Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson

Author:Robin Robertson [Robertson, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Collections, General
ISBN: 9780007402601
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2012-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

‘All is confounded, all!

Reproach and everlasting shame

Sits mocking in our plumes.’ Shakespeare, Henry V

Adam Thorpe

November, 1988. Laura Cumming of the Literary Review on the phone.

‘Hi, Adam. Like to do an interview?’

‘OK. Who with?’

‘Poet. Begins with B.’

‘Brownjohn?’

‘Brodsky.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It’s the big one. A scoop. Exclusive, too.’

I’d reason to be nervous. Joseph Brodsky had recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature, had spent years in an Arctic labour camp, had been ‘adopted’ by Auden, wrote long poems in both Russian and English, and was described as ‘one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century’ (by his publishers). Apart from a pat on the head from the Queen in Calcutta (an event of which I have no memory), I had never in my life encountered anybody as big; it would be like interviewing a cliff.

He was over in London to launch the Penguin edition of his latest poetry collection, To Urania. For the next week I filled my spare hours (I was a full-time lecturer at PCL) with a lot of Brodsky as well as Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva. I made twenty pages of notes and quotes. Then I boiled down the notes. Like spinach, they boiled down to something that wasn’t enough to feed an interviewer for more than about ten minutes. I’d learned that Brodsky had a bristling creative energy, could reel off whole English poems (especially Berjeman’s), laughed a lot, and was generally very Russian. This reassured me; all I had to provide was a trigger.

‘Always start with a quote,’ my English teacher would say. Artfully, I made my first question turn around Auden.

You have called Auden ‘a stoic who prays’. Could this also be a self-definition?

He would have to be modest to the point of illness not to rise to that; there would be a gush of passionate memories and reflections. All I had to do was nod and smile.

The morning of the interview, I slipped my own slim volume into the briefcase along with Brodsky’s pile, and tested my old portable tape-recorder – I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the passionate flood by note-taking, and I wanted an exact transcription. The tape-recorder didn’t work. It had worked perfectly for years. I had an hour before the interview at Penguin’s headquarters, and I lived out in Bounds Green. Its quiet electrical appliance shop had only one tape-recorder in stock. I made it just on time to the grandiose Penguin headquarters, struggling with my briefcase and the shiny new silver-and-crimson ghetto blaster. The receptionist didn’t know anything about an interview. The publicity person was called up. I was told to wait. I sat in a trendy leather chair. A lot of people who looked like Joseph Brodsky passed through the lobby. Everyone had an affable, confident air. After an hour, I suggested to the receptionist that Mr Brodsky might have forgotten his appointment. I went up in a lift and met the publicity person and then went down again and waited another hour. I felt that she hadn’t rated the Literary Review very highly.

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