Joseph Brodsky by Lev Loseff

Author:Lev Loseff [Loseff, Lev]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-16302-5
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

When Brodsky met him, Auden was hardly in good health. He was old and alone, he was drinking more and more, and his old friends were alarmed at the changes in his behavior, for the ever-kind Auden was becoming ever more rude. He had stopped talking with people and started talking at them, launching into monologues that until six in the evening were as brilliant as they’d ever been, but which became less coherent the more alcohol he downed.6

Still, Brodsky’s recollections of Auden in Austria and London paint a different picture. Although the communication may have been one-sided, given Brodsky’s lack of conversational English and Auden’s complete lack of Russian, the elder poet clearly took very good care of his unexpected guest. Charles Osborne, who organized a yearly poetry festival in London at which Auden was more or less the main feature, wrote that “Wystan fussed about him like a mother hen … an unusually kindly and understanding mother hen.”7

We have to give Auden’s intuition its due: he sensed something in this young poet who wrote in a language he could not understand; Auden liked him and tried to help him through his first days in a strange place. But this was hardly a meeting of equals. Auden had no idea what lay behind Brodsky’s verse; Brodsky did not know enough English to explain. Brodsky’s arrival in the West was a media event, and Auden was too old and too wise to take much of that seriously. At the time, he himself was a celebrity who often had to fight off reporters and cameramen.

Brodsky was only one of many young poets in need of moral and material support—both of which Auden gave freely. But Brodsky’s recollections suggest that the English poet was also intrigued by the Russian connection—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov.8 His sympathy for Brodsky went hand in hand with his antipathy to the Soviet regime, especially after its incursion into Czechoslovakia in 1968. Still, for the aging Auden, this encounter was nothing particularly extraordinary. For Brodsky it was the very hand of providence. “One may call this generosity of the spirit if it weren’t that the spirit requires a body to refract itself through. It’s not the man who becomes sacred through this refraction: it’s the spirit that becomes human and comprehensible. This—and the fact that men are finite—is enough for me to worship this poet.”9

Brodsky’s poem commemorating the centenary of Akhmatova’s birth is almost a paraphrase of the same thought: a great poet has found words to express both forgiveness and love:

… since we have but one life, they [these words]

sound clearer from mortal lips than from cotton puffs on high.

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