Let me attempt to clarify how all this had come about. Back in 1969, George L. Kline, a professor of philosophy at Bryn Mawr, had visited me in Leningrad. Professor 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 ideally 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 ven lure 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 carrying 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 in 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 only 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 know one way or another? I could have told him, of course, how I had translated several poems of his into Russian and took them to a magazine in Moscow; but the year happened to be 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and one night the BBC broadcast his "The Ogre does what ogres can . .." and that was the end of this venhire. (The story would perhaps have endeared me to him, but I didn't have a very 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 himself, perhaps all too well. That I was overjoyed to learn one day about his devotion to the Kierkegaardian triad, which for many of us too was the key to the human 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 Dostoevsky under the same roof," he would declare. Or, "The best Russian writer is Chekhov"—"Why?" "He's the only one of your people who's got common sense." Or he would ask about the matter that seemed to perplex him most about my homeland: "I was told that the Russians always steal windshield 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, and, having read him, I almost began to see one myself. Then he offered to translate some of my poems. This shook me considerably. Who was I to be translated by Auden? I !mew that because of his translations some of my compatriots had profited more than their lines deserved; yet somehow I couldn't allow myself the thought of him working for me. So I said, "Mr. Auden, what do you think about . . . Robert Lowell?" "I don't like men," came the answer, "who leave behind them a smoking 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 "c/o W. H. Auden." Then he wrote to the Academy of American Poets requesting that they provide me with some financial support. This was how I got my first American money—$1,000 to be precise—and it lasted me all the way to my first payday at the University of Michigan. He'd
378 I J О s E p H B В О D sky
recommend me to his agent, instruct me on whom to meet and whom to avoid, introduce me to friends, shield me from journalists, and speak ruefully about having given up his flat on St. Mark's Place—as though I were planning to settle in his New York. "It would be good for you. If only 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—c{o \V. H. Auden—an invitation for me to participate in the Poetry International in Queen Elizabeth Hall, and we booked the same Bight by British European Airways. At this point an opportunity arose for me to pay him back a little 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 Quartets). One member of that family, Olga Razumovsky, was working then for the Austrian airlines. Having learned ab6ut W. H. Auden and myself taking the same flight to London, she called BEA and suggested they give these two passengers the royal 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 call me Wystan, or I'll have to address you as Mr. Brodsky." This prospect sounded so grotesque to me that I gave up. "Yes, Wystan," I said. "Anything you say, Wystan." Afterward we went to the reading. He leaned on the lectern, and for a good 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 before 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 health, but I have to have somebody to look after me." As far as I could see, visiting him there in January 1973, he was looked after only by the four walls of the sixteenth-cenhiry cottage given him by the college, and by the maid. In the dining hall the members of the faculty jostled him away from the food board. I supposed that was just English school manners, boys being boys. Looking at them, however, I couldn't help recalling one more of those blinding approximations of Wystan'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 politician of comparable age, or even older, but not to a poet. There is a variety of reasons for this, ranging from anthropologic ones to the sycophantic. But the conclusion is plain and unavoidable: society has no right to complain if a politician does it in. For, as Auden once put it in his "Rimbaud":
Butin that child the rhetorician's lie Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.
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 foreigner, the tragic achievement of Auden as a poet was precisely that he had dehydrated 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 thirsting 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 transplants. 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 unwillingness 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 rechristening their "Hinterholz." If it were only fear of death, readers and the appreciative critics especially should have been doing away with themselves nonstop, following the example of their beloved young authors. But that doesn't happen.