signature really, if only because it is so u n- Georgian.) At any rate, the bird here, in addition to behaving like a bard, has his visual characteristics also. This is our poet's ticket into its sentiments, which yield s one of the greatest lines in English poetry of the twentieth century. It turns out that an aged thrush of not particularly fetching appearance Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.Speaking of choices, "f ling" can't be beaten here. Given the implied visual similarity between bird and bard, this two- liner bespeaking a posture toward reality of the one does the s ame for another. And if one had to define the philosophy underlying this posture , one would end up no doubt oscillating madly between epicurianism and stoicism. Blissfully, for us terminology is not the most pressing issue. Far more pressing is the need to absorb this two-liner into our system, say, for the dark time of the year. Had the poem stopped here, we would have an extraordinary piece of moral instruct ion; they are few and far between in poetry but they still do exist. Besides, th e superiority of the animal kingdom (birds in particular) in poetry is taken for granted. In fact, the notion of that superiority is one of poetry's most distinc tive trappings. What is quite remarkable about "The Darkling Thrush" is that the poet goes practically against this notion, which he himself has bought and is t rying to resell in the process of the poem. What's more, by doing this, he almos t goes against his most successful lines ever. What is he hoping for? What is he driven by? Hard to tell, except that perhaps he does not recognize his own success, and wha t blinds him to it is his metaphysical appetite. Another explanation for why he goes for the fourth stanza here is that appetite's close relative: the sense of symmetry. Those who write formal verse will always prefer four eight-line stanzas to three, and we shouldn't forget the ecclesiastical architect in Hardy. Quatrai ns could be likened to euphonic building blocks. As such they tend to generate a n order that is most satisfactory when it can be divided by four. The sixteen-li ne exposition naturally for our poet's mind, ear, and eye calls for at minimum the s ame number of lines for the rest. To put it less idiosyncratically, the stanzaic pattern employed in a poem determi nes its length as much as if not more than its story line, "So little cause for caro lings/Of such ecstatic sound" is no less a denouement than the euphonic imperativ e created by the preceding twenty-four lines, requiring resolution. A poem's len gth, in other words, is its breath. The first stanza inhales, the second exhales , the third stanza inhales . . . Guess what you need a fourth stanza for? To com

plete the cycle. Remember that this is a poem about looking into the future. As such, it has to b e balanced. Our man, poet though he is, is not a Utopian; nor can he permit hims elf the posture of a prophet, or that of a visionary. The subject itself, by def inition, is too pregnant with imprecision; so what's required of the poet here is sobriety, regardless of whether he is pessimistic or optimistic by temperament. Hence the absolutely remarkable linguistic content of the fourth stanza, with it s fusion of legalese ("cause . . . Was written") with modernist detachment ("on terrestrial things") and the quaintly archaic ("Afar or nigh around"). "So little cause for carolings/Of such ecstatic sound/Was written on terrestrial things" betrays not so much the unique bloody-mindedness of our poet as his imp artiality to any level of diction he resorts to in a poem. There is something fr ight- eningly democratic in Hardy's whole approach to poetics, and it can be sum med up as "so long as it works." Note the elegiac opening of this stanza, all the more poignant in tone because of the "growing gloom" a line before. The pitch is still climbing up, we are still after an elevation, after an exit from our cul-de-sac. "So little cause" [caesu ra] "for carolings/Of such ecstatic" caesura "sound ..." "Ecstatic" carries an exclam ation, and so, after the caesura, does "sound." Vocally, this is the highest point in the stanza; even "whereof he knew/And I was unaware" is several notes notches lower. And yet even at this highest point, the poet, we realize, holds his voice in check, because "ca rolings/Of such ecstatic sound" are what "a jfull-hearted evensong" comes down t o; which is to say, the evaluation of the bird's voice has undergone a demotion, with ecclesiastical diction being supplanted, as it were, by lay parlance. And then comes this terrific "Was written on terrestrial things," whose detachment f rom any particularity bespeaks presumably the vantage point either of the "weake ning eye of day" or, to say the least, of the bird itself, and that's why we hav e the archaic which is to say, impersonal "Afar or nigh around." The unparticularity and impersonality, however, belong to neither, but rather to their fusion, the crucible being the poet's mind or, if you will, the language itself. Let's dwell on this extraordinary line "Was written on terrestrial things" a bit longer, for it crept into this turn-of-the- century poem out of where no poe t had ever been before. The conjunction "terrestrial things" suggests a detachment whose nature is not ex actly human. The point of view attained here through the proximity of two abstra ct notions is, strictly speaking, inanimate. The only evidence of human manufact ure is that it is indeed being "written"; and it gives you a sense that language is capable of arrangements that reduce a human being to, at best, the function of a scribe. That it is language that utilizes a human being, not the other way around. That language flows into the human domain from the realm of nonhuman tru ths and dependencies, that it is ultimately the voice of inanimate matter, and t hat poetry just registers now and then its ripple effect. I am far from suggesting that this is what Thomas Hardy was after in this line. Rather, it was what this line was after in Thomas Hardy, and he responded. And a s though he was somewhat perplexed by what escaped from under his pen, he tried to domesticate i t by resorting to familiarly Victorian diction in "Afar or nigh around." Yet the diction of this conjunction was destined to become the diction of twentieth- ce ntury poetry, more and more. It is only two or three decades from "terrestrial t hings" to Auden s "necessary murder" and "artificial wilderness." For its "terres trial things" line alone, "The Darkling Thrush" is a turn-of-the-century poem. And the fact that Hardy responded to the inanimate voice of this conjunction had to do obviously with his being well prepared to heed this sort of thing, not on ly by his agnosticism (which might be enough), but by practically any poem's vec tor upward, by its gravitation toward epiphany. In principle, a poem goes down t he page as much as it goes up in spirit, and "The Darkling Thrush" adheres to th is principle closely. On this course, irrationality is not an obstacle, and the b allad's tetrameters and trimeters bespeak a considerable familiarity with irrati onality:

That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware. What brings our author to this "blessed Hope" is above all the centrifugal momen tum developed by the amassment of thirty alternating tetrameters and trimeters, requiring either vocal or mental resolution, or both. In this sense, this turnof-the-century poem is very much about itself, about its composition which by happy coincidence gravitates toward its finale the way the century does. A poem, in fac t, offers a century its own, not necessarily rational, version of the future, thereby making the century possible. Against all odds, against the absen ce of "cause." And the century which is soon to be over has gallantly paid this poem back, as we see in this classroom. In any case, as prophecies go, "The Darkling Thrush" has pro ved to be more sober and accurate than, let's say, "The Second Coming," by W. B. Yeats. A thrush proved a more reliable source than a falcon; perhaps because th is thrush showed up for Mr. Hardy some twenty years earlier. Perhaps because mon otony is more in tune with time's own idiom than a shriek. So if "The Darkling Thrush" is a poem about nature, it is so only by half, since both bard and bird are that nature's effects, and only one of them is, to put i t coarsely, hopeful. It is, rather, a poem about two perceptions of the same rea lity, and as such it is clearly a philosophical lyric. There is no hierarchy her e between hope and hopelessness, distributed in the poem with notable evenhandedn ess certainly not between their carriers, as our thrush, I am tempted to point out, is not "aged" for nothing. It's been around, and its "blessed Hope" is as valid as the absence thereof. The last line's caesura isolating "unaware" is eloquent enough to muffle out regret and bring to the last word an air of assertion. Aft er all, the "blessed Hope" is that for the future; that's why the last word here is spoken by reason. V Twelve years later but still before the Irish bard's beast \ set out for Bethlehem t he British passenger liner Titanic \ sank on her maiden voyage in the mid-Atlant ic after colliding I' with an iceberg. Over 1,500 lives were lost. That was presu mably the first of many disasters the century ushered in by Thomas Hardy's thrus h became famous for."The Convergence of the Twain" was written barely two weeks after the catastrophe; it was published shortly afterward, on May 14. The Titanic was lost on April 14. In other words, the raging controversy over the cause of the disaster, the court case against the company, the shocking survivors' accoun ts, etc. all those things were still ahead at the time of this poem's composition. The poem thus amounts to a visceral response on the part of our poet; what's mo re, the first time it was printed, it was accompanied by a headnote saying "Impr ovised on the Loss of the Titanic." So, what chord did this disaster strike in Mr. Hardy? "The Convergence of the Tw ain" is habitually billed by the critical profession either as the poet's condem nation of modern man's self-delusion of technological omnipotence or as the song of his vainglory's and excessive luxury's comeuppance. To be sure, the poem is bo th. The Titanic itself was a marvel of both modern shipbuilding and ostentatious ness. However, no less than in the ship, our poet seems to be interested in the iceberg. And it is the iceberg's generic triangular shape that informs the poem's s tanzaic design. So does "A Shape of Ice" 's inanimate nature vis-a-vis the poem' s content. At the same time, it should be noted, the triangular shape suggests the ship: by alluding to the standard representation of a sail. Also, given oui; poet's archi tectural past, this shape could connote for him an ecclesiastical edifice or a p yramid. (After all, every tragedy presents a riddle.) In verse, the foundation o f such a pyramid would be hexameter, whose caesura divides its six feet into eve n threes: practically the longest meter available, and one Mr. Hardy was particul arly fond of, perhaps because he taught himself Greek.Although his fondness for figurative verse (which comes to us from Greek poetry of the Alexandrian period) shouldn't be overstated, his enterprise with stanzaic patterns was great enough to make him sufficiently self-conscious about the visual dimension of his poems to make such a move. In any case, the stanzaic design of "The Convergence of th

e Twain" is clearly deliberate, as two trimeters and one hexameter (normally con veyed in English precisely by two trimeters also the convergence of a twain) show , held together by the triple rhyme. This is your bona fide occasional poem in the form of a public address. In fact, it is an oration; it gives you the feeling that it should be spoken from a pulp it. The opening line "In a solitude of the sea" is extraordinarily spacious, both vo cally and visually, suggesting the width of the sea's horizon and that degree of elemental autonomy which is capable of perceiving its own solitude. But if the opening line scans the vast surface, the second line "Deep from human v anity" takes you farther away from the human sphere, straight into the heart of th is utterly isolated element. In fact, the second line is an invitation for the u nderwater journey which is what the first half of the poem a lengthy exposition ag ain! amounts to. Toward the end of the third line, the reader is well along on a v eritable scuba-diving expedition. Trimeters are a tricky proposition. They may be rewarding euphonically, but they naturally constrain the content. At the outset of the poem they help our poet to establish his tonality; but he is anxious to get on with the business of the poe m. For this, he gets the third, quite capacious hex- ametric line, in which he p roceeds indeed in a very businesslike, bloody-minded fashion: The first half of this line is remarkable for its pileup of stresses, no less th an for what it ushers in: the rhetorical, abstract construct which is, on top of that, also capitalized. Now, the Pride of Life is of course linked syntactically to human vanity, but th is helps matters little because (a) human vanity is not capitalized, and (b) it is still more coherent and familiar a concept than the Pride of Life. Furthermor e, the two n's in "that planned her" give you a sense of a truly jammed, bottlen eck-type diction, befitting an editorial more than a poem. No poet in his right mind would try to cram all this into half a line: it is bar ely utterable. On the other hand, as we've noted, there were no mikes. Actually, "And the Pride of Life that planned her," though menaced by its mechanical scans ion, can be delivered out loud, to the effect of somewhat unwarranted emphasis; the effort, however, will be obvious. The question is, why does Thomas Hardy do this? And the answer is, because he is confident that the image of the ship rest ing at the bottom of the sea and the triple rhyme will bail this stanza out. "Stilly couches she" is indeed a wonderful counterbalance to the unwieldy pileup of stresses ushering it in. The two l's a "liquid" consonant in "stilly" almost conv ey the gently rocking body of the ship. As for the rhyme, it clinches the femini nity of the ship, already emphasized by the verb "couches." For the purposes of the poem, this suggestion is indeed timely. What does our poet's deportment in this stanza and, above all, in its third line tell us about him? That he is a very calculating fellow (at least he counts his stresses). Also, that his pen is driven less by a sense of harmony than by his central idea, and that his triple rhyme is a euphonic necessity second and a str uctural device first. As rhymes go, what we've got in this stanza is no great sh akes. The best that can be said about it is that it is highly functional and rev erberates the wonderful fifteenth-century poem sometimes attributed to Dunbar: In what estate so ever I be Timor mortis conturbat me . . . "All Christian peopl e, behold and see: This world is but a vanity And replete with necessity. Timor mortis conturbat me." It's quite possible that these lines indeed set "The Convergence of the Twain" in motion, because it is a poem above all about vanity and necessity, as well, of course, as about fear of death. However, what perturbs the seventy-two-year- old Thomas Hardy in his poem is precisely necessity. Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, a nd turn to rhythmic tidal lyres. We are indeed on an underwater journey here, and although the rhymes are not get ting any better (we encounter our old friend "lyres"), this stanza is striking b ecause of its visual content. We are clearly in the engine room, and the entire machinery is seen quiveringly refracted by water. The word that really stars in this stanza is "salamandrine." Apart from its mythological and metallurgical con

notations, this four- syllable-long, lizardlike epithet marvelously evokes the q uivering motion of the element directly opposite to water: fire. Extinguished, ye t sustained, as it were, by refractions. "Cold" in "Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres" underscores th is transformation; but on the whole, the line is extremely interesting because i t arguably contains a hidden metaphor of the very process of composing this poem . On the surface or, rather, underneath it we have the movement of the waves approac hing the shore (or a bay, or a cove), which looks like the horn of a lyre. Break ers, then, are its played strings. The verb "thrid," being the archaic (or diale ct) form of "thread," while conveying the weaving of the sound and meaning from line to line, eu- phonically also evokes the triangularity of the stanzaic design , which is a triplet. In other words, with the progression from "fire" to "cold" we get here to an artifice that suggests artistic self-consciousness in general and, given the treatment a great tragedy receives in this poem, Hardy's in partic ular. For, to put it bluntly, "The Convergence of the Twain" is devoid of the "h ot" feelings that might seem appropriate, given the volume of human loss. This is an entirely unsentimental job, and in the second stanza our poet reveals somewh at (most likely unwittingly) the way it's done. Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent. This is where, I believe, the poem's reputation for social criticism comes from. It is there, of course, but that's the least of it. The Titanic was indeed a fl oating palace. The ballroom, casino, and cabins themselves were built to redefine luxury on the grandest scale, their decor was lavish. To convey this, the poet uses the verb "to glass," which both doubles the opulence and betrays its one-di mensionality: it is glass-deep. However, in the scene Mr. Hardy paints here, he is concerned less, I think, with debunking the rich than with the discrepancy be tween the intent and the outcome. The sea-worm crawling over the mirror stands i n not for the essence of capitalism but for "the opulent" 's opposite. The succession of negative epithets qualifying that sea- worm tells us quite a l ot about Mr. Hardy himself. For in order to know the value of a negative epithet , one should always try applying it to oneself first. Being a poet, not to menti on a novelist, Thomas Hardy would have done that more than once. Therefore, the succession of negative epithets here could and should be perceived as reflecting his hierarchy of human wrongs, the gravest being the last on the list. And the l ast on this list, sitting above all in the rhyming position, is "indifferent." T his renders "grotesque, slimed, dumb" as lesser evils. At least from the point o f view of this poet, they are; and one can't help thinking that the gravity "ind ifferent" is burdened with in this context is perhaps self-referential. Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind. Perhaps this is as good a time as any to point to the cinematic, frame-by-frame procedure our poet resorts to here, and the fact that he is doing this in 1912, long before film became a daily well, nightly reality. I believe I've said someplace that it was poetry that invented the technique of montage, not Eisenstein. A ve rtical arrangement of identical stanzas on the page is a film. A couple of years ago a salvaging company trying to raise the Titanic showed its footage of the s hip on TV; it was remarkably close to the matter at hand. Their emphasis was obv iously on the contents of the ship's vault, which among other things might have contained a manuscript of Joseph Conrad's most recent novel, which was sent by t he author to his American publisher with the ship, since it was to be the speedi est mail carrier, among other virtues. The camera circled in the vault area ince ssantly, attracted by the smell of its riches, but to no avail. Thomas Hardy doe s a far better job. "Jewels in joy designed" practically glitters with its j's and s's. So again doe s, with its swishing and hissing s's, the next line. Yet the most fascinating us e of alliteration is on display in the third line, where the ravished, sensuous mind goes flat, as all the line's I's crackle and burst in "sparkles," turning t he jewels in "beared and and blind" into so many released bubbles rising to the lin

e's end. The alliteration is literally undoing itself in front of our eyes. It is more rewarding to admire the poet's ingenuity here than to read into this line a sermon on the ephemeral and destructive nature of riches. Even if the lat ter were his concern, the emphasis would be on the paradox itself rather than the social commentary. Had Thomas Hardy been fifty years younger at the time of the composition of "The Convergence of the Twain," he perhaps might have sharpened t he social edge of the poem a bit more, though even this is doubtful. As it was, he was seventy-two years old, fairly well off himself; and among the 1,500 souls lost when the Titanic went down, two were his personal acquaintances. However, on his underwater journey, he is not looking for them either. Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" "Gaze at the gilded gear" has obviously crept into the second line of this stanz a by pure alliterative inertia (the author presumably had other word combination s to consider working up the last stanza, and this is just one of the spin-offs), which serves to recapitulate the ship's ostentatiousness. Fish are seen here as if through a porthole, hence the magnifying- glass effect dilating the fish eye s and making them moonlike. Of much greater consequence, however, is this stanza 's third line, which concludes the exposition and serves as the springboard for t he poem's main business. "And query: 'What does this vaingloriousness down here?' " is not only a rhetorical turn setting up the rest of the poem to provid e the answer to the question posed by the line. It is first of all the recapturi ng of the oratorical posture, somewhat diluted by the lengthy exposition. To ach ieve that, the poet heightens his diction here, by combining the legalese of "que ry" with the clearly ecclesiastical "vaingloriousness." The latter's five-syllab le-long hulk mar- velously evokes the cumbersomeness of the ship at the sea's bo ttom. Apart from this, though, both the legalese and the ecclesiastical clearly point to a stylistic shift and a change of the whole discourse's plane of regard . Now, "Well" here both disarms and signals a regrouping. It's a colloquial conceit , designed both to put the audience a bit off guard should "vaingloriousness" have put it on alert and to pump some extra air into the speaker's lungs as he embarks on a lengthy, extremely loaded period. Resembling somewhat the speech mannerisms of our fortieth President, "Well" here indicates that the movie part of the poe m is over and now the discourse begins in earnest. It appears that the subject, after all, is not submarine fauna but Mr. Hardy's as well as poetry's very own, ev er since the days of Lucretius concept of causality. "Well: while was fashioning/This creature of cleaving wing" informs the public syn tactically, above all that we are beginning from afar. More important, the subordi nateclause preceding the Immanent Will statement exploits to the hilt the ship's gender designation in our language. We've got three words here with increasingl y feminine connotations, whose proximity to each other adds up to an impression o f deliberate emphasis. "Fashioning" could have been a fairly neutral reference t o shipbuilding were it not qualified by "this creature," with its overtones of p articular fondness, and were "this creature" itself not side-lit by "cleaving." There is more of "cleavage" in "cleaving" than of "cleaver," which, while denoti ng the movement of the ship's prow through the water, also echoes a type of sail with its whiteness, resembling a blade. In any case, the conjunction of "cleavin g wing" and "wing" itself especially, sitting here in the rhyming position pitches th e line sufficiendy high for Mr. Hardy to usher in a notion central to his entire mental operation, that of "The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything." Hexameter gives this notion's skeptical grandeur full play. The caesura separate s the formula from the qualifier in the most natural way, letting us fully appre ciate the almost thundering reverberations of consonants in "Immanent Will," as well as the resolute assertiveness "that stirs and urges everything." The latter is all the more impressive thanks to the reserve in the line's dactyls which bord ers, in fact, on hesitation detectable in "everything." Third in the stanza, this line is burdened with the inertia of resolution, and gives you a feeling the ent ire poem has been written for the sake of this statement.Why? Because if one cou

ld speak of Mr. Hardy's philosophical outlook (if one can speak about a poet's ph ilosophy at all, since, given the omniscient nature of language alone, such disc ourse is doomed to be reductive by definition), one would have to admit that the notion of Immanent Will was paramount to it. Now, it all harks back to Schopenh auer, with whom the sooner you get acquainted the better not so much for Mr. Hardy 's sake as for your own. Schopenhauer will save you quite a trip; more exactly, his notion of the Will, which he introduced in his The World as Will and Idea, w ill. Every philosophical system, you see, can easily be charged with being essen tially a solipsistic, if not downright anthropomorphic, endeavor. By and large th ey all are, precisely because they are systems and thus imply a varying usually qu ite high degree of rationality of overall design. Schopenhauer escapes this charge with his Will, which is his term for the phenomenal world's inner essence; bett er yet, for a ubiquitous nonrational force and its blind, striving power operati ng in the world. Its operations are devoid of ultimate purpose or design and are not many a philosopher's incarnations of rational or moral order. In the end, o f course, this notion can also be charged with being a human self-projection. Ye t it can defend itself better than others with its horrific, meaningless omnisci ence, permeating all forms of struggle for existence but voiced (from Schopenhauer 's point of view, presumably only echoed) by poetry alone. Small wonder that Tho mas Hardy, with his appetite for the infinite and the inanimate, zeroed in on th is notion; small wonder that he capitalizes it in this line, for whose sake one may think the entire poem was written. It wasn't: Prepared a sinister mate For her so gaily great A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate. For if you give four stars to that line, how are you to rank "A Shape of Ice, fo r the time far and dissociate"? Or, for that matter, "a sinister mate"? As conju nctions go, it is so far ahead of 1912! It's straight out of Auden. Lines like t hat are invasions of the future into the present, they are whiffs of the Immanen t Will themselves. The choice of "mate" is absolutely marvelous, since apart fro m alluding to "shipmate, " it again underscores the ship's femininity, sharpened even further by the next trimeter: "For her so gaily great " What we are getting here, with increasing clarity, is not so much collision as a metaphor for romantic union as the other way around: the union as a metaphor fo r the collision. The femininity of the ship and the masculinity of the iceberg a re clearly established. Except that it is not exactly the iceberg. The real mark of our poet's genius is in his offering a circumlocution: "A Shape of Ice." Its menacing power is directly proportionate to the reader's ability to fashion that shape according to his own imagination's negative potential. In other words, th is circumlocution actually, its letter a alone insinuates the reader into the poem a s an active participant. Practically the same job is performed by "for the time far and dissociate." Now, "far" as an epithet attached to time is commonplace; any poet could do it. But it takes Hardy to use in verse the utterly unpoetic "dissociate." This is the be nefit of the general stylistic nonchalance of his we commented on earlier. There are no good, bad, or neutral words for this poet: they are either functional or not. This could be put down, of course, to his experience with prose, were it no t for his frequently stated abhorrence of the smooth, "jewelled line." And "dissociate" is about as unglittering as it is functional. It bespeaks not on ly the Immanent Will's farsightedness but time's own disjointed nature: not in th e Shakespearean but in the purely metaphysical which is to say, highly perceptible , tactile, mundane sense. The latter is what makes any member of the audience iden tify with the disaster's participants, placing him or her within time's atomizing domain. What ultimately saves "dissociate," of course, is its being rhymed, wit h the attendant aspect of resolution moreover, in the third, hexametric line. Actually, in the last two stanzas, the rhymes get better and better: engaging an d unpredictable. To appreciate "dissociate" fully, perhaps, one should try readin g the stanza's rhymes vertically, column-wise. One would end up with "mate great dis sociate." This is enough to give one a shudder, and this is far from being gratu itous, since the succession clearly emerged in the poet's mind before the stanza

was finished. In fact, this succession was precisely what allowed him to finish the stanza, and to do it the way he did. And so it emerges that we are dealing with the betrothed. With the feminine smart ship engaged early on to a Shape of Ice. A construction to nature. Almost a bru nette to a blonde. Something was growing in Plymouth docks toward that which was growing "In shadowy silent distance" somewhere in the North Atlantic. The hushed , conspiratorial "shadowy silent distance" underscores the secretive, intimate ch aracter of this information, and the stresses falling almost mechanically on eac h word in this stanza sort of echo time's measured pace the pace of this maid's an d her mate's advancement toward one another. For it is that pace that makes the encounter inevitable, not the pair's individual features.What also makes their a pproach inexorable is the excess of rhyme in this stanza. "Grew" creeps into the third line, making this triplet contain four rhymes. That could be regarded, of course, as a cheap effect, were it not for the rhyme s sound. "Grew hue too" has, as a euphonic referent, the word "you," and the second "grew" triggers the reader's realization of his/her involvement in the story, and not as its addressee only. Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their l ater history . . . In the euphonic context of the last four stanzas, "Alien" comes as an exclamatio n, its wide-open vowels being like the last cry of the doomed before submitting to the unavoidable. It's like "not guilty" on the scaffold, or "I don't love him" before the altar: pale face turned to the public. And the altar it is, for "wel ding" as well as "history" in the third line sound like homonyms for "wedding" a nd "destiny." So "No mortal eye could see" is not so much the poet's bragging ab out being privy to the workings of causality as the voice of a Father Lorenzo. Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event . . .Again, no poet in his right mind, unless his is Gerard Manley Hopkins's, would stud a line with stresses in such a hammering manner. And not even Hopkins would dare to use in verse "anon" like this. Is this our old friend Mr. Hardy's abhorrence of the smooth line, reaching here a degree of perversity? Or a further attempt to obscure, with this Middle English equivalent of "at onc e," a "mortal eye" 's ability to see what he, the poet, sees? An elongation of t he perspective? Going for those coincident paths of origin? His only concession to the standard view of the disaster? Or just a heightening of the pitch, the wa y "august" does, in view of the poem's finale, to pave the way for the Immanent Will's saying its piece: Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres. i "Everything" that the Immanent Will "stirs and urges" presumably includes time. Hence the Immanent Will's new billing: "Spinner of the Years." This is a bit too personified for the abstract notion's abstract good, but we may put this down to the ecclesiastical architect's inertia in Hardy. He comes uncomfortably close h ere to equating the meaningless with the malevolent, whereas Schopenhauer pushes precisely the blind mechanistic which is to say, nonhuman nature of that Will, whos e presence is recognized by all forms of existence, both animate and inanimate, t hrough stress, conflict, tension, and, as in the case at hand, through disaster. This, in the final analysis, is what lies behind his poetry's quite ubiquitous p redilection for the dramatic anecdote. The nonhumanity of the ultimate truth abo ut the phenomenal world fires up his imagination the way female beauty does many a Lothario's. A biological determinist, on the one hand, he eagerly, as it were , embraces Schopenhauer's notion not only because it amounts in his mind to the source of completely unpredictable and otherwise unaccountable occurrences (unifyi ng thus the "far and dissociate") but also, one suspects, to account for his own "indifference." You could bill him as a rational irrationalist, of course, but that would be a m istake, since the concept of Immanent Will is not irrational. No, quite the cont rary. It is highly uncomfortable, not to say menacing, perhaps; but that is a di fferent matter altogether. Discomfort shouldn't be equated with irrationality an y more than rationality with comfort. Still, this is the wrong place for nit-pic

king. One thing is clear: the Immanent Will for our poet has the status of Suprem e Entity, bordering on that of Prime Mover. Fittingly, then, it speaks in monosy llables; fittingly, also, it says, "Now." The most fitting word in this last stanza, however, is, of course, "consummation ," since the collision occurred at night. With "consummation" we have the marita l union trope seen, as it were, to the end. "Jars," with its allusion to broken earthenware, is more this trope's residue than its enhancement. It is a stunning verb here, making the two hemispheres, which the "maiden" voyage of the Titanic was supposed to connect, into two clashing convex receptacles. It looks as if i t was precisely the notion of "maiden" that struck the chord of our poet's "lyre " first. VI The question is why, and the answer arrives in the form of a cycle of poems writ ten by Mr. Hardy a year after "The Convergence of the Twain," the famous Poems o f igi.2-13. As we are about to embark on discussing one of them, let's bear in m ind that the feminine ship was lost and that the masculine Shape of Ice survived the encounter. That the remarkable lack of sentimentality, warranted in princip le by both the genre and the subject of the poem, could be attributed to our poet 's inability to identify here with the loser, if only because of the ship's gend er. Poems of 1Q12-13 was occasioned by the poet's loss of his wife of thirty-eight y ears, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who died on November 27, 1912, eight months after th e Titanic disaster. Twenty-one pieces in all, these poems amount to the Shape of Ice's meltdown. To make a long story short, the marriage was long and unhappy enough to give "Th e Convergence of the Twain" its central metaphor. It was also sufficiently solid to make at least one of its participants regard himself as a plaything of the I mmanent Will, and, as such playthings go, a cold one. Had Emma Hardy outlived he r husband, this poem would stand as a remarkable, albeit oblique, monument to th e morose equilibrium of their dissociate lives, to the low temperature of the poet 's heart. The sudden death of Emma Hardy shattered this equilibrium. In a manner of speakin g, the Shape of Ice suddenly found itself on its very own. In another manner of speaking, Poems of 1912-13 is essentially this Iceberg's lament for the vanished ship. As such, it is a meticulous reconstruction of the casualty; the by-produc t, naturally, of an excruciating self-examination rather than a metaphysical que st for the tragedy's origins. After all, no casualty can be redeemed by exposing its causality. That's why this cycle is essentially retrospective. To make a long story still s horter, its heroine is not Emma Hardy, the wife, but precisely Emma Lavinia Gilf ord, the bride: a maiden. The poems look at her through the dim prism of thirtyeight years of marriage, through the foggy hard crystal of Emma Hardy herself. I f this cycle has a hero, it is the past with its happiness or, to put it a bit m ore accurately, with its promise of happiness. As human predicaments go, the story is sufficiently common. As a subject for eleg iac poetry, the loss of the beloved is common as well. What makes Poems of 191213 slightly unusual at the outset is not only the age of the poet and his heroin e but the sheer number of poems and their formal variety. A characteristic featu re with elegies occasioned by someone's demise is their tonal, to say the least, metric uniformity. In the case of this cycle, however, we have a remarkable met ric diversity, which points to the possibility that craftsmanship was a no lesse r issue for the poet here than the issue itself. A psychological explanation for this variety might be, of course, that it has to do with our poet's grief searching for an adequate form of expression. Still, t he formal intricacy of the twenty-one attempts made in that direction suggests a greater pressure behind this cycle than pure grief or, for that matter, any sin gle sentiment. So let us take a look at perhaps the least stanzaically enterpris ing among these poems and try to find out what's going on. "Your Last Drive" is the second in the cycle and, according to the date underneat h, was written less than a month after Emma Hardy's death, i.e., when the shock

of her departure was very fresh. Ostensibly an evocation of her returning home i n the evening from a routine outing that proved to be her last, the poem for its first two stanzas appears to explore the paradox of the interplay between motio n and stasis. The carriage carrying the heroine past the place where she shortly will be buried seems to arrest the poet's imagination as a metaphor either of mo bility's myopic vision of immobility or of space's disregard for either. In any case, the mental input in these stanzas is somewhat larger than the sentimental one, though the latter comes first. More accurately, the poem strays from the emotional into the rational, and rathe r quickly so. In this sense, it is indeed vintage Hardy, for the trend is seldom the reverse with him. Besides, every poem is a means of transportation by definition, and thi s one is only more so, since metrically at least it is about a means of transpor tation. With its iambic tetrameter and the shifting caesura that makes its fifth line slide into an anapest, its stanza wonderfully conveys the tilting movement of a horse-driven carriage, and the closing couplets mimic its arrival. As is ine vitable with Hardy, this pattern is sustained throughout the poem. We first see the features of the cycle's heroine lit most likely dimly by "the borou gh lights ahead." The lighting here is more cinematic than poetic; nor does the word "borough" heighten the diction much something you would expect when it comes t o the heroine's appearance. Instead, a line and a half are expended on stressing l iterally, and with a touch of tautological relish her lack of awareness of the imp ending transformation into being "the face of the dead." In effect, her features are absent; and the only explanation for our poet's not grabbing this opportunit y to depict them is the prospect of the cycle already existing in his head (alth ough no poet is ever sure of his ability to produce the next poem). What's presen t of her, however, in this stanza is her speech, echoed in "And you told of the charm of that haloed view." One hears in this line her "It's charming," and conc eivably, "Such a halo!" as she was by all accounts a churchgoing woman. The second stanza sticks to the "moorway" topography no less than to the chronol ogy of events. Apparently the heroine's outing occurred one week perhaps slightly less before she died, and she was interred on the eighth day at this place, appar ently to her left as she drove home by the moorway. Such literalness may owe her e to the poet's deliberately reining in his emotion, and "spot" suggests a consci ous deflation. It is certainly in keeping with the notion of a carriage trundlin g along, supported, as it were, by leaf-springs of tetrameters. Yet knowing Hard y's appetite for detail, for the mundane, one may as well assume that no special effort was applied here and no special significance was sought. He simply regist ers the pedestrian manner in which an absurdly drastic change has taken place. Hence the next line, which is the highest point in this stanza. In "And be spoke n of as one who was not," one detects the sense not so much of loss or unbearabl e absence as that of all-consuming negation. "One who was not" is too resolute f or comfort or, for that matter, for discomfort, and negation of an individual is what death is all about. Therefore, "Beholding it with a heedless eye/As alien from you" is not a scolding but rather an admission of the appropriate response. With "... though under its tree/You soon would halt everlastingly" the carriage and the exposition part of the poem indeed come to a halt. Essentially, the central theme of these two stanzas is their heroine's lack of a ny inkling or premonition of her approaching end. This could be perceived as a r emarkable expectation indeed, were it not for her age. Besides, although througho ut the cycle the poet insists on the suddenness of Emma Hardy's demise, it's obvi ous from other sources that she was afflicted with several ailments, including a mental disorder. But presumably there was something about her that made him con vinced of her durability; perhaps that had to do with his notion of himself as t he Immanent Will's plaything. And although many would regard the third stanza's opening as heralding the theme of guilt and remorse that the same many would detect in the whole cycle, "I dro ve not with you" is just a restatement of that premonition's requirement; worse comes to worse, of his probable failure at obtaining it. The next line and a hal f postulate quite resolutely that probability, ruling out grounds for the speaker

's self-reproach on that account. Yet for the first time, true lyricism creeps i nto the poem: first through the ellipsis, secondly through "Yet had I sat/At your side that eve" (which is, of course, a reference to his not being at her side a t the moment of death). It takes over in full force with "That the countenance I was glancing at," where all the consonants of "countenance" vibrate, giving you a passenger's silhouette swaying from side to side because of the carriage's move ment, seen against the light. The treatment again is quite cinematic, the film b eing black-and-white. One could throw "flickering" into the bargain, were it not 1912. And were it not for the starkness of "Had a last-time look" (still, perceptions often run ahead of technology, and as we said earlier, montage wasn't invented b y Eisenstein). This starkness both enhances and shatters the almost loving tenta tiveness of "the countenance I was glancing at," betraying the poet's eagerness t o escape a reverie for the truth, as though the latter is more rewarding. A reverie he certainly escapes, but he pays for that with the monstrous next lin e: with recalling the heroine's actual features in "Nor have read the writing up on your face." The reference here, obviously, is to the writing upon the wall, w hose inescapable equation with the heroine's appearance tells us enough about th e state of the union prior to her death. What informs this equation is his sense of her impenetrability, and that's what the poem was all about thus far, since t his impenetrability applies to the past about as much as it does to the future, and it's a quality she happens to share with the future generally. Thus his read ing of Emma's equivalent of "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin' here is no fantasy. "I go hence soon to my resting-place; And here is our heroine, verbatim. Because of the deftly blended tenses, this is a voice from beyond the grave as much as from the past. And it is relentless. W ith every next sentence, she takes away what she has given a sentence before. And what she gives and takes is obviously his humanity. This way she reveals hersel f to be indeed a good match for her poet. There is a strong echo of marital argu ment in these lines, the intensity of which overcomes completely the list- lessn ess of the verse. It gets much louder here and drowns the sound of the carriage wheels on the cobblestones. To say the least, dead, Emma Hardy is capable of inv ading her poet's future to the point of making him defend himself. What we have in this stanza is essentially an apparition. And although the cycle 's epigraph "Traces of an old flame" is taken from Virgil, this particular passage b ears a very close resemblance, both in pitch and substance to the famous elegy by Sextus Propertius, from his "Cynthia Mono- biblos." The last two lines in this s tanza, in any case, sound like a good translation of Cynthia's final plea: "And as for your poems in my honor, burn them, burn them!"The only escape from such n egation is into the future, and that's the route our poet takes: "True: never yo u'll know." That future, however, should be fairly distant, since its foreseeabl e part, the poet's present, is already occupied. Hence, "And you will not mind" and "But shall I then slight you because of such?" Still, with that escape comes i n this last stanza's first line especially a piercing recognition of the ultimate parting, of the growing distance. Characteristically, Hardy handles this line wit h terrific reserve, allowing only a sigh to escape in the caesura and a slight e levation of pitch in "mind." Yet the suppressed lyricism bursts into the open an d claims its own in "Dear ghost." He indeed addresses an apparition, but one that's free of any ecclesiastical dim ension. This is not a particularly mellifluous form of address, which alone conv inces one of its literalness. He is not searching here for a tactfid alternative. (What could there be instead? The meter, allotting him here only two syllables, rules out "Dear Emma"; what then, "Dear friend"?) A ghost she is, and not becau se she is dead, but because though less than a physical reality she is far more than just a memory: she is an entity he can address, a presence or absence he is fam iliar with. It's not the inertia of marriage but of time itself thirty-eight years of it that solidifies into a substance: what may be, he feels, only hardened by h is future, which is but another increment of time. Hence, "Dear ghost." Thus designated, she can almost be touched. Or else "ghost" is the ultimate in detachment. And for somebody who ran the whole gamut of atti

tudes available to one human being vis-a-vis another, from pure love to total in difference "ghost" offers one more possibility, if you will, a postscript, a sum to tal. "Dear ghost" is uttered here indeed with an air of discovery and of summary, which is what, in feet, the poem offers two lines later: "Yet abides the fact, indeed, the same, /You are past love, praise, indifference, blame." This describes not only the condition of a ghost but also a new attitude attained by the poet an attitude that permeates the cycle of Poems 1912-13 and without which that cycle wouldn't be possible.This finale's enumeration of attitudes is tactically simil ar to "The Convergence of the Twain" 's "grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent." Yet while it is propelled by similar self- deprecating logic, it adds up not to the reductive ("choose one") precision of analysis but to an extraordinary emoti onal summary that redefines the genre of funeral elegy no less than that of love poetry itself. Immediate as the former, "Your Last Drive" amounts, on account o f its finale, to a much-delayed postscript, rarely encountered in poetry, to wha t love amounts to. Such a summary is obviously the minimal requirement for engag ing a ghost in a dialogue, and the last line has an engaging, indeed somewhat fl irtatious air. Our old man is wooing the inanimate. VII Every poet learns from his own breakthroughs, and Hardy, with his professed tend ency to "exact a full look at the worst," seems to profit in, and from, Poems of 1912-13 enormously. For all its riches of detail and topographical reference, t he cycle has an oddly universal, almost impersonal quality, since it deals with the extremes of the emotional spectrum. "A full look at the worst" is well match ed by a full look at the best, with very short shrift given to the mean. It is a s though a book were being riffled through from the end to the beginning before b eing shelved. It never got shelved. A rationalist more than an emotionalist, Hardy, of course, saw the cycle as an opportunity to rectify what many and in part he himself rega rded as a lyrical deficiency in his poetry. And true enough, Poems of 1912-13 do es constitute a considerable departure from his pattern of graveyard musing, gra nd on metaphysics and yet usually rather bland sentimentally. That's what accoun ts for the cycle's enterprising stanzaic architecture, but above all for its zer oing in on the initial stage of his marital union: on meeting a maiden. In theory, that encounter ensures an upsurge of positive sentiment, and at times it does. But it was so long ago that the optic of intro- and retrospection ofte n proves insufficient. As such it gets unwittingly replaced by the lens habitual ly employed by our poet for pondering his beloved infinities, Immanent Wills, an d all, exacting a lull look at the worst. It seems he's got no other instruments anyway: whenever faced with a choice betwe en a moving or a drastic utterance, he normally goes for the latter. This may be attributed to certain aspects of Mr. Hardy's character or temperament; a more ap propriate attribution would be to the metier itself. For poetry for Thomas Hardy was above all a tool of cognition. His correspondenc e as well as his prefaces to various editions of his work are full of disclaimers of a poet's status; they often emphasize the diaristic, commentary role his poe try had for him. I think this can be taken at face value. We should bear in mind also that the man was an autodidact, and autodidacts are always more interested in the essence of what they are learning than its actual data. When it comes to poetry, this boils down to an emphasis on revelatory capacity, often at the expe nse of harmony. To be sure. Hardy went to extraordinary lengths to master harmony, and his craft smanship often borders on the exemplary. Still, it is just craftsmanship. He is no genius at harmony; his lines seldom sing. The music available in his poems is a mental music, and as such it is absolutely unique. The main distinction of Th omas Hardy's verse is that its formal aspects rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc. are p recisely the aspects standing in attendance to the driving force of his thought. In other words, they seldom generate that force; their main job is to usher in a n idea and not to obstruct its progress. I suppose if asked what he values more in a poem the insight or the texture he would cringe, but ultimately he would give the autodidact's reply: the insight. This

is, then, the criterion by which one is to judge his work, and this cycle in par ticular. It is the extension of human insight that he sought in this study of th e extremes of estrangement and attachment, rather than pure self-expression. In this sense, this pre-modernist was without peer. In this sense also, his poems a re indeed a true reflection of the metier itself, whose operational mode, too, i s the fusion of the rational and the intuitive. It could be said, however, that he turned the tables somewhat: he was intuitive about his work's substance; as f or his verse's formal aspects, he was excessively rational. For that he paid dearly. A good example of this could be his "In the Moonlight," written a couple of years later but in a sense belonging to Poems of igi2-i3 if n ot necessarily thematically, then by virtue of its psychological vector. Like an extremely high percentage of Hardy's verse, the poem seems to hark back to the folk ballad, with its use of dialogue and its element of social commentar y. The mock romantic opening and the nagging lapidary tone of triplets not to men tion the poem's very title suggest a polemical aspect to "In the Moonlight" when v iewed within the contemporary poetic discourse. The poem is obviously a "variation on a theme" frequent enough in Hardy's own work in the first place. The overtones of social commentary, usually fairly sharp in a ballad, are somewh at muted here, though not entirely. Rather, they are subordinated to the psychol ogical thrust of the poem. It is extremely shrewd of the poet to make precisely a "workman," and not the urbane, sneering passerby the carrier of the loaded, ter rifying insight revealed in the last stanza. For normally a crisis-ridden consci ence in literature is the property of the educated classes. Here, however, it is a n uncouth, almost plebeian "workman" who weighs in with at once the most menacin g and the most tragic admission Hardy's verse ever made. Yet although the syntax here is fairly clear, the meter sustained, and the psych ology powerful, the poem's texture undermines its mental achievement with its tr iple rhyme, warranted neither by the story line nor, what's worse, its own quali ty. In short, the job is expert but not particularly rewarding. We get the poem' s vector, not its target. But as far as the truth about the human heart is conce rned, this vector may be enough. That's what the poet, one imagines, has told hi mself on this and on many other occasions. For the full look at the worst blinds you to your own appearance. VIII Blissfully, Hardy lived long enough not to be trapped by either his achievements or his failures. Therefore, we may concentrate on his achievements, perhaps wit h an additional sense of their humanity or, if you will, independent of it. Here 's one of them, a poem called "Afterwards." It was written somewhere around 1917 , when quite a lot of people all over the place were busy doing each other in an d when our poet was seventy-seven years old. These twenty hexametric lines are the glory of English poetry, and they owe all that they've got precisely to hexameter. The good question is to what does hexame ter itself owe its appearance here, and the answer is so that the old man can br eathe more easily. Hexameter is here not for its epic or by the same classical t oken elegiac connotations but for its trimeter-long, inhale-exhale properties. O n the subconscious level, this comfort translates into the availability of time, into a generous margin. Hexameter, if you will, is a moment stretched, and with every next word Thomas Hardy in "Afterwards" stretches it even further. The conceit in this poem is fairly simple: while considering his immanent passing , the poet produces cameo representations of each one of the four seasons as his departure's probable backdrop. Remarkably well served by its title and free of t he emotional investment usually accompanying a poet when such prospects are ente rtained, the poem proceeds at a pace of melancholy meditation which is what Mr. Har dy, one imagines, wanted it to be. It appears, however, that somewhere along the way the poem escaped his control and things began to occur in it not according t o the initial plan. In other words, art has overtaken craft. But first things first, and the first season here is spring, which is ushered in with an awkward, almost creaking septuagenarian elegance: no sooner does May get in than it is hit by a stress. This is all the more noticeable after the indeed highly arch and creaking "When the Present has latched its postern behind my tr

emulous stay," with its wonderfully hissing confluence of sibilants toward the e nd of the line. "Tremulous stay" is a splendid conjunction, evocative, one would imagine, of the poet's very voice at this stage, and thus setting the tone for the rest of the poem. Of course, we have to bear in mind that we are viewing the whole thing through th e prism of the modern, late- twentieth-century idiom in poetry. What seems arch and antiquated through this lens wouldn't necessarily have produced the same effe ct at the time. When it comes to generating circumlocutions, death has no equals, and at the Last Judgment it could cite them in its defense. And as such circuml ocutions go, "When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay" is wonderful if only because it shows a poet more concerned with his diction tha n with the prospect he describes. There is a peace in this line, not least becau se the stressed words here are two and three syllables long; the unstressed syll ables play the rest of these words down with the air of a postscript or an after thought. Actually, the stretching of the hexameter i.e., time and filling it up begins with "tremulous stay." But things really get busy once the stress hits "May" in the s econd line, which consists solely of monosyllables. Euphonically, the net result in the second line is an impression that Mr. Hardy's spring is more rich in lea f than any August. Psychologically, however, one has the sense of piiing-up qual ifiers spilling well into the third line, with its hyphenated, Homer-like epithe ts. The overall sensation (embodied in the future per- feet tense) is that of ti me slowed down, stalled by its every second, for that's what monosyllabic words are; uttered or printed seconds. "The best eye for natural detail," enthused Yvor Winters about Thomas Hardy. And we, of course, can admire this eye sharp enough to liken the reverse side of a leaf to newly spun silk but only at the expense of praising the ear. As you read t hese lines out loud, you stumble through the second, and you've got to mumble fas t through the first half of the third. And it occurs to you that the poet has st uffed these lines with so much natural detail not for its own sake but for reaso ns of metric vacancy. The truth, of course, is that it's both; that's your real natural detail: the ra tio of, say, a leaf to the amount of space in a line. It may fit, and then it ma y not. This is the way a poet learns the value of that leaf as well as of those available stresses. And it is to alleviate the syllabic density of the preceding line that Mr. Hardy produces the almost trochaic "Delicate-filmed as new-spun s ilk" qualifier, not out of attachment to this leaf and this particular sensation. Had he been attached to them, he'd have moved them to the rhyming position, or i n any case out of the tonal limbo where you find them. Still, technically speaking, this line and a half do show off what Mr. Winters a ppreciates so much about our poet. And our poet himself is cognizant of trotting out natural detail here, and polishing it up a bit on top of that. And this is what enables him to wrap it up with the colloquial " 'He was a man who used to n otice such things.' " This understatement, nicely counterbalancing the opening li ne's ramshackle grandeur, is what he was perhaps after in the first place. It's highly quotable, so he attributes it to the neighbors, clearing the line of the charge of self-consciousness, let alone of being an autoepitaph. There is no way for me to prove this though there is also no way to refute it but I think the first and last lines, "When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay" and " 'He was a man who used to notice such things,' " existe d long before "Afterwards" was conceived, independently. Natural detail got in b etween them by chance, because it provided a rhyme (not a very spectacular one, so it needed a qualifier). Once there, it gave the poet a stanza, and with that came the pattern for the rest of the poem. One indication of this is the uncertainty of the season in the next stanza. I'd suggest it's autumn, since the stanzas after deal respectively with summer and w inter; and the leafless thorn seems fallow and chilled. This succession is sligh tly odd in Hardy, who is a superb plotter and who, you might think, would be one to handle the seasons in the traditional, orderly manner. That said, however, t he second stanza is a work of unique beauty.

It all starts with yet another confluence of sibilants in "eyelid's soundless bl ink." Again, proving and refuting may be a problem, but I tend to think that "an eyelid's soundless blink" is a reference to Petrarch's "One life is shorter tha n an eyelid's blink"; "Afterwards," as we know, is apoem about one's demise. But even if we abandon the first line with its splendid caesura followed by thos e two rustling s's between "eyelid's" and "soundless," ending with two more s's, we've got plenty here. First, we have this very cinematographic, slow-motion pa ssage of "The dewfall-hawk" that "comes crossing the shades to alight ..." And w e have to pay attention to his choice of the word "shades," considering our subj ect. And if we do, we may further wonder about this "dewfall-hawk," about its "d ewfall" bit especially. What, we may ask, does this "dewfall," following an eyel id's blink and preceding "shade," try to do here, and is it, perhaps, a well-bur ied tear? And don't we hear in "to alight/Upon the wind-warped upland thorn" a r eined-in or overpowered emotion? Perhaps we don't. Perhaps all we hear is a pileup of stresses, at best evoking t hrough their "up/warp/up" sound the clapping of wind-pestered shrubs. Against su ch a backdrop, an impersonal, unreacting "gazer" would be an apt way to describe the onlooker, stripped of any human characteristics, reduced to eyesight. "Gazer" is fitting, since he observes our speaker's absence and thus can't be described in detail: probability can't be terribly particular. Similarly the hawk, battin g its wings like eyelids through "the shades," is moving through the same absenc e. The refrainlike "To him this must have been a familiar sight" is all the more poignant because it cuts both ways: the hawk's flight here is as real as it is posthumous. On the whole, the beauty of "Afterwards" is that everything in it is multiplied b y two. The next stanza considers, I believe, the summer, and the opening line overwhelm s you with its tactility in "mothy and warm," all the more palpable because it i s isolated by a very bravely shifted caesura. Yet speaking of bravery, it should be noted that only a very healthy person can ponder the nocturnal blackness of the moment of his demise with such equipoise as we find in "If I pass during som e nocturnal blackness ..." Not to mention more cavalier treatment of the caesura . The only mark of possible alarm here is the "some" before "nocturnal blackness ." On the other hand, "some" is one of those readily available bricks a poet use s to save his meter. Be that as it may, the real winner in this stanza is obviously "When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn" and within the line itself it is, of course, "fu rtively." The rest is slightly less animated and certainly less interesting, sinc e our poet is clearly bent on endearing himself to the public with his animal-ki ngdom sympathies. That's quite unnecessary, since, given the subject, the reader is on his side as it is. Also, if one wanted to be really hard-nosed here, one could query whether that hedgehog was indeed in harm's way. At this stage, howev er, nobody wants to quibble. But the poet himself seems to be aware of the insuf ficiency of the material here; so he saddles his hexameter with three additional syllables ("One may say") partly because the awkwardness of speech, he believes, suggests geniality, partly to stretch the dying man's time or the time he is rememb ered. It is in the fourth, winter stanza that the poem confronts absence in earnest. To begin with, being "stilled at last" includes within its euphemistic reach the author taking leave of the poem, as well as the poem's previous stanza growing s ilent. This way the audience, more numerous than "the neighbors," "a gazer," or "one," is ushered here into the text and asked to play the role of "Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees." This is an extraordinary line; the natu ral detail here is positively terrifying and practically prefigures Robert Frost. For winter indeed sees more "heavens," since in winter trees are naked and the air is clear. If these heavens are full- starred, it, winter, sees more stars. T he line is an apotheosis of absence, yet Mr. Hardy seeks to aggravate it further with "Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more." "Rise" imparts to the presumably cold features of the "stilled at last" t he temperature of the moon.

Behind all this there is, of course, an old trope about the souls of the dead re siding on stars. Still, the optical literalness of this rendition is blinding. A pparently when you see a winter sky you see Thomas Hardy. That's the kind of mys tery he had an eye for, in his lifetime. He had an eye for something closer to the ground, too. As you read "Afterwards," you begin to notice the higher and higher position in the lines of each stanza of those who are to comment on him. From the bottom in the first, they climb to the top in the fifth. This could be a coincidence with anyone other than Hardy. We also have to watch their progression from "the neighbours" to "a gazer" to "o ne" to "they" to "any." None of these designations is particular, let alone ende aring. Well, who are these people? Before we get to that, let's learn something about "any" and what he expects fro m them. There is no particular season here, which means it's any time. It's any backdrop also, presumably a countryside, with a church in the fields, and its bell tolli ng. The observation described in the second and third lines is lovely but too co mmon for our poet to claim any distinction for making it. It's his ability to de scribe it that "any" might refer to by saying in his absence, "He hears it not n ow, but used to notice such things." Also, "such things" is a sound: interrupted by wind yet returning anew. An interrupted but resuming sound could be regarded h ere, at the end of this autoelegy, as a self-referential metaphor, and not becau se the sound in question is that of a bell tolling for Thomas Hardy. It is so because an interrupted yet resuming sound is, in fact, a metaphor for p oetry: for a succession of poems emerging from under the same pen, for a success ion of stanzas within one poem. It is a metaphor for "Afterwards" itself, with al l its peregrination of stresses and suddenly halting caesuras. In this sense, th e bell of quittance never stops not Mr. Hardy's, anyway. And it doesn't stop as l ong as his "neighbors," "gazers," "one," "they," and "any" are us. IX Extraordinary claims for a dead poet are best made on the basis of his entire oe uvre; as we are perusing only some of Thomas Hardy's work, we may dodge the temp tation. Suffice it to say that he is one of the very few poets who, under minima l scrutiny, easily escape the past. What helps his escape is obviously the conte nt of his poems: they are simply extraordinarily interesting to read. And to rer ead, since their texture is very often pleasure-resistant. That was his whole ga mble, and he won. Out of the past there is only one route, and it takes you into the present. Howe ver, Hardy's poetry is not a very comfortable presence here. He is seldom taught , still less read. First, with respect to content at least, he simply overshadows the bulk of poetry's subsequent achievement: a comparison renders too many a mo dern giant a simpleton. As for the general readership, his thirst for the inanim ate comes off as unappealing and disconcerting. Rather than the general public's mental health, this bespeaks its mental diet. As he escapes the past, and sits awkwardly in the present, one trains one's eye o n the future as perhaps his more appropriate niche. It is possible, although the technological and demographic watershed we are witnessing would seem to obliter ate any foresight or fantasy based on our own relatively coherent experience. Sti ll, it is possible, and not only because the triumphant Immanent Will might deci de to acknowledge, at the peak of its glory, its early champion. It is possible because Thomas Hardy's poetry makes considerable inroads into wha t is the target of all cognition; inanimate matter. Our species embarked on this quest long ago, rightly suspecting that we share our own cellular mix- up with the stuff, and that should the truth about the world exist, it's bound to be non human. Hardy is not an exception. What is exceptional about him, however, is the relentless- ness of his pursuit, in the course of which his poems began to acqu ire certain impersonal traits of his very subject, especially tonally. That could be regarded, of course, as camouflage, like wearing fatigues in the trenches. Or like a new line of fashion that set a trend in English poetry in this century : the dispassionate posture became practically the norm, indifference a trope. S

till, these were just side effects; I daresay he went after the inanimate not for its jugular, since it has none, but for its diction. Come to think of it, the expression "matter-of-fact" could well apply to his idi om, except that the emphasis would be on matter. His poems very often sound as i f matter has acquired the power of speech as yet another aspect of its human dis guise. Perhaps this was indeed the case with Thomas Hardy. But then it's only na tural, because as somebody most likely it was I once said, language is the inanimate's first line of information about itself, released to the animate. Or, to put it more accurately, language is a diluted aspect of matter. It is perhaps because his poems almost invariably (once they exceed sixteen line s) either display the inanimate's touch or else keep an eye on it that the futur e may carve for him a somewhat larger niche than he occupies in the present. To paraphrase "Afterwards" somewhat, he used to notice un- human things; hence his "eye for natural detail," and numerous tombstone musings. Whether the future will be able to comprehend the laws governing matter better than it has done thus fa r remains to be seen. But it doesn't seem to have much choice in acknowledging a greater degree of human affinity with the inanimate than literature and philosoph ical thought have been insisting on. This is what enables one to see in a crystal ball unfamiliar multitudes in odd a ttire making a run on the Scribner's edition of Hardy s Collected Works or the Pe nguin Selected. Ninety Years Later ^j i Written in 1904, "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes," by Rainer Maria Rilke, makes one w onder whether the greatest work of the century wasn't done ninety years ago. At the moment of its composition, its German author was twenty-nine years old and l eading a rather peripatetic life that brought him first to Rome, where the poem was started, and, later the same year, to Sweden, where it was finished. We shou ld say no more about the circumstances of its emergence, for the simple reason t hat what this poem adds up to can't be squared with any experience. To be sure, "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is as much a flight from biography as it is from geography. Of Sweden there is at best the diffused, gray, somber light enveloping the entire scene. Of Italy there is still less, save the frequently ma de claim that it was a bas relief in the Museo Nazionale in Naples depicting the poem's three characters that set Rilke's pen in motion. The relief does exist, and that claim could be valid, but, one would think, of s elf-defeating consequence. For the copies of this particular marble are innumerab le, as are this myth's vastly various other renditions. The only way for us to h ook said relief with the poem and the poet's personal circumstances would be to come up with proof that our poet recognized, for instance, a physiognomic resemb lance between the relief's female figure and either his sculptress wife, at the t ime estranged, or better yet his great love, Lou Andreas-Salome, estranged from him at that time as well. Yet we possess practically no evidence on that score. And even had that evidence been in abundance, it would be of no use. For a parti cular union, or its dissolution, is of interest only so far as it avoids metapho r. Once metaphor is introduced, it steals the show. Besides, the features of all the relief's characters appear too general as befits a mythological subject treated for the past three millennia in every art form with relentless frequency for any particular allusion. Estrangement, on the other hand, is everyone's forte, and estrangement is what t his poem, in part, is about. It is to this part in particular that the poem owes its perennial appeal; all the more so because it deals with the essence of that sentiment rather than with the personalized version specific to our poet's pred icament. On the whole, what lies at the core of "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is a common enough locution which formulates that essence and goes approximately like this: "If you leave, I'll die." What our poet, technically speaking, has done i n this poem is simply cross all the way over to the far end of this formula. Tha t's why we find ourselves at the outset of "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" squarely

in the netherworld. II As conceits go, a journey to the netherworld is about as ur as is the first trav eler to undertake it: Orpheus, the ur-poet. Which is to say that this conceit rivals in age literature as such, or perhaps e ven predates it. For all the obvious attractions of a round-trip story, the origins of this conce it are not literary at all. They have to do, believe, with the fear of being bur ied alive, sufficiently common even in our own time but, one imagines, quite ram pant in days of yore, with their sweeping epidemics particularly those of cholera . As fears go, this one undoubtedly is a product of mass society of a society in any case where the ratio between the mass and its individual members results in the former's relative disregard for the latter s actual end. In the days of yore su ch a ratio would be provided chiefly by an urban setting or perhaps by a militar y camp fertile ground for epidemics and literature (oral or not) alike, since, in order to spread, both require human amassment. It is suitable, then, that the subject of the earliest works of literature known to us is the military campaign. Several of them incorporate various versions of the myth of descent into the netherworld, with the subsequent return of the her o. That has to do as much with the underlying mori- bundity of any human endeavo r, warfare in particular, as with the congeniality of such a myth with its equival ent of a happy end to a narrative suggesting the loss of life on a mass scale. Ill The notion of the netherworld as a ramified, subway-like underground structure d erives in all likelihood from the (practically identical) limestone landscapes o f Asia Minor and the northern Peloponnesus, rich in what used to serve as both a prehistoric and a historic human habitat: in caves. The kingdom of Hades is essentially an echo of the pre- urban past, as the intri cacy of the netherworld's topography suggests, and the most probable place of th is notion's origin is ancient Cappadocia. (In our own civilization, the most aud ible echo of a cave, with all its otherworldly implications, is obviously a cath edral.) Any given cluster of Cappadocian caves might indeed have housed a popula tion similar in size to that of a small modern township or big village, with the most privileged occupying presumably the spaces closer to fresh air and the res t more and more remote. Often, the caves meander for hundreds of meters into the rock. It seems that the least accessible among them were used by the inhabitants for s torage and as burial grounds. When a dweller in such a community died, he would be taken to the most remote end of the cave network, laid there, and the entranc e to his resting place would be barred with a stone. With such a start, the imag ination wouldn t have to work too hard to conceive of the caves' patterns' conti nuation farther into the porous limestone. On the whole, finality ushers in the idea of infinity more readily than the other way around. IV Some three thousand years of that imagination's steady work later, it's natural to liken the netherworld's domain to an abandoned mine. The opening lines of "Or pheus. Eurydice. Hermes" bespeak the degree of our fluency with the notion of th e kingdom of the dead, whose familiarity somewhat wore off or fell into disuse b ecause of more pressing matters: That was the strange unfathomed mine of souls. And they, like silent veins of si lver ore, were winding through its darkness . . . "Strange" serves here as an invitation to suspend the rational approach to the s tory, and the translator's amplification of umnderlich, as "unfathomed" suggests both the mental and the physical depth of the place we find ourselves in. These epithets qualify the only tangible noun the poem's opening line contains, which is "mine." However, whatever tangibility there is to speak of is blown away with another qualifier: "of souls." As the netherworld's depictions and definitions go, a "mine of souls" is extreme ly effective, because "souls" here, meaning in the first place simply "the dead,

" carries with it also both its pagan and its Christian connotations. The netherw orld thus is both a storage and a source of supplies. This warehouse aspect of t he kingdom of the dead fuses the two metaphysics available to us, resulting, whe ther from pressure, shortage of oxygen, or high temperature, in the next line's " silver ore." Such oxidation is a product of neither chemistry nor alchemy but of cultural met abolism, most immediately detectable in language; and nothing shows this better t han "silver." v Museo Nazionale or no Museo Nazionale, this "silver" comes, as it were, from Nap les, from another cave heading into the netherworld, about ten miles west of the city. This cave, which had about a hundred openings, was the dwelling place of the Sibyl of Cumae, whom Virgil's Aeneas consults about his descent into the kin gdom of the dead, which he undertakes in Book VI of the Aeneid, to see his fathe r. The Sibyl warns Aeneas about various difficulties attendant on this enterpris e, chief among them breaking the Golden Bough off a golden tree he will encounter along the way. Presenting this bough t o Persephone, the Queen of Hades, is his only way to secure admission to her dar k realm. Now the Golden Bough, as well as its tree, obviously stands in for underground d eposits of golden ore. Hence the difficulty of breaking it off, which is the dif ficulty of extracting a whole vein of ore from the rock. Unwittingly, or conscio usly trying to avoid imitating Virgil, Rilke changes the metal and, with it, the color of the scene, aspiring evidently to a somewhat more monochromatic renditio n of Persephone's domain. With this change, of course, comes also a change in the trade value of his "ore," which is souls, suggesting both their plenitude and t he narrator's own unemphatic posture. "Silver," in short, comes from the Sibyl v ia Virgil. This is what that metabolism is all about; but we've just scratched t he surface. VI We'll do better than that, I hope, though we are dealing with this German poem i n an English translation. Well, actually, precisely because of that. Translation is the father of civilization, and as translations go, this is a particularly g ood one. It's taken from Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Works, Volume 11: Poetry, published in 1976 by the Hogarth Press in London. It was done by J. B. Leishman. What makes it particularly good is, in the first p lace, of course, Rilke himself. Rilke was a poet of simple words and by and larg e of regular meters. As for the latter, it was so much the case with him that on ly twice in the course of his roughly thirty-year career as a poet did he seek t o break away from meter-and-rhyme constraints in a decisive manner. The first ti me he did it is in the 1907 collection called Neue Gedichte (New Poems), in the cycle of five poems treating to put it superficially themes related to Greek antiqu ity. The second attempt, spanning with intervals the years 1915 to 1923, compris es what came to be known as his Duino Elegies. Breathtaking though these elegies are, one has the feeling that our poet got more freedom there than he bargained for. The five pieces from Neue Gedichte are a different matter, and "Orpheus. Eu rydice. Hermes" is one of them. It is an iambic pentameter job done in blank verse: something that the English l anguage feels quite comfortable with. Second, it is a straight-out narrative poe m, with its exposition, development, and denouement fairly clearly defined. From the translator's point of view, this is not a language-driven but rather a storydriven proposition, and that sort of thing makes translators happy, for with a p oem like this, accuracy becomes synonymous with felicity. Leishman's performance is all the more admirable because he seems to regularize h is pentameter to a greater degree than the German original offers. This brings t he poem into a metric mold familiar to English readers, enabling them to observe the author's line-by-line achievements in greater confidence. Many a subsequent effort and in the past three decades translating Rilke has become practically a f ad is marred either by attempts to produce stress for stress a metrical equivalenc y of the original or to subordinate this poem to the vagaries of vers libre. Whe

ther this shows the translators' appetite for authenticity or for being comme il faut in the current poetic idiom, the distinct feature of their aspirations (of ten sharply argued in prefaces) is that they were not the author's. In Leishman' s case, though, we clearly deal with the translator's surrender of his ego to th e reader's comfort; that's how a poem ceases to be foreign. And here it is, in i ts entirety. VIII The poem has the quality of an uneasy dream, in which you gain something extreme ly valuable, only to lose it the very next moment. Within the limitation of one' s sleeping time, and perhaps precisely because of that, such dreams are excruciat ingly convincing in their details; a poem is also limited, by definition. Both im ply compression, except that a poem, being a conscious act, is not a paraphrase or a metaphor for reality but a reality itself. For all the recent popularity of the subconscious, our dependence on the conscio us is still greater. If responsibilities begin in dreams, as Delmore Schwartz onc e put it, poems are where they are ultimately articulated and fulfilled. For whi le it's silly to suggest a hierarchy among various realities, it can be argued t hat all reality aspires to the condition of a poem: if only for reasons of econom y. This economy is art's ultimate raison d'etre, and all its history is the history of its means of compression and condensation. In poetry, it is language, itself a highly condensed version of reality. In short, a poem generates rather than re flects. So if a poem addresses a mythological subject, this amounts to a reality scrutinizing its own history, or, if you will, to an effect putting a magnifyin g glass to its cause and getting blinded by it. "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is exactly that, as much as it is the author's selfportrait with that glass in hand, and one learns from this poem a lot more about him than any life of him will offer. What he is looking at is what made him; bu t he who does the looking is far more palpable, for you can look at something on ly from the outside. That's the difference between a dream and a poem for you. S ay, the reality was language's, the economy was his. IX And the first example of that economy is the title. Titles are a quite difficult affair: they run so many risks. Of being didactic, overly emphatic, banal, orna te, or coy. This one eludes any definition and has the air of a caption undernea th a photograph or a painting or, for that matter, a bas relief. Arid presumably it was intended as such. This would suit the purpose of a poem t reating a Greek myth very well, proclaiming the subject matter and nothing else. Which is what this title does. It states the theme and is free of any emotional investment. Except that we do not know whether the title preceded the composition of the poe m or was thought up afterward. One is tempted, naturally, to assume the former, given the largely dispassionate tone throughout the poem. In other words, the ti tle offers the reader a cue. Well, so far, so good, and one may only marvel at the remarkable shrewdness of a twenty-nine-year-old putting full stops after each name here to avoid any sembl ance of melodrama. As on Greek vases, one thinks, and marvels at his intelligence again. But then one looks at the title and notices that something is missing. D id I say "after each name"? There is no full stop after Hermes, and he is the last. Why? Because he is a god, and punctuation is the province of mortals. To say the leas t, a period after a god's name won't do, because gods are eternal and can't be c urbed. Hermes, "the god of faring and of distant message," least of all. The use of divinity in poetry has its own etiquette, which goes at least as far back as the medieval period, and Dante, for instance, advised against rhyming an ything in the Christian pantheon with low-level nouns. Rilke, as it were, takes t his etiquette a dot further, pairing Orpheus and Eurydice in their finality but leaving the god literally open-ended. As far as giving cues is concerned, this i s a superbly emblematic job; one almost wishes it were a typo. But then it would be divine intervention.

X This blend of matter-of-factness and open-endedness is what constitutes the dict ion of the poem. Nothing could be more suitable for retelling a myth, which is t o say that the choice of diction was as much Rilke's own achievement as it was t he product of this myth's previous renditions say, from the Georgics onward. It's those innumerable previous versions that push our poet into the flight from any f lourish, into adopting this dispassionate timbre tinged now and then with a note of somber wistfulness, equally befitting the age and the tenor of his story. What is more Rilke's own is, in the opening lines of the poem, the use of color. Its bleached pastel tones of gray, of opaque porphyry, all the way down to Orph eus' own blue mantle are straight out of the Worpswede-soft bed of Northern expre ssionism, with its subdued, washed-out sheets wrinkled by the pre-Raphaelite-cum -Art-Nouveau aesthetic idiom of the turn of the century. Now this is the exposition; so, naturally, the emphasis on color is substantial. You may count up to two "grays," a couple of "darknesses," three "reds." Add to that the "ghostly" of the forests and the "pale" of the pathway as belonging to t he same monochrome-gravitating family of epithets, since the source of light is w ithdrawn. This is a scene devoid of any sharp color. If anything stands out, it is the sou ls' "veins of silver ore," whose glitter also amounts to an animated version of g ray at best. "Rocks" project a further absence of color, another degree of gray perhaps, especially being preceded by the spectrum- thwarting "Else there was no thing red." It is an anticlimactic palette, fashionable at the time, that Rilke uses here, o bviously running the risk of turning the poem into a period piece. Having read t hus far, we learn at least what kind of art was inspiring for him, and we may wr iggle our modern noses at this dated aesthetic idiom: at best, it's somewhere be tween Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch. XI Yet for all his slaving as a secretary for Rodin, for all his tremendous sentime nt for , for all his immersion in the artistic milieu, he was a stranger to the visual arts, and his taste for them was incidental. A poet is always a concep- tualist rather than a colorist, and having read thus far, we realize that his eye in the quoted passage is subordinate to his imagination, or, to put it more accurately , to his mind. For while we can trace the application of color in these lines to a certain period in European painting, the spatial construction of has no detectable origin. Save, perhaps, a standard textbook figure of a river ( or lake) in profile in a high-school geometry lesson. Or both. For "Bridges over voidness" echoes an arc chalked upon a blackboard. Similarly, "and that immense, gray, unreflecting pool/that hung above its so far distant bed " evokes a horizontal line drawn on the same blackboard and supplemented with a s emicircle underneath joining that line's two ends. Add to this "like a gray rain y sky above the landscape," which is yet another semicircle arching over that ho rizontal line, and what you get is the figure of a sphere with its diameter with in it.XII Rilke's poems are brimming and bristling with such depictions of things-in-them s elves, in Neue Gedichte particularly. Take, for instance, his famous "Panther," with its "dance of forces around their center." He does this sort of thing with relish, sometimes gratuitously, just at a rhyme's suggestion. Yet arbitrariness in poetry is a better architect, because it supplies a poem's structure with its climate. Here, of course, this sketch of a sphere fits rather well into the notion of his subterranean landscape's utter autonomy. It performs nearly the same function as his use of "porphyry," with its strictly geological connotations. What's more i nteresting, however, is the psychological mechanism behind this drawing full cir cle, and I believe that in this iambic pentameter blank-verse job, the equivalen ce of the two semicircles is the echo of the rhyme principle of, to put it rudely, the inertia of pairing and/or equating one thing with another whose application t his particular poem was meant to eschew. It does; but the rhyme principle makes itself felt through this poem like a musc

le through a shirt. A poet is a con- ceptualist if only because his mind is cond itioned by the properties of his means, and nothing makes you connect heretofore disparate things and notions like rhyme. These connections are often unique or singular enough to create a sense of their result's autonomy. Furthermore, the l onger our poet is at it, at generating or dealing with autonomous entities, the more the notion of autonomy rubs off on his own psychological makeup, his sense of himself.This line of thinking may take us, of course, straight into Rilke's b iography, but that's hardly necessary, since biography will avail us much less th an the verse itself. For the shuttling and oscillating of verse, fiieled by that rhyme principle while questioning conceptual consonance, offers a far greater m ental and emotional reach than any romantic endeavor. That's why one settles for a literary career in the first place. XIII Underneath the exposition's alternative landscape, with all it contains, includi ng the perfect sphere, runs, like a painter's signature, the wonderfully meander ing "pale strip of the single pathway/like a long line of linen laid to bleach," whose alliterative beauty should be credited, no doubt, to its English translato r, J. B. Leishman. This is a remarkably good circumlocution for an untrav- eled road, which, we lea rn a line before, is the only one in this alternative, wholly autonomous world j ust created by the poet. This is not the only such creation in this poem; more a re to come, and they, retroactively, will explain to us the poet's appetite for self-contained scenes. But this is indeed an exposition, and Rilke proceeds here as a good stage designer setting the scene for the movement of his characters. So last comes the pathway, a meandering horizontal line "between meadows, soft a nd full of patience," i.e., accustomed to the absence of movement but implicitly waiting for it: like us. Landscapes, after all, are to be inhabited; the ones sporting a road, in any case , are. In other words, now the poem ceases to be a painting and becomes a story: now he can start moving his figures. XIV "The slender man in the blue mantle" is obviously Orpheus himself. We should be interested in this depiction for a variety of reasons, above all because if there is anyone in this poem to tell us about its author, it is Orpheus. First, becau se he is a poet. Second, because in the context of this myth, he is a suffering party. Third, because he also has to imagine what is going on. Among the three, the emergence of some semblance of the author's self-portrait is inevitable. All the same, we shouldn't lose sight of the narrator, for it is he who gave us this exposition. It's the narrator who provided the poe m with its deadpan title, thus gaining our confidence as regards the rest. It's his version of the myth we are dealing with, not Orpheus'. In other words, Rilke and the poet shouldn't overlap in our minds completely, if only because no two poets are alike. Still, if our Orpheus is only an aspect of our author, that's already of suffici ent interest to us, because through his portrayal of our ur-poet we can espy the great German's own vantage point and what as he stands at that point he envies or disdains in the figure of Orpheus. Who knows, perhaps the whole purpose of this poem for its author was in sorting these things out. So as tempting as this might be, we should avoid fusing in our minds the author and his character. It's more difficult, of course, for us to resist this temptat ion than it was for Rilke himself, for whom total identification with Orpheus wo uld be just plain unseemly. Hence his rather hard look at the legendary bard fro m Thrace. We should attempt to follow suit as we look at them both. XV ". . . the slender man in the blue mantle" gives you very little, save the comple xion and perhaps the height. "Blue" doesn't seem to denote anything in particula r; it simply makes the figure more visible against the colorless background. "Gazing in dumb impatience straight before him" is a bit more loaded and appears unflattering. Although Orpheus is understandably anxious to get it over with, t he author's choice of psychological detail is quite telling. Theoretically, ther

e must have been some other options: Orpheus' joy at regaining his beloved wife, for instance. However, by selecting ostensibly negative characterization, the au thor achieves two goals. First, he distances himself from Orpheus. Second, "impatienc e" underscores the fact that we are dealing with a figure in motion: with human m ovements in the domain of gods. This couldn't be otherwise, since in our visual habits we are to the ancients what their gods are to us. And equally inevitable is the failure of Orpheus' mission, as human movements in divine precincts are d oomed from the threshold: they are subject to a different clock. Sub specie aete mitatis, any human movement would appear a bit too choleric and impatient. Come to think of it, Rilke's rendition of the myth, removed as he is in time from ant iquity, is in itself the product of that eternity's small part. But like a germ that each spring shoots up a new leaf, a myth engenders its mout hpiece century after century in every culture. So Rilke's poem is not so much a rendition of the myth as its growth. For all the differences between the human a nd divine time patterns a difference which is at the core of this myth the poem is s till the story of a mortal told by a mortal. A god perhaps would present Orpheus in a harsher light than Rilke since, to the gods, Orpheus is just a trespasser. If he is to be clocked at all, it's just to time his expulsion, and the gods' epit hets for Orpheus' movements would be, no doubt, tinged with Schadenfreude. "Dumb impatience" is an utterly human characterization; it has an air of personal reminiscence, of hindsight, if you will, of belated regret. Airs of that kind a bound in this poem, imparting to Rilke's retelling of this myth an aspect of rec ollection. But myths have no other seat in men save memory; and a myth whose sub ject is loss only more so. What makes this sort of myth memorable is one's own e xperience of a similar nature. When you talk of loss you are on home ground, anti quity or no antiquity. Let's jump the hurdle, then, and let's equate myth with m emory; this way we'll spare ourselves likening the life of our psyche to the veg etable kingdom; this way we might get some explanation for myth's haunting power s over ourselves and of the detectable regularity of their recurrence in every cu lture. For the source of memory's potency (often overshadowing our very reality) is a se nse of unfinished business, of interruption. The same, it must be noted, lies be hind the concept of history. Memory is essentially a continuation of that busine ss be that the life of your mistress or affairs of some nation by different means. P artly because we learn about myths in our childhood, partly because they belong to antiquity, they are an integral part of our private past. And toward our past we are normally either judgmental or nostalgic, for we are not bossed around an y longer by those beloveds or by those gods. Hence, the sway of myths over us; h ence their blurring effect upon our own private record; hence, to say the least, the invasion of self-referential diction and imagery into the poem at hand. "Du mb impatience" is a good example, since self-referential diction, by definition, is bound to be unflattering. Now, this is the beginning of a poem dealing with a mythological subject, and Ri lke elects to play here by the rules of antiquity, stressing the one-dimensional ity of mythological characters. On the whole, the representational pattern in myth s boils down to the man-is-his-purpose principle (athlete runs, god strikes, war rior fights, and so forth), whereupon everyone is defined by his action. This is so not because the ancients were unwitting Sartreans but because everyone was t hen depicted in profile. A vase, or for that matter a bas relief, accommodates a mbiguity rather poorly. So if Orpheus is presented here by the author as being single-minded, it is pret ty much in tune with the treatment of the human figure in the art of Greek antiq uity: because on this "single pathway" we see him in profile. Whether deliberate ly or not (which is in the final analysis of no consequence, although one is temp ted to credit the poet with more rather than with less), Rilke rules out any nua nce. That's why we, accustomed as we are to multifarious, indeed stereoscopic re presentations of the human figure, find the first characterization of Orpheus un flattering. XVI

Because things are not getting any better with "His steps devoured the way in mig hty chunks/they did not pause to chew ..." let's say here something really corny . Let's say that our poet operates in these lines like an archaeologist removing the sediment of centuries from his find, layer by layer. So the first thing he sees about the figure is that it's in motion, and that's what he registers. The cleaner the find gets, the more psychological detail emerges. Having debased our selves with this corny simile, let's address those devouring steps. XVII "To devour" denotes a ravenous manner of eating and generally pertains to animals . The author resorts to this simile not only to describe the speed of Orpheus' m ovements but also to imply the source of that speed. The reference here is clear ly to Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the entrance to Hades as well as the exit from it, we must add, since it's one and the same gate. Orpheus, as we hav e him here, is on his way back to life from Hades, which is to say that he has s een that monstrous animal just recently and must feel terrified. So the speed of his movements owes as much to his desire to bring his beloved wife back to life as quickly as possible as to the desire to put as much distance as possible bet ween himself and that dog. By employing this verb in describing Orpheus' manner of movement, the author suggests that the terror of Cerberus turns the ur-poet h imself into a sort of animal, i.e., makes him unthinking. "His steps devoured th e way in mighty chunks/they did not pause to chew . . is a remarkable job, if on ly because it implies the true reason behind our hero's failing in his mission, as well as the meaning of the divine taboo forbidding one to look back; don't fa ll prey to terror. Which is to say, don't accelerate. Again, there is no reason for us to believe that the author set out to decipher the myth's main provision as he embarked on the poem. Most likely this came out intuitively, in the process of composition, after his pen drew out "devoured" a c ommon-enough intensification of diction. And then it suddenly jelled: speed and terror, Orpheus and Cerberus. Most likely the connection just flashed into his m ind and determined the subsequent treatment of our ur-poet. XVIII For Orpheus appears to be literally dogged by fear. Four lines and a half later- l ines that theoretically put a bit of distance between Orpheus and that fear's so urce the dog overtakes him to the point of becoming practically his own physical a spect: What we are given in this simile is essentially the domestication of fear. Now ou r archaeologist has removed the last layer of soil from his find, and we see Orp heus' state of mind, which appears to be quite frantic. His sight's shuttling ba ck and forth, however faithfully it serves him, compromises both his progress and his destination. Yet the little doggy seems to be doing far more running here t han we initially realize, for Orpheus' hearing lagging behind him like a smell i s yet another deployment of the same dog simile. XIX Now, quite apart from what these lines accomplish in portraying Orpheus' mental s tate, the mechanics behind their coupling of his senses (of sight and hearing) i s of great significance itself. And attributing this to the poet's rhyming muscle showing won't tell us the whole story. For the rest of the story has to do with the nature of verse as such, and for th at we have to go somewhat back in time. At the moment let me point out to you th e remarkably mimetic fluency of the lines we are dealing with. This fluency, you would agree, is directly proportionate to our doggy's ability to shuttle back a nd forth. To use I. A. Richards's terms, this little quadruped is indeed a vehicl e here. However, the danger with a successful metaphor lies precisely in the vehicle's a bility to absorb the tenor entirely (or the other way around, which happens less often) and confuse the author not to mention the reader as to what is being qualifi ed by what. And if the vehicle is a quadruped, it swallows the tenor real fast. But now let's go somewhat back in time. XX

Well, not too far: to approximately the first millennium B.C., and if you insist on a precise location, to that millennium's seventh century. The standard mode of ecriture (written language) in that particular century in G reek was called "boustrophedon." Boustrophedon literally means "ox way" and deno tes the kind of writing which is similar to plowing a field, when a forrow reach ing the end of that field turns and goes in the opposite direction. In writing, this amounts to a line running from left to right and, upon reaching the margin, turning and running from right to left, and so on. Most of writing in Greek at the time was done in this, I daresay, oxonian fashion, and one only wonders wheth er the term "boustrophedon" was contemporaneous with the phenomenon, or coined po st-factum, or even in anticipation? For definitions normally bespeak the presence of an alternative. Boustrophedon had a minimum of two: the Hebrew and the Sumerian ways of writing. The Hebrew went, as it still does, from right to left. As for the Sumerian cune iform, it went pretty much the way we are doing things now: from left to right. It's not that a civilization is exactly shopping around for a way to deploy its written language; but the existence of the term reveals a recognized distinction , and a very loaded one. Hebrew's right-to-left procedure (available to the Greeks via the Phoenicians) c ould be traced, I suppose, to stone carving, i.e., to the process in which the c arver holds the stylus in his left hand and the mallet in the right. In other wo rds, the origins of this written language were not exactly in writing: moving th is way, an ancient scribe would inevitably smudge his work with his sleeve or hi s elbow. A Sumerian (available to the Greeks, alas, directly), on the other hand , relying on clay rather than stone for his narrative or documentation, could pr ess his wedge into the soft surface as easily as he could use a pen (or whatever he would have instead) on the papyri or parchment. The other hand in this case would be the right one. The Greek boustrophedon, with its shuttle-like movement, suggests the absence of sufficient physical obstacles to the scribe's progress. In other words, its proc edure doesn't seem to be motivated by the nature of available writing material. It is so nonchalant in its treading back and forth that it looks almost decorati ve and brings to mind the lettering on Greek ceramics, with its pictorial and orn amental freedom. It's quite possible that precisely ceramics gave rise to Greek written language, since pictographs normally precede ideograms. We must also bear in mind that, unlike the Hebrew or Sumerian, Greek was the language of an archip elago civilization, and heaving boulders was not the best way to communicate bet ween islands. Ultimately, because ceramics employ paint, it's safe to assume that written lang uage lettering, actually did likewise. Hence its fluency and the knack for continuing regardless of limits. All right, says a sentence hitting the edge of its ceramic tablet, I'll just turn and proceed with what I've got to say to the available s urface for it's most likely that both lettering and images, not to mention ornamen t, were executed by the same hand. In other words, the very material used in Greek writing at the time, as well as its relative fragility, suggests the fairly immediate and frequent character of the procedure. In this sense alone, the Greek written language, boustrophedon or no boustrophedon, was much more an ecriture than similar processes in Hebrew or Sumerian, and presumably evolved faster than the other two. To say the least, t he relatively short history of boustrophedon and its status as an archaeological curiosity testifies to that evolution's pace. And as a part of that evolution, t he emergence of poetry in Greek owes quite a lot to this archaeological curiosit y, for it is difficult not to recognize in boustrophedon at least visually a precurso r of verse.XXI For "verse," which comes from the Latin versus, means "turn." Of direction, of o ne thing into another: left, right, U-; of thesis into antithesis, metamorphosis , juxtaposition, paradox, metaphor, if you will, especially successful metaphor; ultimately, rhyme, when two things sound the same but their meanings diverge. It all comes from the Latin versus. And in a sense this whole poem, as well as t

he very myth of Orpheus, is one large verse, because it is about turning. Or sho uld we say it's about a U-turn within a U-turn, for it's about Orpheus turning h is back on his trip back from Hades? And that divine taboo was as sound as your traffic regulations? Perhaps. One thing we can be confident about, though, is that the division of Or pheus' senses and its simile owes first to the medium itself, which is verse, an d the poet's imagination, which is conditioned by that medium. And that this sim ile's movement itself conveys extremely well the medium's own progress, being pe rhaps the best imitation by a dog of ox-ways on record. If one could speak of Rilke's emotional investment in his depiction of Orpheus and our poet has done everything within his power from the title on to avoid any se mblance of sentiment for his hero it is in these lines that one may detect it. Tha t's not surprising, since these lines deal with the extremes of self-awareness: something every poet is familiar with because of the nature of his enterprise, an d something he can't detach himself from, as hard as he may try. This passage, wonderful as it is in its psychological accuracy, warrants no parti cular comment save the small matter dealt with by the author in parentheses. Take n as a whole, though, these lines indeed represent a slight shift in the narrato r's attitude toward the figure of the ur-poet: there is an air of reluctant symp athy here, although Rilke is doing everything to keep his sentiments in check, i ncluding the aforesaid matter in parentheses. Or should we say, perhaps, matter of parentheses? Because this parenthetical matt er is the most audacious job pulled off by any poet dealing with this sort of ma terial in the history of our civilization. What Mr. Rilke puts here in the parentheses, as a matter of some secondary or te rtiary importance, is the main provision of the myth nay, the very premise of the m yth nay again, the myth itself. For the entire story of Orpheus' descent into the netherworld to bring back his wife and of his unsuccessful return revolves prec isely around the Olympians' taboo and his violating it. A good half of world poet ry is about this taboo! Well, even if it's one-tenth, say from Virgil to Goethe, making a huge meal precisely of this taboo! And Rilke gives it such short shrif t. Why? Because he is a modern poet who sees everything as psychological conflict? Or is it because of all those exalted ornate jobs done before him, and his wanting to sound different say, deadpan? Does he really perceive Orpheus as a severely fatigue d, perplexed creature, saddled with one more problem to solve, working his way o ut of Hades, with the main condition of the deal stashed away at the back of his mind? Or is this something to do with that rhyming inertia and boustrophedon aga in? XXIII Well, what's modern here is not the poet but the reader, consideration for whose attention span prompts the poet to issue this reminder. Also, since the relevan ce of the whole story for this reader is not exactly a given, this business-like parenthetical reminder may do some good. For parenthesis is the typographical e quivalent of the back of one's mind: the true seat of civilization in modern man . So the smaller the shrift, the easier the reader's not the poet's identification wit h the poet's hero lubricated further by having been thrown into the midst of the situation, as though it were happening this week, with a minimum of alienating archaic features. The irony and "if only looking back/were not undoing of this whol e enterprise/still to be done" is highly ironical in its stumbling, prose-like ca dence and cumbersome enjambments also helps. Moreover, these lines are just the la st brushstrokes completing the depiction of the ur-poet's appearance not of his su bstance, which comes six fines later so the more mortal he looks, the better for what lies ahead. XXIV But does our poet know what lies ahead? He certainly knows the ropes of the stor y and so, especially after the reminder, does the reader. So he knows that there a re two more figures to be introduced and moved through the poem. He also knows t hat the means of their transportation is blank verse, and that he has to keep th

e iambic pentameter under tight control, for it has a tendency to march to its o wn music, occasionally bursting into song. He knows that thus far he has managed to hold the poem to the key given by the title and rein the meter in pretty wel l, but after forty lines any meter acquires a certain critical mass that presses for vocal release, for a lyrical resolution. So the question is, where is he to let his meter sing, especially since his story, being a tragic one, presents hi m with constant opportunities? For instance, here, in the first line of the pass age introducing Hermes, the pentameter is about to get out from under the poet's dispassionate control: The pitch rises here as much because of the subject's elevated nature as because of the open-endedness of "faring," propped up by the caesura and followed with the spacious "distant message." Both designations are far more suggestive than t hey are precise; one registers their vowels rather than their meaning. Connected by a preposition which is supposed to link them, they end up qualifying their r espective vagueness and limitlessness as notions. In other words, one hears here the meter itself rather than the mental properties of what it deploys, which ar e eroded, washed out by the meter's own flow. There is quite a lot of "airing" i n "faring," and the "distant message" expands to "distant passage." But then poet ry has always been a melic art, especially in Orpheus' time, and it is, after al l, Orpheus' vision of Hermes that we get here, so we may let our meter go. Anyho w, the English here is as inviting as "Den Gott des Ganges und der weiten Botscha ft" Well, not yet. There may well be other opportunities warranting song more than t his one. And the poet knows this not only because he knows the plot and that Eur ydice's turn in the poem, for instance, is coming up. He knows this because of t he accumulation we mentioned a while ago of the meter's critical mass: the longe r he keeps it in check, the greater will be its vocal explosion. So for the moment it's back to the business-like, matter- of-fact tonality of "t he traveling-hood over his shining eyes," although with this poet the matter-offact approach is extraordinarily rich. Hermes' eyes are described as "shining" not simply because we are in the netherwo rld with its absence of light and color and the hood's shadow makes his eyes mor e prominent. No, it's because Hermes is a god, and his eyes shine with as Rilke's c ontemporary, the great Greek poet Con- stantine Cavaly, put it about one of thos e Greek gods "the joy of being immortal in his eyes." "Shining" is, of course, a standard epithet for "eyes"; however, neither Orpheus' nor, as we shall see shortly, Eurydice's which would be most appropriate eyes are referred to in this manner. Moreover, this is the first epithet with positive co nnotations to appear in the thus far opaque body of the poem. So it's not stylis tic inertia that lies behind this adjective, although the remainder of Hermes' de scription proceeds indeed along very traditional lines for that god's representa tion: the slender wand held out before his body, the wings around his ankles lightly b eating . . . The only interesting things about these lines is the second appearance in the poe m of "slender," perhaps not the most evocative choice in this case and making yo u think that, at the moment of the poem's composition, it was one of our poet's pet words. But then, he was twenty-nine years old, so his attachment to this epi thet is perhaps understandable. The wings around Hermes' ankles are, of course, as standard a detail of his atti re as the lyre is of Orpheus'. That they are "lightly beating" denotes the slow pace at which the god moves, as Orpheus' hands hanging "heavy and clenched, out of the falling folds,/no longer conscious of the lightsome lyre,/the lyre which had grown into his left/like twines of rose into a branch of olive" denote the o pposite: the speed with which he moves as well as where he moves, both excluding the use of his instrument to the point of turning it into a decorative detail, a motif, worthy of adorning some classical cornice. Yet two lines later, it is all going to change. XXV Given human utterance's vocal properties, the most puzzling aspect of our Ventur

e is its horizontality. Whether it runs from right to left or vice versa, all th at it is armed with to convey numerous tonal modulations is the exclamation point and question mark. Comma, semicolon, colon, dash, parentheses, period all these t hings punctuate the linear, which is to say horizontal, version of our verbal ex istence. In the end, we buy this form of representation of our speech to the poin t of imparting to our utterances a certain mental, to say the least, tonal equiv alent of horizontality, billing it now as equipoise, now as logic. Come to think of it, virtue is horizontal. This stands to reason, for so is the ground underfoot. Yet when it comes to our speech, one may find oneself feeling envious of Chinese characters, with their v ertical arrangement: our voice darts in all directions; or else one may long for a pictogram over an ideogram. For late as we are in our happy process of evoluti on, we are short of means of conveying on paper tonal changes, shifts in emphasis , and the like. The graphics of our phonetic alphabets are far from being suffic ient; typographic tricks such as line breaks or blank intervals between words fa il as a system of notation and are plain wasteful. It took ecriture so long to emerge not necessarily because the ancients were slow -witted but due to the anticipated inadequacy of to human speech. The potency of myt has to do perhaps precisely with their oral and vocal precedence over the writte n. Every record is reductive by definition. Ecriture is essentially a footprint wh ich I believe is the beginning of ecriture left by a dangerous or benevolent but el sewhere-bound body in the sand. So two thousand years later (two thousand six hundred, to be precise, since the first mention of Orpheus took place in the sixth century B.C.) our poet, by usin g structured verse structured precisely to highlight the euphonic (i.e., vocal) pr operties of written words and the caesuras that separate them returns, as it were, this myth to its pre-ecritufe vocal origins. Vocally speaking, Rilke's poem and the ancient myth are one. More exactly, their euphonic difference equals nil. Wh ich is what he is to show two lines later. XXVI Two lines below, Eurydice is introduced, and the vocal explosion goes off: The lyre motif erupts here into full-blown singing. What triggers this is not ev en Eurydice herself but the epithet "belov'd." And what we get here is not her p ortrait but the ultimate characterization of Orpheus, which comes extremely close to being the author s self-portrait, or, at any rate, the description of his me tier. This passage is very similar to the autonomous sphere we encountered at the poem 's beginning, except in this case we have, as it were, a universe also, if you wil l, a sphere, though not static but in the process of expansion. At the center of this universe we find a lyre, initially engaged in a mimetic reproduction of re ality but subsequently increasing its reach, sort of like the traditional depict ion of sound waves emitted by an antenna. This, I daresay, is very much a formula for Rilke's own art, not to mention his vision of himself. The quoted passage echoes very closely the 1898 entry in his diary in which he, twenty-three years old and reasonably low on self-esteem, pon ders restructuring himself into a semblance of a demiurge omnipresent at every l ayer of his creations and traceable to the center: "There will be nothing outsid e this solitary figure [i.e., himself], for trees and hills, clouds and waves wil l only be symbols of those realities which he finds within himself." A rather exalted vision, perhaps, to go by, but surelytransferable, and, when ap plied to Orpheus, a fitting one. What matters is not so much the ownership or au thorship of the emerging universe but its constantly widening radius; for its pr ovenance (the lyre) is less important than its truly astronomical destination. And the astronomy here, it must be noted, is very appropriately far from being he liocentric. It's deliberately epi- cyclic or, better yet, egocentric, since it's an Orphic, vocal astronomy, an astronomy of imagination and mourning. Hence its disfigured refracted by tears stars. Which, apparently, constitute the outer end of his cosmos. But what I think is crucial for our understanding of Rilke is that these ever-wi dening concentric circles of sound bespeak a unique metaphysical appetite, to sat

isfy which he is capable of detaching his imagination from any reality, including that of himself, and proceeding autonomously within a mental equivalent of the galaxy or, with luck, beyond it. Herein lies the greatness of this poet; herein, too, lies the recipe for losing anything humanly attained which is what presumabl y attracted him to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the first place. After all , Orpheus was known specifically for his ability to move the inhabitants of the C elestial Mansions with his singing. Which is to say that our author's notion of the world was free of any definable creed, since for him mimesis precedes genesis. Which is also to say that the orig in of this centrifugal force enabling him to overcome gravitational pull to any center was that of verse itself. In a rhymed poem with a sustained stanzaic desi gn this happens earlier. In an iambic pentameter blank-verse poem, it takes roug hly forty or fifty lines. That is, if it occurs at all. It's simply that after c overing such a distance, verse gets tired of its rhymelessness and wants to aven ge it. Especially upon hearing the word Geliebte. XXVII This effectively completes the portrait of Orpheus, son of Apollo and the Muse C alliope, husband of Eurydice. Here and there a few touches will be added, but on the whole, here he is, the bard from Thrace whose singing was so enrapturing tha t rivers would slow down and mountains would shift their places to hear his song more clearly. A man who loved his wife so much that when she suddenly died he w ent, lyre in hand, all the way to Hades to bring her back, and who even after fa iling in this mission kept mourning her and proved unsusceptible to the wiles of the Maenads with their understandable designs on him. Angry, they killed him an d dismembered his body and threw it into the sea. His head drifted away and ende d up at the island of Lesbos, where it was buried. His lyre drifted much farther away and became a constellation. We see him at a point in his mythic career which promises to be high but ends up very low. And we see him depicted with, for all we can tell, unflattering sobrie ty: a terrified, self-absorbed man of genius, alone on a single, not much travel ed pathway, concerned no doubt about making it to the exit. Were it not for the set piece about his mourning, we wouldn't believe him much capable of loving; perh aps we would not wish him success either. For why should we empathize with him? Less highborn and less gifted than he is, w e never will be exempt from the law of nature. With us, the journey to Hades is a one-way trip. What can we possibly learn from his story? That a lyre takes one farther than a plow or a hammer and anvil? That we should emulate geniuses and heroes? That perhaps audacity is what does it? For what if not sheer audacity wa s it that made him undertake this pilgrimage? And where does that audacity come from? Apollo's genes, or Calliope's? From his lyre, whose sound, not to mention i ts echo, travels farther than the man himself? Or is this belief that he may ret urn from no matter where he goes simply a spin-off from too much boustrophedon r eading? Or does that audacity come perhaps from the Greeks' instinctive realizat ion that loving is essentially a oneway street, and that mourning is its continua tion? In the pre- ecriture culture, one could arrive at this realization rather easily. XXVIII And now it's time to move the third figure: Here she goes, Eurydice, Orpheus' wife, who died of snakebite, fleeing from the p ursuit of Aristaeus (also sired by Apollo and thus her husband's half brother). Now she moves very slowly: like somebody just woken up, or else like a statue, w hose marble "lengthy shroudings" interfere with her small steps.Her appearance i n the poem presents the author with a number of problems. The first among them i s the necessity of changing the pitch, especially after the vocal outburst of th e preceding passage about Orpheus' mourning, to a more lyrical one, as she is a woman. This is partly accomplished by the repetition of "she, so beloved," which comes off as a choked wail. More important, her arrival calls for the author's altering his entire posture i n the poem, that of manly restraint fit for dealing with the figure of Orpheus who se place the narrator may occasionally occupy being unseemly (at least in Rilke's t

ime) vis-a-vis a female heroine, and one who is dead at that. The narrative, in other words, will be infused with a substantial portion of eulogizing and elegia c tonality, if not wholly subverted by them. This is so much so that "uncertain, gentle, and without impatience" sounds more like the author's inner monologue, like a set of commands he issues to himself o n embarking on the description of Eurydice, than like an account of this statue' s progress. Clearly a certitude or a definitive attitude, at any rate displayed by th e poet in the Orpheus part of the poem is lacking: our poet is groping here. But , then, she is dead. And to describe the state of death is the tallest order in this line of work. Th is is so in no small part because of the number and quality of the jobs already done in this, shall we say, vein. Also, because of the general affinity of poetr y with this subject, if only because every poem, in its own right, gravitates to ward a finale.Rilke chooses, assuming that the process is at least in part consc ious, a tactic we may expect from him: he presents Eurydice as an utterly autono mous entity. The only distinction is that instead of the centrifugal procedure em ployed in the portrayal of Orpheus who was, for the poem's intents and purposes, a fter all alive he goes here for the centripetal one. XXIX And the centripetal treatment starts, naturally, at the outer limits of an auton omous entity. For Eurydice, it's the shroud. Hence the first word of her descrip tion, "wrapt"; Rilke, to his great credit, proceeds not by unwrapping his heroin e but by following the shroud itself to the entity's center. "Thought not of the man who went before them" approaches the mental, subjective l ayers of herself, going, as it were, from the more outer ones to the more inner and, in a manner of speaking, more warm, since time is more abstract a notion th an man. She is defined by these notions, but she is not them: she fills them up. And what fills her up is her death. The underlying metaphor of the next four line s is that of a vessel defined by its contents rather than by its own shape and d esign. The cum- bersomeness, or, more accurately, bulkiness of that shape ushers in the oblique but nonetheless extremely palpable imagery of pregnancy highligh ting the richness and mysterious ness of Eurydice's new state, as well as its ali enating aspect of total withdrawal. Naturally, "one whose time is near" comes of floaded with grief translated into the guilt of surviving, or, to put it more ac curately, of responsibility for perceiving death from the outside, for filling u p, as it were, the beloved with that perception.This is Rilke at his best. He is a poet of isolation, and isolating the subject is his forte. Give him a subject and he will turn it immediately into an object, take it out of its context, and go for its core, inhabiting it with his extraordinary erudition, intuitions, and instinct for allusion. The net result is that the subject becomes his, colonize d by the intensity of his attention and imagination. Death, somebody else's espe cially, certainly warrants this approach. XXX Notice, for instance, that there is not a word about the heroine's physical beaut y which is something to expect when a dead woman, and the wife of Orpheus at that, is being eulogized. Yet there is this line, "She had attained a new virginity," which accomplishes a lot more than reams of the most imaginative praise. Apart from being, like the above allusion to pregnancy, one more take on the notion of Eurydice's total alienation from her poet, this is obviously a reference to Venu s, the goddess of love, endowed like many a goddess with the enviable (by some) capacity for self- renewing virginity a capacity that had much less to do with the value the ancients placed on virginity as such than with their notion of divine exemption from the standard principles of causality binding mortals. Be that as it might have been, the underlying meaning of this line is that our h eroine even in death resembles Venus. This is, of course, the highest compliment one can possibly be paid, because what comes to your mind first is beauty synony mous with the goddess, thanks to her numerous depictions; her miraculous properti es, including her regaining virginity after each sexual encounter with a god or a mortal, you recall later if at all.Still, our poet here seems to be after some thing larger than imaginative compliments per se, since that could have been acc

omplished by the just quoted line. The line, however, ends not with a period but with a line break, after which we read "and was intangible." Naturally, one shou ldn't read too much into lines, especially translated ones; but beyond this wond erfully evocative, very much fm-de-siecle qualifier lies a kind of equation betw een a mortal and a goddess which the latter could regard only as a backhanded co mpliment. Of course, being a product of a later civilization, and a German on top of that, our poet can't avoid making a bit of heavy weather of Eros and Thanatos once he sees an opening. So the suggestion that, to the goddess, the outcome of a sexua l encounter is never anything other than le petit mori can be put down to that. Yet what appears dramatic to a mortal, to the immortals, whose metier is infinit y, may be less so, if not downright attractive. And the equation of love and dea th is presumably one of those things. So in the end Venus perhaps wouldn't be much disturbed to be used as a vehicle to Eurydice's tenor. What's more, the goddess might be the first to appreciate the poet's resolution to drive the whole notion of existence, of being, inside: for that's what divinity in the final analysis is all about. So his stressing the h eroine's corporeality, indeed her carnality, seals the vessel further off, pract ically promoting Eurydice to divine status, and infinity to sensual pleasure. That the narrator's and Orpheus' perspective on Eurydice diverge here is beside the point. To Orpheus, Eurydice's death is a pure loss that he wants to reverse. To the narrator, it is his and her gain, which he wants to extend. A seeker of autonomy for his objects, Rilke certainly couldn't fail to detect th is property in either his notion of death or that of love. What makes him equate them is their common rejection of the previous state. To wit, of life or of ind ifference. The clearest manifestation of that rejection is, of course, oblivion, and this is what our poet zeroes in on here with understand able gusto: For oblivion is obviously the first cry of infinity. One gets here the sense tha t Rilke is stealing Eurydice from Orpheus to a far greater degree than the myth itself calls for. In particular, he rules out even Hermes as a possible object o f Orpheus' envy or jealousy, which is to say that her infinity might exclude the entire Greek pantheon. One thing is certain: our poet is far more interested in the forces pulling the heroine away from life than in those that might bring her back to it. In this, however, he doesn't contradict the myth but extends its ve ctor. XXXII The question is, who uses whom Rilke the myth, or the myth Rilke? Myths are essent ially a revelatory genre. They deal in the interplay of gods and mortals or, to put it a bit more bluntly, of infinities with finalities. Normally the confines o f the story are such that they leave a poet very little room for maneuvering the plot line, reducing him to the role of a mouthpiece. Faced with that and with h is public's assumed prior knowledge of the story, a poet tries to excel in his l ines. The better the myth is known, the tougher the poet's job. As we said before, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is a very popular one, tried by an extraordinary number of hands. To embark on r endering it anew, one should have a compelling reason indeed. Yet the compelling reason (whatever it might be), in order to be felt as such, itself must have som ething to do with both finalities and infinities. In other words, the compelling reason is itself myth's relative. Whatever it was that possessed Rilke in 1904 to undertake a rendering of this myt h, it is not reducible to personal anguish or sexual anxiety, as some of his mode rn critics would have it, since those things are manifestly finite. What plays t o a big audience in, say, Berkeley wouldn't ruffle the ink pot of the twenty-nin e-year-old German poet in 1904, however much such things might happen to trigger a particular insight or more likely might themselves be the by-product of that insig ht's effects. Whatever it was that possessed him to write this poem must have ha d an aspect of myth, a sense of infinity. XXXIII Now, a poet arrives at this sense fastest by employing metrical verse, since mete

rs are a means of restructuring time. This is so because every syllable has a te mporal value. A line of iambic pentameter, for instance, is an equivalent of fiv e seconds, though it could be read faster, especially if not out loud. A poet, h owever, always reads what he has written out loud. The meanings of words and the ir acoustics are saddled in his mind, therefore, with duration. Or, if you will, the other way around. In any case, a line of pentameter means five seconds spen t differently from any other five seconds, including those of the next pentamete r line. This goes for any other meter, and a poet's sense of infinity is temporal rather than spatial practically by default. But few other meters are capable of genera ting the dispas-419 / Ninety Years Later sionate monotone of blank verse, all the more perceptible, in Rilke's case, afte r a decade of practically nonstop rhyming. Quite apart from alluding to the poet ry of Greco-Roman antiquity, habitually rendered in blank verse, this meter must have smelled to Rilke in 1904 of pure time, simply because it promised him neut rality of tone and freedom from the emphasis inevitable in rhymed verse. So up t o a certain point in Eurydice's detachment from her previous state one discerns an echo of the poet's attitude to his previous diction, for she is neutral and f ree of emphasis. This is about as autobiographical as it gets. XXXIV Or as self-referential as it gets. Because the above four lines certainly sugges t a personal perspective. It is marked not so much by the physical distance from which Eurydice is observed as by the mental one from which she is, and used to b e, perceived. In other words, now, as then, she is being objectified, and the se nsuality of this object owes all to its surface. And though it would be best to attribute this perspective to Orpheus' shielding thus Rilke from feminist critics, the vantage point here is unmistakably the narrator's. Its clearest indication is "the broad couch's scent and island," objectifying and literally isolating th e heroine. But even "that blond woman" would suffice, since the ur-poet's wife w as bound to be dark-haired. On the other hand, verisimilitude and fear of anachronism are the least relevant concerns in rendering a myth: its time frame overshoots both archaeology and uto pia. Besides, here, toward the end of the poem, all the author aims at is a heigh tening of the pitch and a softening of the focus. The latter is certainly in kee ping with Orpheus' own: Eurydice, if seen at all, is to be seen from afar. XXXV And here we are given by Rilke the greatest sequence of three similes in the ent ire history of poetry, and these deal precisely with going out of focus, More ex actly, they deal with retreating into infinity. But first of all they deal with each other: She was already loosened like long hair, and given far and wide like fallen rain , and dealt out like a manifold supply. The hair, presumably still blond, gets loosened, presumably for the night, conno ting presumably the eternal one; and its strands, presumably turning grayish, be come a rain, obscuring with its hairlike lines the horizon, to the point of repla cing it with a distant plenitude. In principle, this is the same type of job that gave you the sphere at the begin ning of the poem and the concentric layers of Orpheus' universe-spinning lyre in the middle, except that this time a geometric pattern is replaced by plain penci ling. This vision of one's ultimate dissipation has no equal. To say the least, the line "and given far and wide like fallen rain" doesn't. Now, this is, of cou rse, a spatial rendition of infinity; but that's how infinity, temporal by defin ition, tends to introduce itself to mortals: it practically has no other choice. Therefore it can be depicted only at our end, which is to say, the netherworld's . Rilke, to his immense credit, manages to elongate the perspective: the above li nes suggest Hades' open-endedness, its fanning out, if you will, and into a Utop ian rather than an archaeological dimension at that. Well, an organic one, to say the least. Seizing on the notion of "supply," our p oet finishes his description of the heroine in the next line "She was already root " by firmly planting her in his "mine of souls," between those roots where "welled

up the blood that flows on to mankind." This signals the poem's return to its p lot line. XXXVI For now the explication of the characters is finished. Now they can interact. We know, however, what's going to happen, and if we are continuing to read this poe m, it is for two reasons. First, because the poet has told us to whom it is goin g to happen; second, because we want to know why.Myth, as we've said before, is a revelatory genre, because myths illuminate the forces that, to put it crassly, control human destiny. The gods and heroes inhabiting them are essentially those forces' sometimes more, sometimes less tangible stand-ins or figureheads. No ma tter how stereoscopic or palpable a poet renders them, the job may remain in the end decorative, especially if he is obsessed with perfecting the details or if he identifies himself with one or several characters in the story, in which case i t turns into a a clef. In this case the poet imparts to the forces his characters re present an imbalance alien to their own logic or volatility. To put it bluntly, his becomes an inside story. Whereas the forces' is an outside one. As we've see n, Rilke shields himself from too close an affinity with Orpheus right from the outset. Thus, the risk he runs is that of concentrating on the detail, particular ly in Eurydice's case. Luckily, the details here are of a metaphysical nature an d, if only because of that, resist elaboration. In short, his lack of partiality vis-a-vis his material resembles that of the forces themselves. Combined with the built-in unpredictability of verse's every next word, this amounts nearly to hi s affinity, not to say parity, with those forces. In any case, it makes him avai lable to their self-expression, alias revelation, and he is not one to miss it. XXXVII The first opportunity emerges right now, offered by the plot. And yet it is prec isely the plot, with its need for conclusion and denouement, that sidetracks him . This is a stunning scene. The monosyllabic "who" is oblivion's own voice, an ulti mate exhaling. Because forces, divine powers, abstract energies, etc., tend to o perate in monosyllables; that's one way of recognizing them in everyday reality. Our poet could have easily arrested the revelatory moment had the poem been a rhy med one. Since he had blank verse on his hands, however, he was denied the eupho nic finality provided by rhyme and had to let this vastness compressed into the o ne vowel of "who" go. Remember that Orpheus' turning is the pivotal moment of the myth. Remember that verse means "turn." Remember, above all, that "Do not turn" was the divine taboo. Applied to Orpheus it means, "In the netherworld, don't behave like a poet." Or , for that matter, like verse. He does, however, since he can't help it, since v erse is his second nature perhaps his first. Therefore he turns and, boustrophedon or no boustrophedon, his mind and his eyesight go back, violating the taboo. The price of that is Eurydice's "Who?" In English, in any case, this could be rhymed. XXXVIII And had it been rhymed, the poem might well have stopped here. With the effect o f euphonic finality and the vocal equivalent of distant menace contained in the 0 0. It continues, however, not only because it is in blank verse, in German, and for compositional reasons requiring a denouement though these could be enough. It con tinues because Rilke has two more things up his sleeve. One of them is highly pe rsonal, the other is the myth's own. First, the personal; and here we are entering the murky domain of surmise. To be gin with, "she took in nothing, and said softly: Who?" is modeled, I believe, on the poet's personal experience of, shall we say, romantic alienation. In fact, t he entire poem could be construed as a metaphor for romantic estrangement betwee n two participants in an affair, with the initiative belonging to the woman and the desire to restore things to normal to the man, who would naturally be the au thor's alter ego. The arguments against such an interpretation are numerous; some of them have been mentioned here, including the dread of self-aggrandizement manifested in our au

thor. Nonetheless, such an interpretation shouldn't be ruled out entirely, preci sely because of his awareness of such a possibility, or else because the possibil ity of an affair gone bad on his part shouldn't be ruled out.So having imagined that the level of personal reference is present here, we should take the next lo gical step and imagine a particular context and psychological significance infor ming the heroine's utterance in the poem. That's not too difficult. Put yourself into any rejected lover's shoes and imagi ne yourself, say, on a rainy night passing after a protracted hiatus the all-too -familiar entrance of your beloved's house, stopping, and pressing the bell. And imagine the voice coming over, say, an intercom, inquiring who is there, and ima gine yourself replying something like, "It's me, John." And imagine the voice, fa miliar to you in its slightest modulation, returning to you with a soft, colorle ss "Who?" You would assume then not so much that you'd been entirely forgotten as that you 'd been replaced. This is the worst possible interpretation of "Who?" in your cu rrent situation, and you may go for it. Whether you're right is a different matte r. But if eventually you find yourself writing a poem about alienation or the wo rst possible thing a human being can encounter, for instance, death, you might d raw on this experience of being replaced to add, so to speak, local color. All t he more so because, being replaced, you seldom know by whom. X X X X X This is what might or might not have been behind this line, which cost Rilke an insight into the nature of the forces running the Orpheus-Eurydice hiatus. It to ok him seven more lines to get to the myth's own story, but it was worth waiting for. The myth's own story is like this: Orpheus and Eurydice seem to be pulled in opp osite directions by conflicting forces: he, to life; she, to death. Which is to say, he is claimed by finality while she is by infinity. Ostensibly, there is a semblance of parity between the two, with life showing pe rhaps some edge over death, for the latter allows the former to make an inroad i nto death's domain. Or it may be the other way around and Pluto and Persephone a llow Orpheus to enter Hades to collect his wife and bring her back to life preci sely because they are confident that he is going to fail. Perhaps even the taboo they issue, forbidding him to turn and look back, reflects their apprehension th at Orpheus may find their realm too seductive to return to life, and they don't w ant to offend their fellow god Apollo by claiming his son before his time. Ultimately, of course, it appears that the force that controls Eurydice is strong er than the one that controls Orpheus. This stands to reason, for one remains dea d longer than one may be alive. And it follows that infinity yields nothing to f inality save perhaps in verse for, being categories of time, neither can change. And it also follows that these categories use mortals not so much to manifest their forces' presence or power as to mark the boundaries of their respective domains. XL All this is pretty absorbing, no doubt, but in the final analysis it doesn't exp lain how or, for that matter, why the divine taboo works. For that, it turns out , the myth needs a poet, and it's this myth's great fortune that it finds Rainer Maria Rilke. Here is the poem's final part, which tells you about the mechanism of that taboo as well as who is using whom: a poet a myth, or a myth a poet: Now, the "bright exit" is obviously the exit from Hades into life, and the "some one or other" who is standing there, and whose "countenance" is "indistinguishab le," is Orpheus. He is "someone or other" for two reasons: because he is of no r elevance to Eurydice and because he is just a silhouette for Hermes, the god, wh o looks at Orpheus standing on the threshold of life from the dark depth of the netherworld. In other words, Hermes at this point is still facing in the same direction as he did before, throughout the poem. Whereas Orpheus, as we've been told, has turne d. As to Eurydice . . . and here comes the greatest job of the entire poem. "Stood and saw," says the narrator, emphasizing by the change of tense in the ve rb "to stand" Orpheus' regret and acknowledgment of failure. But what he sees is

truly remarkable. For he sees the god turning, but only now, to follow "behind t he figure/already going back ..." Which is to say that Eurydice has turned also. Which is to say, the god is the last to turn. And the question is, when did Eurydice turn? And the answer is "already," and wh at it boils down to is that Orpheus and Eurydice turned simultaneously. Our poet, in other words, has synchronized their movements, telling us thereby th at the forces controlling finality and infinity themselves are controlled from a certain let's call it panel, and that this control panel is, on top of that, auto matic. Our next question is, presumably, a soft "Who?" XL I The Greeks certainly would know the answer and say, Chronos, since he is the one to whom all myths point anyway. At the moment, though, he is beyond our concern or, for that matter, reach. We should stop here, where roughly six hundred seco nds, or ten minutes, of this poem written ninety years ago leave us. It is not a bad place, though it is only a finality. Except that we don't see it as such perhaps because we don't wish to identify with Orpheus, rejected and fail ed. We see it rather as an infinity, and we even would prefer to identify with E urydice, because it's easier to identify with beauty, especially dissipating and "given far and wide like fallen rain." These, however, are the extremes. What makes the place where we are left by this poem indeed attractive is that while we are here, we have the chance to identif y with its author, Rainer Maria Rilke, wherever he is. , Sweden 1994 Letter to Horace My dear Horace, If what Suetonius tells us about your lining your bedroom walls with mirrors to e njoy coitus from every angle is true, you may find this letter a bit dull. On th e other hand, you may be entertained by its coming to you from a part of the wor ld whose existence you never suspected, and some two thousand years after your d eath, at that. Not bad for a reflection, is it? You were almost fifty-seven, I believe, when you died in 8 B.C., though you were n't aware of either C. Himself or a new millennium coming. As for myself, I am f ifty-four now; my own millennium, too, has only a few years to run. Whatever new order of things the future has in store, I anticipate none of it either. So we m ay talk, I suppose, man to man, Horace. And I may as well begin with a locker-ro om kind of story. Last night I was in bed rereading your Odes, and I bumped into that one to your fellow poet Rufus Valgius in which you are trying to convince him not to grieve so much over the loss of his son (according to some) or his lover (according to others). You proceed for a couple of stanzas with your exempla, telling him that So-and-so lost this person and Such-and-such another, and then you suggest to Ru fus that he, as a kind of self-therapy, get engaged in praising Augustus' new tr iumphs. You mention several recent conquests, among them grabbing some space from the Scythians. Actually, that must have been the Geloni; but it doesn't matter. Funny, I hadn't noticed this ode before. My people well, in a manner of speaking aren't mentioned t hat often by great poets of Roman antiquity. The Greeks are a different matter, since they rubbed shoulders with us quite a bit. But even with them we don't far e that well. A few bits in Homer (of which Strabo makes such a meal afterward!), a dozen lines in Aeschylus, not much more in Euripides. Passing references, basi cally; but nomads don't deserve any better. Of the Romans, I used to think, it w as only poor Ovid who paid us any heed; but then he had no choice. There is prac tically nothing about us in Virgil, not to mention Catullus or Propertius, not t o mention Lucretius. And now, lo and behold, a crumb from your table. Perhaps, I said to myself, if I scratch him hard enough, I may find a reference to the part of the world I find myself in now. Who knows, he might have had a fa ntasy, a vision. In this line of work that happens. But you never were a visionary. Quirky, unpredictable, yes but not a visionary. To advise a grief-stricken fellow to change his tune and sing Caesar's victories thi

s you could do; but to imagine another land and another heaven well, for that one should turn, I guess, to Ovid. Or wait for another millennium. On the whole, you Latin poets were bigger on reflection and rumination than on conjecture. I supp ose because the empire was large enough as it was to strain one's own imagination . So there I was, lying across my unkempt bed, in this unimaginable (for you) place ,, on a cold February night, some two thousand years later. The only thing I had in common with you, I thought, was the latitude and, of course, the little volu me of your Collected, in Russian translations. At the time you wrote all this, y ou see, we didn't have a language. We weren't even we; we were Geloni, Getae, Bud ini, etc.: just bubbles in our own future gene pool. So two thousand years were n ot for nothing, after all. Now we can read you in our own highly inflected langu age, with its famous gutta-percha syntax suiting the translation of the likes of you marvelously. Still, I am writing this to you in a language with whose alphabet you are more fa miliar. A lot more, I should add, than I am. Cyrillic, I am afraid, would only b ewilder you even further, though you no doubt would recognize the Greek characters . Of course the distance between us is too large to worry about increasing it or, for that matter, about trying to shrink it. But the sight of Latin letters may b e of some comfort to you, no matter how bewildering their use may look.So I was l ying atop my bed with the little volume of your Carmina. The heat was on, but th e cold night outside was winning. It is a small, two-storied wooden affair I liv e in here, and my bedroom is upstairs. As I looked at the ceiling, I could almos t see cold seeping through my gambrel roof: a sort of anti-haze. No mirrors here . At a certain age one doesn't care for one's own reflection, company or no compa ny; especially if no. That's why I wonder whether Suetonius tells the truth. Alth ough I imagine you would be pretty sanguine about that as well. Your famous equi poise! Besides, for all this latitudinal identity, in Rome it never gets that co ld. A couple of thousand years ago the climate perhaps was different; your lines , though, bear no witness to that. Anyhow, I was getting sleepy. And I remembered a beauty I once knew in your town. She lived in Subura, in a sm all apartment bristling with flowerpots but redolent with the smell of the crumb ling paperbacks the place was stuffed with. They were everywhere, but mostly on s helves reaching the ceiling (the ceiling, admittedly, was low). Most of them were not hers but belonged to her neighbor across the hall, about whom I heard a lot but whom I never met. The neighbor was an old woman, a widow, who was born and spent her entire life in Libya, in Leptis Magna. She was Italian but of Jewish e xtraction or maybe it was her husband who was Jewish. At any rate, when he died an d when things began to heat up in Libya, the old lady sold her house, packed up her stuff, and came to Rome. Her apartment was apparently even smaller than my t ender companion's, and jammed with a lifetime's accretions. So the two women, th e old and the young, struck a deal whereupon the latter's bedroom began to resem ble a regular second- hand-book store. What jarred with this impression wasn't s o much the bed as the large, heavily framed mirror leaning somewhat precariously against a rickety bookshelf right across from the bed, and at such an angle that whenever I or my tender companion wanted to imitate you, we had to strain and c rane our necks rather desperately. Otherwise the mirror would frame only more pap erbacks. In the early hours it could give one an eerie feeling of being transpar ent.All that happened ages ago, though something nudges me to mutter, centuries ago. In an emotional sense, that would be valid. In fact, the distance between t hat place in Subura and my present precincts psychologically is larger than the one between you and me. Which is to say that in neither case are "millennia" ina pplicable. Or to say that, to me, your reality is practically greater than that of my private memory. Besides, the name of Leptis Magna interferes with both. I' ve always wanted to visit there; in fact, it became a sort of obsession with me once I began to frequent your town and Mediterranean shores in general. Well, pa rtly because one of the floor mosaics in some bath there contains the only survi ving likeness of Virgil, and a likeness done in his lifetime, at that! Or so I wa s told; but maybe it's in Tunisia. In Africa, anyway. When one is cold, one reme mbers Africa. And when it's hot, also.

Ah, what I wouldn't give to know what the four of you looked like! To put a face to the lyric, not to mention the epic. I would settle for a mosaic, though I'd prefer a fresco. Worse comes to worse, I would resign myself to the marbles, exc ept that the marbles are too generic everybody gets blond in marble and too question able. Somehow, you are the least of my concerns, i.e., you are the easiest to pi cture. If what Suetonius tells us about your appearance is indeed true at least s omething in his account must be true! and you were short and portly, then you most likely looked like Eu- genio Montale or Charlie Chaplin in the King in New York period. The one I can't picture for the life of me is Ovid. Even Propertius is easier: skinny, sickly, obsessed with his equally skinny and sickly redhead, he is imaginable. Say, a cross between William Powell and Zbigniew Cybulski. But no t Ovid, though he lasted longer than all of you. Alas, not in those parts where they carved likenesses. Or laid mosaics. Or bothered with frescoes. And if anyth ing of the sort was done before your beloved Augustus kicked him out of Rome, th en it was no doubt destroyed. So as not to offend high sensibilities. And afterw ard well, afterward any slab of marble would do. As we used to say in northern Scy thia Hyperborea to you paper can endure anything, and in your day marble was a kind of paper. You think I am rambling, but I am just trying to reproduce the train of thought that took me late last night to an unusually graphic destination. It meandered a bit, for sure; but not that much. For, one way or another, I've always been thin king about you four, especially about Ovid. About Pub- lius Ovidius Naso. And no t for reasons of some particular affinity. No matter how similar my circumstances may now and then appear to his in the eyes of some beholder, I won't produce an y Metamorphoses. Besides, twenty-two years in these parts won't rival ten in Sar matia. Not to mention that I saw my Terza Roma crumble. I have my vanity, but it has its limits. Now that they are drawn by age, they are more palpable than befo re. But even as a young pup, kicked out of my home to the Polar Circle, I never fancied myself playing his double. Though then my empire looked indeed eternal, and one could roam on the ice of our many deltas all winter long. No, I never could conjure Naso's face. Sometimes I see him played by James Mason a hazel eye soggy with grief and mischief; at other times, though, it's Paul Newm an's winter-gray stare. But, then, Naso was a very protean fellow, with Janus no doubt presiding over his lares. Did you two get along, or was the age differenc e too big to bother? Twenty-two years, after all. You must have known him, at le ast through Maecenas. Or did you just think him too frivolous, saw it coming? Was there bad blood between you? He must have thought you ridiculously loyal, true blue in a sort of quaint, self-made man's kind of way. And to you he was just a punk, an aristo, privileged from the cradle, etc. Not like you and Anthony Perki ns's Virgil, practically working- class boys, only five years' difference. Or is this too much Karl Marx reading and moviegoing, Horace? Perhaps. But wait, ther e is more. There is Dr. Freud coming into this, too, for what sort of interpreta tion of dreams is it, if it's not filtered through good old Ziggy? For it was my good old subconscious the train of thought I just mentioned was taking me to, l ate last night, and at some speed. Anyhow, Naso was greater than both of you well, at least as far as I'm concerned. Metrically, of course, more monotonous; but so is Virgil. And so is Propertius, f or all his emotional intensity. In any case, my Latin stinks; that's why I read y ou all in Russian. It copes with your asclepiadic verse in a far more convincing way than the language I am writing this in, for all the familiarity of the latt er's alphabet. The latter just can't handle dactyls. Which were your forte. More exactly, Latin's forte. And your Carmina is, of course, their showcase. So I am reduced to judging the stuff by the quality of imagination. (Here's your defens e, if you need one.) And on that score Naso beats you all. All the same, I can't conjure up your faces, his especially; not even in a dream. Funny, isn't it, not to have any idea how those whom you think you know most in timately looked? For nothing is more revealing than one's use of iambs and troch ees. And, by the same token, those who don't use meters are always a closed book , even if you know them physically, inside out. How did John Clare put it? "Even those whom I knew best / Are strange, nay! stranger than the rest." At any rate,

metrically, Flaccus, you were the most diverse among them. Small wonder that th is huffing and puffing train took you for its engineer as it was leaving its own millennium and heading for yours, unaccustomed as it may have been to electrici ty. Hence I was traveling in the dark. Few things are more boring than other people's dreams, unless they are nightmare s or highly carnal. This one, Flaccus, was of the latter denomination. I was in s ome very sparsely furnished bedroom, in a bed sitting next to the sea- serpent-l ike, though extremely dusty, radiator. The walls were absolutely naked, but I wa s convinced I was in Rome. In fact, I was sure I was in Subura, in the apartment of that pretty friend of mine from days of yore. Except that she wasn't there. Neither were the paperbacks, nor the mirror. But the brown flowerpots stood abso lutely intact, emitting not so much the aroma of their plants as the tint of the ir own clay: the whole scene was done in terra-cotta-cum-sepia tones. That's how I knew I was in Rome. Everything was terra-cotta-cum-sepia-shaded. Even the crumpled bedsheets. Even t he bodice of my affections' target. Even those looming parts of her anatomy that wouldn't have benefited from a sun tan, I imagine, in your day either. The whole thing was positively monochrome; I felt that, had I been able to see myself, I would be in sepia, too. Still, there was no mirror. Imagine those Greek vases wi th their mul- tifigured design running around, and you'll get the texture. This was the most vigorous session of its kind I've ever taken part in, whether in real life or in my imagination. Such distinctions, however, should have been d ispensed with already, given the character of this letter. Which is to say, I was as much impressed by my stamina as by my concupiscence. Given my age, not to men tion my cardiovascular predicament, this distinction is worth sustaining, dream or no dream. Admittedly, the target of my affections a target long since reached was markedly younger than I, but not by a huge margin. The body in question seemed in its late thirties, bony, yet supple and of great elasticity. Still, its most exacting aspect was its tremendous agility, wholly devoted to the single purpose of escaping the banality of bed. To condense the entire endeavor into one cameo, my target's upper torso would be plunged into the narrow, one-foot- wide trough between the bed and the radiator, with the tanless rump and me atop it floating at the mattress's brink. The bodice's laced hem would do as foam. Throughout all this I didn't see her face. For the above- implied reasons. All I knew about her was that she was from Leptis Magna, although I have no idea how I learned this. There was no sound track to this session, nor do I believe we ex changed two words. If we did, that was before I became cognizant of the process, and the words must have been in Latin: I have a faint sense of some obstacle re garding our communication. Still, all along I seem to have known, or else manage d to surmise in advance, that there was something of Ingrid Thulin in the bone st ructure of her face. Perhaps I espied this when, submerged as she was under the bed, her right hand now and then, in an awkward backward motion, groped for the w arm coils of that dusty radiator. When I woke up the next i.e., this morning, my bedroom was dreadfully cold. A mealy, revolting daylight was arriving through both windows like some kind of dust. Perh aps dust is indeed daylight's leftover; well, this shouldn't be ruled out. Momen tarily, I shut my eyes; but the room in Subura was gone. Its only evidence linger ed in the dark under my blanket where daylight couldn't reach, but clearly not f or long. Next to me, opened in the middle, was your book. No doubt it's you whom I should thank for this dream, Flac- cus. Now, the hand j erkily trying to clutch the radiator could of course stand for the straining and craning in days of yore, as that pretty friend of mine or I tried to catch a gl impse of ourselves in that gilded mirror. But I rather doubt it two torsos can't s hrink into one limb; no subconscious is that economical. No, I believe that hand somehow echoed the general motion of your verse, its utter unpredictability and , with this, the inevitable stretching nay, straining of your syntax in translation. As a result, practically every line of yours is surprising. This is not a compl iment, though; just an observation. In our line of work, tricks, naturally, are de rigueur. And the standard ratio is something like one little miracle per stan za. If a poet is exceptionally good, he may come up with a couple. With you, pra

ctically each line is an adventure; sometimes there are several in one line. Of course, some of this has to do with having you in translation. But I suspect tha t in your native Latin, too, your readers seldom knew what the next word was goi ng to be. It's like constantly walking on broken glass or something: on the ment al oral? version of broken glass, limping and leaping. Or like that hand clutching th e radiator: there was something distinctly logaoedic about its bursts and withdra wals. But, then, next to me I had your Carmina. Had it been your Epodes or Epistles, not to mention Satires or, for that matter, Ars Poetica, the dream I am sure would have been different. That is, it would p erhaps have been as carnal, but a good deal less memorable. For it's only in the Carmina that you are metrically enterprising, Flaccus. The rest is practically all done in couplets; the rest is bye- bye to asclepiads and Sapphics and hello to downright hexameters. The rest is not that twitching hand but the radiator its elf, with its rhythmic coils like nothing more than elegiac couplets. Make this radiator stand on end and it will look like anything by Virgil. Or by Propertius . Or by Ovid. Or by you, save your Carmina. It will look like any page of Latin poetry. It will look like should I use the hat eful word text.Well, I thought, what if it was Latin poetry? And what if that hand was simply trying to turn the page? And my efforts vis-&-vis that sepia-shaded body simply stood for my reading of a body of Latin poetry? If only because I st ill even in a dream! couldn't make out her face. As for that glimpse of her Ingrid T hulin features that I caught as she was straining to turn the page, it had most likely to do with the Virgil played in my mind by Tony Perkins. Because he and I ngrid Thulin have sort of similar cheekbones; also since Virgil is the one I've read most of all. Since he has penned more lines than anybody. Well, I've never counted, but it sure feels that way, thanks to the Aeneid. Though I, for one, by far prefer his Bucolics or Georgics to his epic. I'll tell you why later. The truth of the matter, however, is that I honestly do n't know whether I espied those cheekbones first and learned that my sepia-shaded target was from Leptis Magna second, or vice versa. For I'd seen a reproduction of that floor-mosaic likeness some time before. And I believed it was from Lepti s Magna. I can't recall why or where. On the frontispiece of some Russian editio n, perhaps? Or maybe it was a postcard. Main thing, it was from Leptis Magna and done in Virgil's lifetime, or shortly thereafter. So what I beheld in my dream wa s a somewhat familiar sight; the sensation itself wasn't so much that of beholdi ng as that of recognition. Never mind the armpit muscle and the breast bustling in the bodice.Or precisely because of that: because, in Latin, poetry is feminin e. That's good for allegory, and what's good for allegory is good for the subcon scious. And if the target of my affections stood lay down, rather for a body of Lati n poetry, its high cheekbones could just as well resemble Virgil's, regardless of his own sexual preferences, if only because the body in my dream was from Lepti s Magna. First, because Leptis Magna is a ruin, and every bedroom endeavor resemb les a ruin, what with sheets, pillows, and the prone and jumbled limbs themselve s. Second, because the very name "Leptis Magna" always struck me as being femini ne, like Latin poetry, not to mention what I suppose it literally means. Which i s, a great offering. Although my Latin stinks. But be that as it may, what is La tin poetry after all if not a great offering? Except that my reading, as you no doubt would charge, only ruins it. Well, hence this dream. Let's avoid murky waters, Flaccus; let's not saddle ourselves with exploring whe ther dream can be reciprocal. Let me hope at least you won't proceed in a simila r fashion about my own scribblings should you ever get acquainted with them. You won't pun about pen and penis, will you? And why shouldn't you get acquainted w ith my stuff quite apart from this letter. Reciprocity or no reciprocity, I see no reason why you, so capable of messing up my dreams, won't take the next step and interfere with my reality. You do, as it is; if anything, my writing you this letter is the proof. But beyo nd that, you know full well that I've written to you, in a manner of speaking, b efore. Since everything I've written is, technically, addressed to you: you person ally, as well as the rest of you. Because when one writes verse, one's most imme diate audience is not one's own contemporaries, let alone posterity, but one's pr

edecessors. Those who gave one a language, those who gave one forms. Frankly, yo u know that far better than I. Who wrote those asclepiadics, Sapphics, hexameter s, and Alcaics, and who were their addressees? Caesar? Maecenas? Rufus? Varus? L ydias and Glycerias? Fat lot they knew about or cared for trochees and dactyls! And you were not aiming at me, either. No, you were appealing to Asclepiades, to Alcaeus and Sappho, to Homer himself. You wanted to be appreciated by them, firs t of all. For where is Caesar? Obviously in his palace or smiting the Scythians. And Maecenas is in his villa. Ditto Rufus and Varus. And Lydia is with a client and Gly- ceria is out of town. Whereas your beloved Greeks are right here, in y our head, or should I say in your heart, for you no doubt knew them by heart. Th ey were your best audience, since you could summon them at any moment. It's they you were trying to impress most of all. Never mind the foreign language. In fac t, it's easier to impress them in Latin: in Greek, you wouldn't have the mother tongue's latitude. And they were talking back to you. They were saying, Yeah, we 're impressed. That's why your lines are so twisted with en- jambments and quali fiers, that's why your argument is always so unpredictable. That's why you advis e your grief-stricken pal to praise Augustus' triumphs. So if you could do this to them, why can't I do that to you? The language differ ence at least is here; so one condition is being met. One way or the other, I've been responding to you, especially when I use iambic trimeters. And now I am foll owing this up with a letter. Who knows, I may yet summon you here, you may yet m aterialize in the end even more than you've done already in my verses. For all I know, logaoedics with dactyls beat any old seance as a means of conjuring. In ou r line of work, this sort of thing is called pastiche. Once the beat of a classi c enters one's system, its spirit moves in, too. And you are a classic, Flaccus, aren't you, in more ways than one, which alone would be complex enough. And ultimately who else is there in this world one can talk to without revulsion , especially if one is of a misanthropic disposition by nurture. It is for this reason, not vanity, that I hope you get acquainted with my iambs and trochees in some netherworldly manner. Stranger things have happened, and my pen at least ha s done its bit to that end. I'd much rather, of course, talk to Naso or Properti us, but with you I have more in common metrically. They stuck to elegiac couplet s and hexameters; I seldom use those. So it's between you and me here, presumptu ous as this may sound to everybody. But not to you. "All the literati keep / An i maginary friend," says Auden. Why should I be an exception? At the very least, I can sit myself down in front of my mirror and talk to it. T hat would be fairly close, although I don't believe that you looked like me. But when it comes to the human appearance, nature, in the final analysis, doesn't h ave that many options. What are they? A pair of eyes, a mouth, a nose, an oval. For all their diversity, in two thousand years nature is bound to repeat itself. Even a God will. So I could easily claim that that face in the mirror is ultimate ly yours, that you are me. Who is there to check, and in what way? As conjuring tricks go, this might do. But I am afraid I am going too far: I'll never write m yself a letter. Even if I were truly your look-alike. So stay faceless, Flaccus, stay unconjured. This way, you may last for two millennia more. Otherwise, each time I mount a woman she might think that she is dealing with Horace. Well, in a sense she is, dream or no dream. Nowhere does time collapse as easily as in on e's mind. That's why we so much like thinking about history, don't we? If I am r ight about nature's options, history is like surrounding oneself with mirrors, l ike living in a bordello. Two thousand years of what? By whose count, Flaccus? Certainly not in terms of met rics. Tetrameters are tetrameters, no matter when and no matter where. Be they in Greek, Latin, Russian, English. So are dactyls, and so are anapests. Et .cetera . So two thousand years in what sense? When it comes to collapsing time, our tra de, I am afraid, beats history, and smells, rather sharply, of geography. What E uterpe and Urania have in common is that both are Clio's seniors. You start talk ing your Rufiis Valgius out of his protracted grieving by evoking the waves of Ma re Caspium; even they, you write, do not remain rough forever. This means that y ou knew about that mare two thousand years ago from some Greek author, no doubt, a s your own people didn't cast their quills that wide. Herein, I suppose, lay thi

s mares first attraction for you as a Roman poet. An exotic name and, on top of that, one connoting the farthest point of your Pax Rom ana, if not of the known world itself. Also, a Greek one (actually, perhaps even Persian, but you could b ump into it only in Greek). The main thing, though, about "Caspium" is that this word is dactylic. That's why it sits at the second line's end, where every poem 's meter gets established. And you are consoling Rufus in an asclepiad. Whereas I I crossed that Caspium once or twice. When I was either eighteen or nine teen, or maybe twenty. When I am tempted to say you were in Athens, learning your Gr eek. In those days, the distance between Caspium and Hellas, not to mention Rome , was in a sense even greater than it was two thousand years ago; it was, frankl y, insurmountable. So we didn't meet. The mare itself was smooth and shiny, near its western shores especially. Thanks not so much to the propitious proximity to civilization as to vast oil spills, perennial in those parts. (I could say this was the real case of pouring oil upon troubled waters, but I am afraid you woul dn't catch the reference.) I was lying flat on the hot upper deck of a dirty ste amer, hungry and penniless, but happy all the same, because I was participating in geography. When you are going by boat you always do. Had I read by that time your piece to Rufus, I would have realized that I was also participating in poet ry. In a dactyl rather than in a sharpening horizon. But in those days I wasn't that much of a reader. In those days I was working in Asia: mountain climbing and desert trekking. Prospecting for uranium, basically . You don't know what that stuff is, and I won't bore you with an explanation, F laccus. Although "uranium" is another dactylic word. What does it feel like to l earn a word you cannot use? Especially for you a Greek one? Awful, I suppose; like, for me, your Latin. Perhaps if I were able to operate in it confidently, I coul d indeed conjure you up. On the other hand, perhaps not: I'd become for you just another Latin author, and that is a recipe for hiatus. In any case, in those days I'd read none of you, except if my memory doesn't play t ricks on me Virgil, i.e., his epic. I remember that I didn't care for it much, par tly because against that backdrop of mountains and deserts few things managed to make sense; mainly because of the epic's rather sharp smell of commission. In t hose days, one's nostrils were very keen for that sort of thing. Besides, I simpl y couldn't make out 99 percent of his exempla, which were getting in the way rat her frequently. What do you expect from an eighteen-year-old from Hyperborea? I am better with this sort of thing now, but it's taken a lifetime. On the whole, it seems to me that you all were overdoing it a bit with the references; they of ten strike one as filler. Although euphonieally of course they the Greek ones espe cially do marvels for the texture. What rattled me perhaps most in the Aeneid was that retroactive prophecy of Anchi ses, when the old man predicts what has already taken place. Here, I thought, yo ur friend went a bit too far. I don't mind the conceit, but the dead should be a llowed to be more imaginative. They ought to know more than just Augustus' pedig ree; after all, they are not oracles. What a waste of that stunning, mind-boggli ng idea about souls being entitled to a second corporeality and lapping from the river Lethe to cleanse themselves of their previous memories! To reduce them to paving the road for the reign of the current master! Why, they could become Chr istians, Charlemagnes, Diderots, Communists, Hegels, us! Those who will come aft er, mongrels and mutants, and in more ways than one! That would be a real prophe cy, a real flight of fancy. Instead, he rehashes the official record and serves it as hot news. The dead are free of causality, to begin with. The knowledge ava ilable to them is that about time all time. That much he could have learned from L ucretius; your friend was a learned man. More than that, he had a terrific metaph ysical instinct, a real nose for things' spiritual lining: his souls are far les s physical than Dante's. True manes: gaseous and unpalpable. One is tempted to s ay his scholasticism here is practically medieval. But that would be a put-down. Because metaphysically your future turned out to be far less imaginative than y our Greek past. For what is life eternal to a soul compared with a second corpor eality? What is Paradise to it after the Pythagorean promise of another body? Jus t unemployment. Still, whatever his sources were Pythagoras, Plato's Phaedrus, his own fancy he blows it all for the sake of Caesar's lineage.

Well, the epic was his; he had the right to do with it what he liked. But I find it, frankly, unforgivable. It's failures of imagination like these that paved t he road to the triumph of monotheism. The one, I guess, is always more graspable than the many; and after that gigantic Greek-and-homemade stew of gods and hero es, this sort of longing for something more graspable, more coherent, was practi cally inevitable. In other words, for all his expansive gestures, your friend, m y dear Flaccus, was just craving metaphysical security. And that, I am afraid, i s a contradiction in terms; perhaps the chief attraction of polytheism is that i t would have none of that. But I suppose the place was getting too populous to i ndulge in insecurity of any kind. That's why your friend pins this whole thing, metaphysics and all, on his beloved Caesar in the first place. Civil wars, I sho uld say, do wonders for one's spiritual orientation. But it's no use talking to you like that. You all loved Augustus, didn't you? Ev en Naso, although he apparently was more curious about Caesar's sentimental prop erty, beyond suspicion as it habitually was, than about his territorial conquests. But then, unlike your friend, Naso was a womanizer. Among other things, that's what makes it so difficult to picture his appearance, that's why I oscillate betw een Paul Newman and James Mason. A womanizer is an everyman: not that it means he should be trusted any more than a pedophile. And yet his account of what transpi red between Dido and Aeneas sounds a bit more convincing than that of your frien d. Naso's Dido claims that Aeneas is abandoning her and Carthage in such a hurry r emember, there was a storm looming and Aeneas must have had it with storms by th en, what with being tossed on the high seas for seven years not because he heeded the call of his divine mother but because Dido was pregnant with his child. And that's why she commits suicide: because her reputation is ruined. She is a quee n, after all. Naso makes his Dido even question whether Venus was indeed the mot her of Aeneas, for she was the goddess of love, and departure is an odd (though not unprecedented) way to manifest this sentiment. No doubt Naso spoofs your fri end here. No doubt this depiction of Aeneas is unflattering and, given the fact that the legend of Rome's Trojan origins was the official historical orthodoxy f rom the third century B.C. onward, downright unpatriotic. Equally doubtless is t hat Virgil never read Naso's Heroides; otherwise, the former's treatment of Dido in the netherworld would be less reprehensible. For he simply stashes her away, together with Sychaeus, her former husband, in some remote nook of Elysium, wher e the two forgive and console each other. A retired couple in an old people's ho me. Out of our hero's way. To spare him agony, to provide him with a prophecy. B ecause the latter makes better copy. Anyhow, no second corporeality for Dido's s oul. You will argue that I am applying to him the standards that took two millennia t o emerge. You are a good friend, Flaccus, but it's nonsense. I am judging him by his own standards, more evident actually in the Bucolics and the Georgics than in his epic. Don't play the innocent: you all had a minimum of seven centuries o f poetry behind you. Five in Greek and two in your own Latin. Remember Euripides , remember his Alcestis: the wedding scene's scandal of King Admetus with his pa rents beats anything in Dostoevsky hands down though you may not catch the refere nce. Which means it beats any psychological novel. Which is something we excelle d at in Hyperborea a hundred years ago. Out there, you see, we are big on agony. Prophecy is a different matter. Which is to say, two thousand years were not in vain. No, the standards are his, by way of the Georgics. Based on Lucretius and on Hes iod. In this line of work, Flaccus, there are no big secrets. Only small and gui lty ones. Herein, I must add, lies their beauty. And the small and guilty secret of the Georgics is that their author, unlike Lucretius and, for that matter, Hesi od had no overriding philosophy. To say the least, he was no atomist, no epicurean . At best, I imagine, he hoped that the sum total of his lines would add up to a worldview, if he cared about such a thing in the first place. For he was a spon ge, and a melancholic one at that. For him, the best if not the only way to understa nd the world was to list its contents, and if he missed anything in his Bucolics or in- the Georgics, he caught up with that in his epic. He was an epic poet, i ndeed; an epic realist, if you will, since, speaking numerically, reality itself

is quite epic. The cumulative effect of his output upon my reflective faculty h as always been the sensation that this man has itemized the world, and in a rath er meticulous fashion. Whether he talks of plants or planets, soils or souls, th e deeds and/or destinies of the men of Rome, his close-ups are both blinding and binding; but so are things themselves, dear Flaccus, aren't they? No, your frie nd was no atomist, no epicurean; nor was he a stoic. If he believed in any princ iple, it was life's regeneration, and his Georgics' bees are no better than those souls chalked up for second corporeality in the Aeneid. But perhaps they are better, and not so much because they don't end up buzzing " Caesar, Caesar" as because of the Georgics tonality of utter detachment. Perhaps it's those days of yore I spent roaming the mountains and deserts of Central As ia that make this tonality most appealing. Back then, I suppose, it was the impe rsonality of the landscape I'd find myself in that impressed itself on the corte x. Now, a lifetime later, I might blame this taste for monotony on the human vis ta. Underneath either one lies, of course, an inkling that detachment is the fin al product of many intense attachments. Or else the modern predilection for a ne utral voice, so characteristic of didactic genres in your times. Or both, which is more likely still. And even if the Georgics impersonal drone is nothing but a Lucretian pastiche as I strongly suspect it is it is still appealing. Because of it s implicit objectivity and explicit similarity to the monotonous clamor of days and years; to the sound time makes as it passes. The very absence of story, the absence of characters in the Georgics echo, as it were, time's own perspective o n any existential predicament. I even remember myself thinking back then that sho uld time have a pen of its own and decide to compose a poem, its lines would inc lude leaves, grass, earth, wind, sheep, horses, trees, cows, bees. But not us. M aximum, our souls. So the standards are indeed his. And the epic, for all its splendors, as well as because of them, is a letdown as regards those standards. Plain and simple, he had a story to tell. And a story is bound to have us in it. Which is to say, tho se whom time dismisses. On top of that, the story wasn't his own. No, give me th e Georgics any day. Or, should I say, any night, considering my present reading habits. Although I must confess that even in those days of yore, when the sperm c ount was much higher, hexameter would have left my dreams dry and uneventful. Lo gaoedics apparently are much more potent. Two thousand years this, two thousand years that! Just imagine, Flaccus, if I'd h ad company last night. And imagine an er translation of this dream into reality. Wel l, half of humanity must be conceived that way, no? Wouldn't you be responsible, at least in part? Where would those two thousand years be; and wouldn't I have t o call the offspring Horace? So, consider this letter a soiled sheet, if not your own by-blow. And, by the same token, consider the part of the world I am writing to you from, the outskirts of the Pax Romana, ocean or no ocean, distance or no distance. We 've got all sorts of flying contraptions here to handle that, not to mention a re public with the first among equals built in, to boot. And tetrameters, as I said , are still tetrameters. They alone can take care of any millennia, to say nothi ng of space or of the subconscious. I've been dwelling here for twenty-two years now, and I've noticed no difference. In all likelihood, here is where I'll die. So you can take my word for it: tetrameters are still tetrameters, and so are tr imeters. And so forth. It was a flying contraption, of course, that brought me here from Hyperborea twe nty-two years ago, though I can as easily put down that flight to my rhymes and meters. Except that the latter might add up to an even greater distance between me and th e good old Hyperborea, as your dactylic Caspium does to the actual size of your Pax Romana. Contraptions flying ones especially only delay the inevitable: you gain t ime, but time can fool space only so far; in the end, space catches up. What are years, after all? What can they measure save the decay of one's epidermis, of o ne's wits? Yet the other day I was sitting in a cafe here with a fellow Hyperbor ean, and as we were chatting about our old town in the delta, it suddenly crosse d my mind that should I, twenty-two years ago, have tossed a splinter of wood in

to that delta, it could, given the prevailing winds and currents, have crossed t he ocean and reached by now the shores I am dwelling on, to witness my decay. Th at's how space catches up with time, my dear Flaccus; that's how one truly depar ts from Hyperborea. Or: how one expands Pax Romana. By dreams, if necessary. Which, come to think of it, are yet another perhaps the last form of life's regeneration, especially if you 've got no company. Also, it doesn't lead up to Caesar, beating in this sense ev en the bees. Although, I repeat, it's no use talking to you like this, since you r sentiments toward him were in no way different from Virgil's. Nor were your me thods of conveying them. You, too, preach Augustus'glory overman's grief, saddli ng with this task not to your considerable credit idling souls but geography and myt hology. Commendable as this is, it implies, I'm afraid, that Augustus either owns or is sponsored by both. Ah, Flaccus, you might just as well have used hexamete r. Asclepiads are just too good for this stuff, too lyrical. Yes, you're right: nothing breeds snobbery better than tyranny. Well, I suppose I am just allergic to this sort of thing. If I am not reproachin g you more venomously, it is because I am not your contemporary: I am not he, because I am almost you. I've written i n your meters, and in this one particularly. That, as I've said, is what makes m e appreciate "Caspium," "Niphaten," and "Gelonos" sitting there at the end of yo ur lines, expanding the empire. And so do "Aqui- lonibus" and "Vespero," but upw ard. My subject matter, of course, was more humble; besides, I used rhyme. The o nly way to overlap with you completely would be by setting myself the task of re peating all your stanzaic patterns in this tongue or in my native Hyperborean. O r else by translating you into either. Come to think of it, such an exercise is plausible far more so than redoing, say, Ovid's hexameters and elegiac couplets. A fter all, your Collected is not such a large book, and the Carmina itself is jus t ninety-five pieces of varying length. But I am afraid the dog's too old for ne w and old tricks alike; I should have thought of that earlier. We are destined t o stay separated, to remain pen pals at best. Not for long, I'm afraid, but long enough, I hope, to get close to you now and then. Even if not close enough to m ake out your face. In other words, I am doomed to my dreams; but this doom is we lcome. Because the body in question is so rum. Its greatest charm, Flaccus, is the tota l lack of the egocentricity that so often plagues its successors, and I daresay the Greeks also. It seldom pushes the first person singular though that's partly t he grammar. In a language so highly inflected, it's hard to zero in on one's own plight. Although Catullus managed; that's why he is loved so universally. But a mong you four, even with Propertius, the most ardent of all of you, that was out . And certainly with your friend, treating as he did both man and nature sui gen eris. Most of all with Naso, which, given some of his subject matter, must be wh at turned the Romantics against him so sharply. Still, in my proprietary (after last night) capacity, this pleases me considerably. Come to think of it, the abs ence of egocentricity may be a body's best defense. It is in my day and age, in any case. Actually, of all of you, Flaccus, it is you who are perhaps the most egocentric. Which is to say, the most palpable. But tha t isn't so much a matter of pronouns, either: it is, again, the distinctness of your metrics. Standing out against the other guys' sprawling hexameters, they su ggest some unique sensibility, a character that can be judged -while the others are largely opaque. Sort of like a solo versus the chorus. Perhaps they went for th is hexametric drone precisely for reasons of humility, for purposes of camouflage . Or else they just wanted to play by the rules. And hexameter was that game's s tandard net; to put it differently, its terra-cotta. Of course, your logaoedics don't make you a cheat; still, they flash rather than obscure individuality. Tha t's why for the next two thousand years practically everybody, including the Roma ntics, would embrace you so readily. Which rattles me, naturally in my proprietar y capacity, that is. In a manner of speaking, you were that body's tanless part, its private marble. And with the passage of time you got whiter and whiter: more private and more de sirable. Suggesting that you can be an egocentric and still handle a Caesar; tha

t it's only a matter of equipoise. Music to so many ears! But what if your famou s equipoise was just a matter of the phlegmatic temperament, easily passing for p ersonal wisdom? Like Virgil's melancholy, say. But unlike the choleric upsurges of Pro- pertius. And certainly unlike Naso's sanguinic endeavors. Now, here's on e who paved not an inch of that highway leading to monotheism. Here's one who wa s short on equipoise and had no system, let alone a wisdom or a philosophy. His i magination couldn't get curbed, neither by its own insights nor by doctrine. Only by hexameter; better yet, by elegiac couplets. Well, one way or another, he taught me practically everything, the explication o f dreams included. Which begins with that of reality. Next to him, somebody like the Viennese doctor never mind not catching the reference! is kindergarten, child's play. And frankly, you, too. And so is Virgil. To put it bluntly, Naso insists that in this world one thing is another. That, in the final analysis, reality is one large rhetorical figure and you are lucky if it is just a polyptoton or a c hiasmus. With him a man evolves into an object, and vice versa, with the immanen t logic of grammar, like a statement sprouting a subordinate clause. With Naso t he tenor is the vehicle, Flaccus, and/or the other way around, and the source of it all is the ink pot. So long as there was a drop of that dark liquid in it, h e would go on which is to say, the world would go on. Sounds like "In the beginni ng was the word"? Well, not to you. To him, though, this adage would not be news , and he would add that there will be a word in the end as well. Give him anythi ng and he will extend it or turn it inside out which is still an extension. To him, language was a godsend; more exactly, its grammar was. More exactly still, to hi m the world was the language: one thing was another, and as to which was more re al, it was a toss-up. In any case, if one thing was palpable, the other was boun d to be also. Often in the same line, especially if it was hexameter: there is a big caesura. Failing that, in the next line; especially if it is an elegiac cou plet. For measures to him were a godsend also. He would be the first to confirm this, Flaccus, and so would you. Remember his r ecalling in Tristia how amid the storm that hit the ship taking him into exile ( to my parts, roughly; to the outskirts of Hyperborea) he caught himself again co mposing verses? Naturally you don't. That was some sixteen years after you died. On the other hand, where is one better informed than in the netherworld? So I s houldn't worry that much about my references; you are catching them all. And met ers are always meters, in the netherworld especially. Iambs and dactyls are forev er, like stars and stripes. More exactly: whenever. Not to mention, wherever. Sm all wonder that he eventually came to compose in the local dialect. As long as v owels and consonants were there, he could go on, Pax Romana or no Pax Romana. In the end, what is a foreign tongue if not just another set of synonyms. Besides, my good old Geloni had no . And even if they had, it would be only natural for him, t e genius of metamorphosis, to mutate into an alien alphabet. That, too, if you will, is how one expands the Pax Romana. Although that never ha ppened. He never stepped into our genetic pool. The linguistic one was enough, t hough: it took practically these two thousand years for him to enter Cyrillic. Ah , but life without an alphabet has its merits! Existence can be very poignant whe n it's just oral. Actually, as regards ecriture, my nomads were in no hurry. To scribble, it takes a settler: someone who's got nowhere to go. That's why civili zations blossom more readily on islands, Flaccus: take, for instance, your dear Greeks. Or in cities. What is a city if not an island surrounded by space? Anywa y, if he indeed barged into the local dialect, as he tells us, it was not so muc h out of necessity, not in order to endear himself to the natives, but because o f verse's omnivorous nature: it claims everything. Hexameter does: it is not so sprawling for nothing. And an elegiac couplet is even more so. Lengthy letters are anathema everywhere, Flaccus, including in the afterlife. By now, I guess, you've quit reading, you've had enough. What with these aspersions cast on your pal and praise of Ovid practically at your expense. I continue bec ause, as I said, who is there to talk to, anyway? Even assuming that Pythagorean fantasy about virtuous souls' second corporeality every thousand years is true, and that you've had a minimum of two opportunities so far, and now with Auden de ad and the millennium having only four years to go, that quota seems to be buste

d. So it's back to the original you, even if by now, as I suspect, you've quit r eading. In our line of work, addressing the vacuum comes with the territory. So y ou can't surprise me with your absence, nor can I you with my perseverance. Besides, I have a vested interest and you, too. There is that dream that once was your reality. By interpreting it, one gets two for the price of one, And that's what Naso is all about. For him, one thing was another; for him, I'd say, A was B. To him, a body a girl's especially could become nay, was a stone, a river, a bird, a t ree, a sound, a star. And guess why? Because, say, a running girl with her mane undone looks in profile like a river? Or asleep on a couch, like a stone? Or, wi th her arms up, like a tree or a bird? Or, vanishing from sight, being theoretic ally everywhere, like a sound? And, triumphant or remote, like a star? Hardly. Th at would suffice for a good simile, while what Naso was after wasn't even a meta phor. His game was morphology, and his take was metamorphosis. When the same subs tance attains a different form. The main thing is the sameness of substance. And , unlike the rest of you, he managed to grasp the simple truth of us all being co mposed of the stuff the world is made of. Since we are of this world. So we all contain water, quartz, hydrogen, fiber, et cetera, albeit in different proportio ns. Which can be reshuffled. Which already have been reshuffled into that girl. Small wonder she becomes a tree. Just a shift in her cellular makeup. Anyhow, wi th our species, shifting from the animate to the inanimate is the trend. You know what I mean, being where you are. Smaller wonder, then, that a body of Latin poetry of its Golden Age became the targe t of my relentless affection last night. Well, regard it perhaps as a last gasp of your joint Pythagorean quota. And yours was the last part to submerge: becaus e it was less burdened with hexameters. And attribute the agility with which tha t body strove to escape the banality of bed to its flight from my reading you in translation. For I am accustomed to rhyme, and hexameters won't have it. And yo u, who came closest to it in your Iogaoedics, you too gravitated to hexameters: you groped for that radiator, you wanted to submerge. And for all the relendessn ess of my pursuit, which stood no pun intended for a lifetime of reading you, the dr eam never turned wet, not because I am fifty-four, but precisely because all of you were rhymeless. Hence the terra-cotta sheen of that Golden Age body; hence, too, the absence of your beloved mirror, not to mention its gilded frame. And do you know why it wasn't there? Because, as I said, I am accustomed to rhym e. And rhyme, my dear Flaccus, is itself a metamorphosis, and metamorphosis is no t a mirror. Rhyme is when one thing turns into another without changing its subs tance, which is sound. As far as language is concerned, to say the least. It is a condensation of Naso's approach, if you will a distillation, perhaps. Naturally he comes frightfully close to it himself in that scene with Narcissus and Echo. F rankly, closer even than you, to whom he is metrically inferior. I say "frightfu lly" because, had he done so, for the next two thousand years we all would have been out of business. Thank God, then, for the hexametric inertia that kept him off, in that scene in particular; thankGod for that myth's own insistence on kee ping eyesight and hearing apart. For that's what we've been at for the past two thousand years: grafting one onto another, fusing his vision with your meters. I t is a gold mine, Flaccus, a full-time occupation, and no mirror can reflect a l ifetime of reading. At any rate, this should account for at least half of the body in question and i ts efforts to escape me. Perhaps, had my Latin stunk less, this dream would neve r have occurred in the first place. Well, at a certain age, it appears, one has reasons to be grateful for one's ignorance. For meters are still meters, Flaccus , and anatomy is still anatomy. One may claim to possess the whole body, even th ough its upper part is submerged somewhere between the mattress and the radiator: as long as this part belongs to Virgil or Propertius. It is still tanned, it is still terra-cotta, because it is still hexa- metric and pentametric. One may ev en conclude it is not a dream, since a brain can't dream about itself: most like ly, it is reality because it is a tautology. Just because there is a word, "dream," it doesn't follow that reality has an alt ernative. A dream, Flaccus, is at best a momentary metamorphosis: far less lasti ng than that of rhyme. That's why I haven't been rhyming here not because you would

n't appreciate the effort. The netherworld, I presume, is a polyglot kingdom. An d if I've resorted to writing at all, it is because the interpretation of a drea m of an erotic one especially is, strictly speaking, a reading. As such, it is prof oundly anti-metamorphic, for it is the undoing of a fabric: thread by thread, li ne by line. And its repetitive nature is its ultimate giveaway: it asks for an e quation mark between the reading and the erotic endeavor itself. Which is erotic because it is repetitive. Turning pages: that's what it is; and that's what you are or should be doing now,Flaccus. Well, this is one way of conjuring you up, i sn't it? Because repetition, you see, is the primary trait of reality. Someday, when I end up in your part of the netherworld, my gaseous entity will a sk your gaseous entity whether you've read this letter. And if your gaseous enti ty should reply, No, mine won't feel offended. On the contrary, it will rejoice at this proof of reality's extension into the domain of shadows. For you've neve r read me to begin with. In this sense, you'll be like many people above who nev er read either one of us. To say the least, that's one thing that constitutes rea lity. But should your gaseous entity reply, Yes, my gaseous entity will not be much wo rried either about having offended you with my letter, especially its smutty bit s. Being a Latin author, you would be the first to appreciate an approach trigge red in one by a language in which "poetry" is feminine. And as for "body," what else can one expect from a man in general, and a Hyperborean at that, not to men tion the cold February night. I wouldn't even have to remind you that it was jus t a dream. To say the least, next to death, dream is reality. So we may get along famously. As for the language, the realm, as I said, is most likely poli- or supra-glot. Besides, being just back from filling up your Pytha gorean quota as Auden, you may still retain some English. That's perhaps how I w ould recognize you. Though he was a far greater poet than you, of course. But th at's why you sought to assume his shape last time you were around, in reality. Worse comes to worse, we can communicate through meters. I can tap the First Asc lepiadic stanza easily, for all its dactyls. The second one also, not to mention the Sapphics. That might work; you know, like inmates in an institution. After all, meters are meters even in the netherworld, since they are time units. For this reason, they are perhaps better known now in Elysium than in the asini ne world above. That's why using them feels more like communicating with the lik es of you than with reality. And naturally I would like you to introduce me to Naso. For I wouldn't know him by sight, since he never assumed anyone else's shape. I guess it's his elegiacs and hexameters that conspired against this. For the past two thousand years, few er and fewer people have tried them. Auden again? But even he rendered hexameter as two trimeters. So I wouldn't aspire to a chat with Naso. All I would ask is to take a look at him. Even among souls he should be a rarity. I shall not bother you with the rest of the crowd. Not even with Virgil: he's be en back to reality, I should say, in so many guises. Nor with Tibullus, Gallus, Varus, and the others: your Golden Age was quite populous, but Elysium is no pla ce for affinities, and I won't be there as a tourist. As for Propertius, I think I'll look him up myself. I believe it should be relatively easy to spot him: he must feel comfortable among the manes in whose existence he believed so much in reality. No, the two of you will be enough for me. One's taste sustained in the & amounts to a xtension of reality into the domain of shadows. I should hope 111 be able to do this, at least initially. Ah, Flaccus! Reality, like the Pax Romana, wants to ex pand. That's why it dreams; that's why it sticks to its guns as it dies. In Memory of Stephen Spender i Twenty-three years later, the exchange with the Immigration Officer at Heathrow is brisk. "Business or pleasure?" "What do you call a funeral?" He waves me thro ugh. II Twenty-three years ago, it took me nearly two hours to pass his predecessors. Th e fault, as it were, was mine. I had just left Russia and was heading for the St

ates via London, where I had been invited to take part in the Poetry Internation al festival. I had no proper passport, just a U.S. transit visa in a huge manila envelope issued to me at the American Consulate in Vienna.Apart from the natural anxiety, the wait was extremely uncomfortable for me because of Wystan Auden, w ith whom I had come on the same plane from Vienna. As the customs officials grap pled with that manila envelope, I saw him pacing frantically behind the barrier, in a state of growing irritation. Now and then he'd try to talk to one or anoth er of them, only to be told off. He knew that I knew nobody in London and he cou ldn't leave me there alone. I felt terrible, if only because he was twice my age . When in the end we emerged from customs, we were greeted by a strikingly beautif ul woman, tall and almost regal in her deportment. She kissed Wystan on the chee k and introduced herself. "I am Natasha," she said. "I hope you don't mind stayi ng with us. Wystan is staying with us also." And as I began to mumble something not entirely grammatical, Auden intervened, "She is Stephen Spender's wife. Best if you say yes. They've prepared a room for you. " The next thing, we were in a car, with Natasha Spender at the wheel. Evidently t hey'd thought of everything; perhaps they'd discussed it over the phone although I was a total stranger. Wystan hardly knew me, the Spenders even less. And yet . . . The London suburbs were flashing by in the car window and I tried to read sig ns. The most frequent was bed and breakfast; I understood the words, but luckily couldn't grasp due to the absence of a verb their meaning. Ill Later that evening, as the three of us sat down for supper, I tried to explain t o Natasha (all the while marveling at the discrepancy between that wonderfully c hiseled face and the homey-sounding Russian name) that I was not exactly a total stranger. That in fact back in Russia I'd had in my possession some items from this household, brought to me by Anna Akhmatova upon her return from England, wh ere she had received an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1965. The items were t wo records (Dido and Aeneas by Purcell and Richard Burton reading a selection fr om the English poets) and a veritable tricolor of some college scarf. They were given to her, she told me, by an extraordinarily handsome English poet whose nam e was Stephen Spender and who asked her to pass these things on to me. "Yes," said Natasha. "She told us a lot about you. You were in prison, and we we re all terribly worried that you would be cold. Hence the scarf." Presently the doorbell rang and she went off to open the door. I was in the midd le of a conversation with Wystan, or more exactly, I was listening to him, as my grammar would allow for very little initiative. Although I'd translated quite a bit from English (mostly the Elizabethans, as well as some modern American poet ry and a couple of plays), my conversational skills at that time were minimal. I' d say "trepidation of the ground" instead of "earthquake." Besides, Wystan's spee ch, because of its extraordinary speed and truly transatlantic texture, required considerable concentration on my part. But momentarily I lost it completely. In walked a very tall, slightly stooped, w hite-haired man with a gentle, almost apologetic smile on his face. He moved abou t what I assumed was his own dining room with the tenta- tiveness of a newcomer rather than the master of the house's certitude. "Hello, Wystan," he said, and t hen he greeted me. I don't remember the exact words, but I remember being stunned by the beauty of their utterance. It felt as if all the nobility, civility, grace, and detachment of the English language suddenly filled the room. Like an instrument's chords b eing played all at once. To me, with my then untrained ear, the effect was spellb inding. It owed, no doubt, in part to the instrument's stooping frame: one felt not so much this music's audience as its accomplice. I looked about the room: no body betrayed the slightest emotion. But then accomplices never do. IV Still later that same night, Stephen Spender for that was he and I went to the BBC t elevision station, for the late- news program's on-camera interview. Twenty-thre e years ago the arrival in London of somebody like me still counted as news. The whole thing took two hours, including the round trip by taxi. During those two

hours and during the taxi ride especially the spell I was under began to let up some what, since we were talking logistics. Of the TV interview, of the Poetry Interna tional that began the next day, of my stay in England. Suddenly conversation was easy: we were just two men discussing relatively tangible matters. I felt oddly comfortable in the presence of this six-foot-tall, blue-eyed, white-haired old man I had never met before, and I marveled, Why? Most likely, I simply felt prot ected by his superior height and age, not to mention his Oxonian. But_ quite apa rt from that, in the gentle tentativeness of his deportment, bordering on the aw kward and accompanied by a guilty smile, I sensed his awareness of the provision al, faintly absurd nature of any reality at hand. To this attitude I wasn't a st ranger myself, as it comes not from one's physique or temperament but from one's metier. Some people are less ready to display this, some more. Then there are th ose incapable of concealing it. I sensed that he and I belonged in the latter cat egory. v I'd pick this as the main reason for the subsequent twenty- three years of our u nlikely friendship. There were several others, and I'll mention some. Yet before I go any further, I must say that if what follows sounds a bit too much like a personal memoir, with too much of my own presence in it, this is because I find it impossible at least for now to speak about Stephen Spender in the past tense. I d on't intend to play the solipsistic game of denying the obvious: that he is no mo re. It would perhaps be an easy thing for me to do, since for all these twenty-t hree years that I've mentioned, we saw each other rather infrequently, and never for more than five days in a row. But what I think and do is so intertwined in m y mind with his and Wystan Auden's lives and lines that to reminisce seems more appropriate at present than trying to comprehend my emotions. Living is like quo ting, and once you've learned something by heart, it's yours as much as the auth ors. VI For the next few days that I stayed under their roof, I was mothered by the Spen ders and by Wystan in the most minute way, from breakfast to supper and into the nightcap. At one point, Wystan tried to teach me how to use the English public phone and was alarmed at my slow-wittedness. Stephen attempted to explain the Und erground system, but in the end Natasha drove me everywhere. We lunched at the C afe Royal, the scene of their courtship during the Blitz, where they'd sit for a hot meal between air raids as the waiters swept away shards of the cafe's broke n windows. ("As the Germans were pounding us, we were actually wondering how soo n the Russian planes would join them. In those days we were expecting the Russia n bombers anytime.") Or else we'd go for lunch to Sonia Orwell. ("1984 is not a novel," Wystan declared. "It is a study.") Then there was dinner at the Garrick Club with Cyril Connolly, whose Enemies of Promise I'd read just a couple of yea rs before, and Angus Wilson, of whom I knew nothing. The former looked gray, blo ated, and oddly Russian; the latter, in his pink shirt, resembled a tropical bir d. The conversation escaped me, and I was reduced to observation. This was often the case with me at that time, and I felt rather awkward on a num ber of occasions. I explained that to Stephen, but he evidently believed in osmo sis more than analysis. One evening he and Natasha took me to a dinner party som ewhere in South London, at the local bishop's rectory. His Eminence turned out to be a bit too lively, not to say gregarious; too purple, not to say lavender, fo r my untrained eye. Still, the food was superb, so was the wine, and his stable o f pretty young clerics waiting on the guests was lovely to look at. When the mea l was over, the ladies departed to an adjacent chamber; the gentlemen stayed for their port and Havanas. I found myself sitting across from C. P. Snow, who began to extol to me the virtues and verities of Mikhail Sholokhov's prose. It took m e about ten minutes to summon the appropriate entries from Partridge's dictionar y of English slang (back in Russia, I had only Volume I) for an adequate reply. Mr. Snow's face went indeed white; Stephen laughed uproariously. In fact, I was aiming not so much at the pink novelist as at the lavender host, whose lacquered loafer was footsieing my honest Hush Puppy under the table. 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 ou t the window and said, "They are still sitting." And to me: "Are you tired?" I s aid no. "Then let's go in." Natasha stopped the car; we got out and walked to th e Houses of Parliament. We climbed several flights of stairs, entered a large ha ll, and landed in the gallery chairs. It was, I believe, the House of Commons, a nd some tax debate was in full swing. Men of more or less similar height and com plexion would rise, deliver vehement- sounding tirades, and sit down, to rise ag ain 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 blin ding. 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 l eather 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 th em. On the other hand, it matched what was transpiring inside. The West Germans in particular got into the spirit of the place, taking vers lihre one step furth er by resorting to plain body language, and I remember Wystan saying morosely int o the backstage TV monitor, "This is not what you were paid for." The pay was me asly, 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 us ed by Dickens's and Joseph Conrad's characters. The opening party was on the top floor of some high- rise on Pall Mall; New Zeal and 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 of us, 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 junctu re, 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 wi th these arrested instants stolen from life without any anticipation of the far g reater theft ahead that will render your hoard the source of utter despair. A hu ndred 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 conte nts the way we all do before a reading. The edition was a twin of what I'd had bac k home, courtesy of an English exchange student, and I knew it well enough to no tice 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 th e 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 Na tasha 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" poe m. It had astounded me in my previous, Russian incarnation (in spite of my dim E nglish) with its searchlight imagery's progression from the visual to the vision ary. I thought the poem owed a lot to the contemporary, post-Cubist (what we call ed 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 t o that effect to Stephen, and the next thing was Henry Moore's little book of dr

awings. IX I'll never know now whether that was just a shift in conversation or a part of St ephen's osmosis game plan vis-^-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 post cards, 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-m ass 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 wit h security. If the sequence had any root, it must have been Mantegna's Agony in the Garden. Moore, evidently, was similarly obsessed with ellipsoids, and the Bl itz provided him with a veritable safari. The whole thing takes place in the Und erground, which is an apt word in more ways than one. Thus, no airborne angel ca rrying the cup is in sight here, though "Let it pass from me" is presumably on al l 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 s tations' vaults. But it is also a study in submission, since a body reduced to i ts generic form for reasons of safety won't forget this reduction, won't straight en up fully. Once you've crouched in submission to fear, the future of your vert ebrae 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 Steph en with his exploration of searchlights. As I looked at the Drawings I practicall y remembered the crypt-turned-bomb-shelter of our nearby cathedral, with its vau lts and shrouded or swaddled bodies, my mother's and mine among them. While outs ide "Triangles, parallels, parallelograms,/were experimenting with hypotheses/on the blackboard sky . . ."At this rate, I said to myself as I was turning the ob sessively penciled pages, I may remember even my own birth, perhaps even the tim e 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 Pen guin anthology Poetry in the Thirties. If you are born in Russia, nostalgia for a n alternative genesis is inevitable. The thirties were close enough, as I was bo rn in 1940. What made the decade even more congenial was its grimy, monochrome de nomination, owing chiefly to the printed word and black-and-white cinema: my nat ive realm was of the same shade and stayed that way long after the Kodak invasio n. MacNeice, Auden, and Spender I mention them in the order I found them made me fe el 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 t hing I found terribly attractive was their common knack for taking a bewildered l ook at the familiar. Call this influence; fll 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 st ylistic conservatism. Or else simply to vanity: to some puerile desire to be jud ged under a foreign code of conscience. On the other hand, consider the possibil ity that what they did could be loved from afar. Or that reading poets writing i n a foreign tongue bespeaks one's appetite for worship. Stranger things have hap pened: you've seen the churches. XI I lived happily in that mental family. The wall-thick English- Russian dictionar y was in fact a door, or should I say a window, since it was often foggy and star ing through it required some concentration. This paid off particularly well beca use it was poetry, for in a poem every line is a choice. You can tell a lot abou t a man by his choice of an epithet. I thought MacNeice chaotic, musical, self-i

ndulgent, and imagined him moody and reticent. I thought Auden brilliant, resolu te, profoundly tragic, and witty; I imagined him quirky and gruff. I thought Spe nder more lyrical and ambitious with his imagery than either, though rather cons picuously modernist, but I couldn't picture him at all. Reading, like loving, is a one-way street, and all that was going on unbeknown t o any of them. So when I ended up that summer in the West, I was a total strange r 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 Se lected 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 Relat ions, Journals. Initially, I suppose, the culprit was my timidity, saddled with my Elizabethan vocabulary and shaky grammar. Eventually, it would be his or my tr ansatlantic 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 i t is in a family. XII Aside from our respective mother tongues, what would keep us apart were more tha n thirty years of life in this world, Wystan's and Stephen's superior intelligen ce, 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 whi ch thus far I've seen no approximation. Which of course puts my intellectual ins ecurity somewhat to rest, though it doesn't necessarily close the gap. As for th eir private lives, they came into focus, I believe, precisely for the reasons of their perceived intellectual superiority. In plain words, because in the thirti es they were on the left, with Spender joining the Communist Party for a few day s. What's done in a totalitarian state by the secret police in an open society p resumably is the province of one's opponents or critics. Still, the reverse of t his 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 breathta kingly reductive. If only because the ratio of one's sexual activity to other pu rsuits say, earning a living, driving a car is dismal even in one's prime. Theoretica lly, 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 common than not. The only gap I w ouldn'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 re gard. What remained was the language gap, and now and then I've tried to close i t as best I could, though that required prose. XIII 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 n ot for the book's being dedicated to Herbert List, a great German photographer w ith whose niece I was once in love. Spotting the dedication, I ran to him with t he book in my teeth I think this was in London declaring triumphantly, "See, we are r elated!" He smiled wanly and said that the world is a small place, Europe in par ticular. Yes, I said, the world is a small place, and no next person makes it bi gger. And no next time, he added, or something to that effect, and then asked wh ether I actually liked the book. I told him I'd always thought an autobiographic al novel is a contradiction in terms; that it disguises more than it reveals eve n if the reader is partial. That to me, in any case, there was more of the autho r in the book's heroine than in its hero. He replied that this had a lot to do w

ith the period's mental climate in general and with censorship in particular, an d that he perhaps should have rewritten the whole thing. To that I protested, sa ying that disguise is the mother of literature and that censorship might even cl aim its fatherhood, and that there is nothing worse than when Proust's biographe rs 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 undoin g 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. W hatever I may say about him will be provisional or one-sided. Definitions are al ways reductive, and his ability to escape them at the age of eighty-six is not s urprising, even though I caught up with only a quarter of it. Somehow it's easie r 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 m ost 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 matte r of choice as much as temperament. In sissy times like these one, a writer especial ly, can afford to be brutal, lean, mean, etc. In fact, in sissy times one practi cally 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 ta lent! 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 we ll as with epithets is what helps you to retain your dignity, and gentleness and c ivility do. For that reason alone he is, and will remain, palpable. More and mor e so, as days go by. XV My fanciful notions (affinity, mental family, etc.) aside, we got along very wel l. This partly had to do with the total unpredictability of his mind and its tur ns. With people around, he was terribly amusing not so much for their sake as beca use 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 was n't trying to amuse himself, either: it's simply that his speech was trying to c atch up with the perpetually running train of his thought , and therefore was ra ther unpredictable to the speaker himself. Given his age, the past was remarkabl y infrequently his subject; much less so than the present or the future, on whic h he was especially big. In part, I think, this was the result of his metier. Poetry is a tremendous scho ol 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 d oesn't destroy you, insecurity and uncertainty in the end become your intimate f riends and you almost attribute to them an intelligence all their own. That's wh y, I think, he showed such interest in the future: of countries, individuals, cu ltural trends: as though he tried to run the entire gamut of all possible mistak es in advance not in order eventually to avoid them, but just to know those intimate friends of his better. For the sa me 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 vanit y. _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. A ctually, 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 is sue of censorship itself, he cared deeply. We had to spend about an hour and a half onstage and were sitting in the anteroo m shuffling our papers. Normally when two poets share a reading, one reads for f orty-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 say

s, "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 th ey 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, kno ws precious little about its own, American poetry, let alone about the Brits. Th e 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 anythin g topical, either. I can't imagine anyone from among his American brethren (of his age, especially) deliberately sho rt-changing himself either for the sake of an issue or for the public's sake. Ther e 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 t he 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. Tha t virtue, too, I should think, was n^tier-inspired. If you are not born with som e 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. T he dead alone will set you straight fast, not to mention your peers. Second-gues sing yourself will become your second nature. You may be enamored with your own e ndeavors 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 wro ng, 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 sub tlety as well as in terrifying sobriety (with Auden becoming now and then its ta rget but never a casualty). This mixture of subtlety and sobriety is what makes a gen tleman, provided their ratio favors subtlety.476 / xviii And that is what he was, in a largely uncouth literary crowd on both sides of th e Atlantic. He stood out, both literally and figuratively speaking. And the crow d's response, left and right, was predictable. X would chide him for being a pac ifist in World War (though he was nothing of the sort, having been turned down o n medical grounds, after which he served as a fireman and being a fireman during t he 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 fift ies (although Stephen resigned this job once he learned the nature of the magazi ne'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 i t was being bombed but inquire who was to pay the fare. A man living by his pen ov er 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 gover nment. 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., th ey 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 ap pears in retrospect as its saving grace. XIX I notice I am editorializing; the genre begins to dictate the content. This is a cceptable, 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 o

ne'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 o f 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 fo r some big award in poetry. Which goes this year to Giorgio Caproni, a creaky, c rusty octogenarian of rustic appearance, bearing some resemblance to Frost. The old man shuffles awkwardly along the aisle and with great difficulty starts to c limb the stage, mumbling something inaudible to himself. Nobody moves; the Italia n 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. XX 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 m arch toward some gigantic arrangement of cast iron and steel cables sitting ther e, 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 le aves town in the morning. "Very Spanish," he says. "And very warlike." And sudde nly, 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 li s carnage. The night is grainy with rain and wind, c old 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 of his old black jacket, is slowly circling these random pieces of metal twisted by the Spanish genius into a work of art that resembles a ruin. XXIOr 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, a nd also my wife, who cannot take her young eyes away from Stephen's face. For in deed, 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 of total strangers. Besides , it's summer. ("What's good about summer here," I hear him saying while uncorki ng a bottle in his garden, "is that you don't have to chill the wine.") We are m aking "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. "A nyone 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," sa ys Stephen. "How do you spell his name?" So I get a piece of paper, spell the na me, and add Life and Times of Michael and pass it on to Stephen. Then the conver sation reverts to gossip, a recent production of Cosi fan tutte, with the singer s 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 i s a good time to die." XXII And, lunch over, we are giving him a lift home, but on the Strand he asks the ca bbie to stop, bids us farewell, and disappears into a large bookstore waving tha t piece of paper with Coefczee's name on it. I worry how hell get home; then I r emember that London is his town more than mine. X X11! X And speaking of fragments, I remember how, in 1986, when the Challenger blew up in the air over Cape Canaveral, I heard either the ABC or the CNN voice reading Stephen's "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great," written fifty yea rs ago. Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields, See how these names are feted by the waving grass And by the streamers of white cloud And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life, Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre. Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun And left the vivid air signed with their honour. XXIV I think I told him of this episode a few years later, and I believe he smiled, w ith that famous smile of his that conveyed at once pleasure, a sense of general a bsurdity, his partial culpability for that absurdity, pure warmth. If I am tentative here, it' s because I can't quite picture the surroundings. (For some reason a hospital roo m keeps popping up.) As for his reaction, it couldn't have been otherwise: "I Th ink Continually" is his most tired, most anthologized piece. Of all his lines writ ten, discarded, unwritten, half or fully forgotten, yet glowing inside him never theless. For the metier claims its own one way or another. Hence his radiance, w hich stays on my retina whether I shut my eyes or not. Hence, in any case, that smile. XXV People are what we remember about them. What we call life is in the end a patchw ork of someone else's recollections. With death, it gets unstitched, and one end s up with random, disjointed fragments. With shards or, if you will, with snapsho ts. Filled with their unbearable laughter or equally unbearable smiles. Which are unbearable because they are one- dimensional. I should know; after all, I am a photographer's son. And I may even go as far as suggesting a link between pictur e taking and verse writing well, insofar as the fragments are black-and-white. Or i nsofar as writing means retention. Yet one can't pretend that what one beholds go es beyond its blank reverse side. Also, once one realizes how much somebody's li fe is a hostage of one's own memory, one balks at the jaws of the past tense. Ap art from anything, it's too much like talking behind somebody's back, or like bel onging to some virtuous, triumphant majority. One's heart should try to be more honest if it can't be smarter than one's grammar. Or else one should keep a journal whose entries, simply by definition, would keep that tense at bay. 481 / In Memory of Stephen Spender XXVI So now the last fragment. A journal entry, as it were: for July 20 to 21, 1995. Although I never kept a journal. Stephen, however, did. Awfully hot night, worse than N.Y. D. [family friend] picks me up, and 45 minute s later we are at Loudoun Rd. Ah, how well I know this place's floors and baseme nt! Natasha's first words: "Of all people, he was unlikeliest to die." I can't t hink of what the last four days were like for her, of what this night is going t o be like. It's all in her eyes. The same goes for the children: for Matthew and Lizzie. Barry [Lizzie's husband] produces whiskey and treats my glass generousl y. No one is in good shape. Of all things, we are talking about Yugoslavia. I co uldn't eat on the plane and still can't. More whiskey, then, and more Yugoslavia , and by now it's midnight for them. Matthew and Lizzie suggest that I stay eithe r in Stephen's study or in Lizzie and Barry's attic. But M. booked a hotel for m e, and they drive me there: it's a few blocks away. In the morning D. drives us all to St. Mary's on Pad- dington Green. On account of my Russianness, Natasha arranges for me to see Stephen in an open coffin. He l ooks severe and settled for whatever it is ahead. I kiss him on his brow, saying , "Thank you for everything. Say hello to Wystan and my parents. Farewell." I re member his legs, in the hospital, protruding from the gown: bruised with burst b lood vessels exactly like my father's, who was older than Stephen by six years. No, it's not because I wasn't present at his death that I flew to London. Though th at could be as good a reason as any. No, not because of that. Actually, after se eing Stephen in the open coffin, I feel much calmer. Presumably this custom has s omething to do with its therapeutic effect. This strikes me as a Wystan-like tho ught. He would be here if he could. So it might just as well be me. Even if I ca n't provide Natasha and the children with any comfort, I can be a distraction. N ow Matthew screws the bolts into the coffin lid. He fights tears, but they are w inning. One can't help him; nor do I think one should. This is a son's job. XXVII

People begin to arrive for the service and stand outside in little groups. I rec ognize Valerie Eliot, and after some initial awkwardness we talk. She tells me t his story: The day her husband died, the BBC broadcast a tribute to him over the wireless, read by Auden. "He was absolutely the right man," she says. "Still, I was somewhat surprised by his promptness." A little later, she says, he comes to London, calls on her, and tells her that when the BBC learned that Eliot was gr avely ill, they telephoned and asked him to record an obituary. Wystan said that he refused to speak about T. S. Eliot in the past tense while he was alive. In that case, said the BBC, we'll go to somebody else. "So I had to grit my teeth a nd do it," said Auden. "And for that I beg your forgiveness." Then the service begins. It is as beautiful as an affair of this kind can be. Th e window behind the altar gives onto a wonderfully sunlit churchyard. Haydn and Schubert. Except that, as the quartet goes into a crescendo, I see in the side w indow a lift with construction workers climbing to the umpteenth floor of the adj acent high-rise. This strikes me as the kind of thing Stephen himself would noti ce and later remark about. And throughout the service, totally inappropriateline s from Wystan's poem about Mozart keep running through my mind: How seemly then to celebrate the birth Of one who didn't do harm to our poor ear th, Created masterpieces by the dozen, Indulged in toilet humor with his cousin And had a pauper funeral in the rain The like of whom we'll never meet again. So, after all, he is here: not as a comfort but as a distraction. And out of habi t: I suppose his lines used to visit Stephen's mind quite frequently, and Stephe n's his. Now in either case they will be homesick forever. XXVIII The service over, all adjourn to Loudoun Road for drinks in the garden. The sun is hard-hitting, the sky is a solid blue slate. General chatter; the most freque nt openings are "The end of an era" and "What a perfect day." The whole thing lo oks more like a garden party than anything. Perhaps this is the way the English keep their real sentiments in check, though some faces betray confusion. Lady R. says hello and makes some remark to the effect that at all funerals one thinks inevitably of one's own, didn't I think? I say no and, when she professes disbel ief, explain to her that in our line of work one learns to narrow the focus by w riting elegies. That, I add, rubs off on one's attitudes in reality. "I meant th at one implicitly wishes to last as long as the person who's just died," maneuve rs Lady R. I buy the implication and move toward the exit. As I step outside, I run into a just-arriving couple. The man is about my age and looks vaguely famil iar (somebody in publishing). We greet each other hesitantly and he says, "The en d of an era." No, I want to say to him, not the end of an era. Of a life. Which was longer and better than either yours or mine. Instead I just muster a broad, cheerful, Stephen-like grin and say, "I don't think so," and walk away. August 10, 1995 An Immodest Proposal About an hour ago, the stage where I stand now as well as your seats were quite empty. An hour hence, they will be empty again. For most of the day, I imagine, this place stays empty; emptiness is its natural state. Had it been endowed with consciousness of its own, it would regard our presence as a nuisance. This is a s good an illustration as any of one's significance, in any case; certainly of t he significance of our gathering. No matter what brings us here, the ratios are not in our favor. Pleased as we may be with our number, in spatial terms it is o f infinitesimal consequence. This is true, I think, of any human assembly; but when it comes to poetry, it ri ngs a special bell. For one thing, poetry, the writing or the reading of it, is an atomizing art; it is far less social than music or painting. Also, poetry has a certain appetite for emptiness, starting, say, with that of infinity. Mainly, though, because historically speaking the ratio of poetry's audience to the res t of society is not in the former s favor. So we should be pleased with one anot her, if only because our being here, for all its seeming insignifDelivered at the Library of Congress, October 1991.

icance, is a continuation of that history which, by some accounts floating around this town, has ended. Throughout what we call recorded history, the audience for poetry does not appea r to have exceeded 1 percent of the entire population. The basis for this estima te is not any particular research but the mental climate of the world that we li ve in. In fact, the weather has been such that, at times, the quoted figure seem s a bit generous. Neither Greek nor Roman antiquity, nor the glorious Renaissanc e, nor the Enlightenment provides us with an impression of poetry commanding huge audiences, let alone legions or battalions, or of its readership being vast. It never was. Those we call the classics owe their reputations not to their cont emporaries but to their posterity. This is not to say that posterity is the quan titative expression of their worth. It just supplies them, albeit retroactively and with some effort, with the size of readership to which they were entitled fr om the beginning. As it was, their actual circumstances were by and large fairly narrow; they courted patrons or flocked to the courts pretty much in the same w ay poets today go to the universities. Obviously that had to do with the hope of largesse, but it was also the quest for an audience. Literacy being the privile ge of the few, where else could a poet find a sympathetic ear or an attentive ey e for his lines? The seat of power was often the seat of culture; and its diet w as better, the company was less monochrome and more tender than elsewhere, inclu ding the monastery. Centuries passed. Seats of power and seats of culture parted ways, it seems for good. That, of course, is the price you pay for democracy, for the rule of the p eople, by the people, and for the people, of whom still only 1 percent reads poe try. If a modern poet has anything in common with his Renaissance colleague, it is in the first place the paltry distribution^ his work. Depending on one's temperament, one may relish the archetypal aspects of this predicament pride oneself in being the means of carrying on the hallowed tra dition, or derive a similar degree of comfort from one's so-well-precedented res ignation. There is nothing more psychologically rewarding than linking oneself to the glories of the past, if only because the past is more articulate than the p resent, not to mention the future. A poet can always talk himself out of a jam; after all, that's his metier. But I am here to speak not about the predicament of the poet, who is never, in the fi nal analysis, a victim. I am here to speak about the plight of his audience: abo ut your plight, as it were. Since I am paid this year by the Library of Congress , I take this job in the spirit of a public servant, not in any other. So it is the audience for poetry in this country that is my concern; and it is the public servant in me who finds the existing ratio of 1 percent appalling and scandalous , not to say tragic. Neither my temperament nor the chagrin of an author over his own dismal sales has anything to do with this appraisal. The standard number of copies of a first or second collection by any poet in this country is something between 2,000 and 10,000 (and X speak of the commercial ho uses only). The latest census that I've seen gives the population of the United States as approximately 250 million. This means that a standard commercial publi shing house, printing this or that author's first or second volume, aims at only .001 percent of the entire population. To me, this is absurd. What stood for centuries in the way of the public's access to poetry was the abs ence of press and the limitation of literacy. Now both are practically universal , and the aforementioned ratio is no longer justifiable. Actually, even if we ar e to go by that l percent, it should result in publishers printing not 2,000 to 10,000 copies of a poet's collection but 2.5 million. Do we have that many reade rs of poetry in this country? I believe that we do; in fact, I believe that we h ave a lot more than that. Just how many could be determined, of course, through market research, but that is precisely what should be avoided. For market research is restrictive by definition. So is any sociological breakdo wn of census figures into groups, classes, and categories. They presuppose certa in binding characteristics pertaining to each social group, ushering in their pr escribed treatment. This leads, plain and simple, to a reduction of people's men tal diet, to their intellectual segregation. The market for poetry is believed to

be those with a college education, and that's whom a publisher targets. The blu e-collar crowd is not supposed to read Horace, nor the farmer in his overalls Mo ntale or Marvell. Nor, for that matter, is the politician expected to know by he art Gerard Manley Hopkins or Elizabeth Bishop. This is dumb as well as dangerous. More about that later. For the moment I'd lik e to assert only that the distribution of poetry should not be based on market cr iteria, since any such estimate, by definition, shortchanges the existing potenti al. When it comes to poetry, the net result of market research, for all its comp uters, is distinctly medieval. We are all literate, therefore everybody is a pot ential reader of poetry: it is on this assumption that the distribution of books should be based, not on some claustrophobic notion of demand. For in cultural m atters, it is not demand that creates supply, it is the other way around. You re ad Dante because he wrote the Divine Comedy, not because you felt the need for h im: you would not have been able to conjure either the man or the poem.Poetry mu st be available to the public in for greater volume than it is. It should be as ubiquitouTas the nature that surrounds us, and from which poetry derives many of its similes; or as ubiquitous as gas stations, if not as cars themselves. Books tores should be located not only on campuses or main drags but at the assembly pl ant's gates also. Paperbacks of those we deem classics should be cheap and sold at supermarkets. This is, after all, a country of mass production, and I don't s ee why what's done for cars can't be done for books of poetry, which take you qu ite a bit further. Because you don't want to go a bit further? Perhaps; but if t his is so, it's because you are deprived of the means of transportation, not bec ause the distances and the destinations that I have in mind don't exist. Even to sympathetic ears, I suppose, all this may sound a bit loony. Well, it is n't; it also makes perfect economic sense. A book of poetry printed in 2.5 milli on copies and priced at, say, two dollars, will in the end bring in more than 10 ,000 copies of the same edition priced at twenty dollars. You may encounter, of course, a problem of storage, but then you'll be compelled to distribute as far and wide as the country goes. Moreover, if the government would recognize that t he construction of your library is as essential to your inner vocation as busines s lunches are to the outer, tax breaks could be made available to those who read , write, or publish poetry. The main loser, of course, would be the Brazilian rai n forest. But I believe that a tree facing the choice between becoming a book of poems or a bunch of memos may well opt for the former. A book goes a long way. Overkill in cultural matters is not an optional strategy , it is a necessity, since selective cultural targeting spells defeat no matter how well one's aim is taken. Fittingly, then, without having any idea whom it is in particular that I am addressing at the moment, I would like to suggest that wi th the low-cost technology currently available, there is now a discernible oppor tunity to turn this nation into an enlightened democracy. And I think this oppor tunity should be risen to before literacy is replaced with videocy. I recommend that we begin with poetry, not only because this way we would echo t he development of our civilization the song was there before the story but also becau se it is cheaper to produce. A dozen titles would be a decent beginning. The ave rage poetry reader's bookshelf contains, I believe, somewhere between thirty and fifty collections by various authors. It's possible to put half of it on a sing le shelf, or a mantelpiece or if worse comes to worse, on the windowsill of every Am erican household. The cost of a dozen poetry paperbacks, even at their current p rice, would amount at most to one-fourth the price of a television set. That thi s is not done has to do not with the absence of a popular appetite for poetry bu t with the near-impossibility of whetting this appetite: with the unavailability of books. In my view, books should be brought to the doorstep like electricity, or like mi lk in England: they should be considered utilities, and their cost should be appr opriately minimal. Barring that, poetry could be sold in drugstores (not least be cause it might reduce the bill from your shrink). At the very least, an antholog y of American poetry should be found in the drawer in every room in every motel in the land, next to the Bible, which will surely not object to this proximity, since it does not object to the proximity of the phone book.

All this is doable, in this country especially. For apart from anything else, Am erican poetry is this country's greatest patrimony. It takes a stranger to see so me things clearly. This is one of them, and I am that stranger. The quantity of verse that has been penned on these shores in the last century and a half dwarfs the similar enterprise of any literature and, for that matter, both our jazz an d our cinema, rightly adored throughout the world. The same goes, I daresay, for its quality, for this is a poetry informed by the spirit of personal responsibil ity. There is nothing more alien to American poetry than those great Continental specialties: the sensibility of the victim with its wildly oscillating, blame-th irsty finger; the incoherence of elevation; the Promethean affectations and spec ial pleading. To be sure, American verse has its vices too many a parochial vision ary, a verbose neurotic. But it is extremely tempering stuff, and sticking with the l percent distribution method robs this nation of a natural resource of endu rance, not to mention a source of pride. Poetry, by definition, is a highly individualistic art; in a sense, this country is its logical abode. At any rate, it is only logical that in this country this individualistic tendency has gone to its idiosyncratic extreme, in modernists a nd traditionalists alike. (In fact, this is what gave birth to modernists.) To my eye as well as my ear, American poetry is a relentless nonstop sermon on human a utonomy; the song of the atom, if you will, defying the chain reaction. Its gene ral tone is that of resilience and fortitude, of exacting the full look at the w orst and not blinking. It certainly keeps its eyes wide open, not so much in won derment, or poised for a revelation, as on the lookout for danger. It is short o n consolation (the diversion of so much European poetry, especially Russian); rich and extremely lucid in detail; free of nostalgia for some Golden Age; big on ha rdihood and escape. If one looked for its motto, I would suggest Frost's line fr om "A Servant to Servants": "The best way out is always through." I permit myself to speak about American poetry in such a wholesale manner, it is not because of its body's strength and vastness but because my subject is the p ublic's access to it, In this context it must be pointed out that the old adage about a poet's role in, or his duty to, his society puts the entire issue upside down. If one can speak of the social function of somebody who is essentially se lf-employed, then the social function of a poet is writing, which he does not by society's appointment but by his own volition. His only duty is to his language , that is, to write well. By writing, especially by writing well, in the languag e of his society, a poet takes a large step toward it. It is society's job to me et him halfway, that is, to open his book and to read it. If one can speak of any dereliction of duty here, it's not on the part of the po et, for he keeps writing. Now, poetry is the supreme form of human locution in a ny culture. By failing to read or listen to poets, a society dooms itself to inf erior modes of articulation of the politician, or the salesman, or the charlatan -in short, to its own. It forfeits, in other words, its own evolutionary potential, for what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is precisely the gi ft of speech. The charge frequently leveled against poetry that it is difficult, o bscure, hermetic, and whatnot indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.For poetic discourse is continuous; it also avoids cliche and repetition. The absence of those things is what speeds up and distinguishes art from life, whose chief stylistic device , if one may say so, is precisely cliche and repetition, since it always starts from scratch. It is no wonder that society today, chancing on this continuing po etic discourse, finds itself at a loss, as if boarding a runaway train. I have r emarked elsewhere that poetry is not a form of entertainment, and in a certain se nse not even a form of art, but our anthropological, genetic goal, our linguisti c, evolutionary beacon. We seem to sense this as children, when we absorb and re member verses in order to master language. As adults, however, we abandon this p ursuit, convinced that we have mastered it. Yet what we've mastered is but an id iom, good enough perhaps to outfox an enemy, to sell a product, to get laid, to e arn a promotion, but certainly not good enough to cure anguish or cause joy. Unt il one learns to pack one's sentences with meanings like a van or to discern and love in the beloved's features a "pilgrim soul"; until one becomes aware that "N

o memory of having starred / Atones for later disregard, / Or keeps the end from being hard" until things like that are in one's bloodstream, one still belongs amo ng the sublinguals. Who are the majority, if that's a comfort.If nothing else, r eading poetry is a process of terrific linguistic osmosis. It is also a highly e conomical form of mental acceleration. Within a very short space a good poem cov ers enormous mental ground, and often, toward its finale, provides one with an e piphany or a revelation. That happens because in the process of composition a po et employs by and large unwittingly the two main modes of cognition available to our species: Occidental and Oriental. (Of course both modes are available whenever you find frontal lobes, but different traditions have employed them with differe nt degrees of prejudice.) The first puts a high premium on the rational, on anal ysis. In social terms, it is accompanied by man's self-assertion and generally i s exemplified by Des- cartes's "Cogito ergo sum." The second relies mainly on in tuitive synthesis, calls for self-negation, and is best represented by the Buddha . In other words, a poem offers you a sample of complete, not slanted, human int elligence at work. This is what constitutes the chief appeal of poetry, quite ap art from its exploiting rhythmic and euphonic properties of the language which a re in themselves quite revelatory. A poem, as it were, tells its reader, "Be lik e me." And at the moment of reading you become what you read, you become the sta te of the language which is a poem, and its epiphany or its revelation is yours. They are still yours once you shut the book, since you can't revert to not havi ng had them. That's what evolution is all about. Now, the purpose of evolution is the survival neither of the fittest nor of the defeatist. Were it the former, we would have to settle for Arnold Schwarzenegger ; were it the latter, which ethically is a more sound proposition, we'd have to make do with Woody Allen. The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty , which survives it all and generates truth simply by being a fusion of the ment al and the sensual. As: it is always in the eye of the beholder, it can't be who lly embodied save in words: that's what ushers in a poem, which is as incurably semantic as it is incurably euphonic.No other language accumulates so much of th is as does English. To be born into it or to arrive in it is the best boon that c an befall a man. To prevent its keepers from full access to it is an anthropolog ical crime, and that's what the present system of the distribution of poetry boi ls down to. I don't rightly know what's worse, burning books or not reading them ; I think, though, that token publishing falls somewhere in between. I am sorry to put this so drastically, but when I think of the great works by the poets of this language bulldozed into neglect, on the one hand, and then consider the min d-boggling demographic vista, on the other, I feel that we are on the verge of a tremendous cultural backslide. And it is not the culture I am worried about, or the fate of the great or not-so-great poets' works. What concerns me is that ma n, unable to articulate, to express himself adequately, reverts to action. Since the vocabulary of action is limited, as it were, to his body, he is bound to ac t violendy, extending his vocabulary with a weapon where there should have been an adjective. In short, the good old quaint ways should be abandoned. There should be a nation wide distribution of poetry, classic and contemporary. It should be handled priv ately, I suppose, but supported by the state. The age group it should be aiming a t is fifteen and up. The emphasis should be on the American classics; and as to who or what should be printed, that should be decided by a body of two or three people in the know, that is, by the poets. The academics, with their ideological bickering, should be kept out of it, for nobody has the authority to prescribe in this field on any grounds other than taste. Beauty and its attendant truth ar e not to be subordinated to any philosophical, political, or even ethical doctri ne, since aesthetics is the mother of ethics and not the other way around. Shoul d you think otherwise, try to recall the circumstances in which you fall in love . What should be kept in mind, however, is that there is a tendency in society to appoint one great poet per period, often per century. This is done in order to a void the responsibility of reading others, or for that matter the chosen one, sho uld you find his or her temperament uncongenial. The fact is that at any given m

oment in any literature there are several poets of equal gravity and significanc e by whose lights you can go. In any case, whatever their number, in the end it corresponds to the known temperaments, for it can't be otherwise: hence their di fferences. By grace of language, they are there to provide society with a hierarc hy or a spectrum of aesthetic standards to emulate, to ignore, to acknowledge. T hey are not so much role models as mental shepherds, whether they are cognizant of it or not and it's better if they are not. Society needs all of them; and shoul d the project I am speaking of ever be embarked on, no preferences should be show n to any one of them. Since on these heights there is no hierarchy, the fanfare should be equal. I suspect that society settles just for one, because one is easier to dismiss th an several. A society with several poets for its secular saints would be harder to rule, since a politician would have to offer a plane of regard, not to mentio n a level of diction, matching at least the one offered by poets: a plane of reg ard and a level of diction which no longer could be viewed as exceptional. But s uch a society would be perhaps a truer democracy than what we've known thus far. For the purpose of democracy is not democracy itself: that would be redundant. T he purpose of democracy is its enlightenment. Democracy without enlightenment is at best a well- policed jungle with one designated great poet in it for its Tarz an. It's the jungle that I am talking about here, not Tarzans, For a poet to sink in to oblivion is not such an extraordinary drama; it comes with the territory: he can afford it. Unlike society, a good poet always has the future, and his poems, in a manner of speaking, are an invitation for us to sample it. And the least per haps the best thing that can be said about us is that we are the future of Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop: to name just a few . . . Every generation living on the earth is the future more exactly, a part of the future of those who are gone, but of poets in particular, because when we read their work we realize that they knew us, that the poetry that preceded us is ess entially our gene pool. This calls not for reverence; this calls for reference. I repeat: A poet is never a loser; he knows that others will come in his stead a nd pick up the trail where he left it. (In fact, it's the swelling number of oth ers, energetic and vocal, clamoring for attention, that drive him into oblivion. )He can take this, as well as being regarded as a sissy. It is society that cann ot afford to be oblivious, and it is society that compared with the mental toughne ss of practically any poet comes out a sissy and a loser. For society, whose main strength is that of reproducing itself, to lose a poet is like having a brain ce ll busted. This impairs one's speech, makes one draw a blank where an ethical ch oice is to be made; or it barnacles speech with qualifiers, turns one into an ea ger receptacle for demagoguery or just pure noise. The organs of reproduction, h owever, are not affected. There are few cures for hereditary disorders (undetectable, perhaps, in an indivi dual, but striking in a crowd), and what I'm suggesting here is not one of them. I just hope that this idea, if it catches on, may slow down somewhat the spread of our cultural malaise to the next generation. As I said, I took this job in t he spirit of public service, and maybe being paid by the Library of Congress in Washington has gone to my head. Perhaps I fancy myself as a sort of Surgeon Gene ral slapping a label onto the current packaging of poetry. Something like This Wa y of Doing Business Is Dangerous to the National Health. The fact that we are ali ve does not mean that we are not sick. It's often been said first, I think, by Santayana that those who don't remember hist ory are bound to repeat it. Poetry doesn't make such claims. Still, it has some things in common with history: it employs memory, and it is of use for the futur e, not to mention the present. It certainly cannot reduce poverty, but it can do something for ignorance. Also, it is the only insurance available against the v ulgarity of the human heart. Therefore, it should be available to everyone in th is country and at a low cost.Fifty million copies of an anthology of American po etry for two dollars a copy can be sold in a country of 250 million. Perhaps not at once, but gradually, over a decade or so, they will sell. Books find their r eaders. And if they will not sell, well, let them lie around, absorb dust, rot,

and disintegrate. There is always going to be a child who will fish a book out o f the garbage heap. I was such a child, for what it's worth; so, perhaps, were s ome of you. A quarter of a century ago, in a previous incarnation in Russia, I knew a man wh o was translating Robert Frost into Russian. I got to know him because I saw his translations: they were stunning poems in Russian, and I wanted to become acquai nted with the man as much as I wanted to see the originals. He showed me a hardc over edition (I think it was by Holt), which fell open onto the page with "Happi ness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length." Across the page went a hug e, size-twelve imprint of a soldier's boot. The front page of the book bore the stamp stalag #," which was a World War II concentration camp for Allied POWs somew here in France. Now, there is a case of a book of poems finding its reader. All it had to do was to be around. Otherwise it couldn't be stepped on, let alone picked up. Letter to a President Dear Mr. President, I've decided to write this letter to you because we have something in common: we both are writers. In this line of work, one weighs words more carefully, I beli eve, than elsewhere before committing them to paper or, for that matter, to the m icrophone. Even when one finds oneself engaged in a public affair, one tries to do one's best to avoid catchwords, Latinate expressions, all manner of jargon. In a dialogue, of course, or with two or more interlocutors around, that's difficul t, and may even strike them as pretentiousness. But in a soliloquy or in a monol ogue it is, I think, attainable, though, of course, one always tailors one's dic tion to one's audience. We have something else in common, Mr. President, and that is our past in our res pective police states. To put it less grandly: our prisons, that shortage of spa ce amply made up for by an abundance of time, which, sooner or later, renders on e, regardless of one's temperament, rather contemplative. You spent more time in yours, of course, than Published in The New York Review of Books in response to a lecture by Mr. Havel that appeared in the May zj, 1993, issue of that publication. I in mine, though I started in mine long before Spring. Yet in spite of my nearl y patriotic be_ hopelessness of some urine-reeking cement hole in the bowels of R ussia awakens one to the arbitrariness of existence faster than what I once pict ured as a clean, stuccoed solitary in civilized Prague, as contemplative beings, I think, we might be quite even. In short, we were pen pals long before I conceived of this letter. But I conceiv ed of it not because of the literalness of my mind, or because our present circu mstances are quite different from those of the past (nothing can be more natural than that, and one is not obliged to remain a writer forever: not any more so t han to stay a prisoner). I've decided to write this letter because a while ago I read the text of one of your most recent speeches, whose conclusions about the past, the present, and the future were so different from mine that I thought one of us must be wrong. And it is precisely because the present and the future and n ot just your own or your country's but the global one were involved that I decided to make this an open letter to you. Had the issue been only the past, I wouldn' t have written you this letter at all, or if I had, I'd have marked it "Personal ." The speech of yours that I read was printed in The New York Review of Books and its title was "The Post-Communist Nightmare." You begin by reminiscing about a t ime when you would be avoided in the street by your friends and acquaintances, s ince in those days you were on dangerous terms with the state and under police s urveillance. You proceed to explain the reasons for their avoiding you and suggest , in the usual, grudge-free manner for which you are justly famous, that to thos e friends and acquaintances you constituted an inconvenience; and "inconvenience s" you cite the conventional wisdom "are best avoided." Then formost of your speech you describe the post-Communist reality (in Eastern Europe and by implication in the Balkans) and equate the deportment of the democratic world vis-a-vis that r eality to avoiding an inconvenience.

It is a wonderful speech, with a great many wonderful insights and a convincing conclusion; but let me go to your starting point. It occurs to me, Mr. President , that your famous civility benefited your hindsight here rather poorly. Are you so sure you were avoided by those people then and there for reasons of embarras sment and fear of "potential persecution" only, and not because you were, given the seeming stability of the system, written off by them? Are you sure that at l east some of them didn't simply regard you as a marked, doomed man on whom it wo uld be foolish to waste much time? Don't you think that instead of, or as well a s, being inconvenient (as you insist), you were also a convenient example of the wrong deportment and thus a source of considerable moral comfort, the way the si ck are for the healthy majority? Haven't you imagined them saying to their wives in the evening, "I saw Havel today in the street. He's had it." Or do I misjudg e the Czech character?That they were proven wrong and you right matters little. They wrote you off in the first place because even by the standards of our half of the century you were not a martyr. Besides, don't we all harbor a certain mea sure of guilt, totally unrelated to the state, of course, but nonetheless palpab le? So whenever the arm of the state reaches us, we regard it vaguely as our com euppance, as a touch of the blunt but nevertheless expected tool of Providence. That's, frankly, the main raison d'etre behind the institution of police, plainclothed or uniformed, or at least behind our general inability to resist an arr est. One may be perfectly convinced that the state is wrong, but one is seldom c onfident of one's own virtue. Not to mention that it is the same arm that locks one up and sets one free. That's why one is seldom surprised at being avoided wh en one gets released, and doesn't expect a universal embrace. Such expectations, under such circumstances, would be disappointed, because nobo dy wants to be reminded of the murky complexity of the relations between guilt a nd getting one's comeuppance, and in a police state providing such a reminder is what heroic deportment is largely about. It alienates one from others, as any em phasis on virtue does; not to mention that a hero is always best observed from a distance. In no small measure, Mr. President, you were avoided by the people you 've mentioned precisely because for them you were a sort of test tube of virtue confronting evil, and they didn't interfere with the experiment, since they had their doubts about both. As such, you again were a convenience, because in the po lice state absolutes compromise each other since they engender each other. Haven 't you imagined those prudent people saying to their wives in the evening: "I sa w Havel today in the street. He's too good to be true." Or do I misjudge the Cze ch character again? That they were proven wrong and you right, I repeat, matters little. They wrote you off at the time because they were guided by the same relativism and self-int erest that I suppose helps them to make a go of it now, under the new dispensati on. And as a healthy majority, they no doubt had a significant part in your velv et revolution, which, after all asserts, the way democracy always does, precisel y self- interest. If such is the case, and I'm afraid it is, they've paid you ba ck for their excessive prudence, and you preside now over a society which is mor e theirs than yours. There is nothing wrong with that. Besides, things might easily have gone the oth er way: for you, that is; not for them (the revolution was so velvet because the tyranny itself by that time was more woolen than ironclad otherwise I wouldn't ha ve this privilege of commenting upon your speech). So all I'm trying to suggest is that by introducing the notion of inconvenience you quite possibly misspoke, for self-interest is always exercised at the expense of others, whether it's don e by individuals or by nations. A better notion would be the vulgarity of the hu man heart, Mr. President; but then you wouldn't be able to bring your speech to a ringing conclusion. Certain things come with a pulpit, though one should resist them, writer or no writer. As I am not faced with your task, I'd like to take y our argument now where, I think, it could perhaps have gone. I wonder if you'll disagree with the result. "For long decades," your next paragraph begins, "the chief nightmare of the demo cratic world was Communism. Today three years after it began to collapse like an avalanche- it would seem as though another nightmare has replaced it: post-Communi

sm." Then you describe in considerable detail the existing modes of the democrat ic world's response to the ecological, economic, political, and social catastrop hes unraveling where previously one perceived a smooth cloth. You liken these res ponses to those toward your "inconvenience" and suggest that such a position lea ds "to a turning away from reality, and ultimately, to resigning oneself to it. It leads to appeasement, even to collaboration. The consequences of such a positi on may even be suicidal." It is here, Mr, President, that I think your metaphor fails you. For neither the Communist nor the post- Communist nightmare amounts to an inconvenience, since i t helped, helps, and for quite some time will help the democratic world to extern alize evil. And not the democratic world only. To quite a few of us who lived in that nightmare, and especially those who fought it, its presence was a source o f considerable moral comfort. For one who fights or resists evil almost automati cally perceives oneself as good and skips self-analysis. So perhaps it's time for us and for the world at large, democratic or not to scrub the term "Communism" from the human reality of Eastern Europe so one can recognize that reality for what it was and is: a mirror. For that is what human evil always is. Geographic names or political terminology provides not a telescope or a window but the reflection of ourselves: of human negative potential. The magnitude of what took place in our parts of the world, and over two-thirds of a century, cannot be reduced to "Communism." Catchwords, o n the whole, lose more than they retain, and in the case of tens of millions kil led and the lives of entire nations subverted, a catchword simply won't do. Alth ough the ratio of executioners to victims favors the latter, the scale of what h appened in our realm suggests, given its technological backwardness at the time, that the former, too, run in the millions, not to mention the complicity of mil lions more. Homilies are not my forte, Mr. President; besides, you are a convert. It's not f or me to tell you that what you call "Communism" was a breakdown of humanity and not a political problem. It was a human problem, a problem of our species, and t hus of a lingering nature. Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a n ation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil terminology , I should add, invented by evil to obscure its own reality. Nor should one refe r to it as a nightmare, since that breakdown of humanity wasn't a nocturnal affa ir, not in our hemisphere, to say the least.To this day, the word "Communism" re mains a convenience, for an -ism suggests a fait accompli. In Slavic languages es pecially, an -ism, as you know, suggests the foreignness of a phenomenon, and wh en a word containing an -ism denotes a political system, the system is perceived as an imposition. True, our particular -ism wasn't conceived on the banks of th e Volga or the Vltava, and the fact that it blossomed there with a unique vigor doesn't bespeak our soil's exceptional fertility, for it blossomed in different latitudes and extremely diverse cultural zones with equal intensity. This suggests not so much an imposition as our -ism's rather organic, not to say universal, o rigins. One should think, therefore, that a bit of self-examination on the part of the democratic world as well as our own is in order, rather than ringing calls fo r mutual "understanding." (What does this word mean, anyway? What procedure do y ou propose for this understanding? Under the auspices of the UN, perhaps?) And if self-examination is unlikely (why should what's been avoided under duress be done at leisure?), then at least the myth of imposition should be dispelled, since, for one thing, tank crews and fifth columns are biologically indistinguis hable. Why don't we simply start by admitting that an extraordinary anthropologi cal backslide has taken place in our world in this century, regardless of who or what triggered it? That it involved masses acting in their self-interest and, in the process of doing so, reducing their common denominator to the moral minimum? And that the masses' self-interest stability of life and its standards, similarly reduced has been attained at the expense of other masses, albeit numerically infe rior? Hence the number of the dead. It is convenient to treat these matters as an error, as a horrendous political a berration, perhaps imposed upon human beings from an anonymous elsewhere. It is e ven more convenient if that elsewhere bears a proper geographical or foreign-sou

nding name, whose spelling obscures its utterly human nature. It was convenient to build navies and defenses against that aberration as it is convenient to dismantl e those defenses and those navies now. It is convenient,I must add, to refer to these matters in a civil manner, Mr. President, from a pulpit today, although I don't question for a minute the authenticity of your civility, which, I believe, is your very nature. It was convenient to have around this living example of ho w not to run things in this world and supply this example with an -ism, as it is convenient to supply it nowadays with "know-how" and a "post-." (And one easily envisions our -ism, embellished with its post-, conveniently sailing on the lip s of dimwits into the future.) For it would be truly inconvenient for the cowboys of the Western industrial democ racies specifically to recognize the catastrophe that occurred in Indian territory as the first cry of mass society: a cry, as it were, from the world's future, a nd to recognize it not as an -ism but as a chasm suddenly gaping in the human he art, to swallow up honesty, compassion, civility, justice, and, thus satiated, pr esenting to the still democratic outside a reasonably perfect, monotonous surfac e. Cowboys, however, loathe mirrors if only because there they may recognize the back ward Indians more readily than they would in the open. So they prefer to mount t heir high horses, scan the Indian-free horizons, deride the Indians' backwardness , and derive enormous moral comfort from being regarded as cowboys first of all, b y the Indians.As one who has been likened often to a philosopher- king, you can, Mr. President, appreciate better than many how much all that happened to our "I ndian nation" harks back to the Enlightenment, with its idea (from the Age of Di scovery, actually) of a noble savage, of man being inherently good but habitually ruined by bad institutions; with its belief that improvement of those instituti ons will restore man to his initial goodness. So to the admission previously mad e or hoped for, one should add, I suppose, that it's precisely the accomplishmen t of the "Indian" in perfecting those institutions that brought them to that proj ect's logical end: the police state. Perhaps the manifest bestiality of this ach ievement should suggest to the "Indians" that they must retreat some way into the interior, that they should render their institutions a bit less perfect. Otherw ise they may not get the "cowboys' " subsidies for their reservations. And perha ps there is indeed a ratio between man's goodness and the badness of institution s. If there isn't, maybe somebody should admit that man isn't that good. Isn't this the juncture at which we find ourselves, Mr. President or at least you do? Should "Indians" embark on imitating "cowboys," or should they consult the s pirits about other options? May it be that the magnitude of the tragedy that bef ell them is in itself a guarantee that it won't happen again? May their grief an d their memory of what happened in their parts create a greater egalitarian bond than free enterprise and a bicameral legislature? And if they should draft a co nstitution anyway, maybe they should start by recognizing themselves and their hi story for the better part of this century as a reminder of Original Sin. It's not such a heady concept, as you know. Translated into common parlance, it means that man is dangerous. Apart from being a footnote to our beloved Jean-Jac ques, this principle may allow us to build if not elsewhere, then at least in our r ealm, so steeped in Fourier, Proudhon, and Blanc at the expense of Burke and Toc queville a social order resting on a less self-flattering basis than was our habit , and perhaps with less disastrous consequences. This also may qualify as man's "new understanding of himself, of his limitations and his place in the world" you call for in your speech."We must discover a new relationship to our neighbors, and to the universe," you say toward the end of your speech, "and its metaphysic al order, which is the source of the moral order." The metaphysical order, Mr. P resident, should it really exist, is pretty dark, and its structural idiom is it s parts' mutual indifference. The notion that man is dangerous runs, therefore, closest to that order's implications for human morality. Every writer is a reader , and if you scan your library's shelves, you must realize that most of the book s you've got there are about either betrayal or murder. At any rate, it seems mo re prudent to build society on the premise that man is evil rather than the prem ise of his goodness. This way at least there is the possibility of making it saf

e psychologically, if not physically (but perhaps that as well), for most of its members, not to mention that its surprises, which are inevitable, might be of a more pleasant nature. Maybe the real civility, Mr. President, is not to create illusions. "New understa nding," "global responsibilities," "pluralistic metaculture" are hot 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 p redicated 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, pe rhaps, the innocents, or demagogues, running the affairs of industrial democraci es, but not you, who ought to know the truth about the condition of the human he art. And you are, one would imagine, in a good position not only to convey your knowl edge to people but also to cure that heart condition somewhat: to help them to b ecome like yourself. Since what made you the way you are was not your penal expe rience but the books you've read. I'd suggest, for starters, serialization of so me 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 parliame nt would object. By giving your people Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Platonov, Camus, or Joyce, you may turn at least one nation in the heart of Europe into a civili zed 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 attendan t "hatred of the world, self-affirmation at all costs, and the unparalleled flou rishing 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 b est 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 demo cracy 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 i s better for your people, which book it is better to throw at them. If I were yo u, though, I'd start with your own library, because apparently it wasn't in law s chool that you learned about moral imperatives. Yours sincerely, On Grief and Reason i I should tell you that what follows is a spinoff of a seminar given four years a go at the College International de Philosophic, in Paris. Hence a certain breezin ess to the pace; hence, too, the paucity of biographical material irrelevant, in m y view, to the analysis of a work of art in general, and particularly where a fo reign audience is concerned. In any case, the pronoun "you" in these pages stand s for those ignorant of or poorly acquainted with the lyrical and narrative stre ngths of the poetry of Robert Frost. But, first, some basics. Robert Frost was bom in 1874 and died in 1963, at the age of eighty-eight. One m arriage, six children; fairly strapped when young; farming, and, later, teaching jobs in various schools. Not much traveling until late in his life; he mostly r esided on the East Coast, in New England. If biography accounts for poetry, this one should have resulted in none. Yet he published nine books of poems; the seco nd 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 no t 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 sta nding.

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 In auguration 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 com mon: 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 fo lksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer, generally of positive dispositio n. In short, as American as apple pie. To be fair, he greatly enhanced this noti on by projecting precisely this image of himself in numerous public appearances a nd 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 ma de of, and what the term "American" means as applied to poetry and, perhaps, in g eneral. In 1959, at a banquet thrown in New York on the occasion of Robert 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. Trag edy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do wit h anticipation, with man's recognition of his own negative potential with his sens e 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 wa nt of a better term American. On the surface, he looks very positively predisposed toward his surroundings parti cularly toward nature. His fluency, indeed, his "being versed in country things" alone can produce this impression. However, there is a difference between the w ay a European perceives nature and the way an American does. Addressing this dif ference, 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 confr onting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either f riends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he 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 sta nds there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, ou r 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, mer ry time. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree i t is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective prima l power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is great er, it is a toss-up. Basically, it's epidermis meeting bark. Our man returns to h is cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror. Now, this is obviously a romantic caricature, but it accentuates the features, an d that's what I am after here. In any case, the second point could be safely bil led as the gist of Robert Frost's nature poetry. Nature for this poet is neither friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is this poet's terrif ying self-portrait. And now I am going to start with one of his poems, which app ears in the 1942 volume A Witness Tree. I am about to put forth my views and opi nions about his lines without any concern for academic objectivity, and some of t hese views will be pretty dark. All I can say in my defense is (a) that I do lik e this poet enormously and I am going to try to sell him to you as he is, and (b ) that some of that darkness is not entirely mine: it is his lines' sediment tha t has darkened my mind; in other words, I got it from him. Let's look at "Come In." A short poem in short meter actually, a combination of t rimeter with dimeter, anapest with iamb. The stuff of ballads, which by and larg e are all about gore and comeuppance. So, up to a certain point, is this poem. T

he meter hints as much. What are we dealing with here? A walk in the woods? A st roll through nature? Something that poets usually do? (And if yes, by the way, t hen why?) "Come In" is one of many poems written by Frost about such strolls. Th ink of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Acquainted with the Night," "Des ert Places," "Away!," and so forth. Or else think of Thomas Hardy's "The Darklin g Thrush," with which this poem has a distinct affinity. Hardy was also very fon d of lonely strolls, except most of his had a tendency to wind up in a graveyard s ince England was settled long ago, and more thickly, I guess. To begin with, we again have a thrush. And a bird, as you know, is very often a bard, since, technically speaking, both sing. So as we proceed we should bear in mind that our poet may be delegating certain aspects of his psyche to the bird. Actually, I firmly believe that these two birds are related. The difference is only that it takes Hardy sixteen lines to introduce his in a poem, whereas Frost gets down to business in the second line. On the whole, this is indicative of t he difference between the Americans and the British I mean in poetry. Because of a greater cultural heritage, a greater set of references, it usually takes much longer for a Briton to set a poem in motion. The sense of echo is stronger in hi s ear, and thus he flexes his muscle and demonstrates his facility before he get s down to his subject. Normally, that sort of routine results in a poem's being as big on exposition as on the actual message: in long-windedness, if you will thou gh, depending on who is doing the job, this is not necessarily a shortcoming. Now, let's do it line by line. "As I came to the edge of the woods" is a fairly simple, informative job, stating the subject and setting the meter. An innocent line, on the surface, wouldn't you say? Well, it is, save for "the woods." "The w oods" makes one suspicious, and, with that, "the edge" does, too. Poetry is a da me with a huge pedigree, and every word comes practically barnacled with allusio ns and associations. Since the fourteenth century, the woods have given off a ve ry strong smell of selva oscura, and you may recall what that selva led the auth or of The Divine Comedy into. In any case, when a twentieth-century poet starts a poem with finding himself at the edge of the woods there is a reasonable eleme nt of danger or, at least, a faint suggestion of it. The edge, in its very self, is sufficiently sharp. Maybe not; maybe our suspicions are unfounded, maybe we are just paranoid and ar e reading too much into this line. Let's go to the next one, and we shall see: As I came to the edge of the woods, Thrush music hark! Looks like we've goofed. What could be more innocuous than this antiquated, Vict orian-sounding, fairy-tale-like "hark"? A bird is singing listen! "Hark" truly bel ongs in a Hardy poem, or in a ballad; better yet, in a jingle. It suggests a lev el of diction at which nothing untoward could be conveyed. The poem promises to p roceed in a comforting, melodious way. That's what you're thinking, anyway, after hearing "hark": that you're going to have some sort of description of the music made by the thrush that you are getting into familiar territory. But that was a setup, as the following two lines show. It was but an exposition, crammed by Frost into two lines. Abruptly, in a fairly indecorous, matter-of-fa ct, non- melodious, and non-Victorian way, the diction and the register shift: Now if it was dusk outside, Inside it was dark. It's "now" that does this job of leaving very little room for any fancy. What's more, you realize that the "hark" rhymes with "dark." And that that "dark" is th e condition of "inside," which could allude not only to the woods, since the com ma sets that "inside" into sharp opposition to the third line's "outside," and s ince the opposition is given you in the fourth line, which makes it a more drast ic statement. Not to mention that this opposition is but the matter of substitut ion of just two letters: of putting ar instead of us between d and k. The vowel sound remains essentially the same. What we've got here is the difference in jus t one consonant. There is a slight choking air in the fourth line. That has to do with its distri bution of stresses, different from the first dimeter. The stanza contracts, as i t were, toward its end, and the caesura after "inside" only underscores that "ins ide" 's isolation. Now, while I am offering you this deliberately slanted reading of this poem, I'd like to urge you to pay very close attention to its every let

ter, every caesura, if only because it deals with a bird, and a bird's trills ar e a matter of pauses and, if you will, characters. Being predominantly monosyllab ic, English is highly suitable for this parroting job, and the shorter the meter, the greater the pressure upon every letter, every caesura, every comma. At any rate, that "dark" literally renders the "woods" as la selva oscura. With the memory of what that dark wood was entry to, let's approach the next sta nza: Too dark in the woods for a bird By sleight of wing To better its perch for the night, Though it still could sing. What do you think is happening here? A British or a Continental or, for that matte r, a properly American innocent would still reply that it is about a bird singing in the evening, and that it is a nice tune. Interestingly, he would be right, a nd it is on this sort of Tightness that Frost's reputation rests. In fact, thoug h, this stanza, in particular, is extremely dark. One could argue that the poem considers something rather unpleasant, quite possibly a suicide. Or, if not suic ide well, death. And, if not necessarily death, then at least, in this stanza the noti on of the afterlife. In "Too dark in the woods for a bird," a bird, alias bard, scrutinizes "the wood s" and finds them too dark. "Too" here echoes no! harks back to Dante's opening line s in The Divine Comedy: our bird/bard's assessment of that selva differs from the great Italian's. To put it plainly, the afterlife is darker for Frost than it i s for Dante. The question is why, and the answer is either because he disbelieve s in the whole thing or because his notion of himself makes him, in his mind, sl ated for damnation. Nothing in his power can improve his eventual standing, and I 'd venture that "sleight of wing" could be regarded as a reference to last rites . Above all, this poem is about being old and pondering what is next. "To better its perch for the night" has to do with the possibility of being assigned elsewh ere, not just to hell the night here being that of eternity. The only thing the bi rd/ bard has to show for himself is that it/he "still could sing." "The woods" are "too dark" for a bird because a bird is too far gone at being a bird. No motion of its soul, alias "sleight of wing," can improve its eventual f ate in these "woods." Whose woods these are I think we know: one of their branch es is where a bird is to end up anyway, and a "perch" gives a sense of these woo ds' being well structured: it is an enclosure a sort of chicken coop, if you will. Thus, our bird is doomed; no last-minute conversion ("sleight" is a conjuring t erm) is feasible, if only because a bard is too old for any quick motion of the hand. Yet, old though he is, he still can sing. And in the third stanza you have that bird singing: you have the song itself, th e last one. It is a tremendously expansive gesture. Look at how every word here p ostpones the next one. "The last" caesura "of the light" caesura "of the sun" line break, which is a big caesura "That had died" caesura "in the west." Our bird/bard traces t he last of the light to its vanished source. You almost hear in this line the go od old "Shenandoah," the song of going West. Delay and postponement are palpable here. "The last" is not finite, and "of the light" is not finite, and "of the sun" is not. What's more, "that had died" itself is not finite, though it should have be en. Even "in the west" isn't. What we've got here is the song of lingering: of l ight, of life. You almost see the finger pointing out the source and then, in th e broad circular motion of the last two lines, returning to the speaker in "Stil l lived" caesura "for one song more" line break "In a thrush's breast." Between "The las t" and "breast" our poet covers an extraordinary distance: the width of the cont inent, if you will. After all, he describes the light, which is still upon him, the opposite of the darkness of the woods. The breast is, after all, the source of any song, and you almost see here not so much a thrush as a robin; anyhow, a bird singing at sunset: it lingers on the bird's breast. And here, in the opening lines of the fourth stanza, is where the bird and the b ard part ways. "Far in the pillared dark / Thrush music went." The key word here is "pillared," of course: it suggests a cathedral interior a church, in any case. In other words, our thrush flies into the woods, and you hear his music from wi thin, "almost like a call to come in / To the dark and lament." If you want, you

may replace "lament" with "repent": the effect will be practically the same. Wh at's being described here is one of the choices before our old bard this evening : the choice he does not make. The thrush has chosen that "sleight of wing" afte r all. It is bettering its perch for the night; it accepts its fate, for lament is acceptance. You could plunge yourself here into a maze of ecclesiastical dist inctions Frost's essential Protestantism, etc. I'd advise against it, since a stoic posture befits believers and agnostics alike; in this line of work, it is pract ically inescapable. On the whole, references (religious ones especially) are not to be shrunk to inferences."But no, I was out for stars" is Frost's usual decep tive maneuver, projecting his positive sensibility: lines like that are what ear ned him his reputation. he was indeed "out for stars," why didn't he mention tha t before? Why did he write the whole poem about something else? But this line is here not solely to deceive you. It is here to deceive or, rather, to quell himself. This whole stanza is. Unless we read this line as the poet's general statement about his presence in this world in the romantic key, that is, as a line about his general metaphysical appetite, not to be quenched by this little one-night agony . I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been. There is too much jocular vehemence in these lines for us to take them at face v alue, although we should not omit this option, either. The man is shielding hims elf from his own insights, and he gets grammatically as well as syllabically ass ertive and less idiomatic especially in the second line, "I would not come in," wh ich could be easily truncated into "I won't come in." "I meant not even if asked " comes off with a menacing resoluteness, which could amount to a statement of hi s agnosticism were it not for the last line's all too clever qualifier: "And I h adn't been." This is indeed a sleight of hand. Or else you can treat this stanza and, with it, the whole poem as Frost's humble footnote or postscript to Dante's Commedia, which ends with "stars" as his acknow ledgment of possessing either a lesser belief or a lesser gift. The poet here ref uses an invitation into darkness; moreover, he questions the very call: "Almost like a call to come in . One shouldn't make heavy weather of Frost's affinity wi th Dante, but here and there it's palpable, especially in the poems dealing with dark nights of the soul for instance, in "Acquainted with the Night." Unlike a nu mber of his illustrious contemporaries, Frost never wears his learning on his sle eve mainly because it is in his bloodstream. So "I meant not even if asked" could be read not only as his refusal to make a meal of his dreadful apprehension but also as a reference to his stylistic choice in ruling out a major form. Be that a s it may, one thing is clear: without Dante's Commedia, this poem wouldn't have existed. Still, should you choose to read "Come In" as a nature poem, you are perfectly w elcome to it. I suggest, though, that you take a longer look at the title. The t wenty lines of the poem constitute, as it were, the title's translation. And in this translation, I am afraid, the expression "come in" means "die." Ill While in "Come In" we have Frost at his lyrical best, in "Home Burial" we have h im at his narrative best. Actually, "Home Burial" is not a narrative; it is an e clogue. Or, more exactly, it is a pastoral except that it is a very dark one. Inso far as it tells a story, it is, of course, a narrative; the means of that story' s transportation, though, is dialogue, and it is the means of transportation tha t defines a genre. Invented by Theocritus in his idylls, refined by Virgil in the poems he called eclogues or bucolics, the pastoral is essentially an exchange be tween two or more characters in a rural setting, returning often to that perenni al subject, love. Since the English and French word "pastoral" is overburdened w ith happy connotations, and since Frost is closer to Virgil than to Theocritus, and not only chronologically, let's follow Virgil and call this poem an eclogue. The rural setting is here, and so are the two characters: a farmer and his wife , who may qualify as a shepherd and a shepherdess, except that it is two thousan d years later. So is their subject: love, two thousand years later.

To make a long story short, Frost is a very Virgilian poet. By that, I mean the Virgil of the Bucolics and the Georgics, not the Virgil of the Aeneid. To begin with, the young Frost did a considerable amount of farming as well as a lot of wri ting. The posture of gentleman farmer wasn't all posture. As a matter of fact, u ntil the end of his days he kept buying farms. By the time he died, he had owned , if I am not mistaken, four forms in Vermont and New Hampshire. He knew somethin g about living off the land not less, in any case, than Virgil, who must have been a disastrous farmer, to judge by the agricultural advice he dispenses in the Geo rgics. With few exceptions, American poetry is essentially Virgilian, which is to say c ontemplative. That is, if you take four Roman poets of the Augustan period, Prop ertius, Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, as the standard representatives of the four kn own humors (Propertius' choleric intensity, Ovid's sanguine couplings, Virgil's phlegmatic musings, Horace's melancholic equipoise), then American poetry indeed, poetry in English in general strikes you as being by and large of Virgilian or Hora tian denomination. (Consider the bulk of Wallace Stevens's soliloquies, or the l ate, American Auden.) Yet Frost's affinity with Virgil is not so much temperamen tal as technical. Apart from frequent recourse to disguise (or mask) and the opp ortunity for distancing oneself that an invented character offers to the poet, Fr ost and Virgil have in common a tendency to hide the real subject matter of thei r dialogues under the monotonous, opaque sheen of their respective pentameters a nd hexameters. A poet of extraordinary probing and anxiety, the Virgil of the Ecl ogues and the Georgics is commonly taken for a bard of love and country pleasures, just like the author of North of Boston. To this it should be added that Virgil in Frost comes to you obscured by Wordswo rth and Browning. "Filtered" is perhaps a better word, and Browning's dramatic m onologue is quite a filter, engulfing the dramatic situation in solid Victorian a mbivalence and uncertainty. Frost's dark pastorals are dramatic also, not only i n the sense of the intensity of the characters' interplay but above all in the s ense that they are indeed theatrical. It is a kind of theater in which the autho r plays all the roles, including those of stage designer, director, ballet maste r, etc. It's he who turns the lights off, and sometimes he is the audience also. That stands to reason. For Theocritus' idylls, like nearly all Augustan poetry, in their own right are but a compression of Greek drama. In "Home Burial" we hav e an arena reduced to a staircase, with its Hitchcockian banister. The opening l ine tells you as much about the actors' positions as about their roles: those of the hunter and his prey. Or, as you'll see later, of Pygmalion and Galatea, exc ept that in this case the sculptor turns his living model into stone. In the fin al analysis, "Home Burial" is a love poem, and if only on these grounds it quali fies as a pastoral. But let's examine this line and a half: He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him. Frost could have stopped right here. It is already a poem, it is already a drama . Imagine this line and a half sitting on the pagj all by itself, in minimalist fashion. It's an extremely loaded scene or, better yet, a frame. You've got an enc losure, the house, with two individuals at cross no, diverse purposes. He's at the bottom of the stairs;she's at the top. He's looking up at her; she, for all we k now thus far, doesn't register his presence at all. Also, you've got to remember that it's in black and white. The staircase dividing them suggests a hierarchy o f significances. It is a pedestal with her atop (at least, in his eyes) and him at the bottom (in our eyes and, eventually, in hers). The angle is sharp. Place yourself here in either position better in his and you'll see what I mean. Imagine yourself observing, watching somebody, or imagine yourself being watched. Imagin e yourself interpreting someone's movements or immobility unbeknownst to that person . That's what turns you into a hunter, or into Pygmalion. Let me press this Pygmalion business a bit further. Scrutiny and interpretation are the gist of any intense human interplay, and of love in particular. They are also the most powerful source of literature: of fiction (which is by and large about betrayal) and, above all, of lyric poetry, where one is trying to figure o ut the beloved and what makes her/him tick. And this figuring out brings us back

to the Pygmalion business quite literally, since the more you chisel out and th e more you penetrate the character, the more you put your model on a pedestal. A n enclosure be it a house, a studio, a page intensifies this pedestal aspect enormou sly. And, depending on your industry and on the model's ability to cooperate, th is process results either in a masterpiece or in a disaster. In "Home Burial" it results in both. For every Galatea is ultimately a Pygmalion's self-projection. On the other hand, art doesn't imitate life but infects it. So let's watch the deportment of the model: She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. She took a d oubtful step and then undid it To raise herself and look again. On the literal level, on the level of straight narrative, we have the heroine beg inning to descend the steps with her head turned to us in profile, her glance li ngering on some frightful sight. She hesitates and interrupts her descent, her e yes still trained, presumably, on the same sight; neither on the steps nor on th e man at the bottom. But you are aware of yet another level present here, aren't you? Let's leave that level as yet unnamed. Each piece of information in this narrati ve comes to you in an isolated manner, within a pentameter line. The isolation j ob is done by white margins framing, as it were, the whole scene, like the silen ce of the house; and the lines themselves are the staircase. Basically, what you get here is a succession of frames. "She was starting down" is one frame. "Look ing back over her shoulder at some fear" is another; in fact, it is a close-up, a profile you see her facial expression. "She took a doubtful step and then undid it" is a third: again a close- up the feet. "To raise herself and look again" is a fourth full figure. But this is a ballet, too. There is a minimum of two pas de deux here, conveyed to you with a wonderful euphonic, almost alliterative precision. I mean the ds i n this line, in "doubtful" and in "undid it," although the ts matter also. "Undi d it" is particularly good, because you sense the spring in that step. And that profile in its opposition to the movement of the body the very formula of a dramati c heroine is straight out of a ballet as well. But the real faux pas de deux starts with "He spoke / Advancing toward her." For the next twenty-five lines, a conversation occurs on the stairs. The man climbs them as he speaks, negotiating mechanically and verbally what separates them. "A dvancing" bespeaks self-consciousness and apprehensiveness. The tension grows wi th the growing proximity. However, the mechanical and, by implication, physical pr oximity is more easily attained than the verbal i.e., the mental and that's what the poem is all about. " 'What is it you see / From up there always? for I want to kn ow' " is very much a Pygmalion question, addressed to the model on the pedestal: atop the staircase. His fascination is not with what he sees but with what he i magines it conceals what he has placed there. He invests her with mystery and the n rushes to uncloak it: this rapacity is always Pygmalion's double bind. It is as though the sculptor found himself puzzled by the facial expression of his model : she "sees" what he does not "see." So he has to climb to the pedestal himself, to put himself in her position. In the position of "up there always" of topographi cal (vis-a-vis the house) and psychological advantage, where he put her himself. It is the latter, the psychological advantage of the creation, that disturbs the creator, as the emphatic " 'for I want to know' " shows. The model refuses to cooperate. In the next frame ("She turned and sank upon her skirts at that"), followed by the close-up of "And her face changed from terrif ied to dull," you get that lack of cooperation plain. Yet the lack of cooperation here is cooperation. The less you cooperate, the more you are a Galatea. For we have to bear in mind that the woman's psychological advantage is in the man's s elf- projection. He ascribes it to her. So by turning him down she only enhances his fantasy. In this sense, by refusing to cooperate she plays along. That's ba sically her whole game here. The more he climbs, the greater is that advantage; he pushes her into it, as it were, with every step. Still, he is climbing: in "he said to gain time" he does, and also in "What is it you see?" Mounting until she cowered under him.

"I will find out now you must tell me, dear." The most important word here is the verb "see," which we encounter for the secon d time. In the next nine lines, it will be used four more times. We'll get to th at in a minute. But first let's deal with this "mounting" line and the next. It' s a masterly job here. With "mounting," the poet kills two birds at once, for "m ounting" describes both the climb and the climber. And the climber looms even la rger, because the woman "cowers" i.e., shrinks under him. Remember that she looks "at some fear." "Mounting" versus "cowered" gives you the contrast, then, betwee n their respective frames, with the implicit danger contained in his largeness. In any case, her alternative to fear is not comfort. And the resoluteness of" 1 will find out now' " echoes the superior physical mass, not alleviated by the ca joling "dear" that follows a remark " you must tell me' " that is both imperative a nd conscious of this contrast. And now we come to this verb "see." Within fifteen lines it's been used six time s. Every experienced poet knows how risky it is to use the same word several tim es within a short space. The risk is that of tautology. So what is it that Frost is after here? I think he is after precisely that: tautology. More accurately, n onsemantic utterance. Which you get, for instance, in " 'Oh,' and again, 'Oh.' " Frost had a theory about what he called "sentence-sounds." It had to do with hi s observation that the sound, the tonality, of human locution is as semantic as actual words. For instance, you overhear two people conversing behind a closed d oor, in a room. You don't hear the words, yet you know the general drift of thei r dialogue; in fact, you may pretty accurately figure out its substance. In othe r words, the tune matters more than the lyrics, which are, so to speak, replacea ble or redundant. Anyway, the repetition of this or that word liberates the tune, makes it more audible. By the same token, such repetition liberates the mind rids you of the notion presented by the word. (This is the old Zen technique, of cou rse, but, come to think of it, finding it in an American poem makes you wonder w hether philosophical principles don't spring from texts rather than the other wa y around.) The six "see's here do precisely that. They exclaim rather than explain. It coul d be "see," it could be "Oh," it could be "yes," it could be any monosyllabic wo rd. The idea is to explode the verb from within, for the content of the actual o bservation defeats the process of observation, its means, and the very observer. The effect that Frost tries to create is the inadequacy of response when you au tomatically repeat the first word that comes to your tongue. "Seeing" here is si mply reeling from the unnameable. The least seeing our hero does is in " 'Just t hat I see,' " for by this time the verb, having already been used four times, is robbed of its "observing" and "understanding" meaning (not to mention the fact dr aining the word even further of content that we readers are ourselves still in the dark, still don't know what there is to see out that window). By now, it is jus t sound, denoting an animal response rather than a rational one. This sort of explosion of bona-fide words into pure, nonsemantic sounds will occ ur several times in the course of this poem. Another happens very soon, ten line s later. Characteristically, these explosions occur whenever the players find the mselves in close physical proximity. They are the verbal or, better yet, the audia l equivalents of a hiatus. Frost directs them with tremendous consistency, suggest ing his characters' profound (at least, prior to this scene) incompatibility. "Ho me Burial" is, in fact, the study of that, and on the literal level the tragedy it describes is the characters' comeuppance for violating each other's territori al and mental imperatives by having a child. Now that the child is lost, the imp eratives play themselves out with vehemence: they claim their own. IV By standing next to the woman, the man acquires her vantage point. Because he is larger than she, and also because this is his house (as line 23 shows), where h e, has lived, presumably, most of his life, he must, one imagines, bend somewhat to put his eyes on her line of vision. Now they are next to each other, in an al most intimate proximity, on the threshold of their bedroom, atop the stairs. The bedroom has a window; a window has a view. And here Frost produces the most stu nning simile of this poem, and perhaps of his entire career:

" 'The little graveyard where my people are!' " generates an air of endearment, a nd it's with this air that " 'So small the window frames the whole of it' " star ts, only to tumble itself into " 'Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?' " T he key word here is "frames," because it doubles as the window's actual frame an d as a picture on a bedroom wall. The window hangs, as it were, on the bedroom w all like a picture, and that picture depicts a graveyard. "Depicting," though, me ans reducing to the size of a picture. Imagine having that in your bedroom. In t he next line, though, the graveyard is restored to its actual size and, for that reason, equated with the bedroom. This equation is as much psychological as it is spatial. Inadvertently, the man blurts out the summary of the marriage (fores hadowed in the grim pun of the title). And, equally inadvertently, the "is it?" invites the woman to agree with this summary, almost implying her complicity. As if that were not enough, the next two lines, with their stones of slate and m arble, proceed to reinforce the simile, equating the graveyard with the made-up bed, with its pentametrically arranged pillows and cushions populated by a family o f small, inanimate children: "Broad- shouldered little slabs." This is Pygmalion unbound, on a rampage. What we have here is the man's intrusion into the woman' s mind, a violation of her mental imperative if you will, an ossification of it. A nd then this ossifying hand petrifying, actually stretches toward what's still raw, palpably as well as in her mind: "But I understand: it is not the stones, But the child's mound " It's not that the contrast between the stones and the mound is too stark, though it is; it is his ability or, rather, his attempt to articulate it that she finds un bearable. For, should he succeed, should he find the words to articulate her men tal anguish, the mound will join the stones in the "picture," will become a slab itself, will become a pillow of their bed. Moreover, this will amount to the to tal penetration of her inner sanctum: that of her mind. And he is getting there: The poem is gathering its dark force. Four "don't's are that nonsemantic explosi on, resulting in hiatus. We are so much in the story line now up to the eyebrows tha t we may forget that this is still a ballet, still a succession of frames, still an artifice, stage-managed by the poet. In fact, we are about to take sides wit h our characters, aren't we? Well, I suggest we pull ourselves out of this by ou r eyebrows and think for a moment about what it all tells us about our poet. Ima gine, for instance, that the story line has been drawn from experience from, say, the loss of a firstborn. What does all that you've read thus far tell you about the author, about his sensibility? How much he is absorbed by the story and what's more crucial to what degree he is free from it? Were this a seminar, I'd wait for your answers. Since it is not, I've got to ans wer this question myself. And the answer is: He is very free. Dangerously so. Th e very ability to utilize to play with this sort of material suggests an extremely w ide margin of detachment. The ability to turn this material into a blank-verse, pentameter monotone adds another degree to that detachment. To observe a relatio n between a family graveyard and a bedroom's four-poster still another. Added up, they amount to a considerable degree of detachment. A degree that dooms human in terplay, that makes communication impossible, for communication requires an equa l. This is very much the predicament of Pygmalion vis-a-vis his model. So it's n ot that the story the poem tells is autobiographical but that the poem is the aut hor's self-portrait. That is why one abhors literary biography because it is reduct ive. That is why I am resisting issuing you with actual data on Frost. Where does he go, you may ask, with all that detachment? The answer is: into utte r autonomy. It is from there that he observes similarities among unlike things, it is from there that he imitates the vernacular. Would you like to meet Mr. Fro st? Then read his poems, nothing else; otherwise, you are in for criticism from b elow. Would you like to be him? Would you like to become Robert Frost? Perhaps o ne should be advised against such aspirations. For a sensibility like this, there is very little hope of real human congeniality, or conjugality either; and, actu ally, there is very little romantic dirt on him of the sort normally indicative of such hope. This is not necessarily a digression, but let's get back to the lines. Remember the hiatus, and what causes it, and remember that this is an artifice. Actually,

the author himself reminds you of it with She withdrew, shrinking from beneath his arm That rested on the banister, and sl id downstairs. It is still a ballet, you see, and the stage direction is incorporated into the text. The most telling detail here is the banister. Why does the author put it h ere? First, to reintroduce the staircase, which we might by now have forgotten ab out, stunned by the business of ruining the bedroom. But, secondly, the banister prefigures her sliding downstairs, since every child uses banisters for sliding down. "And turned on him with such a daunting look" is another stage direction. He said twice over before he knew himself: "Can't a man speak of his own child h e's lost?" Now, this is a remarkably good line. It has a distinctly vernacular, almost prov erbial air. And the author is definitely aware of how good it is. So, both tryin g to underscore its effectiveness and to obscure his awareness of it, he emphasiz es the unwittingness of this utterance: "He said twice over before he knew himse lf." On the literal, narrative level, we have the man stunned by the woman's gaz e, the daunting look, and groping for words. Frost was awfully good with those f ormulaic, quasi-proverbial one-liners. "For to be social is to be forgiving" (in "The Star-Splitter"), or "The best way out is always through" ("A Servant to Ser vants"), for example. And a few lines later you are going to get yet another one . They are mostly pentametric; iambic pentameter is very congenial to that sort o f job. This whole section of the poem, from " 'Don't, don't, don't, don't' " on, obviou sly has some sexual connotations, of her turning the man down. That's what the s tory of Pygmalion and his model is all about. On the literal level, "Home Burial" evolves along similar "hard to get" lines. However, I don't think that Frost, f or all his autonomy, was conscious of that. (After all, "North of Boston" shows no acquaintance with Freudian terminology.) And, if he was not, this sort of app roach on our part is invalid. Nevertheless, we should bear some of it in mind as we are embarking on the bulk of this poem: What we've got here is the desire to escape: not so much the man as the enclosur e of the place, not to mention the subject of their exchange. Yet the resolution is incomplete, as the fidgeting wi th the hat shows, since the execution of this desire will be counterproductive f or the model as far as being the subject of explication goes. May I go so far as to suggest that that would mean a loss of advantage, not to mention that it wou ld be the end of the poem? In fact, it does end with precisely that, with her ex it. The literal level will get into conflict, or fusion, with the metaphorical. Hence " 'I don't know rightly whether any man can,' " which fuses both these lev els, forcing the poem to proceed; you don't know any longer who is the horse her e, who is the cart. I doubt whether the poet himself knew that at this point. Th e fusion's result is the release of a certain force, which subordinates his pen, and the best it can do is keep both strands literal and metaphorical in check. We learn the heroine's name, and that this sort of discourse had its precedents, with nearly identical results. Given the fact that we know the way the poem ends , we may judge well, we may imagine the character of those occasions. The scene in " Home Burial" is but a repetition. By this token, the poem doesn't so much inform us about their life as replace it. We also learn, from " 'Don't go to someone e lse this time,' " about a mixture of jealousy and sense of shame felt by at leas t one of them. And we learn, from " 'I won't come down the stairs' " and from "H e sat and fixed his chin between his fists," about the fear of violence present i n their physical proximity. The latter line is a wonderful embodiment of stasis, very much in the fashion of Rodin's Penseur, albeit with two fists, which is a very telling self-referential detail, since the forceful application of fist to chin is what results in a knockout. The main thing here, though, is the reintroduction of the stairs. Not only the l iteral stairs but the steps in "he sat," too. From now on, the entire dialogue occurs on the stairs, though they have bec ome the scene of an impasse rather than a passage. No physical steps are taken. Instead, we have their verbal, or oral, substitute. The ballet ends, yielding to

the verbal advance and retreat, which is heralded by " 'There's something I shou ld like to ask you, dear.' " Note again the air of cajoling, colored this time w ith the recognition of its futility in "dear." Note also the last semblance of ac tual interplay in " 'You don't know how to ask it.' 'Help me, then' " this last kn ocking on the door, or, better yet, on the wall. Note "Her fingers moved the lat ch for all reply," because this feint of trying for the door is the last physica l movement, the last theatrical or cinematic gesture in the poem, save one more latch-trying. The speaker's hectic mental pacing is fully counterbalanced by his immobility. If this is a ballet, it is a mental one. In fact, it's very much like fencing: not with an opponent or a shadow but with one's self. The lines are constantly taki ng a step forward and then undoing it. ("She took a doubtful step and then undid it.") The main technical device here is enjambment, which physically resembles descending the stairs. In fact, this back-and-forth, this give-and-take almost g ives you a sense of being short of breath. Until, that is, the release that is c oming with the formulaic, folksy " 'A man must partly give up being a man / With womenfolk.' " After this release, you get three lines of more evenly paced verse, almost a tri bute to iambic pentameter's proclivity for coherence, ending with the pentametric ally triumphant " 'Though I don't like such things 'twixt those that love.' " And here our poet makes another not so subdued dash toward the proverbial: " 'Two t hat don't love can't live together without them. / But two that do can't live to gether with them' " though this comes off as a bit cumbersome, and not entirely co nvincing. Frost partly senses that: hence "She moved the latch a little." But that's only one explanation. The whole point of this qualifier-burdened monologue is the exp lication of its addressee. The man is groping for understanding. He realizes that in order to understand he's got to surrender if not suspend entirely his rationalit y. In other words, he descends. But this is really running down stairs that lead upward. And, partly from rapidly approaching the end of his wits, partly out of purely rhetorical inertia, he summons here the notion of love. In other words, this quasi-proverbial two- liner about love is a rational argument, and that, of course, is not enough for its addressee. For the more she is explicated, the more remote she gets: the higher her pedesta l grows (which is perhaps of specific importance to her now that she is downstai rs). It's not grief that drives her out of the house but the dread of being expl icated, as well as of the explicator himself. She wants to stay impenetrable and won't accept anything short of his complete surrender. And he is well on the wa y to it: "Don't don't go. Don't carry it to someone else this time. Tell me about it if it's something human." The last is the most stunning, most tragic line, in my view, in the entire poem. It amounts practically to the heroine's ultimate victory i.e., to the aforemention ed rational surrender on the part of the explicator. For all its colloquial air, it promotes her mental operations to supernatural status, thus acknowledging in finity ushered into her mind by the child's death as his rival. Against this he is p owerless, since her access to that infinity, her absorption by and commerce with it, is backed in his eyes by the whole mythology of the opposite sex by the whole notion of the alternative being impressed upon him by her at this point rather thoroughly. That's what he is losing her to by staying rational. It is a shrill, almost hysterical line, admitting the man's limitations and momentarily bringin g the whole discourse to a plane of regard that the heroine could be at home on th e one she perhaps seeks. But only momentarily. He can't proceed at this level, a nd succumbs to pleading: "Let me into your grief. I'm not so much Unlike other folks as your standing the re Apart would make me out. Give me my chance. I do think, though, you overdo it a little. What was it brought you up to think it the thing To take your motherloss of a first child So inconsolably in the face of love. You'd think his memory might be satisfied "He tumbles down, as it were, from the hysterical height of " T

ell me about it if it's something human.' " But this tumble, this mental knockin g about the metrically lapsing stairs, restores him to rationality, with all its attendant qualifiers. That brings him rather close to the heart of the matter to h er taking her " 'mother-loss of a first child / So inconsolably' " and he evokes t he catchall notion of love again, this time somewhat more convincingly, though s till tinged with a rhetorical flourish: " 'in the face of love. ' " The very wor d "love" undermines its emotional reality, reducing the sentiment to its utilitarian application: as a means of overcoming tragedy. However, overcoming tragedy depri ves its victim of the status of hero or heroine. This, combined with the resentm ent over the explicator's lowering of his explication's plane of regard, results in the heroine's interruption of " 'You'd think his memory might be satisfied ' " with " 'There you go sneering now!' " It's Galatea's self-defense, the defense a gainst the further application of the chiseling instrument to her already attain ed features. Because of its absorbing story line, there is a strong temptation to bill "Home Burial" as a tragedy of incom- municability, a poem about the failure of languag e; and many have succumbed to this temptation. In fact, it is just the reverse: it is a tragedy of communication, for communication's logical end is the violatio n of your interlocutor's mental imperative. This is a poem about language's terr ifying success, for language, in the final analysis, is alien to the sentiments it articulates. No one is more aware of that than a poet; and if "Home Burial" is autobiographical, it is so in the first place by revealing Frost's grasp of the collision between his metier and his emotions. To drive this point home, may I su ggest that you compare the actual sentiment you may feel toward an individual in your company and the word "love." A poet is doomed to resort to words. So is th e speaker in "Home Burial." Hence, their overlapping in this poem; hence, too, i ts autobiographical reputation. But let us take it a step further. The poet here should be identified not with o ne character but with both. He is the man here, all right, but he is the woman a lso. Thus you've got a clash not just of two sensibilities but of two languages. Sensibilities may merge say, in the act of love; languages can't. Sensibilities m ay result in a child; languages won't. And, now that the child is dead, what's l eft is two totally autonomous languages, two non-overlapping systems of verbaliz ation. In short: words. His versus hers, and hers are fewer. This makes her enig matic. Enigmas are subject to explication, which they resist in her case, with all she's got. His job, or, more exactly, the job of his language, is, therefore, t he explication of her language, or, more exactly, her reticence. Which, when it comes to human interplay, is a recipe for disaster. When it comes to a poem, an enormous challenge. Small wonder, then, that this "dark pastoral" grows darker with every line; it p roceeds by aggravation, reflecting not so much the complexity of the author's mi nd as words' own appetite for disaster. For the more you push reticence, the gre ater it gets, having nothing to fall back upon but itself. The enigma thus grows bigger. It's like Napoleon invading Russia and finding that it goes beyond the Urals. Small wonder that this "dark pastoral" of ours has no choice but to procee d by aggravation, for the poet's mind plays both the invading army and the terri tory; in the end, he can't take sides. It is a sense of the incomprehensible vas tness of what lies ahead, defeating not only the notion of conquest but the very sense of progress, that informs both " 'Tell me about it if it' s something hum an' " and the lines that follow " 'There you go sneering now!' ": A language invading reticence gets no trophy here, save the echo of its own word s. All it has to show for its efforts is a good old line that brought it nowhere before: "And it's come to this, A man can't speak of his own child that's dead." It, too, falls back on itself. A stalemate. It's broken by the woman. More exactly, her reticence is broken. Which could be regarded by the male character as success, were it not for what she surrenders. Which is not so much an offensive as a negation of all the man stands for. This is the voice of a very foreign territory indeed: a foreign language. It is a view of the man from a distance he can't possibly fathom, since it is proporti

onate to the frequency with which the heroine creeps up and down the stairs. Whic h, in its own right, is proportionate to the leaps of his gravel in the course o f his digging the grave. Whatever the ratio, it is not in favor of his actual or mental steps toward her on that staircase. Nor in his favor is the rationale be hind her creeping up and down the stairs while he is digging. Presumably, there is nobody else around to do the job. (That they lost their firstborn suggests th at they are fairly young and thus not very well off) Presumably also, by perform ing this menial task, and by doing it in a particularly mechanical way as a remark ably skillful mimetic job in the pentameter here indicates (or as is charged by the heroine) the man is quelling, or controlling, his grief; that is, his movement s, unlike the heroine's, are functional. In short, this is futility's view of utility. For obvious reasons, this view is usually precise and rich in judgment: " 'If you had any feelings,' " and " 'Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly / And roll back down the mound be side the hole.' " Depending on the length of observation and the description of dig ging runs here for nine lines this view may result, as it does here, in a sensatio n of utter disparity between the observer and the observed: " 'I thought, Who is that man? I didn't know you.' " For observation, you see, results in nothing, w hile digging produces at least a mound, or a hole. Whose mental equivalent in the observer is also, as it were, a grave. Or, rather, a fusion of the man and his purpose, not to mention his instrument. What futility and Frost's pentameter regi ster here above all is rhythm. The heroine observes an inanimate machine. The man in her eye is a gravedigger, and thus her alternative. Now, the sight of our alternative is always unwelcome, not to say threatening. T he closer your view of it, the sharper your general sense of guilt and of a dese rved comeuppance. In the mind of a woman who has lost her child, that sense may be fairly sharp. Add to that her inability to translate her grief into any usefu l action, save a highly agitated creeping up and down, as well as the recognitio n and subsequent glorification of that inability. And add a cross-purpose corresponde nce between her movements and his: between her steps and his spade. What do you think it would result in? And remember that she is in his house, that this is th e graveyard where his people are. And that he is a gravedigger. Note this "and I don't know why," for here she unwittingly drifts toward her own projection. All that she needs now is to check that projection with her own eye s. That is, she wants to make her mental picture physical: So what do you think she sees with her own eyes, and what does that sight prove? What does the frame contain this time? What does she have a close-up of? I am a fraid she sees a murder weapon: she sees a blade. The fresh earth stains either on the shoes or on his spade make the spade's edge shine: make it into a blade. And does earth "stain," however fresh? Her very choice of noun, denoting liquid, suggests accuses blood. What should our man have done? Should he have taken his shoes off before entering the house? Perhaps. Perhaps he should have left his spade o utside, too. But he is a farmer, and acts like one presumably out of fatigue. So h e brings in his instrument in her eyes, the instrument of death. And the same goes for his shoes, and it goes for the rest of the man. A gravedigger is equated he re, if you will, with the reaper. And there are only the two of them in this hou se. The most awful bit is "for I saw it," because it emphasizes the perceived symboli sm of that spade left standing against the wall outside there in the entry: for future use. Or as a guard. Or as an unwitting memento mori. At the same time, "f or I saw it" conveys the capriciousness of her perception and the triumph of som ebody who cannot be fooled, the triumph of catching the enemy. It is futility in full bloom, engulfing and absorbing utility into its shadow. "I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed. I'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed." This is practically a nonverbal recognition of defeat, coming in the form of a t ypical Frostian understatement, studded with tautological monosyllables quickly abandoning their semantic functions. Our Napoleon or Pygmalion is completely rout ed by his creation, who still keeps pressing on. Now, this is where our poem effectively ends. The rest is simply denouement, in

which our heroine goes rambling on in an increasingly incoherent fashion about d eath, the world being evil, uncaring friends, and feeling alone. It is a rather hysterical monologue, whose only function, in terms of the story line, is to str uggle toward a release for what has been pent up in her mind. It does not, and i n the end she resorts to the door, as though only landscape were proportionate t o her mental state and thus could be of solace. And, quite possibly, it is. A conflict within an enclosure a house, say normally dete riorates into tragedy, because the rectangularity of the place itself puts a high er premium on reason, offering emotion only a straitjacket. Thus in the house th e man is the master not only because the house is his but because within the conte xt of the poem rationality is his. In a landscape, "Home Burial' "s dialogue would have run a different course; in a landscape, the man would be the loser. The dr ama would perhaps be even greater, for it's one thing when the house sides with a character, and another when the elements do so. In any case, that's why she is trying for the door. So let's get back to the five lines that precede the denouement to this business o f rotting birches. "Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best b irch fence a man can build," our farmer is quoted as saying, sitting there in th e kitchen, clods of fresh earth on his shoes and the spade standing up there in the entry. One may ascribe this phrase again to his fatigue and to the next task in store for him: building a little fence around the new grave. However, since t his is not a public but a family graveyard, the fence he mentioned might indeed be one of his everyday concerns, something else he has to deal with. And presumab ly he mentions it to take his mind off what he has just finished doing. Still, f or all his effort, the mind is not entirely taken, as the verb "rot" indicates: the line contains the shadow of the hidden comparison if a fence rots so quickly i n the damp air, how quickly will a little coffin rot in earth damp enough to lea ve "stains" on his shoes? But the heroine once again resists the encompassing ga mbits of language metaphor, irony, litotes and goes straight for the literal meanin g, the absolute. And that's what she jumps on in " 'What had how long it takes a birch to rot / To do with what was in the darkened parlor?' " What is remarkabl e here is how diverse their treatment of the notion of rotting is. While he is t alking about a "birch fence," which is a clear deflection, not to mention a refe rence to something above the ground, she zeroes in on "what was in the darkened parlor." It's understandable that, being a mother, she concentrates that Frost make s her concentrate on the dead child. Yet her way of referring to it is highly roun dabout, even euphemistic: "what was in. " Not to mention that she refers to her dead child as a "what," not a "who." We don't learn his name, and for all we kno w, he didn't have much of a life after his birth. And then you should note her r eference to the grave: "the darkened parlor." Now, with "darkened parlor," the poet finishes his portrait of the heroine. We ha ve to bear in mind that this is a rural setting, that the heroine lives in "his" house i.e., that she came here from without. Because of its proximity to rot, thi s darkened parlor, for all its colloquial currency, sounds noticeably oblique, n ot to say arch. To the modern ear it has an almost Victorian ring, suggesting a difference of sensibilities bordering on class distinction. I think you will agree that this is not a European poem.Not French, not Italian, not German, not even British. I also can assure you that it is not Russian at a ll. And, in terms of what American poetry is like today, it is not American, eit her. It's Frost's own, and he has been dead for over a quarter of a century now. Small wonder, then, that one rambles on about his lines at such length, and in strange places, though he no doubt would wince at being introduced to a French a udience by a Russian. On the other hand, he was no stranger to incongruity. So what was it that he was after in this, his very own poem? He was, I think, af ter grief and reason, which, while poison to each other, are language's most eff icient fuel or, if you will, poetry's indelible ink. Frost's reliance on them here and elsewhere almost gives you the sense that his dipping into this ink pot had to do with the hope of reducing the level of its contents; you detect a sort of vested interest on his part. Yet the more one dips into it, the more it brims wi th this black essence of existence, and the more one's mind, like one's fingers,

gets soiled by this liquid. For the more there is of grief, the more there is o f reason. As much as one may be tempted to take sides in "Home Burial," the pres ence of the narrator here rules this out, for while the characters stand, respec tively, for reason and for grief, the narrator stands for their fusion. To put i t differently, while the characters' actual union disintegrates, the story, as i t were, marries grief to reason, since the bond of the narrative here supersedes the individual dynamics well, at least for the reader. Perhaps for the author as well. The poem, in other words, plays fate. I suppose it is this sort of marriage that Frost was after, or perhaps the other way around. Many years ago, on a flight from New York to Detroit, I chanced upo n an essay by the poet's daughter printed in the American Airlines in-flight 261 / On Grief and Reason magazine. In that essay Lesley Frost says that her father and her mother were co -valedictorians at the high school they both attended. While she doesn't recall the topic of her father's speech on that occasion, she remembers what she was to ld was her mother's. It was called something like "Conversation as a Force in Lif e" (or "the Living Force"). If, as I hope, someday you find a copy of North of B oston and read it, you'll realize that Elinor White's topic is, in a nutshell, t he main structural device of that collection, for most of the poems in North of Boston are dialogues are conversations. In this sense, we are dealing here in "Home Burial," as elsewhere in North of Boston with love poetry, or, if you will, with p oetry of obsession: not that of a man with a woman so much as that of an argumen t with a counterargument of a voice with a voice. That goes for monologues as wel l, actually, since a monologue is one's argument with oneself; take, for instanc e, "To be or not to be . . ." That's why poets so often resort to writing plays. In the end, of course, it was not the dialogue that Robert Frost was after but the other way around, if only because by themselves two voices amount to little. Fused, they set in motion something that, for want of a better term, we may jus t as well call "life." This is why "Home Burial" ends with a dash, not with a pe riod. HOME BURIAL He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him. She was starting do wn, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. She took a doubtful step and th en undid it To raise herself and look again. He spoke Advancing toward her: "Wha t is it you seeFrom up there always? for I want to know." She turned and sank upon her skirts at that, And her face changed from terrified to dull. He said to gai n time: "What is it you see?" Mounting until she cowered under him. "I will find out now you must tell me, dear." She, in her place, refused him any help, With th e least stiffening of her neck and silence. She let him look, sure that he would n't see, Blind creature; and awhile he didn't see. But at last he murmured, "Oh, " and again, "Oh." "What is it what?" she said. "Just that I see." "You don't," she challenged. "Tell me what it is." "The wonder is I didn't see at once. I never noticed it from here before. I must be wonted to it that's the reason. The little graveyard where my people are! So s mall the window frames the whole of it. Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it ? There are three stones of slate and one of marble, Broad-shouldered little sla bs there in the sunlight On the sidehill. We haven't to mind those. But I unders tand: it is not the stones, But the child's mound " "Don't, don't, don't, don't," she cried. She withdrew, shrinking from beneath his arm That rested on the banister, and sl id downstairs; And turned on him with such a daunting look, He said twice over before he knew himself: "Can't a man speak of his own child h e's lost?" If this poem is dark, darker still is the mind of its maker, who plays all three roles: the man, the woman, and the narrator. Their equal reality, taken separat ely or together, is still inferior to that of the poem's author, since "Home Bur ial" is but one poem among many. The price of his autonomy is, of course, in its coloration, and perhaps what you ultimately get out of this poem is not its stor

y but the vision of its ultimately autonomous maker. The characters and the narr ator are, as it were, pushing the author out of any humanly palatable context: he stands outside, denied re-entry, perhaps not coveting it at all. This is the di alogue's alias the Life Force's doing. And this particular posture, this utter auton omy, strikes me as utterly American. Hence this poet's monotone, his pentametric drawl: a signal from a far- distant station. One may liken him to a spacecraft that, as the downward pull of gravity weakens, finds itself nonetheless in the gr ip of a different gravitational force: outward. The fuel, though, is still the s ame: grief and reason. The only thing that conspires against this metaphor of mi ne is that American spacecraft usually return. Homage to Marcus Aurelius The twentieth is perhaps the first century that looks at this statue of a horsem an with slight bewilderment. Ours is the century of the automobile, and our king s and presidents drive, or else they are driven. We don't see many horsemen arou nd, save at equestrian shows or races. One exception is perhaps the British cons ort, Prince Philip, as well as his daughter, Princess Anne. But that has to do n ot even so much with their royal station as with the name "Philip," which is of Greek origin and means philo-hippov. lover of horses. It is so much so that Her Royal Highness was married until recently to Captain Mark Phillips of the Royal Guar ds, an accomplished steeplechaser himself. You may even add to that Prince Charl es, the heir to the British crown, an avid polo player. But that would be it. Yo u don't see leaders of democracies or, for that matter, the few available tyrann ies, mounted. Not even military commanders receiving parades, of which these day s there are fewer and fewer. Horsemen have left our precincts almost entirely. T o be sure, we still have our mounted police; and there is perhaps no greater Sch adenfreude for a New Yorker than to watch one of these Lochinvars in the saddle issuing a traffic ticket to an illegally parked car while his hackney is sniffin g at the victim's hood. But when we erect monuments to our leaders and public he roes these days, there are only two feet resting on the pediment. Well, too bad, since a horse used to symbolize quite a lot: empires, virility, nature. Actuall y, there is a whole etiquette of equestrian statuary, as when a horse, for insta nce, rears up under the rider, it means that the latter died in battle. If all o f its four hooves rest on the pediment, that suggests he died in his four-poster . If one leg is lifted high up in the air, then the implication is that he died of battle-related wounds; if not so high up, that he lived long enough, trotting , as it were, through his existence. You can't do that with a car. Besides, a ca r, even a Rolls, doesn't bespeak one's uniqueness, nor does it elevate one above the crowd the way a horse does. Roman emperors in particular used to be depicte d on horseback not in order to commemorate their preferred mode of transportation but precisely to convey their superiority; their belonging, often by birth, to the equestrian class. In the parlance of the time, "equestrian" presumably meant "high up" or "highborn." An equus, in other words, in addition to carrying an a ctual rider, was saddled with a lot of allusions. Above all, it could represent the past, if only because it represented the animal kingdom and that's where the pa st came from. Maybe this is what Caligula had in mind after all when he introduc ed his horse to the Senate. Since antiquity seems to have made this connection a lready. Since it had far more truck with the past than with the future. Ill What the past and the future have in common is our imagination, which conjures th em. And our imagination is rooted in our eschatological dread: the dread of thin king that we are without precedence or consequence. The stronger that dread, the more detailed our notion of antiquity or of Utopia. Sometimes actually, all too o ften they overlap, as when antiquity appears to possess an ideal order and abundan ce of virtues, or when the inhabitants of our Utopias stroll through their marbl e well-governed cities clad in togas. Marble is, to be sure, the perennial buildi ng material of our antiquity and Utopia alike. On the whole, the color white per meates our imagination all the way through its extreme ends, when its version of the past or the future takes a metaphysical or religious turn. Paradise is whit e, so are ancient Greece and Rome. This predilection is not so much an alternativ e to the darkness of our fancy's source as a metaphor for our ignorance, or simp

ly a reflection of the material our fancy normally employs for its flight: paper . A crumpled paper ball on its way to the wastebasket could easily be taken for a splinter of a civilization, especially with your glasses off. IV I first saw this bronze horseman indeed through a windshield of a taxi some twen ty years ago, almost in a previous incarnation. I'd just landed in Rome for the f irst time, and was on my way to the hotel, where a distant acquaintance of mine had made a reservation. The hotel bore a very un- Roman name: it was called Boli var. Something equestrian was already in the air, since the great libertador is normally depicted atop his rearing horse. Did he die in battle? I couldn't remem ber. Presently we were stuck in the evening traffic, in what looked like a cross between a railroad station's square and the end of a soccer game. I wanted to a sk the driver how far we had to go, but my Italian was good only for "Where are we?" "Piazza Venezia," he blurted, nodding to the left. "Campidoglio," a nod to the right. And with another nod: "Marco Aurelio," followed by what was no doubt an energetic reference to the traffic. I looked to the right. "Marco Aurelio," I repeated to myself, and felt as if two thousand years were collapsing, dissolvi ng in my mouth thanks to the Italian's familiar form of this Emperor's name. Whi ch always had for me an epic, indeed imperial, sway, sounding like a caesura-stu dded, thundering announcement by history's own majordomo: Marcus! caesura Aurelius! The Roman! Emperor! Marcus! Aurelius! This is how I knew him in high school, whe re the majordomo was our own stumpy Sarah Isaakovna, a very Jewish and very resi gned lady in her fifties, who taught us history. Yet for all her resignation, wh en it came to uttering the names of Roman emperors, she'd straighten up, assumin g an attitude of grandeur, and practically shout, well above our heads, into the peeling-off stucco of the classroom wall adorned with its portrait of Stalin: Ca ius Julius Caesar! Caesar Octavian Augustus! Caesar Tiberius! Caesar Vespasianus Flavius! The Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius! And then Marcus Aurelius! It was as thou gh the names were bigger than she herself, as though they were swelling up from inside to be released into a far greater space than her own body or, for that ma tter, the room, the country, the times themselves could contain. She reveled in those odd-sounding foreign names, in their unpredictable succession of vowels an d consonants, and that was, frankly, contagious. A child loves this sort of thing : strange words, strange sounds, and that's why, I suppose, history is best taug ht in childhood. At the age of twelve one may not grasp the intrigue, but a stra nge sound suggests an alternative reality. "Marcus Aurelius" certainly did to me , and that reality proved to be quite vast: larger, in fact, than that Emperor's own. Now apparently came time to domesticate that reality; which is why, I supp ose, I was in Rome. "Marco Aurelio, eh?" I said to myself, and turned to the dri ver: "Where?" He pointed to the top of a huge waterfall of marble steps leading uphill, now right in front of us, and as the car sharply swerved to gain some mi nuscule advantage in the sea of traffic, I momentarily beheld a floodlit pair of horse's ears, a bearded head, and a protruding arm. Then the sea swallowed us u p. Half an hour later, at the entrance to the Bolivar, my valet pack in one hand , my money in another, I asked the driver in a sudden surge of fraternity and gr atitude after all, he was the first person I had spoken with in Rome and he had al so brought me to my hotel and didn't even overcharge me, or so it seemed his name. "Marco," he said, and drove off. v The most definitive feature of antiquity is our absence. The more available its debris and the longer you stare at it, the more you are denied entry. Marble neg ates you particularly well, though bronze and papyri don't fall too far behind. Reaching us intact or in fragments, these things strike us, of course, with thei r durability and tempt us to assemble them, fragments especially, into a coheren t whole, but they were not meant to reach us. They were, and still are, for them selves. For man's appetite for the future is as limited as his own ability to co nsume time, or as grammar, this first casualty of every discourse on the subject of the hereafter, shows. At best, these marbles, bronzes, and papyri were meant to outlast their subjects and their makers, but not themselves. Their existence was functional, which is to say, of limited purpose. Time is no jigsaw puzzle,

because it is made up of perishing pieces. And though perhaps objects- inspired, the idea of the afterlife wasn't an option until quite late. Anyhow, what is be fore us are the leftovers of necessity or vanity, i.e., of considerations always nearsighted. Nothing exists for the future's sake; and the ancients couldn't in nature regard themselves as the ancients. Nor should we bill ourselves as their tomorrow. We won't be admitted into antiquity: it being well inhabited in fact, ove rpopulated as it was. There are no vacancies. No point in busting your knuckles ag ainst marble. VI If we find the fives of Roman emperors highly absorbing, it is because we are hi ghly self-absorbed creatures. To say the least, we regard ourselves as the cente rs of our own universes, varying to be sure in width, but universes nonetheless, a nd as such having centers. The difference between an empire and a family, a netw ork of friends, a web of romantic entanglements, a field of expertise, etc., is a difference in volume, not in structure. Also, because the Caesars are so much removed from us in time, the complexity of their predicament appears to be graspa ble, shrunk, as it were, by the perspective of two millennia to almost a fairy-t ale scale, with its wonders and its naivete. Our address books are their empires , especially after hours. One reads Suetonius or Ae- lius or, for that matter, P sellus, for archetypes even if all one runs is a bike shop or a household of two . Somehow it is easier to identify with a Caesar than with a consul, or praetor, or lictor, or slave, even though that is what one's actual station in the moder n reality corresponds to. This has nothing to do with self-aggrandizement or asp irations but is due to the understandable attraction of king-size (so to speak), clear-cut versions of compromised virtue, vice, or self-delusion rather than th eir fuzzy, inarticulate originals next door or, for that matter, in the mirror. That's why, perhaps, one looks at their likenesses, at the marbles especially. Fo r in the end, a human oval can accommodate only so much. You can't have more tha n two eyes or less than one mouth; surrealism wasn't yet invented and African ma sks were not yet in vogue. (Or maybe the Romans clung so much to Greek standards precisely because they were.) So in the end you are bound to recognize yourself in one of them. For there is no Caesar without a bust, as there is no swan with out a reflection. Clean-shaven, bearded, bald, or well coiffed, they all return a vacant, pupil-free, marble stare, pretty much like that of a passport photo or the mug shot of a criminal. You won't know what they have been up to,- and putt ing these faces to their stories is what, perhaps, makes them indeed archetypal. It also moves them somewhat closer to us, since, being depicted fairly often, th ey, no doubt, must also have developed a degree of detachment vis-a-vis their ph ysical reality. In any case, to them a bust or a statue was indeed what a photog raph is to us, and the most "photographed" person would obviously be a Caesar. T here were, of course, others: their wives, senators, consuls, praetors, great at hletes or beauties, actors and orators. On the whole, though, judging by what ha s survived, men were chiseled more often than women, which presumably reflects w ho controlled the purse as much as the society's ethos. By either standard, a Ca esar would be a winner. In the Capi- toline Museum you can shuffle for hours thr ough chambers filled up practically to the rafters with rows and rows of marble portraits of Caesars, emperors, dictators, augusti hoarded there from all over w hat used to be the place they ran. The longer one stayed on the job, the more nu merous would be one's "photographs." One would be depicted in one's youth, matur ity, decrepitude; sometimes the distance between one's busts is no more, it woul d seem, than a couple of years. It appears that marble portraiture was an indust ry and, with its calibrations of decay, something of a mortuary one; the rooms s trike you in the end as not unlike a library housing an encyclopedia of beheadin g. It is hard to "read," though, because marble is notoriously blank. In a sense , what it also has in common with photography or, more accurately, with what photog raphs used to be is that it is literally monochrome. For one thing, it renders ever yone blond. Whereas in their real lives, some of the models Caesars' wives, to say the least, since many of them came from Asia Minor were not . Yet one is almost grateful to marble for its lack of pigmentation, the way one is grateful to a black-and-white photograph, for it unleashes one's fantasy, one

's intuition, so that viewing becomes an act of complicity: like reading. VII And there are ways of turning viewing into reading. When I was a boy I used to f requent a big museum in my hometown. It had a vast collection of Greek and Roman marbles, not to mention those by Canova and Thorvaldsen. I'd noticed that, depen ding on the time of day as well as the season, those carved features would wear different expressions, and I wondered what they would look like after hours. But the museum closed at 6 p.m., presumably because the marbles were not accustomed to electricity. I couldn't do much about that. In general, one can't do much ab out statues anyway. One can circle around them, squint at them from different an gles; but that's that. With busts, though, one can go a bit further, as I discov ered inadvertently. One day, staring at the little white face of some early Roma n fanciulla, I lifted my hand, presumably to smooth my hair, and thus obstructed the single source of light coming to her from the ceiling. At once her facial ex pression changed. I moved my hand a bit to the side: it changed again. I began m oving both my arms rather frantically, casting each time a different shadow upon her features: the face came to life. Eventually, of course, I was interrupted b y the shrieks of the guard. He ran toward me, but looking at his screaming face, I thought it less animated than that of a little marble girl from B.C. viii Of all Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius gets the best press. Historians love him, and so do philosophers. It is to the latter, though, that Marcus Aurelius owes his good standing to this day, since this discipline proved to be more durable t han the Roman Empire or the aspects of one's statecraft in it. Actually, histori ans should be perhaps less enthusiastic about him than they are, because a coupl e of times he came very close to depriving them of their subject, particularly b y designating his son, the really moronic Commodus, to be his heir. But historia ns are a sturdy lot; they've digested things much harder than Commodus' idea of renaming Rome after himself. They could live with as well as live in Commodiopolis and research the history of the Commodian empire. As for philosophers, they were , and some still are, enamored of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations perhaps not so mu ch for the depth of its probing as for the respectability the discipline itself gained in the royal embrace. Politics is far more often the pursuit of philosoph ers than philosophy is the sideline of kings. Besides, for Marcus Aurelius, philo sophy was a lot more than a sideline: it was, as we'd say today, a therapy, or, as Boethius put it later, a consolation. He wasn't a great philosopher, nor was he a visionary; not even a sage; his Meditations is at once a melancholy and rep etitive book. The Stoic doctrine at the time had become a doctrine indeed, and t hough he did write in Greek, he is no match for Epictetus. Most likely a Roman e mperor was drawn to this kind of language out of respect for the doctrine's orig ins, and also perhaps out of nostalgia, in order not to forget the language of c ivilized discourse; the language, after all, of his youth and pursuits more nobl e perhaps than those at hand. Add to that, if you will, possible considerations of secrecy, and the benefit of detachment: the purpose and the method of the dis cipline itself, enhanced here by the very means of expression. Not to mention th at his reign simply happened to coincide with a substantial revival of Greek cul ture in Rome, the first Renaissance, if you will, owing no doubt to the long era of considerable stability historians dubbed the "Pax Romana." And historians lo ve Marcus Aurelius precisely because he was the last guardian of that Pax. Becaus e his reign effectively and neatly concluded a period of Roman history lasting n early two centuries that began with Augustus and, to all intents and purposes, e nded with our man. They love him because he is the end of the fine, and a very c oherent one at that: which, for historians, is a luxury. Marcus was a highly con scientious ruler; perhaps because he was appointed to the job not anointed; becaus e he was adopted into the dynasty, not born to it. And both historians and philo sophers love him precisely for carrying out so well the commission for which he thought himself ill suited, and was in fact reluctant to accept. To them, his pr edicament presumably echoes in some fashion their own: he is, as it were, a mode l for those who have to go in this life against their calling. In any case, the Roman Empire gained a lot more from his dual loyalty to duty and philosophy than

did the Stoic doctrine (which, in its own turn, comes with Marcus to the end of its own line: to ethics). So much so that it's been maintained, often vigorousl y, that this sort of inner split is a good recipe for ruling. That it's better i f one's spiritual yearnings have their own outlet and don't interfere too much w ith one's actions. This is what the whole philosopher-king business is all about , isn't it? When your metaphysics get short shrift. As for Marcus, however, he d readed this prospect from the very beginning, dreaded being summoned to Hadrian's court, for all its comforts and bright perspectives. Perhaps precisely because of those; as a true product of the Greek doctrine, all he aspired to was "the ca mp-bed and skin coverlet." Philosophy for him was a manner of dressing as much a s it was a manner of discourse: the texture of existence, not just a mental purs uit. Picture him as a Buddhist monk, then; you won't be much off target, since th e "way of life" was the essence of Stoicism as well; emphatically so, we may add . The young Marcus must have been apprehensive of the royal adoption for more rea sons than Hadrian's sexual predilections: it meant a wardrobe as different as th e accompanying mental diet. That he went for it had to do, one imagines, less wi th royal pressure than with our man's own misgivings about his intellectual fort itude: apparently it's easier to be a king than a philosopher. Anyhow, it came t o pass, and here's a monument. The good question, though, is: To whom? To a phil osopher? Or to a king? To both? Perhaps to neither. IX A monument is by and large a vertical affair, a symbolic departure from the gene ral horizontality of existence, an antithesis to spatial monotony. A monument ne ver actually departs from this horizontality well, nothing does but rather rests upo n it, punctuating it at the same time like an exclamation mark. In principle, a monument is a contradiction. In this way, it resembles its most frequent subject: a human being, equally endowed with vertical and horizontal properties, but eve ntually settling for the latter. The durability of the material a monument is usu ally made of marble, bronze, increasingly cast-iron, and now even concrete highlight s the contradictory nature of the undertaking even further, especially if a monu ment's subject is a great battle, a revolution, or a natural disaster i.e., an eve nt that took a great toll and was momentary. Yet even if the subject is an abstr act ideal or the consequence of a momentous event, there is a detectable clash of time frames and notions of viability, not to ment ion textures. Perhaps given the material's aspiration for permanence, the best su bject for a monument is indeed destruction. Zadkin's statue of bombed-out Rotterd am immediately comes to mind: its verticality is functional, since it points at t he catastrophe's very source. Also, what could be more horizontal than the Nethe rlands? And it occurs to one that the monument owes its genealogy to great plane s, to the idea of something being seen from afar whether in a spatial or a tempora l sense. That it is of nomadic origin, for at least in a temporal sense we are a ll nomads. A man as aware of the futility of all human endeavor as our philosoph er-king would be, of course, the first to object to being turned into a public s tatue. On the other hand, twenty years of what appears to have been practically nonstop frontier combat, taking him all over the place, effectively turned him in to a nomad. Besides, here's his horse. x The Eternal City is a city of hills, though. Of seven of them, actually. Some ar e natural, some artificial, but negotiating them is an ordeal in any case, espec ially on foot and especially in summer, although the adjacent seasons' temperatu res don't fall too far behind. Add to that the Emperor's rather precarious healt h; add to that its not getting any better with age. Hence, a horse. The monument sitting at the top of the Capitoline actually fills up the vacuum left by Marcu s' actual mounted figure, which, some two thousand years ago, occupied that space quite frequently, not to say routinely. On the way to the Forum, as the saying goes. Actually, on his way from it. Were it not for Michelangelo's pedestal, the monument would be a footprint. Better yet, a hoofprint. The Romans, superstitio us like all Italians, maintain that whenthe bronze Marcus hits the ground, the e nd of the world will occur. Whatever the origin of this superstition, it stands to reason if one bears in mind that Marcus' motto was Equanimity. The word sugges

ts balance, composure under pressure, evenness of mental disposition; literally: equation of the animus, i.e., keeping the soul and thus the world in check. Give thi s formula of the Stoic posture a possible misspelling and you'll get the monument 's definition: Equi- nimity. The horseman tilts, though, somewhat, as if leaning toward his subjects, and his hand is stretched out in a gesture that is a cross between a greeting and a blessing. So much so that for a while some insisted th at this was not Marcus Aurelius but Constantine, who converted Rome to Christiani ty. For that, however, the horseman's face is too serene, too free of zeal or ar dor, too uninvolved. It is the face of detachment, not of love and detachment is p recisely what Christianity never could manage. No, this is no Constantine, and n o Christian. The face is devoid of any sentiment; it is a postscript to passions , and the lowered corners of the mouth bespeak the lack of illusion. Had there b een a smile, you could think perhaps of the Buddha; but the Stoics knew too much about physics to toy with the finality of human existence in any fashion. The fa ce shines with the bronze's original gold, but the hair and the beard have oxidiz ed and turned green, the way one turns gray. All thought aspires to the conditio n of metal; and the bronze denies you any entry, including interpretation or tou ch. What you've got here, then, is detachment per se. And out of this detachment the Emperor leans toward you slightly, extending his right hand either to greet you or to bless you which is to say, acknowledge your presence. For where he is, there is no you, and vice versa. The left hand theoretically holds the reins, wh ich are either missing now or were never there in the first place: a horse would obey this rider no matter what.Especially if it represented Nature. For he repr esents Reason. The face is clearly of the Antonine dynasty, though he wasn't born into it but adopted. The hair, the beard, the somewhat bulging eyes and slightl y apoplectic posture are those of his stepfather turned father-in-law and his ve ry own son. Small wonder that it is so hard to tell the three of them apart amon g the Ostia marbles. But, as we know nowadays, a period's fashion may easily bea t the genes. Remember the Beatles. Besides, he revered Antoninus Pius enough to emulate him in a variety of ways; his appearance could be simply that attitude's spin-off. Also, the sculptor, being a contemporary, might have wished to convey t he sense of continuum perceived by the historians of the stepfather's and the st epson's reigns: a sense that Marcus himself, needless to say, sought to create. O r else the sculptor just tried to produce a generic portrait of the era, of the perfect ruler, and what we've got here is the fusion of the two best emperors th e realm had had since the murder of Domitian the way he did the horse, whose ident ity we don't ponder. In all probability, however, this is the author of the Medit ations himself: the face and the torso slightly tilted toward his subjects fit ex tremely well the text of that melancholy book, which itself leans somewhat towar d the reality of human existence, in the attitude not so much of a judge as of a n umpire. In this sense this monument is a statue to a statue: it's hard to pict ure a Stoic in motion. XI The Eternal City resembles a gigantic old brain that long ago gave up any intere st in the world it being too graspable a proposition and settled for its own crevass es and folds. Negotiating their narrows, where even a thought about yourself is t oo cumbersome, or their expanses, where the concept of the universe itself appea rs puny, you feel like a worn-out needle shuffling the grooves of a vast record to the center and back extracting with your soles the tune that the days of yore hum to the present. This is the real His Master's Voice for you, and it turns your heart into a dog. History is not a discipline but something that is not yours whic h is the main definition of beauty. Hence, the sentiment, for it is not going to love you back. It is a one-way affair, and you recognize its platonic nature in this city instantly. The closer you get to the object of your desire, the more marble or bronze it gets, as the natives' fabled profiles scatter around like an imated coins escaped from some broken terra-cotta jar. It is as though here time puts, between bedsheets and mattress, its own carbon paper since time mints as mu ch as it types. The moment you leave the Bolivar or the equally smelly yet cheap er Nerva, you hit Foro Trajano with its triumphant column tightly wrapped in con quered Dacians and soaring like a mast above the marble ice floe of broken pilla

rs, capitals, and cornices. Now this is the domain of stray cats, reduced lions in this city of reduced Christians. The huge white slabs and blocks are too unwi eldy and random to arrange them in a semblance of order or to drag them away. Th ey are left here to absorb the sun, or to represent "antiquity." In a sense they do; their ill-matching shapes are a democracy, this place is still a forum. And on his way from it, just across the road, beyond pines and cypresses, atop the Capitoline Hill, stands the man who made the fusion of republic and imperial rul e probable. He has no company: virtue, like a malady, alienates. For a split sec ond, it is still a.d. 176 or thereabouts, and the brain ponders the world. XII Marcus was a good ruler and a lonely man. In his line of work, loneliness, of co urse, comes with the territory; but he was lonelier than most. Meditations gives you a greater taste of that than his correspondence; yet it is just a taste. Th e meal had many courses and was pretty heavy. To begin with, he knew that his li fe had been subverted. For the ancients, philosophy wasn't a by-product of life but the other way around, and Stoicism was particularly exacting. Perhaps we sho uld momentarily dispense here with the very word "philosophy," for Stoicism, its Roman version especially, shouldn't be characterized as love for knowledge. It was, rather, a lifelong experiment in endurance, and a man was his own guinea pi g: he was not a probing instrument, he was an answering instrument. By the time of Marcus, the doctrine's knowledge was to be lived rather than loved. Its materia list monism, its cosmogony, its logic, and its criterion of truth (the perceptio n that irresistibly compels the subject to assent to it as true) were already in place, and for a philosopher, life's purpose was to prove the validity of this k nowledge by applying it to reality till the end of his days. In other words, a S toic's life was a study in ethics, since ethics buys nothing except osmosis. And Marcus knew that his experiment was interrupted, or qualified, to a degree he h imself wouldn't be able to comprehend; worse still, that his findings provided the re were any could have no application. He believed Plato, but not to this extent. A t any rate, he would be the first to square the common good with individual unha ppiness, and that's what Meditations is perhaps all about: a postscript to the Re public. He knew that as a philosopher he was finished: that concentration was ou t, that all he could hope for was some time for sporadic contemplation. That the best his life would amount to would be a few glimpses of eternity, a true surmise now and then. He accepted that, for t he sake of the common good no doubt, but hence Meditations' overriding melanchol y or, if you will, pessimism all the more deep because the man definitely suspecte d that there was rather more to the story. Meditations is thus a patchy book, nur tured by interference. It is a disjointed, rambling internal monologue, with occ asional flashes of pedantry as well as of genius. It shows you what he might hav e been rather than what he was: his vector, rather than an attained destination. It appears to have been jotted down amid the hubbub and babel of this or that m ilitary campaign, successful as they might have been by the campfire, indeed, and t he soldier's cloak played the Stoic philosopher's body coverlet. In other words, it was done in spite of or, if you will, against history, of which his destiny was t rying to make him a part. A pessimist he perhaps was, but certainly not a determ inist. That's why he was a good ruler, why the mixture of republic and imperial rule under him didn't look like a sham. (One may even argue that the larger demo cracies of the modern world show an increasing preference for his formula. Good examples are contagious, too; but virtue, as we said, alienates. Not to mention that time, wasting its carbon paper on subjects, seems to have very little left for rulers.) To say the least, he was a good caretaker: he didn't lose what he i nherited; and if the empire under him didn't expand, it was just as well; as Aug ustus said, "Enough is enough." For somebody in charge of an entity so vast and for so long (practically thirty- three years, from A.D. 147, when his father-inlaw conferred upon him the powers of emperorship, to his death in A.D. 181 near t he would-be Vienna), he has surprisingly little blood on his hands. He would rat her pardon than punish those who rebelled against him; those who fought him, he would rather subdue than destroy. The laws he made benefited the most powerless: widows, slaves, juniors, although it must be said that he was the first to intro

duce the double standard in prosecuting criminal offenses by members of the Sena te (the office of special prosecutor was his invention). He used the state's pur se sparingly and, being abstemious himself, tried to encourage this in others. O n several occasions, when the empire needed money, he sold imperial jewels rather than hit his subjects up for new taxes. Nor did he build anything extravagant, no Pantheon or Colosseum. In the first place, because those already existed; sec ond, because his sojourn in Egypt was quite brief and he didn't go beyond Alexan dria, unlike Agrippa and unlike Titus and Hadrian, to have his mind fired up by the gigantic, desert- fitting scale of Egyptian edifices. Besides, he didn't lik e cir- cenze that much, and when he had to attend a show, he is reported to have read or written or been briefed during the performance. It was he, however, who introduced to the Roman Circus the safety net for acrobats. XIII Antiquity is above all a visual concept, generated by objects whose age escapes definition. The Latin anticum is essentially a more drastic term for "old," deriv ing from the equally Latin ante, which means "before," and used to be applied pr esumably to things Greek. "Beforishness," then. As for the Greeks themselves, th eir arche denotes beginning or genesis, the moment when something occurs for the first time. "Firstness," then? Herein, in any case, lies a substantial distincti on between the Romans and the Greeks a distinction owing its existence partly to th e Greeks having fewer objects at their disposal to fathom the provenance of, par tly to their general predilection for dwelling on origins. The former, in fact, may very well be an explanation for the latter, since next to archaeology there is only geology. As for our own version of antiquity, it eagerly swallows both t he Greeks and the Romans, yet, if worse comes to worse, might cite the Latin pre cedent in its defense. Antiquity to us is a vast chronological jumble, filled wi th historical, mythical, and divine beings, interrelated among themselves by mar ble and also because a high percentage of the depicted mortals claim divine desc endance or were deified. This last aspect, resulting in the practically identical scant attire of those marbles and in the confusion on our part of attributing fr agments (did this splintered arm belong to a mortal or to a deity?), is worth no ticing. The blurring of distinctions between mortals and deities was habitual wit h the ancients, with the Roman Caesars in particular. While the Greeks on the wh ole were interested in lineage, the Romans were after promotion. The target, howe ver, was the same: Celestial Mansions, yet vanity or boosting the ruler's author ity played a rather small part in this. The whole point of identifying with the gods lies not so much in the notion of their omniscience as in the sense that th eir extreme carnality is fully matched by the extremes of their detachment. To b egin with, a ruler's own margin of detachment would make him identify with a god (carnality, of course, would be Nero or Caligula's shortcut). By acquiring a sta tue, he'd boost that margin considerably, and it's best if it's done in the cours e of one's lifetime, since marble reduces both the expectations of the subjects and the model's own willingness to deviate from manifest perfection. It sets one free, as it were, and freedom is the province of deities. Putting it very broad ly, the marble and mental vista that we call antiquity is a great repository of shed and shredded skins, a landscape after the departure, if you will; a mask of freedom, a jumble of discarded boosters. xiv If Marcus indeed hated anything, and was prescriptive about it, that was gladiat orial show. Some say it was because he detested blood sports, so vulgar and nonGreek, because siding with a team would be for him the beginning of partiality. O thers insist that it had to do with his wife, Faustina, who, for all her thirtee n children only six survived was remarkably promiscuous for an empress. Among her num erous affairs, these others single out a particular gladiator who, they claim, w as the real father of Commodus. But nature works in mysterious ways; an apple of ten rolls far from the tree, especially if that tree grows on a slope. Commodus w as both a rotten apple and its slope. Actually, as far as the imperial fortunes were concerned, he was a precipice. And perhaps an inability to grasp nature's m ysterious ways was the source of Faustina's reputation (though if Marcus had it against the gladiators because of Faustina, he should have proscribed also again

st sailors, pantomime actors, generals, and so forth). Marcus himself would make light of this. Once, approached with these rumors and the suggestion that he get rid of her, he retorted: "If we send our wife away, we must give back her dowry , too." The dowry here was the empire itself, since Faustina was the daughter of Antoninus Pius. On the whole, he stood by her unswervingly and, judging by the honors he bestowed upon her when she died, perhaps even loved her. She was, it a ppears, one of those heavy main courses whose taste you barely sample in the Med itations. In general, Caesar's wife is beyond reproach and suspicion. And perhap s precisely in order to uphold this attitude as well as to save Faustina's reput ation Marcus departed from the nearly two-century-old tradition of selecting an h eir to the throne and passed the crown to what he thus asserted to be his own fl esh and blood. At any rate, it was Faustina's. Apparently his reverence for his father-in-law was enormous and he s imply couldn't believe that someone in whose veins ran the blood of the Antonine s could be all that bad. Or perhaps he regarded Faustina as a force of nature; a nd nature for a Stoic philosopher was the ultimate authority. If anything, natur e taught him indifference and a sense of proportion; otherwise his life would ha ve been pure hell; Meditations strings out solipsism like glacial debris. Toward the wrong and atrocious, Marcus was not so much forgiving as dismissive. Which is to say that he was impartial rather than just and that his impartiality was t he product not of his mind's fairness but of his mind's appetite for the infinit e; in particular, for impartiality's own limits. This would stun his subjects no less than it does his historians, for history is the domain of the partial. And as his subjects chided Marcus for his attitude toward gladiatorial shows, histo rians jumped on him for his persecution of Christians. It is unclear, of course, how much Marcus was informed about the Christian creed, but it is easy to imagi ne him finding its metaphysics myopic and its ethics detestable. From a Stoic po int of view, a god with whom you trade in virtue to obtain eternal favors wouldn 't be worth a prayer. For somebody like Marcus, virtue's value lay precisely in its being a gamble, not an investment. Intellectually, to say the least, he had very little reason to favor the Christians; still less could he do so as a ruler , faced at the time with wars, plague, uprisings and a disobedient minority. Besid es, he didn't introduce new laws against the Christians; those of Hadrian, and t hose of Trajan before him, were quite enough. It is obvious that, following his beloved Epictetus, Marcus regarded a philosopher, i.e., himself, as the missionar y of Divine Providence to mankind, i.e., to his own subjects. You are welcome to quibble with his notion of it; one thing is quite clear, though: it was far mor e open-ended than the Christian version. Blessed are the partial, for they shall inherit the earth. xv Take white, ocher, and blue; add to that a bit of green and a lot of geometry. Y ou'll get the formula time has picked for its backdrop in these parts, since it is not without vanity, especially once it assumes the shape of history or of an individual. It does so out of its prurient interest in finality, in its reductive ability, if you will, for which it has numerous guises, including the human bra in or the human eye. So you shouldn't be surprised, especially if you were born here, to find yourself one day surrounded by the white-cum-ocher, trapezoid squa re with the white-cum-blue trapeze overhead. The former is human-made (actually, by Michelangelo), the latter is heaven-made, and you may recognize it more readi ly. However, neither is of use to you, since you are green: the shade of oxidize d bronze. And if the cumulus white in the oxygen blue overhead is still preferab le to the balustrade's marble calves and well-tanned Tiburtine chests below, it is because clouds remind you of your native antiquity: because they are the future of any architecture. Well, you've been around for nearly two thousand years, an d you ought to know. Perhaps they, the clouds, are indeed the only true antiquit y there is, if only because among them you are not a bronze. xviAve, Caesar. How do you feel now, among barbarians? For we are barbarians to you, if only because we speak neither Greek nor Latin. We are also afraid of dea th far more than you ever were, and our herd instinct is stronger than the one f or self-preservation. Sound familiar? Maybe it's our numbers, Caesar, or maybe i

t's the number of our goods. We sure feel that by dying we stand to lose far mor e than you ever had, empire or no empire. To you, if I remember correctly, birth was an entrance, death an exit, life a little island in the ocean of particles. To us, you see, it's all a bit more melodramatic. What spooks us, I guess, is t hat an entrance is always guarded, whereas an exit isn't. We can't conceive of d windling into particles again: after hoarding so many goods, that's unpalatable. Status's inertia, I guess, or fear of the elemental freedom. Be that as it may, Caesar, you are among barbarians. We are your true Parthians, Mar- comanni, and Quadi, because nobody came in your stead, and we inhabit the earth. Some of us go even further, barging into your antiquity, supplying you with definitions. Yo u can't respond, can't bless, can't greet or quell us with your outstretched righ t hand the hand whose fingers still remember scribbling your Meditations. If that b ook hasn't civilized us, what will? Perhaps they billed you as the PhilosopherKing precisely to dodge its spell by underscoring your uniqueness. For theoretic ally what's unique isn't valid, Caesar, and you were unique. Still, you were no p hilosopher- king you'd be the first to wince at this label. You were what the mixt ure of power and inquiry made you: a postscript to both, a uniquely autonomous e ntity, almost to the point of pathology. Hence your emphasis on ethics, for supr eme power exempts one from the moral norm practically by definition, and so does supreme knowledge. You got both for the price of one, Caesar; that's why you had to be so bloody ethical. You wrote an entire book to keep your soul in check, t o steel yourself for daily conduct. But was it really ethics that you were after , Caesar? Wasn't it your extraordinary appetite for the infinite that drove you to the most minute self-scrutiny, since you considered yourself a fragment, no m atter how tiny, of the Whole, of the Universe and the Universe, you maintained, ch anges constantly. So whom were you checking, Marcus? Whose morality did you try and, for all I know, manage to prove? Small wonder, then, that you are not surpr ised to find yourself now among the barbarians; small wonder that you always wer e far less afraid of them than of yourself since you were afraid of yourself far m ore than of death. "Reflect that the chief source of all evils to man," says Epi ctetus, "as well as of baseness and cowardice, is not death but the fear of deat h." But you knew also that no man owns his future or, for that matter, his past. T hat all one stands to lose by dying is the day when it happens the day's remaining part, to be precise and in time's eye, still less. The true pupil of Zeno, weren' t you? At any rate, you wouldn't allow the prospect of nonbeing to color your be ing, Universe or no Universe. The eventual dance of particles, you held, should have no bearing on the animated body, not to mention on its reason. You were an island, Caesar, or at least your ethics were, an island in the primordial and pard on the expression postmordial ocean of free atoms. And your statue just marks the place on the map of the species' history where this island once stood: uninhabit ed, before submerging. The waves of doctrine and of creed of the Stoic doctrine an d the Christian creed have closed over your head, claiming you as their own Atlant is. The truth, though, is that you never were either's. You were just one of the best men that ever lived, and you were obsessed with your duty because you were obsessed with virtue. Because it's harder to master than the alternative and be cause, if the universal design had been evil, the world would not exist. Some wi ll point out no doubt that the doctrine and the creed came before and after you, but it's not history that defines the good. To be sure, time, conscious of its m onotony, calls forth men to tell its yesterday from its tomorrow. You, Caesar, w ere good because you didn't. xviiI saw him for the last time a few years ago, on a wet winter night, in the c ompany of a stray Dalmatian. I was returning by taxi to my hotel after one of th e most disastrous evenings in my entire life. The next morning I was leaving Rom e for the States. I was drunk. The traffic moved with the speed one wishes for o ne's funeral. At the foot of the Capitol I asked the driver to stop, paid, and g ot out of the car. The hotel was not far away and I guess I intended to continue on foot; instead, I climbed the hill. It was raining, not terribly hard but eno ugh to turn the floodlights of the square nay! trapeze into fizzing-off Alka-Seltzer pellets. I hid myself under the conservatory's arcade and looked around. The sq uare was absolutely empty and the rain was taking a crash course in geometry. Pr

esently I discovered I was not alone: a middle-sized Dalmatian appeared out of n owhere and quietly sat down a couple of feet away. Its sudden presence was so odd ly comforting that momentarily I felt like offering it one of my cigarettes. I g uess this had to do with the pattern of its spots; the dog's hide was the only p lace in the whole piazza free of human intervention. For a while we both stared at the horseman's statue. "The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now molds the figure of a horse, then melting this down uses the material for a tree, next for a man, next for something else; and each of th ese things subsists for a very short time. Yet it is no hardship for a box to be broken up, as it was none for it to be nailed together." This is what a boy memo rized at the age of fifteen and remembered thirty-five years later. Still, this horse didn't melt down, nor did this man. Apparently the universal nature was sa tisfied with this version of its substance and cast it in bronze. And suddenly pres umably because of the rain and the rhythmic pattern of Michelangelo's pilasters a nd arches all got blurred, and against that blur, the shining statue, devoid of an y geometry, seemed to be moving. Not at great speed, and not out of this place; but enough for the Dalmatian to leave my side and follow the bronze progress. xviii As absorbing as Roman antiquity appears to be, perhaps we should be a bit more c areful with our retrospective proclivity. What if man-made chronology is but a s elf-fulfilling fallacy, a means of obscuring the backwardness of one's own intell igence? What if it's just a way of justifying the snail's pace of the species' e volution? And what if the very notion of such evolution is a lie? Ultimately, wh at if this good old sense of history is just the dormant majority's self-defense against the alert minority? What if our concept of antiquity, for example, is b ut the switching off of an alarm clock? Let's take this horseman and his book. T o begin with, Meditations wasn't written in the second century a. d. , if only b ecause its author wasn't going by the Christian calendar. In fact, the time of i ts composition is of no relevance, since its subject is precisely ethics. Unless, of course, humanity takes a special pride in having wasted fifteen centuries be fore Marcus' insights were reiterated by Spinoza. Maybe we are just better at cou nting than at thinking, or else we mistake the former for the latter? Why is it that we are always so interested in knowing when truth was uttered for the first time? Isn't this sort of archaeology in itself an indication that we are living a lie? In any case, if Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins. If only because we believe that ethics has the future. Well, perhaps our retrospec tive ability should indeed be reined in somewhat, lest it become all-consuming. For if nothing else, ethics is the criterion of the present perhaps the only one t here is, since it turns every yesterday and tomorrow into now. It is precisely t hat sort of arrow that at every moment of its flight is immobile. Meditations is no existential manual and it wasn't written for posterity. Nor should we, for t hat matter, be interested in the identity of its author or promote him to the ra nk of philosopher-king: ethics is an equalizer; thus the author here is Everyman . His concept of duty cannot be attributed to his royal overdose of it, because he wasn't the only emperor around; neither can his resignation of the imperial o rigin, because one is able to empathize with it quite readily. Nor can we put it down to his philosophic training and for the same reasons: there were too many ph ilosophers apart from Marcus, and on the other hand, most of us are not Stoics. What if his sense of duty and his resignation were, in the first place, products of his individual temperament, of the melancholic disposition, if one wants to be precise; combined perhaps with the man's aging? There are, after all, only fo ur known humors; so at least the melancholies among us can take this book to hea rt and skip the bit about the historical perspective nobody possesses anyhow. As for the sanguinics, cholerics, and phleg- matics, they, too, perhaps should admi t that the melancholic version of ethics is accommodating enough for them to marv el at its pedigree and chronology. Perhaps short of compulsory Stoic indoctrinati on, society may profit by making a detectable melancholic streak a prerequisite for anyone aspiring to rule it. To this extent, a democracy can afford what an em pire could. And on top of that, one shouldn't call the Stoic acceptance of the p erceptible reality resignation. Serenity would be more apt, given the ratio betwe

en man and the subjects of his attention, or as the case may be vice versa. A grain of sand can't resign itself to the desert; and perhaps what's ultimately good ab out melancholies is that they seldom get hysterical. By and large, they are quit e reasonable, and, "what is reasonable," as Marcus once said, "is consequently s ocial." Did he say this in Greek, to fit your idea of antiquity? xix Of all Roman poets, Marcus knew best and preferred Seneca. Partly because Seneca , too, was of Spanish origin, sickly, and a great statesman; mainly, of course, because he was a Stoic. As for Catullus, Marcus would find him no doubt too hot and choleric. Ovid for him would be licentious and excessively ingenious, Virgil too heavy-handed and perhaps even servile, Propertius too obsessive and passiona te. Horace? Horace would seem to be the most congenial author for Marcus, what wi th his equipoise and attachment to the Greek monody. Yet perhaps our Emperor tho ught him too quirky, or too diverse and unsteady as well: in short, too much of a poet. In any case, there is almost no trace of Horace in Meditations, nor for that matter of the greatest among the Latins, Lucretius another you would think a natural choice for Marcus. But then perhaps a Stoic didn't want to be depressed by an Epicurean. On the whole, Marcus seems to have been far more fluent in Greek literature, preferring dramatists and philosophers to poets of course, though s natches from Homer, Agathon, and Menander crop up in his book quite frequently. Come to think of it, if anything makes antiquity a coherent concept, it is the vo lume of its literature. The library of someone like Marcus would contain a hundr ed or so authors; another hundred perhaps would be hearsay, a rumor. Those were the good old days indeed: antiquity or no antiquity. And even that rumored writi ng would be limited to two languages: Greek and Latin. If you were he, if you we re a Roman emperor, would you in the evening, to take your mind off your cares, read a Latin author if you had a choice? Even if he was Horace? No; too close fo r comfort. You'd pick up a Greek because that's what you'd never be. Because a Gre ek, especially a philosopher, is in your eyes a more genuine item than yourself, since he knew no Latin. If only because of that, he was less a relativist than y ou, who consider yourself practically a mongrel. So if he were a Stoic, you must take heed. You even may go so far as to take up a stylus yourself. Otherwise you might not fit into someone's notion of antiquity. XX A stray Dalmatian trotting behind the bronze horseman hears something strange, s ounding somewhat familiar but muffled by rain. He accelerates slightly and, havi ng overtaken the statue, lifts up his muzzle, hoping to grasp what's coming out o f the horseman's mouth. In theory it should be easy for him, since his Dalmatia was the birthplace of so many Caesars. He recognizes the language but fails to m ake out the accent: Take heed not to be transformed into Caesar, not to be dipped in purple dye; for it does happen. Keep yourself therefore simple, go pure, grave, unaffected, the friend of justice, religious, kind, affectionate, strong for your proper work. Wrestle to continue to be the man that Philosophy wished to make you. Reverence the gods, save men . . . Let not the future trouble you, for you will come to it, if come you must, beari ng with you the same reason which you are using now to meet the present. All things are the same: familiar in experience, transient in time, sordid in th eir material; all now such as in the days of those whom we have buried. To leave the company of men is nothing to fear, if gods exist; for they would no t involve you in ill . . . To turn against anything that comes to pass is a separation from nature. Men have come into the world for the sake of one another. Either instruct them, then, or bear with them. The universe is change, life is opinion. Run always the short road, and nature's road is short. As are your repeated imaginations, so will your mind be, for the soul is dyed by its imaginations. Love that to which you go back, and don't return to Philosophy as to a schoolmas ter, but as a man to the sponge and slave, as another to a poultice, another to

fomentation . . . The mind of the Whole is social. The noblest kind of retribution is not to become like your enemy. What doesn't benefit the hive is no benefit to the bee. On Pain: what we cannot bear removes us from life; what lasts can be borne. The understanding, too, preserves its own tranquillity by abstraction, and the govern ing self does not grow worse; but it is for the parts which are injured by pain, if they can, to declare it. There are three relations. One is to what surrounds you. One to the divine cause from which all things come to pass for all. One to those who live at the same t ime with you. Accept without pride, relinquish without struggle. And then there was nothing else, save the sound of rain crashing on Michelangelo 's flagstones, The Dalmatian darted across the square like a piece of unearthed marble. He was heading no doubt for antiquity, and carried in his ears his maste r's the statue's voice: To acquaint yourself with these things for a hundred years, or for three, is the same. preference for an archaic word, for instance, is dictated by his subject matter or his nerves rather than by a preconceived stylistic program. The same is true o f syntax, stan- zaic design, and the like. For sixty years Montale has managed t o sustain his poetry on a stylistic plateau, the altitude of which one senses ev en in translation. New Poems is, I believe, Montales sixth book to appear in English. But unlike pr evious editions, which aspired to give a comprehensive idea of the poet's entire career, this volume contains only poems written during the last decade, coincidi ng thus with Montales most recent (1971) collection Satura. And though it would be senseless to view them as the ultimate word of the poet, still because of their au thor's age and their unifying theme, the death of his wife each conveys to some ex tent an air of finality. For death as a theme always produces a self-portrait. In poetry, as in any other form of discourse, the addressee matters no less than the speaker. The protagonist of the New Poems is preoccupied with the attempt t o estimate the distance between himself and his "interlocutor" and then to figur e out the response "she" would have made had she been present. The silence into which his speech necessarily has been directed harbors, by implication, more in t he way of answers than human imagination can afford a fact which endows Montale's "her" with undoubted superiority. In this respect Montale resembles neither T. S. Eliot nor Thomas Hardy, with whom he has been frequently compared, but rather t he Robert Frost of the "New Hampshire period," with his idea that woman was creat ed out of mans rib (a nickname for heart), neither to be loved nor to be loving, nor to be judged, but to be "a judge of thee." Unlike Frost, however, Montale is dealing with a form of superiority that is a f ait accompli superiority in absentia and this stirs in him not so much a sense of g uilt as a feeling of disjunction: his persona in these poems has been exiled int o "outer time." This is, therefore, love poetry in which death plays approximately the same role it does in La Divina Commedia or in Petrarch's sonnets to Madonna Laura: the rol e of a guide. But here quite a different person is moving along familiar lines; his speech has nothing to do with sacred anticipation. What Montale displays in New Poems is that tenaciousness of imagination, that urge to outflank death, whi ch might enable a person, upon arriving in the domain of shadows and finding "Ki lroy was here," to recognize his own handwriting. Yet there is no morbid fascination with death, no falsetto in these poems; what the poet is talking about here is the absence which lets itself be felt in exact ly the same nuances of language and feeling as those which "she" once used to ma nifest "her" presence the language of intimacy. Hence the extremely private tone o f the poems: in their metrics and in their choice of detail. This voice, of a ma n speaking often muttering to himself, is generally the most conspicuous characteris

tic of Montale's poetry. But this time the personal note is enforced by the fact that the poet's persona is talking about things only the real he and the real sh e had knowledge of shoehorns, suitcases, the names of hotels where they used to st ay, mutual acquaintances, books . they had both read. Out of this sort of realia , and out of the inertia of intimate speech, emerges a private mythology Iwhich gradually acquires all the traits appropriate to any Jmythology, including surre alistic visions, metamorphoses, and the like. In this mythology, instead of some female- breasted sphinx, there is the image of "her," minus her glasses: this i s the surrealism of subtraction, and this subtraction, affecting either subject m atter or tonality, is what gives unity to this collection. Death is always a song of "innocence/' never of experience. And from the beginni ng of his career Montale shows his preference for song over confession. Although less explicit than the latter, a song is less repeatable; as is loss. Over the course of a lifetime, psychological acquisitions become more real than real esta te. There is nothing more moving than an alienated man resorting to elegy: With my arm in yours I have descended at least a million stairs, and now that you aren't here, a void opens at each step. Even so our long journey has been brief. Mine continues still, though I've no mo re use for connections, bookings;, traps, and the disenchantment of him who beli eves that the real is what one sees. I have descended millions of stairs with my arm in yours, not, of course, that with four eyes one might see better. I descended them because I knew that even though so bedimmed yours w ere the only true eyes. Other considerations aside, this reference to a continuing solitary descent of s tairs echoes something in La Divina Commedia. "Xenia I" and "Xenia II," as well as "Diary of 71" and "Diary of 72," the poems that make up the present volume, a re full of references to Dante. Sometimes a reference consists of a single word, sometimes an entire poem is an echo like No. 13 of "Xenia I/' which echoes the conc lusion of the twenty-first Song in the Purgatorio, the most stunning scene in th e whole Cantica. But what marks Montale's poetic and human wisdom is his rather b leak, almost exhausted, falling intonation. After all, he is speaking to a woman with whom he has spent many years: he knows her well enough to realize that she would not appreciate a tragic tremolo. He knows, certainly, that he is speaking into silence; the pauses that punctuate his lines suggest the closeness of that void, which is made somewhat familiar if not actually inhabited because of his bel ief that "she" might be somewhere out there. And it is the sense of her presence that keeps him from resorting to expressionistic devices, elaborate imagery, hi gh-pitched catch-phrases, and so forth. She who died would resent verbal flamboy ance as well. Montale is old enough to know that the classically "great" line, h owever immaculate its conception, flatters the audience and by and large is self -serving, whereas he is perfectly aware toward whom and where his speech is dire cted. In such an absence, art grows humble. For all our cerebral progress, we are still greatly subject to relapse into the Romantic (and, hence, Realistic as well) no tion that "art imitates life." If art does anything of this kind, it undertakes to reflect those few elements of existence which transcend "life," extend it bey ond its terminal point an undertaking which is frequently mistaken for art's or th e artist's own groping for immortality. In other words, art "imitates" death rat her than life; i.e., it imitates that realm of which life supplies no notion: re alizing its own brevity, art tries to domesticate the longest possible version o f time. After all, what distinguishes art from life is the ability of the former to produce a higher degree of lyricism than is possible within any human interpl ay. Hence poetry's affinity with if not the very invention of the notion of afterlif e. New Poems provides an idiom which is qualitatively new. It is largely Montale's own idiom, but some of it derives from the act of translation, whose limited mea ns only increase the original austerity. The cumulative effect of this book is s tartling, not so much because the psyche portrayed in New Poems has no previous record in world literature, as because it makes clear that such a mentality could

not be expressed in English as its original language. The question "why" may on ly obscure the reason, since even in Montale's native Italian such a mentality is strange enough to earn him the reputation of an exceptional poet. Poetry after all in itself is a translation; or, to put it another way, poetry i s one of the aspects of the psyche rendered in language. It is not so much that poetry is a form of art as that art is a form to which poetry often resorts. Ess entially, poetry is the articulation of perception, the translation of that perc eption into the heritage of lan- guage language is, after all, the best available tool. But for all the value of this tool in ramifying and deepening perceptions rev ealing sometimes more than was originally intended, which, in the happiest cases, merges with the perceptions every more or less experienced poet knows how much is left out or has suffered because of it. This suggests that poetry is somehow also alien or resistant to language, be it I talian, English, or Swahili, and that the human psyche because of its synthesizi ng nature is infinitely superior to any language we are bound to use (having som ewhat better chances with inflected ones). To say the least, if the psyche had i ts own tongue, the distance between it and the language of poetry would be approx imately the same as the distance between the latter and conversational Italian. Montale's idiom shortens both trips. New Poems ought to be read and reread a number of times, if not for the sake of analysis, the function of which is to return a poem to its stereoscopic origins th e way it existed in the" poet's mind then for the fugitive beauty of this subtle, muttering, and yet firm stoic voice, which tells us that the world ends with nei ther a bang nor a whimper but with a man talking, pausing, and then talking agai n. When you have had such a long life, anticlimax ceases to be just another devi ce. The book is certainly a monologue; it couldn't be otherwise when the interlocutor is absent, as is nearly always the case in poetry. Partly, however, the idea of monologue as a principal device springs from the "poetry of absence," another na me for the greatest literary movement since Symbolism a movement which came into ex istence in Europe, and especially in. Italy, in the twenties and thirties "Hermet icism." The following poem, which opens the present collection, is testimony to t he main postulates of the movement and is itself its triumph. (Tu in Italian is the familiar form of "you.") The Use of "Tu Misled by me the critics assert that my "tu" is an institution, that were it not for this fau lt of mine, they'd have known that the many in me are one, even though multiplie d by the mirrors. The trouble is that once caught in the net the bird doesn't kn ow if he is himself or one of his too many duplicates. Montale joined the Hermetic movement in the late thirties while living in Floren ce, where he moved in 1927 from his native Genoa. The principal figure in Hermet icism at that time was Giuseppe Ungaretti, who took the aesthetics of Mallarme s "Un Coup de Des" perhaps too much to heart. However, in order to comprehend the nature of Hermeticism fully it is worthwhile to take into account not only those who ran this movement, but also who ran the whole Italian show and that was II Du ce. To a large degree, Hermeticism was a reaction of the Italian intelligentsia to the political situation in Italy in the third and fourth decades of this cent ury and could be viewed as an act of cultural self-defense linguistic self-defense , in the case of poetry against Fascism. At least, to overlook this aspect of Herm eticism would be as much a simplification as frequently overstressing this aspect is. Although the Italian regime was far less carnivorous toward art than were its Ru ssian and German counterparts, the sense of its incompatibility with the traditi ons of Italian culture was much more apparent and intolerable than in those coun tries. It is almost a rule that in order to survive under totalitarian pressure art should develop density in direct proportion to the magnitude of that pressur e. The whole history of Italian culture supplied part of the required substance; the rest of the job fell to the Hermeticists, little though their name implied i t. What could be more odious for those who stressed literary asceticism, compactn

ess of language, emphasis on the word and its alliterative powers, sound versus or , rather, over meaning, and the like, than the propaganda verbosities and state-sp onsored versions of Futurism? Montale has the reputation of being the most difficult poet of this school and h e is certainly more difficult in the sense of being more complex than Ungaretti or S alvatore Quasimodo. But for all the overtones, reticence, merging of association s, or hints of associations in his work, its hidden references, substitutions of general statements for microscopic detail, elliptical speech, etc., it was he who wrote "La primavera Hitleriana" ("The Hitler Spring"), which begins: The dense white cloud of the mayflies crazily whirls around the pallid street la mps and over the parapets spread on the ground a blanket on which the foot grates as on sprinkled sugar . . . This image of the foot grating on the dead mayflies as on sprinkled sugar convey s such a toneless, deadpan unease and horror that when some fourteen lines below he says: it sounds like lyricism. Little in these lines recalls Hermet- icism, that ascet ic variant of Symbolism. Reality was calling for a more substantial response, an d World War II brought with it a "de-Hermetization." Still, the "Hermeticist" la bel became glued to Montale's back, and he has, ever since, been considered an " obscure" poet. But whenever one hears of obscurity, it is time to stop and ponde r one's notion of clarity, for it usually rests on what is already known or prefe rred, or, in the worst cases, remembered. In this sense, the more obscure, the b etter. In this sense, too, the obscure poetry of Montale still carries on a defe nse of culture, this time against a much more ubiquitous enemy: The man of today has inherited a nervous system which cannot withstand the prese nt conditions of life. While waiting for the man of tomorrow to be born, the man of today reacts to the altered conditions not by standing up to them or by ende avoring to resist their blows, but by turning into a mass. This passage is taken from Poet in Our Time, a collection of Montale's prose pie ces which he himself calls a "collage of notes." The pieces are excerpted from e ssays, reviews, interviews, etc., published at different times and in different p laces. The importance of this book goes far beyond the sidelights it casts on th e poet's own progress, if it does that at all. Montale seems to be the last pers on to disclose his inner processes of thought, let alone the "secrets of his cra ft." A private man, he prefers to make the public life the subject of his scruti ny, rather than the reverse. Poet in Our Time is a book concerned precisely with the results of such scrutiny, and its emphasis falls on "Our Time" rather than on "Poet."109 / In the Shadow of Dante Both the lack of chronology and the harsh lucidity of language in these pieces su pply this book with an air of diagnosis or of verdict The patient or the accused is the civilization which Relieves it is walking while in fact it is being carrie d along by a conveyor belt," but since the poet realizes that he is himself the flesh of this civilization's flesh, neither cure nor rehabilitation is implied. Poet in Our Time is, in fact, the disheartened, slightly fastidious testament of a man who doesn't seem to have inheritors other than the "hypothetical stereoph onic man of the future incapable even of thinking about his own destiny." This p articular vision surely sounds backward in our track-taped present, and it betra ys the fact that a European is speaking. It is hard, however, to decide which on e of Montale's visions is more frightening this one or the following, from his "Pi ccolo Testamento " a poem which easily matches Yeats's "Second Coming": Still, a good thing about testaments is that they imply a future. Unlike philoso phers or social thinkers, a poet ponders the future out of professional concern f or his audience or awareness of art's mortality. The second reason plays a bigge r part in Poet in Our Time because "the content of art is diminishing, just as t he difference between individuals is diminishing." The pages in this collection t hat do not sound either sarcastic or elegiac are those that deal with the art of letters: There remains the hope that the art of the word, an incurably semantic art, will sooner or later make its repercussions felt even in those arts which claim to h

ave freed themselves from every obligation toward the identification and represe ntation of truth. This is about as affirmative as Montale can be with respect to the art of letter s, which he does not spare, however, the following comment: To belong to a generation which can no longer believe in anything may be a cause of pride for anyone convinced of the ultimate nobility of this emptiness or of s ome mysterious need for it, but it does not excuse anyone who wants to transform this emptiness into a paradoxical affirmation of life simply in order to give h imself a style . . . It is a tempting and dangerous thing to quote Montale because it easily turns in to a full-time occupation. Italians have their way with the future, from Leonard o to Marinetti. Still, this temptation is due not so much to the aphoristic qual ity of Montale's statements or even to their prophetic quality as to the tone of his voice, which alone makes one trust his utterances because it is so free of anxiety. There is a certain air of recurrence to it, kindred to water coming ash ore or the invariable refraction of light in a lens. When one lives as long as h e has, "the provisional encounters between the real and the ideal" become frequen t enough for the poet both to develop a certain familiarity with the ideal and t o be able to foretell the possible changes of its features. For the artist, these changes are perhaps the only sensible measurements of time. There is something remarkable about the almost simultaneous appearance of these t wo books; they seem to merge. In the end, Poet in Our Time makes the most ap~ pr opriat illustration of the "outer time" inhabited by the persona of the New Poem s. Again, this is a reversal of La Divina Commedia, where this world was underst ood as "that realm." "Her" absence for Montale s persona is as palpable as "her" presence was for Dante's. The repetitive nature of existence in this afterlife now is, in its turn, kindred to Dante's circling among those "who died as men bef ore their bodies died." Poet in Our Time supplies us with a sketch and sketches ar e always somewhat more convincing than oils of that rather overpopulated spiral lan dscape of such dying yet living beings. This book doesn't sound very "Italian," although the old civilization contribute s a great deal to the accomplishment of this old man of letters. The words "Euro pean" and "international" when applied to Montale also look like tired euphemisms for "universal." Montale is one writer whose mastery of language stems from his spiritual autonomy; thus, both New Poems and Poet in Our Time are what booksuse d to be before they became mere books: chronicles of souls. Not that the latter need any. The last of the New Poems goes as follows: To Conclude I charge my descendants (if I have any) on the literary plane, which is rather improbable, to make a big bonfire of all that concerns my life7 my ac tions, my non-actions. Tm no Leopardi, I leave little behind me to be burnt, and it's already too much to live by percentages. I lived at the rate of five per c ent; don't increase the dose. And yet it never rains but it pours. 1977On Tyranny Illness and death are, perhaps, the only things that a tyrant has in common with his subjects. In this sense alone a nation profits from being run by an old man. It's not that one's awareness of one's own mortality necessarily enlightens or makes one mellow, but the time spent by a tyrant pondering, s<xy, his metabolism is time stolen from the affairs of state. Both domestic and international tranqu illities are in direct proportion to the number of maladies besetting your First Secretary of the Party, or your President-for-Life. Even if he is perceptive en ough to learn that additional art of callousness inherent in every illness, he i s usually quite hesitant to apply this acquired knowledge to his palace intrigue s or foreign policies, if only because he instinctively gropes for the restorati on of his previous healthy condition or simply believes in full recovery.In the case of a tyrant, time to think of the soul is always used for scheming to prese rve the status quo. This is so because a man in his position doesn't distinguish between the present, history, and eternity, fused into one by the state propagan da for both his and the population's convenience. He clings to power as any elde rly person does to his pension or savings. What sometimes appears as a purge in t he top ranks is perceived by the nation as an attempt to sustain the stability f

or which this nation opted in the first place by allowing the tyranny to be esta blished. The stability of the pyramid seldom depends on its pinnacle, and yet it is precis ely the pinnacle that attracts our attention. After a while a spectator's eye ge ts bored with its intolerable geometrical perfection and all but demands changes . When changes come, however, they are always for the worse. To say the least, a n old man fighting to avoid disgrace and discomfort, which are particularly unpl easant at his age, is quite predictable. Bloody and nasty as he may appear to be in that fight, it affects neither the pyramid's inner structure nor its externa l shadow. And the objects of his struggle, the rivals, fully deserve his vicious treatment, if only because of the tautology of their ambition in view of the di fference in age. For politics is but geometrical purity embracing the law of the jungle. Up there, on the head of the pin, there is room only for one, and he had better be old, since old men never pretend they are angels. The aging tyrant's sole pur pose is to retain his position, and his demagoguery and hypocrisy do not tax the minds of his subjects with the necessity of belief or textual proliferation. Whe reas the young upstart with his true or false zeal and dedication always ends up raising the level of public cynicism. Looking back on human history we can safe ly say that cynicism is the best yardstick of social progress. For new tyrants always introduce a new blend of hypocrisy and cruelty. Some are m ore keen on cruelty, others on hypocrisy. Think of Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, C astro, Qad- dafi, Khomeini, Amin, and so on. They always beat their predecessors in more ways than one, and give a new twist to the arm of the citizen as well a s to the mind of the spectator. For an anthropologist (an extremely aloof one at that) this kind of development is of great interest, for it widens one's notion of the species. It must be noted, however, that the responsibility for the afores aid processes lies as much with technological progress and the general growth of population as with the particular wickedness of a given dictator. Today, every new sociopolitical setup, be it a democracy or an authoritarian reg ime, is a further departure from the spirit of individualism toward the stampede of the masses. The idea of one's existential uniqueness gets replaced by that o f one's anonymity. An individual perishes not so much by the sword as by the pen is, and, however small a country is, it requires, or becomes subjected to, centr al planning. This sort of thing easily breeds various forms of autocracy, where tyrants themselves can be regarded as obsolete versions of computers. But if they were only the obsolete versions of computers, it wouldn't be so bad. The problem is that a tyrant is capable of purchasing new, state-of-the-art com puters and aspires to man them. Examples of obsolete forms of hardware running ad vanced forms are the Fiihrer resorting to the loudspeaker, or Stalin using the t elephone monitoring system to eliminate his opponents in the Politburo. People become tyrants not because they have a vocation for it, nor do they by pu re chance either. If a man has such a vocation, he usually takes a shortcut and becomes a family tyrant, whereas real tyrants are known to be shy and not terrib ly interesting family men. The vehicle of a tyranny is a political party (or mil itary ranks, which have a structure similar to that of the party), for in order to get to the top of something you need to have something that has a vertical to pography. Now, unlike a mountain or, better still, a skyscraper, a party is essentially a fictitious reality invented by the mentally or otherwise unemployed. They come to the world and find its physical reality, skyscrapers and mountains, fully occup ied. Their choice, therefore, is between waiting for an opening in the old system and creating a new, alternative one of their own. The latter strikes them as th e more expedient way to proceed, if only because they can start right away. Buil ding a party is an occupation in itself, and an absorbing one at that. It surely doesn't pay off immediately; but then again the labor isn't that hard and there is a great deal of mental comfort in the incoherence of the aspiration. In order to conceal its purely demographic origins, a party usually develops its own ideology and mythology. In general, a new reality is always created in the image of an old one, aping the existing structures. Such a technique, while obsc

uring the lack of imagination, adds a certain air of authenticity to the entire enterprise. That's why, by the way, so many of these people adore realistic art. On the whole, the absence of imagination is more authentic than its presence. T he droning dullness of a party program and the drab, unspectacular appearance of its leaders appeal to the masses as their own reflection. In the era of overpopu lation, evil (as well as good) becomes as mediocre as its subjects. To become a tyrant, one had better be dull. And dull they are, and so are their lives. Their only rewards are obtained while climbing: seeing rivals outdone, pushed away, demoted. At the turn of the centur y, in the heyday of political parties, there were the additional pleasures of, s ay, putting out a haywire pamphlet, or escaping police surveillance; of deliverin g a fervent oration at a clandestine congress or resting at the party's expense in the Swiss Alps or on the French Riviera. Now all that is gone: burning issues , false beards, Marxist studies. What's left is the waiting game of promotion, e ndless red tape, paper work, and a search for reliable pals. There isn't even th e thrill of watching your tongue, for it's surely devoid of anything worth the at tention of your fully bugged walls. What gets one to the top is the slow passage of time, whose only comfort is the sense of authenticity it gives to the undertaking: what's time-consuming is real . Even within the ranks of the opposition, party advancement is slow; as for the party in power, it has nowhere to hurry, and after half a century of domination is itself capable of distributing time. Of course, as regards ideals in the Vict orian sense of the word, the one-party system isn't very different from a modern version of political pluralism. Still, to join the only existing party takes mo re than an average amount of dishonesty. Nevertheless, for all your cunning, and no matter how crystal-clear your record is, you are not likely to make it to the Politburo before sixty. At this age lif e is absolutely irreversible, and if one grabs the reins of power, he unclenches his fists only for the last candle. A sixty-year-old man is not likely to try an ything economically or politically risky. He knows that he has a decade or so to go, and his joys are mostly of a gastronomical and a technological nature: an ex quisite diet, foreign cigarettes, and foreign cars. He is a status quo man, whic h is profitable in foreign affairs, considering his steadily growing stockpile o f missiles, and intolerable inside the country, where to do nothing means to wor sen the existing condition. And although his rivals may capitalize on the latter , he would rather eliminate them than introduce any changes, for one always feel s a bit nostalgic toward the order that brought one to success. The average length of a good tyranny is a decade and a half, two decades at most . When it's more than that, it invariably slips into a monstrosity. Then you may get the kind of grandeur that manifests itself in waging wars or internal terror , or both. Blissfully, nature takes its toll, resorting at times to the hands of the rivals just in time; that is, before your man decides to immortalize himself by doing something horrendous. The younger cadres, who are not so young anyway, press from below, pushing him into the blue yonder of pure Chronos. Because aft er reaching the top of the pinnacle that is the only way to continue. However, m ore often than not, nature has to act alone and encounter a formidable oppositio n from both the Organs of State Security and the tyrant's personal medical team. Foreign doctors are flown in from abroad to fish your man out from the depths o f senility to which he has sunk. Sometimes they succeed in their humanitarian mi ssion (for their governments are themselves deeply interested in the preservation of the status quo), enough to enable the great man to reiterate the death threat to their respective countries. In the end both give up; Organs perhaps less willingly than doctors, for medicin e has less in the way of a hierarchy which stands to be affected by the impendin g changes. But even the Organs finally get bored with their master, whom they ar e going to outlive anyway, and as the bodyguards turn their faces sideways, in s lips death with scythe, hammer, and sickle. The next morning the population is a wakened not by the punctual roosters but by waves of Chopin's Marche Funebre pou ring out of the loudspeakers. Then comes the military funeral, horses dragging t he gun carriage, preceded by a detachment of soldiers carrying on small scarlet

cushions the medals and orders that used to adorn the coat of the tyrant like th e chest of a prize- winning dog. For this is what he was: a prize- and race- win ning dog. And if the population mourns his demise, as often happens, its tears a re the tears of bettors who lost: the nation mourns its lost time. And then appe ar the members of the Politburo, shouldering the banner-draped coffin: the only denominator that they have in common. As they carry their dead denominator, cameras chirr and click, and both foreigne rs and the natives peer intently at tbr inscrutable faces, trying to pick out th e successor. The deceased may have been vain enough to leave a political testamen t, but it won't be made public anyway. The decision is to be made in secrecy, at a closed that is, to the population session of the Politburo. That is, clandestinely . Secretiveness is an old party hang-up, an echo of its demographic origin, of i ts glorious illegal past. And the faces reveal nothing. They do it all the more successfully because there is nothing to reveal. For it' s simply going to be more of the same. The new man will differ from the old man only physically. Mentally and otherwise he is bound to be the exact replica of th e corpse. This is perhaps the biggest secret there is. Come to think of it, the party's replacements are the closest thing we've got to resurrection. Of course, repetition breeds boredom, but if you repeat things in secret there is still roo m for fun. The funniest thing of all, however, is the realization that any one of these men can become a tyrant. That what causes all this uncertainty and confusion is jus t that the supply exceeds the demand. That we are dealing not with the tyranny o f an individual but with the tyranny of a party that simply has put the producti on of tyrants on an industrial footing. Which was very shrewd of this party in ge neral and very apt in particular, considering the rapid surrender of individuali sm as such. In other words, today the "who-is-going-to-be-who" guessing game is as romantic and antiquated as that of bilbo quet, and only freely elected people can indulge in playing it. The time is long since over for the aquiline profile s, goatees or shovel-like beards, walrus or toothbrush mustaches; soon it will b e over even for eyebrows. Still, there is something haunting about these bland, gray, undistinguished face s: they look like everyone else, which gives them an almost underground air; the y are similar as blades of grass. The visual redundance provides the "government of the people" principle with an additional depth: with the rule of nobodies. To be governed by nobodies, however, is a far more ubiquitous form of tyranny, sin ce nobodies look like everybody. They represent the masses in more ways than one, and that's why they don't bother with elections. It's a rather thankless task f or the imagination to think of the possible result of the "one man, one vote" sy stem in, for example, the one-billion-strong China: what kind of a parliament tha t could produce, and how many tens of millions would constitute a minority there . The upsurge of political parties at the turn of the century was the first cry of overpopulation, and that's why they score so well today. While the individualis ts were poking fun at them, they capitalized on depersonalization, and presently the individualists quit laughing. The goal, however, is neither the par ty's own nor some particular bureaucrat's triumph. True, they turned out to be ah ead of their time; but time has a lot of things ahead, and above all, a lot of p eople. The goal is to accommodate their numerical expansion in the non-expanding world, and the only way to achieve it is through the depersonalization and bure aucratization of everybody alive. For life itself is a common denominator; that's enough of a premise for structuring existence in a more detailed fashion. And a tyranny does just that: structures your life for you. It does this as meti culously as possible, certainly far better than a democracy does. Also, it does it for your own sake, for any display of individualism in a crowd may be harmful: first of all for the person who displays it- but one should care about those ne xt to him as well. This is what the party- run state, with its security service, mental institutions, police, and citizens' sense of loyalty, is for. Still, all these devices are not enough: the dream is to make every man his own bureaucrat . And the day when such a dream comes true is very much in sight. For bureaucrat

ization of individual existence starts with thinking politics, and it doesn't : s top with the acquisition of a pocket calculator. So if one still feels elegiac at the tyrant's funeral, it's mostly for autobiogr aphical reasons, and because this de- I parture makes one's nostalgia for "the g ood old days" even ^ more concrete. After all, the man was also a product of the ' old school, when people still saw the difference between \ what they were say ing and what they were doing. If he J doesn't deserve more than a line in histor y, well, so much the better: he just didn't spill enough of his subjects' blood - for a paragraph. His mistresses were on the plump side and few. He didn't write much, nor did he paint or play a musical instrument; he didn 't introduce a new style in furniture either. He was a plain tyrant, and yet lea ders of the greatest democracies eagerly sought to shake his hand. In short, he didn't rock the boat. And it's partly thanks to him that as we open our windows in the morning, the horizon there is still not vertical. Because of the nature of his job, nobody knew his real thoughts. It's quite prob able that he didn't know them himself. That would do for a good epitaph, except t hat there is an anecdote the Finns tell about the will of their Presi- dent-forLife Urho Kekkonnen which begins as follows: "If I die..." 1980The Child of Civilization For some odd reason, the expression "death of a poet" always sounds somewhat mor e concrete than "life of a poet" Perhaps this is because both "life" and "poet," as words, are almost synonymous in their positive vagueness. Whereas "death" even as a word is about as definite as poet's own production, i.e., a poem, the main f eature of which is its last line. Whatever a work of art consists of, it runs to the finale which makes for its form and denies resurrection. After the last lin e of a poem nothing follows except literary criticism. So when we read a poet, w e participate in his or his works' death. In the case of Mandel- stam, we partici pate in both. A work of art is always meant to outlast its maker. Paraphrasing the philosopher, one could say that writing poetry, top, is an exercise in dying. But apart from pure linguistic necessity, what makes one write is not so much a concern for on e's perishable flesh as the urge to spare certain things of one's world of one's p ersonal civilization one's own non-semantic continuum. Art is not a better, but an alternative existence; it is not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate it. It is a spirit seeking flesh but finding words. In the case of Mandelstam, the words happened to be those of the Russian language. For a spirit, perhaps, there is no better accommodation: Russian is a very infle cted language. What this means is that the noun could easily be found sitting at the very end of the sentence, and that the ending of this noun (or adjective, or verb) varies according to gender, number, and case. All this provides any given verbalization with the stereoscopic quality of the perception itself, and (somet imes) sharpens and develops the latter. The best illustration of this is Mandelst am's handling of one of the main themes of his poetry, the theme of time. There is nothing odder than to apply an analytic device to a synthetic phenomeno n; for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet. Yet in dealing with M andelstam it wouldn't be much easier to apply such a device in Russian either. P oetry is the supreme result of the entire language, and to analyze it is but to diffuse the focus. It is all the more true of Mandelstam, who is an extremely lo nely figure in the context of Russian poetry, and it is precisely the density of his focus that accounts for his isolation. Literary criticism is sensible only when the critic operates on the same plane of both psychological and linguistic regard. The way it looks now, Mandelstam is bound for a criticism coming strictl y "from below" in either language. The inferiority of analysis starts with the very notion of theme, be it a theme of time, love, or death. Poetry is, first of all, an art of references, allusion s, linguistic and figurative parallels. There is an immense gulf between Homo sa piens and Homo scribens, because for the writer the notion of theme appears as a result of combining the above techniques and devices, if it appears at all. Writ ing is literally an existential process; it uses thinking for its own ends, it c onsumes notions, themes, and the like, not vice versa. What dictates a poem is t

he language, and this is the voice of the language, which we know under the nick names of Muse or Inspiration. It is better, then, to speak not about the theme o f time in Mandelstam's poetry, but about the presence of time itself, both as an entity and as a theme, if only because time has its seat within a poem anyway, and it is a caesura. It is because we know this full well that Mandelstam, unlike Goethe, never excla ims "O moment, stay! Thou art so very fair!" but merely tries to extend his caes ura. What is more, he does it not so much because of this moment's particular fa irness or lack of fairness; his concern (and subsequently his technique) is quit e different. It was the sense of an oversaturated existence that the young Mande lstam Wui trying to convey in his first two collections, and he chose the portray al of overloaded time as his medium. Using all the phonetic and allusory power o f words themselves, Mandelstam's verse in that period expresses the slowing-down, viscous sensation of time's passage. Since he succeeds (as he always does), the effect is that the reader realizes that the words, even their letters vowels espec ially are almost palpable vessels of time. On the other hand, his is not at all that search for bygone days with its obsess ive gropings to recapture and to reconsider the past. Mandelstam seldom looks bac kward in a poem; he is all in the present in this moment, which he makes continue, linger beyond its own natural limit. The past, whether personal or historical, has been taken care of by the words' own etymology. But however un-Proustian his treatment of time is, the density of his verse is somewhat akin to the great Fre nchman's prose. In a way, it is the same total warfare, the same frontal attack bu t in this case, an attack on the present, and with resources of a different nature. It is e xtremely important to note, for instance, that in almost every case when Mandelst am happens to deal with this theme of time, he resorts to a rather heavily caesu raed verse which echoes the hexameter either 1 in its beat or in its content. It is usually an iambic pentam- I eter lapsing into alexandrine verse, and there i s always a paraphrase or a direct reference to either of Homer's epics. As a rul e, this kind of poem is set somewhere by the sea, in late summer, which directly or indirectly evokes the ancient Greek background. This is partly because of Rus sian poetry's traditional regard for the Crimea and the Black Sea as the only av ailable approximation of the Greek world, of which these places Taurida and Pontus Euxinus used to be the outskirts. Take, for instance, poems like "The stream of t he golden honey was pouring so slow . . . ," "Insomnia. Homer. Tautly swelling sa ils . . . and "There are orioles in woods and lasting length of vowels," where t here are these lines: . . . Yet nature once a year Is bathed in lengthiness as in Homeric meters. Like a caesura that day yawns . . . The importance of this Greek echo is manifold. It might seem to be a purely tech nical issue, but the point is that the alexandrine verse is the nearest kin to h exameter, if only in terms of using a caesura. Speaking of relatives, the mother of all Muses was Mnemosyne, the Muse of Memory, and a poem (be it a short one o r an epic) must be memorized in order to survive. Hexameter was a remarkable mnem onic device, if only because of being so cumbersome and different from the collo quial speech of any audience, Homer s included. So by referring to this vehicle of memory within another one i.e., within his alexandrine verse Mandelstam, along w ith producing an almost physical sensation of time's tunnel, creates the effect o f a play within a play, of a caesura within a caesura, of a pause within a pause . Which is, after all, a form of time, if not its meaning: if time does not get s topped by that, it at least gets focused. Not that Mandelstam does this consciously, deliberately. Or that this is his mai n purpose while writing a poem. He does it offhandedly, in subordinate clauses, while writing (often about something else), never by writing to " this point. His i s not topical poetry. Russian poetry on the whole is not very topical. Its basic technique is one of beating around the bush, approaching the theme from various angles. The clear-cut treatment of the subject matter, which is so characteristi c of poetry in English, usually gets exercised within this or that line, and the

n a poet moves on to something else; it seldom makes for an entire poem. Topics and concepts, regardless of their importance, are but material, like words, and they are always there. Language has names for all of them, and the poet is the on e who masters language. Greece was always there, so was Rome, and so were the .-biblical Judea and Chris tianity. The cornerstones of our !'; civilization, they are treated by Mandelsta m's poetry in ;;approximately the same way time itself would treat them: las a u nity and in their unity. To pronounce Mandel- |am an adept at either ideology (and especially at the latter) is not only to miniaturize him but to distort his his torical perspective, or rather his historical landscape. Thematically, Mandelsta m's poetry repeats the development of our civilization: it flows north, but the p arallel streams in this current mingle with each other from the very beginning. Toward the twenties, the Roman themes gradually overtake the Greek and biblical references, largely because of the poet's growing identification with the archet ypal predicament of "a poet versus an empire." Still, what created this kind of attitude, apart from the purely political aspects of the situation in Russia at the time, was Mandelstam's own estimate of his work's relation to the rest of co ntemporary literature, as well as to the moral climate and the intellectual conc erns of the rest of the nation. It was the moral and the mental degradation of th e latter which were suggesting this imperial scope. And yet it was only a themat ic overtaking, never a takeover. Even in "Tristia," the most Roman poem, where t he author clearly quotes from the exiled Ovid, one can trace a certain Hesi- odi c patriarchal note, implying that the whole enterprise was being viewed through a somewhat Greek prism. Later, in the thirties, during what is known as the Voronezh period, when all th ose themes including Rome and Christianity yielded to the "theme" of bare existential horror and a terrifying spiritual acceleration, the pattern of interplay, of int erdependence between those realms, becomes even more obvious and dense. It is not that Mandelstam was a "civilized" poet; he was rather a poet for and o f civilization. Once, on being asked to define Acmeism the literary movement to wh ich he belonged he answered: "nostalgia for a world culture." This notion of a wor ld culture is distinctly Russian. Because of its location (neither East nor West ) and its imperfect history, Russia has always suffered from a sense of cultural inferiority, at least toward the West. Out of this inferiority grew the ideal o f a certain cultural unity "out there" and a subsequent intellectual voracity to ward anything coming from that direction. This is, in a way, a Russian version o f Hellenicism, and Mandelstam's remark about Pushkin's "Hellenistic paleness" wa s not an idle one. The mediastinum of this Russian Hellenicism was St. Petersburg. Perhaps the best emblem for Mandelstam's attitude toward this so-called world culture could be t hat strictly classical portico of the St. Petersburg Admiralty decorated with re liefs of trumpeting angels and topped with a golden spire bearing a silhouette o f a clipper at its tip. In order to understand his poetry better, the English- s peaking reader perhaps ought to realize that Mandelstam was a Jew who was living in the capital of Imperial Russia, whose dominant religion was Orthodoxy, whose political structure was inherently Byzantine, and whose alphabet had been devis ed by two Greek monks. Historically speaking, this organic blend was most strongl y felt in Petersburg, which became Mandelstam's "familiar as tears" eschato- log ical niche for the rest of his not-that-long life. It was long enough,, however, to immortalize this place, and if his poetry was s ometimes called "Petersburgian," there is more than one reason to consider this definition both accurate and complimentary. Accurate because, apart from being t he administrative capital of the empire, Petersburg was also the spiritual cente r of it, and in the beginning of the century the strands of that current were me rging there the way they do in Mandelstam's poems. Complimentary because both th e poet and the city profited in meaning by their confrontation. If the West was Athens, Petersburg in the teens of this century was Alexandria. This "window on Europe," as Petersburg was called by some gentle souls of the Enlightenment, thi s "most invented city," as it was defined later by Dostoevsky, lying at the lati tude of Vancouver, in the mouth of a river as wide as the Hudson between Manhatta

n and New Jersey, was and is beautiful with that kind of beauty which happens to be caused by madness or which tries to conceal this madness. Classicism never had so much room, and the Italian architects who kept being invited by successive R ussian monarchs understood this all too well. The giant, infinite, vertical rafts of white columns from the fagades of the embankments' palaces belonging to the Czar, his family, the aristocracy, embassies, and the nouveaux riches are carrie d by the reflecting river down to the Baltic. On the main avenue of the empire Nev sky Prospect there are churches of all creeds. The endless, wide streets are fille d with cabriolets, newly introduced automobiles, idle, well-dressed crowds, first -class boutiques, confectioneries, etc. Immensely wide squares with mounted statu es of previous rulers and triumphal columns taller than Nelson's. Lots of publis hing houses, magazines, newspapers, political parties (more than in contemporary America), theaters, restaurants, gypsies. All this is surrounded by the brick Bi rnam Wood of the factories' smoking chimneys and covered by the damp, gray, widesprea d blanket of the Northern Hemisphere's sky. One war is lost, another a world war is i mpending, and you are a little Jewish boy with a heart full of Russian iambic pen tameters. In this giant-scale embodiment of perfect order, iambic beat is as natural as cob blestones. Petersburg is a cradle of Russian poetry and, what is more, of its pr osody. The idea of a noble structure, regardless of the quality of the content ( sometimes precisely against its quality, which creates a terrific sense of dispa rity indicating not so much the author's but the verse's own evaluation of the des cribed phenomenon), is utterly local. The whole thing started a century ago, and Mandelstam's usage of strict meters in his first book, Stone, is clearly remini scent of Pushkin, and of his pleiad. And yet, again, it is not a result of some conscious choice, nor is it a sign of Mandelstam's style being predetermined by the preceding or contemporary processes in Russian poetry. The presence of an echo is the primal trait of any good acoustics, and Mandelsta m merely made a great cupola for his predecessors. The most distinct voices unde rneath it belong to Derzhavin, Baratynsky, and Batyushkov. To a great extent, ho wever, he was acting very much on his own in spite of any existing idiom especiall y the contemporary one. He simply had too much to say to worry about his stylist ic uniqueness. But this overloaded quality of his otherwise regular verse was wh at made him unique. Ostensibly, his poems did not look so different from the work of the Symbolists, who were dominating the literary scene: he was using fairly regular rhymes, a s tandard stan- zaic design, and the length of his poems was quite ordinary from si xteen to twenty-four lines. But by using these humble means of transportation he was taking his reader much farther than any of those cozy-because-vague meta- p hysicists who called themselves Russian Symbolists. As a movement, Symbolism was surely the last great one (and not only in Russia); yet poetry is an extremely individualistic art, it resents isms. The poetic production of Symbolism was as vo luminous and seraphic as the enrollment and postulates of this movement were. Th is soaring upward was so groundless that graduate students, military cadets, and clerks felt tempted, and by the turn of the century the genre was compromised t o the point of verbal inflation, somewhat like the situation with free verse in America today. Then, surely, devaluation as reaction came, bearing the names of Futurism, Constructivism, Imagism, and so forth. Still, these were isms fighting isms, devices fighting devices. Only two poets, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, came up with a qualitatively new content, and their fate reflected in its dreadful wa y the degree of their spiritual autonomy. In poetry, as anywhere else, spiritual superiority is always disputed at the phy sical level. One cannot help thinking it was precisely the rift with the Symboli sts (not entirely without anti-Semitic overtones) which contained the germs of M andelstam's future. I am not referring so much to Georgi Ivanov's sneering at Ma ndelstam's poem in 1917, which was then echoed by the official ostracism of the thirties, as to Mandelstam's growing separation from any form of mass production , especially linguistic and psychological. The result was an effect in which the clearer a voice gets, the more dissonant it sounds. No choir likes it, and the a

esthetic isolation acquires physical dimensions, When a man creates a world of h is own, he becomes a foreign body against which all laws are aimed: gravity, com pression, rejection, annihilation. Mandelstam's world was big enough to invite all of these. I don't think that, ha d Russia chosen a different historical path, his fate would have been that much different. His world was too autonomous to merge. Besides, Russia went the way s he did, and for Mandelstam, whose poetic development was rapid by itself, that di rection could bring only one thing a terrifying acceleration. This acceleration aff ected, first of all, the character of his verse. Its sublime, meditative, caesur aed flow changed into a swift, abrupt, pattering movement. His became a poetry o f high velocity and exposed nerves, sometimes cryptic, with numerous leaps over the self-evident with somewhat abbreviated syntax. And yet in this way it became more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song, with its shar p, unpredictable turns and pitches, something like a goldfinch tremolo. And like that bird, he became a target for all kinds of stones generously hurled at him by his motherland. It is not that Mandelstam opposed the political chang es taking place in Russia. His sense of measure and his irony were enough to ack nowledge the epic quality of the whole undertaking. Besides, he was a paganistica lly buoyant person, and, on the other hand, whining intonations were completely u surped by the Symbolist movement. Also, since the beginning of the century, the air was full of loose talk about a redivision of the world, so that when the Rev olution came, almost everyone took what had occurred for what was desired. Mandelstam's was perhaps the only sober response to the events which shook the world and made so many thoughtful heads dizzy: Well, let us try the cumbersome, the awkward, The screeching turning of the whee l . . . (from, "The Twilight of Freedom") But the stones were already flying, and so was the bird. Their mutual trajectori es are fully recorded in the memoirs of the poet's widow, and they took two volu mes. These books are not only a guide to his verse, though they are that too. Bu t any poet, no matter how much he writes, expre^es in his verse, physically or s tatistically speaking, at most one-tenth of his life's reality. The rest is norm ally shrouded in darkness; if any testimony by contemporaries survives, it conta ins gaping voids, not to mention the differing angles of vision that distort the object. The memoirs of Osip Mandelstam's widow take care precisely of that, of those nine -tenths. They illuminate the darkness, fill in the voids, eliminate the distorti on. The net result is close to a resurrection, except that everything that kille d the man, outlived him, and continues to exist and gain popularity is also rein carnated, reenacted in these pages. Because of the material's lethal power, the poet's widow re-creates these elements with the care used in defusing a bomb. Bec ause of this precision and because of the fact that through his verse, by the ac ts of his life, and by the quality of his death somebody called forth great pros e, one would instantly understand even without knowing a single line by Mandelstam that it is indeed a great poet being recalled in these p ages: because of the quantity and energy of the evil directed against him. Still, it is important to note that Mandelstam's attitude toward a new historica l situation wasn't at all that of outright hostility. On the whole he regarded it as just a harsher form of existential reality, as a qualitatively new challenge . Ever since the Romantics we have had this notion of a poet throwing down the g love to his tyrant. Now if there ever was such a time at all, this sort of actio n is utter nonsense today: tyrants do not make themselves available for such a t ete-a-tete any longer. The distance between us and our masters can be reduced on ly by the latter, which seldom happens. A poet gets into trouble because of his linguistic, and, by implication, his psychological superiority, rather than beca use of his polities. A song is a form of linguistic disobedience, and its sound casts a doubt on a lot more than a concrete political system: it questions the e ntire existential order. And the number of its adversaries grows proportionally. It would be a simplification to think that it was the poem against Stalin which

brought about Mandelstam's doom. This poem, for all its destructive power, was j ust a byproduct of Mandelstam's treatment of the theme of this not-so-new era. Fo r that matter, there's a much more devastating line in the poem called "Ariosto" written earlier the same year (1933): "Power is repulsive as are the barber's fi ngers . . There were plenty of others, too. And yet I think that by themselves t hese mug-slapping comments wouldn't invite the law of annihilation. The iron bro om that was walking across Russia could have missed him if he were merely a poli tical poet or a lyrical poet spilling here and there into politics. After all, h e got his warning and he could have learned from that as many others did. Yet he didn't because his instinct for self-preservation had long since yielded to his aesthetics. It was the immense intensity of lyricism in Mandelstam's poetry whic h set him apart from his contemporaries and made him an orphan of his epoch, "ho meless on an all-union scale." For lyricism is the ethics of language and the su periority of this lyricism to anything that could be achieved within human inter play, of whatever denomination, is what makes for a work of art and lets it surv ive. That is why the iron broom, whose purpose was the spiritual castration of t he entire populace, couldn't have missed him. It was a case of pure polarization. Song is, after all, re- Istrw ured time, tow ard which mute space is inherently ihostile. The first has been represented by M andelstam; the second 'chose the state as its weapon. There is a certain terrify ing logic in the location of that concentration camp where Osip Mandelstam died in 1938: near Vladivostok, in the very bowels of the state-owned space. This is about as far as one can get from Petersburg inside Russia. And here is how high one can get in poetry in terms of lyricism (the poem is in memory of a woman, Ol ga Vaksel, who reportedly died in Sweden, and was written while Mandelstam was li ving in Voronezh, where he was transferred from his previous place of exile near the Ural Mountains after having -a nervous breakdown). Just four lines: . . . And stiff swallows of round eyebrows (a) ?flew (b)from the grave to me to tell me they've rested enough in their (a) cold Stockholm bed (b). Imagine a four-foot amphibrach with alternating (a b a b) rhyme. This strophe is an apotheosis of restructuring time. For one thing, language is itself a product of the past. The return of these stiff swallows implies both th e recurrent character of their presence and of the simile itself, either as an i ntimate thought or as a spoken phrase. Also, "flew ... to me" suggests spring, re turning seasons. "To tell me they've rested enough," too, suggests past: past im perfect because not attended. And then the last line makes a full circle because the adjective "Stockholm" exposes the hidden allusion to Hans Christian Andersen' s children's story about the wounded swallow wintering in the mole's hole, then recovering and flying home. Every schoolboy in Russia knows this story. The cons cious process of remembering turns out to be strongly rooted in the subconscious memory and creates a sensation of sorrow so piercing, it's as if this is not a suffering man we hear but the very voice of his wounded psyche. This kind of voi ce surely clashes with everything, even with its medium's i.e., poet's life. It is l ike Odysseus tying himself to a mast against the call of his soul; this and not on ly the fact that Mandelstam is married is why he is so elliptical here. He worked in Russian poetry for thirty years, and what he did will last as long as the Russian language exists. It will certainly outlast the present and any su bsequent regime in that country, because of both its lyricism and its profundity. Quite frankly, I don't know anything in the poetry of the world comparable to t he revelatory quality of these four lines from his "Verses on the Unknown Soldie r," written just a year prior to his death: An Arabian mess and a muddle, The light of speeds honed into a beam And with its slanted soles, A ray balances on my retina... There is almost no grammar here but it is not a modernistic device, it is a resu lt of an incredible psychic, acceleration, which at other times was responsible for the breakthroughs of Job and Jeremiah. This honing of speeds is as much a se lf-portrait as an incredible insight into astrophysics. What he heard at his bac k "hurrying near" wasn't any "winged chariot" but his "wolf-hound century," and he ran till there was space. When space ended, he hit time. Which is to say, us. This pronoun stands not only for his Ru sian- but also for

his English-speaking readers. Perhaps more than anyone in this century, he was a poet of civilization: he contributed to what had inspired him. One may even arg ue that he became a part of it long before he met death. Of course he was a Russ ian, but not any more so than Giotto was an Italian. Civilization is the sum tot al of different cultures animated by a common spiritual numerator, and its main vehicle speaking both metaphorically and literally is translation. The wandering of a Greek portico into the latitude of the tundra is a translation. His life, as well as his death, was a result of this civilization. With a poet, o ne's ethical posture, indeed one's very temperament, is determined and shaped by one's aesthetics. This is what accounts for poets finding themselves invariably at odds with the social reality, and their death rate indicates the distance whi ch that reality puts between itself and civilization. So does the quality of tra nslation. A child of a civilization based on the principles of order and sacrifice, Mandel stam incarnated both; and it is only fair to expect from his translators at leas t a semblance of parity. The rigors involved in producing an echo, formidable th ough they may seem, are in themselves an homage to that nostalgia for the world culture which drove and fashioned the original. The formal aspects of Mandelstam 's verse are not the product of some backward poetics but, in effect, columns of the aforesaid portico. To remove them is not only to reduce one's own "architec ture" to heaps of rubble and shacks: it is to lie about what the poet has lived and died for. Translation is a search for an equivalent, not for a substitute. It requires styl istic, if not psychological, congeniality. For instance, the stylistic idiom tha t could be used in translating Mandelstam is that of the late Yeats (with whom he has much in common thematically as well). The trouble of course is that a perso n who can master such an idiom if such a person exists will no doubt prefer to writ e his own verse anyway and not rack his brains over translation (which doesn't p ay that well besides). But apart from technical skills and even psychological co ngeniality, the most crucial thing that a translator of Mandelstam should posses s or else develop is a like-minded sentiment for ci vihzation. Mandelstam is a formal poet in the highest sense of the word. For him, a poem be gins with a sound, with "a sonorous molded shape of form," as he himself called i t. The absence of this notion reduces even the most accurate rendition of his im agery to a stimulating read. "I alone in Russia work from the voice, while all round the unmitigated muck scribbles," say s Mandelstam of himself in his "Fourth Prose." This is said with the fury and di gnity of a poet who realized that the source of his creativity conditioned its m ethod. It would be futile and unreasonable to expect a translator to follow suit: the v oice one works from and by is bound to be unique. Yet the timbre, pitch, and pac e reflected in the verse's meter are approachable. It should be remembered that v erse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing ca n be substituted. They cannot be replaced even by each other, let alone by free v erse. Differences in meters are differences in breath and in heartbeat. Differenc es in rhyming pattern are those of brain functiris. The cavalier treatment of ei ther is at best a sacrilege, at worst a mutilation or a murder. In any case, it i s a crime of the mind, for which its perpetrator especially if he is not caught pays with the pace of his intellectual degradation. As for the readers, they buy a l ie. Yet the rigors involved in producing a decent echo are too high. They excessivel y shackle individuality. Calls for the use of an "instrument of poetry in our ow n time" are too strident. And translators rush to find substitutes. This happens primarily because such translators are themselves usually poets, and their own individuality is dearest of all to them. Their conception of individuality simpl y precludes the possibility of sacrifice, which is the primary feature of mature individuality (and also the primary requirement of any even a technical translation ). The net result is that a poem of Mandelstam's, both visually and in its textu re, resembles some witless Neruda piece or one from Urdu or Swahili. If it survi ves, this is due to the oddity of its imagery, or of its intensity, acquiring in

the eyes of the reader a certain ethnographic significance. *I don't see why Ma ndelstam is considered a great poet," said the late W. H. Auden. "The translatio ns that I've seen don't convince me of it." Small wonder. In the available versions, one encounters an absolutely impersonal product, a sort of common denominator of modern verbal art. If they were simply bad translations, that wouldn't be so bad. For bad translations, precisely becau se of their badness, stimulate the reader's imagination and provoke a desire to break through or abstract oneself from the text: they spur one's intuition. In t he cases at hand this possibility is practically ruled out: these versions bear the imprint of self-assured, insufferable stylistic provincialism; and the only optimistic remark one can make regarding them is that such low-quality art is an unquestionable sign of a culture extremely distant from decadence. Russian poetry on the whole, and Mandelstam in particular, does not deserve to be treated as a poor relation. The language and its literature, especially its poe try, are the best things that that country has. Yet it is not concern for Mandel stam's or Russia's prestige that makes one shudder at what has been done to his lines in English: it is rather a sense of plundering the English-language cultur e, of degrading its own criteria, of dodging the spiritual challenge. "O.K.," a y oung American poet or reader of poetry may conclude after perusing these volumes , "the same thing goes on over there in Russia." But what goes on over there is not at all the same thing. Apart from her metaphors, Russian poetry has set an e xample of moral purity and firmness, which to no small degree has been reflected in the preservation of so-called classical forms without any damage to content. Herein lies her distinction from her Western sisters, though in no way does one presume to judge whom this distinction favors most. However, it is a distinction , and if only for purely ethnographic reasons, that quality ought to be preserve d in translation and not forced into some common mold. A poem is the result of a certain necessity: it is inevitable, and so is its for m. "Necessity," as the poet's widow Nadezhda Mandelstam says in her "Mozart and Salieri" (which is a must for everyone interested in the psychology of creativit y), "is not a compulsion and is not the curse of determinism, but is a link betw een times, if the torch inherited from forebears has not been trampled." Necessit ies of jurse cannot be echoed; but a translator's disregard for forms which are illumined and hallowed by time is nothing but stamping out that torch. The only good thing about the theories put forth to justify this practice is that their a uthors get paid for stating their views in print. As though it is aware of the fragility and treachery of man's faculties and sens es, a poem aims at human memory. To that end, it employs a form which is essenti ally a mnemonic device allowing one's brain to retain a world and simplifying the t ask of retaining it when the rest of one's frame gives up. Memory usually is the l ast to go, as if it were trying to keep a record of the going itself. A poem thu s may be the last thing to leave one's drooling lips. Nobody expects a native Eng lish speaker to mumble at that moment verses of a Russian poet. But if he mumble s something by Auden or Yeats or Frost he will be closer to Mandelstam's origina ls than current translators are. In other words, the English-speaking world has yet to hear this nervous, high-pi tched, pure voice shot through with love, terror, memory, culture, faith a voice t rembling, perhaps, like a match burning in a high wind, yet utterly inextinguisha ble. The voice that stays behind when its owner is gone. He was, one is tempted to say, a modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow dodge d across one-sixth of the earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in the event they were found by Furi es with a search warrant. These are our metamorphoses, our myths. 1977JVadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary Of the eighty-one years of her life, Nadezhda Mandelstam spent nineteen as the w ife of Russia's greatest poet in this century, Osip Mandelstam, and forty-two as his widow. The rest was childhood and youth. In educated circles, especially am ong the literati, being the widow of a great man is enough to provide an identit y. This is especially so in Russia, where in the thirties and in the forties the regime was producing writers' widows with such efficiency that in the middle of

the sixties there were enough of them around to organize a trade union. "Nadya is the most fortunate widow," Anna Akhmatova used to say, having in mind the universal recognition coming to Osip Mandelstam at about that time. The focus of this remark was, understandably, her fellow poet, and right though she was, this was the view from the outside. By the time this recognition began to arrive , Mme Mandelstam was already in her sixties, her health extremely precarious and her means meager. Besides, for all the universality of that recognition, it did not include the fabled "one-sixth of the entire planet," i.e., Russia itself. B ehind her were already two decades of widowhood, utter deprivation, the Great (o bliterating any personal loss) War, and the daily fear of being grabbed by the a gents of State Security as a wife of an enemy of the people. Short of death, any thing that followed could mean only respite. I met her for the first time precisely then, in the winter of 1962, in the city of Pskov, where together with a couple of friends I went to take a look at the l ocal churches (the finest, in my view, in the empire). Having learned about our intentions to travel to that city, Anna Akhmatova suggested we visit Nadezhda Ma ndelstam, who was teaching English at the local pedagogical institute, and gave us several books for her. That was the first time I heard her name: I didn't kno w that she existed. She was living in a small communal apartment consisting of two rooms. The first room was occupied by a woman whose name, ironically enough, was Nyetsvetaeva (li terally: Non-Tsvetaeva), the second was Mme Mandelstam's. It was eight square me ters large, the size of an average American bathroom. Most of the space was take n up by a cast-iron twin-sized bed; there were also two wicker chairs, a wardrobe chest with a small mirror, and an all-purpose bedside table, on which sat plate s with the leftovers of her supper and, next to the plates, an open paperback co py of The Hedgehog and the Fox, by Isaiah Berlin. The presence of this red-cover ed book in this tiny cell, and the fact that she didn't hide it under the pillow at the sound of the doorbell, meant precisely this: the beginning of respite. The book, as it turned out, was sent to her by Akhmatova, who for nearly half th e century remained the closest friend of the Mandelstams: first of both of them, later of Nadezhda alone. Twice a widow herself (her first husband, the poet Nik olai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921 by the Cheka the maiden name of the KGB; the secon d, the art historian Nikolai Punin, died in a concentration camp belonging to th e same establishment), Akhmatova helped Nadezhda Mandelstam in every way possibl e, and during the war years literally saved her life by smuggling Nadezhda into Tashkent, where some of the writers had been evacuated, and by sharing with her t he daily rations. Even with her two husbands killed by the regime, with her son languishing in the camps for eighteen years, Akhmatova was somewhat better off t han Nadezhda Mandelstam, if only because she was recognized, however reluctantly , as a writer, and was allowed to live in Leningrad and Moscow. For the wife of an enemy of the people big cities were simply off limits. For decades this woman was on the run, darting through the back waters and provi ncial towns of the big empire, settling down in a new place only to take off at the first sign of danger. The status of nonperson gradually became her second na ture. She was a small woman, of slim build, and with the passage of years she sh riveled more and mare, as though trying to turn herself into something weightles s, something easily pocketed in the moment of flight. Similarly, she had virtual ly no possessions: no furniture, no art objects, no library. The books, even for eign books, never stayed in her hands for long: after being read or glanced thro ugh they would be passed on to someone else the way it ought to be with books. In the years of her utmost affluence, at the end of the sixties and the beginning o f the seventies, the most expensive item in her one-room apartment on the outskir ts of Moscow was a cuckoo clock on the kitchen wall. A thief would be disillusioned here; so would those with a search warrant. In those "affluent" years following the publication in the West of her two volum es of memoirs that kitchen became the place of veritable pilgrimages. Nearly eve ry other night the best of what survived or came to life in the post-Stalin era in Russia gathered around the long wooden table, which was ten times bigger than the bedstead in Pskov. It almost seemed that she was about to make up for decad

es of being a pariah. I doubt, though, that she did, and somehow I remember her b etter in that small room in Pskov, or sitting on the edge of a couch in Akhmatov a's apartment in Leningrad, where she would come from time to time illegally from Pskov, or emerging from the depth of the corridor in Shklov- sky's apartment in Moscow, where she perched before she got a place of her own. Perhaps I remember that more clearly because there she was more in her element as an outcast, a fu gitive, "the beggar-friend," as Osip Mandelstam calls her in one of his poems, a nd that is what she remained for the rest of her life. There is something quite breathtaking in the realization that she wrote those tw o volumes of hers at the age of sixty- five. In the Mandelstam family it is Osip who was the writer; she wasn't. If she wrote anything before those volumes, it was letters to her friends or appeals to the Supreme Court. Nor is hers the case of someone reviewing a long and eventful life in the tranquillity of retirement . Because her sixty-five years were not exactly normal. It's not for nothing tha t in the Soviet penal system there is a paragraph specifying that in certain camp s a year of serving counts for three. By this token, the lives of many Russians in this century came to approximate in length those of biblical patriarchs with w hom she had one more thing in common: devotion to justice. Yet it wasn't this devotion to justice alone that made her sit down at the age o f sixty-five and use her time of respite for writing these books. What brought t hem into existence was a recapitulation, on the scale of one, of the same proces s that once before had taken place in the history of Russian literature. I have in mind the emergence of great Russian prose in the second half of the nineteent h century. That prose, vhich appears as though out of nowhere, as an effect with out traceable cause, was in fact simply a spin-off of the nineteenth century's R ussian poetry. It set the tone for all subsequent writing in Russian, and the be st work of Russian fiction can be regarded as a distant echo and meticulous elab oration of the psychological and lexical subtlety displayed by the Russian poetry of the first quarter of that centrny. "Most of Dostoevsky's characters," Anna A khmatova used to say, "are aged Pushkin heroes, Onegins and so forth." Poetry always precedes prose, and so it did in the life of Nadezhda Mandelstam, and in more ways than one. As a writer, as well as a person, she is a creation o f two poets with whom her life was linked inexorably: Osip Mandelstam and Anna Ak hmatova. And not only because the first was her husband and the second her lifel ong friend. After all, forty years of widowhood could dim the happiest mem- ones (and in the case of this marriage they were few and far between, if only becaus e this marriage coincided with the economic devastation of the country, caused b y revolution, civil war, and the first five-year plans). Similarly, there were ye ars when she wouldn't see Akhmatova at all, and a letter would be the last thing to confide to. Paper, in general, was dangerous. What strengthened the bond of t hat marriage as well as of that friendship was a technicality: the necessity to commit to memory what could not be committed to paper, i.e., the poems of both au thors. In doing so in that "pre-Gutenberg epoch," in Akhmatova's words, Nadezhda Mandels tam certainly wasn't alone. However, repeating day and night the words of her de ad husband was undoubtedly connected not only with comprehending them more and mo re but also with resurrecting his very voice, the intonations peculiar only to h im, with a however fleeting sensation of his presence, with the realization that he kept his part of that "for better or for worse" deal, especially its second h alf. The same went for the poems of the physically often absent Akhmatova, for, once set in motion, this mechanism of memorization won't come to a halt. The sam e went for other authors, for certain ideas, for ethical principles for everything that couldn't survive otherwise. And gradually those things grew on her. If there is any substitute for love, it' s memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy. Gradually the lines of thos e poets became her mentality, became her identity. They supplied her not only wi th the plane of regard or angle of vision; more importantly, they became her ling uistic norm. So when she set out to write her books, she was bound to gauge by tha t time already unwittingly, instinctively her sentences against theirs. The clarit y and remorselessness of her pages, while reflecting the character of her mind,

are also inevitable stylistic consequences of the poetry that had shaped that mi nd. In both their content and style, her books are but a postscript to the supre me version of language which poetry essentially is and which became her flesh th rough learning her husband's lines by heart. To borrow W. H. Auden's phrase, great poetry "hurt" her into prose. It really di d, because those two poets' heritage could be developed or elaborated upon only by prose. In poetry they could be followed only by epigones. Which has happened. In other words, Nadezhda Mandelstam's prose was the only available medium for t he language itself to avoid stagnation. Similarly, it was the only medium availab le for the psyche formed by those poets' use of language. Her books, thus, were not so much memoirs and guides to the lives of two great poets, however superbly they performed these functions; these books elucidated the consciousness of the n ation. Of the part of it, at least, that could get a copy. Small wonder, then, that this elucidation results in an indictment of the system . These two volumes by Mme Mandelstam indeed amount to a Day of Judgment on eart h for her age and for its literature a judgment administered all the more rightful ly since it was this age that had undertaken the construction of earthly paradise . A lesser wonder, too, that these memoirs, the second volume especially, were n ot liked on either side of the Kremlin Wall. The authorities, ^ must say, were m ore honest in their reaction than the ^ telligentsia: they simply made possessio n of these books apt offense punishable by law. As for the intelligentsia, espedaily in Moscow, it went into actual turmoil over Nadezhda Mandelstam's charges against many of its illustrious and not so illustrious members of virtual compl icity with the regime, and the human flood in her kitchen significantly ebbed. There were open and semi-open letters, indignant resolutions not to shake hands, friendships and marriages collapsing over whether she was right or wrong to consi der this or that person an informer. A prominent dissident declared, shaking his beard: "She shat on our entire generation"; others would rush to their dachas a nd lock themselves up there, to tap out antimemoirs. This was already the beginni ng of the seventies, and some six years later these same people would become equ ally split over Solzhenitsyn's attitude toward the Jews. There is something in the consciousness of literati that cannot stand the notion of someone's moral authority. They resign themselves to the existence of a Firs t Party Secretary, or of a Fiihrer, as to a necessary evil, but they would eager ly question a prophet. This is so, presumably, because being told that you are a slave is less disheartening news than being told that morally you are a zero. A fter all, a fallen dog shouldn't be kicked. However, a prophet kicks the fallen dog not to finish it off but to get it back on its feet. The resistance to those kicks, the questioning of a writer's assertions and charges, come not from the desire for truth but from the intellectual smugness of slavery. All the worse, t hen, for the literati when the authority is not only moral but also cultural as it was in Nadezhda Mandelstam's case. I'd like to venture here one step further. By itself reality isn't worth a damn. It's perception that promotes reality to meaning. And there is a hierarchy among perceptions (and, correspondingly, among meanings), with the ones acquired throu gh the most refined and sensitive prisms sitting at the top. Refinement and sens itivity are imparted to such a prism by the only source of their supply: by cult ure, by civilization, whose main tool is language. The evaluation of reality mad e through such a prism the acquisition of which is one goal of the species is theref ore the most accurate, perhaps even the most just. (Cries of "Unfair!" and "Elit ist!" that may follow the aforesaid from, of all places, the local campuses must be left unheeded, for culture is "elitist" by definition, and the application o f democratic principles in the sphere of knowledge leads to equating wisdom with idiocy.) It's the possession of this prism supplied to her by the best R 3sian poetry of the twentieth century, and not the uniqueness of the size of her grief, that mak es Nadezhda Mandelstam's statement about her piece of reality unchallengeable. It 's an abominable fallacy that suffering makes for greater art. Suffering blinds, deafens, ruins, and often kills. Osip Mandelstam was a great poet before the re volution. So was Anna Akhmatova, so was Marina Tsve- taeva. They would have beco

me what they became even if none of the historical events that befell Russia in this century had taken place: because they were gifted. Basically, talent doesn't need history. Would Nadezhda Mandelstam have become what she became had it not been for the Rev olution and all the rest that followed? Probably not, for she met her future hus band in 1919. But the question itself is immaterial; it leads us into the murky domains of the law of probability and of historical determinism. After all, she b ecame what she became not because of what took place in Russia in this century bu t rather in spite of it. A casuist's finger will surely point out that from the point of view of historical determinism "in spite of' is synonymous with "because ." So much then for historical determinism, if it gets so mindful about the sema ntics of some human "in spite of." For a good reason, though. For a frail woman of sixty-five turns out to be capab le of slowing down, if not averting in the long run, the cultural disintegration of a whole nation. Her memoirs are something more than a testimony to her times ; they are a view of history in the light of conscience and culture. In that lig ht history winces, and an individual realizes his choice: between seeking that l ight's source and committing an anthropological crime against himself. She didn't mean to be so grand, nor did she simply try to get even with the syst em. For her it was a private matter, a matter of her temperament, of her identit y and what had shaped that identity. As it was, her identity had been shaped by culture, by its best products: her husband's poems. It's them, not his memory, t hat she was trying to keep alive. It's to them, and not to him, in the course of forty-two years that she became a widow. Of course she loved him, but love itse lf is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and p erspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more space in the min d than it does in the bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimens ional fiction. She was a widow to culture, and I think she loved her husband mor e at the end than on the day they got married. That is probably why readers of h er books find them so haunting. Because of that, and because the status of the m odern world vis-a-vis civilization also can be defined as widowhood. If she lacked anything, it was humility. In that respect she was quite unlike he r two poets. But then they had their art, and the quality of their achievements provided them with enough contentment to be, or to pretend to be, humble. She was terribly opinionated, categorical, cranky, disagreeable, idiosyncratic; many of her ideas were half-baked or developed on the basis of hearsay. In short, there was a great deal of one-upwomanship in her, which is not surprising given the siz e of the figures she was reckoning with in reality and later in imagination. In the end, her intolerance drove a lot of people away, but that was quite all right with her, because she was getting tired of adulation, of being liked by Robert McNamara and Willy Fisher (the real name of Colonel Rudolf Abel). All she wanted was to die . her bed, and, in a way, she looked forward to dying, because "up th ere I'll again be with Osip." "No," replied Akhmatova, upon hearing tihis. "You ve got it all wrong. Up there it's now me who is going to be with Osip." Her wish came true, and she died in her bed. Not a small thing for a Russian of her generation. There undoubtedly will surface those who will cry that she misun derstood her epoch, that she lagged behind the train of history running into the future. Well, like nearly every other Russian of her generation, she learned on ly too well that that train running into the future stops at the concentration c amp or at the gas chamber. She was lucky that she missed it, and we are lucky th at she told us about its route. I saw her last on May 30, 1972, in that kitchen of hers, in Moscow. It was late afternoon, and she sat, smoking, in the corner, in the deep shadow cast by the tall cupboard onto the wall. The shadow was so de ep that the only things one could make out were the faint flicker of her cigaret te and the two piercing eyes. The rest her smallish shrunken body under the shawl, her hands, the oval of her ashen face, her gray, ashlike hair all were consumed b y the dark. She looked like a remnant of a huge fire, like a small ember that bu rns if you touch it. 1981The Power of the Elements Along with air, earth, water, and fire, money is the fifth natural force a human

being has to reckon with most often. This is one, if not the main, reason why t oday, one hundred years after Dostoevsky's death, his novels preserve their rele vance. Given the modern world's economic vector, i.e., that f general impoverish ment and leveling of living standards, this writer can be regarded as a propheti c phenomenon. For the best way to avoid mistakes in dealing with the future is to perceive it through the prism of poverty or guilt. As it was, Dostoevsky used b oth lenses. In her diary, a fervent admirer of the writer, Elizaveta Stackenschneider, a St. Petersburg socialite whose house in the seventies and eighties of the last cent ury was a veritable salon for literati, suffragettes, politicians, artists, etc. , writes about Dostoevsky in 1880, i.e., a year before his death: .. . but he is a petit bourgeois, yes, a petit bourgeois. Not of the gentry, nor of the clergy, not a merchant, nor an odd ball, like an artist or scholar, but precisely a petit bourgeois. And yet this petit bourgeois is the most profound t hinker and a writer of genius . . . Now he frequents the houses of the aristocra cy and even those of the high nobility, and of course he bears himself with dign ity, and yet the petit bourgeois in him trickles through. It can be spotted in ce rtain traits, surfacing in private conversation, but most of all, in his works . .. in his depiction of big capital he will always regard 6,000 rubles as a vast amount of money. Now this, of course, is not entirely accurate: a great deal more than six thousa nd rubles flies into Nastasya Filip- povna's fireplace in The Idiot. On the othe r hand, in one of the most heartbreaking scenes in world literature the scene no r eader's conscience survives intact Captain Snegiryov from The Brothers Karamazov s tamps no more than two hundred rubles into a snowdrift. The point, however, is th at those six thousand rubles (at present the equivalent of $20,000) could buy a year of decent living at the time. "What Mme Stackenschneider, a product of her epoch's social stratification, call s petit bourgeois is known today as middle class, as defined in terms of annual income and not social affiliation. In other words, the said amount means neither great riches nor screaming poverty, but a tolerable human condition: a conditio n that makes one human. Six thousand rubles is the monetary expression of a mode rate, normal existence, and if it takes a petit bourgeois to comprehend this fact , hail to the petit bourgeois. For a normal, human-like existence is what the majority of the human race aspire s to. A writer who regards six thousand rubles as a vast amount of money operate s, therefore, on the same physical and psychological plane as the majority of peo ple; i.e., he deals with life on its own general terms, since, like every natura l process, human life gravitates toward moderation. Conversely, a writer who belo ngs to the upper echelon of society or to its lower depths will invariably produ ce a somewhat distorted picture of existence, for, in either case, he would regar d it at too sharp an angle. Criticism of society (which is a nickname for life) from either above or below may produce a great read; but it's only an inside job that can supply you with moral imperatives. Furthermore, a middle-class writer s own position is precarious enough to make hi m view what goes on below with considerable keenness. Alternatively, the situati on above, due to its physical proximity, lacks in celestial appeal. Numerically, to say the least, a middle-class writer deals with a greater variety of plights, increasing, by the same token, the size of his audience. In any case, this is o ne way to account for the wide readership enjoyed by Dostoevsky, as well as by M elville, Balzac, Hardy, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner. It looks as if the equivalent of six thousand rubles ensures great literature. The point is, however, that it is far harder to come into this money than to com e into millions or to stay penniless, for there are simply more contenders for t he norm than for extremes. Acquisition of the said amount, as well as of a half or a tenth of it, involves far greater convolutions of the human psyche than any get-rich scheme or any form of asceticism. In fact, the smaller the amount invo lved, the more one spends emotionally to acquire it. It's obvious then why Dosto evsky, for whose operation the intricacies of the human psyche were lock and sto ck, viewed six thousand rubles as a vast amount of money. To him, it meant a vas

t amount of human investment, a vast amount of nuance, a vast amount of literatu re. In short, it was not so much real as metaphysical money. Almost without exception, all his novels are about people in narrow circumstances . This kind of material itself guarantees absorbing reading. However, what turne d Dostoevsky into a great writer was neither the inevitable intricacy of his sub ject matter nor even the unique profundity of his mind and his capacity for compa ssion; it was the tool or, rather, the texture of the material he was using, i.e ., the Russian language. As intricacies go, this language, where nouns frequently find themselves sitting smugly at the very end of the sentence, whose main power lies not in the stateme nt but in its subordinate clause, is extremely accommodating. This is not your a nalytical language of "either/or" this is the language of "although." Like a bankno te into change, every stated idea instantly mushrooms in this language into its opposite, and there is nothing its syntax loves to couch more than doubt and sel f-deprecation. Its polysyllabic nature (the average length of a Russian word is t hree to four syllables) reveals the elemental, primeval force of the phenomena co vered by a word a lot better than any rationalization possibly could, and a write r sometimes, instead of developing his thought, stumbles and simply revels in th e word's euphonic contents, thereby sidetracking his issue in an unforeseen dire ction. And in Dostoevsky's writing we witness an extraordinary friction, nearly sadistic in its intensity, between the metaphysics of the subject matter and tha t of the language. He made the most of Russian's irregular grammar. His sentences have a feverish, hysterical, idiosyncratic pace and their lexical content is an all but maddening fusion of belles- lettres, colloquialisms, and bureaucratese. True, he never wr ote at leisure. Much like his characters, he worked to make ends meet: there were always either creditors or a deadline. Still, for a m an beset with deadlines, he was extraordinarily digressive, and those digression s, I venture to say, were prompted more by the language than by the requirements of a plot. Reading him simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness sp rings not from consciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one's cons ciousness. No, he was not a victim of the language; but his treatment of the human psyche wa s by far too inquisitive for the Russian Orthodox he claimed to be, and it is sy ntax rather than the creed that is responsible for the quality of that treatment . Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-better ment. Sooner or later, and as a rule qu^e soon, a man discovers that his pen acc omplishes a lot more than his soul. This discovery very often creates an unbeara ble schism within an individual and is, in part, responsible for the demonic rep utation literature enjoys in certain witless quarters. Basically, it's just as w ell, for the seraphim's loss nearly always is the mortal's gain. Besides, either extreme, in itself, is quite boring, and in a work of a good writer we always h ear a dialogue of the spheres with the gutter. If it doesn't destroy the man or his manuscript (as in the case of Gogol's Part II of Dead Souls), this schism is precisely what creates a writer, whose job therefore becomes making his pen catc h up with his soul. This is what Dostoevsky was all about, except that his pen was pushing his soul beyond the confines of his creed, Russian Orthodoxy. For to be a writer means in variably to be a Protestant or, to say the least, to employ the Protestant concep tion of man. While either in Russian Orthodoxy or in Roman Catholicism man is ju dged by the Almighty or His Church, in Protestantism it is the man who subjects himself to a personal eq uivalent of the Last Judgment. In doing so, he is far more merciless toward hims elf than the Deity, or even than the Church, if only because he knows himself be tter (so he thinks) than does either, and is unwilling or, to be precise, unable to forgive. Since no writer writes for his parish alone, a literary character an d his deeds should be given a fair trial. The more thorough the investigation, th e greater the verisimilitude, and verisimilitude is what a writer is, in the fir st place, after. In literature, Grace doesn't count for much; that's why Dostoev

sky's holy man stinks. Of course, he was a great defender of the "good cause," the cause of Christianit y. But come to think of it, there hardly ever was a better devil's advocate. Fro m classicism, he took the principle that before you come forth with your argumen t, however right or righteous you may feel, you have to list all the arguments o f the opposite side. And it is not that in the process of listing them one is be ing swayed by the opposite side; it is simply that the listing itself is a might ily absorbing process. One may not in the end drift away from one's original sta nce, but after having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters t he creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor. This, in its own way, also fosters the case of verisimilitude. But it is not for the sake of verisimilitude only that this writer's heroes bare their souls with an almost Calvinistic tenacity before the reader. There is som ething else that forces Dostoevsky to turn their lives inside out and undo every fold and wrinkle of their mental dirty linen; and it is not the quest for truth either. For the results of his inquisition show more than truth; they reveal the very fabric of life, and that this fabric is shabby. The force that drives him to do it is the omnivorousness of his language which eventually comes to a point where it cannot be satisfied with God, man, reality, guilt, death, infinity, sa lvation, air, earth, water, fire, money; and then it takes on itself. 1980The Sound of the Tide* Because civilizations are finite, in the life of each of them comes a moment whe n centers cease to hold. What keeps them at such times from disintegration is no t legions but languages. Such was the case with Rome, and before that, with Hell enic Greece. The job of holding at such times is done by the men from the provin ces, from the outskirts. Contrary to popular belief, the outskirts are not where the world ends they are precisely where it unravels. That affects a language no l ess than an eye. Derek Walcott was born on the island of Saint Lucia, in the parts where "the sun , tired of empire, declines." As it does, however, it heats up a far greater cru cible of races and cultures than any melting pot north of the equator. The realm this poet comes from is a real genetic Babel; English, however, is its tongue. If at times Walcott writes in Creole patois, it's not to flex his stylistic musc le or to enlarge his audience but as a homage to what he spoke as a child before h e spiraled the tower. Poets' real biographies are like those of birds, almost identical their real data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography is in his vowels and sibilants, i n his meters, rhymes, and metaphors. Attesting to the miracle of exis* This piece originally appeared as the introduction to Poems of the Caribbean b y Derek Walcott (Limited Editions Club, 1983).tence, the body of one's work is a lways in a sense a gospel whose lines convert their writer more radicallv than h is public. With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the s tory line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies be ing written. If Walcott's origins are to be learned, the pages of this selection are the best guide. Here's what one of his characters tells about himself, and what may well pass for the author's self- portrait: I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation. This jaunty four-liner informs us about its writer as surely as does a song saving you a look out the window that there is a bird. The dialectal "love" tells us tha t he means it when he calls himself "a red nigger." "A sound colonial education" may very well stand for the University of the West Indies, from which Walcott g raduated in 1953, although there is a lot more to this line, which well deal with later. To say the least, we hear in it both scorn for the very locution typical of the master race and the pride of the native in receiving that education, "Du tch" is here because by blood Walcott is indeed part Dutch and part English. Giv en the nature of the realm, though, one thinks not so much about blood as about languages. Instead of or along with "Dutch" there could have been French, Hindu, Cr eole patois, Swahili, Japanese, Spanish of some Latin American denomination, and so forth anything that one heard in the cradle or in the streets. The main thing

is, there was English. The way this third line arrives at "English in me" is remarkable in its subtlety . After "I have Dutch," Walcott throws in "nigger," sending the whole line into a jazzy downward spin, so that when it swings up to "and English in me" we get a sense of terrific pride, indeed of grandeur, enhanced by this syncopatic jolt b etween "English" and "in me." And it's from this height of "having English," to which his voice climbs with the reluctance of humility and yet with certitude of rhythm, that the poet unleashes his oratorial power in "either I'm nobody, or I 'm a nation." The dignity and astonishing vocal power of this statement are in d irect proportion to both the realm in whose name he speaks and the oceanic infin ity that surrounds it. When you hear such a voice, you know; the world unravels. This is what the author means when he says that he "love the sea. For the almost forty years that Walcott has been at it; at this loving the sea, critics on both its sides have dubbed him "a West Indian poet" or "a black poet from the Caribbean." These definitions are as myopic and misleading as it would be to call the Saviour a Galilean. This comparison is appropriate if only because every reductive tendency stems from the same terror of the infinite; and when i t comes to an appetite for the infinite, poetry often bests creeds. The mental a s well as spiritual cowardice, obvious in these attempts to render this man a re gional writer, can be further explained by the unwillingness of the critical prof ession to admit that the great poet of the English language is a black man. It ca n also be attributed to completely busted helixes or bacon-lined retinae. Still, its most benevolent explanation is, of course, a poor knowledge of geography. For the West Indies is a huge archipelago, about five times as big as the Greek one. If poetry is to be defined by the subject matter alone, Mr. Walcott would h ave ended up with material five times superior to that of the bard who wrote in the Ionian dialect and who, too, loved the sea. Indeed, if there is a poet Walco tt seems to have a lot in common with, it's nobody English but rather the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, or else the author of On the Nature of Things. Fo r Walcott's descriptive powers are truly epic; what saves his lines from the cor responding tedium, though, is the shortage of the realm's actual history and tih e quality of his ear for the English language, whose sensibility in itself is a history. Quite apart from the matter of his own unique gifts, Walcott's lines are so reso nant and stereoscopic precisely be ause this "history" is eventful enough: becau se language itself is an epic device. Everything this poet touches mushrooms with reverberations and perspectives, like magnetic waves whose acoustics are psycho logical, whose implications are echo-like. Of course, in that realm of his, in t he West Indies, there is plenty to touch the natural kingdom alone provides a grea t deal of fresh material. But here's an example of how this poet deals with the m ost de rigueur of all poetic subjects with the moon which he makes speak for itself: Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire. (from "Metamorphoses, IjMoon") And here's how he himself speaks about this most un- palpable poetic subject or ra ther, here's what makes him speak about it: a moon ballooned up from the Wireless Station. mirror, where a generation yearne d for whiteness, for candour, unreturned. (from Another Life ) The psychological alliteration that almost forces the reader to see both of the Moon's o's suggests not only the recurrent nature of this sight but also the repe titive character of looking at it. A human phenomenon, the latter is of a greate r significance to this poet, and his description of those who do the looking and of their reasons for it astonishes the reader with its truly astronomical equati on of black ovals to the white one. One senses here that the Moon's two o's have mutated via the two Vs in ballooned" into the two r's of "O mirror," which, tru e to their consonant virtue, stand for "resisting reflection"; that the blame is being put neither on nature nor on people but on language and time. It's the re dundance of these two, and not the author's choice, that is responsible for this equation of black and white which takes better care of the racial polarization thi

s poet was born to than all his critics with their professed impartiality are ca pable of. To put it simply, instead of reductive racial self- assertion, which no doubt wo uld have endeared him to both his foes and his champions, Walcott identifies him self vrith that "disembodied vowel" of the language which both parts of his equa tion share. The wisdom of this choice is, again, not so much his own as the wisd om of his language better still, the wisdom of its letter: of black on white. He is simply a pen th at is aware of its movement, and it is this self-awareness that forces his lines into their graphic eloquence: Virgin and ape, maid and malevolent Moor, their immortal coupling still halves o ur world. He is your sacrificial beast, bellowing, goaded, . a black bull snarle d in ribbons of its blood. And yet, whatever fury girded on that saffron-sunset turban, moon-shaped sword was not his racial, panther-black revenge pulsing her chamber with raw musk, its sweat, but horror of the moons change, of +he corrupt ion of an absolute, like a white fruit pulped ripe by fondling but doubly sweet. (from "Goats and Monkeys") This is what "sound colonial education" amounts to; this is what having "English in me" is all about. With equal right, Walcott could have claimed having in him Greek, Latin, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, French: because of Homer, Lucr etius, Ovid, Dante, Rilke, Machado, Lorca, Neruda, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Paster nak, Baudelaire, Valery, Apollinaire. These are not influences they are the cells of his bloodstream, no less so than Shakespeare or Edward Thomas are, for poetry is the essence of world culture. And if world culture feels more palpable among urine- stunted trees through which "a mud path wriggles like a snake in flight," hail to the mud path. And so Walcott's lyric hero does. Sole guardian of the civilization grown hollow in the center, he stands on this mud path watching how "the fish plops, making rings/ that marry the wide harbour" with "clouds curled like burnt-out papers at their edges" above it, with "telephone wires singing from pole to pole / parody ing perspective." In his keensightedness this poet resembles Joseph Banks, excep t that by setting his eyes on a plant "chained in its own dew" or on an object, he accomplishes something no naturalist is capable of he animates them. To be sure , the realm needs it, not any less so than does the poet in order to survive the re. In any case, the realm pays back, and hence lines like: Slowly the water rat takes up its reed pen and scribbles leisurely, the egret on the mud tablet stamps its hieroglyph . . . This is more than naming things in the garden this is also a bit later. Walcott's poetry is Adamic in the sense that both he and his world have departed from Para dise he, by tasting the fruit of knowledge; his world, by political history. "Ah brave third world!" he exclaims elsewhere, and a lot more goes into this exc lamation than simple anguish or exasperation. This is a comment of language upon a greater than purely local failure of nerves and imagination; a semantic reply to the meaningless and abundant reality, epic in its shabbiness. Abandoned, ove rgrown airstrips, dilapidated mansions of retired civil servants, shacks covered with corrugated iron, single-stack coastal vessels coughing like "relics out of C onrad," four-wheeled corpses escaped from their junkyard cemeteries and rattling their bones past condominium pyramids, helpless or corrupt politicos and young ignoramuses trigger-happy to replace them and babbling revolutionary garbage, "s harks with well-pressed fins / ripping we small fry off with razor grins"; a rea lm where "you bust your brain before you find a book," where if you turn on the radio, you may hear the captain of a white cruise boat insisting that a hurrican e-stricken island reopen its. duty-free shop no matter what, where "the poor sti ll poor, whatever arse they catch," where one sums up the deal the realm got by saying "we was in chains, but chains made us unite, / now who have, good for the m, and who blight, blight," and where "beyond them the firelit mangrove swamps, / ibises practicing for postage stamps." Whether accepted or rejected, the colonial heritage remains a mesmerizing presenc

e in the West Indies. Walcott seeks to break its spell neither by plunging "into incoherence of nostalgia" for a nonexistent past nor by eking himself a niche in the culture of departed masters (into which he wouldn't fit in the first place b ecause of the scope of his talent). He acts out of the belief that language is g reater than its masters or its servants, that poetry, being its supreme version, is therefore an instrument of self-betterment for both; i.e., that it is a way t o gain an identity superior to the confines of class, race, or ego. This is just plain common sense; this is also the most sound program of social change there is. But then poetry is the most democratic art it always starts from scratch. In a sense, a poet is indeed like a bird that chirps no matter what twig it alights on, hoping there is an audience, even if it's only the leaves.About these "leav es" lives mute or sibilant, faded or immobile, about their impotence and surrender, Walcott knows enough to make you look sideways from the page containing: Sad is the felons love for the scratched wall, beautiful the exhaustion of old t owels, and the patience of dented saucepans seems mortally comic . . . And you resume the reading only to find: ... I know how profound is the folding of a napkin by a woman whose hair wiU go white . . . For all its disheartening precision, this knowledge is free of modernistic despa ir (which often only disguises one's shaky sense of superiority) and is conveyed in tones as level as its source. What saves Walcott's lines from hysterical pitc h is his belief that: . . . time that makes us objects, multiplies our natural loneliness . . . which results in the following "heresy": . . . God's loneliness moves in His smallest creatures. No "leaf," neither up here nor in the tropics, would like to hear this sort of t hing, and that's why they seldom clap to this bird's song. Even a greater stilln ess is bound to follow after: 173 / The Sound of the Tide AU of the epics are blown away with leaves, blown with careful calculations on b rown paper, these were the only epics; the leaves . . . The absence of response has done in many a poet, and in so many ways, the net re sult of which is that infamous equilibrium or tautology between cause and effect: sil ence. What prevents Walcott from striking a more than appropriate, in his case, tragic pose is not his ambition but his humility, which binds him and these "lea ves" into one tight book: . . yet who am I . . . under the heels of the thousand / racing towards the exclamation of their single name, / Sauteurs! . . Walcott is neither a traditionalist nor a modernist. None of l .e available -ism s and the subsequent -ists will do for him. He belongs to no "school": there are not so many of them in the Caribbean, save those of fish. One would feel tempte d to call him a metaphysical realist, but then realism is metaphysical by defini tion, as well as the other way around. Besides, that would smack of prose. He ca n be naturalistic, expressionistic, surrealistic, imagistic, hermetic, confessio nal you name it. He simply has absorbed, the way whales do plankton or a paintbrus h the palette, all the "stylistic idioms the North could offer; now he is on his own, and in a big way. His metric and genre versatility is enviable. In general, however, he gravitates to a lyrical monologue and to a narrative. That, and the tendency to write in c ycles, as well as his verse plays, again suggest an epic streak in this poet, an d perhaps it's time to take him up on that. For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, co agulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literatur e would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or "a world"; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language as well as in the ocea n which is always present in his poems: as their background or foreground, as th eir subject, or as their meter. To put it differently, these poems represent a fusion of two versions of infinit y: language and ocean. The common parent of these two elements is, it must be re membered, time. If the theory of evolution, especially that part of it that sugg ests we all came from the sea, holds any water, then both thematically and styli

stically Derek Walcott's poetry is the case of the highest and most logical evol ve- ment of the species. He was surely lucky to be born at this outskirt, at thi s crossroads of English and the Atlantic where both arrive in waves only to reco il. The same pattern of motion ashore, and back to the horizon is sustained in Walco tt's lines, thoughts, life. Open this hook and see "... the grey, iron harbour / open on a sea-gull's rusty hinge," hear how ". . . the sky's window rattles / at gears raked into reverse," be warned that "At the end of the sentence, rain will begin. / At the rain s ed ge, a sail ..." This is the West Indies, this is that realm which once, in its i nnocence of history, mistook the lantern of a caravel for a light at the end of a tunnel and paid for that dearly it was a light at the tunnel's entrance. This so rt of thing happens often, to archipelagoes as well as to individuals; in this se nse, every man is an island. If, nevertheless, we must register this experience a s West Indian and call this realm the West Indies, let's do so, but let's also c larify that we have in mind the place discovered by Co- 175 / The Sound of the T ide lumbus, colonized by the British, and immortalized by Walcott. We may add, too, that giving a place a status of lyrical reality is a more imaginative as well as a more generous act than discovering or exploiting something that was created al ready. 1983Catastrophes in the Air II a des remedes a la sauvagerie primitive; il n'y en a point & la manie de para itre ce quon nest pas. Marquis de Custine, Lettres de Russie 1 Because of the volume and quality of Russian fiction in the nineteenth century, it's been widely held that the great Russian prose of that century has automatic ally, by pure inertia, wandered into our own. From time to time, in the course o f our century, here and there one could hear voices nominating this or that writ er for the status of the Great Russian Writer, purveyor of the tradition. These voices were coming from the critical establishment and from Soviet officialdom, as well as from the intelligentsia itself, with a frequency of roughly two great writers per decade. During the postwar years alone which have lasted, blissfully, so far a minimum of ha lf a dozen names have filled the air. The forties ended with Mikhail Zoshchenko and the fifties started with the rediscovery of Babel. Then came the thaw, and t he crown was temporarily bestowed upon Vladimir Dudintsev for his Not by Bread A lone. The * The Biddle Memorial Lecture, delivered at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on January 31, 1984, under the auspices of the Academy of American Poet s. sixties were almost equally shared by Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and by Mi khail Bulgakov's revival. The better part of the seventies obviously belong to S ol- zhenitsyn; at present what is in vogue is so-called peasant prose, and the n ame most frequently uttered is that of Valentin Rasputin. Officialdom, though, it should be noted in all fairness, happens to be far less mercurial in its preferences: for nearly fifty years now it has stuck to its gun s, pushing Mikhail Sholokhov. Steadiness paid off or rather a huge shipbuilding or der placed in Sweden did and in 1965 Sholokhov got his Nobel Prize. Still, for all this expense, for all this muscle of the state on the one hand and agitated flu ctuation of the intelligentsia on the other, the vacuum proje ted by the great R ussian prose of the last century into this one doesn't seem to get filled. With every passing year, it grows in size, and now that the century is drawing to its close, there is a growing suspicion that Russia may exit the twentieth century without leaving great prose behind. It is a tragic prospect, and a Russian native doesn't have to look feverishly ar ound for where to put the blame: the fault is everywhere, since it belongs to th e state. Its ubiquitous -hand felled the best, and strangled the remaining second -rate into pure mediocrity. Of more far-reaching and disastrous consequence, how ever, was the state-sponsored emergence of a social order whose depiction or eve

n criticism automatically reduces literature to the level of social anthropology. Even that presumably would be bearable had the state allowed writers to use in their palette either the individual or collective memory of the preceding, i.e., * abandoned, civilization: if not as a direct reference, then at least in the guise of stylistic experimentation. With that tabooed, Russian pros e quickly deteriorated into the debilitated being's flattering self-portrayal. A caveman began to depict his cave; the only indication that this still was art wa s that, on the wall, it looked more spacious and better lit than in reality. Als o, it housed more animals, as well as tractors. This sort of thing was called "socialist realism" and nowadays it is universally mocked. But as is often the case with irony, mockery here considerably subtracts from one's ability to grasp how it was possible for a literature to plummet, in less than fifty years, from Dostoevsky to the likes of Bubennov or Pavlenko. Was this dive a direct consequence of a new social order, of a national upheaval th at overnight reduced people's mental operation to the level where the consumptio n of garbage became instinctive? (Enter and exeunt Western observers salivating over the Russians' proclivity to read books while riding public transportation. ) Or wasn't there perhaps some flaw in the very literature of the nineteenth centu ry that precipitated that dive? Or was it simply a matter of ups and downs, of a vertical pendulum pertinent to the spiritual climate of any nation? And is it l egitimate to ask such questions anyway? It is legitimate, and especially in a country with an authoritarian past and tot alitarian present. For unlike the subconscious, the superego is expected to be v ocal. To be sure, the national upheaval that took place in Russia in this centur y has no parallel in the history of Christendom. Similarly, its reductive effect on the human psyche was unique enough to enable the rulers to talk about a "new society" and a "new type of man." But then that was precisely the goal of the wh ole enterprise: to uproot the species spiritually to the point of no return; for how else can you build a genuinely new society? You start neither with the found ation nor with the roof; you start by making new bricks. What took place, in other words, was an unprecedented anthropological tragedy, a genetic backslide whose net result is a drastic reduction of human potential. To quibble about it, to use political-science mumbo-jumbo here is misleading and un necessary. Tragedy is history's chosen genre. Had it not been for literature's o wn resilience, we wouldn't have known any other. In fact, it is an act of selfpreservation on the part of prose to produce a comedy or a roman a clef. Yet suc h was the magnitude of what happened in Russia in this century that all the genr es available to prose were, and still are, in one way or another, shot through w ith this tragedy's mesmerizing presence. No matter which way one turns, one catc hes the Gorgon-like stare of history. For literature, unlike its audience, this is both good and bad. The good part co mes from the fact that tragedy provides a work of literature with a greater than usual substance and expands its readership by appealing to morbid curiosity. The bad part is that tragedy confines the writer's imagination very much to itself. For tragedy is essentially a didactic enterprise and as such it's stylistically limiting. Personal, let alone national, drama reduces, indeed negates, a writer 's ability to achieve the aesthetic detachment imperative for a lasting work of a rt. The gravity of the matter simply cancels the desire for stylistic endeavor. Narrating a tale of mass extermination, one's not terribly keen to unleash the st ream of consciousness; and rightly so. However attractive such discretion is, on e's soul profits from it more than does one's paper. On paper, such display of scruples pushes a work of fiction toward the genre of biography, this last bastion of realism (which explains this genre's popularity far more than the uniqueness of its subjects). In the end, every tragedy is a bi ographical event, one way or another. As such, it tends to exacerbate the Aristo telian art-to-life proximity, to the point of reducing it to a synonym. The comm on view of prose as being made in the likeness of speech doesn't help matters mu ch either. The sad truth about this equating art to life is that it's always don e at the expense of art. Had a tragic experience been a guarantee of a masterpie ce, readers would be a dismal minority vis-a-vis illustrious multitudes inhabiti

ng ruined and freshly erected pantheons. Were ethics and aesthetics synonymous, literature would be the province of cherubs, not of mortals. Luckily, though, it' s the other way around: cherubs, in all likelihood, wouldn't bother inventing th e stream of consciousness, being more interested in the steam of it. For prose is, apart from anything, an artifice, a bag of tricks. As artifice, it has its own pedigree, its own dynamics, its own laws, and its own logic. Perhap s more than ever, this sort of thing has been made apparent by the endeavors of modernism, whose standards play a great role in today's assessment of the work o f the writer. For modernism is but a logical consequence compression and concision o f things classical. (And this is why one is hesitant to add to the list of moder nism's properties its own ethics. This is also why it's not altogether futile to ask history those questions. For, contrary to popular belief, history answers: by means of today, of the present; and that's what perhaps is the present's main charm, if not its sole justification.) At any rate, if these standards of moder nism have any psychological significance, it is that the degree of their mastery indicates the degree of a writer's independence from his material or, more broadly , the degree of primacy of an individual over his own or his nation's predicament . It can be argued, in other words, that stylistically at least, art has outlived tragedy, and, with it, so has the artist. That the issue to an artist is to tell the story not on its own but on his own terms. Because the artist stands for an individual, a hero of his own time: not of time past. His sensibility owes more to the aforesaid dynamics, logic, and laws of his artifice than to his actual h istorical experience, which is nearly always redundant. The artist's job vis-a-vi s his society is to project, to offer this sensibility to 1 ^e audience as perha ps the only available route of departure from the known, captive self. If art tea ches men anything, it is to become like art: not like other men. Indeed, if there is a chance for men to become anything but victims or villains of their time, it lies in their prompt response to those last two lines from Rilke's "Torso of Ap ollo" that say: . . . this torso shouts at you with its every muscle: "Do change your life And this is precisely where the Russian prose of this century fails. Hypnotized by the scope of the tragedy that befell the nation, it keeps scratching its woun ds, unable to transcend the experience either philosophically or stylistically. N o matter how devastating one's indictment of the apolitical system may be, its d elivery always comes wrapped in the sprawling cadences of fin de siecle religiou s humanist rhetoric. No matter how poisonously sarcastic one gets, the target of such sarcasm is always "external: the system and the powers-that-be. The human b eing is always extolled, his innate goodness is always regarded as the guarantee o f the ultimate defeat of evil. Resignation is always a virtue and a welcome subj ect, if only because of the infinity of its examples. In the age that read Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Musil, Svevo, Faulkner, Beckett, etc. , it's precisely these characteristics that make a yawning and disdainful Russia n grab a detective novel or a book by a foreign author: a Czech, a Pole, a Hungar ian, an Englishman, an Indian. Yet these same characteristics gratify many a West ern literary pundit bewailing the sorry state of the novel in his own language an d darkly or transparently hinting at the aspects of suffering beneficial to the art of letters. It may sound like a paradox, but, for a variety of reasons chief o f which is the low cultural diet on which the nation has been kept for more than half a century the reading tastes of the Russian public are far less conservative than those of the spokesmen for their Western counterparts. For the latter, over saturated presumably with modernist detachment, experimentation, absurdity, and s o forth, the Russian prose of this century, especially that of the postwar perio d, is a respite, a breather, and they rave about and expand oil the subject of t he Russian soul, of the traditional values of Russian fiction, of the surviving legacy of the nineteenth century's religious humanism and all the good that it b rought to Russian letters, of should I quote the severe spirit of Russian Orthodoxy. (As opposed, no doubt, to the laxness of Roman Catholicism.) Whatever ax, and whomsoever with, people of this sort want to grind, the real po

int is that religious humanism is indeed a legacy. But it is a legacy not so muc h of the nineteenth century in particular as of the general spirit of consolation, of justifying the existential order on the highest, preferably ecclesiastical, plane, pertinent to the Russian sensibility and to the Russian cultural endeavor as such. To say the least, no writer in Russian history is exempt from this att itude, ascribing to Divine Providence the most dismal occurrences and making the m automatically subject to human forgiveness. The trouble with this otherwise ap pealing attitude is that it's fully shared by the secret police as well, and cou ld be cited by its employees on Judgment Day as a sound excuse for their practic es. Practical aspects aside, one thing is clear: this sort of ecclesiastical relativ ism (which is what the grounded flight of religious humanism boils down to on pa per) naturally results in a heightened attention to detail, elsewhere called rea lism. Guided by this world view, a writer and a policeman rival each other in pre cision, and, depending on who is gaining the upper hand in a society, supply thi s realism with its eventual epithet. Which goes to show that the transition of R ussian fiction from Dostoevsky to its present state hasn't occurred overnight, a nd that it wasn't exactly a transition either, because, even for his own time, D ostoevsky was an isolated, autonomous phenomenon. The sad truth about the whole m atter is that Russian prose has been in a metaphysical slump for quite some time , ever since it produced Tolstoy, who took the idea of art reflecting reality a b it too literally and in whose shadow the subordinate clauses of Russian prose ar e writhing indolently till this day. This may sound like a gross simplification, for indeed, by itself, Tolstoy's mim etic avalanche would be of a limited stylistic significance were it not for its timing: it hit the Russian readership almost simultaneously with Dostoevsky. Sure ly for an average Western reader, this sort of distinction between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is of limited or exotic consequence, if any. Reading both of them in tr anslation, he regards them as one great Russian writer, and the fact that they bo th were translated by the same hand, Constance Garnett's, is of no help. (Even t oday, it must be noted, the same translator can be assigned to do Notes from the House of the Dead and The Death of Ivan Ilyich presumably because the Dead and Dea th are perceived as enough of a common denominator.) Hence, the pundits' specula tion about the traditional values of Russian literature; hence, too, the popular belief in the coherent unity of Russian prose in the nineteenth century and the subsequent expectations of its similar show in the twentieth century. All that i s quite far from reality; and, frankly, the proximity of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in time was the unhappiest coincidence in the history of Russian literature. The consequences of it were such that perhaps the only way Providence can defend itse lf against charges of playing tricks with the spiritual makeup of a great nation is by saying that this way it prevented the Russians from getting too close to its secrets. Because who knows better than Providence that whoever follows a grea t writer is bound to pick things up precisely where the great man left them. And Dostoevsky went perhaps too high for Providence's liking. So it sends in a Tols toy as if to ensure that Dostoevsky in Russia gets no continuum. 2 It worked; there was none. Save for Lev Shestov, a literary critic and philosoph er, Russian prose went with Tolstoy, only too glad to spare itself climbing the heights of Dostoevsky's spiritual pitch. It went down the winding, well-trodden path of mimetic writing, and at several removes via Chekhov, Korolenko, Kuprin, Bun in, Gorky, Leonid Andreev, Gladkov has reached the pits of socialist realism. The T olstoy mountain cast a long shadow, to emerge from which one had to either outdo Tolstoy in precision or offer a qualitatively new linguistic content. Even those who took the second route and fought that engulfing shadow of descriptive ficti on most valiantly authors like Filnyak, Zamyatin, Babel, and a few others were paral yzed by it into a telegraph-style tongue-twitching that, for a while, would pass for an avant-garde art. Still, however generously these men were endowed with t alent, spiritually they were but products of the aforementioned ecclesiastical r elativism; the pressures of the new social order easily reduced them to outright cynicism, and their works to tantalizing hors d'oeuvres on the empty table of a l

ean nation. The reason Russian prose went with Tolstoy lies of course in his stylistic idiom , with its open invitation to imitate it. Hence, an impression that one can beat him; hence, too, a promise of security, since even by losing to him one winds up with a substantial recognizable! product. Nothing of the sort emanated from Dostoev sky. Quite apart from the nonexistent chances of beating him in the game, the pu re aping of his style was out of the question. In a sense, Tolstoy was inevitabl e because Dostoevsky was unique. Neither his spiritual quest nor his "means of t ransportation" offered any possibility of repetition. The latter especially, with its plots evolving according to the immanent logic of scandal, with its feverish ly accelerating sentences conglomerating in their rapid progress, bureaucrat- ese , ecclesiastical terminology, lumpen argot, French uto- pists' mumbo-jumbo, the classical cadences of gentry prose anything! all the layers of contemporary dicti on the latter especially constituted an unthinkable act to follow. In many ways, he was our first writer to trust the intuition of language more tha n his own and more than intimations of his system of belief or those of his persona l philosophy. And language repaid him a hundredfold. Its subordinate clauses oft en carried him much farther than his original intentions or insights would have allowed him to travel. In other words, he treated the language not so much as a novelist but as a poet or as a biblical prophet demanding from his audience not im itation but conversion. A born metaphysician, he instinctively realized that for probing infinity, whether an ecclesiastical one or that of the human psyche, th ere was no tool more far-reaching than his highly inflected mother tongue, with its convoluted syntax. His art was anything but mimetic: it wasn't imitating real ity; it was creating, or better still, reaching for one. In this vector of his h e was effectively straying from Orthodoxy (or for that matter from any creed). H e simply felt that art is not about life, if only because life is not about life . For Dostoevsky, art, like life, is about what man exists for. Like biblical pa rables, his novels are vehicles to obtain the answer and not goals unto themselv es. There are, roughly, two kinds of men and, correspondingly, two kinds of writers. The first kind, undoubtedly a majority, regards life as the one and only availab le reality. Turned writer, such a person will reproduce this reality in its minu test detail; he'll give you a conversation in the bedroom, a battlefield scene, the texture of upholstery, scents and tangs, with a precision rivaling your sens es and the lenses of your camera; rivaling perhaps reality itself. Closing his b ook is like the end of a movie: the lights go up and you walk out into the stree t admiring Technicolor and the performance of this or that star whom you may eve n try to imitate subsequently in accent or deportment. The second kind, a minori ty, perceives his, and anyone else's, life as a test tube for certain human qual ities, the retention of which under extreme duress is crucial for either an eccl esiastical or an anthropological version of the species' arrival. As a writer, s uch a man won't give you much in the way of detail; instead, hell describe his c haracters' states and twists of psyche with such thoroughness that you feel grate ful for not having met him in person. Closing his book is like waking up with a changed face. One certainly should decide for oneself with whom to go; and Russian fiction obv iously flocked to the former, prodded in that direction, we shouldn't forget, by history and her ironclad agent: the Polizeistaat. And normally it would be unju stifiable to pass judgment on such a choice, made under such circumstances, were it not for several exceptions, the main one being the career of Andrei Platonov. But before getting to him, it would be only prudent to emphasize once more that at the turn of the century, Russian prose was indeed at a crossroads, at a fork, and that one of those two roads wasn't taken. Presumably too many things were h appening on the outside to waste that famous mirror of Stendhal's on scrutinizin g the contortions of one's psyche. The vast, corpse-strewn, treachery-ridden his torical vistas, whose very air turned solid with howls of ubiquitous grief, call ed for an epic touch, not for insidious questioning never mind that that question ing could have prevented this epic sight. If anything, this idea of a fork, of a road not taken, can be somewhat helpful t

o an average reader in his distinguishing between two great Russian writers, in p utting him on alert whenever he hears about the "traditional values" of the Russ ian literature of the nineteenth century. The main point, though, is that the ro ad not taken was the road that led to modernism, as is evidenced by the influenc e of Dostoevsky on every major writer in this century, from Kafka on. The road t aken led to the literature of socialist realism. To put it differently, in terms of guarding its secrets, Providence suffered some setbacks in the West but it w on in Russia. However, even knowing as little as we do about Providence's ways, we have a reason to assume that it may be not entirely happy with its victory. T hat is at least one explanation for its gift to Russian literature of Andrei Pla tonov. 3 If I refrain from stating here that Platonov is a greater writer than Joyce or M usil or Kafka, it's not because such ratings are in poor taste or because of his essential unavailability through existing translations. The trouble with such ra tings is not poor taste (when was that ever a deterrent to an admirer?) but the vagueness of hierarchy that such a notion of superiority implies. As for the ina dequacy of available translations, they are that way through no fault of the tra nslators; the guilty party here is Platonov himself, or rather, the stylistic ex tremism of his language. It's the latter, along with the extreme character of th e human predicament that Platonov is concerned with, that makes one refrain from this sort of hierarchical judgment, for the above-mentioned writers were not ex posed to either extreme. He definitely belongs to this echelon of literature; yet , on those heights there is no hierarchy. Platonov was born in 1899 and died in 1951 of tuberculosis, which he contracted f rom his son, whose release from prison he had eventually won, only to have his c hild die in his arms. From a photograph, a lean face with features as simple as a rural landscape looks at you patiently and as though prepared to take in anyth ing. By education a civil engineer (he worked for several years on various irrig ation projects), he began to write rather early, in his twenties, which coincide d with the twenties of this century. He fought in the civil war, worked for vari ous newspapers, and, although reluctantly published, achieved a great reputation in the thirties. Then came the arrest of his son on charges of anti-Soviet consp iracy, then came the first signs of official ostracism, then came World War II, during which he was in the army working for the army newspaper. After the war he was silenced; a short story of his published in 1946 invited a full-page pogrom by the top critic of Literaturnatja Gazeta, and that was it. After that he was allowed only occasional freelance ghostwriting jobs, such as editing some fairy t ales for children; beyond that, nothing. But then his tuberculosis worsened and he couldn't do much anyway. He and his wife and their daughter lived on his wife 's salary as an editor; he'd moonlight as a street sweeper or a stagehand in a t heater nearby. He wasn't arrested, although that review in Litem- turnaya Gazeta was a clear si gn that his days as a writer were numbered. But they were numbered anyway; the t op honcho in the Writers' Union administration even refused to endorse the secre t police's case against Platonov, both because of his grudging admiration for th e man and because he knew that the man was ill. Regaining consciousness after a bo ut with his illness, Platonov would often see by his bedside a couple of men gaz ing at him very keenly: the state security was monitoring the progress of his il lness to determine whether they should bother with this character, and whether th e Writers' Union official's stubbornness was justified. So Platonov died of natu ral causes. All of this, or most of it, you'll no doubt find in various encyclopedias, forew ords, afterwords, in dissertations about his work. By the standards of the time and the place, it was a normal life, if not an idyllic one. However, by the stan dards of the work Platonov did, his life was a miracle. That the author of The F oundation Pit and Chevengur was allowed to die in his own bed can be attributed only to divine intervention, only in the guise of a fraction of scruples survivi ng in the men from the administration of the Writers' Union. Another explanation could be that neither novel had ever been in circulation, since both were presu

mably, in Platonov's view, works in progress, temporarily abandoned, much in the same way as Musil's The Man without Qualities. Still, the reasons for which they were temporarily abandoned also should be regarded as divine intervention. Chevengur is some six hundred pages long; The Foundation Pit is one hundred and s ixty. The first is about a man who, in the middle of the civil war, gets it into his head that there is a possibility that socialism has already emerged somewhe re in a natural, elemental way; so he mounts his horse, which is named Rosa Luxe mburg, and sets off to discover whether or not that is the case. The Foundation Pit takes place during collectivizationj in some provincial landscape where for quite some time the entire population has been engaged in digging a vast foundat ion pit for the subsequent erection of a many-storied brightly lit building call ed "socialism." If from this idiotically simpleminded description one concludes that we are talking about yet another anti-Soviet satirical writer, with perhaps a surrealistic bent, one should blame the description's author, as well as the n ecessity for making the description; the main thing one should know is that one is wrong. For these books are indescribable. The power of devastation they inflict upon the ir subject matter exceeds by far any demands of social criticism and should be m easured in units that have very little to do with literature as such. These book s never were published in Soviet Russia and they never will be published there, for they come closest to doing to the system what it has done to its subjects. O ne wonders whether they will ever be published in Russia, for apart from concret e social evil, their real target is the sensibility of language that has brought that evil about. The whole point about Andrei Platonov is that he is a millenar ian writer if only because he attacks die very carrier of millenarian sensibilit y in Russian society: the language itself or, to put it in a more graspable fashio n, the revolutionary eschatology embedded in the language. The roots of Russian millenarianism are essentially not very different from thos e of other nations. This sort of thing always has to do with this or that religi ous community's anticipation of its oncoming peril (less frequently, but as well , with the presence of a real one) and with that community's limited literacy, Th e few who read, and the still fewer who write, normally get to run the show, sug gesting as a rule an alternative interpretation of Holy Writ, On the mental hori zon of every millenarian movement there is always a version of a New Jerusalem, the proximity to which is determined by the intensity of sentiment. The idea of God's City being within reach is in direct proportion to the religious fervor in which the entire journey originates. The variations on this theme include also a version of an apocalypse, ideas of a change of the entire world order, and a va gue, but all the more appealing because of that, notion of a new time, in terms of both chronology and quality. (Naturally, transgressions committed in the name of getting to a New Jerusalem fast are justified by the beauty of the destinatio n.) When such a movement succeeds, it results in a new creed. If it fails, then, with the passage of time and the spread of literacy, it degenerates into Utopias , to peter out completely in the dry sands of political science and the pages of science fiction. However, there are several things that may somewhat rekindle s oot-covered embers. It's either severe oppression of the population, a real, mos t likely military peril, a sweeping epidemic, or some substantial chronological e vent, like the end of a millennium or the beginning of a new century. If only because the species' eschatological capacity is always one and the same, there is not much point in going on about the roots of Russian millenarianism in great detail. Its fruits, too, were not of such great variety, except for their volume and for the influence their volume exerted on the language of the epoch i n which Platonov happened to live. Still, talking about Platonov and that epoch, we should bear in mind certain peculiarities of the period that directly preced ed the arrival of this epoch in Russia, as well as elsewhere. The period the turn of the century was indeed a peculiar one because of its climate of mass agitation fueled by the incoherent symbolism with which this chronologic al non-event the turn of the century was invested by a variety of technological and scientific breakthroughs, by the spread of means of communication, causing a qua litative leap in the masses' self-awareness. It was the period of great political

activization: in Russia alone by the time of the -{evolution there were more po litical parties than in today's America or Great Britain. Along with that, it wa s the period of a great upsurge in philosophical writing and in science fiction with strong Utopian or social-engineering overtones. The air was filled with exp ectations and prophecies of a big change, of a new order of things coming, of res tructuring the world. On the horizon there was Halley's comet, threatening to hi t the globe; in the news, military defeat at the hands of the yellow race; and i n an undemocratic society it's usually one step from a czar to a messiah or, for that matter, to the Antichrist. The period, to say the least, was a bit on the h ysterical side. So it's indeed rriall wonder that when revolution came, many too k it for " hat they had been looking for. Platonov writes in the language of the "qualitative aiange," in the language of a greater proximity to New Jeru- Tem. More precisely, in the language of paradise 's builders 'or, as in the case with The Foundation Pit, of paradise's diggers. Now, the idea of paradise is the logical end of human thought in the se nse that it, that thought, goes no further; for beyond paradise there is nothing else, nothing else happens. It can safely be said, therefore, that paradise is a dead end; its the last vision of space, the end of things, the summit of the m ountain, the peak from which there is nowhere to step except into pure Chronos; hen ce the introduction of the concept of eternal life. The same actually applies to hell; structurally at least, these two things have a lot in common. Existence in the dead end is not limited by anything, and if one can conceive th at even there "circumstances condition consciousness" and engender their own psyc hology, then it is above all in language that this psychology is expressed. In ge neral, it should be noted that the first casualty of any discourse about Utopia de sired or already attained is grammar; for language, unable to keep up with this s ort of thought, begins to gasp in the subjunctive mood and starts to gravitate t oward categories and constructions of a rather timeless denomination. As a conse quence of this, the ground starts to slip out from under even the simplest nouns , and they gradually get enveloped in an aura of arbitrariness. This is the sort of thing that is happening nonstop in Platonov's prose. It can safely be said about this writer that his every sentence drives the Russian lang uage into a semantic dead end or, more precisely, reveals a proclivity for dead e nds, a blind-alley mentality in the language itself. What he does on the page is approximately as follows: he starts a sentence in a way familiar enough that yo u almost anticipate the tenor of the rest. However, each word that he uses is qu alified either by epithet or intonation, or by its incorrect position within the context, to the extent that the rest of the senten ce gives you not so much a sense of surprise as the sense that you have compromis ed yourself by knowing anything about the tenor of speech in general and about h ow to place these words in particular. You find yourself locked in, marooned in b linding proximity to the mean- inglessness of the phenomenon this or that word d enotes, and you realize that you have got yourself into this predicament through your own verbal carelessness, through trusting too much your own ear and the wo rds themselves. Reading Platonov, one gets a sense of the relentless, implacable absurdity built into the language and that with each new anyone's utterance, that absurdity deepens. And that there is no way out of that blind alley but to retre at back into the very I guage that brought one in. This is perhaps a too laborious and not terribly accurate or exhaustive (far from t hat!) attempt to describe Platonov's writing technique. Perhaps, too, effects of t his sort can be created in the Russian language only, although the presence of t he absurd in grammar says something not just about a particular linguistic drama but about the human race as a whole. All I have tried to do is to highlight one of Platonov's stylistic aspects that happens to be not so much even a stylistic one. He simply had a tendency to see his' words to their logical -that is absurd, that is totally paralyzing end. In other words, like no other Russian writer , bef ore or after him, Platonov was able to reveal a self- destructive, eschatologica l element within the language itself, and that, in turn, was of extremely reveal ing consequence to the revolutionary eschatology with which history supplied him as his subject matter.

In casting a sort of myopic, estranged glance at any page of this writer, one ge ts a feeling of looking at a cuneiform tablet: so densely is it packed with thos e semantic blind alleys. Or else his pages look like a great department store wi th its apparel items turned inside out. This by no means suggests that Platonov was the enemy of this Utopia, of this socialism, of the regime, collectivization , etc.; not at all. It's just that what he was doing with the language went far beyond the framework of that specific utopia. But then this is what every langua ge inevitably does: it goes beyond history. However, what's interesting about Pl atonov's style is that he appears to have deliberately and completely subordinate d himself to the vocabulary of his utopia with all its cumbersome neologisms, abbr eviations, acronyms, bureaucratese, sloganeering, militarized imperatives, and t he like. Apart from the writer's instinct, this willingness, not to say abandon, with which he went for newspeak, indicates, it would seem, his sharing of some beliefs in the promises the new society was so generous with. It would be false as well as unnecessary to try to divorce Platonov from his epo ch; the language was to do this anyway, if only because epochs are finite. In a s ense, one can see this writer as an embodiment of language temporarily occupying a piece of time and reporting from within. The essence of his message is langua ge is a muxenarian device, history isn't, and coming from him that would be appro priate. Of course, to get into excavating the genealogy of Platonov's style, one has inevitably to mention the ' plaiting of words" of centuries of Russian hagi ography, Nikolai Leskov with his tendency to highly individualized narrative (so -called "skaz" sort of "yarn-ing"), Gogol's satirical epic sway, Dostoevsky with h is snowballing, feverishly choking conglomeration of dictions. But with Platonov the issue is not lines of succession or tradition in Russian literature but the writer's dependence on the synthesizing (or, more precisely, supra-analy tical) essence of the Russian language itself, conditioning at times by means of p urely phonetic allusions the emergence of concepts totally devoid of any real conte nt. His main tool was inversion; and as he wrote in a totally inverted, highly i nflected language, he was able to put an equals sign between 'language" and "inve rsion." "Version" the normal word order came more and more to play a service role.Ag ain, very much after Dostoevsky's fashion, this treatment of language was more be fitting a poet than a novelist. And, indeed, Platonov, like Dostoevsky, wrote som e poetry. But if Dostoevsky, for his Captain Lebyadkin poem a? ~)ut the cockroac h in The Possessed, can be considered the first writer of the absurd, Platonov's verses earn him a niche in no pantheon. But then scenes such as the one in The Foundation Pit where the bear-apprentice at some village's smithy is enforcing c ollectivization and is more politically orthodox than his master put Platonov so mewhat beyond the status of a novelist as well. Of course, it could be said that he was our first properly surrealist writer, except that his surrealism wasn't a literary category tied in our mind with an individualistic world view but a pr oduct of philosophical madness, a product of blind-alley psychology on a mass scal e. Platonov wasn't an individualist; quite the contrary: his consciousness was d etermined precisely by the mass scale and both the impersonal and the depersonali zing character of what was happening. His novels depict not a hero against a bac kground but rather that background itself devouring a hero. And that's why his s urrealism, in its turn, is impersonal, folkloric, and, to a of this writer, one gets a feeling of looking at a cuneiform tablet: so densely is it packed with th ose semantic blind alleys. Or else his pages look like a great department store with its apparel items turned inside out. This by no means suggests that Platono v was the enemy of this utopia, of this socialism, of the regime, collectivizati on, etc.; not at all. It's just that what he was doing with the language went fa r beyond the framework of that specific utopia. But then this is what every lang uage inevitably does: it goes beyond history. However, what's interesting about Platonov's style is that he appears to have deliberately and completely subordina ted himself to the vocabulary of his utopia with all its cumbersome neologisms, ab breviations, acronyms, bureaucratese, sloganeering, militarized imperatives, and the like. Apart from the writer's instinct, this willingness, not to say abando n, with which he went for newspeak, indicates, it would seem, his sharing of som e beliefs in the promises the new society was so generous with.

It would be false as well as unnecessary to try to divorce Platonov from his epo ch; the language was to do this anyway, if only because epochs are finite. In a s ense, one can see this writer as an embodiment of language temporarily occupying a piece of time and reporting from within. The essence of his message is langua ge is a millenarian device, history isn't, and coming from him that would be appr opriate. Of course, to get into excavating the genealogy of Platonov's style, on e has inevitably to mention the "plaiting of words" of centuries of Russian hagi ography, Nikolai Leskov with his tendency to highly individualized narrative (so -called "skaz" sort of "yarn-ing"), Gogol's satirical epic sway, Dostoevsky with h is snowballing, feverishly choking conglomeration of dictions. But with Platonov the issue is not lines of succession or tradition in Russian literature but the writer's dependence on the synthesizing (or, more precisely, supra-analy tical) essence of the Russian language itself, conditioning at times by means of p urely phonetic allusions the emergence of concepts totally devoid of any real conte nt. His main tool was inversion; and as he wrote in a totally inverted, highly i nflected language, he was able to put an equals sign between "language" and "inve rsion." "Version" the normal word order came more and more to play a service role. Again, very much after Dostoevsky's fashion, this treatment of language was more befitting a poet than a novelist. And, indeed, Platonov, like Dostoevsky, wrote s ome poetry. But if Dostoevsky, for his Captain Lebyadkin poem abc it the cockroa ch in The Possessed, can be considered the first writer of the absurd, Platonov' s verses earn him a niche in no pantheon. But then scenes such as the one in The Foundation Pit where the bear-apprentice at some village's smithy is enforcing collectivization and is more politically orthodox than his master put Platonov s omewhat beyond the status of a novelist as well. Of course, it could be said tha t he was our first properly surrealist writer, except that his surrealism wasn't a literary category tied in our mind with an individualistic world view but a p roduct of philosophical madness, a product of blind-alley psychology on a mass sca le. Platonov wasn't an individualist; quite the contrary: his consciousness was determined precisely by the mass scale and both the impersonal and the depersonal izing character of what was happening. His novels depict not a hero against a ba ckground but rather that background itself devouring a hero. And that's why his surrealism, in its turn, is impersonal, folkloric, and, to aAnd the heart doesn' t die when one thinks it should. Czeslaw Milosz, "Elegy for N.N." Less Than One i As failures go, attempting to recall the past is like trying to grasp the meanin g of existence. Both make one feel like a baby clutching at a basketball: one's palms keep sliding off. I remember rather little of my life and what I do remember is of small consequenc e. Most of the thoughts I now recall as having been interesting to me owe their significance to the time when they occurred. If any do not, they have no doubt b een expressed much better by someone else. A writer s biography is in his twists of language. X remember, for instance, that when I was about ten or eleven it o ccurred to me that Marx's dictum that "existence conditions consciousness" was tr ue only for as long as it takes consciousness to acquire the art of estrangement ; thereafter, consciousness is on its own and can both condition and ignore exis tence. At that age, this was surely a discovery but one hardly worth recording, an d surely it had been better stated by others. And does it really matter who firs t cracked the mental cuneiform of which "existence conditions consciousness" is a perfect example?So I am writing all this not in order to set the record straigh t (there is no such record, and even if there is, it is an insignificant one and thus not yet distorted), but mostly for the usual reason why a writer writes to g ive or to get a boost from the language, this time from a foreign one. The littl e I remember becomes even more diminished by being recollected in English. For the beginning I had better trust my birth certificate, which states that I w as born on May 24,1940, in Leningrad, Russia, much as I abhor this name for the city which long ago the ordinary people nicknamed simply "Peter" from Petersburg. There is an old two-liner:

The sides of people Are rubbed by Old Peter. In the national experience, the city is definitely Leningrad; in the growing vul garity of its content, it becomes Leningrad more and more. Besides, as a word, "L eningrad" to a Russian ear already sounds as neutral as the word "construction" o r "sausage." And yet Td rather call it "Peter," for I remember this city at a ti me when it didn't look like "Leningrad" right after the war. Gray, pale-green fa5ad es with bullet and shrapnel cavities; endless, empty streets, with few passersby and light traffic; almost a starved look with, as a result, more definite and, if you wish, nobler features. A lean, hard face with the abstract glitter of its river reflected in the eyes of its hollow windows. A survivor cannot be named af ter Lenin. Tbose magnificent pockmarked fa5ades behind which among old pianos, worn-out rugs , dusty paintings in heavy bronze frames, leftovers of furniture (chairs least o f all) consumed by the iron stoves during the siege a faint life was beginning to glimmer. And I remember, as I passed these fa?ades on my way to school, being co mpletely absorbed in imagining what was going on in those rooms with the old, bil lowy wallpaper. I must say that from these facades and porticoes classical, modern, eclectic, with their columns, pilasters, and plastered heads of mythic animals or people from their ornaments and caryatids holding up the balconies, from the to rsos in the niches of their entrances, I have learned more about the history of our world than I subsequently have from any book. Greece, Rome, Egypt all of them were there, and all were chipped by artillery shells during the bombardments. A nd from the gray, reflecting river flowing down to the Baltic, with an occasional tugboat in the midst of it struggling against the current, I have learned more about infinity and stoicism than from mathematics and Zeno. All that had very little to do with Lenin, whom, I suppose, I began to despise e ven when I was in the first grade not so much because of his political philosophy or practice, about which at the age of seven I knew very little, but because of his omnipresent images which plagued almost every textbook, every class wall, po stage stamps, money, and what not, depicting the man at various ages and stages of his life. There was baby Lenin, looking like a cherub in his blond curls. The n Lenin in his twenties and thirties, bald and uptight, with that meaningless ex pression on his face which could be mistaken for anything, preferably a sense of purpose. This face in some way haunts every Russian and suggests some sort of st andard for human appearance because it is utterly lacking in character. (Perhaps because there is nothing specific in that face it suggests many possibilities.) Then there was an oldish Lenin, balder, with his wedge-like beard, in his threepiece dark suit, sometimes smiling, but most often addressing the "masses" from the top of an armored car or from the podium of some party congress, with a hand outstretched in the air. There were also variants: Lenin in his worker's cap, with a carnation pinned to his lapel; in a vest, sitting in his study, writing or reading; on a lakeside st ump, scribbling his April Theses, or some other nonsense, al fresco. Ultimately, Lenin in a paramilitary jacket on a garden bench next to Stalin, who was the on ly one to surpass Lenin in the ubiquitous- ness of his printed images. But Stali n was then alive, while Lenin was dead and, if only because of that, "good" becau se he belonged to the past i.e., was sponsored by both history and nature. Whereas Stalin was sponsored only by nature, or the other way around. I think that coming to ignore those pictures was my first lesson in switching of f, my first attempt at estrangement. There were more to follow; in fact, the res t of my life can be viewed as a nonstop avoidance of its most importunate aspect s. I must say, I went quite far in that direction; perhaps too far. Anything that bore a suggestion of repetitive- ness became compromised and subject to removal . That included phrases, trees, certain types of people, sometimes even physical pain; it affected many of my relationships. In a way, I am grateful to Lenin. W hatever there was in plenitude I immediately regarded as some sort of propaganda. This attitude, I think, made for an awful acceleration through the thicket of ev ents, with an accompanying superficiality. I don't believe for a moment that all the clues to character are to be found in c

hildhood. For about three generations Russians have been living in communal apart ments and cramped rooms, and our parents made love while we pretended to be asle ep. Then there was a war, starvation, absent or mutilated fathers, horny mothers , official lies at school and unofficial ones at home. Hard winters, ugly clothe s, public expose of our wet sheets in summer camps, and citations of such matter s in front of others. Then the red flag would flutter on the mast of the camp. S o what? All this militarization of childhood, all the menacing idiocy, erotic te nsion (at ten we all lusted for our female teachers) had not affected our ethics much, or our aesthetics or our ability to love and suffer. X recall these things not because I think that they are the keys to the subconscious, or certainly not out of nostalgia for my childhood. I recall them because I have never done so be fore, because I want some of those things to stay at least on paper. Also, because looking backward is more rewarding than its opposite. Tomorrow is just less attr active than yesterday. For some reason, the past doesn't radiate such immense mo notony as the future does. Because of its plenitude, the future is propaganda. S o is grass. The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie. I happen to remem ber mine. It was in a school library when I had to fill out an application for m embership. The fifth blank was of course "nationality." I was seven years old an d knew very well that I was a Jew, but I told the attendant that I didn't know. With dubious glee she suggested that I go home and ask my parents. I never retur ned to that library, although I did become a member of many others which had the same application forms. I wasn't ashamed of being a Jew, nor was I scared of ad mitting it. In the class ledger our names, the names of our parents, home addres ses, and nationalities were registered in full detail, and from time to time a t eacher would "forget" the ledger on the desk in the classroom during breaks. The n, like vultures, we would fall upon those pages; everyone in my class knew that I was a Jew. But seven-year-old boys don't make good anti-Semites. Besides, I w as fairly strong for my age, and the fists were what mattered most then. I was a shamed of the word "Jew" itself in Russian, "yevrei" regardless of its connotations. A word's fate depends on the variety of its contexts, on the frequency of its us age. In printed Bussian "yevrei" appears nearly as seldom as, say, "mediastinum" or "gennel" in American English. In fact, it also has something like the status of a four-letter word or like a name for VD. When one is seven one's vocabulary proves sufficient to acknowledge this word's rarity, and it is utterly unpleasan t to identify oneself with it; somehow it goes against one's sense of prosody. I remember that I always felt a lot easier with a Russian equivalent of "kike" "zhy d" (pronounced like Andre Gide): it was clearly offensive and thereby meaningles s, not loaded with allusions. A one-syllable word can t do much in Russian. But when suffixes are applied, or endings, or prefixes, then feathers fly. All this is not to say that I suffered as a Jew at that tender age; it's simply to say th at my first lie had to do with my identity. Not a bad start. As for anti-Semitism as such, I didn't care much about it becau se it came mostly from teachers: it seemed innate to their negative part in our lives; it had to be coped with like low marks. If I had been a Roman Catholic, I would have wished most of them in Hell. True, some teachers were better than ot hers; but since all were masters of our immediate lives, we didn't bother to dis tinguish. Nor did they try to distinguish among their little slaves, and even the most ardent anti-Semitic remarks bore an air of impersonal inertia. Somehow, I never was capable of taking seriously any verbal assault on me, especially from people of such a disparate age group. I guess the diatribes my parents used to de liver against me tempered me very well. Besides, some teachers were Jews themsel ves, and I dreaded them no less than I did the pure-blooded Russians. This is just one example of the trimming of the self that along with the language itself, where verbs and nouns change places as freely as one dares to have them do so bred in us such an overpowering sense of ambivalence that in ten years we ended up with a willpower in no way superior to a seaweed's. Four years in the a rmy (into which men were drafted at the age of nineteen) completed the process o f total surrender to the state. Obedience would become both first and second nat ure.

If one had brains, one would certainly try to outsmart the system by devising al l kinds of detours, arranging shady deals with one's superiors, piling up lies a nd pulling the strings of one's semi-nepotic connections. This would become a ful l-time job. Yet one was constantly aware that the web one had woven was a web of lies, and in spite of the degree of success or your sense of humor, you'd despis e yourself. That is the ultimate triumph of the system: whether you beat it or j oin it, you feel equally guilty. The national belief is as the proverb has it that t here is no Evil without a grain of Good in it and presumably vice versa. Ambivalence, I think, is the chief characteristic of my nation, There isn't a Ru ssian executioner who isn't scared of turning victim one day, nor is there the s orriest victim who would not acknowledge (if only to himself) a mental ability t o become an executioner. Our immediate history has provided well for both. There is some wisdom in this. One might even think that this ambivalence is wisdom, t hat life itself is neither good nor bad, but arbitrary. Perhaps our literature st resses the good cause so remarkably because this cause is challenged so well. If this emphasis were simply doublethink, that would be fine; but it grates on the instincts. This kind of ambivalence, I think, is precisely that "blessed news" w hich the East, having little else to offer, is about to impose on the rest of th e world. And the world looks ripe for it. The world's destiny aside, the only way for a boy to fight his imminent lot woul d be to go off the track. This was hard to do because of your parents, and becau se you yourself were quite frightened of the unknown. Most of all, because it ma de you different from the majority, and you got it with your mother's milk that the majority is right A certain lack of concern is required, and unconcerned I wa s. As I remember my quitting school at the age of fifteen, it wasn't so much a c onscious choice as a gut reaction. I simply couldn't stand certain faces in my cl ass of some of my classmates, but mostly of teachers. And so one winter morning, fo r no apparent reason, I rose up in the middle of the session and made my melodra matic exit through the school gate, knowing clearly that I'd never be back. Of t he emotions overpowering me at that moment, I remember only a general disgust wit h myself for being too young and letting so many things boss me around. Also, the re was that vague but happy sensation of escape, of a sunny street without end. The main thing, I suppose, was the change of exterior. In a centralized state al l rooms look alike: the office of my school's principal was an exact replica of the interrogation chambers I began to frequent some five years later. The same w ooden panels, desks, chairs a paradise for carpenters. The same portraits of our fo unders, Lenin, Stalin, members of the Politburo, and Maxim Gorky (the founder of Soviet literature) if it was a school, or Felix Dzerzhinsky (the founder of the Soviet Secret Police) if it was an interrogation chamber. Often, though, Dzerzhinsky "Iron Felix" or "Knight of the Revolution," as propagan da has it would decorate the principal's wall as well, because the man had glided into the system of education from the heights of the KGB. And those stuccoed wal ls of my classrooms, with their blue horizontal stripe at eye level, running unfa ilingly across the whole country, like the line of an infinite common denominator : in halls, hospitals, factories, prisons, corridors of communal apartments. The only place I didn't encounter it was in wooden peasant huts. This decor was as maddening as it was omnipresent, and how many times in my life would I catch myself peering mindlessly at this blue two-inch-wide stripe, taki ng it sometimes for a sea horizon, sometimes for an embodiment of nothingness its elf. It was too abstract to mean anything. From the floor up to the level of you r eyes a wall covered with rat-gray or greenish paint, and this blue stripe topp ing it off; above it would be the virginally white stucco. Nobody ever asked why it was there. Nobody could have answered. It was just there, a border line, a di vider between gray and white, below and above. They were not colors themselves b ut hints of colors, which might be interrupted only by alternating patches of br own: doors. Closed, half open. And through the half-open door you could see anoth er room with the same distribution of gray and white marked by the blue stripe. Plus a portrait of Lenin and a world map. It was nice to leave that Kafkaesque cosmos, although even then or so it seems I sor t of knew that I was trading six for half a dozen. I knew that any other building

I was going to enter would look the same, for buildings are where we are doomed to carry on anyhow. Still, I felt that I had to go. The financial situation in our family was grim: we existed mostly on my mother's salary, because my father, after being discharged from the navy in accordance with some seraphic ruling th at Jews should not hold substantial military ranks, had a hard time finding a jo b. Of course, my parents would have managed without my contribution; they would have preferred that I finish school. I knew that, and yet I told myself that I h ad to help my family. It was almost a lie, but this way it looked better, and by that time I had already learned to like lies for precisely this "almost-ness" w hich sharpens the outline of truth: after all, truth ends where lies start. That 's what a boy learned in school and it proved to be more useful than algebra. 2 Whatever it was a lie, the truth, or, most likely, their mixture that caused me to ma ke such a decision, I am immensely grateful to it for what appears to have been m y first free act. It was an instinctive act, a walkout. Reason had very little t o do with it. I know that, because I've been walking out ever since, with increas ing frequency. And not necessarily on account of boredom or of feeling a trap gap ing; I've been walking out of perfect setups no less often than out of dreadful ones. However modest the place you happen to occupy, if it has the slightest mar k of decency, you can be sure that someday somebody will walk in and claim it fo r himself or, what is worse, suggest that you share it. Then you either have to fight for that place or leave it. I happened to prefer the latter. Not at all be cause I couldn't fight, but rather out of sheer disgust with myself: managing to pick something that attracts others denotes a certain vulgarity in your choice. It doesn't matter at all that you came across the place first. It is even worse to get somewhere first, for those who follow will always have a stronger appeti te than your partially satisfied one. Afterward I often regretted that move, especially when I saw my former classmate s getting on so well inside the system. And yet I knew something that they didn't . In fact, I was getting on too, but in the opposite direction, going somewhat f urther. One thing I am especially pleased with is that I managed to catch the "w orking class" in its truly proletarian stage, before it began to undergo a middl e-class conversion in the late fifties. It was a real "proletariat" that I dealt with at the factory where, at the age of fifteen, I began to work as a milling machine operator. Marx would recognize them instantly. They or rather "we" all lived in communal apartments, four or more people in one room, often with three gener ations all together, sleeping in shifts, drinking like sharks, brawling with eac h other or with neighbors in the communal kitchen or in a morning line before the communal john, beating their women with a moribund determination, crying openly when Stalin dropped dead, or at the movies, and cursing with such frequency that a normal word, like "airplane," would strike a passerby as something elaboratel y obscene becoming a gray, indifferent ocean of heads or a forest of raised hands at public meetings on behalf of some Egypt or other. The factory was all brick, huge, straight out of the industrial revolution. It h ad been built at the end of the nineteenth century, and the population of "Peter " referred to it as "the Arsenal": the factory produced cannons. At the time I b egan to work there, it was also producing agricultural machinery and air compres sors. Still, according to the seven veils of secrecy which blanket almost everyt hing in Russia that has to do with heavy industry, the factory had its code name , "Post Office Box 671." I think, though, that secrecy was imposed not so much to fool some foreign intelligence service as to maintain a kind of paramilitary di scipline, which was the only device for guaranteeing any stability in production. In either case, failure was evident. The machinery was obsolete; 90 percent of it had been taken from Germany as repa rations after World War II. I remember that whole cast-iron zoo full of exotic c reatures bearing the names Cincinnati, Karlton, Fritz Werner, Siemens & Schuckert . Planning was hideous; every once in a while a rush order to produce some item would mess up your flickering attempt to establish some kind of working rhythm, a procedure. By the end of a quarter (i.e., every third month), when the plan wa s going up in smoke, the administration would issue the war cry mobilizing all ha

nds on one job, and the plan would be subjected to a storm attack. Whenever some thing broke down, there were no spare parts, and a bunch of usually semi-drunk t inkers would be called in to exercise their sorcery. The metal would arrive full of craters. Virtually everyone would have a hangover on Mondays, not to mention the mornings after paydays. Production would decline sharply the day after a loss by the city or national so ccer team. Nobody would work, and everybody discussed the details and the player s, for along with all the complexes of a superior nation, Russia has the great i nferiority complex of a small country. This is mostly the consequence of the cen tralization of national life. Hence the positive, "life-affirming" drivel of the official newspapers and radio erven when describing an earthquake; they never g ive you any information about victims but only sing of other cities' and republi cs' brotherly care in supplying the stricken area with tents and sleeping bags. Or if there is a cholera epidemic, you may happen to learn of it only while read ing about the latest success of our wondrous medicine as manifested in the inven tion of a new vaccine. The whole thing would have looked absurd if it were not for those very early mor nings when, having washed my breakfast down with pale tea, I would run to catch the streetcar and, adding my berry to the dark-gray bunch of human grapes hangin g on the footboard, would sail through die pinkish-blue, watercolor-like city to the wooden doghouse of my factory's entrance. It had two guards checking our bad ges and its fagade was decorated with classical veneered pilasters. I've noticed that the entrances of prisons, mental hospitals, and concentration camps are don e in the same style: they all bear a hint of classicistic or baroque porticoes. Quite an echo. Inside my shop, nuances of gray were interwoven under the ceiling , and the pneumatic hoses hissed quietly on the floor among the mazout puddles g littering with all the colors of the rainbow. By ten o'clock this metal jungle w as in full swing, screeching and roaring, and the steel barrel of a would-be ant iaircraft gun soared in the air like the disjointed neck of a giraffe. I have always envied those nineteenth-century characters who were able to look b ack and distinguish the landmarks of their lives, of their development. Some eve nt would mark a point of transition, a different stage. I am talking about write rs; but what I really have in mind is the capacity of certain types of people to rationalize their lives, to see things separately, if not clearly. And I underst and that this phenomenon shouldn't be limited to the nineteenth century. Yet in my life it has been represented mostly by literature. Either because of some bas ic flaw of my mind or because of the fluid, amorphous nature of life itself, I h ave never been capable of distinguishing any landmark, let alone a buoy. If ther e is anything like a landmark, it is that which I won't be able to acknowledge m yself i.e., death. In a sense, there never was such a thing as childhood. These ca tegories childhood, adulthood, maturity seem to me very odd, and if I use them occas ionally in conversation I always regard them mutely, for myself, as borrowed. I guess there was always some 'me" inside that small and, later, somewhat bigger shell around which "everything" was happening. Inside that shell the entity whi ch one calls "I" never changed and never stopped watching what was going on outs ide. I am not trying to hint at pearls inside. What I am saying is that the pass age of time does not much affect that entity. To get a low grade, to operate a m illing machine, to be beaten up at an interrogation, or to lecture on Callimachu s in a classroom is essentially the same. This is what makes one feel a bit asto nished when one grows up and finds oneself tackling the tasks that are supposed to be handled by grownups. The dissatisfaction of a child with his parents' cont rol over him and the panic of an adult confronting a responsibility are of the sa me nature. One is neither of these figures; one is perhaps less than "one." Certainly this is partly an outgrowth of your profession. If you are in banking or if you fly an aircraft, you know that after you gain a substantial amount of expertise you are more or less guaranteed a profit or a safe landing. Whereas in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft. In this field, where expertise invites doo m, the notions of adolescence and maturity get mixed up, and panic is the most fr equent state of mind. So I would be lying if I resorted to chronology or to anyt

hing that suggests a linear process. A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is aca- demia is boredom, with flashes of panic. Except that the factory was next to a hospital, and the hospital was next to the most famous prison in all of Russia, called the Crosses. And the morgue of that hospital was where I went to work after quitting the Arsenal, for I had the ide a of becoming a doctor. The Crosses opened its cell doors to me soon after I cha nged my mind and started to write poems. When I worked at the factory, I could s ee the hospital over the wall. When I cut and sewed up corpses at the hospital, I would see prisoners walking in the courtyard of the Crosses; sometimes they ma naged to throw their letters over the wall, and I'd pick them up and mail them. Because of this tight topography and because of the shell's enclosure, all these places, jobs, convicts, workers, guards, and doctors have merged into one anoth er, and I don't know any longer whether I recall somebody walking back and forth in the flatiron-shaped courtyard of the Crosses or whether it is me walking the re. Besides, both the factory and the prison were built at approximately the sam e time, and on the surface they were indistinguishable; one looked like a wing o f the other. So it doesn't make sense to me to try to be consecutive here. Life never looked to me like a set of clearly marked transitions; rather, it snowballs, and the mor e it does, the more one place (or one time) looks like another. I remember, for instance, how in 1945 my mother and I were waiting for a train at some railway s tation near Leningrad. The war was just over, twenty million Russians were decay ing in makeshift graves across the continent, and the rest, dispersed by war, wer e returning to their homes or what was left of their homes. The railway station was a picture of primeval chaos. People were besieging the cattle trains like ma d insects; they were climbing on the roofs of cars, squeezing between them, and s o on. For some reason, my eye caught sight of an old, bald, crippled man with a wooden leg, who was trying to get into car after car, but each time was pushed a way by the people who were already hanging on the footboards. The train started to move and the old man hopped along. At one point he managed to grab a handle o f one of the cars, and then I saw a woman in the doorway lift a kettle and pour boiling water straight on the old man's bald crown. The man fell the Brownian move ment of a thousand legs swallowed him and I lost sight of him. It was cruel, yes, but this instance of cruelty, in its own turn, merges in my m ind with a story that took place twenty years later when a bunch of former colla borators with the German occupation forces, the so-called Polizei, were caught. It was in the papers. There were six or seven old men. The name of their leader was naturally Gurewicz or Ginzburg i.e., he was a Jew, however unthinkable it is t o imagine a Jew collaborating with Nazis. They all got various sentences. The Je w, naturally, got capital punishment. I was told that on the morning of the exec ution he was taken from the cell, and while being led into the courtyard of the prison where the firing squad was waiting, he was asked by the officer in charge of the prison guard: "Ah, by the way, Gurewicz [or Ginzburg], what's your last wish?" "Last wish?" said the man. "I don't know ... I'd like to take a leak . . ." To which the officer replied: "Well, you'll take a leak later." Now, to me bo th stories are the same; yet it is even worse if the second story is pure folklo re, although I don't think it is know hundreds of similar tales, perhaps more th an hundreds. Yet they merge. What made my factory different from my school wasn't what I'd been doing inside each, not what I'd been thinking in the respective periods, but the way their fac ades looked, what I saw on my way to class or to the shop. In the last analysis, appearances are all there is. The same idiotic lot befell millions and millions . Existence as such, monotonous in itself, has been reduced to uniform rigidity by the centralized state. What was left to watch were faces, weather, buildings; also, the language people used. I had an uncle who was a member of the Party and who was, as I realize now, an a wfully good engineer, During the war he built bomb shelters for the Party Genoss en; before and after it he built bridges. Both still stand. My father always rid iculed him while quarreling about money with my mother, who would cite her engin eer-brother as an example of solid and steady living, and I disdained him more o

r less automatically. Still, he had a magnificent library. He didn't read much, I think; but it was and still is a mark of chic for the Soviet middle class to subscr ibe to new editions of encyclopedias, classics, and so on. I envied him madly. I remember once standing behind his chair, peering at the back of his head and th inking that if I killed him all his books would become mine, since he was then u nmarried and had no children. I used to take books from his shelves, and even fa shioned a key to a tall bookcase behind whose glass sat four huge volumes of a pr e- revolutionary edition of Man and Woman. This was a copiously illustrated encyclopedia, to which I still consider myself indebted for my basic knowledge of how the forbidden fruit tastes. If, in genera l, pornography is an inanimate object that causes an erection, it is worth notin g that in the puritanical atmosphere of Stalin's Russia, one could get turned on by the one hundred percent innocent Socialist Realist painting called Admission to the Komsomol, which was widely reproduced and which decorated almost every cla ssroom. Among the characters depicted in this painting was a young blond woman s itting on a chair with her legs crossed in such a way that two or three inches o f her thigh were visible. It wasn't so much that bit of her thigh as its contras t to the dark brown dress she wore that drove me crazy and pursued me in my drea ms. It was then that I learned to disbelieve all the noise about the subconscious. I think that I never dreamed in symbols I always saw the real thing: bosom, hips, female underwear. As to the latter, it had an odd significance for us boys at tha t time. I remember how during a class, somebody would crawl under a row of desks all the way up to the teacher's desk, with a single purpose to look under her dre ss to check what color underpants she was wearing that day. Upon completing his expedition, he would announce in a dramatic whisper to the rest of the class, "L ilac." In short, we were not troubled much by our fantasies we had too much reality to d eal with. I've said somewhere else that Russians at least my generation never resort to shrinks. In the first place, there are not so many of them. Besides, psychiat ry is the state's property. One knows that to have a psychiatric record isn't su ch a great thing. It might backfire at any moment. But in any case, we used to h andle our problems ourselves, to keep track of what went on inside our heads wit hout help from the outside. A certain advantage of totalitarianism is that it su ggests to an individual a kind of vertical hierarchy of his own, with consciousn ess at the top. So we oversee what's going on inside ourselves; we almost report to our consciousness on our instincts. And then we punish ourselves. When we re alize that this punishment is not commensurate with the swine we have discovered inside, we resort to alcohol and drink our wits out. I think this system is efficient and consumes less cash. It is not that I think suppression is better than freedom; X just believe that the mechanism of suppres sion is as innate to the human psyche as the mechanism of release. Besides, to t hink that you are a swine is humbler and eventually more accurate than to percei ve yourself as a fallen angel. I have every reason to think so because in the co untry where I spent thirty-two years, adultery and moviegoing are the only forms of free enterprise. Plus Art. All the same, I felt patriotic. This was the normal patriotism of a child, a patr iotism with a strong militaristic flavor. I admired planes and warships, and not hing was more beautiful to me than the yellow and blue banner of the air force, which looked like an open parachute canopy with a propeller in the center. I lov ed planes and until quite recently followed developments in aviation closely. Wi th the arrival of rockets I gave up, and my love became a nostalgia for propjets . (I know X am not the only one: my nine-year-old son once said that when he gre w up he would destroy all turbojets and reintroduce biplanes.) As for the navy, I was a true child of my father and at the age of fourteen applied for admission to a submarine academy. I passed all the exams, but because of the fifth paragr aph nationality didn't get in, and my irrational love for navy overcoats with their double rows of gold buttons, resembling a night street with receding lights, re mained unrequited. Visual aspects of life, I am afraid, always mattered to me more than its content

. For instance, I fell in love with a photograph of Samuel Beckett long before I 'd read a line of his. As for the military, prisons spared me the draft, so that my affair with the uniform forever remained platonic. In my view, prison is a l ot better than the army. In the first place, in prison nobody teaches you to hat e that distant "potential" enemy. Your enemy in prison isn't an abstraction; he i s concrete and palpable. That is, you are always palpable to your enemy. Perhaps "enemy" is too strong a word. In prison you are dealing with an extremely domest icated notion of enemy, which malces the whole thing quite earthly, mortal. Afte r all, my guards or neighbors were not any different from my teachers or those w orkers who humiliated me during my apprenticeship at the factory. My hatred's center of gravity, in other words, wasn't dispersed into some foreign capitalist nowhere; it wasn't even hatred. The damned trait of understanding an d thus forgiving everybody, which started while I was in school, fully blossomed in prison. I don't think I hated even my KGB interrogators: I tended to absolve even them (good-for- nothing, has a family to feed, etc.). The ones I couldn't j ustify at all were those who ran the country, perhaps because I'd never got close to any of them. As enemies go, in a cell you have a most immediate one: lack of space. The formula for prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus o f time. This is what really bothers you, that you can't win. Prison is a lack of alternatives, and the telescopic predictability of the future is what drives you crazy. Even so, it is a hell of a lot better than the solemnity with which the army sics you on people on the other side of the globe, or nearer. Service in the Soviet Army takes from three to four years, and I never met a per son whose psyche wasn't mutilated by its mental straitjacket of obedience. With the exception, perhaps, of musicians who play in military bands and two distant acquaintances of mine who shot themselves in 1956, in Hungary, where both were t ank commanders. It is the army that finally makes a citizen of you; without it y ou still have a chance, however slim, to remain a human being. If there is any r eason for pride in my past, it is that I became a convict, not a soldier. Even f or having missed out on the military lingo the thing that worried me most I was gene rously reimbursed with the criminal argot. Still, warships and planes were beautiful, and every year there were more of the m. In 1945, the streets were full of "Studebekker" trucks and jeeps with a white star on their doors and hoods the American hardware we had got on lend-lease. In 1972, we were selling this kind of thing urhi et orbi ourselves. If the standard of living during that period improved 15 to 20 percent, the improvement in weapon ry production could be expressed in tens of thousands of percent. It will contin ue to go up, because it is about the only real thing we have in that country, th e only tangible field for advancement. Also because military blackmail, i.e., a constant increase in the production of armaments which is perfectly tolerable in the totalitarian setup, may cripple the economy of any democratic adversary tha t tries to maintain a balance. Military buildup isn't insanity: it's the best to ol available to condition the economy of your opposite number, and in the Kremlin they've realized that full well. Anyone seeking world domination would do the s ame. The alternatives are either unworkable (economic competition ) or too scary (actually using military devices).Besides, the army is a peasant's idea of order . There is nothing more reassuring for an average man than the sight of his coho rts parading in front of Politburo members standing on top of the Mausoleum. I g uess it never occurred to any of them that there is an element of blasphemy in s tanding on top of a holy relic s tomb. The idea, I guess, is that of a continuum , and the sad thing about these figures on top of the Mausoleum is that they rea lly join the mummy in defying time. You either see it live on TV or as a poor- q uality photograph multiplied in millions of copies of the official newspapers. L ike the ancient Romans who related themselves to the center of the Empire by mak ing the main street in their settlements always run north-south, so the Russians check the stability and predictability of their existence by those pictures. When I was working at the factory, we would go for lunch breaks into the factory yard; some would sit down and unwrap their sandwiches, others would smoke or pla y volleyball. There was a little flower bed surrounded by the standard wooden fenc e. This was a row of twenty-inch-high planks with two-inch spaces between them,

held together by a transverse lath made of the same material, painted green. It was covered with dust and soot, just like the shrunken, withered flowers inside the square-shaped bed. Wherever you went in that empire, you would always find t his fence. It comes prefabricated, but even when people make it with their own h ands, they always follow the prescribed design. Once I went to Central Asia, to Samarkand; I was all warmed up for those turquoise cupolas and the inscrutable o rnaments of madrasahs and minarets. They were there. And then I saw that fence, with its idiotic rhythm, and my heart sank, the Orient vanished. The small-scale , comb-like repetitiveness of the narrow palings immediately annihilated the spa ce as well as the time between the factory yard and Kubla Khan's ancient seat. There is nothing more remote from these planks than nature, whose green color their paint idiotically suggests. These planks, the go vernmental iron of railings, the inevitable khaki of the military uniform in ever y passing crowd on every street in every city, the eternal photographs of steel foundries in every morning paper and the continuous Tchaikovsky on the radio these things would drive you crazy unless you learned to switch yourself off. There a re no commercials on Soviet TV; there are pictures of Lenin, or so-called photoetudes of "spring," "autumn," etc., in the intervals between the programs. Plus "light" bubbling music which never had a composer and is a product of the amplif ier itself. At that time I didn't know yet that all this was a result of the age of reason a nd progress, of the age of mass production; I ascribed it to the state and partly to the nation itself, which would go for anything that does not require imaginat ion. Still, I think I wasn't completely wrong. Should it not be easier to exerci se and distribute enlightenment and culture in a centralized state? A ruler, the oretically, has better access to perfection (which he claims anyhow) than a repr esentative. Rousseau argued this. Too bad it never worked in Russia. This countr y, with its magnificently inflected language capable of expressing the subtlest n uances of the human psyche, with an incredible ethical sensitivity (a good resul t of its otherwise tragic history), had all the makings of a cultural, spiritual paradise, a real vessel of civilization. Instead, it became a drab hell, with a shabby materialist dogma and pathetic consumerist gropings. My generation, however, was somewhat spared. We emerged from under the postwar r ubble when the state was too busy patching its own skin and couldn't look after us very well. We entered schools, and whatever elevated rubbish we were taught t here, the suffering and poverty were visible all around. You cannot cover a ruin with a page of Pravda. The empty windows gaped at us like skulls' orbits, and a s little as we were, we sensed tragedy. True, we couldn't connect ourselves to t he ruins, but that wasn't necessary: they emanated enough to interrupt laughter. Then we would resume laughing, quite mindlessly and yet it would be a resumption. In those postwar years we sensed a strange intensity in the air; something imma terial, almost ghostly. And we were young, we were kids. The amount of goods was very limited, but not having known otherwise, we didn't mind it. Bikes were old , of prewar make, and the owner of a soccer ball was considered a bourgeois. The coats and underwear that we wore were cut out by our mothers from our fathers' uniforms and patched drawers: exit Sigmund Freud. So we didn't develop a taste f or possessions. Things that we could possess later were badly made and looked ug ly. Somehow, we preferred ideas of things to the things themselves, though when we looked in mirrors we didn't much like what we saw there. We never had a room of our own to lure our girls into, nor did our girls have ro oms. Our love affairs were mostly walking and talking affairs; it would make an astronomical sum if we were charged for mileage. Old warehouses, embankments of t he river in industrial quarters, stiff benches in wet public gardens, and cold e ntrances of public buildings these were the standard backdrops of our first pneumati c blisses. We never had what are called "material stimuli." Ideological ones were a laughable matter even for kindergarten kids. If somebody sold himself out, it wasn't for the sake of goods or comfort: there were none. He was selling out be cause of inner want and he knew that himself. There were no supplies, there was sheer demand. If we made ethical choices, they were based not so much on immediate reality as

on moral standards derived from fiction. We were avid readers and we fell into a dependence on what we read. Books, perhaps because of their formal element of f inality, held us in their absolute power. Dickens was more real than Stalin or B eria. More than anything else, novels would affect our modes of behavior and conv ersations, and 90 percent of our conversations were about novels. It tended to b ecome a vicious circle, but we didn't want to break it. In its ethics, this generation was among the most bookish in the history of Russi a, and thank God for that. A relationship could have been broken for good over a preference for Hemingway over Faulkner; the hierarchy in that pantheon was our r eal Central Committee. It started as an ordinary accumulation of knowledge but s oon became our most important occupation, to which everything could be sacrifice d. Books became the first and only reality, whereas reality itself was regarded as either nonsense or nuisance. Compared to others, we were ostensibly flunking or faking our lives. But come to think of it, existence which ignores the standa rds professed in literature is inferior and unworthy of effort. So we thought, an d I think we were right. The instinctive preference was to read rather than to act. No wonder our actual lives were more or less a shambles. Even those of us who managed to make it thro ugh the very thick woods of "higher education," with all its unavoidable lip and o ther members' service to the system, finally fell victim to literature-imposed scr uples and couldn't manage any longer. We ended up doing odd jobs, menial or edito rial or something mindless, like carving tombstone inscriptions, drafting blueprint s, translating technical texts, accounting, bookbinding, developing X-rays. From time to time we would pop up on the threshold of one another's apartment, with a bottle in one hand, sweets or flowers or snacks in the other, and spend the ev ening talking, gossiping, bitching about the idiocy of the officials upstairs, gu essing which one of us would be the first to die. And now I must drop the pronou n "we." Nobody knew literature and history better than these people, nobody could write i n Russian better than they, nobody despised our times more profoundly. For these characters civilization meant more than daily bread and a nightly hug. This was n't, as it might seem, another lost generation. This was the only generation of Russians that had found itself, for whom Giotto and Mandelstam were more imperat ive than their own personal destinies. Poorly dressed but somehow still elegant, shuffled by the dumb hands of their immediate masters, running like rabbits from the ubiquitous state hounds and the even more ubiquitous foxes, broken, growing old, they still retained their love for the nonexistent (or existing only in thei r balding heads) thing called "civilization." Hopelessly cut off from the rest o f the world, they thought that at least that world was like themselves; now they know that it is like others, only better dressed. As I write this, I close my ey es and almost see them standing in their dilapidated kitchens, holding glasses i n their hands, with ironic grimaces across their faces. "There, there . . They g rin. "Liberie, Egalite, Fraternite . . . Why does nobody add Culture?" Memory, I think, is a substitute for the tail that we lost for good in the happy process of evolution. It directs our movements, including migration. Apart from that there is something clearly atavistic in the very process of recollection, if only because such a process never is linear. Also, the more one remembers, the closer perhaps one is to dying. If this is so, it is a good thing when your memory stumbles. More often, however, it coils, recoils, digresses to all sides, just as a tail does; so should one's narrative, even at the risk of sounding inconsequential and boring. Boredom, af ter all, is the most frequent feature of existence, and one wonders why it fared so poorly in the nineteenth-century prose that strived so much for realism. But even if a writer is fully equipped to imitate on paper the subtlest fluctuat ions of the mind, the effort to reproduce the tail in all its spiral splendor is still doomed, for evolution wasn't for nothing. The perspective of years straigh tens things to the point of complete obliteration. Nothing brings them back, not even handwritten words with their coiled letters. Such an effort is doomed all the more if this tail happens to lag behind somewhere in Russia.But if the print ed words were only a maLrk of forgetful- ness, that would be fine. The sad truth

is that words fail reality as well. At least it's been my impression that any e xperience coming from the Russian realm, even when depicted with photographic pr ecision, simply bounces off the English language, leaving no visible imprint on its surface. Of course the memory of one civilization cannot, perhaps should not, become a memory of another. But when language fails to reproduce the negative re alities of another culture, the worst kind of tautologies result. History, no doubt, is bound to repeat itself; after all, like men, history doesn 't have many choices. But at least one should have the comfort of being aware of what one is falling a victim to when dealing with the peculiar semantics prevail ing in a foreign realm such as Russia. One gets done in by one's own conceptual and analytic habits e.g., using language to dissect experience, and so robbing one 's mind of the benefits of intuition. Because, for all its beauty, a distinct co ncept always means a shrinkage of meaning, cutting off loose ends. While the loo se ends are what matter most in the phenomenal world, for they interweave. These words themselves bear witness that I am far from accusing the English lang uage of insufficiency; nor do I lament the dormant state of its native speakers' psyche. I merely regret the fact that such an advanced notion of Evil as happen s to be in the possession of Russians has been denied entry into consciousness o n the grounds of having a convoluted syntax. One wonders how many of us can reca ll a plain-speaking Evil that crosses the threshold, saying: "Hi, I'm Evil. How a re you?" If all this, nonetheless, has an elegiac air, it is owing rather to the genre of the piece than to its content, for which rage would be more appropriate. Neithe r, of course, yields the meaning of the past; elegy at least doesn't create a ne w reality. No matter how elaborate a structure anyone may devise for catching hi s own tail, he'll end up with a net full of fish but without water. Which lulls his boat. And which is enough to cause dizziness or to make him resort to an ele giac tone. Or to throw the fish back. # a Once upon a time there was a little boy. He lived in the most unjust country in the world. Which was ruled by creatures who by all human accounts should be cons idered degenerates. WTiich never happened. And there was a city. The most beautiful city on the face of the earth. With an immense gray river that hung over its distant bottom like the immense gray sky o ver that river. Along that river there stood magnificent palaces with such beaut ifully elaborated facades that if the little boy was standing on the right bank, the left bank looked like the imprint of a giant mollusk called civilization. W hich ceased to exist. Early in the morning when the sky was still full of stars the little boy would r ise and, after having a cup of tea and an egg, accompanied by a radio announceme nt of a new record in smelted steel, followed by the army choir singing a hymn t o the Leader, whose picture was pinned to the wall over the little boy's still w arm bed, he would run along the snow-covered granite embankment to school. The wide river lay white and frozen like a continent's tongue lapsed into silenc e, and the big bridge arched against the dark blue sky like an iron palate. If t he little boy had two extra minutes, he would slide down on the ice and take twe nty or thirty steps to the middle. All this time he would be thinking about what the fish were doing under such heavy ice. Then he would stop, turn 180 degrees, and run back, nonstop, right up to the entrance of the school. He would burst i nto the hall, throw his hat and coat off onto a hook, and fly up the staircase a nd into his classroom. It is a big room with three rows of desks, a portrait of the Leader on the wall behind the teachers chair, a map with two hemispheres, of which only one is lega l. The little boy takes his seat, opens his briefcase, puts his pen and notebook on the desk, lifts his face, and prepares himself to hear drivel. 1976The Keening Muse When her father learned that his daughter was about to publish a selection of he r poems in a St. Petersburg magazine, he called her in and told her that although he had nothing against her writing poetry, he'd urge her "not to befoul a good respected name" and to use a pseudonym. The daughter agreed, and this is how "An

na Akhmatova" entered Russian literature instead of Anna Gorenko. The reason for this acquiescence was neither uncertainty about the elected occup ation and her actual gifts nor anticipation of the benefits that a split identity can provide a writer. It was done simply for the sake of "maintaining appearanc es," because among families belonging to the nobility and the Gorenkos were one the l iterary profession was generally regarded as somewhat unseemly and befitting tho se of more humble origins who didn't have a better way of making a name. Still, the father's request was a bit of an overstatement. After all, the Gorenk os weren't princes. But then again the family lived in Tsarskoe Selo Tsar's Villag e which was the summer residence of the imperial family, and this sort of topograp hy could have influenced the man. For his seventeen-year-old daughter, however, the place had a different significance. Tsarskoe was the seat of the Lyceum in wh ose gardens a century ago "carelessly blossomed" young Pushkin. As for the pseudonym itself, its choice had to do with the maternal ancestry of Anna Gorenko, which could be traced back to the last khan of the Golden Horde: t o Achmat Khan, descendant of Jenghiz Khan. "I am a Jen- ghizite," she used to re mark not without a touch of pride; and for a Russian ear "Akhmatova" has a disti nct Oriental, Tatar to be precise, flavor. She didn't mean to be exotic, though, if only because in Russia a name with a Tatar overtone meets not curiosity but prejudice. All the same, the five open as of Anna Akhmatova had a hypnotic effect and put t his name's carrier firmly at the top of the alphabet of Russian poetry. In a sen se, it was her first successful line; memorable in its acoustic inevitability, w ith its Ah sponsored less by sentiment than by history. This tells you a lot abo ut the intuition and quality of the ear of this seventeen-year-old girl who soon after her first publication began to sign her letters and legal papers as Anna Akhmatova. In its suggestion of identity derived from the fusion of sound and ti me, the choice of the pseudonym turned out to be prophetic. Anna Akhmatova belongs to the category of poets who have neither genealogy nor d iscernible "development." She is the kind of poet that simply happens"; that arr ives in the world with an already established diction and his/her own unique sen sibility. She came fully equipped, and she never resembled anyone. What was perh aps more significant is that none of her countless imitators was ever capable of producing a convincing Akhmatova pastiche either; they'd end up resembling one a nother more than her. This suggests that Akhmatova's idiom was a product of something less graspable t han an astute stylistic calculation and leaves us with the necessity of upgrading the second part of Buffon's famous equation to the notion of "self." Apart from the general sacred aspects of the said entity, its uniqueness in the case of Akhmatova was further secured by her actual physical beauty. She looked p ositively stunning. Five feet eleven, dark-haired, fair-skinned, with pale graygreen eyes like those of snow leopards, slim and incredibly lithe, she was for h alf a century sketched, painted, cast, carved, and photographed by a multitude o f artists starting with Amedeo Modigliani. As for the poems dedicated to her, th ey'd make more volumes than her own collected works. All this goes to show that the visible part of that self was quite breathtaking; as for the hidden one being a perfect match, there is testimony to it in her wr iting, which blends both. This blend's chief characteristics are nobility and restraint. Akhmatova is the p oet of strict meters, exact rhymes, and short sentences. Her syntax is simple an d free of subordinate clauses whose gnomic convolutions are responsible for most of Russian literature; in fact, in its simplicity, her syntax resembles English. From the very threshold of her career to its very end she was always perfectly clear and coherent. Among her contemporaries, she is a Jane Austen. In any case, if her sayings were dark, it wasn't due to her grammar. In an era marked by so much technical experimentation in poetry, she was blatantl y non-avant-garde. If anything, her means were visually similar to what prompted that wave of innovations in Russian poetry, as everywhere else, at the turn of t he century: to the Symbolists' quatrains, ubiquitous as grass, Yet this visual r esemblance was maintained by Akhmatova deliberately: through it she sought not th

e simplification of her task but a worsening of the odds. She simply wanted to p lay the game straight, without bending or inventing the rules. In short, she want ed her verse to maintain appearances. Nothing reveals a poet's weaknesses like classical verse, and that's why it's so universally dodged. To make a couple of lines sound unpredictable without produc ing a comic effect or echoing someone else is an extremely perplexing affair. Thi s echo aspect of strict meters is most nagging, and no amount of oversaturating the line with concrete physical detail sets one free. Akhmatova sounds so indepe ndent because from the outset she knew how to exploit the enemy. She did it by a collage-like diversification of the content. Often within just o ne stanza she'd cover a variety of seemingly unrelated things. When a person talk s in the same breath about the gravity of her emotion, gooseberry blossoms, and p ulling the left-hand glove onto her right hand that compromises the breath which is , in the poem, its meter to the degree that one forgets about its pedigree. The ec ho, in other words, gets subordinated to the discrepancy of objects and in effect provides them with a common denominator; it ceases to be a form and becomes a n orm of locution. Sooner or later this always happens to the echo as well as to die diversity of t hings themselves in Russian verse it was done by Akhmatova; more exactly, by that self which bore her name. One can't help thinking that while its inner part hear s what, by means of rhyme, the language itself suggests about the proximity of t hose disparate objects, the outer one literally sees that proximity from the van tage point of her actual height. She simply couples what has been already joined : in the language and in the circumstances of her life, if not, as they say, in h eaven. Hence the nobility of her diction, for she doesn't lay claim to her discoveries. Her rhymes are not assertive, the meter is not insistent. Sometimes she'd drop a syllable or two in a stanza's last or penultimate line in order to create the effect of a choked throat, or that of unwitting awkwardness caused by emotional t ension. But that would be as far as she'd go, for she felt very much at home wit hin the confines of classical verse, thereby suggesting that her raptures and rev elations don't require an extraordinary formal treatment, that1 they are not any greater, than those of her predecessors who used these meters before. This, of course, wasn't exactly true. No one absorbs the past as thoroughly as a poet, if only out of fear of inventing the already invented. (This is why, by t he way, a poet is so often regarded as being "ahead of his time," which keeps it self busy rehashing cliches.) So no matter what a poet may plan to say, at the m oment of speech he always knows that he inherits the subject. The great literatu re of the past humbles one not only through its quality but through its topical precedence as well. The reason why a good poet speaks of his own grief with rest raint is that, as regards grief, he is a Wandering Jew. In this sense, Akhmatova was very much a product of the Petersburg tradition in Russian poetry, the foun ders of which, in their own turn, had behind them European classicism as well as its Roman and Greek Origins. In addition, they, too, were aristocrats. If Akhmatova was reticent, it was at least partly because she was carrying the h eritage of her predecessors into the art of this century. This obviously was but an homage to them, since it was precisely that heritage which made her this cen tury's poet. She simply regarded herself, with her raptures and revelations, as a postscript to their message, to what they recorded about their lives. The live s were tragic, and so was the message. If the postscript looks dark, it's becaus e the message was absorbed fully. If she never screams or showers her head with ashes, it's because they didn't. Such were the cue and the key with which she started. Her first collections were tremendously successful with both the critics and the public. In general, the r esponse to a poet's work should be considered last, for it is a poet's last cons ideration. However, Akhmatova's success was in this respect remarkable if one tak es into account its timing, especially in the case of her second and third volume s: 1914 (the outbreak of World War I) and 1917 (the October Revolution in Russia ). On the other hand, perhaps it was precisely this deafening background thunder of world events that rendered the private tremolo of this young poet all the mo

re discernible and vital. In that sense again, the beginning of this poetic care er contained a prophecy of the course it came to run for half a century. Wliat i ncreases the sense of prophecy is that for a Russian ear at the time the thunder of world events was compounded by the incessant and quite meaningless mumbling o f the Symbolists. Eventually these two noises shrunk and merged into the threaten ing incoherent drone of the new era against which Akhmatova was destined to spea k for the rest of her life. Those early collections (Evening, Rosary, and White Flock) dealt mostly with the sentiment which is de rigueur for early collections; with that of love. The poe ms in those books had a diary-like intimacy and immediacy; they'd describe no mo re than one actual or psychological event and were short sixteen to twenty lines a t best. As such they could be committed to memory in a flash, as indeed they wer e and still are by generations and generations of Russians. Still, it was neither their compactness nor their subject matter that made one's memory desire to appropriate them; those features were quite familiar to an exp erienced reader. The news came in the form of a sensibility which manifested itse lf in the author's treatment of her theme. Betrayed, tormented by either jealousy or guilt, the wounded heroine of these poems speaks more frequently in self- re proach than in anger, forgives more eloquently than accuses, prays rather than s creams. She displays all the emotional subtlety and psychological complexity of nineteenth-century Russian prose and all the dignity that the poetry of the same century taught her. Apart from these, there is also a great deal of irony and de tachment which are strictly her own and products of her metaphysics rather than shortcuts to resignation. Needless to say, for her readership those qualities seem to come in both handy a nd timely. More than any other art, poetry is a form of sentimental education, a nd the lines that Akhmatova readers learned by heart were to temper their hearts against the new era's onslaught of vulgarity. The comprehension of the metaphys ics of personal drama betters one's chances of weathering the drama of history. This is why, and not because of the epigrammatic beauty of her lines only, the p ublic clung to them so unwittingly. It was an instinctive reaction; the instinct being that of self-preservation, for the stampede of history was getting more a nd more audible. Akhmatova in any case heard it quite clearly. The intensely personal lyricism of White Flock is tinged with the note that was destined to become her imprimatur: the note of controlled terror. The mechanism designed to keep in check emotions of a romantic nature proved to be as effective when applied to mortal fears. The latter was increasingly intertwined with the former until they resulted in emoti onal tautology, and White Flock marks the beginning of this process. With this co llection, Russian poetry hit "the real, non-calendar twentieth century" but didn 't disintegrate on impact. Akhmatova, to say the least, seemed better prepared for this encounter than most of her contemporaries. Besides, by the time of the Revolution she was twenty-ei ght years old: that is, neither young enough to believe in it nor too old to jus tify it. Furthermore, she was a woman, and it would be equally unseemly for her to extol or condemn the event. Nor did she decide to accept the change of social order as an invitation to loosen her meter and associative chains. For art does n't imitate life if only for fear of cliches. She remained true to her diction, to its private timbre, to refracting rather than reflecting life through the pris m of the individual heart. Except that the choice of detail whose role in a poem previously was to shift attention from an emotionally pregnant issue presently began to be less and less of a solace, overshadowing the issue itself.. She didn't reject the Revolution: a defiant pose wasn't for her either. Using la tter-day locution, she internalized it. She simply took it for what it was; a te rrible national upheaval which meant a tremendous increase of grief per individu al. She understood this not only because her own share went too high but first a nd foremost through her very craft. The poet is a born democrat not thanks to th e pre- cariousness of his position only but because he caters to the entire nati on and employs its language. So does tragedy, and hence their affinity. Akhmatov a, whose verse always gravitated to the vernacular, to the idiom of folk song, c

ould identify with the people more thoroughly than those who were pushing at the time their literary or other programs: she simply recognized grief. Moreover, to say that she identified with the people is to introduce a rationali zation which never took place because of its inevitable redundancy. She was a par t of the whole, and the pseudonym just furthered her class anonymity. In addition , she always disdained the air of superiority present in the word "poet." "I don 't understand these big words," she used to say, "poet, billiard." This wasn't h umility; this was the result of the sober perspective in which she kept her exist ence. The very persistence of love as the theme of her poetry indicates her prox imity to the average person. If she differed from her public it was in that her ethics weren't subject to historical adjustment. Other than that, she was like everybody else. Besides, the times themselves didn 't allow for great variety. If her poems weren't exactly the vox populi, it's be cause a nation never speaks with one voice. But neither was her voice that of th e creme de la creme, if only because it was totally devoid of the populist nosta lgia so peculiar to the Russian intelligentsia. The "we" that she starts to use a bout this time in self-defense against the impersonality of pain inflicted by hi story was broadened to this pronoun's linguistic limits not by herself but by th e rest of the speakers of this language. Because of the quality of the future, th is "we" was there to stay and the authority of its user to grow. In any case, there is no psychological difference between Akhmatova's "civic" po ems of World War I and the revolutionary period, and those written a good thirty years later during World War II. Indeed, without the date underneath them, poems like "Prayer" could be attributed to virtually any moment of Russian history in this century which justifies that particular poem's title. Apart from the sensit ivity of her membrane, though, this proves that the quality of history for the l ast eighty years has somewhat simplified the poet's job. It did so to the degree that a poet would spurn a line containing a prophetic possibility and prefer a plain description of a fact or sensation. Hence the nominative character of Akhmatova's lines in general and at that perio d in particular. She knew not only that the emotions and perceptions she dealt w ith were fairly common but also that time, true to its repetitive nature, would r ender them universal. She sensed that history, like its objects, has very limite d options. What was more important, however, was that those "civic" poems were b ut fragments borne by her general lyrical current, which made their "we" practic ally indistinguishable from the more frequent, emotionally charged "I." Because o f their overlapping, both pronouns were gaining in verisimilitude. Since the name of the current was "love," the poems about the homeland and the e poch were shot through with almost inappropriate intimacy; similarly, those abou t sentiment itself were acquiring an epic timbre. The latter meant the current's widening. Later in her life, Akhmatova always resented attempts by critics and scholars to confine her significance to her love poetry of the teens of this century. She w as perfectly right, because the output of the subsequent forty years outweighs h er first decade both numerically and qualitatively. Still, one can understand th ose scholars and critics, since after 1922 until her death in 1966 Akhmatova sim ply couldn't publish a book of her own, and they were forced to deal with what w as available. Yet perhaps there was another reason, less obvious or less compreh ended by those scholars and critics, that they were drawn to the early Akhmatova . Throughout one's life, time addresses man in a variety of languages: in those of innocence, love, faith, experience, history, fatigue, cynicism, guilt, decay, e tc. Of those, the language of love is clearly the lingua franca. Its vocabulary a bsorbs all the other tongues, and its utterance gratifies a subject, however inan imate it may be. Also, by being thus uttered, a subject acquires an ecclesiastic al, almost sacred denomination, echoing both the way we perceive the objects of our passions and the Good Book's suggestion as to what God is. Love is essential ly an attitude maintained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal constitu tes either faith or poetry. Akhmatova's love poems, naturally, were in the first place just poems. Apart fro

m anything else, they had a terrific novelistic quality, and a reader could have had a wonderful time explicating the various tribulations and trials of their heroine. (Some did just that, and on the basis of those poems, the heated public imagination would have their author "romantically involved" with Alexander Blok the poet of the per iod as well as with His Imperial Majesty himself, although she was a far better po et than the former and a good six inches taller than the latter.) Half self- por trait, half mask, their poetic persona would augment an actual drama with the fa tality of theater, thus probing both her own and pain's possible limits. Happier states would be subjected to the same probing. Realism, in short, was em- f plo yed as the means of transportation to a metaphysical \ destination. Still, all t his would have amounted to animating the genre's tradition were it not for the s heer quantity of poems dealing with the said sentiment. That quantity denies both biographical and Freudian approaches, for it overshoots the addressees' concreteness and renders them as pretexts for the author's spee ch. What art and sexuality have in common is that both are sublimations of one's creative energy, and that denies them hierarchy. The nearly idiosyncratic persi stence of the early Akhmatova love poems suggests not so much the recurrence of p assion as the frequency of prayer. Correspondingly, different though their imagin ed or real protagonists are, these poems display a considerable stylistic simila rity because love as content is in the habit of limiting formal patterns. The sa me goes for faith. After all, there are only so many adequate manifestations for truly strong sentiments; which, in the end, is what explains rituals. It is the finite's nostalgia for the infinite that accounts for the recurrence o f the love theme in Akhmatova's verse, not the actual entanglements. Love indeed has become for her a language, a code to record time's messages or, at least, to convey their t une; she simply heard them better this way. For what interested this poet most w as not her own life but precisely time and the effects of its monotone on the hum an psyche and on her own diction in particular. If she later resented attempts to reduce her to her early writing, it was not because she disliked the status of the habitually love-sick girl: it was because her diction and, with it, the code , subsequently changed a great deal in order to make the monotone of the infinit e more audible. In fact, it was already quite distinct in Anno Domini MCMXXI her fifth and technic ally speaking last collection. In some of its poems, that monotone merges with th e author's voice to the point that she has to sharpen the concreteness of detail or image in order to save them, and by the same token her own mind, from the in human neutrality of the meter. Their fusion, or rather the former's subordination to the latter, came later. In the meantime, she was trying to save her own noti ons of existence from being overtaken by those supplied to her by prosody: for p rosody knows more about time than a human being would like to reckon with. Close exposure to this knowledge, or more accurately to this memory of time rest ructured, results in an inordinate mental acceleration that robs insights that co me from the actual reality of their novelty, if not of their gravity. No poet ca n ever close this gap, but a conscientious one may lower his pitch or muffle his diction so as to downplay his estrangement from real life. This is done sometimes for purely aesthetic purposes: to make one's voice less theatrical, less hel ca nto-like. More frequently, though, the purpose of this camouflage is, again, to retain sanity, and Akhmatova, a poet of strict meters, was using it precisely to that end. But t he more she did so, the more inexorably her voice was approaching the impersonal tonality of time itself, until they merged into something that makes one shudder trying to guess as in her Northern Elegies who is hiding behind the pronoun "I." What happened to pronouns was happening to other parts of speech, which would pe ter out or loom large in the perspective of time supplied by prosody. Akhmatova was a very concrete poet, but the more concrete the image, the more extemporary it would become because of the accom-. panying meter. No poem is ever written fo r its story line's sake only, just as no life is lived for the sake of an obitua ry. What is called the music of a poem is essentially time restructured in such a

way that it brings this poem's content t into a linguistically inevitable, memo rable focus. | Sound, in other words, is the seat of time in the poem, I a background against which its content acquires a stereoscopic quality. The powe r of Akhmatova's lines comes from ; her ability to convey the music's impersonal epic sweep, | which more than matched their actual content, especially | from t he twenties on. The effect of her instrumentation | upon her themes was akin to that of somebody used to being i put against the wall being suddenly put against the horizon. ' The above should be kept very much in mind by the foreign reader of Akhmatova, since that horizon vanishes in translations, leaving on the page absorbing but one- | dimensional content. On the other hand, the foreign reader | may perhaps be consoled by the fact that this poet's native 1 audience also ha s been forced to deal with her work in a | very misrepresented fashion. What tra nslation has in com- t-mon with censorship is that both operate on the basis of the "what's possible" principle, and it must be noted that linguistic barriers c an be as high as those erected by the state, Akhmatova, in any case, is surround ed by both and it's only the former that shows signs of crumbling. Anno Domini MCMXXI was her last collection: in the forty-four years that followe d she had no book of her own. - In the postwar period there were, technically sp eaking, two slim editions of her work, consisting mainly of a few reprinted early lyrics plus genuinely patriotic war poems and doggerel bits extolling the arriv al of peace. These last ones were written by her in order to win the release of her son from the labor camps, in which he nonetheless spent eighteen years. These publications in no way can be regarded as her own, for the poems were selected by the editors of the state-run publishing house and their aim was to convince th e public (especially those abroad) that Akhmatova was alive, well, and loyal. Th ey totaled some fifty pieces and had nothing in common with her output during th ose four decades. For a poet of Akhmatova's stature this meant being buried alive, with a couple o f slabs marking the mound. Her going under was a product of several forces, most ly that of history, whose chief element is vulgarity and whose immediate agent is the state. Now, by MCMXXI, which means 1921, the new state could already be at odds with Akhmatova, whose first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was executed by i ts security forces, allegedly on the direct order of the state's head, Vladimir Lenin. A spin-off of a didactic, eye-for-eye mentality, the new state could expe ct from Akhmatova nothing but retaliation, especially given her reputed tendency for an autobiographical touch. Such was, presumably, the state's logic, furthered by the destruction in the sub sequent decade and a half of her entire circle (including her closest friends, p oets Vladimir Narbut and Osip Mandelstam). It culminated in the arrests of her s on, Lev Gumilyov, and her third husband, art- historian Nikolai Punin, who soon died in prison. Then came World War II. Those fifteen years preceding the war were perhaps the darkest in the whole of R ussian history; undoubtedly they were so in Akhmatova's own life. It's the mater ial which this period supplied, or more accurately the lives it subtracted, that made her eventually earn the title of the Keening Muse. This period simply replac ed the frequency of poems about love witlrthat of poems in memoriam. Death, whic h she would previously evoke as a solution for this or that emotional tension, b ecame too real for any emotion to matter. From a figure of speech it became a fi gure that leaves you speechless. If she proceeded to write, it's because prosody absorbs death, and because she f elt guilty that she survived. The pieces that constitute her "Wreath for the Dea d" are simply attempts to let those whom she outlived absorb or at least join pro sody. It's not that she tried to "immortalize" her dead: most of them were the p ride of Russian literature already and thus had immortalized themselves enough. She simply tried to manage the meaninglessness of existence, which suddenly gape d before her because of the destruction of the sources of its meaning, to domesti cate the 'reprehensible infinity by inhabiting it with familiar shadows. ?Beside s, addressing the dead was the only way of prevent- ing speech from slipping int o a howl.The elements of bowl, however, are quite audible in other Akhmatova poe

ms of the period and later. They'd appear either in the form of idiosyncratic ex cessive rhyming or as a non sequitur line interjected in an otherwise coherent n arrative. Nevertheless, the poems dealing directly with someone's death are free of anything of this sort, as though the author doesn't want to offend her addre ssees with her emotional extremes. This refusal to exploit the ultimate opportun ity to impose herself upon them echoes, of course, the practice of her lyric poe try. But by continuing to address the dead as though they were alive, by not adju sting her diction to "the occasion," she also refuses the opportunity to exploit the dead as those ideal, absolute interlocutors that every poet seeks and finds e ither in the dead or among angels. As a theme, death is a good litmus test for a poet's ethics. The "in memoriam" g enre is frequently used to exercise self-pity or for metaphysical trips that den ote the subconscious superiority of survivor over victim, of majority (of the ali ve) over minority (of the dead). Akhmatova would have none of that. She particul arizes her fallen instead of generalizing about them, since she writes for a min ority with which it's easier for her to identify in any case. She simply continu es to treat them as individuals whom she knew and who, she senses, wouldn't like to be used as the point of departure for no matter how spectacular a destination . Naturally enough, poems of this sort couldn't be published, nor could they even b e written down or retyped. They could only be memorized by the author and by som e seven other people, since she didn't trust her own memory. From time to time, she'd meet a person privately and would ask him or her to recite quietly this or that selection as a means of inventory. This precaution was far from being exce ssive: people would disappear forever for smaller things than a piece of paper w ith a few lines on it. Besides, she feared not so much for her own life as for t hat of her son, who was in a camp and whose release she desperately tried to obt ain for eighteen years. A little piece of paper with a few lines on it could cos t a lot, and more to him than to her, who could lose only hope and, perhaps, min d. The days of both, however, would have been numbered had the authorities found he r Requiem, a cycle of poems describing the ordeal of a woman whose son is arrest ed and who waits under prison walls with a parcel for him and scurries about the thresholds of state offices to find out about his fate. Now, this time around s he was autobiographical indeed, yet the power of Requiem lies in the fact that Ak hmatova's biography was all too common. This requiem mourns the mourners: mother s losing sons, wives turning widows, sometimes both, as was the author's case. T his is a tragedy where the chorus perishes before the hero. The degree of compassion with which the various voices of Requiem are rendered c an be explained only by the authors Orthodox faith; the degree of understanding and forgiveness which accounts for this work's piercing, almost unbearable lyrici sm, only by the uniqueness of her heart, her self, and this self's sense of time . No creed would help to understand, much less forgive, let' alone survive this double widowhood at the hands of the regime, this fate of her son, these forty y ears of being silenced and ostracized. No Anna Gorenko would be able to take it. Anna Akhmatova did, and it's as though she knew what was in 1 store when she took this pen name.

52 / Joseph Brodsky |!! fi | At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise could n't be retained by the mind. In that sense, the whole nation took up the pen name of Akhmatova which explains her popularity and which, more importantly, enabled he r to speak for the nation as well as to tell it something it didn't know, She wa s, essentially, a poet of human ties: cherished, strained, severed. She showed t hese evolutions first through the prism of the individual heart, then through th e prism of history, such as it was. This is about as much as one gets in the way of optics anyway. These two perspectives were brought into sharp focus through prosody, which is s imply a repository of time within language. Hence, by the way, her ability to fo rgive because forgiveness is not a virtue postulated by creed but a property of t ime in both its mundane and metaphysical senses. This is also why her verses are to survive whether published or not: because of the prosody, because they are ch arged with time in both those senses,v They will survive because language is old er than state and because prosody always survives history. In fact, it hardly ne eds history; all it needs is a poet, and Akhmatova was just that. 1982

Pendulum's Song i Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, and died there sevent y years later of throat cancer. The uneventfulness of his life would have made t he strictest of New Critics happy. Cavafy was the ninth child of a well- to-do m ercantile family, whose prosperity went into rapid decline with the death of his father. At the age of nine the future poet went to England, where Cavafy and So ns had its branches, and he returned to Alexandria at sixteen. He was brought up in the Greek Orthodox religion. For a while he attended the Hermes Lyceum, a bu siness school in Alexandria, and some sources tell us that while there he was mo re interested in classical and historical studies than in the art of commerce. B ut this may be merely a cliche in the biography of a poet. In 1882, when Cavafy was nineteen, an anti-European outbreak took place in Alexa ndria which caused a great deal of bloodshed (at least according to that century 's standards), and the British retaliated with a naval bombardment of the city. S ince Cavafy and his mother had left for Constantinople not long before, he misse d his chance to witness perhaps the only historic event to takeplace in Alexandr ia during his lifetime. He spent three subsequent years in Constantinople importan t years for his development. It was in Constantinople that the historical diary, which he had been keeping for several years, stopped at the entry marked "Alexande r," Here also he allegedly had his first homosexual experience. At twenty- eight Cavafy got his first job, as a temporary clerk at the Department of Irrigation in the Ministry of Public Works. This provisional position turned out to be fair ly permanent: he held it for the next thirty years, occasionally making some ext ra money as a broker on the Alexandrian Stock Exchange. Cavafy knew ancient and modern Greek, Latin, Arabic, French; he read Dante in It alian and he wrote his first poems in English. But if there were any literary in fluences and in Cavafy s Alexandria Edmund Keeley sees some of the English Romant ics they ought to be confined to that stage of Cavafy's poetic development which t he poet himself dismissed from the "canon" of his work, as Keeley defines it. As for the later period, Cavafy's treatment of what were known during Hellenic time s as mime-jambs (or simply "mime") and his use of the epitaph are so much his ow n that Keeley is correct in sparing us the haze of the Palatine Anthology. The uneventfulness of Cavafy's life extends to his never having published a book of his poems. He lived in Alexandria, wrote poems (occasionally printing them in feuilles volantes, as pamphlets or broadsheets in a severely limited edition), talked in cafes to local or visiting literati, played cards, bet on horses, visi ted homosexual brothels, and sometimes attended church. I believe that there are at least five editions of Cavafy's poetry in English. T he most successful renderings are those by Rae Dalven* and Messrs. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.f The hardcover version of the latter is bilingual. Since t here is little or no cooperation in the world of translation, translators sometim es duplicate others' efforts without knowing it. But a reader may benefit from su ch duplication and, in a way, the poet may benefit too. In this case, at least, h e does, although there is a great deal of similarity between the two books in th e goal they set themselves of straightforward rendering. Judged by this goal, Ke eley and Sherrard's versions are certainly superior. It is lucky though that les s than half of Cavafy's work is rhymed, and it is mostly his early poems. Every poet loses in translation, and Cavafy is not an exception. What is exceptio nal is that he also gains. He gains not only because he is a fairly didactic poe t, but also because, starting as early as 1900-1910, he began to strip his poems of all poetic paraphernalia rich imagery, similes, metric flamboyance, and, as al ready mentioned, rhymes. This is the economy of maturity, and Cavafy resorts to deliberately "poor" means, to using words in their primary meanings as a further move toward economy. Thus he calls emeralds "green" and describes bodies as bei ng "young and beautiful." This technique comes out of Cavafy's realization that r language is not a tool of cognition but one of assimilation,) /that the human be ing is a natural bourgeois and uses lan-l ; * The Complete Poems of Cavafy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, edited by George Savadis (Princeton University Pre

ss, 1975). guage for the same ends as he uses housing or clothing. Poetry seems to be the o nly weapon able to beat language, using language's own means. Cavafy's use of "poor" adjectives creates the unexpected effect of establishing a certain mental tautology, which loosens the reader's imagination, whereas more elaborate images or similes would capture that imagination or confine it to the ir accomplishments. For these reasons a translation of Cavafy is almost the next logical step in the direction the poet was moving a step which Cavafy himself cou ld have wished to take. Perhaps he didn't need to take it: his handling of metaphor alone was sufficient for him to have stopped where he did or even earlier. Cavafy did a very simple t hing. There are two elements which usually constitute a metaphor: the object of description (the "tenor," as I. A. Richards called it), and the object to which the first is imagistically, or simply grammatically, allied (the "vehicle"). The implication which the second part usually contains provides the writer with the possibility of virtually endless development. This is the way a poem works. What Cavafy did, almost from the very beginning of his career as a poet, was to jump straight to the second part: for the rest of that career he developed and elabo rated upon its implicit notions without bothering to return to the first part, a ssumed as self-evident. The "vehicle" was Alexandria; the "tenor" was life. 2 Cavafy's Alexandria is subtitled "Study of a Myth in Progress." Although the phra se "myth in progress" was coined by George Seferis, "study of a metaphor in prog ress" would do just as well. Myth is essentially an attribute of the pre- Hellen ic period, and the word "myth" seems an unhappy choice if we take into considera tion Cavafy's own view of all the hackneyed approaches to Greek themes myth- and h ero-making, nationalistic fervor, etc. taken by numerous men of letters, Cavafy's compatriots as well as foreigners. Cavafy's Alexandria is not exactly Yoknapatawpha County, nor is it Tilbury Town or Spoon River. It is, first of all, a squalid and desolate place in that stage of decline when the routine character of decay weakens the very sentiment of regr et. In a way, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 did more to dim Alexandria's luster than had Roman domination, the emergence of Christianity, and the Arab co nquest together: most of the shipping, the main source of Alexandria's commercia l existence, was shunted to Port Said. Cavafy, though, could view this as a dist ant echo of the time, eighteen centuries earlier, when the last ships of Cleopat ra escaped by the same route after losing the battle of Actium. He called himself a historical poet, and Keeley s book, in its turn, represents some sort of archaeological undertaking. We should keep in mind, however, that t he word "history" is equally applicable to the endeavors of nations and to privat e lives. In both cases it consists of memory, record, and interpretation. Cavafy s Alexandria is a kind of upward- reaching archaeology because Keeley is dealin g with the layers of an imagined city; he proceeds with the greatest care, knowi ng that such layers are apt to be intermingled. Keeley distinguishes clearly at least five of them: the literal city, the metaphoric city, the sensual city, myt hical Alexandria, and the world of Hellenism. He finally draws a chart indicating into which category each poem falls. This book is as marvelous a guide to the i magined Alexandria as E. M. Forster's is to the real one. (Forsters book was ded icated to Cavafy, and Forster was the first to introduce Cavafy to the English re ader.) Keeley's findings are helpful, so is his method; and if one disagrees with some of his conclusions, this is because the phenomenon is, and was, still larger tha n his findings can suggest. Comprehension of its size, however, rests on Keeley' s fine performance as a translator of Cavafy's work. If Keeley doesn't say certa in things in this book, it is largely because he has done them in translation. One of the main characteristics of historical writing and especially of classical history is, inevitably, stylistic ambiguity caused either by an abundance of cont radictory evidence or by firm contradictory evaluations of that evidence. Herodot us and Thucydides themselves, not to mention Tacitus, sometimes sound like latte r-day para- doxicalists. In other words, ambiguity is an inevitable byproduct of

the struggle for objectivity in which, since the Romantics, every more or less s erious poet has been involved. We know that as a stylist Cavafy was already movin g in this direction; we know also his affection for history. By the turn of the century Cavafy had acquired that objective, although properly ambiguous, dispassionate tone that he was to employ for the next thirty years. His sense of history, more precisely his reading tastes, took hold of him and su pplied him with a mask. Man is what he reads, and poets even more so. Cavafy in this respect is a library of the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine (Psellus, above all ). In particular, he is a compendium of documents and inscriptions pertaining to the Greco-Roman interplay during the last three centuries .. and the first four ce nturies a.d. It is the neutral cadences of the former and the highly formal path os of the latter that are responsible for the emergence of Cavafy's stylistic id iom, for this cross between a record and an epitaph. This type of diction, wheth er it is applied to his "historical poems" or to properly lyrical matters, creat es an odd effect of genuineness, saving his raptures and reveries from verbosity , staining the plainest utterances with reticence. Under Cavafys pen, sentimental cliches and conventions become very much like his "poor" adjectives a mask. It is always unpleasant to draw boundaries when you are dealing with a poet, but Keeley's archaeology requires it. Keeley introduces us to Cavafy at about the t ime that the poet found his voice and his theme. By then Cavafy was already over forty and had made up his mind about many things, especially about the literal city of Alexandria, where he had decided to stay. Keeley is very persuasive abou t the difficulty of this decision for Cavafy. With the exception of six or seven unrelated poems, the "literal" city does not come to the surface in Cavafy's 22 0-poem canon. What emerges first are the "metaphoric" and mythical cities. This only proves Keeley's point, because Utopian thought, even when, as in Cavafy's c ase, it turns toward the past, usually implies the unbearable character of the p resent. The more squalid and desolate the place, the stronger one's ? desire bec omes to enliven it. What prevents us from saying that there was something extrem ely Greek about Cavafy's decision to remain in Alexandria (as if he had chosen t o go along with Fate, which had put him there, to go along with Parkos) is Cavafy's own distaste for mythologizing; also, perhaps, the realizati on on the. reader's part that every choice is essentially a flight from freedom. Another possible explanation for Cavafy's decision to stay is that he did not li ke himself enough to think that he deserved better. Whatever his reason, his ima gined Alexandria exists as vividly as the literal city. Art is an alternate form of existence, though the emphasis in this statement falls on the word "existence ," the creative process being neither an escape from reality nor a sublimation o f it. At any rate, Cavafy's was not a case of sublimation, and his treatment of the entire sensual city in his work is proof of that. He was a homosexual, and his frank treatment of this theme was advanced not only by the standards of his time, as Keeley suggests, but by present standards as w ell. Relating his thought to attitudes traditionally found in the eastern Mediterr anean is of little or no help; the difference between the Hellenic world and the actual society in which the poet lived was too great. If the moral climate of t he actual city suggested techniques of camouflage, recollections of Ptolemaic gra ndeur should have required some sort of boastful exaggeration. Neither strategy was acceptable to Cavafy because he was, first and foremost, a poet of contemplat ion and because both attitudes are more or less equally incompatible with the ve ry sentiment of love. Ninety percent of the best lyric poetry is written post- coitum, as was Cavafy's . Whatever the subject of his poems, they are always written in retrospect. Homo sexuality as such enforces self-analysis more than heterosexuality does. I belie ve that the homosexual concept of sin is much more elaborate than the heterosexu al concept: heterosexuals are, to say the least, provided with the possibility o f instant redemption through marriage or other forms of socially acceptable const ancy. Homosexual psychology, like the psychology of any minority, is overtly one of nuance and ambivalence: it capitalizes on one's vulnerability to the extent of producing a mental U-turn after which the offensive can be launched. In a way , homosexuality is a form of sensual maximalism which absorbs and consumes both

the rational and the emotional faculties of a person so completely that T. S. El iot's old friend, "felt thought," is likely to be the result. The homosexual's n otion of life might, in the end, have more facets than that of his heterosexual c ounterpart. Such a notion, theoretically speaking, provides one with the ideal m otive for writing poetry, though in Cavafy's case this motive is no more than a pretext. What matter in art are not one's sexual affiliations, of course, but what is mad e of them. Only a superficial or partisan critic would label Cavafy's poems simp ly "homosexual," or reduce them to examples of his "hedonistic bias." Cavafy's lo ve poems were undertaken in the same spirit as- his historical poems. Because of his retrospective nature, one even gets the feeling that the "pleasures" one of the words Cavafy uses most frequently to refer to the sexual encounters he is re calling were "poor" almost in the same way that the literal Alexandria, as Keeley describes it, was a poor leftover of something grandiose. More often than not, th e protagonist of these lyric poems is a solitary, aging person who despises his own features, which have been disfigured by that very time which has altered so many other things that were central to his existence.The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping with time is memory, and it is his uni que, sensual historical memory that makes Cavafy so distinctive. The mechanics o f love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometime s to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only i n our couplings but also in our separations. Paradoxically enough, Cavafy's poem s, in dealing with that Hellenic "special love," and touching en passant upon con ventional broodings and longings, are attempts or rather recognized failures to resu rrect once-loved shadows. Or: photo- graphs. Criticism of Cavafy tends to domesticate his perspective, taking his hopelessnes s for detachment, his absurdity for irony. Cavafy's love poetry is not "tragic" but terrifying, for while tragedy deals with the fait accompli, terror is the pr oduct of the imagination (no matter where it is directed, toward the future or t oward the past). His sense of loss is much more acute than his sense of gain sim ply because separation is a more lasting experience than being together. It almo st looks as though Cavafy was more sensual on paper than in reality, where guilt and inhibitions alone provide strong restraints. Poems like "Before Time Altere d Them" or "Hidden Things" represent a complete reversal of Susan Sontag's formu la "Life is a movie; death is a photograph." To put it another way, Cavafy's hed onistic bias, if such it is, is biased itself by his historical sense, since his tory, among other things, implies irreversibility. Alternatively, if Cavafy's hi storical poems had not been hedonistically slanted, they would have turned into mere anecdotes. One of the best examples of the way this dual technique works is the poem about Kaisarion, Cleopatra's fifteen- year-old son, nominally the last king of the Pto lemaic line, who was executed by the Romans in "conquered Alexandria" by the orde r of the Emperor Octavian. After finding Kaisarion's name in some history book o ne evening, the narrator plunges into fantasies of this young boy and "fashions him freely" in his mind, "so completely" that, by the end of the poem, when Kais arion is put to death, we perceive his execution almost as a rape. And then the words "conquered Alexandria" acquire an extra dimension: the torturing recogniti on of personal loss. Not so much by combining as by equating sensuality and history, Cavafy tells his readers (and himself) the classic Greek story of Eros, ruler of the world. In C avafy's mouth it sounds convincing, all the more so because his historical poems are preoccupied with the decline of the Hellenic world, the situation which he, as an individual, reflects in miniature, or in mirrors. As if unable to be preci se in his handling of the miniature, Cavafy builds us a large- scale model of Al exandria and the adjacent Hellenic world. It is a fresco, and if it seems fragme ntary, this is partly because it reflects its creator, but largely because the H ellenic world at its nadir was fragmented both politically and culturally. With t he death of Alexander the Great it began to crumble, and wars, skirmishes, and t he like kept tearing it apart for centuries after, the way contradictions tear o ne's mind. The only force which held these motley, cosmopolitan pieces together w

as magna lingua Grecae; Cavafy could say the same about his own life. Perhaps th e most uninhibited voice we hear in Cavafy's poetry is when in a tone of heighte ned, intense fascination he lists the beauties of the Hellenic way of life Hedonis m, Art, Sophistic philosophy, and "especially our great Greek language." 3 It was not the Roman conquest that brought an end to the Hellenic world; it was the day Rome itself fell to Christianity. The interplay between the pagan and Chr istian worlds in Cavafy's poetry is the only one of his themes that is not suffi ciently covered in Keeley's book. It is easy to understand why, however, since t his theme deserves a book to itself. To reduce Cavafy to a homosexual who felt u neasy about Christianity would be simplistic. For that matter, he felt no cozier with paganism. He was perceptive enough to know that he had been born with the mixture of both in his veins born, too, into this mixture. If he felt the tension, it was not the fault of either one but of both: his was not a question of split loyalty. Ostensibly, at least, he was a Christian; he always wore a cross, atte nded church on Good Friday, and received the last rites. Profoundly, too, he was perhaps a Christian: his most vigorous ironies were directed against one of the main vices of Christianity pious intolerance. But what matters to us as readers, of course, is not Cavafy's church affiliation but the way in which he handled t he mixture of two religions and Cavafy's way was neither Christian nor pagan. At the end of the pre-Christian era (although people, whether they are warned ab out the coming Messiah or about the impending holocaust, do not count their time backward) Alexandria was a marketplace of creeds and ideologies, among them Jud aism, local Coptic cults, Neo- platonism, and, of course, newly arrived Christia nity. Polytheism and monotheism were familiar issues in this city, site of the fi rst real academy in the history of our civilization Mouseion. By juxtaposing one fa ith with another we certainly take them out of their context, and the context wa s precisely what mattered to the Alexandrians, until the day came when they were told that what mattered was choosing one of them. They didn't like doing so, an d neither does Cavafy. When Cavafy uses the words "paganism" and "Christianity" we should keep in mind, as he did, that they are approximations, conventions, co mmon denominators, and that numerators are what civilization is all about. In his historical poems Cavafy uses what Keeley calls "common" metaphors, i.e., metaphors based on political symbolism (as in the poems "Darius" and "Waiting fo r the Barbarians"); and this is another reason why Cavafy almost gains in transl ation. Politics itself is a kind of meta-Ianguage, a mental uniform, and unlike most modern poets, Cavafy is very good at unbuttoning it. The "canon" contains s even poems about Julian the Apostate quite a few considering the brevity (three ye ars) of Julian's reign as emperor. There must be .some reason for Cavafy's inter est in Julian, and Keeley's interpretation does not seem adequate. Julian was br ought up as a Christian, but when he took the throne he tried to re-establish pa ganism as the state religion. Although the very idea of a state religion suggest s Julian's Christian streak, he went about the matter in a quite different fashi on: he did not persecute the Christians, nor did he try to convert them. He mere ly deprived Christianity of state support and sent his sages to dispute publicly with Christian priests.In these verbal sparring matches, the priests were often losers, partly because of dogmatic contradictions in the teachings of that time and partly because the priests were usually less prepared for a debate than the ir opponents, since they simply assumed their Christian dogma to be superior. At any rate, Julian was tolerant of what he called "Galileanism," whose Trinity he regarded as a backward blend of Greek polytheism and Judaic monotheism. The onl y thing Julian did which could be viewed as persecution was to demand the return of certain pagan temples seized by Christians during the rule of Julian's prede cessors and to forbid Christian proselytizing in the schools. "Those who vilify the gods should not be allowed to teach youths and interpret the works of Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Thu- cydides and Herodotus, who worshipped those gods. Let them, in their own Galilean churches, interpret Matthew and Luke." Not yet having their own literature and, on the whole, not having much with whic h to counter Julian's arguments, the Christians attacked him for the very tolera nce with which he treated them, calling him Herod, a carnivorous scarecrow, an a

rch-liar who, with devilish cunning, does not persecute openly and so deceives t he simpleminded. Whatever it was that Julian was really after, Cavafy evidently w as interested in the way this Roman emperor handled the problem. Cavafy, it seem s, saw Julian as a man who tried to preserve the two metaphysical possibilities, not by making a choice, but by creating links between them that would make the best of both. This is surely a rational attitude for one to take on spiritual is sues, but Julian was after all a politician. His attempt was a heroic one, consi dering both the scope of the problem and its possible outcomes. Risking the charge of idealization, one is tempted to call Julian a great soul obsessed with the recognition that neither paganism nor Christianity is sufficient by itse lf and that, taken separately, neither can exercise man's spiritual capacity to the fullest. There are always tormenting leftovers, always the sense of a certai n partial vacuum, causing, at best, a sense of sin. The fact is that man's spiri tual restlessness is not satisfied by either font, and there is no doctrine whic h, without incurring condemnation, one may speak of as combining both, except, p erhaps, stoicism or existentialism (which might be viewed as a form of stoicism, sponsored by Christianity). A sensual and, by implication, a spiritual extremist cannot be satisfied by this solution, but he can resign himself to it. What matters in any resignation, how ever, is not so much to what as from what one is resigning. It adds greater scop e to Cavafy's poetry to realize that he did not choose between paganism and Chri stianity but was swinging between them like a pendulum. Sooner or later, though, a pendulum realizes the limitations imposed upon it by its box. Unable to reach beyond its walls, the pendulum nevertheless gets ? some glimpses of the outer re alm and recognizes that it is r subservient and that the directions in which it is forced to | swing are preordained, that they are governed by time in I if not for its progress. I Hence that implacable note of ennui which makes Ca- "i vafy's voice with its h edonistic-stoic tremolo sound so haunting. What makes it even more haunting is o ur realization that we are on this man's side, that we recognize his . situation, even if it is only in a poem that deals with the : assimilation of a pagan into a pious Christian regime. I have in mind the poem "If Actually Dead" about Apollo- nius of Tyana, the pagan prophet who lived only thirty years later than Christ, was known for miracles, c ured people, left no record of his death, and, unlike Christ, could write. 1975A Guide to a Renamed City To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to reexperience the un reality and remoteness of the real. Susan Sontag, On Photography In front of the Finland Station, one of five railroad terminals through which a traveler may enter or leave this city, on the very bank of the Neva River, there stands a monument to a man whose name this city presently bears. In fact, every station in Leningrad has a monument to this man, either a full-scale statue in front of or a massive bust inside the fbuilding. But the monument before the Fin land Station is unique. It's not the statue itself that matters here, because Co mrade Lenin is depicted in the usual quasi-romantic ashion, with his hand poking into the air, supposedly addressing the masses; what matters is the pedestal. Fo r Com- ade Lenin delivers his oration standing on the top of an Ignored car. It' s done in the style of early Constructivism, popular nowadays in the West, and i n general the very |ea of carving an armored car out of stone smacks of a ertain psychological acceleration, of the sculptor being a it ahead of his time. As fa r as I know, this is the only monu- ent to a man on an armored car that exists i n the world. In 's respect alone, it is a symbol of a new society. The old ociety used to be represented by men on horseback. And appropriately enough, a couple of miles downstream, on the opposite bank of the river, there stands a monument to a man whose name this city bore from the d ay of its foundation: to Peter the Great This monument is known universally as t he "Bronze Horseman," and its immobility matches only the frequency with which i t has been photographed. It's an impressive monument, some twenty feet tall, the best work of Etienne-Maurice Falconet, who was recommended by both Diderot and V

oltaire to Catherine the Great, its sponsor. Atop the huge granite rock dragged here from the Karelian Isthmus, Peter the Great looms on high, restraining with his left hand the rearing horse that symbolizes Russia, and stretching his right hand to the north. Since both men are responsible for the name of the place, it's quite tempting to compare not their monuments alone but their immediate surroundings, too. On his left, the man on the armored car has the quasi-classicistic building of the loc al Party Committee and the infamous "Crosses" the biggest penitentiary in Russia. On his right, there is the Artillery Academy; and, if you follow the direction i n which his hand points, the tallest post-revolutionary building on the left ban k of the river Leningrad's KGB headquarters. As for the "Bronze Horseman," he too has a military institution on his right the Admiralty; on his left, however, there is the Senate, now the State Historical Archive, and his hand points across the river to the university which he built and where the man on the armored car late r got some of his education. So this two-hundred-and-seventy-six-year-old city has two names, maiden and alia s, and by and large its inhabitants tend to use neither. When it comes to their mail or identity papers, they certainly write "Leningrad," but in a normal conve rsation they would rather call it simply "Peter." This choice of name has very l ittle to do with their politics; tihe point is that both "Leningrad" and "Peters burg" are a bit cumbersome phonetically, and anyway, people are inclined to nick name their habitats it's a further degree of domestication. "Lenin" certainly won't do, if only because this was the last name of the man (and an alias at that); w hereas "Peter" seems to be the most natural choice. For one thing, the city alre ady has been called that for two centuries. Also, the presence of Peter I's spir it is still much more palpable here than the flavor of the new epoch. On top of that, since the real name of the Emperor in Russian is Pyotr, "Peter" suggests a certain foreignness and sounds congenial for there is something distinctly foreig n and alienating in the atmosphere of the city: its European- looking buildings, perhaps its location itself, in the delta of that northern river which flows in to the hostile open sea. In other words, on the edge of so familiar a world. Russia is a very continental country; its land mass constitutes one-sixth of the world's firmament. The idea of building a city on the edge of the land, and furt hermore ^proclaiming it the capital of the nation, was regarded by ;Peter I's co ntemporaries as ill conceived, to say the least. 'The womb-warm, and traditional to the point of idiosyncrasy, claustrophobic world of Russia proper was fshiveri ng badly under the cold, searching Baltic wind. The ^opposition to Peter's refor ms was formidable, not least because the lands of the Neva delta were really bad. They pvere lowlands, and swamps; and, in order to build on them, the ground wou ld have to be strengthened, There was plenty of timber around but no volunteers to cut it, much less to drive the piles into the ground. But Peter I had a vision of the city, and of more than the city: he saw Russia w ith her face turned to the world. In the context of his time, this meant to the West, and the city was destined to become in the words of a European writer who vi sited Russia then a window on Europe. Actually, Peter wanted a gate, and he wanted it ajar. Unlike both his predecessors and his successors on the Russian throne, this six-and-a-half-foot-tall monarch didn't suffer from the traditional Russian malaise an inferiority complex toward Europe. He didn't want to imitate Europe: he wanted Russia to be Europe, in much the same way as he was, at least partly, a European himself. Since his childhood many of his intimate friends and companion s, as well as the principal enemies with whom he warred, were Europeans; he spen t more than a year working, traveling, and literally living in Europe; he visite d it frequently afterward. For him, the West wasn't terra incognita. A man of so ber mind, though of frightful drinking habits, he regarded every country where h e had set his foot his own included as but a continuation of space. In a way, geogra phy was far more real for him than history, and his most beloved directions were north and west. In general, he was in love with space, and with the sea in particular. He wanted Russia to have a navy, and with his own hands this "Czar-carpenter," as he was called by contemporaries, built its first boat (currently on display at the Navy

Museum), using the skills he had acquired while working in the Dutch and British shipyards. So his vision of this city was quite particular. He wanted it to be a harbor for the Russian fleet, a fortress against the Swedes, who beset these s hores for centuries, the northern stronghold of his nation. At the same time, he thought of this city becoming the spiritual center of the new Russia: the center of reason, of the sciences, of education, of knowledge. For him, these were the elements of vision, and conscious goals, not the by-products of the military dri ve of the subsequent epochs. When a visionary happens also to be an emperor, he acts ruthlessly. The methods to which Peter I resorted, to carry out his project, could be at best defined as conscription. He taxed everything and everyone to force his subjects to fight t he land. During Peters reign, a subject of the Russian crown had a somewhat limi ted choice of being either drafted into the army or sent to build St. Petersburg , and it's hard to say which was deadlier. Tens of thousands found their anonymo us end in the swamps of the Neva delta, whose islands enjoyed a reputation simil ar to that of today's Gulag. Except that in the eighteenth century you knew what you were building and also had a chance in the end to receive the last rites an d a wooden cross on the top of your grave. Perhaps there was no other way for Peter to ensure the execution of the project. Save for wars, Russia until his reign hardly knew centralization and never acte d as an overall entity. The universal coercion exercised by the future Bronze Ho rseman to get his project done united the nation for the first time and gave bir th to the Russian totalitarianism whose fruits taste no better than did the seed s. Mass had invited a mass solution, and neither by education nor by Russian his tory itself was Peter prepared for anything else. He dealt with the people in ex actly the same fashion as he dealt with the land for his would-be capital. Carpe nter and navigator, this ruler used only one instrument while designing his city : a ruler. The space unrolling before him was utterly flat, horizontal, and he ha d every reason to treat it like a map, where a straight line suffices. If anythi ng curves in this city, it's not because of specific planning but because he was a sloppy draftsman whose finger would slide occasionally off the edge of the ru ler, and the pencil followed this slip. So did his terrified subordinates. This city really rests on the bones of its builders as much as on the wooden pil es that they drove into the ground. So does, to a degree, nearly any other place in the Old World; but then history takes good care of unpleasant memories. St. Petersburg happens to be too young for soothing mythology; and every time a natu ral or premeditated disaster takes place, you can spot in a crowd a pale, somewha t starved, ageless face with its deep-set, white, fixed eyes, and hear the whisp er: "I tell you, this place is cursed!" You'll shudder, but a moment later, when you try to take another look at the speaker, the face is gone. In vain, your ey es will search the slowly milling crowds, the traffic creeping along: you will s ee nothing except the indifferent passersby and, through the slanted veil of rai n, the magnificent features of the great imperial buildings. The geometry of thi s city's architectural perspectives is perfect for losing things forever.But on t he whole the sentiment about nature returning someday to reclaim its usurped prop erty, yielded once under human assault, has its logic here. It derives from the long history of floods that have ravaged this city, from the city's palpable, ph ysical proximity to the sea. Even though the trouble never goes beyond the Neva' s jumping out of her granite straitjacket, the very sight of those massive leade n wads of clouds rushing in on the city from the Baltic makes the inhabitants we ary with anxieties that are always there anyway. Sometimes, especially in the la te fall, this kind of weather with its gushing winds, pouring rain, and the Neva tipping over the embankments lasts for weeks. Even though nothing changes, the mere time factor makes you think that it's getting worse. On such days, you reca ll that there are no dikes around the city and that you are literally surrounded by this fifth column of canals and tributaries; that you are practically living on an island, one of the 101 of them; that you saw in that movie or was it in you r dream? that gigantic wave which et cetera, et cetera; and then you turn on the r adio for the next forecast. Which usually sounds affirmative and optimistic. But the main reason for this sentiment is the sea itself. Oddly enough, for all

the naval might that Russia has amassed today, the idea of the sea is still some what alien to the general population. Both folklore and the official propaganda treat this theme in a vague, if positive, romantic fashion. For the average perso n, the sea is associated most of all with the Black Sea, vacations, the south, : resorts, perhaps palm trees. The most frequent epithets V encountered in songs a nd poems are "wide," "blue," "beau- < tiful." Sometimes you might get "rugged," but it doesn't jar ?with the rest of the context. The notions of freedom, open : space, of getting the hell out of here, are instinctively ! suppressed and cons equently surface in the reverse forms of fear of water, fear of drowning. In the se terms alone, the ^ity in the Neva delta is a challenge to the national psyche Lrnd justly bears the name of "foreigner in his own fatherland" given to it by N ikolai Gogol. If not a foreigner, then at least a sailor. In a way, Peter I achi eved his goal: this city became a harbor, and not only literally; metaphysically, too. There is no other place in Russia where thoughts depart so willingly from reality: it is with the emergence of St. Petersburg that Russian literature came into existence. However true it might be that Peter was planning to have a new Amsterdam, the re sult has as little in common with that Dutch city as does its former namesake on the shores of the Hudson. But what went, in the latter, up, in the former was s pread horizontally; the scope, however, was the same. For the width of the river alone demanded a different scale of architecture. In the epochs following Peter's, they started to build, not separate buildings b ut whole architectural ensembles, or, more precisely, architectural landscapes. Untouched till then by European architectural styles, Russia opened the sluices and the baroque and classicism gushed into and inundated the streets and embankm ents of St. Petersburg. Organ-like forests of columns sprang high and lined up o n the palatial facades ad infinitum in their miles-long Euclidian triumph. For th e last half of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, t his city became a real safari for the best Italian and French architects, sculpt ors, and decorators. In acquiring its imperial look, this city was scrupulous to the very last detail: the granite revetment of the rivers and canals, the elabo rate character of every curl on their cast-iron grilles, speak for themselves. S o does the decor of the inner chambers in the palaces and country residences of the Czar's family and the nobility, the decor whose variety and exquisiteness ve rge on obscenity. And yet whatever the architects took for the standard in their work Versailles, Fontainebleau, and so on the outcome was always unmistakably Russi an, because it was more the overabundance of space that dictated to the builder where to put what on another wing, and in what style it ought to be done, than t he capricious will of his often ignorant but immensely rich client. When you loo k at the Neva's panorama opening from the Trubetzkoy bastion of the Peter and Pau l fortress, or at the Grand Cascade by the Gulf of Finland, you get the odd sensa tion that it's not Russia trying to catch up with European civilization but a bl own-up projection of the latter through a laterna magica onto an enormous screen of space and waters that takes place. In the final analysis, the rapid growth of the city and of its splendor should b e attributed first of all to the ubiquitous presence of water. The twelve-mile-l ong Neva branching right in the center of the town, with its twenty-five large a nd small coiling canals, provides this city with such a quantity of mirrors that narcissism becomes inevitable. Reflected every second by thousands of square fe et of running silver amalgam, it's as if the city were constantly being filmed b y its river, which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Finland, which, on a s unny day, looks like a depository of these blinding images. No wonder that somet imes this city gives the impression of an utter egoist preoccupied solely with i ts own appearance. It is true that in such places you pay more attention to fa5a des than to faces; but the stone is incapable of self-procreation. The inexhaust ible, maddening multiplication of all these pilasters, colonnades, porticoes hint s at the nature of this urban narcissism, hints at the possibility that at least in the inanimate world water may be regarded as a condensed form of time. But perhaps more than by its canals and rivers, this extremely "premeditated city ," as Dostoevsky termed it, has been reflected in the literature of Russia. For

water can talk about surfaces only, and exposed ones at that. The depiction of bo th the actual and mental interior of the city, of its impact on the people and t heir inner world, became the main subject of Russian literature almost from the very day of this city's founding. Technically speaking, Russian literature was b orn here, on the shores of the Neva. If, as the saying goes, all Russian writers "came out of Gogol's 'Overcoat,'" it's worth remembering then that this overcoat was ripped off that poor civil servant's shoulders nowhere else but in St. Peter sburg, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. The tone, however, was s et by Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman," whose hero, a clerk in some department, u pon losing his beloved to a flood, accuses the mounted statue of the Emperor of n egligence (no dikes) and goes insane when he sees the enraged Peter on his horse jumping off the pedestal and rushing in pursuit to trample him, an offender, in to the ground. (This could be, of course, a simple tale about a little man's reb ellion against arbitrary power, or one about persecution mania, subconscious ver sus superego, and so forth, were it not for the magnificence of the verses thems elves the best ever written in praise of this city, with the exception of those by Osip Mandelstam, who was literally stamped into the ground of the empire a cent ury after Pushkin was killed in a duel.)At any rate, by the beginning of the nin eteenth century, St. Petersburg was already the capital of Russian letters, a fa ct that had very little to do with the actual presence of the court here. After all, the court sat in Moscow for centuries and yet almost nothing came out of the re. The reason for this sudden outburst of creative power was again mostly geogr aphical. In the context of the Russian life in those days, the emergence of St. Petersburg was similar to the discovery of the New World: it gave pensive men of the time a chance to look upon themselves and the nation as though from outside . In other words, this city provided them with the possibility of objectifying t he country. The notion of criticism being most valid when conducted from without enjoys a great deal of popularity even today. Then, enhanced by the alternative a t least visually Utopian character of the city, it instilled those who were the fi rst to take quill in their hands with a sense of the almost unquestionable author ity of their pronouncements. If it's true that every writer has to estrange hims elf from his experience to be able to comment upon it, then the city, by renderi ng this alienating service, saved them a trip. Coming from the nobility, gentry, or clergy, all these writers belonged, to use an economic stratification, to the middle class: the class which is almost solel y responsible for the existence of literature everywhere. With two or three exce ptions, all of them lived by the pen, i.e., meagerly enough to understand withou t exegesis or bewilderment the plight of those worse ofF as well as the splendor of those at the top. The second attracted their attention far less if only beca use the chances of moving up were far smaller. Consequently, we have a pretty tho rough, almost stereoscopic picture of the inner, real St. Petersburg, for it is the poor who constitute the main body of reality; the little man is always unive rsal. Furthermore, the more perfect his immediate surroundings are, the more jarr ing and incongruous he looks. No wonder that all of them the retired officers, imp overished widows, robbed civil servants, hungry journalists, humiliated clerks, t ubercular students, and so forth seen against the impeccable Utopian background o f classi- cistic porticoes, haunted the imagination of writers and flooded the v ery first chapters of Russian prose. Such was the frequency with which these characters appeared on paper and such was the number of people who put them there, such was their mastery of their materi al and such was the material itself words that in no time something strange began to happen to the city. The process of recognizing these incurably semantic reflecti ons, loaded with moral judgment, became a process of identification with them. A s often happens to a man in front of a mirror, the city began to fall into depen dence on the three-dimensional image supplied by literature. Not that the adjustm ents it was making were not enough (they weren't!); but with the insecurity inna te to any narcissist, the city started to peer more and more intently at that lo oking glass which the Russian writers were carrying to paraphrase Stendhal- throug h the streets, courtyards, and shabby apartments of its population. Occasionally , the reflected would even try to correct or simply smash the reflection, which

was all the easier to accomplish since nearly all the authors were residing in t he city. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, these two things merged: R ussian literature caught up with reality to the extent that today when you think of St. Petersburg you can't distinguish the fictional from the real. Which is r ather odd for a place only two hundred and seventy-six years old. The guide will show you today the building of the Third Section of the police, where Dostoevsky was tried, as well as the house where his character Ras- kolnikov killed that o ld money-lending woman with an ax. The role of nineteenth-century literature in shaping the image of the city was a ll the more crucial because this was the century when St. Petersburg's palaces a nd embassies grew into the bureaucratic, political, business, military, and in t he end industrial center of Russia. Architecture began to lose its perfect to the degree of being absurd abstract character and worsened with every new building. T his was dictated as much by the swing toward function- alism (which is but a nob le name for profit making) as by general aesthetic degradation. Save for Catheri ne the Great, Peter's successors had little in the way of vision, nor did they s hare his. Each of them tried to promulgate his version of Europe, and did so qui te thoroughly; but in the nineteenth century Europe wasn't worth imitating. From reign to reign the decline was more and more evident; the only thing that saved the face of new ventures was the necessity to adjust them to those of their grea t predecessors. Today, of course, even the barrack-like style of the Nicholas I epoch may warm a brooding aesthete's heart, for it conveys well the spirit of the time. But on the whole, this Russian execution of the Prussian military ideal o f society, together with the cumbersome apartment buildings squeezed between the classical ensembles, produces rather a disheartening effect. Then came the Victo rian wedding cakes and hearses; and, by the last quarter of the century, ' this city that started as a leap from history into the future began to look in some p arts like a regular Northern European bourgeois. : Which was the name of the game. If the literary critic elinslcy was exclaiming in the thirties of the past century: "Petersburg is more original than all Amer ican cities, be- efiuse it is a new city in an old country; consequently it is a new hope, the marvelous future of this country!" then a quarter of a century lat er Dostoevsky could reply sardonically: "Here is the architecture of a huge moder n hotel its efficiency incarnate already, its Americanism, hundreds of rooms; it's clear right away that we too have railroads, we too suddenly became a business-l ike people." "Americanism" as an epithet applied to the capitalist era in St. Petersburg's hi story is perhaps a bit farfetched; but the visual similarity to Europe was indee d quite startling. And it was not the facades of the banks and joint-stock compa nies only that matched in their elephantine solidity their counterparts in Berli n and London; the inner decor of a place like the Elyseev Brothers food store (w hich is still intact and functioning well, if only because there is not much to expand with today) could easily bear comparison with Fauchon in Paris. The truth is that every "ism" operates on a mass scale that mocks national identity; capit alism wasn't an exception. The city was booming; manpower was arriving from all ends of the empire; the male population outnumbered the female two to one, prost itution was thriving, orphanages overflowed; the water in the harbor boiled becau se of the ships exporting Russian grain, just as it boils today as the ships bri ng grain to Russia from abroad. It was an international city, with large French, German, Dutch, and English colonies, not to speak of diplomats and merchants. Pu shkin's prophecy, put into his Bronze Horseman's mouth: "All flags will come to u s as guests!" received its literal incarnation. If in the eighteenth century the imitation of the West didn't run deeper than the makeup and the fashions of the aristocracy ("These Russian monkeys!" cried a French nobleman after attending a ball in the Winter Palace, "how quickly they've adapted! They're outdoing our court!"), then the St. Petersburg of the nineteenth century with its nouveau riche bourgeoisie, high society, demimonde, etc., became Weste rn enough to afford even a degree of contempt toward Europe. However, this contempt, displayed mostly in literature, had very little to do wi th the traditional Russian xenophobia, often manifested in the form of an argumen

t as to the superiority of Orthodoxy to Catholicism. It was rather a reaction of the city to itself, a reaction of professed ideals to mercantile reality; of ae sthete to bourgeois. As for this business of Orthodoxy versus Western Christiani ty, it never got very far, since the cathedrals and churches were designed by the same architects who built the palaces. So unless you step into their vaults, th ere is no way of determining what denomination these houses of prayer are, unless you pay attention to the form of the cross on the cupola; and there are practic ally no onion domes in this city. Still, in that contempt, there was something o f a religious nature. Every criticism of the human condition suggests the critic's awareness of a high er plane of regard, of a better order. Such was the history of Russian aesthetic s that the architectural ensembles of St. Petersburg, churches included, were and s till are perceived as the closest possible incarnation of such an order. In any cas e, a man who has lived long enough in this city is bound to associate virtue wit h ' proportion. This is an old Greek idea; but set under the Jnorthern sky, it a cquires the peculiar authority of an embattled spirit and, to say the least, make s an artist very conscious of form. This kind of influence is especially clear f in the case of Russian or, to name it by its birthplace, Peters- "urgian poetry. For two and a half centuries this school, from Lomonosov and Derzhavin to Pushkin and his pleiad (Baratynsky, Vyazemsky, D elvig), to the Acmeists Akhmatova and Mandelstam in this century has existed under | the very sign under which it was conceived: the sign of classicism. Yet less than fifty years separate Pushkin's paean to the city in "The Bronze Ho rseman" and Dostoevsky's utterance in Notes from Underground: "It's an unhappy l ot to habi- tate Petersburg, the most abstract and the most premeditated place in the world." The brevity of such a span can be explained only by the fact that t he pace of this city's development wasn't actually a pace: it was acceleration f rom the start. The place whose population in 1700 was zero had reached one and a half million by 1900. What would take a century elsewhere was here squeezed int o decades. Time acquired a mythic quality because the myth was that of creation. Industry was booming and smokestacks rose around the city like a brick echo of i ts colonnades. The Imperial Russian Ballet under the direction of Petipa starred Anna Pavlova and in barely two decades developed its concept of ballet as a symp honic structure a concept which was destined to conquer the world. About three th ousand ships flying foreign and Russian flags bustled annually into St. Petersbu rg harbor, and more than a dozen / political parties would convene in 1906 on th e floor of the - would- Russian parliament called the Duma, which in ; Russian mea ns "thought" (its achievements, in retrospect, make its sound in English "Dooma" see m particularly ominous). The prefix "St." was disappearing gradually! but justly fro m the name of the city; and, with the out-,, break of World War I, due to anti-G erman sentiment, thr name itself was Russified, and "Petersburg" became "Petrograd." The once perfectly graspable idea of the city shone less and less through the thickening web of economics and civic demagoguery. In other words, the city of the Bronze Horseman galloped into its future as a regular metropolis in gian t strides, treading on the heels of its little men and pushing them forward. And one day a train arrived at the Finland Station, and a little man emerged from t he carriage and climbed onto the top of an armored car. This arrival was a disaster for the nation but a salvation for the city. For its development came to a full stop, as did the economic life of the whole country. This city froze as if in total mute bewilderment before the impending era, unwil ling to attend it. If anything, Comrade Lenin deserves his monuments here for sp aring St. Petersburg both ignoble membership in the global village and the shame of becoming the seat of his government: in 1918 he moved the capital of Russia b ack to Moscow. The significance of this move alone could equate Lenin , with Peter. However, Le nin himself would hardly approve of naming the city after him if only because th e total amount Jof time he spent there was about two years. Had it been up to hi m, he would have preferred Moscow or any other lace in Russia proper. Besides, h e didn't care much for the ea: he was a man of the terra firma, and a city dwell er at l_t. And if he felt uncomfortable in Petrograd, it was My because of the s

ea, although it wasn't the flood which if was mindful of, but the British Navy. There were perhaps only two things he had in common m Peter I: knowledge of Euro pe and ruthiessness. it while Peter, with his variety of interests, boisterous rgy, and the amateurishness of his grand designs, was i; er an up- or outdated v ersion of a Renaissance man, Lenin was very much a product of his time: a narrow- minded revolutionary with a typical petit bourgeois, mon- omaniacal desire for power, which is in itself an extremely bourgeois concept. So Lenin went to Petersburg because that's where he thought it was: power. For t hat he would go to any other place if he thought that place had it (and, in fact , he did: while living in Switzerland he tried the same thing in Zurich). In sho rt, he was one of the first men for whom geography is a political science. But t he point is that Petersburg never, even during its most reactionary period under Nicholas I, was a center of power. Every monarchy rests on the traditional feud al principle of willing submission or resignation to the rule of one, backed by t he church. After all, either of these submission or resignation is an act of will, a s much as casting a ballot is. Whereas Lenin's main idea was the manipulation of will itself, the control over minds; and that was news to Petersburg. For Peter sburg was merely the seat of imperial rule, and not the mental or political locus of the nation since the national will can't be localized by definition. An organi c entity, society generates the forms of its organization the way trees generate their distance from one another, and a passerby calls that a "forest." The conc ept of power, alias state control over the social fabric, is a contradiction in terms and reveals a woodcutter. The city's very blend of architectural grandeur with a web-like bureaucratic tradition mocked the idea of power. The truth about palaces, especially about winter ones, is that not all of their rooms are occupi ed. Had Lenin stayed longer in this city, his idea of statehood might have grown a bit more humble. But from the age of thirty, he lived for nearly sixteen year s abroad, mostly in Germany and Switzerland, nourishing his political theories. He returned to Petersburg only once, in 1905, for three months, in an attempt to organize workers against the czarist government, but was soon forced abroad, ba ck to his caf6 politicking, chess playing, and Marx reading. It couldn't help him to get less idiosyncratic: failure seldom broadens perspectives. In 1917, in Switzerland, upon learning from a passerby about the Czar's abdicati on, with a group of his followers Lenin boarded a sealed train provided by the G erman General Staff, which relied on them to do a fifth-column job behind the Ru ssian lines, and went to Petersburg. The man who stepped down from the train in 1917 at the Finland Station was forty-seven years old, and this was presumably his last gamble: he had to win or face the charge of treason, except for 12 million in German marks, his only luggage was the dream of world socialist revolution wh ich, once started in Russia, would produce a chain reaction, and another dream o f becoming head of the Russian state in order to execute this first dream. On th e sixteen-year-long, bumpy journey to the Finland Station, the two dreams merged into a somewhat nightmarish concept of power; but climbing onto that armored car , he didn't laiow that only one of those things was destined to come true. So it wasn't so much his coming to Petersburg to grab power as it was the idea o f power which grabbed him long ago that was carrying Lenin now to Petersburg. Wh at's rendered in the history books as the Great October Socialist Revolution was , in fact, a plain coup d'etat, and a bloodless at that. Following the signal a bla nk-fire shot of the cruiser Auroras bow gun a platoon of the newly formed Red Guards walked into the Winter Palace and arrested a bunch of ministers of th e Provisional Government idling there, vainly trying to take care of Russia afte r the Czars abdication. The Red Guards didn't meet any resistance; they raped ha lf of the female unit guarding the palace and looted its chambers. At that, two Red Guardsmen were shot and one drowned in the wine cellars. The only shooting t hat ever took place in the Palace Square, with bodies falling and the searchligh t crossing the sky, was Sergei Eisenstein's. It's perhaps in reference to the modesty of that October 25 night enterprise tha t the city has been termed in official propaganda "the cradle of the Revolution. " And a cradle it remained, an empty cradle, and quite enjoyed this status. To a

degree, the city escaped the revolutionary carnage. "God forbid us to see," sai d Pushkin, "the Russian debacle, meaningless and merciless," and Petersburg didn 't see it. The civil war raged all around and across the country, and a horrible crack went through the nation, splitting it into two mutually hostile camps; bu t here, on the shores of the Neva, for the first time in two centuries, quiet re igned and the grass started to shoot up through the cobblestones of emptied squa res and the slates of sidewalks. Hunger took its toll, and so did the Cheka (the maiden name of the KGB); but other than that, the city was left to itself and t o its reflections. As the country, with its capital returned to Moscow, retreated to its womblike, c laustrophobic, and xenophobic condition, Petersburg, having nowhere to withdraw to, came to a standstill as though photographed in its nineteenth-century posture. The decades that followed the civil war didn't change it much: there were new bu ildings but mostly in the industrial outskirts. Besides, the general housing poli cy was that of so-called condensation, i.e., putting the deprived in with the we ll-off. So if a family had a three- room apartment all to itself, it had to sque eze into one room in order to let other families move into the other rooms. The city's interiors thus became more Dostoevskian than ever, while the facades peel ed off and absorbed dust, this suntan of epochs. Quiet, immobilized, the city stood watching the passage of seasons. Everything c an change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It's the northern lig ht, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual shar pness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a w alker's thoughts travel farther than his destination, and a man with normal eyesi ght can iake out at a distance of a mile the number of the approaching bus or th e age of the tail following him. In his youth, at least, a man born in this city spends as much time on foot as any good Bedouin. And it's not because of the sh ortage or the price of cars (there is an excellent system of public transportati on), or because of the half-mile-long queues at the food stores. It's because to walk under this sky, along the brown granite embankments of this immense gray r iver, is itself an extension of life and a school of farsightedness. There is so mething in the granular texture of the granite pavement next to the constantly f lowing, departing water that instills in one's soles an almost sensual desire for walking. The seaweed-smelling head wind from the sea has cured here many hearts oversaturated with lies, despair, and powerlessness. If that is what conspires to enslave, the slave may be excused. This is the city where it's somehow easier to endure loneliness than anywhere el se: because the city itself is lonely. A strange consolation comes from the noti on that these stones have nothing to do with the present and still less with the future. The farther the fagades go into the twentieth century, the more fastidi ous they look, ignoring these new times and their concerns. The only thing that makes them come to terms with the present is the climate, and they feel most at home in the foul weather of late fall or of premature spring and its showers mix ed with snow and its impetuous disoriented squalls. Or in the dead of winter, when the palaces and mansions loom over the frozen river in their heavy snow trimmin gs and shawls like old imperial dignitaries, sunk up to their eyebrows in massiv e fur coats. When the crimson ball of the setting January sun paints their tall Venetian windows with liquid gold, a freezing man crossing the bridge on foot su ddenly sees what Peter had in mind when he erected these walls: a giant mirror f or a lonely planet. And, exhaling steam, he feels almost pity for those naked co lumns with their Doric hairdos, captured as though driven into this merciless co ld, into this knee-high snow. The lower the thermometer falls, the more abstract the city looks. Minus 25 Cent igrade is cold enough, but the temperature keeps falling as though, having done away with people, river, and buildings, it aims for ideas, for abstract concepts . With the white smoke floating above the roofs, the buildings along the embankm ents more and more resemble a stalled train bound for eternity. Trees in parks an d public gardens look like school diagrams of human lungs with black caverns of crows' nests. And always in the distance, the golden needle of the Admiralty's s pire tries, like a reversed ray, to anesthetize the content of the clouds. And t

here is no way of telling who looks more incongruous against such a background: t he little men of today or their mighty masters scurrying along in black limousin es stuffed with bodyguards. To say the least, both feel quite uncomfortable. Even in the late thirties, when local industries finally began to catch up with the pre-revolutionary level of production, the population hadn't sufficiently inc reased; it was fluctuating somewhere near the two million mark. In fact, the per centage of long-standing families (those who had lived in Petersburg for two gen erations or more) was constantly dropping because of the civil war, emigration i n the twenties, purges in the thirties. Then came World War II and the nine-hund red-day-long siege, which took nearly one million lives as much through bombardm ents as through starvation. _he siege is the most tragic page in the city's hist ory, and I think it was then that the name "Leningrad" was finally adopted by the inhabitants who survived, almost as a tribute to the dead; it's hard to argue w ith tombstone carvings. The city suddenly looked much older; it was as though Hi story had finally acknowledged its existence and decided to catch up with this pl ace in her usual morbid way: by piling up bodies. Today, thirty-three years late r, however repainted and stuccoed, the ceilings and fagades of this unconquered city still seem to preserve the stain-like imprints of its inhabitants' last gas ps and last gazes. Or perhaps it's just bad paint and bad stucco. Today, the population of this city is around five million; and at eight o'clock in the morning, the overcrowded trams, buses, and trolleys rumble across the num erous bridges carrying the barnacles of humanity to their factories and offices. The housing policy has changed from "condensation" to building new structures on the outskirts whose style resembles everything else in the world and is known p opularly as "barrackko." It's a big credit to the present city fathers that they preserved the main body of the city virtually untouched. There are no skyscraper s, no braiding speedways here. Russia has an architectural reason to be grateful for the existence of the Iron Curtain, for it helped her to retain a visual ide ntity. These days when you receive a postcard it takes a while to figure out whe ther it's been mailed from Caracas, Venezuela, or Warsaw, Poland. It's not that the city fathers wouldn't like to immortalize themselves in glass and concrete; but somehow they don't dare. For all their worth, they, too, fall under the spell of the city, and the furthest they go is to erect here and there a modern hotel where everything is done by foreign (Finnish) builders with the exc eption, of course, of telephone and electric wiring: the latter is subject to Ru ssian know- how only. As a rule, these hotels are designated to service only for eign tourists, often the Finns themselves, owing to the proximity of their count ry to Leningrad. The population amuses itself in nearly one hundred movie houses and a dozen dram a, opera, and ballet theaters; there are also two huge soccer stadiums and the c ity supports two professional soccer teams and one ice-hockey team. In general, sports are endorsed substantially by officialdom, and it's widely known here tha t the most enthusiastic ice- hockey fan lives in the Kremlin. But the main pasti me in Leningrad, as everywhere in Russia, is "the bottle." In terms of alcohol c onsumption, this city is the window on Russia indeed, and a wide-open one at tha t. At nine o'clock in the morning, a drunk is more frequently seen than a taxi. In the wine section of the grocery stores, you always find a couple of men with that idle but searching expression on their faces: they are looking for "a third " with whom to share both the price and the content of a bottle. The price share d at the cashier s, the content in the nearest doorway. In the semidarkness of tho se entrances, reigns, at its highest, the art of dividing a pint of vodka into t hree equal parts without any remainder. Strange, unexpected, but sometimes lifelo ng friendships originate here, as well as the most grisly crimes. And while prop aganda condemns alcoholism orally and in print, the state continues to sell vodk a and increases the prices because "the bottle" is the source of the state's big gest revenue: its cost is five kopecks and it's sold to the population for five rubles. Which means a profit of 9,900 percent. But drinking habits are no rarity among those who live by the sea. The most char acteristic features of Lenin- graders are: bad teeth (because of lack of vitamin s during the siege), clarity in pronunciation of sibilants, self- mockery, and a

degree of haughtiness toward the rest of the country. Mentally, this city is sti ll the capital; and it is in the same relation to Moscow as Florence is to Home or Boston is to Washington. Like some of Dostoevsky's characters, Leningrad deriv es pride and almost a sensual pleasure from being "unrecognized," rejected; and y et it's perfectly aware that, for everyone whose mother tongue is Russian, the c ity is more real than anywhere else in the world where this language is heard. For there is the second Petersburg, the one made of verses and of Russian prose. That prose is read and reread and the verses are learned by heart, if only beca use in Soviet schools children are made to memorize them if they want to graduat e. And it's this memorization which secures the city's status and place in the f uture as long as this language exists and transforms the Soviet schoolchildren into the Russian p eople. The school year usually is over by the end of May, when the White Nights arrive in this city, to stay throughout the whole month of June. A white night is a nig ht when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours a phenomenon quite fami liar in the northern latitudes. It's the most magic time in the city, when you c an write or read without a lamp at two o'clock in the morning, and when the buil dings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It's so quiet around that you can almost hear the clink of a spoo n falling in Finland. The transparent pink tint of the sky is so light that the pale-blue watercolor of the river almost fails to reflect it. And the bridges ar e drawn up as though the islands of the delta have unclasped their hands and slo wly begun to drift, turning in the mainstream, toward the Baltic. On such nights , it's hard to fall asleep, because it's too light and because any dream will be inferior to this reality. Where a man doesn't cast a shadow, like water. 1979In the Shadow of Dante Unlike life, a work of art never gets taken for granted: it is always viewed aga inst its precursors and predecessors. The ghosts of the great are especially vis ible in poetry, since their words are less mutable than the concepts they represe nt. A significant part, therefore, of every poet's endeavor involves polemics with th ese shadows whose hot or cold breath he senses on his neck, or is led to sense b y the industry of literary criticism. "Classics" exert such tremendous pressure t hat at times verbal paralysis is the result. And since the mind is more able to produce a negative view of the future than to handle such a prospect, the tenden cy is to perceive the situation as terminal. In such cases natural ignorance or even bogus innocence seems blessed, because it permits one to dismiss all such s pecters as nonexistent, and to "sing" (in vers libre, preferably) merely out of a sense of one's own physical stage presence. To consider any such situation terminal, however, usually reveals not so much la ck of courage as poverty of imagination. If a poet lives long enough, he learns h ow to handle such dry spells (regardless of their origins), using them for his o wn ends. The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the pre sent if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about. Eugenio Montale is now eighty-one years old and has left behind many futures his o wn as well as others'. Only two things in his biography could be considered spec tacular: one is that he served as an infantry officer in the Italian Army during World War I. The second is that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. Between these events one might have found him studying to become an opera singer (he had a promising bel canto), opposing the Fascist regime which he did from the start, and which eventually cost him his post as curator in the Vieusseux Libra ry in Florence writing articles, editing little magazines, covering musical and oth er cultural events for about three decades for the "third page" of II Corriere de lta Sera, and, for sixty years, writing poetry. Thank God that his life has been so uneventful. Ever since the Romantics, we have been accustomed to the biographies of poets wh ose startling careers were sometimes as short as their contributions. In this con text, Montale is a kind of anachronism, and the extent of his contribution to poet

ry has been anachronistically great. A contemporary of Apollinaire, T. S. Eliot, Mandelstam, he belongs more than chronologically to that generation. Each of thes e writers wrought a qualitative change in his respective literature, as did Monta le, whose task was much the hardest. WTiile it is usually chance that brings the English- speaking poet to read a Fre nchman (Laforgue, say), an Italian does so out of a geographical imperative. The Alps, which used to be civilization's one-way route north, are now a two-way hi ghway for all sorts of literary isms! Ghost- wise, that crowds (clouds) one's op eration enormously. For any Italian poet to take a new step, he must lift up the load amassed by the traffic of the past and the present; and it is the load of the present that was, perhaps, a lighter thing for Montale to handle. With the exception of this French proximity, the situation in Italian poetry duri ng the first two decades of this century was not much different from that of oth er European literature. By that I mean that there was an aesthetic inflation cau sed by the absolute domination of the poetics of Romanticism (whether in its nat uralistic or symbolist version). The two principal figures on the Italian poetic scene at that time the "prepotenti" Gabriele D'An- nunzio and Marinetti did little m ore than manifest that inflation, eavii in his own way. While D'Annunzio carried inflated harmony to its extreme (and supreme) conclusion, Marinetti and the oth er Futurists were striving for the opposite, to dismember that harmony. In both cases it was a war of means against means; i.e., a conditioned reaction which mar ked a captive aesthetics, a sensibility. It now seems clear that it took three p oets from the next generation, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Umberto Saba, and Eugenio Mont ale, to make the Italian language yield a modern lyric. In spiritual odysseys there are no Ithacas, and even speech is but a means of tr ansportation. A metaphysical realist with an evident taste for extremely condense d imagery, Montale managed to create his own poetic idiom through the juxtaposit ion of what he called the "aulic" the courtly and the "prosaic"; an idiom which as well could be defined as "amaro stile nuovo" (in contrast to Dante's formula, wh ich reigned in Italian poetry for more than six centuries). The most remarkable aspect of Mon- tale's achievement is that he managed to pull forward despite the grip of the dolce stile nuovo. In fact, far from trying to loosen this grip, Mon tale constantly refers to or paraphrases the great Florentine both in imagery an d vocabulary. His allusiveness is partially responsible for the charges of obscur ity that critics occasionally level against him. But references and paraphrases are the natural elements of any civilized discourse (free or "freed" of them, discour se is but gesturing), especially within the Italian cultural tradition. Michelan gelo and Raphael, to cite only two instances, were both avid interpreters of ha Divina Commedia. One of the purposes of a work of art is to create dependents; t he paradox is that the more indebted the artist, the richer he is. The maturity that Montale displayed in his very first book Ossi di Seppia, publis hed in 1925 makes it more difficult to account for his development. Already here he has subverted the ubiquitous music of the Italian hendecasyl- labics, assuming a deliberately monotonous intonation that is occasionally made shrill by the add ition of feet or is muted by their omission one of the many techniques he employs in order to avoid prosodic inertia. If one recalls Montale's immediate predecess ors (and the flashiest figure among them is certainly D'Annunzio), it becomes cl ear that stylistically Montale is indebted to nobody or to everybody he bounces up against in his verse, for polemic is one form of inheritance. This continuity through rejection is evident in Mon tale's use of rhyme. Apart f rom its function as a kind of linguistic echo, a sort of homage to the language, a rhyme lends a sense of inevitability to the poet's statement. Advantageous as it is, the repetitive nature of a rhyme scheme (or for that matter, of any sche me) creates the danger of overstatement, not to mention the distancing of the pas t from the reader. To prevent this, Montale often shifts from rhymed to unrhymed verse within the same poem. His objection to stylistic excess is clearly an eth ical as well as an aesthetic one proving that a poem is a form of the closest poss ible interplay between ethics and aesthetics. This interplay, lamentably, is precisely what tends to vanish in translation. St ill, despite the loss of his "vertebrate compactness" (in the words of his most

perceptive critic, Glauco Cambon), Montale survives translation well. By lapsing inevitably into a different tonality, translation because of its explanatory nat ure somehow catches up with the ordinal by clarifying those things which could be regarded by the author as self-evident and thus elude the native reader. Though much of the subtle, discreet music is lost, the American reader has an advantage in understanding the meaning, and would be less likely to repeat in English an I talian's charges of obscurity. Speaking of the present collection, one only regr ets that the footnotes do not include indications of the rhyme scheme and metric patterns of the poems. After all, a footnote is where civilization survives. Perhaps the term "development" is not applicable to a poet of Montale's sensitiv ity, if only because it implies a linear process; poetic thinking always has a s ynthesizing quality and employs as Montale himself expresses it in one of his poem s a kind of 'bat-radar" technique, i.e., when thought operates in a 360-degree ran ge. Also, at any given time a poet is in possession of an entire language; his certain degree, akin to ancient or for that matter any mythology, which, in all fai rness, should be regarded as the classical form of surrealism. It's not egocentric individualists whom both the Almighty and literary tradition automatically endow with a crisis-prone sensibility but traditionally inanimate masses that express in Platonov's works the philosophy of the absurd; and it is d ue to the numerical vastness of its carriers that this philosophy becomes far mo re convincing and utterly unbearable in its magnitude. Unlike Kafka, Joyce, and, let's say, Beckett, who narrate quite natural tragedies of their "alter egos," P latonov speaks of a nation which in a sense has become the victim of its own lan guage; or, to put it more accurately, he tells a story about this very language, which turns out to be capable of generating a fictitious world, and then falls i nto grammatical dependence on it. Because of all this, Platonov seems to be quite untranslatable, and, in one sense , that's a good thing: for the language into which he cannot be translated. Still , the body of his work is very substantial and relatively diverse. Cheven- gur a nd The Foundation Pit were written, respectively, toward the end of the twenties and in the beginning of the thirties; Platonov remained operational for quite s ome time after that. In this sense, his case could be regarded as that of Joyce in reverse: he produced his Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners after Finnegans Wake and Ulysses. (And, as we are at this moment on this subject of translation, it is worth recalling that sometime in the late thirties one of Platonov's shor t stories was published in the United States and that Hemingway was extolling it . So it is not entirely hopeless, although the story was very third-rate Platono v; I think it was his "The Third Son.") Like every living creature, a writer is a universe unto himself, only more so. T here is always more in him that separates him from his colleagues than vice vers a. To talk about his pedigree, trying to fit him into this or that tradition of l iterature is, essentially, to move in a direction exactly opposite to the one in which he himself was moving. In general, this temptation of seeing a literature as a coherent whole is always stronger when it's viewed very much from the outsid e. In this sense, perhaps, literary criticism indeed resembles astronomy; one wo nders, though, if this resemblance is really flattering. If there is any tradition of Russian literature, Platonov represents a radical d eparture from it. I, for one, don't see either his predecessors, save perhaps so me passages in The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, or his successors. There is a sen se of terrific autonomy to this man, and much though I'd like to link him to Dos toevsky, with whom he perhaps has more in common than with anyone else in Russia n literature, I'd rather refrain from doing so: it would illuminate nothing. Of c ourse, what screams to be pointed out is that both Chevengur and The Foundation Tit thematically, at least, can be regarded as sequels to Dostoevsky's The Posse ssed because they represent the realization of Dostoevsky's prophecy. But then ag ain, this realization was supplied by history, by reality; it wasn't a writer s conjecture. For that matter, one can see in Chevengur, with its central character 's passage through the lands in his search for the organically emerged socialism , and with his long soliloquies to a horse called Rosa Luxemburg, an echo of Don

Quixote or Dead Souls. But these echoes reveal nothing either except the size of t he wilderness in which one cries. Platonov was very much on his own, and in a big way. His autonomy is the autonom y of an idiosyncratic metaphysician, a materialist, essentially, who tries to com prehend the universe independently, from his vantage or disadvantage point of a small muddy provincial town lost like a comma in the infinite book of a vast, sprawli ng continent. His pages are studded with people of this sort: provincial teacher s, engineers, mechanics, who in their godforsaken places entertain their huge ho memade ideas about world order, ideas that are as mind-boggling and fantastic as these men's own isolation. I have gone on about Platonov at such length partly because he is not very well k nown in this country, but mainly in order to suggest that the mental plane of re gard of contemporary Russian prose is somewhat different from the rustic view of it generally entertained in the West. The uniformity of the social order doesn't guarantee that of mental operation; an individual's aesthetics never completely surrenders to either personal or national tragedy, no more than it surrenders to either version of happiness. If there is any tradition in Russian prose, it is one of searching for a greater thought, for a more exhaustive analysis of the hu man condition than is at present available, of looking for a better resource to ladle from to endure the siege of reality. But in all that, Russian prose is not that different from the vectors of other Western and Eastern literatures: it's a part of Christian civilization's culture, and neither the best nor most exotic part at that. To regard it otherwise amounts to racism in reverse, to patting t he poor relation on the shoulder for his decent conduct, and that should somehow be stopped: if only because this attitude encourages sloppy translations. 4 Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of Platonov is that the quality of his work makes it hard to sustain an engaged discourse about his contemporaries and those who came after him. This may even be cited by the powers-that-be as a reason fo r suppressing both Chevengur and The Foundation Pit. On the other hand, it's prec isely the suppression of these two books, resulting in a lack of awareness of th eir existence that has allowed a great number of writers both his and our contempo raries to go on with their production. There are crimes the forgiving of which is a crime also, and this is one of them. Suppression of Platonov s two novels not o nly set back the entire literature some fifty years; it also hampered the develo pment of the national psyche as such by the same number of years. Burning books, after all, is just a gesture; not publishing them is a falsification of time. B ut then again, that is precisely the goal of the system: to issue its own versio n of the future. Now this future has arrived, and although it's not exactly what the system bet on , in terms of Russian prose it's far less than it should have been. It's a good prose all right, but both stylistically and philosophically, it's far less enter prising than the prose of the twenties and thirties. It's conservative enough to enable one to talk about "traditions of Russian prose," of course, but it knows in what century it lives. For the latest in that knowledge it has to go, unfortu nately, to foreign authors, most of whom still have less to offer than that same Platonov. In the sixties the best of modern Russian writers were taking their c ues from Hemingway, Heinrich Boll, Salinger, and, to a lesser extent, from Camus and Sartre. The seventies were the decade of Nabokov, who is to Platonov what a tightrope walker is to a Chomolungma climber. The sixties also saw the first se lection in Russian of writings by Kafka, and that mattered a lot. Then Borges ca me out, and on the horizon looms the Russian translation of Robert Musil's great masterpiece. There are a great many other foreign authors of lesser stature who, one way or a nother, today teach Russian writers a lesson in modernism, from Cortazar to Iris Murdoch; but as has already been said, it's only the best of them who are willin g to learn this lesson. The ones who really learn this lesson properly are the r eaders, and today an average Russian reader is much smarter than a promising Russ ian writer. Also, the trouble with the best is that they are writers of mainly s atirical bent, and they face from the outset obstacles of such magnitude that th

ey have to go easy even on that acquired knowledge. Apart from this, in the last decade there has been emerging in the country a largely unpalatable, strong ten dency toward nationalistic self-appreciation, and many a writer, consciously or unwittingly, caters to that tendency, which often has the attraction of asserting the national identity in the face of the depersonalizing mass of the state. Nat ural and commendable as such an aspiration may be, for literature it beats a styl istic and aesthetic retreat and means recoiling without firing a destructive salv o, sequestering oneself in narcissistic self-pity because of having curbed one's own metaphysical ability. I am talking here obviously of the "peasant prose/' whi ch, in its Antaeus-like desire to touch the ground, went a bit too far and took root. Neither in invention nor in overall world view does the Russian prose of today o ffer anything qualitatively new. Its most profound perception to date is that th e world is radically evil, and the state is but that evil's blind, if not necess arily blunt, instrument. Its most avant-garde device is stream , of consciousnes s; its most burning ambition is to admit eroticism and foul language into print: not, alas, for the sake of the print, but to further the cause of realism. Thor oughly fundamentalist in its values, it employs stylistic devices whose chief at traction lies in their familiar solidity. The name of the game is, in short, cla ssical standards. But here is f^.e rub. What underlies this concept classical standards is the idea of man being the measure of all things. To tie them to a particular historical past, say, to the Victori an era, amounts to the dismissal of the species' psychological development. To sa y the least, it's like believing that a seventeenth-century man felt hunger more than his modern counterpart. Thus by harping on the traditional values of Russi an fiction, on its "severe spirit of Orthodoxy," and whatnot, the critical profes sion invites us to judge this fiction by standards which are not so much classic al as those of yesterday. A work of art is always a product of its time, and it should be judged by this time's standards, by the standards of its century to sa y the least (especially if that century is about to be over). It is precisely be cause Russia produced such great prose in the nineteenth century that there is n o need for special provisions in evaluation of its contemporary fiction. As in everything else, in the way of prose this century has seen a lot. What it has come to value, it seems, apart from popular-at-all-times straight storytelli ng, is a stylistic invention as such, a structural device montage, hopscotch, what ever. In other words, it has come to like a display of self-awareness, manifeste d by the narrator's distancing himself from the narrative. That, after all, is ti me's own posture toward existence. In still other words, in art, this century (a lias time) has come to like itself, the reflection of its own features: fragment ation, incoherence, an absence of content, a dimmed or a bird's-eye view of the human predicament, of suffering, of ethics, of art itself. For lack of a better n ame, the compendium of these features is commonly called today "modernism," and i t is of "modernism" that contemporary Russian fiction, both published and undergr ound, falls markedly short. By and large, it still clings to an extensive, conventional narrative with an em phasis on a central character and his development, along the lines of a Bildungs roman technique, hoping and not without good reason that, by reproducing reality in i ts minute detail, it may produce a sufficiently surrealistic or absurdist effect . The grounds for such hope, of course, are solid: the quality of the reality of the country; oddly, though, that turns out to be not enough. What thwarts these hopes is precisely the stylistic conventionality of the means of depiction, which hark back to the psychological atmosphere of these means' noble origins, i.e., to the nineteenth century, i.e., to irreality. There was one particular moment, for instance, in Sol- zhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, when Russian prose, as well as the writer himself, came within a two- or three-p aragraph distance of a decisive breakthrough. Solzhenitsyn describes in one chap ter the daily grind of a woman doctor. The description's flatness and monotony d efinitely matches the list of her tasks, epic in their length and idiocy, yet th is list lasts longer than anyone's ability to sustain a dispassionate tone recor ding it; a reader expects an explosion: it is too unbearable. And this is exactl

y where the author stops. Had he gone on for two or three paragraphs more with t his disproportion of tone and content we might have gotten a new literature; we might have gotten a real absurdity, engendered not by the stylistic endeavor of a writ er but by the very reality of things. So why did Solzhenitsyn stop? Why didn't he go on with those two or three paragr aphs? Didn't he feel at the moment that he was on the verge of something? Perhap s he d' I, although I doubt it. The point is that he had no material to stuff th ose two more paragraphs with, no other tasks to mention. Why, then, one would as k, didn't he invent some? The answer is at the same time noble and sad: because he is a realist and inventing things would be untrue: both to the facts and to h is nature as a writer. A realist, he had a different set of instincts from those that nudge you to make things up when you see an opening. It's for this reason that I doubt that he felt he was on the verge of something: he simply couldn't s ense the opening, wasn't poised enough to see it. So the chapter ends on a moral izing, see-how-bad-things-are note. I remember ading it with my fingers almost t rembling: "Now, now, ;ow it's going to happen." It did not. ?This episode in Can cer Ward is all the more symptomatic ' 'ce Solzhenitsyn qualifies as both a publ ished and an derground writer. Among many other things that these so categories have in common are their flaws. Unless he has completely crossed over to the experimental side, an underground writer can be distinguished from his colleagues in the establishment mainly by his subject m atter, much less so by his diction. On the other hand, an experimentalist tends t o go about his experimentation with a real vengeance: having no prospects of bei ng published, he is usually quick to give up didactic concerns altogether, which eventually costs him even his limited audience of a few cognoscenti. Frequently , his only solace is a bottle, his only hope, to be compared by a scholar in som e West German magazine to Uwe Johnson. In part because his work is utterly untra nslatable, in part because he is usually employed by an institution doing some c lassified scientific research with military applications, he doesn't entertain t houghts about emigrating. Eventually, he abandons his artistic pursuits. This is the way it goes, for the middle ground claimed in countries with a bette r political system by somebody like Michel Butor, Leonardo Sciascia, Giinther Gr ass, or Walker Percy simply doesn't exist in Russia. It's an either/ or situatio n in which even publishing abroad is not of decisive help, if only because it's i nvariably detrimental to the author's physical well-being. To produce a work of lasting consequence under these circumstances requires an amount of personal int egrity more frequently possessed by tragic heroes than by the authors of those t ragedies. Naturally, in this predicament prose fares worse than other forms of a rt, not only because the process of creating it is of a less mercurial nature, b ut also because, thanks to prose's didactic nature, it's been watched very closel y indeed. The moment the prose watcher loses the author, it's curtains for the wo rk; yet efforts to keep the work accessible to its watchdog render it properly sh eepish. As for writing "for the drawer/' "for the attic," which an established w riter sometimes undertakes to clear his conscience, it too fails to bring him a s tylistic cure which became evident during the last decade, which saw almost the en tire attic prose swept clean to the West and published there. A great writer is one who elongates the perspective of human sensibility, who sh ows a man at the end of his wits an opening, a pattern to follow. After Platonov , the closest that Russian prose came to producing such a writer were Nadezhda M andelstam with her memoirs and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Alexander Solzhenit syn with his novels and documentary prose. I permit myself to put this great man second largely because of his apparent inability to discern 7 shind the crueles t political system in the history of Christendom the human failure, if not the f ailure of the creed itself (so much for the severe spirit of Orthodoxy!). Given the magnitude of the historical nightmare he describes, this inability in itself is spectacular enough to suspect a dependence between aesthetic conservatism and resistance to the notion of man being radically bad. Quite apart from the stylis tic consequence for one's writing, the refusal to accept this notion is pregnant with the recurrence of this nightmare in broad daylight anytime. Aside from these two names, Russian prose for the moment has very little to offer

to a man at the end of his wits. : There are a few isolated works which in thei r heartbreaking t'honesty or eccentricity approximate masterpieces. All they ean supply our man with is either a momentary catharsis or comic relief. Though ult imately furthering one's subordination to the status quo, this is one of prose's better Services; and it's better if the reading public in this country knows the names of Yury Dombrovsky, Vasily Grossman, Venedikt Erofeev, Andrei Bitov, Vasi ly Shukshin, Fazil Iskander, Yury Miloslavsky, Yevgeny Popov. Some of them autho red only one or two books, some of them are already dead; but, together with the somewhat better-known Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Voinovich, Vladimir Maximov, An drei Sinyavsky, Vladimir Maramzin, Igor Efimov, Eduard Limo- nov, Vasily Aksyono v, Sasha Sokolov, they constitute a reality with which everybody for whom Russia n literature and things Russian are of any consequence sooner or later will have to reckon. Each one of these men deserves a discussio" of no lesser length than this lectur e already is. Some of them happen to be my friends, some are quite the contrary. Squeezing them into one sentence is like listing air-crash victims; but then th at's precisely where a catastrophe has occurred: in the air, in the world of ide as. The best works of these authors should be regarded as this catastrophe's sur vivors. If asked to name one or two books that stand to outlast their authors an d the present generation of readers, I for one would name Voinovich's In Plain R ussian and any selection of short stories by Yury Miloslavsky. However, the work that faces, in my view, a really incalculable future is Yuz Aleshkovsky's Kanga roo, soon to come out in English. (God help its translator!) Kangaroo is a novel of the most devastating, the most terrifying hilarity. It be longs in the genre of satire; however, its net effect is neither revulsion at the system nor comic relief, but pure metaphysical terror. This effect has a lot le ss to do with the author's rather apocalyptical world view as such than with the quality of his ear. Aleshkovsky, whose reputation in Russia as a songwriter is extremely high (in fact, some of his songs are a part of national folklore), hear s the language like a prodigy. The hero of Kangaroo is a professional pickpocket whose career spans the entire history of Soviet Russia, and the novel is an epic yarn spun out in the foulest of language, for which either "slang" or "argot" f ails as a definition. Much like a private philosophy or set of beliefs for an in tellectual, foul language in the mouths of the masses serves as an antidote to th e predominantly positive, obtrusive monologue of authority. In Kangaroo, very muc h as in everyday Russian discourse, the volume of this antidote overshoots its cu rative purpose by a margin capable of accommodating yet another universe. While i n terms of its plot and structure this book may bear a resemblance to something like The Good Soldier Schweik or Tristram Shandy, linguistically it is absolutely Rabelaisian. It is a monologue, nasty, morbid, frightful, rampant with a cadenc e resembling biblical verse. To drop yet another name, this book sounds like Jer emiah: laughing. For a man at the end of his wits that's already something. Howe ver, it is not exactly concern for that anonymous yet ubiquitous man that makes o ne appreciate this particular work, but its overall stylistic thrust in a direct ion unfamiliar to the Russian prose of today. It goes where the vernacular goes; that is, beyond the finality of a content, idea, or belief: toward the next phr ase, the next utterance: into the infinity of speech. To say the least, it stray s from the genre of the ideological novel of whatever denomination, absorbing the condemnation of the social order but spilling over it as over a cup too small t o contain the flood of language. Starting with the authors mentioned above, some may find these notes maximalist and biased; most likely they will ascribe these flaws to their author's own meti er. Still others may find the view of things expressed here too schematic to be true. True: it's schematic, narrow, superficial. At best, it will be called subj ective or elitist. That would be fair enough except that we should bear in mind that art is not a democratic enterprise, even the art of prose, which has an air about it of everybody being able to master it as well as to judge it. The point, however, is that the democratic principle so welcome in nearly all sp heres of human endeavor has no application in at least two of them: in art and i n science. In these two spheres, the application of the democratic principle res

ults in equating masterpiece with garbage and discovery with ignorance. The resi stance to such an equation is synonymous with recognition of prose as an art; and it's precisely this recognition that forces one to discriminate in the most crue l fashion. Whether one likes it or not, art is a linear process. To prevent itself from rec oiling, art has the concept of cliche. Art's history is that of addition and ref inement, of extending the perspective of human sensibility, of enriching, or mor e often condensing, the means of expression. Every new psychological or aesthetic reality introduced in art becomes instantly old for its next practitioner. An a uthor disregarding this rule, somewhat differently phrased by Hegel, automatically destines his work no matter what good press it gets in the marketplace to assume th e status of pulp. But if it were only the fate of his work, or his own, that ? wouldn't be too bad . And the fact that supply of pulp creates a demand for pulp isn't too bad eithe r; to art as such it's not dangerous: it always takes care of its own kind, as the poor or th ose in the animal kingdom do. The bad thing about prose which is not art is that it compromises the life it describes and plays a reductionist role in the devel opment of the individual. This sort of prose offers one finalities where art wou ld have offered infinities, comfort instead of challenge, consolation instead of a verdict. In short, it betrays man to his metaphysical or social enemies, whos e name in either case is legion. Heartless as it may sound in many ways, the condition Russian prose finds itself in today is of its own doing; the sad thing is that it keeps perpetuating this condition by being the way it is. Taking politics into consideration is therefor e an oxymoron, or rather a vicious circle, for politics fills the vacuum left in people's minds and hearts precisely by art. There must be some lesson for other l iteratures in the plight of Russian prose in this century, for it's still a littl e bit more forgivable for Russian writers to operate the way they do, with Platon ov dead, than for their counterparts in this country to court banalities, with B eckett alive. 1984On "September 1, 1939" by W. H. Auden i The poem in front of you has ninety-nine lines, and time permitting, we'll be go ing over each one of them. It may seem, and indeed be, tedious; but by doing so we have a better chance to learn something about its author as well as about the strategy of a lyrical poem in general. For this is a lyrical poem, its subject matter notwithstanding. Because every work of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-po rtrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish b etween the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinct ions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an auth or's self-projection. The author of this poem, as you already know, having been made to memorize it, i s a critic of his century; but he is a part of this century also. So his critici sm of it nearly This lecture was delivered as a part of a course in modern lyric poetry at the W riting Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. It was taped a nd transcribed by Miss Helen Handley and Ann Sherrill Pyne, students in the prog ram. always is self-criticism as well, and this is what imparts to * his voice in thi s poem its lyrical poise. If you think that there are other recipes for successf ul poetic operation, you are in for oblivion. We are going to examine this poem's linguistic content, since vocabulary is what distinguishes one writer from another. We will also pay attention to the ideas t he poet puts forth, as well as to his rhyme schemes, for it's the latter that su pply the former with a sense of inevitability. A rhyme turns an idea into law; a nd, in a sense, each poem is a linguistic codex. As some of you have observed, there is a great deal of irony in Auden, and in th is poem in particular. I hope well proceed in a fashion thorough enough for you

to realize that this irony, this light touch, is the mark of a most profound des pair; which is frequently the case irony anyway. In general, I hope that by the end of this session, you'll develop the same sentiment toward this poem as the o ne that prompted it into existence one of love. ^ 2 This poem, whose title, I hope, is self-explanatory, was written shortly after o ur poet settled on these shores. His departure caused considerable uproar at hom e; he was charged with desertion, with abandoning his country in a I time of per il. Well, the peril indeed came, but some time after the poet left England. Besi des, he was precisely the one who, for about a decade, kept issuing warnings abo ut its the peril's progress. The thing with perils, though, is that no matter how cl airvoyant one is, there is no way to time their arrival. And the bulk of his accusers were precisely those who saw no peril coming: the left, the right, the pacifists, etc. What's more, his decision to move to the United States had very little to do with world politics: the rea sons for the move were of a more private nature. We'll talk about that somewhat later, I hope. Presently what matters is that our poet finds himself at the outb reak of ^ war on new shores, and therefore has a minimum of two audiences to add ress: those at home and those right in front of him. Let's see what effect this fact has upon his diction. Now, on with this thing . . . I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the cle ver hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate ov er the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Let's start with the first two lines: "I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-secon d Street . . ." Why, in your view, does the poem start in this way? Why, for ins tance, this precision of "Fifty-second Street"? And how precise is it? Well, it' s precise in that Fifty-second Street indicates a place that can't be somewhere in Europe. Good enough. And I think what Auden wants to play here a bit is the r ole of a journalist, of a war correspondent, if you wish. This opening has a dist inct air of reporting. Hie poet says something like "your correspondent reports to you from . . ."; he is a newsman reporting to his people back in England. And here we are getting into something very interesting. Watch that word "dive." It's not exactly a British word, right? Nor is "Fifty-se cond Street." For his posture of reporter they are obviously of immediate benefit : both things are equally exotic to his home audience. And this introduces you t o one aspect of Auden with which we are going to deal for some time: the encroac hment of American diction, a fascination with which was, I think, among the reas ons for his move here. This poem was written in 1939, and for the five subsequen t years his lines became literally strewn with Americanisms. He almost revels in incorporating them into his predominantly British diction, whose texture the textu re of English verse in general gets considerably animated by the likes of "dives" a nd "raw towns." And we'll be going over them one by one because words and the wa y they sound are more important for a poet than ideas and convictions. When it c omes to a poem, in the beginning there is still the word.* And in the beginning of this particular poem there is this "dive," and its quite likely that this dive is responsible for the rest of it. He surely likes this w ord if only because he never used it before. But then again he thinks, "Humph, b ack there in England they might think that I am just kind of slumming, in the se nse of language; that I am simply rolling these new "American morsels over my to ngue." So ' then, first of all, he rhymes "dives" with "lives," which is in itse lf telling enough, apart from animating an old rhyme! Secondly, he qualifies the word by saying "one of the ! dives," thereby reducing the exoticism of "dives." At the same time, "one of the" increases the humbling effect of being in a dive in the first place, and this humbling effect suits well his reporter's posture. For he positions himself fairly low here: physically low, which means in the mids t of things. That alone boosts the sense of verisimili- I tude: the guy who spea ks from the thick of things is more readily listened to. What makes the whole th ing even more convincing is "Fifty-second Street," because numbers after all are seldom used in poetry. Most likely, his first impulse was to say, "I sit in one

of the dives"; but then he decided that "dives" may be too linguistically empha tic for the crowd back home, and so he puts in "on Fifty-second Street." This so mewhat lightens the matter, since Fifty- second Street between Fifth and Sixth A venues was at the time the Jazz strip of the universe. Hence, by the way, all th at syncopation that reverberates in the half-rhymes of those trimeters. Remember: it is the second, and not the first, line that shows where your poem i s to go metrically. It also informs an experienced reader as to the identity of the author, i.e., whether he is American or British (an American second line, no rmally, is quite bold: it violates the preconceived music of the meter with its linguistic content; a Briton, normally, tends to sustain the tonal predictabilit y of the second line, introducing his own diction only in the third or, more lik ely, in the fourth line. Compare the tetrametric or even pentametric jobs of Thomas Hardy with E. A. Robinson, or better still, with Robert Frost). More importantly , though, the second line is the line that introduces ' the rhyme scheme. "On Fifty-second Street" performs all these jobs. It tells you that it's going t o be a poem in trimeters, that the author is hard-hitting enough to qualify as a native; that the rhyme is to be irregular , most likely assonant ("afraid" coming after "street"), with a tendency to expa nd (for it is "bright" that in fact rhymes with "street" via "afraid," which wid ens into "decade"). To Auden's British audience, the poem starts in earnest righ t here, with this amusing yet very matter-of-fact air that "Fifty-second Street" creates, in a fairly unexpected fashion. But the point is that by now our autho r isn't dealing only with Britons; not anymore. And the beauty is that this open ing cuts both ways, since "dives" and "Fifty-second Street" inform his American public that he speaks its language as well. If one bears in mind the immediate a im of the poem, this choice of diction is not surprising at all. Some twenty years later, in a poem written in memory of Louis MacNeice, Auden ex presses a desire to "become, if possible, a minor Atlantic Goethe." This is an e xtremely significant admission, and the crucial word here is, believe it or not, not Goethe but Atlantic. Because what Auden had in mind from the very outset of his poetic career was the sense that the language in which he wrote was transat lantic " or, better still, imperial: not in the sense of the British Raj but in the sense that it is the language that made an empire. |,For empires are held to gether by neither political nor military forces but by languages. Take Home, for instance, or .better still, Hellenic Greece, which began to disintegrate ~ imedi ately after Alexander the Greats own demise (and e died very young)'. What held them for centuries, after |heir political centers collapsed, were magna lingua G recae pd Latin. Empires are, first and foremost, cultural entities; " d it's lan guage that does the job, not legions. So if you ant to write in English, you oug ht to master all its idioms, from Fresno to Kuala Lumpur, so to speak. Other than that, the importance of wha t you are saying may not go far beyond your little parish, which is perfectly com mendable, of course; what's more, there is that famous "drop of water" (which re flects the entire universe) approach to comfort you. That's fine. And yet there is every chance for you to become citizens of the Great English Language. Well, this is, perhaps, demagoguery; but it won't hurt. To get back to Auden, I think, one way or another, the above considerations played their role in his dec ision to leave England. Also, his reputation at home was already very high and p resumably the prospect facing him was to join the literary establishment: for in a carefully stratified society there is nowhere else to go, and nothing beyond. So he hit the road, and the language extended it. In any case, for him that emp ire was stretched not only in space but in time as well, and he was ladling from every source, level, and period of English. Naturally, a man who was so frequent ly charged with fishing out of the OED very old, obscure, dated words hardly cou ld ignore the safari America was offering. At any rate, "Fifty-second Street" rings enough of a bell on both sides of the A tlantic to make people listen. In the beginning of every poem, a poet has to dis pel that air of art and artifice that clouds the public's attitude to poetry. He has to be convincing, plain the way, presumably, the public itself is. He has to s peak with a public voice, and all the more so if it is a public subject that he

deals with. "I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street" answers those requirements. What we get here is the level, confident voice of one of us, of a reporter who s peaks to us in our own tones. And just as we are prepared for him to continue in this reassuring fashion, just as we've recognized this public voice and have be en lulled into regularity by his trimeters, the poet plummets us into the very p rivate diction of "Uncertain and afraid." Now, this is not the way reporters talk ; this is the voice of a scared child rather than of a seasoned, trench-coated n ewsman. "Uncertain and afraid" denotes what? doubt. And this is precisely where th is poem indeed poetry in general, art in general starts for real: in, or with, doubt . All of a sudden the certitude~t)f that Fifty-second Street dive is gone and yo u get the feeling that perhaps it was displayed there in the first place because he was "uncertain and afraid" in the very beginning: that's why he clung to their concreteness. But now the preliminaries are over, and we are in business indeed . As we go line by line, we should examine not only their content and function in the overall design of a poem but also their individual independence and stabilit y; for if a poem is there to last, it better have decent bricks. In that light, the first line is a bit shaky, if only because the meter is just introduced and the poet knows it. It has an air of natural speech and is quite relaxed and humb le because of the activity it describes. The main thing is that it doesn't prepa re you for the next line; neither metrically nor in terms of content. After "I s it in one of the dives" everything is possible: pentameter, hexameter, a couplet rhyme, you name it. "On Fifty-second Street," therefore, has a greater signific ance than its content suggests, for it locks the poem into the meter. The three stresses of "On Fifty-second Street" render it as solid and straight a s Fifty-second Street itself. Although sitting "in one of the dives" doesn't jib e with a traditional poetic posture, its novelty is rather provisional, as is ev erything that has to do with the pronoun "I." "On Fifty- second Street," on the o ther hand, is permanent because it is impersonal and also because of its number. The combination of these two aspects reinforced by the regularity of the stress gives the reader a sense of confidence and legitimizes whatever may follow. Because of this, "Uncertain and afraid" strikes you all the more with its absenc e of anything concrete: no nouns, not even numbers; just two adjectives like two little fountains of panic surging in your stomach. The shift of diction from pu blic to private is quite abrupt, and those open vowels in 'the beginning of this line's only two words leave you breathless and alone against the concrete stabi lity of the world whose length doesn't stop at Fifty-second Street. The state th at this line denotes isn't one of mind, obviously. The poet, however, tries to p roduce a rationale having, presumably, no desire to slip into whatever abyss his home- lessness may invite him to glance at. This line could just as well have b een dictated by the sense of his incongruity with the immediate surroundings (by the sense of one's flesh's incongruity with any surroundings, if you like). I w ould even venture to suggest that this sense was permanently present in this poet ; it's simply his personal or, as is the case with this poem, historical circums tances that were making it more acute. So he is quite right here to grope for a rationale for the described state. And the whole poem grows out of these gropings. Well, let's watch what is going on: As the clever hopes expire Of alow dishonest decade . . . To begin with, a considerable portion of his English audience gets it in the neck here. "The clever hopes" stands here for a lot of things: for pacifism, appease ment, Spain, Munich for all those events that paved the road to Fascism in Europe more or less in the same fashion as the road to Communism is paved there in our time by Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Poland. Speaking of the last, Septem ber 1, 1939, which gave our poem its title, is die day when the German troops in vaded Poland and World War II began. (Well, a little bit of history shouldn't hu rt, should it?) The war, you see, began over the British guarantees of Polish in dependence. That was the casus belli. Now it's 1981, and where is that Polish in dependence today, forty years later? So, strictly, legally speaking, World War I

I was in vain, But I'm digressing ... At any rate, these guarantees were British , and this epithet still meant something to Auden. To say the least, it could st ill imply home, and hence the lucidity and harshness of his attitude toward "cle ver hopes." Still, the main role of this conjunction is the hero's attempt to quell the panic by rationalization. And that would do were it not for "clever hopes" being a co ntradiction in terms: it is too late for a hope if it is clever. The only quellin g aspect of this expression comes from the word "hope" itself, since it implies a future invariably associated with improvement. The net result of this oxymoron is clearly satirical. And yet under the circumstances, satire is, on one hand, almost unethical and, on the other hand, not enough. So the author lowers his fi st with "Of a low dishonest decade," which spans all those aforementioned instan ces of yielding to brute force. But before we get into this line, note the epigr ammatic quality of "dishonest decade": thanks to the similarity of stresses and the common opening consonant, "dishonest" constitutes a sort of mental rhyme for "decade." Well, this is perhaps watching things too closely for their own good. Now, why do you think Auden says "low dishonest decade"? Well, partly because th e decade indeed had sunk very low because as the apprehension about Hitler grew, s o did the argument, especially on the Continent, that somehow everything was goin g to work out all right. After all, all those nations rubbed shoulders too long, not to mention the carnage of World War I still fresh in their memories, to con ceive the possibility of yet another shooting session. To many of them that woul d have seemed sheer tautology. This is the type of mentality best described by t he great Polish wit Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (whose Unkempt Thoughts Auden adored gre atly) in the following observation: "A hero who survived tragedy isn't a tragic hero." Cute as it may sound, the sick thing is that a hero often survives one tr agedy to die in another. Hence, in any case, those "clever hopes." By adding "low dishonest decade" Auden produces the effect of being deliberately judgmental. In general, when a noun gets more than one adjective, especially on paper, we become slightly suspicious. Normally, this sort of thing is done for emphasis, but the doer knows it is risky. This, by the way, raises a parenthetic al comment: in a poem, you should try to reduce the number of adjectives to a mi nimum. So that if somebody covers your poem with a magic cloth that removes adjec tives, the page will still be black enough because of nouns, adverbs, and verbs. When that cloth is little, your best friends are nouns. Abo, never rhyme the sa me parts of speech. Nouns you can, verbs you shouldn't, and rhyming adjectives i s taboo. By 1939 Auden is enough of an old hand to know this thing about two or more adje ctives and yet he does exactly this with these epithets which, on top of everyth ing else, are both pejorative. Why, do you think? In order to condemn the decade ? But "dishonest" would have been enough. Besides, righteousness wasn't in Auden' s character, nor would it escape him that he was a part of that decade himself. A man like him wouldn't employ a negative epithet without sensing a touch of sel f-portrayal in it. In other words, whenever you are about to use something pejora tive, try to apply it to yourself to get the full measure of the word. Other tha n that, your criticism may amount simply to getting unpleasant things out of your system. Like nearly every self- therapy, it cures little . . . No, I think the reason for using the adjectives in a row was the poet's desire to supply the rat ional revulsion with physical gravity. He simply wants to seal this line for goo d, and the heavy, one-syllabled "low" does it. The trimeter is employed here in hammerlike fashion. He could have said "sick" or "bad"; "low," however, is more st able and it also reverberates with the seedi- ness of the dive. We deal here not only with the ethical but also with the actual urban topography, as the poet wa nts to keep the whole thing on street level. Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright c* ^ And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives . . . The "waves" are obviously those of radio broadcasts, although the position of tfy e word right after "dishonest decade" and at the beginning of a new sentence promise s you relief, a change of pitch; so originally a reader is inclined to take "wave s" in a romantic key, Well, because a poem sits in the very middle of the page s

urrounded by the enormity of white margins, each word of it, each comma carries an enormous i.e., proportionate to the abundance of unused space burden of allusions and significances. Its words are simply overloaded, especially those at the beg inning and at the end of the line. It ain't prose. It's like a plane in a white s ky, and each bolt and rivet matter greatly. And that's why we are going over eac h one of them . . . Anyhow, "anger and fear" are presumably the substance of tho se broadcasts: the German invasion of Poland and the world's reaction to it, inc luding the British declaration of war against Germany. It could be precisely the contrast of those reports with the American scene that made our poet assume his newsman posture here. In any case, it's this allusion to the press that is resp onsible for the choice of the verb "circulate" in the next line; but only partly .The party more directly responsible for this verb is the word "fear" at the end of the previous line, and not only because of the generally recurring nature of this sensation but because of the incoherence associated with it. "Waves of ang er and fear" is pitched a bit too high above the controlled, level diction of the previous lines, and the poet decides to undercut himself with this technical or bureaucratic, at any rate dispassionate, "circulate." And because of this impers onal, technical verb, he can safely i.e., without risking an air of emotional supe rficiality employ those allusion-laden epithets "bright and darkened," which depic t both the actual and the political physiognomy of the globe. "Waves of anger and fear" clearly echoes the poet's own state of mind in "uncert ain and afraid." In any case, it is the latter that conditions the former, as we ll as "obsessing our private lives." The key word in this line obviously is "obse ssing" because apart from conveying the importance of those news broadcasts /rus tling tabloids, it introduces a sense of shame that runs through the entire stan za and casts its hissing sibilant shadow upon "our private lives" before we catc h the meaning of the statement. Thus the posture of a reporter who speaks to us and about us conceals a self- disgusted moralist, and "our private lives" become s a euphemism for something quite unspeakable; for something that bears responsib ility for the stanza's last two lines: The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Here we sense once again British diction, something that smacks of a drawing roo m: "unmentionable odour." The poet, as it were, gives us two euphemisms in a row : an epithet and an object, and we almost see a wriggled nose. The same goes for "offends." Euphemism, generally, is inertia of terror. What makes these lines d oubly horrid is the mixture of the poet's real fear with a roundabout locution, a ping his audience's reluctance to call a spade a spade. The disgust that you det ect in these two lines has much less to do with the "odour of death" as such and its proximity to our nostrils than with the sensibility that used to render it "unmentionable." On the whole, this stanza's most important admission, 4 uncertain and afraid," h as at the source not so much the outbreak of war as the sensibility that precipi tated it and whose diction the last two lines emulate. Don't make the mistake of regarding them as a parody: not at all. They simply do their job in the author' s drive to bring everybody and everything into the focus of collective guilt. He simply tries to show what that civilized, euphemistic, detached diction and ever ything that is associated with it result in, which is carrion. Now, this is of c ourse a bit too strong a sentiment to end a stanza with, and the poet decides to give you a bit of breathing space; hence that "September night." And although this "September night" has gone somewhat astray because of what's b een done to it, it's still a September night and, as such, it evokes rather toler able allusions. At this point, the poet's strategy is apart from his overall desir e to be historically precise to pave the road for the next stanza: we shouldn't fo rget about considerations like this. So he gives us here a mixture of naturalism and high lyricism that stabs you both in the heart and in the plexus. The last thing in the stanza, however, is the voice of the heart, albeit a wounded one: " the September night." It doesn't constitute a great deal of relief: still, one s enses that there is someplace to go. Let's see, then, where it is that ; our poe t is taking us, after reminding us with "September j night" that what we are rea

ding is a poem. j 3 :| The second stanza starts with a deliberate, I'd say pedant^ surprise of "Accurat e scholarship can/Unearth the wholjl offence/From Luther until now/. . ." Surely you expected anything but this: after "September night." You see, Auden is the most unpredictable poet. In music, his counterpart would be Joseph Haydn. With A uden, you don't foresee the next line even if the meter is the most conventional . And that's the way to do the job .. . Anyway, why do you think he starts here with "accurate scholarship"? Well, he begins a new stanza, and his immediate concern and purpose is to change the pitch, in order to escape the monotony which the repetition of structural d esign always promises. Secondly, and more importantly, he is fully aware of the preceding sentence's gravity, of its effectiveness, and he doesn't want to conti nue in that authoritative fashion: he is simply mindful of the authority of a po et who, in the eyes of the audience, is a priori right. So what he tries to demo nstrate here is his capacity for objective, dispassionate discourse. "Accurate s cholarship" is evoked here to dispel any possibility of a romantic, poetic shado w supposedly cast by the first stanza's diction over the ethical argument in pro gress. : >This pressure for objectivity, dryness of tone, etc., has ibeen both the curs e and the blessing of modern poetry. It Ihoked quite a lot of throats; Mr. Eliot 's would be one, al- 1 ough the same force made him a superb critic. What's ||pd about Auden, among other things, is that he proved * be capable of manipulating this pressure to suit his lyri- ends. Here he is, for instance, speaking in thi s cool, 'antic voice: "Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the ole offence . . ." a nd yet you sense under the mask of ectivity the badly controlled anger. That is, the objec- '7 here is the result of controlled anger. Note that. And ?e also th e pause after "can" that sits at the end of this line and rhymes rather faintly with "done," which is too far away to reckon with . After this pause, "unearth" comes as a false emphatic verb; it's a bit too ele vated and casts considerable doubt over this scholarship's ability to unearth an ything. The metronome-like distribution of stresses in both lines reinforces the absence of emotion peculiar to scholastic undertakings, but a keen ear pricks up at "the whole offence": the dismissal here isn't exactly academic. Perhaps it's done to offset the aforesaid aloofness of "unearth," though I doubt it. The poet resort s to this colloquial dismissive intonation most likely to convey not so much the possible imprecision of this scholarship's findings as its gentlemanly, detache d posture, which has very little to do with its very subject; neither with Luthe r nor with "now." By this time, the entire conceit Oh yeah, we can be logical that s ustains this stanza starts to get on the author's nerves, and in "has driven a cu lture mad" Auden finally lets himself go and releases the word that twitched for too long on the tip of his tongue: "mad." My hunch is that he loved this word dearly. As everyone whose mother tongue is E nglish should: this word covers a lot of ground if not all of it. Also, "mad" is v ery much English-schoolboy diction, which, for Auden, was a sort of sancta sanct orum; not so much because of his "happy childhood" or his experience as schoolma ster as due to every poet's craving for laconism. Apart from being apt in denotin g both the state of the world and that of the speaker's mind, "mad" heralds here the arrival of a diction fully deployed by the end of this stanza. But let's get to the next line. "Find what occurred at Linz." I bet you know more about Luther than about what o ccurred at Linz. Well, Linz is the city in Austria where Adolf Hitler, known als o as Adolf Schiklgruber, spent his childhood; i.e., went to school, got his idea s, and so forth. Actually he wanted to become a painter and applied to the Vienn ese Academy of Fine Arts but was turned down. Too bad for fine arts, considering this man's energy. So he became a Michelangelo in reverse. Well, we'll return t o this business of war and painting later. Now let's watch the lexical content o f this stanza: here we are on to something interesting. Let's assume that what we've said about that high- school aspect of "mad" is acc

urate. The point is that "what occurred at Linz" also refers to a high-school ex perience: that of young Schiklgruber. Of course, we don't know what exactly did happen there, but by now we all have bought that notion of "formative years." Th e next two lines, as you probably see, are "What huge imago made/ A psychopathic god." Now, "imago" comes straight out of psychoanalytic lingo. It means an imag e of a father-figure that a child fashions for himself in the absence of the rea l father which was young Adolf's case and that conditions a child's subsequent deve lopment. In other words, here our poet grinds scholarship into the fine dust of psychoanalysis which we inhale nowadays unwittingly. Note also the beauty of thi s triple rhyme connecting "mad" and "god" via the assonant "made." Very subtly b ut relentlessly the poet is ; paving the road to the last four lines of this sta nza, which every living person has to tattoo in his/her brain. The whole idea of the stanza is to pit "accurate scholarship" (which is yet another version of "cl ever hopes") against the plain ethics of "Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in r eturn." These basics are public knowledge: it's something that even schoolchildr en know; i.e., it's something that belongs in the subconscious, In order to hamme r this into the heads of his audience, he has to offset one diction with another since contrast is what we comprehend most. So he plays the manifest sophisticat ion of Linz/ Luther/imago versus the breathtaking simplicity of the last two lin es. By the time he gets to "a psychopathic god," he is somewhat exasperated with his effort to be fair to the opposite side's argument as well as with the necess ity of containing the actual sentiment. And so he breaks into this oratorical "I and the public know," unleashing the vowels and bringing in the word that explai ns everything: schoolchildren. No, he isn't juxtaposing cunning and innocence here. Nor does he practice analys is without a license. Of course he knew the works of Freud (as a matter of fact, he read them quite early, before he entered Oxford). He is simply introducing th e common denominator that binds us to Hitler, for his audience or his patient is not a faceless authority but all of us to whom this or that evil was, at some point, done. Hitler, according to Auden, is a human phenomenon: not just a political o ne. Therefore he uses the Freudian approach, as it promises a shortcut to the roo t of the problem, to its origin. Auden, you see, is a poet who is interested mos t of all in cause-and-effect interplay, and Freudianism for him is but a means o f transportation: not destination. Also, if not primarily, this doctrine like an y other simply expands his vocabulary: he ladles from every puddle. What he achi eves here then is more than just a snipe at "accurate scholarship's" ability to explain human evil: he tells us that we all are quite evil, for we empathize wit h these four lines, don't we? And do you know why? Because this quatrain sounds, after all, like a most coherent rendition of the concept of Original Sin. * But there is something else to these four lines. For, by suggesting that we all are capable of becoming Hitlers, they steal somewhat from our resolve to condemn him (or the Germans). There is almost an air, however faint, of "who are we to judge?" do you sense it? Or is it just my nostrils? And yet I think it is there. A nd if it is there, how would you explain this air? Well, first of all, it's only September 1, 1939, and most of the enterprise hasn 't yet taken place. Also, the poet could have been hypnotized enough by the effe ctiveness of those four lines (they also give an impression of having come off e asily) to overlook the nuance. But Auden wasn't that kind of a poet, and on the other hand, he knew what modern warfare is like, having been to Spain. The most plausible explanation is that, after Oxford, Auden spent quite a lot of time in Germany. He traveled there several times, and some of his sojourns were long and happy. The Germany he visited was the Germany of the Weimar Republic the best Germany the re ever was in this century, as far as your teacher is concerned. It was quite u nlike England in terms of both misery and vivacity, for the population consisted of those who defeated, crippled, impoverished, orphaned survived the Great War, who se first casualty was the old imperial order. The entire social fabric, not to m ention economy, was completely undone, and the political climate was that of hig h volatility. To say the least, it was unlike England, as regards its atmosphere of permissiveness, as regards the phenomenon loosely

called decadence; especially as regards the visual arts. It was the period of th e great outburst of Expressionism: the "ism" of which the German artists of the period are considered the founding fathers. Indeed, speaking of Expressionist art, whose chief visual characteristics are broken lines, nervous, grotesque deformi ty of objects and figures, lurid and cruel vividness of colors, one can't help t hinking of World War II as its greatest show. One feels as though the canvases o f those artists had wandered out of their frames and projected themselves across the land mass of Eurasia. German was also the language of Freud, and it was in Berlin that Auden got to deal with that great doctrine at close range. Well, to m ake a long story short, I'd . recommend to you Christopher Isherwood's Berlin St ories, for they capture the atmosphere of both the place and the period a lot be tter than any movies you might have seen. Hitler's rise to power, to be sure, spelled an end to nearly all that. In the ey es of European intellectuals, his advent was, at the time, not so much a triumph of will as a triumph of vulgarity. For Auden, who was a homosexual and who orig inally went to Berlin, I think, simply for boys, the Third Reich was also someth ing like a rape of those youths. The boys were to become soldiers and kill or ge t killed. Or else they would be ostracized, incarcerated, and so forth. In a sen se, I think, he took Nazism personally: as something totally hostile to sensuali ty, to subtlety. Needless to say he was right. The cause-and-effect man, he was q uick to realize that in order to produce evil, the ground must be fertilized. Hi s perception of the German developments was sharpened and aggravated by his first hand knowledge that the evil had already been done to all those people before any Nazis ever surfaced. By that I suppose he means the peace of V ersailles and that these boys were themselves children of war who had suffered i ts consequences: poverty, deprivation, neglect. And he knew them all too well to be surprised at them behaving nastily, with or without the uniform; he knew them well enough not to be taken aback by their "evil in return," provided there wer e congenial circumstances in which to do that evil. Schoolchildren, you see, are the most menacing lot; and both the army and the Po lizeistaat repeat the structure of a school. The point is that for this poet sch ool was not only the "formative experience." It was the only social structure' h e ever went through (as a pupil and as a teacher); therefore it became for him th e metaphor for existence. Once a boy, I suppose, always a boy; especially if you are English. That's why Germany was so clear to him, and that's why on Septembe r 1, 1939, he doesn't feel like condemning the Germans in blanket fashion. Besid es, every poet is a bit of a Ftihrer himself: he wants to rule minds, for he is tempted to think that he knows better which is only a step away from thinking that you are better. To condemn is to imply superiority; given this opportunity, Aud en chooses to express grief rather than to pass judgment. These reservations, based in part on offended sensuality, reveal a despairing mo ralist whose only means of self-control is the iambic trimeter; and this trimete r pays him back with 4 the reticent dignity it contains. Now, one doesn't choose one's meter; it's the other way around, for meters have been around longer than any poet. They start to hum in one's head partly because they have been used by s omebody one has just read; mostly, however, because they are themselves equivalen ts of certain mental states (which include ethical states) or they contain a possi bility of curbing a certain state. If you are any good, you try to modify them formally by, say, playing with a sta nzaic design or shifting a caesura around or through the unpredictability of the c ontent; by what you are going to stuff these familiar lines with. A lesser poet would repeat the meter more slavishly, a better one would try to animate it if o nly by giving it a jolt. It is possible that what set Auden's pen in motion here was W. B. Yeats's "Easter 1916," especially because of the similarity in ^subje ct matter. But it's equally possible that Auden had just reread Swinburne's "In the Garden of Proserpine": one may like tunes in spite of their lyrics, and grea t men are not necessarily influenced by their equals only. In any case, if Yeats used this meter to express his sentiments, Auden sought to control them by the same means. Hence, for you, not the hierarchy of poets but the realization that this meter is capable of both jobs. And of a lot more. Of practically everything

. Well, back to the mines. Why do you think the third stanza starts this way: 4 Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy . . . A stanza, you see, is a self-generating device: the end of one spells the necess ity of another. This necessity is first of all \ purely acoustical and, only the n, didactical (although one shouldn't try to divorce them, especially for the sake of analysis). The danger here is that the preconceived music of a recurrent stanzaic pattern tends to dom inate or even determine the content. And it's extremely hard for a poet to fight the dictates of the tune. The eleven-line-long stanza of "September 1, 1939," is, as far as I can tell, Au den's own invention, and the irregularity of its rhyme pattern functions as its b uilt-in anti- fatigue device. Note that. All the same, the quantitative effect o f an eleven-line-long stanza is such that the first thing on the writer's mind a s he starts a new one is to escape from the musical predicament of the preceding lines. Auden, it should be noted, must work here exceptionally hard precisely b ecause of the tight, epigrammatic, spellbinding beauty of the previous quatrain. And so he brings in Thucydides the name you are least prepared to encounter, right? This is more or less the same technique as putting "accurate scholarship" next to "the September night." But lets examine this line a bit closer. "Exiled" is a pretty loaded word, isn't it? It's high-pitched not only because o f what it describes but in terms of its vowels also. Yet because it comes right after a distinctly sprung preceding line and because it opens the line which, we expect, is to return the meter its regular breath, "exiled" arrived here in a l ower key . . . Now, what in your opinion makes our poet think of Thucydides and of what this Thucydides "knew"? Well, my guess is that it has to do with the poet 's own attempts at playing historian for his own Athens; all the more so because they are also endangered and because of his realization that no matter how eloqu ent his message especially the last four lines he, too, is doomed to be ignored. Hen ce this air of fatigue that pervades the line, and hence this exhaling feeling in "exiled" which he could apply to his own physical situation as well, but only in a minor key, for this adjective is loade d with a possibility of self-aggrandizement. We find another clue to this line in Humphrey Carpenter's splendid biography of A uden, where its author mentions the fact that our poet was rereading Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War about this time. And the main thing about the P eloponnesian War, of course, is that it spelled the end for what we know as clas sical Greece. The change wrought by that war was indeed a drastic one: in a sens e, it was the real end of Athens and all it stood for. And Pericles, in whose mo uth Thucydides puts the most heartbreaking speech about democracy you will ever read he speaks there as though democracy has no tomorrow, which in the Greek sens e of the word it really hadn't that Pericles is being replaced in the public mind, almost overnight by whom? By Socrates. The emphasis shifts from identification wit h community, with the polis, to individualism and it is not such a bad shift, excep t that it paves the road to subsequent atomization of society, with all the atten dant ills ... So our poet, who has at least geographical reasons to identify wit h Thucydides, also realizes what change for the world, for our Athens, if you wi ll, looms on the horizon. In other words, he also speaks here on the eve of war but, unlike Thucydides, not with the benefit of hindsight but in real anticipatio n of the shape of things their ruins, rather to come. "All that a speech can say" is, in its wistfulness, a self- contained line. It s ustains the fatigue-laden personal link with Thucydides, for speech can be disda ined only by those who master it: by poets or historians. I'd even add that ever y poet is a historian of speech, although I'd resent having to clarify this remark . At any rate, in "speech" we have obviously a reference to the funeral oration t hat Thucydides put in the mouth of Pericles. On the other hand, of course, a poe m itself is a speech, and the poet tries to compromise his enterprise before som eone else a critic or events would do that. That is, the poet steals from your "so

what" reaction to his work by saying this himself before the poem is over. This is not a safeguarding job, though; it's indicative neither of his cunning nor of his self-awareness but of humility, and is prompted by the minor key of the firs t two lines. Auden is indeed the most humble poet of the English language; next to him even Edward Thomas comes off as haughty. For his virtues are dictated not by his conscience alone but by prosody, whose voice is more convincing. _ Watch for that "About Democracy," though! How reductive this line is! The emphasi s here is of course on the limited or doomed ability of speech as such: an idea that Auden has dealt with in a thorough fashion already in his "In Memory of W. B. Y eats," where he states that . . poetry makes nothing happen." But thanks to this reductive, off-hand treatme nt of the line, the doom spreads onto "democracy" as well. And this "democracy," on top of everything, rhymes both as consonants and visually with "say." In oth er words, the hopelessness of a "a speech" is compounded by the hopelessness of its subject, be it "democracy" or "what dictators do." 4 What's interesting in this line about "dictators" is its more vigorous by comparison with "about Democra cy" distribution of stresses, which, however, highlights less the author's resentme nt of dictators than his attempt to overcome the gravity of increasing fatigue. W atch also this technique of understatement in "dictators do." The euphemistic nat ure of this conjunction gets exposed through the almost unbearable syllabic supe riority of the noun (dictators) over the verb (do). You sense here the great var iety of things a dictator is capable of, and it's not for nothing that "do" (whi ch plays here the role of "unmentionable" in the first stanza) rhymes with "knew ." "The elderly rubbish they talk/To an apathetic grave ..." is certainly a referen ce to the aforesaid funeral oration of Pericles. Yet it's a bit more worrisome h ere because the distinction between the historian's (and by the same token, the p oet's) speech and what's delivered by tyrants is blurred. And what blurs the dis tinction is "apathetic," an epithet more suitable for a crowd than for a grave. On second thought, it's suitable for both. On third, it equates "crowd" with "gr ave." "An apathetic grave" is, of course, your vintage Auden with his definition s' blinding proximity to an object. It's not the futility of dictators, therefor e, that the poet is concerned with here but the destination of speech par excell ence. Such an attitude to one's own craft could again, of course, be explained by the author s humility, by his self-effacing posture. But you shouldn't forget that A uden landed in New York just eight months earlier, on December 26, 1938, the ver y date the Spanish Republic fell. The sense of helplessness which presumably over came this poet (who had issued by that time more and better warnings against the onslaught of Fascism than anyone else in the field) on this September night sim ply seeks solace in the parallel with the Greek historian who dealt with the phe nomenon at hand no less extensively, two millennia ago. In other words,if Thucyd ides failed to convince his Greeks, what chance is there for a modern poet, with his weaker voice and bigger + crowd? ^ The very list of things "analyzed" in Thucydides' book, i.e., the very way in wh ich Auden renders them, suggests a historical perspective: from an old-fashioned "enlightenment" via "habit-forming pain" and down to this very contemporary "mism anagement." As for "habit-forming pain," this expression, of course, isn't of th e poet's own coinage (though it sounds remarkably like being one): he simply lif ted it from psychoanalytical lingo. He did this often and so should you. This is what these lingos are for. They save you a trip and often suggest a more imagina tive treatment of the proper language. Also, Auden used this compound epithet as a sort of homage to Thucydides: because of Homer, classical Greece is associated with hyphenated definitions . . . Well, at any rate, the succession of these ite ms shows that the poet is tracing the present malaise to its origins: a process that, like every retrospection, renders one's voice elegiac. Yet there is a more loaded reason for this succession, since "September 1, 1939, " is a transitionaHpoexii^^r Auden; i.e., what you've heard about our poetVso-ca lled three stages Freudian, Marxist, religious is presented here im a nutshell of t wo lines. For while 'liabit-forming pain" clekrly harks back to the Viennese doc

tor and "mismanagement" to political economy, the monosyllabic "grief' in Avhich the entire succession results, nay, culminates, is straight out of King James a nd shows, as they say, our man's real drift. And the reasons for that drift, ror the emergence of that third, religious stage which this "grief" heralds, are as much personal for this poet as they are historical. Under the circumstances the poem d escribes: an honest man wouldn't bother to distinguish between the two. That Thucydides appears here not only because Auden was reading him at the momen t, but because of the dilemma's own familiarity, is, I hope, clear. Nazi Germany indeed had begun to resemble a sort of Sparta, especially in the light of the Pr ussian military tradition. Under the circumstances the civilized world would thus have amounted to Athens, as it was duly threatened. The new dictator, too, was talkative. If this world was ripe for anything, it was retrospection. But there is a peculiarity. Once you set the apparatus of retrospection into mot ion, you get yourself into a jumble of things possessing different degrees of re moteness, since all of them are past. How, and on what basis, does one choose? E motional affinity with this or that tendency or event? Rationalization about its significance? Pure acoustic pleasure of a word or a name? Why, for instance, doe s Auden pick up "enlightenment"? Because it stands for civilization, cultural and political refinement associated with "Democracy"? In order to pave the road for the impact of "habit-forming pain"? And what is it in "enlightenment's" allusiv e powers that paves that road? Or maybe it has to do with the very act of retros pection: with its purpose as well as with its reason? I think that he picked this word because it is enlightenment with a capital "E" t hat houses the origins of the malaise in question, not Sparta. To put it more ap tly, what it seems to me was going through the poet's mind or, if you will, thro ugh his subconscious (although writing, let me repeat, is a very rational operat ion that exploits the subconscious to its own ends and not vice versa), was a search, in several direc tions, for those origins. And the closest thing in sight was Jean-Jacques Rousse au's idea of a "noble savage" ruined by imperfect institutions. Hence, obviously , the necessity of improving those institutions, hence, then, the concept of the Ideal State. And hence an array of social Utopias, bloodshed in order to bring them about, and their logical conclusion, a Polizeistaat. Because they are so remote, the Greeks are always of an archetypal denomination to us, and this goes for their historians too. And in a didactic poem, one is mor e successful with one's audience if one throws it an archetype to munch. J Auden knew this, and that's why he does not mention Mr. Rousseau here by name, althou gh this man is almost solely responsible for the concept of an ideal ruler, i.e. , in this instance Herr Hitler. Also, under the circumstances, the poet most lik ely didn't feel like debunking even this sort of Frenchman. Finally, an Auden po em always tries to establish a more general pattern of human behavior, and for th at, history and psychoanalysis are more suitable than their side products. I sim ply think that the Enlightenment was very much on the poet's mind as he was pond ering the situation, and it wandered into the poem in the lower case, the way wa ndered into history. I'd like to allow myself one more digression, though, now that we are on this su bject of the "noble savage." The very expression, I suppose, went into circulati on because of all those world voyages of the Age of Discovery. I guess the great navigators people like Magellan, La Perouse, Bougainville, et al., were the ones w ho coined it. They simply had in mind the inhabitants of all those newly discove red tropical islands who presumably greatly impressed them by not eating the visitors alive. This is of course a joke, and in bad taste; li terally so, I must add. The appeal the concept of the "noble savage" enjoyed among the literati and, sub sequently, with the rest of society had clearly to do with a very vulgar public notion of paradise, i.e., with a generally garbled reading of the Bible. It was s imply based on the notion that Adam, too, was naked, as well as on the rejection of Original Sin (in this, of course, the ladies and gentlemen of the Enlightenm ent weren't the first; nor were they the last). Both attitudes especially the latt

er were presumably a reaction against the omnipresence and redundancy of the Cathol ic Church. In France, more particularly, it was a reaction against Protestantism . But whatever its pedigree, the idea was shallow, if only because it flattered ma n. Flattery, as you know, doesn't take you too far. At best, it simply shifts th e emphasis i.e., guilt by telling man that he is inherently good and that it's the institutions which are bad. That is, if things are rotten, it's not your fault b ut someone else's. The truth is, alas, that both men and institutions are good f or nothing, since the latter, to say the least, are the product of the former. S till, each epoch indeed, each generation discovers this lovely species, the noble sav age, for itself and lavishes it with its political and economic theories. As in the days of world voyages, the noble savage of today is mostly of a swarthy shad e and dwells in the tropics. At present we call it the Third World and refuse to admit that our enthusiasm to apply there the formulas that failed in our parts is but an obverse form of racism. Having done all it could in the temperate zone s, the great French idea in a sense has returned to its source: to breed tyrants al fresco. Well, so much for "noble savages." Note other rhymes in this stanza which are no less suggestive than "knew-do" and "say-democracy-away": "talk-book," "grave-gr ief," and finally this "again" enhancing the habit-forming aspect of "pain." Als o, I hope you've been able to appreciate the self-contained character of "misman agement and grief": here you have that enormous distance between cause and effec t covered in one line. Just as math preaches how to do it. 5 Why do you think he starts this stanza by mentioning "this neutral air" and why is this air neutral? Well, first of all, he does it in order to disengage his vo ice from the emo- 0 tionally charged preceding line; any version of neutrality t herefore is welcome. It also supports the notion of the poet's objectivity. Main ly, however, "this neutral air" is here because this is a poem about the outbrea k of the war and America as yet is neutral; i.e., it hasn't yet entered the war. By the way, how many of you remember when it did? Well, never mind. Finally, "t his neutral air" is here because there is no better epithet for air. What could be more apt? Every poet, as you probably know, tries to grapple with this proble m: how to describe an element. Of the four, only the earth yields a handful of a djectives. It's worse with fire, desperate with water, and out of the question w ith air. And I don't think the poet would be able to pull it off here were it no t for politics. Note that. ? What do you think this stanza is all about, anyway? At least, the first half of it? Well, to begin with, the author here shifts the foc us from past history to the present. As a matter of fact, he went this way alrea dy in the last two lines of the previous stanza: "Mismanagement and grief:/ We m ust suffer them all again." This is the way the past closes. Here's how the pres ent opens, and it's a bit ominous: Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man ... First of all, why are skyscrapers blind? Paradoxically enough, precisely because of their glass, because of their windows; i.e., they are blind in direct propor tion to the number of their "eyes." Argus-like, if you wish. Next, right after t hese more terrifying than majestic blind skyscrapers comes the verb "use," which , apart from everything else, reveals the reason they've been erected. And it co mes too soon and too abruptly, in all its inanimate power. And you are fully awa re of what "blind skyscrapers" are capable of if they "use." However, they don't use anything or anybody but "their full height." You get here a terrific sense of redundant self-reliance very much pertinent to these structures. This descripti on hits you not by its invention but by stealing from your expectations. For you expect skyscrapers to be animated, presumably in a nasty way, as is the fashion in poetry. This mindless, dildo-display-like "use/Their full height," ho wever, suggests that they do not act on the outside: presumably on v account of t heir blindness. Blindness, mind you, is, in its turn, a form of neutrality. As a result, you sense the tautology of this air and these buildings, an equation nei

ther part of which is responsible for the other. The poet here, you see, is painting a cityscape, the New York skyline, as it wer e. Partly for the purposes of the poem, but mostly because of the keenness of hi s eye, he renders it as a pay sage moralise (or demoralise, in this case). The a ir here is qualified by buildings that jut into it as well as by the politics of their builders and dwellers. Conversely, it qualifies buildings by reflecting o n their windows and rendering them blind, neutral. After all, it's literally a t all order: to describe a skyscraper. The only successful job that comes to my mi nd is that famous line by Lorca about the "gray sponge." Auden is giving you her e a psychological equivalent of post-Cubism, for, in fact, what the "full height" of these structures proclaims is not "the strength of Collective Man" but the m agnitude of his indifference, which, for Collective Man, is the only possible emo tional state. Keep in mind that this sight is new for the author, and keep in mi nd also that description and itemization are forms of cognition, indeed of philos ophy. Well, there is no other way to explain epic poetry. This inanimate "strength of Collective Man" in a state of frightful passivity is the poets main concern throughout the poem and surely in this stanza. Much as he appreciates the solidity of this republic (Collective Man, I take it, means this as well) into whose "neutral air" "Each language pours its vain/Competitive excu se," he recognizes in it the features of things that brought the whole tragedy a bout. These lines just as well could have been written on the other side of the Atlantic. "Competitive excuse" for doing nothing to stop Herr Hitler is, among o ther things, a snipe at the business world, although what prompts them as well a s "Out of the mirror they stare / Imperialism's face / And the international wro ng" is a terminological inertia that harks back to his Marxonian (from Marx and Oxfo rd) period; more so than the conviction that he has found real culprits. In any case, "Out of the mirror they stare" suggests not so much those looming monstros ities as those who can meet their glances in the mirror. And this means not so m uch "them," whom it's customary to blame, as "us," who are, after all, not even so smug in this "euphoric dream," which we can afford, having erected these invin cible structures that grew out of the Depression. "September 1, 1939" is first and foremost a poem about shame. The poet himself, as you remember, is under some pressure for having left England. This is what he lps him to discern the aforesaid faces in that mirror: he sees there his own. Th e speaker now is no longer a reporter; we hear in this stanza a voice shot throu gh with the lucidity of despair over everyone's complicity in the events this da te unleashed, and over the speaker's own impotence to make that Collective Man ac t. On top of that, Auden, a newcomer to American shores, probably must have felt uncertain as to his moral right to urge the natives to act. Curiously enough, t oward the second part of this particular stanza, the rhymes are getting somewhat shabby, less assertive, and the whole tone becomes neither personal nor imperso nal, but rhetorical. What began as a majestic vision dwindles to the aesthetics o f John Heartfield's photo-montages, and I think the poet senses it. Hence the de ft, muffled lyricism of the opening lines of the next stanza, of this love song for the interior. 6 Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. It's a real morsel, this stanza; a terrific verbal photograph: not Heartfield bu t Cartier-Bresson. "Out of the mirror they stare" paves the road to "Faces along the bar," because you can see those faces only in a bar mirror. In contrast wit

h the public-placard diction in the last lines of the preceding stanza, this is a private voice: for this is a private, an intimate world that doesn't require ex planations. An enclosure, an epitome of security: a fort indeed. Someone said ab out Auden that whatever he was writing about, he always kept an eye on civilizat ion. Well, it would be more accurate to say that he always kept an eye on whethe r it's safe where he or his subjects are, whether the ground's firm. For every g round is a ground for suspicion, so to speak. And if this stanza is beautiful, i t's beautiful because of the underlying uncertainty. Uncertainty, you see, is the mother of beauty, one of whose definitions is that it's something which isn't yours. At least, this is one of the most frequent sen sations accompanying beauty. Therefore, when uncertainty is evoked, then you sens e beauty's proximity. Uncertainty is simply a more alert state than certitude, a nd thus it creates a better lyrical climate. Because beauty is something obtaine d always from without, not from within. And this is precisely what's going on in this stanza. For every description is an externalization of the object: a step aside so as to see it. That's why the comfort that the poet describes in the first lines of th is stanza is a 11 but gone by its end. "Faces along the bar / Cling to their ave rage day" is quite safe, perhaps with the exception of the verb "cling," but it sits at the beginning of the second line, far away from any emphatic position, s o we let it go at that. "The lights must never go out, / The music must always p lay" are soothing too, except that those two "musts" alert you to a possibility that too much is taken for granted. In "The lights must never go out" one detect s not so much a conviction that bars should stay open all night as a fidgeting h ope that there won't be military blackouts. "The music must always play," throug h its combination of understatement and naivet?, tries to obscure that uncertaint y, to prevent it from developing into anxiety that threatens to become audible i n the self-conscious, faltering tone of "conventions conspire" for the piling up o f these two lengthy Latinate words indicates too much rationalization for the co zy place that this bar is.The next line's job is to bring things under control a nd restore the original, appropriately relaxed atmosphere of the stanza; and the ironic "this fort" does the job very nicely. Actually, what's interesting here i s the way the poet arrives at the intended statement that the bar is "home," dish eartening as its accuracy may be. It takes him six lines, whose every word makes its hesitant contribution to the erection of the short verb "is" which is requi red for the emergence of that disheartening notion. This tells you about the com plexity behind every "is" as well as about the author's reluctance to admit this equation. Also, you should pay attention to the deliberate assonance of "assume " and "home" as well as to the quiet desperation behind the word "furniture," wh ich is our synonym for "home," isn't it? For this construction, "the furniture o f home" in itself is a picture of" the ruin. The moment the job is done, the mom ent you are lulled by this mixture of predictable meter and recognizable detail, this whole quest for solace goes up in smoke with "Lest we should see where we are," whose rather Victorian c<lest" sweetens the rest of the line's pill. And t his Victorian echo takes you into "a haunted wood," where it's audible enough to justify the "never" of "Who have never been happy or good" which, in its own righ t, echoes those schoolchildren at the end of the second stanza. This second echo simply reverberates the theme of the subconscious, and very timely so, because t his theme is pertinent to the next stanza's understanding. On our way there, howe ver, let's note the fairy-tale-like, distinctly English character of the last tw o lines, which not only reinforces the admission of human imperfection but helps that echo to fade into the opening of the next stanza. Well, let's have it. 7 The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the er ror bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. "Windiest" is a very English expression here. But the old- country diction also steals in in the old-country notion of autumn which, to me, is responsible for t his line's content, at least in part. Because September in New York, as you all

know, is a hot and muggy time. In England, and in English poetic tradition, howe ver, the name of this month is the very synonym of autumn. Only October could be better. The poet, of course, has in mind the political climate, but he sets out to describe it in terms of the actual for the old country as well as for the rest of the realm in question, i.e., Europe weather. Somehow this opening reminds me o f Richard Wilbur s first stanza in his "After the Last Bulletins," with its descr iption of the trash blown along the big city's streets by the cold wind. I may b e wrong about this line because there is this "militant" that would be hard to f it into my reading of it. Still, something tells me to take this "windiest" firs t of all literally and only then in its derogatory function. With "Important Persons shout" we are on the safer ground of externalizing our d iscontent. Together with "The windiest militant trash," this line, because of it s vigorous subordinate clause, contains the always welcome promise of laying the blame on somebody else, on authority. But just when we are ready to fully enjoy its deriding air comes: Is not so crude as our wish . . . which not only robs us of a scapegoat and states our own responsibility for the rotten state of affairs but tells us that we are worse than those we blame to th e extent that "wish" assonates with "trash," failing to comfort us even with the equation of an exact rhyme. The next two lines usher in the most crucial statem ent made by the poet in this poem, and for all he saw in this era. "What mad Nij insky wrote/About Diaghilev ..." Well, in this city of ours, where ballet is a h ighbrow cum bourgeois equivalent of a ball game, it is, I presume, unnecessary t o go into who is who here. Still, Nijinsky was the star of the legendary Ballet Russe in Paris in the teens and the twenties of the century, and that troupe was run by Sergei Diaghilev, a famous impresario responsible for a variety of breakt hroughs in modern art, a sort of Renaissance man with a very strong personality, but first of all an aesthete. Nijinsky, whom he discovered, was his lover. Subs equently, Nijinsky got married and Diaghilev had his contract discontinued. Short ly afterward Nijinsky went mad. I am telling you all this not for its juiciness but in order to explain the pedigree of one word actually of one consonant farther d own in the stanza. Actually there were several versions of why Diaghilev fired Ni jinsky: because of dissatisfaction with the

quality of his dancing, because there were signs of Nijinsky going mad earlier, because his very marriage illustrated that, and so forth. I simply don't want yo u holding a simplistic view of Diaghilev; partly because of the role his name pla ys in the poem, mostly because he was a unique man. For the same reasons, I don' t want you to simplify Nijinsky either, if only because it's from his diary, whi ch he wrote in a state close to madness, that Auden quotes verbatim at the end o f this stanza. I recommend that diary to you very strongly this book has the Gospe ls' pitch and intensity. That's why it is important "What mad Nijinsky wrote/Abo ut Diaghilev." So much for our who-is-who game. What madmen say about sane ones is usually of i nterest and often valid. "Is true" in "Is true of the normal heart" shows that A uden applies here, albeit unwittingly, the holy-fool principle: i.e., the idea t hat the holy fool is right. Nijinsky, after all, qualifies for a "fool" because he is a performer; for "holiness" we have here his madness as manifested in his w riting, which indeed has a strong religious bent. The poet here, as you know, is not free of the latter himself: "the error bred in the bone/Of each woman and e ach man" denotes not only the subconscious effects of upbringing but also echoes the Bible; "each woman and each man" both confirms and obfuscates that echo. Co ncreteness here fights allusion. What adds to the validity of Nijinsky's stateme nt, however, is his "foolishness" rather than his "holiness": for, as a performe r, he is, technically speaking, an agent of "universal love." I suggest you see A uden's "Ballad of St. Barnaby," where he expands on this subject; it's very late Auden. A The error is of course selfishness that is very deep-seated

in each one of us. The poet tries to zero in on the source of the tragedy, you u nderstand, and his argument moves camera-like from the peripheral (politics) to the central f (subconscious, instinct), where he encounters this craving not for "universal love / But to be loved alone." The distinction here is not so much be tween Christian and heathen or spiritual and carnal as between generous and self ish; i.e., between giving and taking; in a word, between ^ Nijinsky and Diaghile v. Better still, between loving and having. And watch what Auden is doing here. He comes up with the unthinkable: with a new rhyme for love: he rhymes 'love" and "Diaghilev"! Now, let's see how it happens . I bet he had this rhyme in mind for a while. The point is, though, that it's e asier if 'love" comes first and "Diaghilev" comes second. The content, however, forces the poet to put "Diaghilev" first, which presents several problems. One o f them is that the name is foreign, and the reader may misplace the stress. So A uden puts a very short, reductive line, "About Diaghilev," after the regularly s tressed "What mad Nijinsky wrote." Apart from the regularity of its beat, this l ine also acquaints the reader with the possibility of a foreign name and allows him to distribute stresses here whichever way he likes. This liberty paves the r oad to the trochaic arbitrariness of the next line, where "Diaghilev" goes virtu ally stressless. A reader then is quite likely to put the stress on the last syl lable, which suits the author just fine, for it will amount to rhyming "lev" and "love": what could be better? However, the name contains that strange to an English ear, or eye, sound gh, whi ch somehow should be taken care of. The culprit of its strangeness is the positi on of h after g. So it appears that the poet should find a rhyme not for "lev" only but for "ghil ev" or, rather, "hilev" as well. And so he does, and it is "have" in "Craves wha t it cannot have." Terrific line, that: the energy of "Craves" hits head- on the wall of "what it cannot have." It's of the same pattern as "For the error bred in the bone," which is awfully strong. Then the author momentarilv relaxes his r eader in "Of each woman and each man." Then he makes you pay for that relaxation with this monosyllabic "Craves what it cannot have," whose syntax is so tough i t's almost strained; i.e., it's shorter than natural speech, shorter than its th ought, or more final. Anyway, let's get back to "have," for it has far- reaching consequences. You see, to rhyme "Diaghilev" with "love" straight would mean to equate them, ab out which both the poet and the reader could have some qualms. By interjecting " have" Auden scores a terrific hit. For now the rhyme scheme itself becomes a sta tement: "Diaghilev-have-love" or rather, "Diaghilev cannot have love." And "Diag hilev," mind you, stands here for art. So the net result is that "Diaghilev" get s equated with "love," but only via being equated with "have," and "having," as we know, is opposite to "loving," which is, as we remember, Nijinsky, which is " giving." Well, the implications of this rhyme scheme are profound enough to give you vertigo, and we've spent too much time on this stanza already. I wish, thou gh, that at home you'd analyze this rhyme on your own: it may yield, perhaps, mo re than the poet himself had in mind to reveal while using it. I don't mean to w het your appetite, nor do I intend to suggest in the first place that Auden was doing all this consciously. On the contrary, he went for this rhyme scheme insti nctively or, if you like this word better, subconsciously. But this is precisely what makes it so interesting to look into: not because you are getting into someone's subconscious (which in the case of a poet barely exists, being absorbed or badly exploited by the conscious) or his instincts: it simply shows you to what extent a writer is the tool of his language and how his ethic al notions are the sharper, the keener his ear is. On the whole, the role of this stanza is to finish the job of the previous one, i.e., to trace the malaise to its origins, and indeed Auden reaches the marrow. Naturally enough, after this, one needs a break, and the break comes in the form of the next stanza, which employs less pointed thinking and a more general, mor e public level of diction. 8 From the conservative dark

Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; "I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work," And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the deaf, Who can speak for the dumb? This is, perhaps, the least interesting stanza in the poem, but it is not withou t its own jewels. Its most attractive job is the two opening lines describing th e journey from the subconscious to the rational, i.e., ethical, existence, from sleep to action, from "dark" not to light but to "life." As for its rhymes, the most suggestive here is "dark-work-wake," which is quite functional considering the stanza's content. It's the assonant rhyme all along, and it shows you the po ssibilities this sort of rhyming contains, for as you arrive at "wake" after "da rk," you realize that you can develop "wake" into something else as well. For ex ample, you can go "wait-waste-west," and so on. As for the purely didactic aspec t of this "dark-work-wake," the "dark-work" bit is more interesting because of " dark's" probable double significance. This reminds me of a couplet in Auden's "Le tter to Lord Byron": Man is no center of the Universe, And working in an office makes it worse. Which I mean the "Letter" is your only chance to be "happy" if not "good." Metrically, the first six lines of this stanza are doing a lovely job of conveyi ng the sense of train movement: you have a very smooth ride in the first four of them, and then you are getting jolted first by "will" and again by "more," whic h reveal the origins of each emphasis as well as the likelihood of delivering on these promises. With "And helpless governors wake," the meter regains equilibriu m, and after the wallowing "To resume their compulsory game" the stanza is slowe d down by three rhetorical questions, the last of which brings that train to a c omplete halt: "Who can release them now, / Who can reach the deaf, / Who can spe ak for the dumb?" Now "The dense commuters" are presumably what "to be loved alone" results in: a herd. As for "conservative" applied here to "dark," this is yet another example of the typical, for Auden, blinding proximity of definition, like "neutral air" a couple of stanzas before, or "necessary murder" in an absolutely marvelous poem of this period called ' "Spain." These juxtapositions of his are effective and memorable because of merciless light or rather dark their parts normally cast upon on e another; i.e., it's not only murder that is necessary, but necessity itself is murderous, and so is conservativeness dark. Therefore the next line's "ethical life" emerges as a double put-down: because you expect "ethical light." The stan dard positive locution all of a sudden is defamiliarized by apprehension: "life" is a leftover of "light." On the whole the stanza depicts a dispirited mechanical existence where "governors" are not in any way superior to the governed and nei ther are able to escape the enveloping gloom which they spun themselves. And what do you think is the source, the root of all these conjunctions of his? Of things like that "necessary murder," "artificial wilderness" in "The Shield o f Achilles," "important failure" in the "Musee des Beaux Arts," and so forth, and so forth? Yes, it is an intensity of attention, of course; but we are all endow ed with this ability, aren't we? To yield results like these, this ability clear ly should be enhanced by something. And what does enhance it in a poet, and in th is poet in particular? It is the principle of rhyme. What is responsible for the se blinding proximities is the same mechanism of instinct that allows one to see or to heajr that "Diaghilev" and ?love" do rhyme. Once that mechanism is set in motion, there is nothing to stop it, it becomes an instinct. It shapes your ment al operation, to say the least, in more ways than one,- it becomes your mode of cognition. And this is what makes the whole enterprise of poetry so valuable for our species. For it is the principle of rhyme that i enables one to sense that

proximity between seemingly disparate entities. All these conjunctions of his ri ng so true because they are rhymes. This closeness between objects, ideas, conce pts, causes, and effects this closeness, in itself, is a rhyme-, at times, a perfe ct one, more frequently an assonance; or just a visual one. Having developed an instinct for these, you may have a better time with reality. 9 By now the poem is seventy-seven lines long, and apart from the content, its mas s itself requires a resolution. That is, depiction of a world becomes, in its ow n turn, a world. So when the poet here says "All I have is a voice," it cuts man y ways and doesn't just offer a lyrical relaxation to the ethical tension. The s eventy-eighth line reflects not only the author's despair over the human conditi on as it is depicted but his sense of the futility of depiction. Despair alone w ould be more palatable, for there is always a chance to resolve it through anger or resignation, which are both promising avenues for a poet; well, anger especi ally. The same holds for futility also, for, by itself, it may be just as reward ing if treated with irony or sobriety. Stephen Spender once wrote about Auden that good as he was at providing a diagno sis, he'd never presume to offer a cure. Well, "All I have is a voice" cures, be cause by changing tonality, the poet changes here the plane of regard. This line simply is higher pitched than all its predecessors. In poetry, as you know, tona lity is content, or content's result. As pitches go, altitude determines attitud e. The important thing about the seventy-eighth line is the shift from impersonal o bjectivity of description to highly personal, subjective note. After all, this i s the second and basically last time that the author employs "I." And this "I" i s no longer wrapped in a newsman's trench coat: what you hear in this voice is i ncurable sorrow, for all its stoical timbre. This "I" is sharp and is echoed in a somewhat muffled way by "lie" in the next line's end. Still, remember that bot h high-pitched is come immediately after the "deaf and "dumb" of the previous st anza, and this creates a considerable acoustic contrast. The only thing that controls that sorrow here is the beat; and "sorrow controlle provisional definition of humility, if not of th d by meter" may do for you as a e entire art of poetry. As a rule, stoicism and obstinacy in poets are results n ot so much of their personal philosophies and preferences as of their experience s in prosody, which is the name of the cure. This stanza, as well as this whole poem, is a search for a reliable virtue which in the end brings the searching pa rty to itself. This, however, is jumping a bit ahead. Let's proceed in a proper fashion. Well, as far as rhymes are concerned, this stanza is not so spectacular. "Voice-choice -police" and "lie (authority)-sky-die" are all right; a better job is done by th e poet in "brain-alone," which is suggestive enough. What's more suggestive, tho ugh, is "folded lie / The romantic lie in the brain." Both "folded" and "lie" are used twice within the space of two lines. Now, this is obviously done for empha sis; the only question is what's emphasized hare. "Folded" of course suggests "paper" and "lie" therefore is the lie of a pri nted word, most likely the one of a tabloid. But then we are given a qualifier i n "the romantic lie in the brain," What's qualified here is not the "lie" itself , although we have here a different epithet preceding it, but the brain that lie s in folds. It is rather sobriety, of course, and its by-products that are audible in "All I have is a voice" than the irony which is, nonetheless, discernible in the contr olled anger of "the folded lie." Still, the seventy-eighth line's value lies nei ther in despair's and futility's separate effects, nor in their interplay; what we hear in this line most clearly is the voice of humility, which has, in the gi ven context, stoic overtones. Auden isn't just punning here; no. These two lines simply paraphrase that "error bred in the bone / Of each woman and each man." I n a sense, he opens the bone and shows us that lie (error) inside. Why does he d o this here? Because he wants to drive home the idea of "universal love" versus "to be loved alone." "The sensual man-in-the- street" as well as "Authority" and "the citizen" or "the police" are simply elaborations of the "each woman and ea

ch man" theme, as well as spin-offs of the argument for the United States' isola tionist posture at the time. "Hunger allows no choice / To the citizen or the pol ice" is simply a commonsense way of arguing the existence of the common denomina tor among people, and it is placed appropriately low. Auden goes here for a typi cally English no-nonsense locution precisely because the point he tries to make is of a very elevated nature; i.e., he appears to think that you can argue things like "universal love" best if you use down- to-earth logic. Apart from that, he, I believe, enjoys the deadpan, no-exit state of mind whose blinding proximity to the truth creates such a statement. (Actually, hunger allows a choice: to get hungrier; but that's beside the point.) At any rate, this hunger business offse ts possible ecclesiastical association of the next, most crucial for the entire a rgument, line; "We must love one another or die." Well, this is the line because of which the author subsequently scrapped the whol e poem from his corpus. According to various sources, he did so because he found the line presumptuous and untrue. Because, he said, we must die anyway. He tried to change it but all he could come up with was "We must love one another and di e," which would be a platitude with a misleading air of profundity. So he scrapp ed it from his postwar Collected, and if we have it now in front of our eyes, it 's because of his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, who compiled a posthumous Viking edition and whose introduction to it is the best pieces on . Auden I've ever seen. Was Auden right about this line? Well, yes and no. He was obviously extremely co nscientious, and to be conscientious in English is to be literal. Also, we should consider the benefit of hindsight in his revising this line: after the carnage of World War II, either version would sound a bit macabre. Poetry isn't reportag e, and its news should be of a permanent significance. In a sense, it could be a rgued that Auden pays a price here for his posture at the beginning of the poem. Still, I must say that if this line seemed to him untrue, it was through no fau lt of his own. For the actual meaning of the line at the time was, of course, "We must love one another or kill." Or "we'll be killing one another in no time." Since after all, all he had was a voice and this wasn't heard or heeded what followed was exactly w hat he predicted: killing. But again, givenWorld War II's volume of carnage, one could hardly enjoy proving oneself a prophet. So the poet chooses to threat thi s "or die" literally. Presumably because he felt he was responsible for failing t o avert what had happened, since the whole point of writing this poem was to inf luence public opinion. 10 This, after all, wasn't the benefit of hindsight only. The evidence that he didn 't feel very secure about this fine's prescription is felt in the opening of the next stanza: "Defenceless under the night . . ." Paired with "Our world in stupo r lies," this is tantamount to an admission of failure to persuade. At the same time, "Defenceless under the night" is the most lyrical-sounding line in the poe m and surpasses in the height of its pitch even "All I have is a voice." In both cases, the lyricism stems from the feeling of what he terms in "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" "human un- success," from his own "rapture of distress" here in the fi rst place. Coming right after "We must love one another or die," this line has a sharper pe rsonal air and leaps from the level of rationalization to that of pure emotional exposure, into the domain of revelations. Technically speaking, "We must love a nother or die" is the end of the mental road. After this, there is only a prayer , and "Defenceless under the night" climbs there in its tonality if not yet in i ts diction. And as though sensing that things may slip from under his control, t hat the pitch approaches a vibration of wailing, the poet undercuts himself with "Our world in stupor lies." Yet no matter how hard he tries to pull his voice down in this as well as in the subsequent four lines, the spell cast by "We must love one another or die" gets reinforced almost against his own will by "Defenceless under the night" and won 't go away. On the contrary, it penetrates his defenses at the rate at which he builds them. The spell, as we know it, is an ecclesiastical one, i.e., imbued wi

th a sense of infinity; and words like "everywhere," "light," "just," thanks to their generic nature, echo that sense unwittingly and in spite of reductive qual ifiers like "dotted" and "harmonic." And when the poet comes closest to having h is voice completely harnessed, that spell breaks through with full lyrical force in this breathtaking cross between plea and prayer: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame. * Well, what we have here, apart from everything else, is a self-portrait that str ays into the definition of the species. And that definition, I must say, comes f rom the tenor of "May X" rather than from the precision of the next three lines. For it's their sum that produces "May I." What we have here, in other words, is truth resulting in lyricism or, better still, lyricism becoming truth; what we have here is a stoic who prays. This may not be the species' definition as yet, but this is surely its goal. At any rate, this is the direction in which this poet went. You may, of course, find this ending a bit sanctimonious and wonder who are "the Just" the fabled thir ty-six or somebody in particular or what does this "affirming flame" look like? Bu t you don't dissect a bird to find the origins of its song: what should be disse cted is your ear. In either case, however, you'll be dodging the alternative of "We must love one another or die," and I don't think you can afford to. 1984To Please a Shadow i When a writer resorts to a language other than his mother tongue, he does so eit her out of necessity, like Conrad, or because of burning ambition, like Nabokov, or for the sake of greater estrangement, like Beckett. Belonging to a different league, in the summer of 1977, in New York, after living in this country for fiv e years, I purchased in a small typewriter shop on Sixth Avenue a portable "Lett era 22" and set out to write (essays, translations, occasionally a poem) in Engl ish for a reason that had very little to do with the above. My sole purpose then , as it is now, was to find myself in closer proximity to the man whom I consider ed the greatest mind of the twentieth century: Wystan Hugh Auden. I was, of course, perfectly aware of the futility of my undertaking, not so much because I was born in Russia and into its language (which I am never to abandon a nd I hope vice versa) as because of this poet's intelligence, which in my view h as no equal. I was aware of the futility of this effort, moreover, because Auden had been dead four years then. Yet to my mind, writing in English was the best way to get near him, to work on his terms, to be judged, if notby his code of co nscience, then by whatever it is in the English language that made this code of conscience possible. These words, the very structure of these sentences, all show anyone who has read a single stanza or a single paragraph of Auden's how I fail. To me, though, a fa ilure by his standards is preferable to a success by others', Besides, I knew fr om the outset that I was bound to fail; whether this sort of sobriety was my own or has been borrowed from his writing, I can no longer tell. All I hope for whi le writing in his tongue is that I won't lower his level of mental operation, his plane of regard. This is as much as one can do for a better man: to continue in his vein; this, I think, is what ^civilizations are all about. I knew that by temperament and otherwise, X was a different man, and that in the best case possible I'd be regarded as his imitator. Still, for me that would be a compliment. Also I had a second line of defense: I could always pull back to my writing in Russian, of which I was pretty confident and which even he, had he known the language, probably would have liked. My desire to write in English ha d nothing to do with any sense of confidence, contentment, or comfort; it was si mply a desire to please a shadow. Of course, where he was by then, linguistic ba rriers hardly mattered, but somehow I thought that he might like it better if I m ade myself clear to him in English. (Although when I tried, on the green grass at Kirchstetten eleven years ago now, it didn't work; the English I had at that ti me was better for reading and listening than for speaking. Perhaps just as well. ) To put it differently, unable to return the full amount of what has been given,

one tries to pay back at least in the same coin. After all, he did so himself, b orrowing the "Don Juan" stanza for his "Letter to Lord Byron" or hexameters for his "Shield of Achilles." Courtship always requires a degree of self-sacrifice a nd assimilation, all the more so if one is courting a pure spirit. While in the flesh, this man did so much that belief in the immortality of his soul becomes s omehow unavoidable. What he left us with amounts to a gospel which is both broug ht about by and filled with love that's anything but finite with love, that is, wh ich can in no way all be harbored by human flesh and which therefore needs words . If there were no churches, one could easily have built one upon this poet, and its main precept would run something like his If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. \ 2 If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the m inority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Soci ety, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definit ion, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no ma tter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion; a tyrant, of course, may try to save his subjects from it by some spectacular bloodbath. I first read Auden some twenty years ago in Russia in rather limp and listless t ranslations that I found in an anthology of contemporary English poetry subtitled "From Browning to Our Days." "Our Days" were those of 1937, when the volume was published. Needless to say, a lmost the entire body of its translators along with its editor, M. Gutner, were arrested soon afterward, and many of them perished. Needless to say, for the nex t forty years no other anthology of contemporary English poetry was published in Russia, and the said volume became something of a collector's item. One line of Auden in that anthology, however, caught my eye. It was, as I learne d later, from the last stanza of his early poem "No Change of Place," which desc ribed a somewhat claustrophobic landscape where "no one goes / Further than railhe ad or the ends of piers, / Will neither go nor send his son ..." This last bit, "Will neither go nor send his son ..." struck me with its mixture of negative ex tension and common sense. Having been brought up on an essentially emphatic and s elf-asserting diet of Russian verse, I was quick to register this recipe whose m ain component was self-restraint. Still, poetic lines have a knack of straying f rom the context into universal significance, and the threat- ening touch of absu rdity contained in "Will neither go nor send his son" would start vibrating in t he back of my mind whenever I'd set out to do something on paper. This is, I suppose, what they call an influence, except that the sense of the ab surd is never an invention of the poet but is a reflection of reality; invention s are seldom recognizable. What one may owe here to the poet is not the sentiment itself but its treatment: quiet, unemphatic, without any pedal, almost en passan t. This treatment was especially significant to me precisely because I came acros s this line in the early sixties, when the Theater of the Absurd was in full swing. Against that background, Auden's handling of the subject stood out not only because he had beaten a lot of people to the punch but because of a considerably different ethical message. The way he handled the line was tellin g, at least to me: something like "Don't cry wolf" even though the wolf's at the door. (Even though, I would add, it looks exactly like you. Especially because of that, don't cry wolf.) Although for a writer to mention his penal experiences or for that matter, any ki nd of hardship is like dropping names for normal folk, it so happened that my next opportunity to pay a closer look at Auden occurred while I was doing my own time in the North, in a small village lost among swamps and forests, near the polar circle. This time the anthology that I had was in English, sent to me by a frien d from Moscow. It had quite a lot of Yeats, whom I then found a bit too oratoric al and sloppy with meters, and Eliot, who in those days reigned supreme in Easte

rn Europe. I was intending to read Eliot. But by pure chance the book opened to Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." I was young then and therefore particularly keen on elegies as a genre, having nobody around dying to write one for. So I read them perhaps more avidly than anything else, and I frequently thought that the most interesting feature of the genre wa s the authors' unwitting attempts at self-portrayal with which nearly every poem "in memoriam" is strewn or soiled. Understandable though this tendency is, it ofte n turns such a poem into the author's ruminations on the subject of death, from which we learn more about him than about the deceased. The Auden poem had none o f this; what's more, I soon realized that even its structure was designed to pay tribute to the dead poet, imitating in reverse order the great Irishman's own m odes of stylistic development, all the way down to his earliest: the tetrameters of the poem's third last part. It's because of these tetrameters, in particular because of eight lines from thi s third part, that I understood what kind of poet I was reading. These lines ove rshadowed for me that astonishing description of "the dark cold day," Yeats's la st, with its shuddering The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. They overshadowed that unforgettable rendition of the stricken body as a city wh ose suburbs and squares are gradually emptying as if after a crushed rebellion. T hey overshadowed even that statement of the era . . . poetry makes nothing happen . . . They, those eight lines in tetrameter that made this third part of the poem soun d like a cross between a Salvation Army hymn, a funeral dirge, and a nursery rhy me, went like this: Time that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent, And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique, Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives; Pardons cowardice, con ceit, Lays its honours at their feet. I remember sitting there in the small wooden shack, peering through the square po rthole-size window at the wet, muddy, dirt road with a few stray chickens on it, half believing what I'd just read, half wondering whether my grasp of English wa sn't playing tricks on me. I had there a veritable boulder of an English-Russian dictionary, and I went through its pages time and again, checking every word, e very allusion, hoping that they might spare me the meaning that stared at me fro m the page. I guess I was simply refusing to believe that way back in 1939 an En glish poet had said, "Time . . . worships language," and yet the world around wa s still what it was. But for once the dictionary didn't overrule me. Auden had indeed said that time (not the time) worships language, and the train of thought that statement set in motion in me is still trundling to this day. For "worship" is an attitude of the lesser toward the greater. If time worships language, it means that language is greater, or older, than time, which is, in its turn, older and greater than spac e. That was how I was taught, and I indeed felt that way. So if time which is syno nymous with, nay, even absorbs deity worships language, where then does language c ome from? For the gift is always smaller than the giver. And then isn't language a repository of time? And isn't this why time worships it? And isn't a song, or a poem, or indeed a speech itself, with its caesuras, pauses, spondees, and so forth, a game language plays to restructure time? And aren't those by whom langu age "lives" those by whom time does too? And if time "forgives" them, does it do so out of generosity or out of necessity? And isn't generosity a necessity anyho w? Short and horizontal as those lines were, they seemed to me incredibly vertical. They were also very much offhand, almost chatty: metaphysics disguised as commo n sense, common sense disguised as nursery-rhyme couplets. These layers of disgu ise alone were telling me what language is, and I realized that I was reading a poet who spoke the truth or through whom the truth made itself audible. At least i t felt more like truth than anything else I managed to figure out in that anthol ogy. And perhaps it felt that way precisely because of the touch of irrelevance that I sensed in the falling intonation of "forgives / Everyone by whom it lives

; / Pardons cowardice, conceit, / Lays its honours at their feet." These words w ere there, I thought, simply to offset the upward gravity of "Time . .. worships language." I could go on and on about these lines, but I could do so only now. Then and the re I was simply stunned. Among other things, what became clear to me was that on e should watch out when Auden makes his witty comments and observations, keeping an eye on civilization no matter what his immediate subject (or condition) is. I felt that I was dealing with a new kind of metaphysical poet, a man of terrifi c lyrical gifts, who disguised himself as an observer of public mores. And my su spicion was that this choice of mask, the choice of this idiom, had to do less w ith matters of style and tradition than with the personal humility imposed on him not so much by a particular creed as by his sense of the nature of language. Hu mility is never chosen. I had yet to read my Auden. Still, after "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," I knew that I was facing an author more humble than Yeats or Eliot, with a soul less petula nt than either, while, I was afraid, no less tragic. With the benefit of hindsig ht I may say now that I wasn't altogether wrong, and that if there was ever any drama in Auden's voice, it wasn't his own personal drama but a public or existen tial one. He'd never put himself in the center of the tragic picture; at best he' d acknowledge his presence at the scene. I had yet to hear from his very mouth t hat "J. S. Bach was terribly lucky. When he wanted to praise the Lord, he'd writ e a chorale or a cantata addressing the Almighty directly. Today, if a poet wishe s to do the same thing, he has to employ indirect speech." The same, presumably, would apply to prayer. 3 As I write these notes, I notice the first person singular popping its ugly head up with alarming frequency. But man is what he reads; in other words, spotting this pronoun, X detect Auden more than anybody else: the aberration simply reflect s the proportion of my reading of this poet. Old dogs, of course, won't learn ne w tricks; dog owners, though, end up resembling their dogs. Critics, and especia lly biographers, of writers with a distinctive style often adopt, however uncons ciously, their subjects' mode of expression. To put it simply, one is changed by what one loves, sometimes to the point of losing one's entire identity. I am no t trying to say that this is what happened to me; all I seek to suggest is that these otherwise tawdry I's and me's are, in their own turn, forms of indirect sp eech whose object is Auden. For those of my generation who were interested in poetry in English and I can't cl aim there were too many of those the sixties was the era of anthologies. On their way home, foreign students and scholars who'd come to Russia on academic exchang e programs would understandably try to rid themselves of extra weight, and books of poetry were the first to go. They'd sell them, almost for nothing, to secondh and bookstores, which subsequently would charge extraordinary sums if you wanted to buy them. The rationale behind these prices was quite simple: to deter the l ocals from purchasing these Western items; as for the foreigner himself, he woul d obviously be gone and unable to see the disparity. Still, if you knew a salesperson, as one who frequents a place inevitably does, you could strike the sort of deal every book-hunting person is familiar with: yo u'd trade one thing for another, or two or liiree books for one, or you'd buy a book, read it, and return it to the store and get your money back. Besides, by t he time I was released and returned to my hometown, I'd gotten myself some sort of reputation, and in several bookstores they treated me rather nicely. Because of this reputation, students from the exchange programs would sometimes visit me, and as one is not supposed to cross a strange threshold empty-handed, they'd br ing books. With some of these visitors I struck up close friendships, because of which my bookshelves gained considerably. I liked them very much, these anthologies, and not for their contents only but a lso for the sweetish smell of their bindings and their pages edged in yellow. Th ey felt so American and were indeed pocket-size. You could pull them out of your pocket in a streetcar or in a public garden, and even though the text would be only a half or a third comprehensible, they'd instantly obliterate the local rea

lity. My favorites, though, were Louis Untermeyer's and Oscar Williams's because t hey had pictures of their contributors that fired up one's imagination in no les s a way than the lines themselves. For hours on end I would sit scrutinizing a s mallish black-and-white box with this or that poet's features, trying to figure o ut what kind of person he was, trying to animate him, to match the face with his half- or a third-understood lines. Later on, in the company of friends we would exchange our wild surmises and the snatches of gossip that occasionally came ou r way and, having developed a common denominator, pronounce our verdict. Again w ith the benefit of hindsight, I must say that frequently our divinations were no t too far off. That was how I first saw Auden's face. It was a terribly reduced photograph a bit studied, with a too didactic handling of shadow: it said more about the photogra pher than about his model. From that picture, one would have to conclude either that the former was a naive aesthete or the latter's features were too neutral f or his occupation. I preferred the second version, partly because neutrality of tone was very much a feature of Auden's poetry, partly because anti-heroic postu re was the idee fixe of our generation. The idea was to look like everybody else: plain shoes, workman's cap, jacket and tie, preferably gray, no beards or musta ches. Wystan was recognizable. Also recognizable to the point of giving one the shivers were the lines in "Sept ember 1, 1939" ostensibly explaining the origins of the war that had cradled my g eneration but in effect depicting our very selves as well, like a black- and-whi te snapshot in its own right. I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. This four-liner indeed was straying out of context, equating victors to victims, and I think it should be tattooed by the federal government on the chest of ever y newborn, not because of its message alone, but because of its intonation. The only acceptable argument against such a procedure would be that there are better lines by Auden. What would you do with: Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where v>e are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. Or if you think this is too much New York, too American, then how about this cou plet from "The Shield of Achilles," which, to me at least, sounds a bit like a D antesque epitaph to a handful of East European nations: . . . they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died. Or if you are still against such a barbarity, if you want to spare the tender sk in this hurt, there are seven other lines in the same poem that should be carved on the gates of every existing state, indeed on the gates of our whole world: A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, Loitered about that vacancy, a bird Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone: That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises were k ept. Or one could weep because another wept. This way the new arrival won't be deceived as to this world's nature; this way t he world's dweller won't take demagogues for demigods. One doesn't have to be a gypsy or a Lombroso to believe in the relation between an individual's appearance and his deeds: this is what our sense of beauty is ba sed on, after all. Yet how should a poet look who wrote: Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of gold en moss, Silently and very fast.

How should a man look who was as fond of translating metaphysical verities into the pedestrian of common sense as he was of spotting the former in the latter? H ow should one look who, by going very thoroughly about creation, tells you more about the Creator than any impertinent agonist shortcutting through the spheres? Shouldn't a sensibility unique in its combination of honesty, clinical detachme nt, and controlled lyricism result if not in a unique arrangement of facial featu res then at least in a specific, uncommon expression? And could such features or such an expression be captured by a brush? registered by a camera? I liked the process of extrapolating from that stamp-size picture very much. One always gropes for a face, one always wants an ideal to materialize, and Auden wa s very close at the time to amounting to an ideal. (Two others were Beckett and Frost, yet I knew the way they looked; however terrifying, the correspondence be tween their fa9ades and their deeds was obvious.) Later, of course, I saw other photographs of Auden: in a smuggled magazine or in other anthologies. Still they added nothing; the man eluded lenses, or they lagged behind the man. I began to wonder whether one form of art was capable of depicting another, whether the vis ual could apprehend the semantic. Then one day I think it was in the winter of 1968 or 1969 in Moscow, Nadezhda Mandel stam, whom I was visiting there, handed me yet another anthology of modern poetr y, a very handsome book generously illustrated with large black-and-white photog raphs done by, if I remember correctly, Rollie McKenna. I found what I was looki ng for. A couple of months later, somebody borrowed that book from me and I neve r saw the photograph again; still, I remember it rather clearly. The picture was taken somewhere in New York, it seemed, on some overpass either th e one near Grand Central or the one at Columbia University that spans Amsterdam A venue. Auden stood there looking as though he were caught unawares, in passage, eyebrows lifted in bewilderment. The eyes themselves, however, were terribly calm and keen. The time was, presumably, the late forties or the beginning of the fi fties, before the famous wrinkled "unkempt bed" stage took over his features. Every thing, or almost everything, became clear to me. The contrast or, better still, the degree of disparity between those eyebrows ris en in formal bewilderment and the keenness of his gaze, to my mind, directly cor responded to the formal aspects of his lines (two lifted eyebrows = two rhymes) and to the blinding precision of their content. What stared at me from the page was the facial equivalent of a couplet, of truth that's better known by heart. T he features were regular, even plain. There was nothing specifically poetic about this face, nothing Byronic, demonic, ironic, hawkish, aquiline, romantic, wound ed, etc. Rather, it was the face of a physician who is interested in your story though he knows you are ill. A face well prepared for everything, a sum total of a face. It was a result. Its blank stare was a direct product of that blinding proximity of face to object which produced expressions like "voluntary errands," "necessa ry murder," "conservative dark," "artificial wilderness," or "triviality of the sa nd." It felt like when a myopic person takes off his glasses, except that the ke ensightedness of this pair of eyes had to do with neither myopia nor the smallne ss of objects but with their deep-seated threats. It was the stare of a man who knew that he wouldn't be able to weed those threats out, yet who was bent on des cribing for you the symptoms as well as the malaise itself. That wasn't what's c alled "social criticism" if only because the malaise wasn't social: it was existen tial. In general, I think this man was terribly mistaken for a social commentator, or a diagnostician, or some such thing. The most frequent charge that's been levele d against him was that he didn't offer a cure. I guess in a way he asked for tha t by resorting to Freudian, then Marxist, then ecclesiastical terminology. The cu re, though, lay precisely in his employing these terminologies, for they are sim ply different dialects in which one can speak about one and the same thing, whic h is love. It is the intonation with which one talks to the sick that cures. Thi s poet went among the world's grave, often terminal cases not as a surgeon but a s a nurse, and every patient knows that it's nurses and not incisions that event ually put one back on one's feet. It's the voice of a nurse, that is, of love, t

hat one hears in the final speech of Alonso to Ferdinand in "The Sea and the Mir ror": But should you fail to keep your kingdom And, like your father before you, come Where thought accuses and feeling mocks, Believe your pain . . . Neither physician nor angel, nor least of all your beloved or relative will say this at the moment of your final defeat: only a nurse or a poet, out of experience as well as out of love. And I marveled at that love. I knew nothing about Au- den's life: neither about his being homosexual nor about his marriage of convenience (for her) to Erika Ma nn, etc. nothing. One thing I sensed quite clearly was that this love would overs hoot its object. In my mind better, in my imagination it was love expanded or accele rated by language, by the necessity of expressing it; and language that much I alr eady knew has its own dynamics and is prone, especially in poetry, to use its self -generating devices: meters and stanzas that take the poet far beyond his origina l destination. And the other truth about love in poetry that one gleans from read ing it is that a writer's sentiments inevitably subordinate themselves to the lin ear and unrecoiling progression of art. This sort of thing secures, in art, a hi gher degree of lyricism; in life, an equivalent in isolation. If only because of his stylistic versatility, this man should have known an uncommon degree of des pair, as many of his most delightful, most mesmerizing lyrics do demonstrate. Fo r in art lightness of touch more often than not comes from the darkness of its v ery absence. And yet it was love all the same, perpetuated by language, oblivious because the la nguage was English to gender, and intensified by a deep agony, because agony, too, may, in the end, have to be articulated. Language, after all, is self-conscious by definition, and it wants to get the hang of every new situation. As I looked at Rollie McKenna's picture, I felt pleased that the face there revealed neither neurotic nor any other sort of strain; that it was pale, ordinary, not expressi ng but instead absorbing whatever it was that was going on in front of his eyes. How marvelous it would be, I thought, to have those features, and I tried to ap e the grimace in the mirror. I obviously failed, but I knew that I would fail, b ecause such a face was bound to be one of a kind. There was no need to imitate i t: it already existed in the world, and the world seemed somehow more palatable to me because this face was somewhere out there. Strange things they are, faces of poets. In theory, authors' looks should be of no consequence to their readers: reading is not a narcissistic activity, neither is writing, yet the moment one likes a sufficient amount of a poet's verse one s tarts to wonder about the appearance of the writer. This, presumably, has to do with one s suspicion that to like a work of art is to recognize the truth, or the deg ree of it, that art expresses. Insecure by nature, we want to see the artist, wh om we identify with his work, so that the next time around we might know what tr uth looks like in reality. Only the authors of antiquity escape this scrutiny, w hich is why, in part, they are regarded as classics, and their generalized marble features that dot niches in libraries are in direct relation to the absolute ar chetypal significance of their oeuvre. But when you read . . . To visit The grave of a friend, to make an ugly scene, To count the loves one has grown out of, Is not nice, but to chirp like a tearless bird, As though no one dies in particular And gossip were never true, unthinkable . . . you begin to feel that behind these lines there stands not a blond, brunette, pa le, swarthy, wrinkled, or smooth-faced concrete author but life itself; and that you would like to meet; that you would like to find yourself in human proximity to. Behind this wish lies not vanity but certain human physics that pull a small particle toward a big magnet, even though you may end up echoing Auden's own: " I have known three great poets, each one a prize son of a bitch." I: "Who?" He: "Yeats, Frost, Bert Brecht." (Now about Brecht he was wrong: Brecht wasn't a gre at poet.) 4 On June 6, 1972, some forty-eight hours after I had left Russia on very short no

tice, I stood with my friend Carl Proffer, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Michigan (who'd flown to Vienna to meet me), in front of Auden's summer house in the small villa ge of Kirch- stetten, explaining to its owner the reasons for our being there. T his meeting almost didn't happen. There are three Kirchstettens in northern Austria, and we had passed through all three and were about to turn back when the car rolled into a quiet, narrow coun try lane and we saw a wooden arrow saying "Audenstrasse." It was called previous ly (if I remember accurately) "Hinterholz" because behind the woods the lane led to the local cemetery. Renaming it had presumably as much to do with the village rs' readiness to get rid of this "memento mori" as with their respect for the gr eat poet living in their midst. The poet regarded the situation with a mixture o f pride and embarrassment. He had a clearer sentiment, though, toward the local priest, whose name was Schicklgruber: Auden couldn't resist the pleasure of addr essing him as "Father Schicklgruber." All that I would learn later. Meanwhile, Carl Proffer was trying to explain the reasons for our being there to a stocky, heavily perspiring man in a red shirt a nd broad suspenders, jacket over his arm, a pile of books underneath it. The man had just come by train from Vienna and, having climbed the hill, was short of b reath and not disposed to conversation. We were about to give up when he suddenly grasped what Carl Proffer was saying, cried "Impossible!" and invited us into th e house. It was Wystan Auden, and it was less than two years before he died. Let me attempt to clarify how all this had come about. Back in 1969, George L. K line, a professor of philosophy at Bryn Mawr, had visited me in Leningrad. Profe ssor Kline was translating my poems into English for the Penguin edition and, as we were going over the content of the future book, he asked me whom I would idea lly prefer to write the introduction. I suggested Auden because England and Auden were then synonymous in my mind. But, then, the whole prospect of my book being published in England was quite unreal. The only thing that imparted a semblance of reality to this venture was its sheer illegality under Soviet law. All the same, things were set in motion. Auden was given the manuscript to read and liked it enough to write an introduction. So when I reached Vienna, I was ca rrying with me Auden's address in Kirchstetten. Looking back and thinking about the conversations we had during the subsequent three weeks in Austria and later i n London and in Oxford, I hear his voice more than mine, although, I must say, I grilled him quite extensively on the subject of contemporary poetry, especially about the poets themselves. Still, this was quite understandable because the onl y English phrase I knew I wasn't making a mistake in was "Mr. Auden, what do you think about..." and the name would follow. Perhaps it was just as well, for what could I tell him that he didn't already kn ow one way or another? I could have told him, of course, how I had translated se veral poems of his into Russian and took them to a magazine in Moscow; but the y ear happened to be 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and one night the B BC broadcast his "The Ogre does what ogres can . . and that was the end of this venture. (The story would perhaps have endeared me to him, but I didn't have a v ery high opinion of those translations anyway.) That I'd never read a successful translation of his work into any language I had some idea of? He knew that himse lf, perhaps all too well. That I was overjoyed to learn one day about his devoti on to the Kierkegaardian triad, which for many of us too was the key to the huma n species? But I worried I wouldn't be able to articulate it. It was better to listen. Because I was Russian, he'd go on about Russian writers . "I wouldn't like to live with Dosto- evsky under the same roof," he would decl are. Or, "The best Russian writer is Chekhov" "Why?" "He's the only one of your pe ople who's got common sense." Or he would ask about the matter that seemed to pe rplex him most about my homeland: "I was told that the Russians always steal win dshield wipers from parked cars. Why?" But my answer because there were no spare parts wouldn't satisfy him: he obviously had in mind a more inscrutable reason, an d, having read him, I almost began to see one myself. Then he offered to transla te some of my poems. This shook me considerably. Who was I to be translated by A uden? I knew that because of his translations some of my compatriots had profite

d more than their lines deserved; yet somehow I couldn't allow myself the though t of him working for me. So I said, "Mr. Auden, what do you think about. . . Rob ert Lowell?" "I don't like men," came the answer, "who leave behind them a smoki ng trail of weeping women." During those weeks in Austria he looked after my affairs with the diligence of a good mother hen. To begin with, telegrams and other mail inexplicably began to arrive for me "/ W. H. Auden." Then he wrote to the Academy of American Poets requ esting that they provide me with some financial support. This was how I got my f irst American money $1,000 to be precise and it lasted me all the way to my first pa yday at the University of Michigan. He'd recommend me to his agent, instruct me on whom to meet and whom to avoid, introduce me to friends, shield me from journ alists, and speak ruefully about having given up his flat on St. Mark's Place as t hough I were planning to settle in his New York. "It would be good for you. If o nly because there is an Armenian church nearby, and the Mass is better when you don't understand the words. You don't know Armenian, do you?" I didn't. Then from London came / W. H. Auden an invitation for me to participate in the Poetry I nternational in Queen Elizabeth Hall, and we booked the same flight by British E uropean Airways. At this point an opportunity arose for me to pay him back a lit tle in kind. It so happened that during my stay in Vienna I had been befriended by the Razumovsky family (descendants of the Count Razu- movsky of Beethoven's Q uartets). One member of that family, Olga Razumovsky, was working then for the A ustrian airlines. Having learned about W. H. Auden and myself taking the same fli ght to London, she called BEA and suggested they give these two passengers the r oyal treatment. Which we indeed received. Auden was pleased, and I was proud. On several occasions during that time, he urged me to call him by his Christian name. Naturally I resisted and not only because of how I felt about him as a poet but also because of the difference in our ages: Russians are terribly mindful of such things. Finally in London he said, "It won't do. Either you are going to c all me Wystan, or I'll have to address you as Mr. Brodsky." This prospect sounde d so grotesque to me that I gave up. "Yes, Wystan," I said. "Anything you say, Wy stan." Afterward we went to the reading. He leaned on the lectern, and for a goo d half hour he filled the room with the lines he knew by heart. If I ever wished for time to stop, it was then, inside that large dark room on the south bank of the Thames. Unfortunately, it didn't. Although a year later, three months befor e he died in an Austrian hotel, we did read together again. In the same room. 5 By that time he was almost sixty-six. "I had to move to Oxford. I am in good heal th, but I have to have somebody to look after me." As far as I could see, visiti ng him there in January 1973, he was looked after only by the four walls of the sixteenth-century cottage given him by the college, and by the maid. In the dini ng hall the members of the faculty jostled him away from the food board. I suppo sed that was just English school manners, boys being boys. Looking at them, howe ver, I couldn't help recalling one more of those blinding approximations of Wyst an's: "triviality of the sand." This foolery was simply a variation on the theme of society having no obligation to a poet, especially to an old poet. That is, society would listen to a politi cian of comparable age, or even older, but not to a poet. There is a variety of r easons for this, ranging from anthropologic ones to the sycophantic. But the con clusion is plain and unavoidable: society has no right to complain if a politicia n does it in. For, as Auden once put it in his "Kimbaud": But in that child the rhetoricians lie Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a po et. If the lie explodes this way in "that child/' what happens to it in the old man who feels the cold more acutely? Presumptuous as it may sound coming from a forei gner, the tragic achievement of Auden as a poet was precisely that he had dehydr ated his verse of any sort of deception, be it a rhetorician's or a bardic one. This sort of thing alienates one not only from faculty members but also from one 's fellows in the field, for in every one of us sits that red- pimpled youth thi rsting for the incoherence of elevation. Turning critic, this apotheosis of pimples would regard the absence of elevation

as slackness, sloppiness, chatter, decay. It wouldn't occur to his sort that an aging poet has the right to write worse if indeed he does that there's nothing less palatable than unbecoming old age "discovering love" and monkey-gland transplant s. Between boisterous and wise, the public will always choose the former (and not because such a choice reflects its demographic makeup or because of poets' own "romantic" habit of dying young, but because of the species' innate unwillingnes s to think about old age, let alone its consequences). The sad thing about this clinging to immaturity is that the condition itself is far from being permanent. Ah, if it only were! Then everything could be explained by the species' fear of death. Then all those "Selected Poems" of so many a poet would be as innocuous as the citizens of Kirchstetten re christening their "Hinterholz." If it were on ly fear of death, readers and the appreciative critics especially should have be en doing away with themselves nonstop, following the example of their beloved yo ung authors. But that doesn't happen. The real story behind our species' clinging to immaturity is much sadder. It has to do not with man's reluctance to know about death but with his not wanting to hear about life. Yet innocence is the last thing that can be sustained naturall y. That's why poets especially those who lasted long must be read in their entirety, not in selections. The beginning makes sense only insofar as there is an end. F or unlike fiction writers, poets tell us the whole story: not only in terms of t heir actual experiences and sentiments but and that's what's most pertinent to us in terms of language itself, in terms of the words they finally choose. An aging man, if he still holds a pen, has a choice: to write memoirs or to keep a diary. By the very nature of their craft, poets are diarists. Often against t heir own will, they keep the most honest track of what's happening (a) to their souls, be it the expansion of a soul or more frequently its shrinkage and (b) to thei r sense of language, for they are the first ones for whom words become compromise d or devalued. Whether we like it or not, we are here to learn not just what tim e does to man but what language does to time. And poets, let us not forget, are the ones "by whom it [language] lives." It is this law that teaches a poet a gre ater rectitude than any creed is capable of. That's why one can build a lot upon W. H. Auden. Not only because he died at twi ce the age of Christ or because of Kierkegaard's "principle of repetition." He s imply served an infinity greater than we normally reckon with, and he bears good witness to its availability; what's more, he made it feel hospitable. To say th e least, every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: i f not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language. W. H. A uden would do very well on both counts, if only because of their respective rese mblances to hell and Limbo. He was a great poet (the only thing that's wrong with this sentence is its tense , as the nature of language puts one's achievements within it invariably into th e present), and I consider myself immensely lucky to have met him. But had I not met him at all, there would still be the reality of his work. One should feel g rateful to fate for having been exposed to this reality, for the lavishing of th ese gifts, all the more priceless since they were not designated for anybody in p articular. One may call this a generosity of the spirit, except that the spirit needs a man to refract itself through. It's not the man who becomes sacred becau se of this refraction: it's the spirit that becomes human and comprehensible. Thi s and the fact that men are finite is enough for one to worship this poet. Whatever the reasons for which he crossed the Atlantic and became American, the result was that he fused both idioms of English and became to paraphrase one of hi s own lines our transatlantic Horace. One way or another, all the journeys he took t hrough lands, caves of the psyche, doctrines, creeds served not so much to improve his argument as to expand his diction. If poetry ever was for him a matter of a mbition, he lived long enough for it to become simply a means of existence. Henc e his autonomy, sanity, equipoise, irony, detachment in short, wisdom. Whatever it i s, reading him is one of the very few ways (if not the only one) available for f eeling decent. I wonder, though, if that was his purpose. I saw him last in July 1973, at a supper at Stephen Spender's place in London. W ystan was sitting there at the table, a cigarette in his right hand, a goblet in

his left, holding forth on the subject of cold salmon. The chair being too low, two disheveled volumes of the OED were put under him by the mistress of the hous e. I thought then that I was seeing the only man who had the right to use those volumes as his seat. 1983A Commencement Address Ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 1984: No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your lif e you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control. No amount of good nature or cunn ing calculations will prevent this encounter. In fact, the more calculating, the more cautious you are, the greater is the likelihood of this rendezvous, the har der its impact. Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is cap able of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the g uise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: "Hi, I 'm Evil!" That, of course, indicates its secondary nature, but the comfort one m ay derive from this observation gets dulled by its frequency. A prudent thing to do, therefore, would be to subject your notions of good to th e closest possible scrutiny, to go, so to speak, through your entire wardrobe ch ecking which of your clothes may fit a stranger. That, of course, may turn into a full-time occupation, and well it should. You'll be surprised how many things you considered your own and good can easily fit, without much adjustment, your e nemy. You may even start to wonder whether he is not your mirror image, for the most interesting thing about Evil is that it is wholly human. To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, civic conscience, a better future, etc. One of the surest signs of danger here is the number of those who share your views, not so much because unanimity has the knack of degenerating into uniformity as because of the probabi lity implicit in great numbers that noble sentiment is being faked. By the same token, the surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, ori ginality of thinking, whimsicality, even if you will eccentricity. That is, somethin g that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor coul dn't be happy with. Something, in other words, that can't be shared, like your o wn skin: not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes f or big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armie s and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do presumably with its innate insecurity, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil triumphs. Which it does: in so many parts of the world and inside ourselves. Given its vol ume and intensity, given, especially, the fatigue of those who oppose it, Evil t oday may be regarded not as an ethical category but as a physical phenomenon no lo nger measured in particles but mapped geographically. Therefore the reason I am talking to you about all this has nothing to do with your being young, fresh, an d facing a clean slate. No, the slate is dark with dirt and it is hard to believ e in either your ability or your will to clean it. The purpose of my talk is sim ply to suggest to you a mode of resistance which may come in handy to you one da y; a mode that may help you to emerge from the encounter with Evil perhaps less soiled, if not necessarily more triumphant than your precursors. What I have in mind, of course, is the famous business of turning the other cheek. I assume that one way or another you have heard about the interpretations of thi s verse from the Sermon on the Mount by Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luth er King, Jr., and many others. In other words, I assume that you are familiar wi th the concept of nonviolent, or passive, resistance, whose main principle is re turning good for evil, that is, not responding in kind. The fact that the world today is what it is suggests, to say the least, that this concept is far from bei ng cherished universally. The reasons for its unpopularity are twofold. First, w hat is required for this concept to be put into effect is a margin of democracy. This is precisely what 86 percent of the globe lacks. Second, it is common sens e that tells a victim that his only gain in turning the other cheek and not resp onding in kind yields, at best, a moral victory, i.e., something quite immateria

l. The natural reluctance to expose yet another part of your body to a blow is j ustified by a suspicion that this sort of conduct only agitates and enhances Evi l; that a moral victory can be mistaken by the adversary for his impunity. There are other, graver reasons to be suspicious. If the first blow hasn't knock ed all the wits out of the victim's head, he may realize that turning the other cheek amounts to manipulation of the offender's sense of guilt, not to speak of his karma. The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only beca use suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil you r enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of lovi ng another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another. (This is why you've been hit on your right cheek in die first place.) At best, therefore, what one can get from turning the other cheek to one's enemy is the satisfaction of alerting the latte r to the futility of his action. "Look," the other cheek says, "what you are hit ting is just flesh. It's not me. You can't crush my soul." The trouble, of cours e, with this kind of attitude is that the enemy may just accept the challenge. Twenty years ago the following scene took place in one of the numerous prison ya rds of northern Russia. At seven o'clock in the morning the door of a cell was f lung open and on its threshold stood a prison guard, who addressed its inmates: " Citizens! The collective of this prisons guards challenges you, the inmates, to socialist competition in chopping the lumber amassed in our yard." In those part s there is no central heating, and the local police, in a manner of speaking, ta x all the nearby lumber companies for one- tenth of their produce. By the time I am describing, the prison yard looked like a veritable lumberyard: the piles we re two to three stories high, dwarfing the one-storied quadrangle of the prison itself. The need for chopping was evident, although socialist competitions of th is sort had happened before. "And what if I refuse to take part in this?" inquir ed one of the inmates. "Well, in that case no meals for you," replied the guard. Then axes were issued to inmates, and the cutting started. Both prisoners and guards worked in earnest, and by noon all of them, e specially the always underfed prisoners, were exhausted. A break was announced an d people sat down to eat: except the fellow who asked the question. He kept swin ging his ax. Both prisoners and guards exchanged jokes about him, something about Jews being normally regarded as smart people whereas this man . . . and so fort h. After the break they resumed the work, although in a somewhat more flagging ma nner. By four o'clock the guards quit, since for them it was the end of their sh ift; a bit later the inmates stopped too. The man's ax still kept swinging. Seve ral times he was urged to stop, by both parties, but he paid no attention. It se emed as though he had acquired a certain rhythm he was unwilling to break; or wa s it a rhythm that possessed him? To the others, he looked like an automaton. By five o'clock, by six o'clock, the ax was still going up and down. Both guards and inmates were now watching him k eenly, and the sardonic expression on their faces gradually gave way first to on e of bewilderment and then to one of terror. By seven-thirty the man stopped, st aggered into his cell, and fell asleep. For the rest of his stay in that prison, no call for socialist competition between guards and inmates was issued again, although the wood kept piling up. I suppose the fellow could do this twelve hours of straight chopping because at the time he was quite young. In fact, he was then twenty-four. Only a little older t han you are. However, I think there could have been another reason for his behav ior that day. It's quite possible that the young man precisely because he was youn g remembered the text of the Sermon on the Mount better than Tolstoy and Gandhi did. Because the Son of Man was in the habit of speaking in triads, the y oung man could have recalled that the relevant verse doesn't stop at but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also but continues without either period or comma: And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have th y cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

Quoted in full, these verses have in fact very little to do with nonviolent or p assive resistance, with the principles of not responding in kind and returning g ood for evil. The meaning of these lines is anything but passive, for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues t he harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one. The other cheek here sets in motion not the enemy's sen se of guilt (which he is perfectly capable of quelling) but exposes his senses a nd faculties to the meaninglessness of the whole enterprise: the way every form of mass production does. Let me remind you that we are not talking here about a situation involving a fai r fight. We are talking about situations where one finds oneself in a hopelessly inferior position

from the very outset, where one has no chance of fighting back, where the odds a re overwhelmingly against one. In other words, we are talking about the very dar k hours in one's life, when one's sense of moral superiority over the enemy offe rs no solace, when this enemy is too far gone to be shamed or made nostalgic for abandoned scruples, when one has at one's disposal only one's face, coat, cloak , and a pair of feet that are still capable of walking a mile or two. In this situation there is very little room for tactical maneuver. So turning th e other cheek should be your conscious, cold, deliberate decision. Your chances o f winning, however dismal they are, all depend on whether or not you know what y ou are doing. Thrusting forward your face with the cheek toward the enemy, you s hould know that this is just the beginning of your ordeal as well as that of the verse and you should be able to see yourself through the entire sequence, through all three verses from the Sermon on the Mount. Otherwise, a line taken out of c ontext will leave you crippled. To base ethics on a faultily quoted verse is to invite doom, or else to end up b ecoming a mental bourgeois enjoying the ultimate comfort: that of his conviction s. In either case (of which the latter with its membership in well-intentioned m ovements and nonprofit organizations is the least palatable) it results in yieldi ng ground to Evil, in delaying the comprehension of its weaknesses. For Evil, ma y I remind you, is only human. Ethics based on this faultily quoted verse have changed nothing in post-Gandhi I ndia, save the color of its administration. From a hungry man's point of view, th ough, it's all the same who makes him hungry. I submit that he may even prefer a white man to be responsible for his sorry state if only because this way social evil may appear to come from elsewhere and may perhaps be less efficient than t he suffering at the hand of his own kind. With an alien in charge, there is stil l room for hope, for fantasy. Similarly in post-Tolstoy Russia, ethics based on this misquoted verse undermined a great deal of the nation's resolve in confronting the police state. What has followed is known all too well: six decades of turning the other cheek transforme d the face of the nation into one big bruise, so that the state today, weary of its violence, simply spits at that face. As well as at the face of the world. In other words, if you want to secularize Christianity, if you want to translate C hrist's teachings into political terms, you need something more than modern poli tical mumbo-jumbo: you need to have the original in your mind at least if it hasn' t found room in your heart. Since He was less a good man than a divine spirit, i t's fatal to harp on His goodness at the expense of His metaphysics. I must admit that I feel somewhat uneasy talking about these things: because tur ning or not turning that other cheek is, after all, an extremely intimate affair . The encounter always occurs on a one-to-one basis. It's always your skin, your coat and cloak, and it is your limbs that will have to do the walking. To advise , let alone to urge, anyone about the use of these properties is, if not entirel y wrong, indecent. All I aspire to do here is te erase from your minds a cliche

that harmed so many and yielded so little, I also would like to instill in you t he idea that as long as you have your skin, coat, cloak, and limbs, you are not yet defeated, whatever the odds are. There is, however, a greater reason for one to feel uneasy about discussing thes e matters in public; and it's not only your own natural reluctance to regard you r young selves as potential victims. No, it's rather mere sobriety, which makes one anticipate among you potential villains as well, and it is a bad strategy to divulge the secrets of resistance in front of the potential enemy. What perhaps relieves one from a charge of treason or, worse still, of projecting the tactic al status quo into the future, is the hope that the victim will always be more i nventive, more original in his thinking, more enterprising than the villain. Hen ce the chance that the victim may triumph. Williams College, 1984