Notes From a Poet in His Prime Less Than One

By R.Z. Sheppard

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry and not for Joseph Brodsky. His own verse is taut with nouns and verbs: "I said fate plays a game without a score,/ and who needs fish if you've got caviar?" But prose allows the Soviet-born exile to present himself in full figures of speech. Most of the essays in this first collection have appeared in magazines and literary journals; together they parade an extravagant talent and an uncompromising intelligence that equates aesthetics with morality: bad art indicates a bad character.

Brodsky, 45, is something of an international celebrity and hero. He was already an important young poet in the Soviet Union when he was charged with "social parasitism." Translation: his poetry and bohemian ways did not advance the causes of Communism. Hauling manure on a farm near the Arctic Circle did, according to the state, and in 1964 he was sent there to earn his keep. Neither the isolation nor the climate stopped him from writing. As he testified in his poem "A Part of Speech," "I was raised by the cold that, to warm my palm,/ gathered my fingers around a pen." In 1972 the Soviets decided they could get along without a Joseph Brodsky. Against his objections he was shipped to Austria, where W.H. Auden, then living in Kirchstetten, helped the uprooted poet on his way to the U.S. There Brodsky became an ornament on university faculties, a familiar voice on the lecture circuit, a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a recipient of a $208,000 MacArthur Foundation award. Such success by an outsider is cause for envy and resentment: American-born poets must struggle not only with the uncertainties of their craft but against indifference to their art. Fortunately, Brodsky is much more than another exile expected to tell ghost stories about Soviet oppression. He is a major literary figure linked directly to a great tradition, and he never forgets it. His native Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg) is the birthplace of Russian writing. It is also the nursery of totalitarianism. Brodsky elaborates the point in "A Guide to a Renamed City" by contrasting two monuments. On one side of the Neva stands the "Bronze Horseman," the equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Across the river is the figure of Lenin on top of an armored car carved of stone.

Both Czar and revolutionary were despots under whom persecuted Russians managed to write and appreciate great poetry and prose. Both gave their names to Brodsky's city. He, in turn, adds a dimension that makes it difficult to return to ordinary reality. The Neva and its canals, he says, make Leningrad narcissistic: "Reflected every second by thousands of square feet of running silver amalgam, it's as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river, / which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Finland."

Similarly, Brodsky's essays are tributaries flowing toward a connecting sea. It is the idealization of "world culture," nurtured by the legendary Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. He died in one of Stalin's prison camps in the late '30s and was resurrected in Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, the magnificent two-volume memoir by his wife Nadezhda. She died in 1980, and Brodsky recalls her life of outcast poverty and how she hid her husband's manuscripts in saucepans. In the end, her kitchen became a cultural pit stop for touring writers and scholars. She tired of the attention, Brodsky says, and looked forward to death, because "up there I'll again be with Osip." The poet Anna Akhmatova disagreed. "You've got it all wrong," she told her old friend. "Up there it's now me who is going to be with Osip."

A heaven that segregates poets and prose writers suits Brodsky. The supre macy of prosody is a theme he plays backward, forward and sideways throughout his book. If metrical language is the pinnacle of civilization, Brodsky is free to put poets at the top of the heap. He anoints Auden as "the greatest mind of the twentieth century," a brash though not unattractive idea if readers allow themselves to be swept along by Brodsky's passionate discourse on Auden's premonitory war poem "September 1, 1939." The work is reimagined rather than reduced by the usual critical method. "You don't dissect a bird to find the origins of its song," says Brodsky. "What should be dissected is your ear."

This poet is a hard taskmaster. He wants his readers to clear their senses of the cant and iconography that fog perceptions. His highest value is individualism as evolved by Western civilization. He skips through history to find something rotten in Byzantium, the "delirium and horror of the East." There is also the calamity of modernist architecture: "Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the color of an upturned grave." The flip side of this disgust is nostalgia. Though Brodsky overwhelms with startling insight and provocations, he is most affecting in "In a Room and a Half," an account of living with his parents in their small Leningrad apartment. There, behind armoires and bookshelves, he built a cozy sanctum. It is his book's truest image: the poet segregated in his heaven.