Vanity Fair's Writers on Writers

PENGUIN BOOKS

VANITY FAIR’S WRITERS ON WRITERS

GRAYDON CARTER has been the editor of Vanity Fair since 1992.

DAVID FRIEND is Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development.

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All works in this collection were previously published in Vanity Fair or on vanityfair.com. The following essays are reprinted by permission:

Rendezvous with Rushdie by Martin Amis, originally published in Vanity Fair. Copyright © 1990 by Martin Amis, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

Efforts of Affection: A Memoir of Marianne Moore from Prose by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Editor’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Lloyd Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

A Passion of Poets by Joseph Brodsky, originally published in Vanity Fair. Copyright © 1983 by Joseph Brodsky, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

A Visit to the Masters School from E. E. Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever, copyright © 2014 by Susan Cheever. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

At the Ali Baba Café. Copyright © 1989 by Christopher Dickey.

Bosom Buddies from Laura Z: The Early Years. Copyright © 1983 by Laura Z. Hobson.

Paul Bowles in Exile. This article was originally published in the September 1985 issue of Vanity Fair. Copyright © 1985 by Jay McInerney.

Darkness Visible. Copyright © 1989 by William Styron. Permission granted on behalf of the estate of William C. Styron by InkWell Management as agent for the estate.

Reynolds Price: Duke of Writers. Copyright © 1986 by Anne Tyler.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats, September 1, 1939, and Rimbaud, copyright © 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden; The Shield of Achilles, copyright © 1952 by W. H. Auden and renewed 1980 by The Estate of W. H. Auden; The More Loving One, copyright © 1957 by W. H. Auden and renewed 1985 by The Estate of W. H. Auden; The Fall of Rome, copyright © 1947 by W. H. Auden and renewed 1975 by The Estate of W. H. Auden; No Change of Place, copyright © 1934 and renewed 1962 by W. H. Auden; The Sea and the Mirror, copyright © 1944 and renewed 1972 by W. H. Auden; and Homage to Clio from W. H. Auden Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from Remembering Willa Cather, by Truman Capote. © 2006 by The Truman Capote Literary Trust, with whose kind permission it is published.

ISBN 9781101993019

Cover design: Colin Webber

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CONTENTS

About the Authors

Also by Vanity Fair

Title Page

Copyright

INTRODUCTION by David Friend

ONE VANITY FAIR CONTRARIAN FONDLY RECALLS ANOTHER

DOROTHY PARKER by Christopher Hitchens

ON POETS

W. H. AUDEN by Joseph Brodsky

E. E. CUMMINGS by Susan Cheever

MARIANNE MOORE by Elizabeth Bishop

ON LITERARY LIONS

EUDORA WELTY by Willie Morris

REYNOLDS PRICE by Anne Tyler

SAUL BELLOW by Martin Amis

JACK KEROUAC by James Wolcott

TRUMAN CAPOTE by Sam Kashner

NORMAN MAILER by Patricia Bosworth

ERNEST HEMINGWAY by A. Scott Berg

TOM WOLFE by Michael Lewis

DISTANT SHORES

PAUL BOWLES by Jay McInerney

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ by Paul Elie

PRIMO LEVI by James Atlas

NAGUIB MAHFOUZ by Christopher Dickey

SALMAN RUSHDIE by Martin Amis

SHORT TAKES

WILLA CATHER by Truman Capote

JAMES BALDWIN by Jacqueline Woodson

ROGER STRAUS by Tom Wolfe

WARD JUST by David Halberstam

TONI MORRISON by John Leonard

ISHMAEL BEAH by Dave Eggers

ROBERT HARRIS by Nick Hornby

JUDY BLUME by Meg Wolitzer

WOLE SOYINKA by Nadine Gordimer

SONNY MEHTA by Dave Eggers

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS by Salman Rushdie

A FAMILY AFFAIR

JOAN DIDION by Lili Anolik

JOHN GREGORY DUNNE by Dominick Dunne

DOMINICK DUNNE by Mike Hogan

BEHIND THE BEST-SELLERS

JOSEPHINE TEY by Francis Wheen

GRACE METALIOUS by Michael Callahan

MARY McCARTHY by Laura Jacobs

JACQUELINE SUSANN by Amy Fine Collins

CORMAC McCARTHY by Richard B. Woodward

STIEG LARSSON by Christopher Hitchens

JAMES PATTERSON by Todd S. Purdum

DONNA TARTT by Evgenia Peretz

MEMOIR

BOSOM BUDDIES by Laura Z. Hobson

HIS JEWISH QUESTION by Arthur Miller

DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron

A FINAL TALE

KAY THOMPSON by Marie Brenner

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE WRITERS

INTRODUCTION

INK IN OUR VEINS

By David Friend

Literature runs in Vanity Fair’s veins.

Vanity Fair, for starters, was the name of a fictional festival in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), a nonstop, year-round debauch that attracted hedonistic rascals and swells. (Bunyan took a dim view of all this.) One hundred and seventy years later, William Makepeace Thackeray adopted the term as the title of his most famous novel, which satirized social climbers in Victorian England. When Vanity Fair—the American magazine—came along in 1914 it was immediately a hothouse for literary talent, and among the first people hired by its fabled first editor, Frank Crowninshield, were writers destined for prominent careers. There was P. G. Wodehouse, V.F.’s theater critic and most prolific columnist. And Dorothy Parker (here), who wrote everything from poetry to famously scathing reviews of Broadway plays. And her pal Robert Benchley, who served as an editor while polishing his chops as a humorist.

For twenty-two years—until Vanity Fair suspended publication—many of the finest writers of the day walked the magazine’s corridors (first on West 44th Street, and then in the Graybar Building, next to Grand Central Station). Frequent contributors included Alexander Woollcott and Sherwood Anderson, Aldous Huxley and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Colette and D. H. Lawrence, Paul Gallico and Janet Flanner. Noël Coward sold his first work in America (a short satire) to V.F.—at the age of twenty-one. A. A. Milne gained international renown when the magazine ran his first children’s poem, Vespers. Not a half-bad bunch.

In 1936, the magazine, a casualty of the Depression, went on a hiatus—for five decades. But when it was relaunched, in 1983, its founders—Condé Nast chairman S. I. Newhouse, Jr., and editorial director Alexander Liberman—set a high bar for serious prose. Vanity Fair’s inaugural editor, Richard Locke, was brought over from The New York Times Book Review. His successor, Leo Lerman, was a swami of high culture who had a Rolodex like a Ferris wheel. In succession, Locke and Lerman commissioned stories from writers of every ilk: Gore Vidal and Gloria Emerson, Carlos Fuentes and Paul Theroux, Jan Morris and Robert Stone. Covers featured Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, and Italo Calvino. And as the decade progressed, editor Tina Brown brought on contributors such as Martin Amis (pages 77 and 196), Gail Sheehy, Norman Mailer (here), Walker Percy, and George Plimpton. Little wonder that Vanity Fair would take home its share of National Magazine Awards, including for powerful pieces by Francine du Plessix Gray (on Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo’s Butcher of Lyons) and William Styron (on his battles with depression, here).

Graydon Carter arrived as Vanity Fair’s editor in 1992, intent on broadening the magazine’s literary and journalistic footprint. On his watch, Vanity Fair has continued to publish many of the most compelling voices in American letters. Sometimes we cover the back stories: the making of classic books. At other times we focus on the craft of writing or on the publishing trade in the digital age or on messy literary feuds and scandals. And with regularity, as this collection makes plain, we assign writers to explore the life and work of other wordsmiths, from novelists to poets to correspondents to mandarins of the publishing world, knowing, in our bones, that the life of every storyteller brims with revelatory tales—and guided by a common-sense rule often attributed to Mark Twain: Write what you know.

Herein, then, are the best pieces about writers from the modern-era magazine—forty-three essays from the past thirty-three years. Taken together, they speak volumes about the wonder and richness of the Writer’s Life: a life lived doubly, both in the world and outside of the world, as James Joyce described it when envisioning a creator above his handiwork, looking down and paring his fingernails.

When our friend and colleague Christopher Hitchens (pages 3 and 334), a contributor to Vanity Fair for two decades, passed away in 2011, Salman Rushdie wrote about him in the magazine (here), describing a snapshot taken of the two of them standing on either side of a bust of Voltaire: That photograph is now one of my most treasured possessions: me and the two Voltaires, one of stone and one still very much alive. Now they are both gone, and one can only try to believe, as the philosopher Pangloss insisted to Candide in the elder Voltaire’s masterpiece, that everything is for the best ‘in this best of all possible worlds.’

It’s a great life, the writer’s life. So, too, the life of the reader.

Please, have at it.

ONE VANITY FAIR CONTRARIAN FONDLY RECALLS ANOTHER

DOROTHY PARKER

REBEL IN EVENING CLOTHES

by Christopher Hitchens

OCTOBER 1999

In the fall of 1914, as Europe was marching over the precipice, Miss Dorothy Rothschild of New York wrote a poem entitled Any Porch, and sent it off to Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield. It was a nine-stanza lampoon, satirizing the hotel-porch babble of spoiled upper-crust ladies in Connecticut, and its acceptance, for an emolument of $12, marked the first time that the future Dorothy Parker got anything into print:

"My husband says, often, ‘Elise,

You feel things too deeply, you do—’"

"Yes, forty a month, if you please,

Oh, servants impose on me, too."

"I don’t want the vote for myself,

But women with property, dear—"

"I think the poor girl’s on the shelf,

She’s talking about her ‘career.’"

Crowninshield—the granduncle of Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, late of The Washington Post—soon after hired Miss Rothschild for Condé Nast and thereby enabled her to quit her day job as a pianist at a Manhattan dance school. This was an odd alliance, between the cultivated and immaculate super-Wasp Crowninshield, who combined fashion-plate tastes with an interest in Picasso, and the daughter of an ambitious sweatshop artist in the New York Garment District. From then on, young Dorothy divided her time agreeably enough between writing suggestive fashion captions for Vogue and incendiary verses for Vanity Fair. The fashion lines had an edge to them—Brevity is the soul of lingerie, she wrote, and also: There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with frothy Valenciennes lace.

This sort of thing was a revenge for the detested convent school to which her upwardly mobile parents had insisted upon sending her. The poetry, though, was sometimes so subversive that Mr. Crowninshield had to publish it under the pseudonym Henriette Rousseau. Composed in free verse rather than conventional stanzas, they included Women: A Hate Song (I hate Women. They get on my Nerves). There was also a pungent prose article, Why I Haven’t Married, in which it was the turn of the male sex to get the treatment. There was another poem with the Hate Song title, from 1919, subtitled "An Intimate Glimpse of Vanity Fair—En Famille. (You can read it here.) It began and ended with the italicized cry I hate the office; / It cuts in on my social life." Here one encountered such figures as:

. . . the Boss;

The Great White Chief.

He made us what we are to-day,—

I hope he’s satisfied.

He has some bizarre ideas

About his employees getting to work

At nine o’clock in the morning,—

As if they were a lot of milkmen.

He has never been known to see you

When you arrive at 8:45,

But try to come in at a quarter past ten

And he will always go up in the elevator with you.

He goes to Paris on the slightest provocation

And nobody knows why he has to stay there so long.

(To this, one can only add, How different, how very different, is the style of our own dear rédacteur en chef.) Crowninshield was a stuffy man in some ways, but we owe him a debt of gratitude because it was he who kept Mrs. Parker—she married in 1917—in work, he who introduced her to Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood and caused them to become friends and colleagues, and he who had the inspired idea of giving her P. G. Wodehouse’s old job as Vanity Fair’s theater critic, when Plum took himself off to write musical comedies in collaboration with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. Mr. Benchley once observed that the joy of being a Vanity Fair contributor was this: you could write about any subject you liked, no matter how outrageous, as long as you said it in evening clothes. I have devoted my professional life to the emulation of this fine line.

I never knew Mrs. Parker, but I did know Jessica Mitford, whose life in some ways reminds me of Parker’s: refugee from a perfectly ghastly family; champion of the oppressed; implacable foe of the bores. Once, during Mitford’s days in the Deep South as a partisan of civil rights, Decca was taken to an all-white garden party by her friend Virginia Durr. Introduced to the head of the local board of education, she sweetly confided that in Oakland, California, where she lived, the student honor roll was led by blacks. It don’t seem to make no sense, do it? said the sturdy segregationist. To me it do, retorted Decca, sweeping away as the education boss wilted like a salted snail. The crisp one-line comeback is among the least ephemeral things in the world.

People revere and remember Mrs. Parker’s work to this day, for its epigrams and multiple entendres and for its terse, brittle approach to the long littleness of life. There’s a tendency to forget, though, that the edge and the acuity came from an acidulated approach to stupidity and bigotry and cruelty. Much of this awareness originated in her family life; as the youngest of two brothers and two sisters she was the keenest in observing the difference between their uptown life and the dismal condition of those who toiled in the apparel industry. As, in 1939, she was to tell the readers of New Masses—arguably the least brittle and witty magazine ever to be published on American soil:

I think I knew first what side I was on when I was about five years old, at which time nobody was safe from buffaloes. It was in a brownstone house in New York, and there was a blizzard, and my rich aunt—a horrible woman then and now—had come to visit. I remember going to the window and seeing the street with the men shovelling snow; their hands were purple on their shovels, and their feet were wrapped with burlap. And my aunt, looking over my shoulder, said, Now isn’t it nice there’s this blizzard. All those men have work. And I knew then that it was not nice that men could work for their lives only in desperate weather, that there was no work for them when it was fair.

The word fair is beautifully deployed there, I think. Even when she was writing for New Masses (the Communist-dominated mutation of the old Greenwich Village The Masses, which had been associated with John Reed and Max Eastman), Mrs. Parker did not forsake her habit of stretching like a feline and then whipping out with a murderous paw. (Of some superior-minded socialists she used to know, she wrote: Some of them are dead. And the rest are liberals, too.)

So that a life apparently consecrated to Broadway and the speakeasy and (oh God, not all that again) the Algonquin Hotel, with its celebrated Round Table and matching circle of wits—George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott predominating—was also a life, as she phrased it, wild with the knowledge of injustice and brutality and misrepresentation. And in 1927 she married her two styles—deadly perfect-pitch eavesdropping and cold contempt for prejudice—in a story entitled Arrangement in Black and White. It opens like this: The woman with the pink velvet poppies wreathed round the assisted gold of her hair traversed the crowded room at an interesting gait combining a skip with a sidle . . .

Rather like her first poem, Any Porch, much of Mrs. Parker’s story is overheard dialogue, made up of mingled inanity and condescension. The vapid woman of assisted gold hair is bent on meeting the colored singer who is the social lion of the evening. Yet she worries what her husband may think:

But I must say for Burton, he’s heaps broader-minded than lots of these Southerners. He’s really awfully fond of colored people. Well, he says himself, he wouldn’t have white servants. And you know, he had this old colored nurse, this regular old nigger mammy, and he just simply loves her. Why, every time he goes home, he goes out in the kitchen to see her. He does, really, to this day.

There are some moments of superb dryness to offset the electrifying embarrassment, as when the woman gushingly asks her host, Aren’t I terrible?, and he replies, Oh, no, no, no. No, no. Or when she asks:

There are some bad white people, too, in this world. Aren’t there?

I guess there are, said her host.

It’s a fairly short story, but it seems longer—as moments of gross social bêtise always do—because the female character just cannot put a foot right. (When she eventually meets the black singer, she speaks with great distinctness, moving her lips meticulously, as if in parlance with the deaf.) Viewed from more than seven decades later, it seems at moments a little obvious, until one remembers those seven decades and their passage, and the fact that Jim Crow—legally enforced segregation in everything from trains to the armed forces—was the unchallenged rule in 1927, and until one appreciates that Mrs. Parker had anticipated every agonized, patronizing person who was ever to speak of the African-American and his divine sense of rhythm. Indeed, she was four decades ahead of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

She was also four decades away from her own death. But I shall stay the way I am, she wrote in 1925. Because I do not give a damn. In consequence, partly, of her non-damn donation policy, her end wasn’t as sweet as it might have been. Lonely, except for her dog, Troy, and a bit sour, and a touch too fond of the pre-noon cocktail, she hung on in the Volney residential hotel in New York—within dog-walking distance of Central Park and full of the sort of idle women she had always despised—and continued to make biting remarks to a diminishing audience. She was habitually hopeless about money, and her friends were surprised, after her demise, to find that she had bothered to make a will at all. But in 1965, feeling herself wasting away, she had summoned a lawyer named Oscar Bernstien and drawn up a very simple document. Her shares of common stock in The New Yorker (given to her by editor Harold Ross), her savings accounts, and her copyrights and royalties, she instructed him, were to go to the Reverend Martin Luther King. In the event of his death, they would be bequeathed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.). Oscar Bernstien’s widow, Rebecca, later said, He understood completely what she had in mind. It seemed natural because she had no heirs, and racial injustice had always affected her very deeply. Having made these simple provisions—and meanwhile appointing Lillian Hellman as her literary executor—she told Zero Mostel that the least she could do now was die.

But this she didn’t do until June 7, 1967. The Reverend Dr. King was chairing a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in an Atlanta restaurant called B. B. Beamon’s, when he received the news of the bequest. It didn’t amount to all that much—$20,448.39 after deductions—but at 1967 prices it caused him to tell his executive that it verifies what I have always said, that the Lord will provide. At that moment, he had less than a year to live himself.

Mrs. Parker had stipulated that she be cremated, with no funeral service of any kind, and she nearly got her wish. Lillian Hellman organized a memorial at which she herself was the star attraction, and seems to have lost or destroyed all of her friend’s remaining papers. The cremation, though, did take place.

Excuse my dust had been Mrs. Parker’s jokey all-purpose epitaph. But the laugh was on her. Lillian Hellman sent her ashes to the law firm of Oscar Bernstien and Paul O’Dwyer, and Mr. O’Dwyer, one of New York’s greatest people’s attorneys and labor defenders, receiving no instructions about their disposal or their disposition, kept them in a filing cabinet in his office for two decades. There is only one plausible explanation for this amazingly unaesthetic outcome, and that is the vindictiveness of Lillian Hellman—surely one of the least attractive women produced by the American progressive culture in this century. Furious at not having been named owner of the estate, she contested the transfer of the rights from Dr. King to the N.A.A.C.P. A court ruled in favor of the organization, causing Ms. Hellman to explode with irritation and to speak with almost as much condescension as the frothy lady in Arrangement in Black and White. It’s one thing to have real feeling for black people, she expostulated, but to have the kind of blind sentimentality about the N.A.A.C.P., a group so conservative that even many blacks now don’t have any respect for it, is something else. To her playwright friend Howard Teichmann, according to Marion Meade’s surpassingly good Parker biography, What Fresh Hell Is This?, Hellman raged about Mrs. Parker’s alleged promise that when she died, she would leave me the rights to her writing. At my death, they would pass directly to the N.A.A.C.P. But what did she do? She left them to the N.A.A.C.P. Damn her! (To the present day, those who want to reprint Mrs. Parker have to go to the N.A.A.C.P. and discuss royalties: a perfect posthumous revenge from two points of view.)

That period of spitefulness and neglect came to its close in October 1988, when Benjamin Hooks of the N.A.A.C.P. became aware that Mrs. Parker’s remains had no resting-place except for a dank filing cabinet. A small memorial garden was prepared on the grounds of the organization’s national headquarters in Baltimore, and a brief ceremony was held at which Mr. Hooks improved somewhat on the terse line about excuse my dust. It might be better, he said, to recall her lines from Epitaph for a Darling Lady:

Leave for her a red young rose

Go your way, and save your pity.

She is happy, for she knows

That her dust is very pretty.

Mrs. Parker had never been very affirmatively Jewish—she disliked her father’s piety and always insisted that her hatred of Hitler and Fascism was, so to say, secular—but Mr. Hooks took the opportunity to stress the historic comradeship between blacks and Jews. The inscription at the little memorial reads:

Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) Humorist, writer, critic, defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested Excuse My Dust. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind, and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people.

This rather affecting gesture drew little publicity at the time. And black-Jewish relations were not exactly flourishing in the late 1980s. A few years ago, when I was in Baltimore to visit the H. L. Mencken Library, I heard about the Parker monument and made a brief detour-cum-pilgrimage. I was sad to find the garden slightly neglected, and some of the staff unaware that it was even there. But the N.A.A.C.P. was undergoing a dismal interlude then, with its executive director, the Reverend Ben Chavis, accused of diverting its hard-won funds to pay off his mistress. (He has since changed names and identities and sought relief in the ministry of Louis Farrakhan.)

On my most recent visit, in June of this year, things were already looking up. I was greeted by Ms. Chris Mencken, one of the N.A.A.C.P.’s staffers, whose grandfather’s second cousin was the sage of Baltimore himself. (H. L. Mencken, indeed, published several of Mrs. Parker’s early stories in The Smart Set, the middlebrow-baiting review that he edited with George Jean Nathan. But that didn’t prevent her, when they met in Baltimore in 1924, from walking out when he took too many drinks and began to give off slurring jokes about black people.) Ms. Mencken, whose presence seemed like a sort of ideal recompense for that spoiled evening, had just finished sweeping up around the memorial. It stands in a small grove of pines, which could be mistaken for a circle of listeners. The plaque with the above inscription sits on a cylindrical urn which contains the ashes. The whole is set in three circular courses of brown brickwork. Harry G. Robinson, then dean of the School of Architecture at Howard University, was given the commission for the memorial and wrote that it was intended to symbolize the center of a Round Table.

With America’s most venerable civil-rights organization until recently facing bankruptcy and other sorts of discredit, it has been a time for volunteers. Mrs. Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of the civil-rights martyr Medgar Evers, first stepped forward to assume responsibility. So did former congressman Kweisi Mfume, and so did Julian Bond, the brilliant Georgian activist and orator who was a student of Dr. King’s. As the N.A.A.C.P. itself came back from an interval of decline, and as Bond and others began to speak back boldly against the black separatist demagogues (and the mealymouthed senators and congressmen who would not disown the so-called Council of Conservative Citizens), I had a tiny idea. I wrote to Julian Bond, proposing that Mrs. Parker’s memorial garden be refurbished and re-dedicated. (One hopes that she, who so despised the church, would excuse the fact that the N.A.A.C.P. building is a converted nunnery.) By this means, I thought we could do honor to one of Vanity Fair’s founding minxes, and also to the brave causes that she upheld so tenaciously. Julian Bond right away agreed it was a sound scheme, so we’re going to have a little party to celebrate said scheme. I would modestly propose adding a line of Mrs. Parker’s from 1939, about the misery and bigotry she saw around her: I knew it need not be so; I think I knew even then that it would eventually not be so. These are only words, and this is only a gesture, but as Mrs. Parker proved somewhat to her own surprise, there is power in words, and in gestures too.

ON POETS

W. H. AUDEN

A PASSION OF POETS

by Joseph Brodsky

OCTOBER 1983

Time . . . worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives . . .

—W. H. AUDEN

I

When a writer resorts to a language other than his mother tongue, he does so either 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 five years, I purchased in a small typewriter shop on Sixth Avenue a portable Lettera 22 and set out to write (essays, translations, occasionally a poem) in English 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 considered the greatest mind of the twentieth century: Wystan 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’ll never abandon—and I hope vice versa) as because of this poet’s intelligence, which in my view has 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 not by his code of conscience, 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. But, to me a failure by his standards is preferable to a success by others’. Besides, I knew from the threshold that I was bound to fail; whether this sort of sobriety is my own or has been borrowed from his writing, I can no longer tell. All I hope for while 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, I 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 had nothing to do with any sense of confidence, contentment, or comfort; it was simply a desire to please a shadow. Of course, where he was by then, linguistic barriers hardly mattered, but somehow I thought that he might like it better if I made 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 time 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, borrowing 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 and assimilation, all the more so if one is courting a pure spirit. While in flesh, this man did so much that belief in the immortality of his soul becomes unavoidable. What he left us with amounts to a gospel which is both brought about by and filled with love that’s anything but finite—with love, that is, which can in no way all be harbored by human flesh and which therefore needs words. If there were no churches, one could have easily 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.

II

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution by which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society’s equivalent of oblivion; a tyrant, of course, may try to save his society from it by some spectacular bloodbath.

I first read Auden some twenty years ago in Russia in rather limp and listless translations 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, almost 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 next 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 learned later, from the last stanza of his early poem No Change of Place, which described a somewhat claustrophobic landscape where no one goes / Further than railhead 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 extension and common sense. Having been brought up on an essentially emphatic and self-asserting diet of Russian verse, I was quick to register this recipe whose main component was self-restraint. Still, poetic lines have a knack of straying from the context into universal significance, and the threatening touch of absurdity contained in Will neither go nor send his son would start vibrating in the 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 absurd is never an invention of the poet but is a reflection of reality; inventions 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 passant. This treatment was especially significant to me precisely because I came across this line in the early ’60s, 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 telling, 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 kind 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 friend from Moscow. It had quite a lot of Yeats, whom I then found a bit too oratorical and sloppy with meters, and Eliot, who in those days reigned supreme in Eastern 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 was the authors’ unwitting attempts at self-portrayal with which nearly every poem in memoriam is strewn—or soiled. Understandable though this tendency is, it often 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 of this; what’s more, I soon realized that even its structure was designed to pay tribute to the dead poet, imitating in a reverse order the great Irishman’s own modes of stylistic development, all the way down to his earliest: the trimeters of the poem’s third—last—part.

It’s because of these trimeters, in particular because of eight lines from this third part, that I understood what kind of poet I was reading. These lines overshadowed for me that astonishing description of the dark cold day, Yeats’s last, 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 whose suburbs and squares are gradually emptying as if after a crushed rebellion. They overshadowed even that statement of the era

. . . poetry makes nothing happen . . .

They, those eight lines in trimeter that made this third part of the poem sound like a cross between a Salvation Army hymn, a funeral dirge, and a nursery rhyme, 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, conceit,

Lays its honours at their feet.

I remember sitting there in the small wooden shack, peering through the square porthole-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 wasn’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, every allusion, hoping that they might spare me the meaning that stared at me from the page. I guess I was simply refusing to believe that way back in 1939 an English poet had said, Time . . . worships language, and yet the world around was 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 space. That was how I was taught, and I indeed felt that way. So if time—which is synonymous with, nay, even absorbs deity—worships language, where then does language come 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 language 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 anyhow?

Short and horizontal as those lines were, they seemed to me incredibly vertical. They were also very much offhand, almost chatty: metaphysics disguised as common sense, common sense disguised as nursery rhyme couplets. These layers of disguise 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 it felt more like truth than anything else I managed to figure out in that anthology. 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 were 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 there I was simply stunned. Among other things, what became clear to me was that one 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 terrific lyrical gifts, who disguised himself as an observer of public mores. And my suspicion was that this choice of mask, the choice of this idiom, had to do less with 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. Humility 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 petulant than either, while, I was afraid, no less tragic. With the benefit of hindsight 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 existential 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 that J. S. Bach was terribly lucky. When he wanted to praise the Lord, he’d write a chorale or a cantata addressing the Almighty directly. Today, if a poet wishes to do the same thing, he has to employ indirect speech. The same, presumably, would apply to prayer.

III

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, I detect Auden more than anybody else: the aberration simply reflects the proportion of my reading of this poet. Old dogs, of course, won’t learn new tricks, but dog owners end up resembling their dogs. Critics, and especially biographers, of writers with a distinctive style often adopt, however unconsciously, 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 not 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 speech whose object is Auden.

For those of my generation who were interested in poetry in English—and I can’t claim there were too many of them—the ’60s was the era of anthologies. On the way home, foreign students and scholars who’d come to Russia on academic exchange programs would understandably try to rid themselves of extra weight, and books of poetry were first to go. They’d sell them, almost for nothing, to secondhand bookstores, which subsequently would charge extraordinary sums if you wanted to buy them. The rationale behind these prices was quite simple: to deter the locals from purchasing these Western items; as for the foreigner himself, he would 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: 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 filled 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 antiheroic posture was the idée 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. Wystan 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 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 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 are 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 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 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 facades and their deeds was obvious.) Sooner or 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 modern poetry, a very handsome book generously illustrated with large black-and-white photographs done by, if I remember correctly, Rollie 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 ’40s or the beginning of the ’50s, before the famous wrinkled—unkempt bed—stage took over his features. Everything, or almost everything, became clear to me.

The contrast or, better still, the degree of disparity between those eyebrows risen in formal bewilderment and the keenness of his gaze, to my mind, directly corresponded 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. The features were regular, even plain. There was nothing specifically poetic about this face, nothing Byronic, demonic, ironic, hawkish, aquiline, romantic, wounded, 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 not an important failure, necessary murder, conservative dark, apathetic grave, or well-run desert. It felt like when a myopic person takes off his glasses, except that the keen-sightedness of this pair of eyes had to do with neither myopia nor the smallness 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 describing for you the symptoms as well as the malaise itself. That wasn’t what’s called social criticism—if only because the malaise wasn’t social: it was existential.

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 leveled against him was that he didn’t offer a cure. I guess in a way he asked for that by resorting to Freudian, then Marxist, then ecclesiastical terminology. The cure, though, lay precisely in his employing these terminologies, for they are simply different dialects in which one can speak about one and the same thing, which is love. It is the intonation with which one talks to the sick that cures. This poet went about the world’s grave, often terminal cases not as a surgeon but as a nurse, and every patient knows that it’s nurses and not incisions that eventually put one back on one’s feet. It’s the voice of a nurse, that is, of love, that one hears in the final speech of Alonso to Ferdinand in The Sea and the Mirror:

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 Auden’s life: neither about his being homosexual, nor about his marriage of convenience (for her) to Erika Mann, etc.—nothing. One thing I sensed quite clearly was that this love would overshoot its object. In my mind—better, in my imagination—it was love expanded or accelerated by language, by the necessity of expressing it; and language—that much I already 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 original destination. And the other truth about love in poetry that one gleans from reading it is that a writer’s sentiments inevitably subordinate themselves to the linear and unrecoiling progression of art. This sort of thing secures, in art, a higher 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 despair, as many of his most delightful, most mesmerizing lyrics do demonstrate. For in art lightness of touch more often than not comes from the very darkness of its absence.

And yet it was love all the same, perpetuated by language, oblivious—because the language was English—to gender, furthered by the deepest agony, because agony, in the end, would 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