5
I know I have been called a solemn owl but I do detest practical jokes and am bored stiff («Only humorless people use that phrase,» according to Ivor) by a constant flow of facetious insults and vulgar puns («A stiff borer is better than a limp one»—Ivor again). He was a good chap, however, and it was not really respite from his banter that made me welcome his regular week-day absences. He worked in a travel agency run by his Aunt Betty’s former homme d’affaires, an eccentric in his own right, who had promised Ivor a bonus in the form of an Icarus phaeton if he was good.
My health and handwriting very soon reverted to normal, and I began to enjoy the South. Iris and I lounged for hours (she wearing a black swimsuit, I flannels and blazer) in the garden, which I preferred at first, before the inevitable seduction of seabathing, to the flesh of the plage. I translated for her several short poems by Pushkin and Lermontov, paraphrasing and touching them up for better effect. I told her in dramatic detail of my escape from my country. I mentioned great exiles of old. She listened to me like Desdemona.
«I’d love to learn Russian,» she said with the polite wistfulness which goes with that confession. «My aunt was practically born in Kiev and at seventy-five still remembered a few Russian and Rumanian words, but I am a rotten linguist. How do you say `eucalypt’ in your language?»
«Evkalipt.»
«Oh, that would make a nice name for a man in a short story. F. Clipton.' Wells has aMr. Snooks’ that turns out to derive from Seven Oaks.' I adore Wells, don't you?" I said that he was the greatest romancer and magician of our time, but that I could not stand his sociological stuff. Nor could she. And did I remember what Stephen said in The Passionate Friends when he left the room--the neutral room--where he had been allowed to see his mistress for the very last time? "I can answer that. The furniture there was slipcovered, and he said,It’s because of the flies.’ «
«Yes! Isn’t that marvelous! Just blurting out something so as not to cry. It makes one think of the housefly an old Master would paint on a sitter’s hand to show that the person had died in the meantime.»
I said I always preferred the literal meaning of a description to the symbol behind it. She nodded thoughtfully but did not seem convinced.
And who was our favorite modern poet? How about Housman?
I had seen him many times from afar and once, plain. It was in the Trinity Library. He stood holding an open book but looking at the ceiling as if trying to remember something—perhaps, the way another author had translated that line.
She said she would have been «terribly thrilled.» She uttered those words thrusting forward her earnest little face and vibrating it, the face, with its sleek bangs, rapidly. «You ought to be thrilled now! After all, I’m here, this is the summer of 1922, this is your brother’s house—«
«It is not,» she said, sidestepping the issue (and at the twist of her speech I felt a sudden overlap in the texture of time as if this had happened before or would happen again); «It is my house. Aunt Betty left it to me as well as some money, but Ivor is too stupid or proud to let me pay his appalling debts.»
The shadow of my rebuke was more than a shadow. I actually believed even then, in my early twenties, that by mid-century I would be a famous and free author, living in a free, universally respected Russia, on the English quay of the Neva or on one of my splendid estates in the country, and writing there prose and poetry in the infinitely plastic tongue of my ancestors: among them I counted one of Tolstoy’s grand-aunts and two of Pushkin’s boon companions. The forefeel of fame was as heady as the old wines of nostalgia. It was remembrance in reverse, a great lakeside oak reflected so picturesquely in such clear waters that its mirrored branches looked like glorified roots. I felt this future fame in my toes, in the tips of my fingers, in the hair of my head, as one feels the shiver caused by an electric storm, by the dying beauty of a singer’s dark voice just before the thunder, or by one line in King Lear. Why do tears blur my glasses when I invoke that phantasm of fame as it tempted and tortured me then, five decades ago? Its image was innocent, its image was genuine, its difference from what actually was to be breaks my heart like the pangs of separation.
No ambition, no honors tainted the fanciful future. The President of the Russian Academy advanced toward me to the sound of slow music with a wreath on the cushion he held—and had to retreat growling as I shook my graying head. I saw myself correcting the page proof of a new novel which was to change the destiny of Russian literary style as a matter of course—my course (with no self-love, no smugness, no surprise on my part)—and reworking so much of it in the margin—where inspiration finds its sweetest clover—that the whole had to be set anew. When the book made its belated appearance, as I gently aged, I might enjoy entertaining a few dear sycophantic friends in the arbor of my favorite manor of Marevo (where I had first «looked at the harlequins») with its alley of fountains and its shimmering view of a virgin bit of Volgan steppe-land. It had to be that way.
From my cold bed in Cambridge I surveyed a whole period of new Russian literature. I looked forward to the refreshing presence of inimical but courteous critics who would chide me in the St. Petersburg literary reviews for my pathological indifference to politics, major ideas in minor minds, and such vital problems as overpopulation in urban centers. No less amusing was it to envisage the inevitable pack of crooks and ninnies abusing the smiling marble, and ill with envy, maddened by their own mediocrity, rushing in pattering hordes to the lemming’s doom but presently all running back from the opposite side of the stage, having missed not only the point of my book but also their rodential Gadara.
The poems I started composing after I met Iris were meant to deal with her actual, unique traits—the way her forehead wrinkled when she raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to see the point of her joke, or the way it developed a totally different set of soft folds as she frowned over the Tauchnitz in which she searched for the passage she wanted to share with me. My instrument, however, was still too blunt and immature; it could not express the divine detail, and her eyes, her hair became hopelessly generalized in my otherwise well-shaped strophes.
None of those descriptive and, let us be frank, banal pieces, were good enough (particularly when nakedly Englished without rhyme or treason) to be shown to Iris; and, besides, an odd shyness—which I had never felt before when courting a girl in the brisk preliminaries of my carnal youth—kept me back from submitting to Iris a tabulation of her charms. On the night of July 20, however, I composed a more oblique, more metaphysical little poem which I decided to show her at breakfast in a literal translation that took me longer to write than the original. The title, under which it appeared in an émigré daily in Paris (October 8, 1922, after several reminders on my part and one please-return request) was, and is, in the various anthologies and collections that were to reprint it in the course of the next fifty years, Vlyublyonnost’, which puts in a golden nutshell what English needs three words to express.
My zabyvаem chto vlyublyсnnost’ Ne prсsto povorсt litsа,
A pod kupаvami bezdсnnost’, Nochnаya pаnika plovtsа.
Pokзda snмtsya,
