by Clive James
A
Anna Akhmatova
Peter Altenberg
Louis Armstrong
Raymond Aron
ANNA AKHMATOVA
Born in Odessa, educated in Kiev and launched into poetic immortality as the beautiful incarnation of pre-revolutionary Petersburg, Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was the most famous Russian poet of her time, but the time was out of joint. Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, called Akhmatova, already wore the Russian literary world’s most glittering French verbal decorations: her work was avant-garde, and in person she was a femme fatale. Love for her broken-nosed beauty was a common condition among the male poets, one of whom, Nikolay Gumilev, she married. After the Revolution, Gumilev was one of the new regime’s first victims among the literati: the persecution of artists, still thought of today as a Stalinist speciality, began under Lenin. Later on, under Stalin, Akhmatova included a reference to Gumilev’s fate in the most often quoted part of her poem “Requiem.” (“Husband dead, son in gaol / Pray for me.”) In the last gasp of the Tsarist era she had known no persecution worse than routine incomprehension for her impressionistic poetry and condemnation by women for her effect on their men. The Russia of Lenin and Stalin made her first a tragic, then an heroic, figure. After 1922 she was condemned as a bourgeois element and severely restricted in what she could publish. After World War II, in 1946, she was personally condemned by Andrey Zhdanov, Stalin’s plug-ugly in charge of culture. She was allowed to publish nothing new, and everything she had ever written in verse form was dismissed as “remote from socialist reconstruction.” Her prestige abroad helped to keep her alive at home, but also ensured that her life could never be comfortable: the security police were always on her case. In the 1950s she was rehabilitated to the extent that a censored edition of her collected poems was officially published. (“Requiem” was among the poems missing: Isaiah Berlin, who visited her in Moscow in 1946, was correct when he predicted that it would never be published in Russia as long as the Soviet Union lasted.) Unofficially, however, her work had always circulated, whether in samizdat or, in that peculiarly Russian tribute to greatness, from mouth to mouth, by memory. Akhmatova was the embodiment of the Russian liberal heritage that the authoritarians felt bound to go on threatening long after it had surrendered. As such, she was an inspiring symbol, but when a poet becomes better known than her poems it usually means that she is being sacrificed, for extraneous reasons, on the altar of her own glory. In Akhmatova’s case, the extraneous reasons were political. It should be a mark of reasonable politics that a woman like her is not called upon to be a heroine.
This lyrical wealth of Pushkin . . .
—ANNA AKHMATOVA, “PUSHKIN’S ‘STONE GHOST’”
SOME LANGUAGES ARE inherently more beautiful than others, and Russian is among the most beautiful of all. For anyone learning Russian, a phrase like “lyrical wealth” comes singing out of the page like a two-word aria from an opera by Moussorgsky. I noted it down as a soon as I saw it. In 1968 the West German publishing house that called itself Inter-Language Literary Associates produced a magnificent two-volume collection of Akhmatova’s works in verse and prose. I bought those books in London in 1978, when I was in my first stage of learning to read the language. I never got to the last stage, or anywhere near it: but I did reach the point where I could read an essay without too much help from the dictionary. (Memo to any student making a raid on the culture of another language: essays are always the easiest way in.) Reading Akhmatova’s essays, it was soon apparent that she would have been an excellent full-time critic of literature if she had been given permission. But of course she wasn’t, which brings us immediately to the point.
If the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution had never happened, the cafés of Petersburg and Moscow would probably have dominated this book. Petersburg, in particular, would have rivalled Vienna. (If the Nazis had never come to power, Vienna and Berlin would have continued to rival Paris, but that’s another matter, although one we are bound to get to soon enough.) The Russian cultural upsurge in the years before the Revolution was so powerful that after the Revolution it took a while to slow down. (In the emigration, it never slowed down, but it did thin out as time went on: whereas Diaghilev was a whole movement in the arts, Balanchine’s influence was confined to the ballet, and Nureyev and Baryshnikov, though they could create contexts, did so mainly for themselves—wonderful as they both were, they were just dancers.) Largely because the new regime took some time to purge itself of apparatchiks with a taste for the artistically vital, the Revolution, inheriting an unprecedented cultural efflorescence, spent its first decade or so looking like the benevolent guardian of a realized dream. Left-leaning culturati in the West were able to fool themselves for decades afterwards that a totalitarian regime had somehow opened up new possibilities for making art a political weapon in the eternal struggle to free the people’s creative will. The dazzle-painted agitprop trains and the snappily edited newsreels of Dziga Vertov were seen as signs of vigour, which they were, and of truth, which they were not.
Among the Soviet Union’s apologists in the West, it was commonly supposed that, while the self-exiled Stravinsky no doubt enjoyed his personal freedom, Prokofiev and Shostakovich gained from being thought important by the power that paid them, and that this putatively fruitful relationship between creativity and a centralized state had been established in the early years after the Revolution. In reality, the intelligentsia was already doomed, simply because Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar for culture, wielded absolute power over the artists. He could wield it benevolently only with the indulgence of his superiors, which was withdrawn in 1929, the year the nightmare began to unfold unmistakably even to those who had been carried away when they thought it was a dream. (Awareness could be fatal: Mayakovsky, the poet most famous for transmitting state policy through works of art, shot himself not because he was mad, but because he was mad no longer—he had suddenly woken up to the dreadful fact that his creative enthusiasm had been used to cosmeticize mass murder.)
Akhmatova, to her credit, had always tried to stay aloof from the Revolution. But the Revolution was never likely to pay her the courtesy of staying aloof from her. As early as 1922, her poetry had been correctly identified as politically unhelpful, and she was forbidden to publish any more of it. The ban was relaxed temporarily in 1940, but we need to remember that Akhmatova, as a poet, was never really allowed to function. She earned her living mainly from translation and journey-work in prose. (As a consequence, a threat in 1947 to expel her from the Writers’ Union was tantamount to a sentence of death.) Praising Pushkin, as she did in the essay that mentioned his “lyrical wealth,” was as close as she was allowed to get to saying something subversive. As it happened, it was permissible to place a value on a poet’s specifically poetic gifts as long as the poet was accepted as exemplifying—or, in Pushkin’s case, heralding—the correct political direction. If she had been caught even thinking about the “lyrical wealth” of, say, Osip Mandelstam, she would have been in even more trouble than usual. Osip Mandelstam had been murdered by Stalin in 1938. There had been a time when Osip, like most of the male poets of his generation, had been in love with Akhmatova. She had returned his affection, much to the annoyance of his wife Nadezhda, who, in her essential book Hope Against Hope, can be found forgiving Akhmatova for alienating Osip’s affections. Nadezhda Mandelstam knew that the glamorous Akhmatova, like Tolstoy’s Natasha Rostova, needed to be adored: she was a vamp by nature. If there had been no revolution, Akhmatova could have made her seductive nature her subject, in the manner of Edna St. Vincent Millay but to even greater effect. History denied her the opportunity to sublimate her frailties. It made her a heroine instead. There were crueller fates available in Stalinist Russia, but that one was cruel enough.
What we have to grasp is that it needn’t have happened to her. History needn’t have been like that. That’s what history is: the story of everything that needn’t have been lik
e that. We also have to grasp that art proves its value by still mattering to people who have been deprived of every other freedom: indeed instead of mattering less, it matters more. For the Russians, Akhmatova was iconic not just for what she had done, but for the majesty of what she had not been allowed to do. An admirer of Akhmatova, the writer and intellectual Nina Berberova, left the Soviet Union in 1921, the very year that Gumilev was shot and Akhmatova was proscribed. Written in her last years, Berberova’s delightful book about her life in the Russian emigration, The Italics Are Mine (1991), traces the whole tragically fascinating experience of exile far into her old age (she died in America in 1993). In the book she tells the story of the Writers’ Library, the bookshop in Moscow where the books of the old intelligentsia were traded for food after the Revolution. If there had been no revolution, the Writers’ Library would have gone on being one of the most enchanting bookshops in the world. You could eat there, have a drink, write a poem, fall in love, and, above all, speak freely. It was a literary café. All too soon, there were no such places left in Russian cities. There was nowhere to lead the life of the mind except the mind. That thought would reduce us to despair if it were not for the evidence that humanist values are real, not notional: they persist even in conditions of calculated deprivation. 1947 was a particularly bad year for Akhmatova. Every effort was made to deprive her of almost everything except life. Yet she could call herself rich. With Pushkin to read, she still had “lyrical wealth.” The belief that such wealth is our real and inextinguishable fortune is the belief behind this book.
PETER ALTENBERG
In the café life that was such a feature of old Vienna from before the turn of the nineteenth century until the triumph of the Nazis, Peter Altenberg (1859–1919) was the key figure. His name now is not much mentioned outside the German-speaking lands, but for all the greater names on the scene who went on to acquire international reputations, Altenberg remained a touchstone, perhaps partly because he knew no worldly success at all. He had been born into a prosperous family but chose to be a panhandler. To his fellow Jews he was a Schnorrer: a borrower of money. He slept in flophouses and had no real address beyond his favourite café. But all the writers knew that he was carrying a treasure. He had an unrivalled capacity to pour a whole view of life, a few cupfuls at a time, into the briefest of paragraphs, and I am glad that his quotation appears so early on. It comes from an early World War I collection of his bits and pieces that I found in a warehouse on Staten Island in 1983, so when I sat down to read the book in a café on Columbus Avenue, this miniature masterpiece had been nearly seventy years on its journey before it hit me between the eyes like a micro-meteorite.
There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe. And that’s already three things, and there are a lot more.
—PETER ALTENBERG, Fechsung
ALTENBERG SPENT A lot of time scratching for a living, but when he wrote at all, he could write like that: a world view in two sentences. Sometimes he could do it in four words. One of Altenberg’s many young loves had tearfully protested that his interest in her was based only (nur) on sexual attraction. Altenberg asked, “Was ist so nur?” (What’s so only?) In Vienna before, during and after World War I, Altenberg was everybody’s favourite scrounger, saloon barfly and nohoper. Far outstripping him in prestige as recognized writers, Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal both admired him. So did Robert Musil. The supreme stylist Alfred Polgar—later acknowledged by even Thomas Mann as the greatest master of German in modern times—often acknowledged a creative debt to Alternberg and edited his unpublished papers after his death. Kafka said that Altenberg could discover “the splendours of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffee houses.” The great satirist Karl Kraus, himself a Jew but equivocal about it, suspended his usual intolerance of Jewish-born writers in Altenberg’s case, treating his mentally unstable protégé with patience, love and financial support. All these established writers had talents big enough to light a fire. Altenberg produced only sparks, but the sparks were dazzling.
Not many of Alternberg’s writings extended for more than a few paragraphs, scribbled at the café table in the intervals between cadging drinks. More diligent writers and intellectuals cherished him as their other, less trammelled self, devoid of ambition and the obligations of honesty. He was an ideal for men weighed down with ideals. Later on in New York, the semi-mythical Little Joe Gould was celebrated by E. E. Cummings and Joseph Mitchell for the same reason, with the difference that Little Joe Gould was always “working on” a magnum opus that would never see the light of day, whereas Altenberg was a real literary figure. In the late twentieth century, Jeffrey Bernard played the same part in London, but Bernard, by the end, was a man more written about than writing. Collections of Altenberg’s scraps and shavings were published regularly, even during World War I, and café-based philosophers would quote the best bits.
Even by real scholars—the majestic polymath Egon Friedell was only one example—Altenberg was much envied as a Falstaffian scholar gypsy, and envied not least for his hit status with beautiful young women. His deadbeat eyes, drooping moustache and chaotic personal arrangements had their inevitable success with trainee bluestockings inexperienced enough to want the mature male artist of their dreams to look the part. Though he had a questionable taste for prostitutes, and an even more questionable taste for underage working-class girls, he did not withhold his attention from the aspiring young female intellectuals. Thus many a well-favoured daughter of good family was inveigled back to his cheap hotel by Altenberg, where she would find to her disillusionment that the scrutinizing of her poems was only the second item on his agenda. Altenberg sugared the pill for his male audience by making his amatory conquests sound like disasters, but nobody was fooled. As a literary stratagem, however, self-deprecation had the advantage of releasing him into comedy. With due allowance for the intervening ocean, he was Ring Lardner’s equal in getting a lifetime of failure into a short written span. You would think that there could be no match for the compression of Lardner’s question-and-answer dialogue about the family in the car (“ ‘Daddy, are we lost?’ ‘Shut up,’ he explained”). But “What’s so only?” is even neater. Altenberg amply fulfilled Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s requirement that the best writers should make passing remarks lesser spirits might turn into a book. Altenberg made nothing except the passing remarks. They were rarely aphorisms—too much like hard work—but they had resonance. “What’s so only?” resonates. He says just that much, but he commands us to say more. The rest of the story is in our own heads. It might be continued as follows.
The saying goes that men play at love to get sex while women play at sex to get love. The second half of the antithesis is the more likely to be found interesting, because the first sounds closer to the truth. There are reasons, however, for questioning it further. Lenny Bruce said, “A man will fuck mud.” He also said that a man will have sex with a venetian blind. He would not have got the laugh if it had not been a laugh of recognition. A lot of men will do a lot to get laid. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they play at love. It seems far more likely that love plays with them. Theories of male genetic programming have long been under assault from feminists, who would like to believe that men’s behaviour is socially determined, including the claims they make to be impelled by instinct. The belief is understandable and even commendable: justice benefits when a man can’t blame biology after doing the wrong thing, even if it suffers when thinking the wrong thing becomes a crime too. But there can be no serious doubt, except from those who do not feel it, that the initial attraction of a man towards a woman is felt with the comprehensive force of a revelation. The sentimental view is not the romantic one, but the supposedly realistic one that love follows lust and grows through knowledge. It would be better for all concerned to admit that love hits with full force straight away.
Nor does the view that romantic love is a modern idea
quite wash. Leaving aside Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas, there is not much transcendental romantic love in Latin poetry. In Lucretius, lovers tear strips off each other, but with no hint of the spiritual either before or after. Propertius complained of how he was made to suffer. “Cynthia to my great undoing first ensnared me with her eyes / Though no other woman had ever touched me.” Nobody was raised to a higher state unless you count Catullus, who, while he was clearly mad for women, never showed the same tenderness for any of them that he did for his dead brother. But there is at least one incandescent instance of it in Greek poetry, which came first. Troy burned because Paris was smitten by Helen’s beauty: it is practically the first thing that happens in literature. It was to happen again often. David saw Bathsheba bathing and was ready to kill for her. The event is refined by Dante and Petrarch but the initial impact is the same: Beatrice, seen from a distance, inspires The Divine Comedy, and Laura, never possessed, possesses the author throughout the cycle of the Canzoniere, Petrarch’s long series of incrementally varying viewpoints on the one event, written down as if he were walking very slowly around a diamond mounted for exhibition. And the two greatest Italian poets were not founding a tradition: they were giving a new impetus to one that already existed. The courtly love tradition, which has continued to our own day and at all levels—the most touching Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songs are about not getting the girl—has for its chief concern the stricken poet’s visione amorosa of the woman who remains unknown. Love has not been increased through intimacy with her qualities and might well, had it happened, have been reduced by it. (Until Carmen made his life hell, Don Jose thought she was heaven on earth.) In Shakespeare, the reward for adoration is the interchange of enchanted speech, and for possession it is trouble and death.
