by Robert Carr
LAUKHIN
No. The journal begins in 1936. Mayakovsky died in 1930.
INTERVIEWER
Suicide or murder?
LAUKHIN
I don’t know. Some of his close friends were convinced he was killed by the KGB—well, it was the OGPU at the time. His lover, Lily Brik, who was involved with him in an on-and-off ménage a trois, was an OGPU agent. Mayakovsky’s communal apartment had a secret entrance and the killers may have used it to get in and out, unseen. We specialize in this in the Soviet Union, in artists whose deaths we argue about endlessly. Was Gorky poisoned? Why did Tsvetayeva kill herself? How did Babel and Mandelstam die? For how long was Meyerhold tortured? Who killed his wife? When was Pilnyak shot?
INTERVIEWER
Why poetry? Why not fiction, like your father?
LAUKHIN
My father did write poetry. That’s how he began, but he decided early on that he wasn’t good enough and gave up. I think he judged himself too sternly. He had had the bad luck of being born at the turn of the century. As a result, he struggled to become a poet during a miraculous period in Russian poetry, the first quarter of this century. At no other time did Russian poetry reach such heights and inventiveness, and have so many eminent practitioners.
INTERVIEWER
True.
LAUKHIN
My father dismissed his poetry as weak, conventional, worth only lighting a fire with. In desperation, almost as a joke, he wrote the first Oleg Vinograd novel.
There was something else too—my father’s friendship with Pasternak. It wasn’t just friendship, it was awe. He could laugh at Pasternak’s idiosyncrasies, at his colossal egotism, but he was in awe of him. To my father, being a poet was the acme of existence.
INTERVIEWER
Your poetry has been described as being diverse, in the sense that it’s not primarily lyrical, or epic, or overtly political, or short or long. You seem to navigate all seas. There is both quality and accessibility in your poetry. Even humour. You have many admirers, and, unusually for a poet, you have many readers.
LAUKHIN
Poetry today is often obscure, and not only to readers. I hear poets say, “I’m not sure what I tried to say here, or what exactly I said there.” It makes me want to throw up. I can accept that you can find it difficult to explain certain parts, that it’s a feeling or a frisson that’s impossible to paraphrase, but to say that you don’t know or you forgot what you intended to say, that’s too much. Can you imagine Pushkin saying, “Ooops, what’s this all about?” Or Shakespeare scratching his head, “I know I wrote this, but it’s beyond me.”
INTERVIEWER
I heard somebody say that after you finish a poem and you’re happy with it, you spend just as long making it simpler, more accessible. Is that true?
LAUKHIN
I’d rather talk about my father and his journal and not about my poetry.
INTERVIEWER
We will, of course. But you’re a famous poet, and the heading for this Paris Review interview is The Art of Poetry.
LAUKHIN
Then change it to The Art of Memoir or, even better, The Art of Journals.
INTERVIEWER
We will have time for your father and his journal. As much as you want. Our readers want to know also what makes Art Laukhin the poet.
LAUKHIN
Okay. I do not spend time trying to dumb down my poems.
INTERVIEWER
I didn’t say dumb down.
LAUKHIN
You didn’t, but you meant it. I don’t look for the lowest common denominator. I believe simpler is often better, because it lets the reader get to the core beauty or the core interest quicker. Good poetry is to the point, direct, no dallying about. Think of Tsvetayeva’s—to me she’s the best Russian poet of the century. Her poetry is like a simple dress on a beautiful woman. I don’t think readers should spend too much time guessing meanings or allusions. I’m not against difficulties in a poem if they contribute to it, but I’m against deliberate obscurity and meaninglessness, even if it’s nicely shaped. I doubt people read poetry for the mental exercise, but if they do they should do puzzles or mathematics instead.
INTERVIEWER
My next question is about Poets in Heaven …
LAUKHIN
Oh, not again.
INTERVIEWER
So much has been said about Poets in Heaven, the only major poem you’ve written since you left the Soviet Union seven years ago. What were the origins of the poem and the circumstances of its publication?
LAUKHIN
Too much—some of it sheer speculation—has been said and written about this poem already. It’s a bad poem.
INTERVIEWER
You can put the speculation to rest here and now. You call it a bad poem, but most people would strongly disagree. I’m one of them.
LAUKHIN
Fedya Malgunov visited me in Toronto about a year before his death, in 1983, sometime in April or early May. He stayed with me, and one night we drank a lot and got to talking about our lives in the West, our new lives—though it wasn’t that new for him, he’d been in America since the late sixties—and we drank some more, and he told me how unhappy he was, especially since his wife left him. He said he had not written anything worthwhile in ages, he simply couldn’t anymore, and then he began to cry, and said that he was at the end of his rope, that he had days when he seriously thought the life he had was not worth living. It wasn’t easy to look at him or listen to him in such a state. To cheer him up, I took out a draft of Poets in Heaven and read it to him. I’m not sure why I did it. Perhaps because it is about difficulties émigré artists have, about second thoughts and feelings of insignificance, but it is not a funny poem, or uplifting. I just wanted to stop him crying, and he did, said he loved my poem, and asked if he could have a copy. I gave it to him, a mistake.
INTERVIEWER
He translated Poets in Heaven, didn’t he?
LAUKHIN
It had no title at the time. He came up with the English title and, yes, he translated it. I didn’t expect it—the poem wasn’t finished. I’m not even sure it would not have ended in the wastebasket. It had, if you wish, a premature birth because of that night of too much drinking.
INTERVIEWER
Because he translated it.
LAUKHIN
Because he translated it and because he included it in the article he wrote about me.
INTERVIEWER
That’s the long article about you that appeared a few months later in Vanity Fair.
LAUKHIN
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
And, from what I understood, Fedya Malgunov didn’t have your consent to use it.
LAUKHIN
He had my consent to write an article about me, and, while he was here, I gave him a lot of material to chew on. Fedya wasn’t doing well financially at the time, and Vanity Fair had promised him serious money for a long article on me. But he did not have my blessing to include what came to be called Poets in Heaven. As I said, the poem wasn’t finished—far from it. To start with, it was too long, too verbose. There were other things wrong with it. I bought that copy of Vanity Fair and brought it home one afternoon, put on my slippers, poured myself a drink, and sat down—here, right here, in the den—to savour Fedya’s piece about me, full of pleasant anticipation. And then I saw the poem and blew up. I rang Fedya and gave him a piece of my mind. He was surprised, claimed it was good publicity for me and for the forthcoming journal by my father. Shouting, I told him I’d sue him and Vanity Fair for publishing a poem of mine without my consent. He swore I gave my consent when I handed him the copy of the poem, but that I had been too pissed to remember. Well, I was drunk that night, true, but I’m quite aware whether a poem of mine is finished or not. And that poem wasn’t finished, definitely not. It might have led some to think I had doubts about my decision to stay in the West because of silly lines like There are no poets in Heaven, no good poets a
nyway, and if there was one thing I never had doubts about, well, it was exactly that.
Some readers concluded that I regretted having left the Soviet Union, and there were many back in Moscow who pounced on it. I was furious. Vanity Fair said that Bart, my agent in New York, had given Fedya and the magazine the right to include in the article anything of mine that had already been published, in English or in Russian. I don’t know how Fedya did what he did, he probably told them that Poets in Heaven had been published in Russian already and Vanity Fair believed him and didn’t check. It was a mess but I calmed down after a while, and I felt sorry for Fedya. He was my friend. We went a long way back, all the way to the Gorki Literary Institute in Moscow. I told myself, well, to hell with the whole thing, he’s my friend and he’s desperate, let it go, drop it, it’s just one more bad poem out there, and God knows there are plenty of those. I rang him a week later, and we had a couple of glasses, thousands of kilometers apart, of course, and we cried a bit, we Russians being very good at it, at crying together, and we made peace. A few months later, he killed himself.
INTERVIEWER
He was depressed.
LAUKHIN
He was. I learned from his former wife that a few days before he took his life he drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco—she had remarried and was living there—and asked her to come back to him. She sent him away, and so, one thing and then another, and Fedya Malgonov reached the end. Like Mayakovsky,
As they say,
the incident is closed.
Love boat smashed on convention.
I don’t owe life a thing …
Enough. Enough about Poets in Heaven, enough about Fedya Malgunov.
INTERVIEWER
Pavel Laukhin kept a journal from the mid thirties to the late fifties. It was a dangerous thing to do, especially in the Stalinist era. Why did your father keep the journal?
LAUKHIN
My father had had the most wondrous piece of luck—Stalin liked his novels. Of course, since it was Stalin, I’m not sure, and neither was my father, whether the luck was wondrous or monstrous. It likely stemmed from the genre of fiction he wrote—Socialist Realism which was the least stifling on espionage fiction as long as the foreign spies and saboteurs were villainous enough, and were duly caught and punished. My father was told one day, quite unexpectedly, that Stalin liked his first two novels and couldn’t wait to read Oleg Vinograd’s next adventure. That had a huge effect on his life and literary career, and also on our family. The journal describes this brilliantly, his sudden elevation to the ranks of the select and privileged, and the moral contortions that went with it. It also cornered my father, typecast him. It was easy and convenient for him to continue writing spy stories, and he was told to keep at it. The message came from the very top. The sleepless hours of the beloved chief puppeteer were made bearable by my father’s novels. It was a duty, an order. In 1946, he began writing a war novel (everybody was writing one then), and he was about to sign a contract with one of the state publishing houses when he was told in no uncertain terms—word had come down from on high—either include Oleg Vinograd, or drop the whole thing. So Oleg duly appeared in my father’s first book after the war, caught several spies and fascists, and Pavel Laukhin remained a dedicated scribbler of spy stories. And also, likely to compensate for this, a secret and meticulous witness of his literary times.
Oleg Vinograd’s exploits had given my father and our family security and safety, thanks to the benevolent nod of the Kremlin Mountaineer. My father’s books were very popular and had huge print runs. He had an immense income, a large apartment, a dacha. Yet he felt constrained, cast, shackled. That’s why, over time, Oleg Vinograd was given a difficult marriage to a wife that he believed was unfaithful to him, and a sickly daughter. There was also a father with old-age dementia and a mother who couldn’t cope with it. All this gave Pavel Laukhin the elbow room to be more creative, to probe the human soul. Yes, my father knew he had a good thing going with Oleg Vinograd, but he also felt unfulfilled, frustrated. That’s why he wrote his journal—that’s where he kept his thoughts and aspirations and wrote in a freer style. Much of what he wrote in the journal, the dialogues, and the descriptions of people and places, his observations and thoughts, are like sketches or drafts of short stories, or of chapters in a larger narrative piece.
INTERVIEWER
Seven years ago, in the spring of 1978, you defected from the Soviet Union with nine notebooks containing your father’s journal. How did you do it and why then?
LAUKHIN
The decision to leave the Soviet Union was something I struggled with after my father’s death. He told me about the journal once he learned about his brain tumor—he was fifty eight when he was diagnosed—and he asked me to make sure it was published. He made me promise. Nothing else mattered to him. It was both a plea and a command and I had to obey. I had some hope of seeing the journal published during the early sixties. After all, Ehrenburg’s memoirs were being serialized in Novy Mir, although he said very little about the Soviet Union or about the daily life of his fellow writers, or little was left—at best a few Aesopian pages here and there—after the editors and Glavlit had had their ways with his manuscript. I didn’t tell anybody about the journal, but I did a trial run. I picked out an excerpt, a mildly controversial one about a meeting at the Writers’ Union in the spring of 1954. It had some drama in it, and some humour. It was a year after Stalin’s death, and most people still weren’t sure which way the wind was blowing. I pretended I’d found it among my father’s papers. I cut parts of it here and there, not much, massaged it, deleted a couple of names, wrote a few paragraphs to give it context, and I approached several literary journals with it. They didn’t say no immediately, but in the end they all did. They simply didn’t see the point of it. “Why wash our linen in public?” was their main response, and I quickly realized that my father’s journal would never be published in the Soviet Union. It wasn’t only that my father’s writing and views did not conform to the required norms, but too many of those mentioned were still around, wielding power and influence in the very places I wanted the journal published.
INTERVIEWER
Was the rejected excerpt the origin of Conversations with My Father?
LAUKHIN
Conversations with My Father came later. When I thought of Conversations, in 1969, I had not published anything in a very long time. My involvement with the dissident movement—only a few years, cut short by my accident—had had me blacklisted. Never mind the samizdat and tamizdat—I wanted to be published openly in my country. I had had no income in years, and had spent much of the money my father left me. The sanovniki at the Writers’ Union were making unsettling noises and I was told that many had eyes on my apartment on Lavrushinsky Lane. In a way, it was a decision taken out of desperation. I thought that maybe, just maybe, I had been blacklisted only as a poet. Perhaps if I wrote prose I might have a chance. That’s how I began Conversations. I was still working on Bolshevo Days—altering it here and there, but it was by and large finished. Conversations was a revelation—I mean, writing prose was. I remember one night, a few years after the war, I must have been eleven or twelve, when my father came home from a reading Pasternak did for some close friends from the draft of his novel. Before he began, Pasternak had told the few friends around him that he viewed his poetry as a step toward prose writing, which he considered the superior, liberating form. I was nearby when my father told my mother about it and about how horrified he’d been hearing his poet idol say such a thing. The whole incident stayed in my mind because it was the first time I heard my father saying anything critical about his beloved Boris Leonidovich. I thought about it again when I began Conversations. Like Pasternak, I soon found writing prose liberating—I was born again and freer. It was as if, after being in a playpen with a few wooden blocks, I was now permitted the whole courtyard, with all the toys I wanted. I could be long or short, verbose or concise. I could still be poetic, if I fe
lt that way. The only constraint was the story. I had to have a story to tell. And that was never a problem in our country where the most ordinary day in the most ordinary life is a story.
There was something else about writing prose—I slowly lost my dread of the censors. The Glavlit censors, of course, but also, and probably worse, the implicit censoring done by the editors at all the journals. You see, you can’t make cuts and changes to a poem, or very few and not to a good poem, before it’s destroyed. While in prose, in a narrative, you can always salvage something, at the very least some good writing.
I had a fine time writing Conversations, and it wasn’t just the novelty of writing prose. What delighted me more than anything else was writing about my father. I felt he was writing with me.
INTERVIEWER
Writing with you?
LAUKHIN
It is a book about Pavel Laukhin’s last years, as seen and told by his son. My father fell ill in 1958, almost four years before he died. I put all I witnessed in—first symptoms, the diagnosis, doctors, weighing the pros and cons of surgery and radiation, the pain, the long waits and long stays in hospitals, his rage and impotence, the slow loss of his strength, of his ability to do anything, even to speak. And through it all I wove conversations I had with my father in which he recalled the important events of his life. Inevitably, of his life as a writer. Now, there was a big lie in all that, a porky as you say here.
INTERVIEWER
That’s UK slang. Why do you say that?
LAUKHIN
I didn’t have any long conversations with my father after he fell sick. Later he couldn’t, and early on we didn’t, or not about what appeared in Conversations. What I included there were filtered excerpts from his journal, purified of anything provocative. Only a few of them, very few, and selected from the least controversial entries that I felt would still be of interest to readers. I transformed them into a dialogue between us or into a monologue I listened to. They were his experiences, but distilled through my writing, that’s why I said my father wrote with me.
INTERVIEWER
