The Poet immediately saw where this was going. “So it was up to you to seduce them,” he guessed, and he added: “I myself have been inoculated against fear of rejection.”
“By what? By whom?”
He snorted. “By rejection, of course. I have been rejected so often I no longer fear it. I am the victim of a rejection in Moscow right now. Which is why I am the one making the first move to seduce you.”
I laughed along with him in what turned out to be our first complicity. “Which proves,” I remember saying aloud what I was thinking, “you are a new experience for me.”
All right, fine, here’s the uncomfortable truth: Vladimir Mayakovsky was irresistible. If you are hoping to find him in one of his poems, look at his “My University”:
You know French
You can divide.
And multiply.
But tell me—
Can you sing a duet with a house?
Do you know streetcar language?
He exuded arrogance and at the same time self-doubt, physical strength, and emotional fragility, one minute you could read his thoughts like an open book, the next he was as inscrutable as a sphinx. Simply not paying attention to him was an impossibility. You liked him or you loathed him, it didn’t matter which as long as you related to him, interacted with him. Your body felt the magnetic pull of his fragmented personality. Confronted by this monster, you became, without premeditation, due south to his true north. If memory serves something other than ego, I can say with some degree of certainty that I remember feeling exhilarated in his presence.
Nora: At one time or another we were all flattered to be in the orbit of Mayakovsky.
Lilya: She said exhilarated. You say flattered.
Nora: They amount to the same thing, really.
Lilya: They are very different things.
Tatiana: Let her finish the story. Please, Elly, do go on.
Elly: At three in the morning the party was just getting its second wind. The stench of hashish and an incoherent gabble in half a dozen languages filled the spacious apartment. In the living room, a couple of Negro musicians, one playing a Jew’s harp, the other a cornet, were entertaining the crowd with the latest wrinkle in jazz, something called boogie-woogie. Young men in suspenders, their shirt sleeves rolled up to their elbows, their hair slicked back with sweat, were dancing the suggestive Black Bottom with girls in short, low-waisted skirts. I noticed Mayakovsky, his head angled, watching the young people, a half smile playing on his beautiful lips. I supposed he was remembering how his wonderful Bolsheviks banned the fox-trot in the early 1920s because it inevitably led to homosexuality, so they said. In the paneled dining room, an endless supply of bathtub whiskey (literally ladled out of a bathtub that had been hauled up six flights for the occasion) irrigated the intellects of the highbrows bickering over the definition of words. The editor who’d been trying to seduce me was instructing the denizens on the original meaning of denizen: Foreigners allowed certain rights in an adopted country. A female painter named O’Keeffe, who was known for her oversized studies of flowers filled with sexual symbolism, claimed that the definition could stand as a textbook description of Calvin Coolidge’s America: An adopted country filled with denizens who, depending on whether they were white or Negro, were allowed certain albeit different rights.
Mayakovsky, smoking the last of the colored cigarettes he’d bought in Veracruz, was deep in conversation with a Jewish trade unionist—he appeared to be asking questions in Yiddish and the Poet was responding in Georgian, which (I later discovered) was his native language. Neither of them understood a word the other said but that didn’t stop them from arguing, and heatedly. (It’s nothing short of remarkable how whiskey can lubricate a dialogue of the deaf.) One of the Negro jazzmen, who went by the name King Oliver, came over and, pointing to Mayakovsky with his cornet, asked, “What country he be from?” When I told him Russia, he playfully knuckled the Poet in the chest. “Ask him if there be people of color in this Russia of his.”
When I translated the question, the Poet grinned. “Tell him there are millions of people of color, they’re in Central Asia and they’re all yellow.”
“Yellow!” King Oliver exclaimed. “Well I be dawg-tagged and hawg-tied!”
The inquisition of Mayakovsky was only just beginning. Several of the uptown literati had managed to encircle him in anticipation of a siege. An elderly woman (she will have been pushing fifty from the wrong side), a published poet herself who taught a master’s class in literature at Columbia University, asked Mayakovsky to identify the source of the rhythms in his verse. When I’d translated the question, he thought about it the time it took to refill his teacup with whiskey, then coughed up an explanation that I came to identify as unadulterated Mayakovsky. “My rhythms, dear American lady, come from the jolting of Bus Number 7 going from Lubyansky Square to Nogin Square in Moscow.”
The dear American lady in question looked at me in confusion. “Your Russian poet talks to us tongue in cheek,” she decided.
“Consider the possibility that he is saying serious things tongue in cheek,” I said.
An inebriated male model, whose claim to fame was his photograph on the giant King C. Gillette safety razor billboard in Times Square, tapped a forefinger on a nostril of his nose. “I can smell a Commie a mile away,” he managed to say between hiccups. “Everything’n Shoviet Russia is bigger’n better, right? Ought to be one Goddamn thing in New York bigger’n better than what the Commies got in Shoviet Russia.”
Laughing under his breath, Mayakovsky tapped the side of his own nostril with a forefinger. “I can smell a drunk a mile away,” he said. “Tell him he makes the classic American mistake of thinking bigger is necessarily better.”
“Bigger’s better,” the male model insisted when I’d repeated my translation a second time.
“Give him bigger, forget better,” I suggested to the Poet in Russian.
Mayakovsky was obviously enjoying being the center of attention. “Here comes bigger: to begin with, there’s your Brooklyn Bridge. There’s your Woolworth Building, which somebody told me has five thousand windows. There’s your subway, which I’ve ridden from one end of this sprawling urban ghetto to the other. Listen, I’ll give him one thing that is better—it’s your Automat. I am in awe of your Automat. I get a kick out of slipping nickels into the slot and opening the little glass door and pulling out one of those mouthwatering triple-decker turkey sandwiches with a toothpick impaled in it and a pickled cucumber on the side. Tell him we don’t have Automats in Moscow but I’m going to fix that as soon as I get back. Needless to say, our Communist Automats—along with our Communist turkey sandwiches—will be bigger as well as better than the ones here in capitalist New York.”
“Scratch a Commie…” the male model started to say. But seeing the dark cloud obscuring Mayakovsky’s pupils he decided it would be more prudent to leave the sentence hanging.
“Forgetting New York’s skyscrapers and bridges and Automats for the moment, can he favor us with his impressions of America, which I understand he crossed by train?” a notorious writer of risqué novels inquired. She was wearing a gentleman’s formal dress shirt and, so there would be no confusion about her sexual orientation, kept one hand tucked into the bodice of her female companion. “Go ahead, translate,” she insisted when I hesitated to involve our guest of honor in a quarrel.
“She wants to know your impressions of America,” I told the Poet.
So there would be no confusion about his sexual orientation, Mayakovsky slipped an arm around my waist. So there would be no confusion about mine, I didn’t pull away. “America,” he declared, his gaze fixed on the lesbian’s hand glued to her companion’s breast, “is clearly an allegory, by which I mean that, like all authentic allegories, one is obliged to search beneath the surface for the hidden meaning, the moral of the narrative.”
“Holy cow,” the lesbian writer scoffed, “he makes allegory sound like a sexual disease.”
“In America’s case, it is indistinguishable from a disease,” the Poet retorted when I’d translated her remark. “The first thing wrong with this country is the language—American poets don’t have muses because American nouns don’t have gender. Poets without muses are doomed to drift through the intellectual void, weightless and wordless, like spacenauts launched from Mister Verne’s moon cannon.”
The lesbian howled with laughter. Unfazed by the interruption, Mayakovsky, deadpan, went on with his analysis. “As if the lack of noun gender weren’t handicap enough, America is sick with alienation and exploitation, to name two of its most conspicuous symptoms. But I hasten to add, lest you think the malady must inevitably prove fatal, there is nothing wrong with this country that a dose of revolution cannot cure.” Having said this, Mayakovsky bellowed out several lines of a poem he’d composed while crossing North America. I rendered them into the King’s American English as best I could.
You’re stupid, Columbus—
I tell you straight.
As for me
why I
personally—
would have closed America
cleaned it up a little
and then
I would have opened it again
a second time.
Mayakovsky’s poem elicited a smattering of polite applause from the literati, but it was easy to see that his critique, only barely understood, had gone over their heads. They began to drift away, the ladies to refill their teacups with whiskey, the men to flirt with the clutch of East Side girls from the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union who had crashed the party. King Oliver wandered back into the living room to join the Jew’s harp in an improvisation of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Mayakovsky, swallowing a yawn that (so I supposed) had its origin in boredom as opposed to fatigue, suggested we depart à l’Anglais, which is to say leave without saluting our hosts. When we went to retrieve our coats in the bedroom, we discovered a half-naked couple making love on the bed, oblivious to guests like us sorting through the pile of coats that had been unceremoniously thrown onto the floor. The Poet hailed a hansom cab on Broadway to take us all the way downtown to the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had fallen madly in love with during a visit the previous day. The hackie, an Irishman with a week’s beard on his flushed face and (Prohibition notwithstanding) a week’s whiskey on his befouled breath, turned out to be an obnoxious son of a bitch. Hearing us speaking Russian in the backseat, he favored us with a lecture about how the Jews had made revolution in Russia as a first step in world domination. “I read the dirty details in my parish newsletter,” he declared, his whiskey-growl drifting back at us over a shoulder generously speckled with dandruff. “The Jew Jacob Schiff here in New York City is bankrolling them there Russian Bolsheviki. Your Trotsky, his Jew name being Bronshtein, he went and smuggled Schiff’s gold bars back into Russia on the SS Kristianiafjord to finance the Red coup d’état. Your Zinoviev, his real name being Apfelbaum, your Kamenev, his real name being Rozenfeld, your Trotsky, they are the advance guard of this international Jew conspiracy. It’s no accident that this guy who wrote The Communist Manifesto, what’s his name Marx, was the grandson of a Jew rabbi. Holy Mother of Christ, even your Lenin, though he bloody well denied it, had Jew blood in his Bolsheviki veins. His mother’s grandfather was a Ukraine Jew who got himself baptized so as to get out of the ghetto and into some school or other. Listen up, I’m not inventing any of this. These Bolsheviki are nothing more than Zionists masquerading as Communists, their revolution is a Jew plot against Christian Russia. Goddamn them all to the burning fiery furnace before they take over Ireland and America.” I didn’t translate the rant for fear Mayakovsky, who also had alcohol on his breath, would wind up in a fistfight with the driver. “Why is he talking about Trotsky and Lenin?” my companion demanded as we pulled up to the bridge. “He was asking, as we’re Russian, if we happen to know them personally—he thinks they’re the salt of the earth and wants us to convey his respects.” Mayakovsky was elated. “You see,” he declared, “there are good people in this capitalist swamp who appreciate what we’re trying to do in Russia even if you don’t.” The hack fare came to $3.50, which Mayakovsky, to his chagrin, had to quote-unquote borrow from me as he’d forgotten his wallet in his hotel room. Persuaded by my mistranslation that he was in the presence of a comrade from the Communist internationale, the Poet made a point of reaching through the window and pumping the hackie’s hand. I made a point of not adding a tip to the fare (I am hard put to say which I loathe more: Bolsheviks or anti-Semites), which earned me a dirty look as the cab pulled away. Since there was no traffic at this ungodly hour of the morning, we set out on foot to cross over to Brooklyn on the bridge’s car lane. The Poet had a walking stick with an ivory knob that he tapped against the taut suspension cables of the bridge. He laughingly told me he was plucking the strings of a giant harp to produce what Pythagoras identified as the music of the spheres. And then, in the middle of this miracle of engineering, halfway between the island of Manhattan and the flatlands of Brooklyn, before my incredulous eyes, with the colossal forty-odd story Singer Sewing Machine tower looming behind him, the Poet began to shout out what became his ode, “Brooklyn Bridge”:
picture a limestone Colossus
one foot
in Manhattan
teasing Brooklyn
on suspension cables
back across the river.
picture the poet Mayakovsky
both feet
on the Brooklyn Bridge
teasing this ode
by syllables
into being.
I must admit, simply reciting these lines brings tears to my eyes.
Lilya: Hearing them brings tears to mine.
Nora: Mayakovsky’s poems have long since ceased to move me to tears. But his commending us to the tender loving care of Comrade Government makes me cry in frustration every time I think about it.
Elly: His poems still move me. Looking back, I see now that listening to him shout out verse on the Brooklyn Bridge was the most implausible moment of my twenty-plus years on earth. Who could have imagined that this prodigy, this goliath, this Poet who had stumbled into revolution—who (some might say) had stumbled over revolution—would wash up on my shore? If it were possible to freeze one frame of my life for eternity the way silent films sometimes freeze up on the projectionist, this would be the instant I’d want to arrest.
Litzky: (in English) When the projectionist inadvertently freezes a frame, the light usually burns through the emulsion on the film, destroying the image.
Elly: (in English) If the film were to be destroyed, the image would persist in my brain. Nothing but the grave can efface it. (in Russian) Even now, as I describe it to you, in my mind’s eye I see the two of us embracing on the Brooklyn Bridge. I can almost feel his moist breath as he whispered in my ear. “Let us exchange vows,” he said.
I would have been quite unsettled by his suggestion. “But we barely know each other,” I surely murmured.
“That’s precisely when one should exchange vows,” he insisted. “Before our relationship is corrupted by familiarity, which, so it is rumored, more often than not breeds contempt.”
“And what would you have us vow?”
“Let us promise each other never to make small talk.”
“You would have us talk intimately before we are intimate?”
I remember the Poet nodding once.
I wracked my brain for something I could say that would satisfy his craving for instant intimacy. What I came up with was boneheaded: “I arrived in New York with nothing but the clothes on my back.” I remember him shrugging in what I took to be impatience. “You’re supposed to ask how I managed to survive with nothing but the clothes on my back.”
“How did you survive with nothing but the clothes on your back?”
“By taking the clothes off my back.”
He snorted in derision. “That’s your idea of talking intimately? At you
r age everyone in New York has had a lover or two.”
I caught my breath and tried again. “I have had a husband in my life—”
“That’s slightly better. But you already told me that.”
“—and, yes, several lovers, but I have never—” To gather my courage for the leap into the fault that yawned beneath my feet, I filled my lungs with air.
“You have never—”
“—never taken physical pleasure from intercourse.”
“Are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?”
My pained silence must have conveyed more than any reply I might have formulated because I can hear him saying, very softly, “That will change when you and I make love.”
Tatiana: How very sweet! The Mayakovsky you describe is the Poet I knew in Paris.…
Elly: I am not betraying a state secret when I tell you we became inseparable for the time Mayakovsky was in New York, which turned out to be eight glorious weeks. In all that time, true to our vow, we never made small talk. There were occasions when the Poet’s words spilled out of his mouth so rapidly he forgot to breathe—in the oddest parts of his sentences he would wind up gasping for air like someone who had been underwater too long. I had the satisfying feeling that it was me who saved him from drowning. When it came to physical intimacy, I am not ashamed to say that I was as insatiable as the Poet. We explored the Kama Sutra from cover to cover and devised variations of our own. We made love the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning and again during the day when he could steal away from the literary lights who wined and dined him, and quizzed him on Bolshevik Russia though their knowledge of that country was limited to the geographic reality of its vastness. Truth to tell, I fell terribly in love with him. I would have exchanged marriage vows with him on the spot if he had asked me to. I would have married him and followed him back to Russia despite the ghastly Bolsheviks.
Lilya: Why do you suppose he didn’t propose marriage?
Elly: You know damn well why he didn’t propose marriage, Lilya. Don’t play innocent. Your long whining letters that reached him every three or four days, some of which he read out to me, were the reason. The telegrams that he received daily, delivered by a Western Union messenger wearing knee-high leather boots and riding on a motorcycle. Where have you disappeared to? Write about how you are. With whom you are doesn’t matter. Don’t fail to return home as soon as you are able to. It was as if you were keeping him on a long leash.
The Mayakovsky Tapes Page 10
