BRODSKY
Sven Birkerts
Grazing the edge of that world, Ann Arbor in the mid-70s, and then—for me, anyway—part of its dissolution momentum, was Joseph Brodsky the poet. I don’t mean Brodsky the laureate, the world figure, for he was none of those things yet, he was just coming into his first notoriety, but even then, in the mid-70s, he seemed touched with his own blaze, moving with unique energy and purpose. Retrospect, of course, singles him out, stamps him with a tragic romanticism, starts a myth going. The other version, minus all of the projections and attributions, is humbler. Brodsky then was a lonesome, unassimilated figure who had come to teach but had no sense of what teaching was and no ambition in that direction. His ambition, as came so clear later, was all for poetry. I know he felt lost in his Midwestern exile, without peers or friends. Everyone knew who he was, but he seemed unapproachable as he came down the street. His expression was unreadable, angry, distracted, remote. I would see him in the bookstores from time to time, and then there would be his face on a poster for a reading. Do I misremember? He was very public and very private, and it was inevitable that there should be legends and stories. The local literary press made much of him. Once he was spotted walking around with Mikhail Baryshnikov. And then, finally, I had to make an overture. I helped him find a book one Sunday—The Education of Henry Adams—and we got to talking. I asked him if he wanted to come to my place just around the corner for coffee. Now that would sound like a pick-up line. We sat in my apartment above White’s Market, smoking and drinking coffee. The conversation was uncomfortable, in part because his English was still so bad and everything had to be explained; but also because I was so terrified of saying something stupid. I saw right away that he liked to play at lists, naming and ranking poets. I was nervous, completely out of my depth. But then I discovered that I wasn’t really expected to contribute. All I had to do was name a poet and he would do the rest. Yevtushenko. “He is a whore, it’s that simple.” Cavafy. “Ya, well he’s the best there is.” There was no hesitation or uncertainty. In an hour I knew his gods: Mandelstam, Milosz, Frost, Auden—“Wystan”—Montale…I found this unblinking decisiveness was completely thrilling. Somehow it brought greatness—a scale of high excellence—back into view. And sitting there in that smoky burrow, my hands shaking from too much coffee and too many cigarettes, I felt, though it was still very muffled, a hint of the recognition that I eventually would have to act on. At that moment it was inseparable from the general dizziness I was feeling.
I wasn’t yet ready for change, for revolutionizing the self. Just then I was too deeply pledged to my new life, the bookstore life, building a business with my partner George. But I marked the feeling.
I stopped writing this memory here and had a long walk, and as I was walking I found myself thinking about how readily we fall into storytelling mode with regard to the past, arranging anecdotes and explanations, and how it’s possible to do this without ever experiencing the sharp discomfort of the past, and I thought about the real-life falling away of most everything, how experience becomes essentially irretrievable, a subject for narratives that are finally there more to placate and assuage than to connect. Everything I was writing about Brodsky is true, true at the level of that kind of reminiscence, but what I realized as I walked was that not once did I convey the pungency of the man, or get at that maddening vibration of air that was around him. Details, sensations, moments. The jerky indrawn guffaw of his laugh, and then the way he would set his mouth so that you understood absolutely that here was an implacable man, a man who would not bend. How he sucked at cigarettes, his fierce intake, and never a thought about blowing smoke out neatly—it always just sputtered out as he talked. His well-known habit—later—of ripping the filters off his cigarettes and then just tossing them wherever and however. His love of the vulgar word or phrase followed by the little interrogative uptick: “Well, it’s shit, ya?” And how it was impossible for me to disagree with him. I so wanted to. I thought if I could disagree with him he might start seeing me as an equal, as worthy. But I couldn’t face the categorical velocity of his assertions—there was no going against it. And what a shock it was to find out he was a sexual braggart: the relish with which he told of having it off with some faculty wife who had driven him to the airport. The two of them, there in the car, maneuvering around the stick-shift. Brodsky had a locker-room side! As I got to know him better I started to see the extent of his appetites, and his capacity for cruelty. Things he would say about others, his dismissiveness, the way he rated people, and how I dreaded to imagine what he might say of me to some other person. Now I’m remembering, too, how much I worried about him after he moved to New York, his health. I kept telling myself that there would come a day, before too many years, when he would die. And he did.
I haven’t gotten the details I wanted yet, but I know they are all stored inside. I got started writing about Brodsky here not so much to evoke his presence as to reflect further on the fraying of the circle, because he had a great, if indirect, role in that. His presence filled me up with a desire and dissatisfaction I still haven’t fully recovered from. He made me want to write, yes, but at the same time he filled me with his scorn for all that was not writing. I took him in too naively, I think, but there’s no undoing that now. And maybe it was to the good.