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: you'd trade one thing for another, or two or three books for one, or you'd buy a book, read it, and return it to the store and get your money back. Besides, by the 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 bring 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 also for the sweetish smell of their bindings and their pages edged in yellow. They 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 reality. My favorites, though, were Louis Untermeyer's and Oscar Williams's—because they had pictures of their contributors that fired up one's imagination in no less a way than the lines themselves. For hours on end I would sit scrutinizing a smallish black-and-white box with this or that poet's features, trying to figure out 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 our way and, having developed a common denominator, pronounce our verdict. Again with the benefit of hindsight, I must say that frequently our divinations were not 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 photographer 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 for 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 posture 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 mustaches. \Vystan was recognizable.
Also recognizable to the point of giving one the shivers were the lines in "September 1, 1939" ostensibly explaining the origins of the war that had cradled my generation but in effect depicting our very selves as well, like a black- and-white snapshot in its o^ 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 every 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 we 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 couplet from "The Shield of Achilles," which, to me at least, sounds a bit like a Dantesque 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 skin 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 arc raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises were kept. Or one could weep because another wept.
This way the new arrival won't be deceived as to this world's nature; this way the 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 based on, after all. Yet how should a poet look who wrote:
Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden 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? How 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 detachment, and controlled lyricism result if not in a unique arrangement of facial features 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 was 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 between their far;ades 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 visual could apprehend the semantic.
Then one day—I think it was in the winter of 1968 or 1969—in Moscow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, whom I was visiting there, handed me yet another anthology of modem poetry, a very handsome book generously illustrated with large black-and-white photographs done by, if I remember correctly, Hollie McKenna. I found what I was looking for. A couple of months later, somebody borrowed that book from me and I never saw the photograph again; still, I remember it rather clearly.
The picture was taken somewhere in New York, it seemed, on some overpass—either the one near Grand Central or the one at Columbia University that spans Amsterdam Avenue. 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 fifties, before the famous wrinkled— "unkempt bed"—stage took over his features. Everything, or almost everything, became clear to me.