Andrei Voznesensky died early this June, and his death marks the passing of a courageous, astute, and brilliantly ironic poet. His death marks, too, the ending of a cycle in Russia of humanistic struggle on his part and Pasternak’s, Yevtushenko’s, and other poets against the always eager manifestations of brutal power. Before I tell the story of how he came to read his poetry at my university, let me offer the introduction I gave to the packed hall in 1985:
It sometimes seems as if our world and its history are marked by peculiar and profound silences - one thinks of the varieties of silence surrounding the genocides in the twentieth century. And one also thinks of the icy ahd historic silence that prevailed between the United States and the Soviet Union. It is our privilege this evening to meet and hear a person whose art is helping to break the odd and terrible silence plaguing our era. Andrei Voznesensky's voice as a poet cuts through the silence by means of a wide and brilliant accumulation of strengths. And these strengths make him perhaps the most distinguished Russian poet in the generation after the death of Boris Pasternak, who was his mentor. Voznesensky's poetry joins a scrupulous private lyricism to public themes. "I Am Goya" is a poem about the horror of the world at war; "The Call of the Lake" is about how to face the helpless silence of the Holocaust - and in each we feel the force of the poet tapping a deep inner response to the enormities which disfigure history. The joining of a scrupulous intensity to public themes is to be heard also in the sharp irony, sadness, and humor combined in poems like "A Chorus of Nymphs" about Soviet life or "American Buttons" about our own. And a poem like "Chagall's Cornflowers" - written in the mid-seventies, about the art of the Russian-Jewish emigre painter - is another revelation of the courage of Voznesensky's art, in the face of much unspoken anti-semitism. Indeed as his critical and independent imagination ranges over the twentieth century and both Russian and American societies, this courageous artist should remind us of the degrees of courage and of cowardice in our own lives. Our visitor has written that "the task of the poet today is to look deep inside man," and as his art prompts us to delve into whether we are alive or somehow dead at the core, we feel indeed grateful for those poems Voznesensky has written which are full not only of beauty and wit but of what Robert Lowell called his "sorrowing sympathy," his understanding - as in "Nostalgia for the Present" - or our shared human struggle.
I was so moved by his poetry reading in Cleveland in 1980, five years before, that my imagination remained haunted for months afterward, and I felt compelled to write some fiction about it. The story grew beyond the specific circumstances of the reading (the passionate urgency emerging from this ironic man as he read “I Am Goya” or the irritating dead-pan of the reader of the translations), and finally the story grew to imagine ways in which an American college teacher might, too, feel haunted by his society and history; hence the story’s title: “Your Name is Hiroshima.”
In early 1985, the poet was visiting Oberlin College near Cleveland, and with a certain urgency of my own, I mailed my story to him. I did not hear from him and learned he had left Oberlin for New York. In late June, at 6 a.m., the phone rang, and I heard a clear, penetrating voice say: “This is Andrei Voznesensky. I received your story. I like it very much and not because it’s about me. I want to meet you. Let me visit this fall. I can arrange to read at your university.”
On a frigid December morning, I met him at the Cleveland airport, and we did not stop talking. He ate a lunch of lamb, salad, and good bread with my wife, Jeanette, and me in our cottage-like house in Cleveland Heights; he said it reminded him of his dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow, and it made him homesick.
“You would like it there,” he said; “someday you must visit me.”
We spoke of Brodsky and Babel (“Do you know his great story ‘My First Fee’? You would love it.”) and of Rostropovich and Gorbachov, Auden and Lowell, Ginsberg and Balakian. For an afternoon party in his honor, I had invited all the usual suspects (ranging from a vice-provost to a brilliant undergraduate), but he would have none of it; he said he had come only to meet me and to read.
When I picked him up at his hotel before the reading, he asked me into his room and said he would be ready in a few minutes. He wore a fine silk robe as he finished dressing, and I was reminded of his remark that Rostropovich loved beautiful fabrics and furniture: “His home in Washington D.C., it is like a museum!” (The great Russian piano virtuoso Gilels once remarked that American supermarkets were like food museums.)
In order to promote his reading, I had pinned posters to the walls of the area’s universities, of Jewish delicatessens across the east side of Cleveland, etc. In the evening, the community of Russian Jews appeared in mass. The ballroom at the top of old Mather Mansion was filled to capacity. My introduction spoke of the Russian poet’s courage in breaking historic silences after Stalin’s death – about the Cold War, about the Holocaust – and I spoke of his poetry’s combination of wry critical intelligence and “sorrowing sympathy,” to quote Robert Lowell’s remark about him. For most of this audience, though, no introduction was necessary, and neither was the actor who read the translations (“I would have preferred you reading the translations”), for we were rapt by the power of his performance, which was only enhanced by his self-effacing ironic introductions in English.
As he read, he became his personae: Goya, then Gogol, then a witness to the killing of Jews in the nineteen forties. And we the audience became witnesses in turn; finding our ordinary preoccupations placed in stark perspective, we measured the degrees of cowardice and courage in our own lives. The applause shook the ballroom floor, as if he were one of those great Russian virtuosos, Oistrahk or Richter, who traveled here to stun America with their expressive force. No wonder he and Yevtushenko had filled stadiums in Moscow.
After the reading, he agreed to eat at a Greek restaurant; I gathered a half dozen of his most ardent listeners, and once there, we all raised our cloudy glasses of ouzo in toasts to honor Andrei.
The next morning on the drive back to the airport, Voznesensky asked, “Why, Danny, why is your story not published in America?”
“It’s a strange culture here, and publishing in America is a strange business.”
“A business,” he said and then added, “It is not easy to be American writer, no?”
I could not believe it: he was speaking something like what I had invented for him to say in the story I had sent him.
“Not easy,” he repeated.
“I think it’s harder to be a Russian writer, yes?”
He smiled with his characteristic self-irony and said, “I think, yes.”
[Daniel Melnick’s story about Voznesensky can be read if you click on the June 2010 post.]
Monday, July 26, 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Your Name Is Hiroshima - in memory of Andrei Voznesensky
Jacob Black knew no Russian, of course. He had some French, smatterings of Yiddish, and even less Spanish. Dosvedanya, spaceba, tovarich, mir, strasvitya, and proper names: that was it. Russian could not be the language which bled through his speech, to stain the fabric of his English.
He lit a cigarette and sat smoking, with his office door closed and the high rise window wrenched open, releasing his few puffs out into the city’s air. The night before, with his wife still puttering in the kitchen, he had watched again on video a film in French about Hiroshima. Rachel came to the door of the living room, her dark hair framing her face, the wry smiling mouth, the dark eyebrows, and she’d held up a dish cloth for drying, but he was too far gone. Later, he said, and his eyes focussed back on the movie--its indelible beginning, tu n’a rien vu a Hiroshima: you saw nothing at Hiroshima. The images of lovers’ bodies were riddled, porous, their texture smoky then slick with oil and sweat. And always the immolated field which was the city--eighty thousand injured in nine seconds. Two hundred thousand dead. What was there to cry about at Hiroshima? The anguish of forgetting, the taste of your blood, of your name, Hiroshima, ton nom est Hiroshima.
A final plume from his cigarette headed for the wrenched window, drifting through the conditioned air of his office boxed in by his books on shelves. Yes, it was French, not Russian, which would more likely bleed and stain his writing.
Jacob emerged into the hall. Were he an eagle or a swan, he thought, he’d fly out into the morning sky. In the event, with his eyes blazing at the walls, he glided to Robert Sinclair’s office.
“How are things?” Jacob said as he sat down.
“Please,” Robert smiled wanly, “you needn’t ask.”
“Fasker just called with another of his good ideas: I’ll be joining you to meet our Russian visitor next month.” Jacob did not suppress the slight moan in his voice.
“Why must he exact this from you now? He can’t resist temptation, the bureaucrat!” Robert snapped. At his wrists and neck, the exposed skin was lightly crusted with psoriasis, gray and red.
“There’s nothing to be done.” Jacob stopped himself from reaching for the cigarettes in his pocket, and his eyes, wide-set and gray, looked around the neat, bare office. Always he felt welcomed here by Robert Sinclair, twenty years his senior, at once fatherly and fastidious.
In the sealed window, he saw himself hovering in air, a squinting witness to the experience of two Jews—Robert’s mother had been Jewish, and Jacob though agnostic was one hundred percent, but did it matter? Born in Cleveland, he was the product of a Sephardic mother from Istanbul, and his father had been an Ashkenazi from Lublin; in their headlong rush to assimilate, they had refused to teach him the Ladino and Yiddish they had spoken as children.
Jacob looked directly at his friend now: “Fasker can’t help but squeeze as tightly as possible; it’s who he is.”
That afternoon, on his way home, he emerged into the crisp October air, and before him stood the library. He mounted its steps. In the stacks he found a black-bound volume of the Russian poet’s work, oblique and incensed in its ironies and resistances. He leafed backwards through the slim book of translations; the Soviet regime was a thing of the past, but what was the future bringing, he wondered, chaos, more hurt and harm? He came to a poem of war, riddled with knowledge of holocaust, grieving and aflame: it was the voice of Goya, his eyes torn out by what he had seen, the killing fields barren of life; death had turned him into a Goya of pure grief.
* * *
“Welcome to our humble metropolis. Needless to say, it can’t be as alluring as New York or San Francisco, but I trust we’ll make your stay a pleasant one.” Donald Fasker, English Department chairman, shook hands with the visitor, as did the other men. The Russian embraced a woman in a red dress, Professor Frances Crawley, and then he turned back to Robert Sinclair, holding the man’s hand in his own.
“I was told you will be introducing me when I read,” he smiled. “Will you be, Robert?”
The group moved to the elevator, the chairman and Robert walking next to the Russian.
“We have a friend in common, I believe,” Robert said. “One of your translators, Joseph Whitfield.”
“Yes?” The Russian’s face brightened. “He’s done good work on my poems, you think?” he said.
“I think so. We were in college together. He’s a sensitive man.”
The elevator doors opened immediately when Jacob touched the call button. As they began the descent to the basement baggage area, an image from one of Jacob’s own poems came to him. People felt the fragility of their control over existence, as they plunged together in the hanging box--hence its decorum. Across one wall was a mirror. Everything here was reversed, this face that face, this breast that breast, this self that self.
“Your last name I cannot pronounce,” Frances spoke suddenly to the Russian in a high pitched cry. “May we call you by your first?”
In the chairman’s car, the Russian sat between Jacob and Frances in back, and Robert was in front with Donald. Robert turned so as to see the other passengers, and his red hands clutched the top of the seat. Frances leaned forward to discuss the next day’s tight schedule. Her hand rested steadily on the Russian’s knee.
“I hope,” the poet said, “there will be time to visit a class. I would like to see American students. Frances, are you teaching tomorrow?”
“Unfortunately not,” she said.
The car lurched to a stop. The chairman turned for a moment to the visitor. “I believe Jacob has a class in the morning; I know he’d be pleased to have you there. A teaching visitation committee is due to observe him anyway, and you could be added to it. Isn’t that a good idea, Jacob?”
The young teacher mumbled something from the back, and Frances spoke up: “I’m one of your visitors tomorrow, Jacob. Why can’t our poet keep us all company?”
* * *
He carefully watched her eyebrows draw apart, then together. Her lips searched for his, and her dark hair was spread back. He kissed the slender brows. His was the body of an animal, a satyr. His tongue sought her mouth and entered with its own yearning rhythm of resuscitation, mouth to mouth. He lifted her awkwardly up and on top of him, and now in the November night she rasped out to Jacob: “You’re a soldier come back in time. Israeli. Would you save me? Would you save me?”
He saw, dismayed, the ashen field and the furnace of flame as now they made this love.
“I would free you. I would free you.”
Jacob and Rachel slept then through the night, curved about each other for warmth. Her uneven breaths would remind him that she was the child of survivors. His hairy, angular arms and legs wrapped around her, assured her that she was entitled to breathe, to endure.
Later, in the dawn’s first whitening, she awoke, and he sensed her waking. In bed, he held his head on his hand to stare at her opening, dark brown eyes.
“I had my dream,” she said. “Again.”
“What dream?”
“My dream,” she stared back at the distant consolation his gray eyes offered. “Outside a city, there is a steep path running down into bare, ravaged fields with felled trees, burnt stumps. A flattened land, an Auschwitz, yet somehow it’s regrown, with green weeds and bushes.” She stopped. “You know I’m afraid to tell you some things.”
“Don’t say it.”
“I want to, Jacob.”
“Not now. Please, Rachel. Keep telling me your dream.” He nestled his head closer to her, his face against her hair, his eyes closed.
* * *
“For the uncontrolled, there can be no wisdom,” Jacob read. He asked what the epigram meant. There were almost thirty young people seated in front of him, with a few auditors among them, gray headed, wizened even: his elders, especially one white haired man, wry, Jewish, almost always staying after with a word of encouragement, a quizzical remark, a stray revelation. And there was the visitation committee, of course, seated in back.
A boy’s hand waved in the air. “Well, there’s certainly a biblical feel to it. What we have here is just a replay of Cain’s sin; these vengeful, indulgent characters are all of the race of Cain.”
“But how does the epigram tie into your thinking? Control and wisdom?”
The student stared blankly at the teacher, and a young woman calmly raised her hand, saying: “Control of the will is what the novel’s epigram is about; it helps one to endure what is terrible in life, even in oneself.”
“Yes,” Jacob began, “yes,” but a second young man interrupted.
“I thought the novel wasn’t biblical or moral in any way, and the epigram didn’t make a lot of sense for me.” He sat hunched at his desk, but at ease. “If there is control in the work, it’s the sort that a killer or a rapist could be said to have; really, it’s no control at all. Just the sick self-centeredness that’s typical in our society.”
Jacob’s wide-set eyes took in the young man and the calm young woman. Here were the goat’s grumble, the lion’s roar, the lamb’s bleat--a whole symphony already. And here was his turn.
“You’re each pointing, I think, to a tension in the novel and the epigram. Here is a work filled with images of vengeance--the hideous revenge on children, for example--and there are the images of sexual violation. Yet the epigram speaks of control in the midst of the excesses, even the endurance and wisdom control yields. Early on, the nameless narrator wanders over the barren fields of an island or among isolated towns, and either he is controlled and toyed with by people, or he is the controlling force. In each case, the concern with control is tied to some violation. That’s the central tension in the novel, the link between the capacity for viciousness and the concern with...”
An elegant, young Black woman laughed. “I just wonder how you can speak seriously of this sick piece of trash! I wonder how you could require it for a college class. I felt dirtied by it. Really, it belongs on the drugstore pornography rack!” In her hand she took the paperback novel by a survivor of the Holocaust and threw it at the podium. The book slapped against the chalkboard and fell to the floor at Jacob’s feet.
The class--young and old alike--stared at him. In the rear, the eyes of the committee wavered, the Russian sat grinning, and snow whipped against the back windows. What next, Jacob said under his breath, what next?
“I understand what you’re feeling, and the question I need to ask, for each of us, is what’s the significance of our responses to the work.” Jacob picked up the book; sadness and compassion welled in him, and he stepped off the platform to place the novel on the girl’s desk. “What does each of our responses--whether rage or acceptance--say to us about ourselves? Maybe self-examination is an impact, a value of what otherwise is an assaulting, even disgusting work.” Jacob paced back and forth as he eyed his class. “But I think what we should try to think about now is what in the novel does seem assaulting to us. After all, aren’t there violations we face and enact in our daily existence? If we look closely at the lives we lead as citizens, lovers, parents and children, students and teachers, aren’t there things we do to each other and ourselves, which are painful even to acknowledge? What is it, then, that’s especially violating in this novel?”
The calm young woman with a pensive face mentioned the narrator’s cold-blooded voice.
“Yet I wonder in what sense the narrator’s voice could be seen as desperate, even vital?” Jacob asked. “In a sense, the question is: how does one narrate terrible, encompassing violation and oppression, even genocide?”
A girl--ordinary except for Slavic eyes, the eyes of an explorer--responded, and the recognitions ran on.
* * *
The students left through the doors in front. As the committee filed by, Frances, looking concerned, came to the podium. “Thanks for letting us visit,” she said; “I’ll be in touch with you later.” The Russian scampered behind her, and she offered the visitor a broad smile. He directed his own smile at Jacob and stepped from the floor onto the platform where the teacher stood. He reached out to shake Jacob’s hand.
“What pleasure!” the Russian beamed. “Thanks so much! You will come to lunch together, no?”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Jacob said, closing his briefcase and glancing at the short, white haired man, who waited in the aisle.
“Of course,” the Russian said. As Frances and he walked out the door, they waved.
The old man moved closer to the young teacher. Though nearly ninety, with his skin paper white, he was tentative and deferential. He had taken several of Jacob’s classes; staying after, he would talk with him about irony in Proust and Sholem Aleichem, about justice in Kafka, about I. L. Peretz (he had discovered that Jacob’s father had been called Peretz and had been born in Lublin, Poland: “Professor Black, you don’t realize it, but you’re a typical teacher of Lublin. There always they tried to balance the sophistication of Warsaw and the moral rigor of Vilna”).
“Oh, these students,” the old man said now, “the Black book-thrower, the boys, the girls. I watch their beautiful faces as they speak, and what I see gives me a mechaia; do you know what mechaia is? Chaia is birth, meh is again. A rebirth, that is what is in my heart, in my stomach, as I see their sweet searching faces and they answer what you ask.” Jacob decided to sit down at a desk in the front of the room. The old Jew stood by him.
“And you,” he continued, “what you do. You are one of those who the rabbis speak of. You offer your students the mysteries, the schmaltz, the real stuff.” His spit grazed the teacher’s face. “It’s wonderful, what you show them. In Yiddish we have a phrase...‘between the drops of dew.’ You show your students how to look there. You tickle them, you tickle their vanity, which is a good thing. They feel your respect for them; they feel you respect them enough to believe they too can see. It’s a wonderful, healthy thing for them”
The old man sat down beside Jacob, the skin of his thin forearms ghostly white against the desktop. His voice shot out in a whisper: “But most of them are only children. They have such wonderful potential, their faces, the souls of these fine children. Yet some of them cannot know even what you are asking of them, that you are asking them to do the work, to master already everything that comes first. You gave them the responsibility today to look among the imaginary leaves glistening with dew, where they can see the real thing, and you are a wonderful teacher for those who can look. But these are mainly children! You know what the rabbis say about the strong man: he is the one who controls his passion. You have a great passion for the real stuff, but you need to control it.”
“Yes, the same when one writes,” Jacob said, and suddenly he felt an odd, numbing anxiety, as if he himself had no identity, despite--or was it because of--the images projected onto him by this ancient man. Who was Jacob Black really, he wondered? Gratitude fought in him with a sense of nothingness and self-erasure.
“You make me think of Bialik’s essay on Adam’s cry.” The old man spoke dispassionately now. “Jacob Black, forgive me, but I believe I witness you at a moment of crisis, a crossroads, and I can’t help but think of Bialik’s explanation for why he stopped writing the poems of his youth. He discovered that the longing in them--his attempt to echo Adam’s cry--was met by all the dreck of the world, degrading and destroying it, the machers, the schnorrers, you know? So he refused to write his beautiful poetry. Instead he began to write essays, which he packed with all the hazzerai of Zionism flowing through him and around him.”
“Hello,” Donald Fasker walked into the classroom, “what is this, silent meditation?”
“Jesus,” Black said.
“Lunch!” Donald smiled. “The Russian is asking for you.”
* * *
“What did you think of Professor Black’s class this morning?” the Russian asked Frances. “Wasn’t it quite touching?”
“It was exciting. To reach the Black girl like that!” The entourage was approaching the auditorium; Jacob trailed in back.
The Russian laughed, and he shouted against the driven snow: “Frances, you have the spirit of a Muscovite. You visit me there someday.”
Inside, Robert Sinclair mounted to the stage and tested the microphone. His face glowed with exertion and embarrassment. Its red outshone that of his tie and the gray-red skin at his neck. Occasionally he would glance at the Russian who slumped in his chair.
The professor first introduced the reader of the translations and then the great poet. “This courageous Russian artist and citizen,” he called him: a survivor of the Soviet period, a spectacular poet, ironic and compassionate at once, a Russian Auden. The audience tightened in their seats.
“Our visitor has written, ‘the task of the poet is to look deep inside man.’ And in most basic terms, there are varieties of courage and cowardice, of life and of death to be found within. Death above all to the possibilities of life, even in those of us who are outwardly full of promise. And as his art asks us whether we are alive or in some way dead at the core, we feel grateful for those of his poems which are full not only with wit and beauty but with what Robert Lowell has called his ‘sorrowing sympathy,’ his understanding of our shared human struggle.”
The stout visitor rose from his chair and slouched to the podium. Applause roared out at him. His detached, architect’s voice breathed into the microphone that he would first recite a poem of war. The American reader intoned the translation. The words were familiar to Joseph. It was the poem he had lighted on in the library stacks.
“Ya Goya,” a deep, quick, welling cry shook the Russian’s frame, and reached out to assault the surrounding ears and bodies. “Nagoye.” Death streamed its blood before the audience. “Ya gore.” Executioners and victims alike, the listeners were pinned to their chairs by the shocking cry of the short man before them. “Ya golos.” Black’s body was tightly clenched. The poet was like the great musicians who streamed from Russia and sometimes stayed to stun the West, Oistrakh and Heifitz and Rostropovich, Horowitz and Richter and Gilels.
“I am Goya,” Jacob heard, and glared at the faces in the audience. Before him was the carnage. Donald, sitting fascinated, folded his hands low over his crotch. “Goda.” One colleague’s tall skeleton was rotted clean to the bone, his stare frozen in two directions at once. “Ya golod.” Another, his bones consumed, held his severed head up with an erect tongue. “Ya gorlo.” Still another, born without a body, bounced about his empty chair. “Goloi.” Frances did a shriekless war-dance in her seat, her body drenched with blood. “I am Goya.”
Stunned applause splattered and then poured out. The poet offered a benign smile.
* * *
It was day’s end, and he tramped from the bus stop down the snowbound suburban street. The November sun was setting, and he turned to climb a road a few blocks from his home. Aslant a hillside and embedded in the snow was Robert Sinclair’s house. Jacob knocked at the front door. The professor’s wife May opened the door. A television flickered in the living room. It was the hour before their dinner. In her veined hand, she took Jacob’s arm, and asked after his wife. A martini trembled in her other hand. She leaned forward to kiss his cheek, and he smelled her breath. She waved him up the stairs to Sinclair’s study, which opened onto a balcony outside.
Robert sat pouring brandy into a glass by his easy chair.
“Get yourself a glass,” he said to Jacob in the doorway and pointed to a cabinet by the windows. His shirtsleeves were rolled up. His forearms were crusted with patches of gray punctuated by sections of blood-red skin. A boundary of dark red showed at his neck, as if his head had been removed and roughly sewn back on. Robert smiled a toast to his friend.
Joseph began speaking of the Russian, mentioning the Goya poem, but avoiding the details of the day’s experience, the revelations, the grotesque details, the absurdities. He pulled cigarettes from his pocket: an addiction, one more of his maladies.
“You don’t mind?” he mumbled. He exhaled the smoke into the room he often visited, with its shelves of books reaching up a story and a half. There was a silence. Jacob realized that he shouldn’t have come to impose his burden. There was nothing to be done. He glanced at the glass door to the balcony and the hill beyond it. Robert began to speak. His voice seemed to emerge from the eruption of his trunk. Jacob could hardly hear all the words.
“I’ve said before, I know, that his translator was a friend of mine. Whitfield had a great deal of promise in those days. He wrote long poems about experiences which were vivid, though really quite obvious to all of us who read him then, in our late teens and twenties. He turned to translation, and he worked with Williamson, the Eliot scholar. He ended up translating several Russian poets. I don’t know, but something got lost in the meantime, and it’s that something which you’re trying to voice, I think. At moments I think I used to have it. And you have it, Jacob. I don’t want to embarrass you. But I’d like to help you locate what you seek. Let me tell you about one time when it seemed to come clear to me.”
Robert raised his glass, and Jacob rose to pour more brandy. The liquid coagulated in their glasses. The professor continued.
“Who can fully understand the journey we are all taking? During the spring of my second year at college, I had a brilliant teacher, Howard Nemerov. He’d just gotten an appointment at Chicago. He interested himself in my work, asked to see what I was writing, and he seemed to admire my poems and stories--and how I admired him! I am of course partly Jewish. Whatever is finally at the core for each of us, Jewishness--I believe--is only one ingredient of our identity, but for him being Jewish carried quite a charge, though his own work seldom mentioned it. The last day of the semester, he called me into his office; I remember the bare cubicle he was assigned and his large, noble, drawn face--red with drink, his eyes circled with the black of the night’s concentration. He spoke of his admiration for my youthful work, passages which seemed quite fine. But--he said--I never touched the core of who I was, Jew or not: I would never become a great writer.” Jacob sat appalled, his face pained; he reached his hand out and let it fall.
“Yes,” Robert said. “His judgment. That day, then the next on the train ride home, I was overcome. I passed through a sort of death, a striking at my very being. I won’t talk about that, except to say that I realized to the extent I was feeling this pain, to the extent I still struggled, I was alive. I write little now. We are here, Jacob, on this darkening plain. And we know what it is to feel: even to feel dead is yet to feel something--to be haunted by a vision of what is possible but not present, not here, not now. This is something. Not greatness, but something. Perhaps it is sickness. That summer, I was ill with rheumatic fever, and I saw clearer, I think, than I’d ever seen before. I saw what courage is needed, what truth is faced, when you pass through death. What is reborn from the carnage is what you’re seeking, what the Russian seeks, what we are all reaching for.”
Jacob’s throat contracted. Nothing would emerge. Inside him welled and surged all he’d heard from the Russian, the old Jew, and now Robert Sinclair. What next, he wondered? Then the words came. “Your pain, your spirit reaching for the truth, your enduring here for us. They’re a gift to us, even if we don’t know it.”
He told his friend he must go; Rachel was waiting with dinner. He put on his heavy overcoat and looked at the snowy hillside outside the balcony door, seeking some way of escape. Sinclair walked carefully down the hall and the stairs in front of Jacob. Husband and wife stood a distance away from him and from each other as they bade him good-bye.
* * *
After dinner, Jacob worked in his study, off the laundry room of their rented duplex. His mind hummed with the day’s events, and simultaneously a poem began to assert itself, receding, then resounding, word by word, phrase by phrase. Hum and poem sometimes joined in a single perception that all about him he felt a refusal to perceive--the past, the present, the future, what have you. Everyone lived now post-holocaust; they’d all arrived at the door slammed shut of memory and perception, of language and love. What was there left to cry about at Hiroshima, at Auschwitz, at the Ukrainian lake and Babi Yar? Rien. A nothingness. Nothing. What was left for any of them to say, to do, for him, for Rachel, for the Russian poet, for the ancient Jew who was not his student but his teacher really, for Sinclair, Crawley, Fasker? Tu n’a rien vu a Hiroshima. Jacob mouthed each word from the film he’d seen, wanting to resuscitate the breath and savor of each sound and image. Depuis longtemps, depuis longtemps: after awhile, after a long time. Ton nom est Hiroshima, nous devenons Hiroshima: your name is--we become--after awhile--Hiroshima.
Rachel stood at the open door with her dark hair lit by the laundry room bulb. Across from his desk, she sat down in the reading chair, her body slender and small.
“Why so quiet at dinner? Why depressed?”
“It’s nothing,” he said. His mouth seemed to shut when he yearned to speak, and his poems made up for his anxious selfishness with words in life.
“What happened at the Russian’s poetry reading? You never said.”
Jacob started to describe the recitation, withholding again the rage and gore of his own response. Instead he told her of a poem about Chagall, which the Russian sang and shouted in the tilted hall, and another about a Ukrainian site of the Holocaust.
“This poet isn’t Jewish?” Rachel mumbled. “He’s a mensch. But that’s not what’s bothering you. Tell me, Jacob.”
Again, he spoke of his day, the visitation committee observing him teach--with the Russian in tow--and afterwards the old Jew’s haunting and generous remarks. Rachel sat curled quietly in the easy chair across from him, listening to the strange upwelling of words, the painstaking detail. He told her that Frances Crawley had come to his office in the late afternoon to offer the committee’s first impressions. “Certainly an adequate session. Naturally, there are things you might do differently. One of our members,” she had said, “believes you’re more interested in conveying impressions than in analyzing literature. Of course, we all noticed how much you encourage student responses. But I think that effectively gets them involved. More carrot than stick! Why not?”
“The idiots,” Rachel spit out, “the bureaucrats!” He stopped talking, and in the silence she stood and walked around the desk to him. Theirs was a marriage in which she spoke the words he could not, and he or his poems seemed to speak for her. Standing next to him, yet not touching, she stared down at the man with whom she was entwined. She let her fingers drift over the desk and the paper with its network of fragmentary lines and phrases.
“Those fools shouldn’t mean a thing to you. I know they can hurt, but do they really mean anything to you? What’s important is your poems, is your heart, your soul. That’s what’s important in everything we share together. When we’re together, when I become you and you become me.” Her fingers gently brushed his face now, his cheek, his hair, his ear. “There is no difference. Your pain, my joy. My pain, your joy are interchangeable.” Jacob’s hands reached to hold Rachel, to pull her to his lap. But she stood by him unperturbed, her body still and resistant.
“You know, Jacob, if we’re going to have child, I have to soon. This year I...”
“No, no,” he moaned, his hands slackening, “let’s not talk about it now.” He stood up, rising above her, and he walked around to the reading chair. He slumped down in it, and she sat in his chair at the desk.
“I want us to have a child.”
“Don’t say it, Rachel,” he said. “How can we bring children into such a world?”
“How can’t we? Think of my parents. They lived through Auschwitz--died through Auschwitz. They were children: think of how they felt. But then they met, and they had me. Who are you to deny our child life?”
* * *
He floated out into the darkened suburb, the tails of his overcoat fluttering in the snow behind him. He sought his bearings in the frozen air. His feet left their deep imprint in the new snow on the sidewalk. Frances Crawley’s house arose to one side, and he blazed a trail up her unshovelled driveway. Weightless flakes drifted into his face as he peered through the side windows into her house. He felt he must see what was sealed within, yet it was pitch dark and he knew it was folly: he was apart, sealed out.
He cut across her whitened lawn to the street, and he sought the road ascending to Sinclair’s house. Avoiding the stairs to the front door, he struggled further up the hill, and he stood trembling on a ledge of snow by the balcony window. A light was on in Robert Sinclair’s study, and Jacob looked through the glass. Sinclair sat in his chair, his shirt loosely open. He was holding his burning hand up to his reddened neck. His face tilted back, facing the wall of books. His eyes were shut, and his mouth gasped for air, which the sleeping man breathed in heavy gulps.
Jacob’s throat began to cry out in a low moan. He let himself leap free of the balcony ledge. He flew through the freezing air, falling to the snow bank just below. His face squashed into the thick crust of snow, and blood sprang from his mouth.
He wandered in circles through drifts of snow covering the hill and then the bare still streets. Nearby was Fasker’s house now, ablaze still at the end of a party for the Russian. Avoiding the shoveled walk and drive, Jacob pushed through the snowy lawn to the chairman’s lit front window. In the living room, the familiar crowd was thinning. They seemed actors on a stage, beaming silently at each other, oblivious to their audience of one, who gazed through the glass and gauzy curtains. He let go of the icy bush he held and kneeled slowly into the snow. He felt himself disappearing into the whitened lawn, the tableau of snow before the glass, the darkened street.
Voices clattered into the driveway. Jacob crawled unseen across the snowy yard. He stood in the sidewalk, stepped into the street, and jogged slowly down the block. A car approached in back of him, and turning, he saw that it was Frances driving the Russian poet.
“Are you going to stop or not?” Jacob spit out.
“Are you all right?” Frances asked.
The Russian mumbled to her, and the car stopped altogether. The poet leaned in front of her to speak through the narrow opening of the window. Frances slipped her arm inside his open coat.
“Jacob, hello,” the passenger boomed. “We missed you. Can we drive you anywhere? Are you hurt?”
“I had a fall as I walked. It’s okay now. I’m almost home.”
The Russian opened his door and came around the front of the car. He stood breathing clouds of steam next to Jacob in the center of the street. The visitor looked at the torn pants, the mouth. He came closer. His hands gripped the other man’s arms.
“Jacob Black,” he said, “you are a fine and decent man. Jews and Russians, so much in common, yet such terrible things have been done. Joyce was right, no?--history is a nightmare. You are a...what is it you Jews say? I can’t remember.” The Russian leaned forward to hug him and kiss his cheeks. “All I know is you don’t kill the souls of those around you.” Then he dodged back into the car which billowed down the street.
Jacob stood alone now in the snow. Tu n’a rien vu a Hiroshima. He tasted the blood in his mouth. You saw nothing at Hiroshima. Nothing.
My torn tongue
Is corroded by
Its own radiant code.
Is this the gap
Made in the mouth
By mute immolation
And toungueless pain?
He trudged home through the bare ice-bound streets, skidding on glazed patches, bruising his knees and hands as he fell. When cars passed, he sought the shadows. Veering back and forth between the center and the curb, Jacob heard the voices of his days and nights, their images, and the words he fathered into being.
After a time--
Depuis longtemps--
Like sex so richly
Slowly so darkly
The taste of words
Dissolves slowly
In the riddled mouth.
Ton nom est Hiroshima. That would be the title. Your name is Hiroshima. Flawed by alcohol and the taste of blood, yes, it would do for now, before another birth, wailing, bloody, flesh of his flesh. His toes were freezing. His face was swollen and open to the night.
My tongue aches
With your name Hiroshima.
My mouth mouths
Radiant Hiroshima.
Depuis longtemps,
Riddled with love,
We become Hiroshima.
He lit a cigarette and sat smoking, with his office door closed and the high rise window wrenched open, releasing his few puffs out into the city’s air. The night before, with his wife still puttering in the kitchen, he had watched again on video a film in French about Hiroshima. Rachel came to the door of the living room, her dark hair framing her face, the wry smiling mouth, the dark eyebrows, and she’d held up a dish cloth for drying, but he was too far gone. Later, he said, and his eyes focussed back on the movie--its indelible beginning, tu n’a rien vu a Hiroshima: you saw nothing at Hiroshima. The images of lovers’ bodies were riddled, porous, their texture smoky then slick with oil and sweat. And always the immolated field which was the city--eighty thousand injured in nine seconds. Two hundred thousand dead. What was there to cry about at Hiroshima? The anguish of forgetting, the taste of your blood, of your name, Hiroshima, ton nom est Hiroshima.
A final plume from his cigarette headed for the wrenched window, drifting through the conditioned air of his office boxed in by his books on shelves. Yes, it was French, not Russian, which would more likely bleed and stain his writing.
Jacob emerged into the hall. Were he an eagle or a swan, he thought, he’d fly out into the morning sky. In the event, with his eyes blazing at the walls, he glided to Robert Sinclair’s office.
“How are things?” Jacob said as he sat down.
“Please,” Robert smiled wanly, “you needn’t ask.”
“Fasker just called with another of his good ideas: I’ll be joining you to meet our Russian visitor next month.” Jacob did not suppress the slight moan in his voice.
“Why must he exact this from you now? He can’t resist temptation, the bureaucrat!” Robert snapped. At his wrists and neck, the exposed skin was lightly crusted with psoriasis, gray and red.
“There’s nothing to be done.” Jacob stopped himself from reaching for the cigarettes in his pocket, and his eyes, wide-set and gray, looked around the neat, bare office. Always he felt welcomed here by Robert Sinclair, twenty years his senior, at once fatherly and fastidious.
In the sealed window, he saw himself hovering in air, a squinting witness to the experience of two Jews—Robert’s mother had been Jewish, and Jacob though agnostic was one hundred percent, but did it matter? Born in Cleveland, he was the product of a Sephardic mother from Istanbul, and his father had been an Ashkenazi from Lublin; in their headlong rush to assimilate, they had refused to teach him the Ladino and Yiddish they had spoken as children.
Jacob looked directly at his friend now: “Fasker can’t help but squeeze as tightly as possible; it’s who he is.”
That afternoon, on his way home, he emerged into the crisp October air, and before him stood the library. He mounted its steps. In the stacks he found a black-bound volume of the Russian poet’s work, oblique and incensed in its ironies and resistances. He leafed backwards through the slim book of translations; the Soviet regime was a thing of the past, but what was the future bringing, he wondered, chaos, more hurt and harm? He came to a poem of war, riddled with knowledge of holocaust, grieving and aflame: it was the voice of Goya, his eyes torn out by what he had seen, the killing fields barren of life; death had turned him into a Goya of pure grief.
* * *
“Welcome to our humble metropolis. Needless to say, it can’t be as alluring as New York or San Francisco, but I trust we’ll make your stay a pleasant one.” Donald Fasker, English Department chairman, shook hands with the visitor, as did the other men. The Russian embraced a woman in a red dress, Professor Frances Crawley, and then he turned back to Robert Sinclair, holding the man’s hand in his own.
“I was told you will be introducing me when I read,” he smiled. “Will you be, Robert?”
The group moved to the elevator, the chairman and Robert walking next to the Russian.
“We have a friend in common, I believe,” Robert said. “One of your translators, Joseph Whitfield.”
“Yes?” The Russian’s face brightened. “He’s done good work on my poems, you think?” he said.
“I think so. We were in college together. He’s a sensitive man.”
The elevator doors opened immediately when Jacob touched the call button. As they began the descent to the basement baggage area, an image from one of Jacob’s own poems came to him. People felt the fragility of their control over existence, as they plunged together in the hanging box--hence its decorum. Across one wall was a mirror. Everything here was reversed, this face that face, this breast that breast, this self that self.
“Your last name I cannot pronounce,” Frances spoke suddenly to the Russian in a high pitched cry. “May we call you by your first?”
In the chairman’s car, the Russian sat between Jacob and Frances in back, and Robert was in front with Donald. Robert turned so as to see the other passengers, and his red hands clutched the top of the seat. Frances leaned forward to discuss the next day’s tight schedule. Her hand rested steadily on the Russian’s knee.
“I hope,” the poet said, “there will be time to visit a class. I would like to see American students. Frances, are you teaching tomorrow?”
“Unfortunately not,” she said.
The car lurched to a stop. The chairman turned for a moment to the visitor. “I believe Jacob has a class in the morning; I know he’d be pleased to have you there. A teaching visitation committee is due to observe him anyway, and you could be added to it. Isn’t that a good idea, Jacob?”
The young teacher mumbled something from the back, and Frances spoke up: “I’m one of your visitors tomorrow, Jacob. Why can’t our poet keep us all company?”
* * *
He carefully watched her eyebrows draw apart, then together. Her lips searched for his, and her dark hair was spread back. He kissed the slender brows. His was the body of an animal, a satyr. His tongue sought her mouth and entered with its own yearning rhythm of resuscitation, mouth to mouth. He lifted her awkwardly up and on top of him, and now in the November night she rasped out to Jacob: “You’re a soldier come back in time. Israeli. Would you save me? Would you save me?”
He saw, dismayed, the ashen field and the furnace of flame as now they made this love.
“I would free you. I would free you.”
Jacob and Rachel slept then through the night, curved about each other for warmth. Her uneven breaths would remind him that she was the child of survivors. His hairy, angular arms and legs wrapped around her, assured her that she was entitled to breathe, to endure.
Later, in the dawn’s first whitening, she awoke, and he sensed her waking. In bed, he held his head on his hand to stare at her opening, dark brown eyes.
“I had my dream,” she said. “Again.”
“What dream?”
“My dream,” she stared back at the distant consolation his gray eyes offered. “Outside a city, there is a steep path running down into bare, ravaged fields with felled trees, burnt stumps. A flattened land, an Auschwitz, yet somehow it’s regrown, with green weeds and bushes.” She stopped. “You know I’m afraid to tell you some things.”
“Don’t say it.”
“I want to, Jacob.”
“Not now. Please, Rachel. Keep telling me your dream.” He nestled his head closer to her, his face against her hair, his eyes closed.
* * *
“For the uncontrolled, there can be no wisdom,” Jacob read. He asked what the epigram meant. There were almost thirty young people seated in front of him, with a few auditors among them, gray headed, wizened even: his elders, especially one white haired man, wry, Jewish, almost always staying after with a word of encouragement, a quizzical remark, a stray revelation. And there was the visitation committee, of course, seated in back.
A boy’s hand waved in the air. “Well, there’s certainly a biblical feel to it. What we have here is just a replay of Cain’s sin; these vengeful, indulgent characters are all of the race of Cain.”
“But how does the epigram tie into your thinking? Control and wisdom?”
The student stared blankly at the teacher, and a young woman calmly raised her hand, saying: “Control of the will is what the novel’s epigram is about; it helps one to endure what is terrible in life, even in oneself.”
“Yes,” Jacob began, “yes,” but a second young man interrupted.
“I thought the novel wasn’t biblical or moral in any way, and the epigram didn’t make a lot of sense for me.” He sat hunched at his desk, but at ease. “If there is control in the work, it’s the sort that a killer or a rapist could be said to have; really, it’s no control at all. Just the sick self-centeredness that’s typical in our society.”
Jacob’s wide-set eyes took in the young man and the calm young woman. Here were the goat’s grumble, the lion’s roar, the lamb’s bleat--a whole symphony already. And here was his turn.
“You’re each pointing, I think, to a tension in the novel and the epigram. Here is a work filled with images of vengeance--the hideous revenge on children, for example--and there are the images of sexual violation. Yet the epigram speaks of control in the midst of the excesses, even the endurance and wisdom control yields. Early on, the nameless narrator wanders over the barren fields of an island or among isolated towns, and either he is controlled and toyed with by people, or he is the controlling force. In each case, the concern with control is tied to some violation. That’s the central tension in the novel, the link between the capacity for viciousness and the concern with...”
An elegant, young Black woman laughed. “I just wonder how you can speak seriously of this sick piece of trash! I wonder how you could require it for a college class. I felt dirtied by it. Really, it belongs on the drugstore pornography rack!” In her hand she took the paperback novel by a survivor of the Holocaust and threw it at the podium. The book slapped against the chalkboard and fell to the floor at Jacob’s feet.
The class--young and old alike--stared at him. In the rear, the eyes of the committee wavered, the Russian sat grinning, and snow whipped against the back windows. What next, Jacob said under his breath, what next?
“I understand what you’re feeling, and the question I need to ask, for each of us, is what’s the significance of our responses to the work.” Jacob picked up the book; sadness and compassion welled in him, and he stepped off the platform to place the novel on the girl’s desk. “What does each of our responses--whether rage or acceptance--say to us about ourselves? Maybe self-examination is an impact, a value of what otherwise is an assaulting, even disgusting work.” Jacob paced back and forth as he eyed his class. “But I think what we should try to think about now is what in the novel does seem assaulting to us. After all, aren’t there violations we face and enact in our daily existence? If we look closely at the lives we lead as citizens, lovers, parents and children, students and teachers, aren’t there things we do to each other and ourselves, which are painful even to acknowledge? What is it, then, that’s especially violating in this novel?”
The calm young woman with a pensive face mentioned the narrator’s cold-blooded voice.
“Yet I wonder in what sense the narrator’s voice could be seen as desperate, even vital?” Jacob asked. “In a sense, the question is: how does one narrate terrible, encompassing violation and oppression, even genocide?”
A girl--ordinary except for Slavic eyes, the eyes of an explorer--responded, and the recognitions ran on.
* * *
The students left through the doors in front. As the committee filed by, Frances, looking concerned, came to the podium. “Thanks for letting us visit,” she said; “I’ll be in touch with you later.” The Russian scampered behind her, and she offered the visitor a broad smile. He directed his own smile at Jacob and stepped from the floor onto the platform where the teacher stood. He reached out to shake Jacob’s hand.
“What pleasure!” the Russian beamed. “Thanks so much! You will come to lunch together, no?”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Jacob said, closing his briefcase and glancing at the short, white haired man, who waited in the aisle.
“Of course,” the Russian said. As Frances and he walked out the door, they waved.
The old man moved closer to the young teacher. Though nearly ninety, with his skin paper white, he was tentative and deferential. He had taken several of Jacob’s classes; staying after, he would talk with him about irony in Proust and Sholem Aleichem, about justice in Kafka, about I. L. Peretz (he had discovered that Jacob’s father had been called Peretz and had been born in Lublin, Poland: “Professor Black, you don’t realize it, but you’re a typical teacher of Lublin. There always they tried to balance the sophistication of Warsaw and the moral rigor of Vilna”).
“Oh, these students,” the old man said now, “the Black book-thrower, the boys, the girls. I watch their beautiful faces as they speak, and what I see gives me a mechaia; do you know what mechaia is? Chaia is birth, meh is again. A rebirth, that is what is in my heart, in my stomach, as I see their sweet searching faces and they answer what you ask.” Jacob decided to sit down at a desk in the front of the room. The old Jew stood by him.
“And you,” he continued, “what you do. You are one of those who the rabbis speak of. You offer your students the mysteries, the schmaltz, the real stuff.” His spit grazed the teacher’s face. “It’s wonderful, what you show them. In Yiddish we have a phrase...‘between the drops of dew.’ You show your students how to look there. You tickle them, you tickle their vanity, which is a good thing. They feel your respect for them; they feel you respect them enough to believe they too can see. It’s a wonderful, healthy thing for them”
The old man sat down beside Jacob, the skin of his thin forearms ghostly white against the desktop. His voice shot out in a whisper: “But most of them are only children. They have such wonderful potential, their faces, the souls of these fine children. Yet some of them cannot know even what you are asking of them, that you are asking them to do the work, to master already everything that comes first. You gave them the responsibility today to look among the imaginary leaves glistening with dew, where they can see the real thing, and you are a wonderful teacher for those who can look. But these are mainly children! You know what the rabbis say about the strong man: he is the one who controls his passion. You have a great passion for the real stuff, but you need to control it.”
“Yes, the same when one writes,” Jacob said, and suddenly he felt an odd, numbing anxiety, as if he himself had no identity, despite--or was it because of--the images projected onto him by this ancient man. Who was Jacob Black really, he wondered? Gratitude fought in him with a sense of nothingness and self-erasure.
“You make me think of Bialik’s essay on Adam’s cry.” The old man spoke dispassionately now. “Jacob Black, forgive me, but I believe I witness you at a moment of crisis, a crossroads, and I can’t help but think of Bialik’s explanation for why he stopped writing the poems of his youth. He discovered that the longing in them--his attempt to echo Adam’s cry--was met by all the dreck of the world, degrading and destroying it, the machers, the schnorrers, you know? So he refused to write his beautiful poetry. Instead he began to write essays, which he packed with all the hazzerai of Zionism flowing through him and around him.”
“Hello,” Donald Fasker walked into the classroom, “what is this, silent meditation?”
“Jesus,” Black said.
“Lunch!” Donald smiled. “The Russian is asking for you.”
* * *
“What did you think of Professor Black’s class this morning?” the Russian asked Frances. “Wasn’t it quite touching?”
“It was exciting. To reach the Black girl like that!” The entourage was approaching the auditorium; Jacob trailed in back.
The Russian laughed, and he shouted against the driven snow: “Frances, you have the spirit of a Muscovite. You visit me there someday.”
Inside, Robert Sinclair mounted to the stage and tested the microphone. His face glowed with exertion and embarrassment. Its red outshone that of his tie and the gray-red skin at his neck. Occasionally he would glance at the Russian who slumped in his chair.
The professor first introduced the reader of the translations and then the great poet. “This courageous Russian artist and citizen,” he called him: a survivor of the Soviet period, a spectacular poet, ironic and compassionate at once, a Russian Auden. The audience tightened in their seats.
“Our visitor has written, ‘the task of the poet is to look deep inside man.’ And in most basic terms, there are varieties of courage and cowardice, of life and of death to be found within. Death above all to the possibilities of life, even in those of us who are outwardly full of promise. And as his art asks us whether we are alive or in some way dead at the core, we feel grateful for those of his poems which are full not only with wit and beauty but with what Robert Lowell has called his ‘sorrowing sympathy,’ his understanding of our shared human struggle.”
The stout visitor rose from his chair and slouched to the podium. Applause roared out at him. His detached, architect’s voice breathed into the microphone that he would first recite a poem of war. The American reader intoned the translation. The words were familiar to Joseph. It was the poem he had lighted on in the library stacks.
“Ya Goya,” a deep, quick, welling cry shook the Russian’s frame, and reached out to assault the surrounding ears and bodies. “Nagoye.” Death streamed its blood before the audience. “Ya gore.” Executioners and victims alike, the listeners were pinned to their chairs by the shocking cry of the short man before them. “Ya golos.” Black’s body was tightly clenched. The poet was like the great musicians who streamed from Russia and sometimes stayed to stun the West, Oistrakh and Heifitz and Rostropovich, Horowitz and Richter and Gilels.
“I am Goya,” Jacob heard, and glared at the faces in the audience. Before him was the carnage. Donald, sitting fascinated, folded his hands low over his crotch. “Goda.” One colleague’s tall skeleton was rotted clean to the bone, his stare frozen in two directions at once. “Ya golod.” Another, his bones consumed, held his severed head up with an erect tongue. “Ya gorlo.” Still another, born without a body, bounced about his empty chair. “Goloi.” Frances did a shriekless war-dance in her seat, her body drenched with blood. “I am Goya.”
Stunned applause splattered and then poured out. The poet offered a benign smile.
* * *
It was day’s end, and he tramped from the bus stop down the snowbound suburban street. The November sun was setting, and he turned to climb a road a few blocks from his home. Aslant a hillside and embedded in the snow was Robert Sinclair’s house. Jacob knocked at the front door. The professor’s wife May opened the door. A television flickered in the living room. It was the hour before their dinner. In her veined hand, she took Jacob’s arm, and asked after his wife. A martini trembled in her other hand. She leaned forward to kiss his cheek, and he smelled her breath. She waved him up the stairs to Sinclair’s study, which opened onto a balcony outside.
Robert sat pouring brandy into a glass by his easy chair.
“Get yourself a glass,” he said to Jacob in the doorway and pointed to a cabinet by the windows. His shirtsleeves were rolled up. His forearms were crusted with patches of gray punctuated by sections of blood-red skin. A boundary of dark red showed at his neck, as if his head had been removed and roughly sewn back on. Robert smiled a toast to his friend.
Joseph began speaking of the Russian, mentioning the Goya poem, but avoiding the details of the day’s experience, the revelations, the grotesque details, the absurdities. He pulled cigarettes from his pocket: an addiction, one more of his maladies.
“You don’t mind?” he mumbled. He exhaled the smoke into the room he often visited, with its shelves of books reaching up a story and a half. There was a silence. Jacob realized that he shouldn’t have come to impose his burden. There was nothing to be done. He glanced at the glass door to the balcony and the hill beyond it. Robert began to speak. His voice seemed to emerge from the eruption of his trunk. Jacob could hardly hear all the words.
“I’ve said before, I know, that his translator was a friend of mine. Whitfield had a great deal of promise in those days. He wrote long poems about experiences which were vivid, though really quite obvious to all of us who read him then, in our late teens and twenties. He turned to translation, and he worked with Williamson, the Eliot scholar. He ended up translating several Russian poets. I don’t know, but something got lost in the meantime, and it’s that something which you’re trying to voice, I think. At moments I think I used to have it. And you have it, Jacob. I don’t want to embarrass you. But I’d like to help you locate what you seek. Let me tell you about one time when it seemed to come clear to me.”
Robert raised his glass, and Jacob rose to pour more brandy. The liquid coagulated in their glasses. The professor continued.
“Who can fully understand the journey we are all taking? During the spring of my second year at college, I had a brilliant teacher, Howard Nemerov. He’d just gotten an appointment at Chicago. He interested himself in my work, asked to see what I was writing, and he seemed to admire my poems and stories--and how I admired him! I am of course partly Jewish. Whatever is finally at the core for each of us, Jewishness--I believe--is only one ingredient of our identity, but for him being Jewish carried quite a charge, though his own work seldom mentioned it. The last day of the semester, he called me into his office; I remember the bare cubicle he was assigned and his large, noble, drawn face--red with drink, his eyes circled with the black of the night’s concentration. He spoke of his admiration for my youthful work, passages which seemed quite fine. But--he said--I never touched the core of who I was, Jew or not: I would never become a great writer.” Jacob sat appalled, his face pained; he reached his hand out and let it fall.
“Yes,” Robert said. “His judgment. That day, then the next on the train ride home, I was overcome. I passed through a sort of death, a striking at my very being. I won’t talk about that, except to say that I realized to the extent I was feeling this pain, to the extent I still struggled, I was alive. I write little now. We are here, Jacob, on this darkening plain. And we know what it is to feel: even to feel dead is yet to feel something--to be haunted by a vision of what is possible but not present, not here, not now. This is something. Not greatness, but something. Perhaps it is sickness. That summer, I was ill with rheumatic fever, and I saw clearer, I think, than I’d ever seen before. I saw what courage is needed, what truth is faced, when you pass through death. What is reborn from the carnage is what you’re seeking, what the Russian seeks, what we are all reaching for.”
Jacob’s throat contracted. Nothing would emerge. Inside him welled and surged all he’d heard from the Russian, the old Jew, and now Robert Sinclair. What next, he wondered? Then the words came. “Your pain, your spirit reaching for the truth, your enduring here for us. They’re a gift to us, even if we don’t know it.”
He told his friend he must go; Rachel was waiting with dinner. He put on his heavy overcoat and looked at the snowy hillside outside the balcony door, seeking some way of escape. Sinclair walked carefully down the hall and the stairs in front of Jacob. Husband and wife stood a distance away from him and from each other as they bade him good-bye.
* * *
After dinner, Jacob worked in his study, off the laundry room of their rented duplex. His mind hummed with the day’s events, and simultaneously a poem began to assert itself, receding, then resounding, word by word, phrase by phrase. Hum and poem sometimes joined in a single perception that all about him he felt a refusal to perceive--the past, the present, the future, what have you. Everyone lived now post-holocaust; they’d all arrived at the door slammed shut of memory and perception, of language and love. What was there left to cry about at Hiroshima, at Auschwitz, at the Ukrainian lake and Babi Yar? Rien. A nothingness. Nothing. What was left for any of them to say, to do, for him, for Rachel, for the Russian poet, for the ancient Jew who was not his student but his teacher really, for Sinclair, Crawley, Fasker? Tu n’a rien vu a Hiroshima. Jacob mouthed each word from the film he’d seen, wanting to resuscitate the breath and savor of each sound and image. Depuis longtemps, depuis longtemps: after awhile, after a long time. Ton nom est Hiroshima, nous devenons Hiroshima: your name is--we become--after awhile--Hiroshima.
Rachel stood at the open door with her dark hair lit by the laundry room bulb. Across from his desk, she sat down in the reading chair, her body slender and small.
“Why so quiet at dinner? Why depressed?”
“It’s nothing,” he said. His mouth seemed to shut when he yearned to speak, and his poems made up for his anxious selfishness with words in life.
“What happened at the Russian’s poetry reading? You never said.”
Jacob started to describe the recitation, withholding again the rage and gore of his own response. Instead he told her of a poem about Chagall, which the Russian sang and shouted in the tilted hall, and another about a Ukrainian site of the Holocaust.
“This poet isn’t Jewish?” Rachel mumbled. “He’s a mensch. But that’s not what’s bothering you. Tell me, Jacob.”
Again, he spoke of his day, the visitation committee observing him teach--with the Russian in tow--and afterwards the old Jew’s haunting and generous remarks. Rachel sat curled quietly in the easy chair across from him, listening to the strange upwelling of words, the painstaking detail. He told her that Frances Crawley had come to his office in the late afternoon to offer the committee’s first impressions. “Certainly an adequate session. Naturally, there are things you might do differently. One of our members,” she had said, “believes you’re more interested in conveying impressions than in analyzing literature. Of course, we all noticed how much you encourage student responses. But I think that effectively gets them involved. More carrot than stick! Why not?”
“The idiots,” Rachel spit out, “the bureaucrats!” He stopped talking, and in the silence she stood and walked around the desk to him. Theirs was a marriage in which she spoke the words he could not, and he or his poems seemed to speak for her. Standing next to him, yet not touching, she stared down at the man with whom she was entwined. She let her fingers drift over the desk and the paper with its network of fragmentary lines and phrases.
“Those fools shouldn’t mean a thing to you. I know they can hurt, but do they really mean anything to you? What’s important is your poems, is your heart, your soul. That’s what’s important in everything we share together. When we’re together, when I become you and you become me.” Her fingers gently brushed his face now, his cheek, his hair, his ear. “There is no difference. Your pain, my joy. My pain, your joy are interchangeable.” Jacob’s hands reached to hold Rachel, to pull her to his lap. But she stood by him unperturbed, her body still and resistant.
“You know, Jacob, if we’re going to have child, I have to soon. This year I...”
“No, no,” he moaned, his hands slackening, “let’s not talk about it now.” He stood up, rising above her, and he walked around to the reading chair. He slumped down in it, and she sat in his chair at the desk.
“I want us to have a child.”
“Don’t say it, Rachel,” he said. “How can we bring children into such a world?”
“How can’t we? Think of my parents. They lived through Auschwitz--died through Auschwitz. They were children: think of how they felt. But then they met, and they had me. Who are you to deny our child life?”
* * *
He floated out into the darkened suburb, the tails of his overcoat fluttering in the snow behind him. He sought his bearings in the frozen air. His feet left their deep imprint in the new snow on the sidewalk. Frances Crawley’s house arose to one side, and he blazed a trail up her unshovelled driveway. Weightless flakes drifted into his face as he peered through the side windows into her house. He felt he must see what was sealed within, yet it was pitch dark and he knew it was folly: he was apart, sealed out.
He cut across her whitened lawn to the street, and he sought the road ascending to Sinclair’s house. Avoiding the stairs to the front door, he struggled further up the hill, and he stood trembling on a ledge of snow by the balcony window. A light was on in Robert Sinclair’s study, and Jacob looked through the glass. Sinclair sat in his chair, his shirt loosely open. He was holding his burning hand up to his reddened neck. His face tilted back, facing the wall of books. His eyes were shut, and his mouth gasped for air, which the sleeping man breathed in heavy gulps.
Jacob’s throat began to cry out in a low moan. He let himself leap free of the balcony ledge. He flew through the freezing air, falling to the snow bank just below. His face squashed into the thick crust of snow, and blood sprang from his mouth.
He wandered in circles through drifts of snow covering the hill and then the bare still streets. Nearby was Fasker’s house now, ablaze still at the end of a party for the Russian. Avoiding the shoveled walk and drive, Jacob pushed through the snowy lawn to the chairman’s lit front window. In the living room, the familiar crowd was thinning. They seemed actors on a stage, beaming silently at each other, oblivious to their audience of one, who gazed through the glass and gauzy curtains. He let go of the icy bush he held and kneeled slowly into the snow. He felt himself disappearing into the whitened lawn, the tableau of snow before the glass, the darkened street.
Voices clattered into the driveway. Jacob crawled unseen across the snowy yard. He stood in the sidewalk, stepped into the street, and jogged slowly down the block. A car approached in back of him, and turning, he saw that it was Frances driving the Russian poet.
“Are you going to stop or not?” Jacob spit out.
“Are you all right?” Frances asked.
The Russian mumbled to her, and the car stopped altogether. The poet leaned in front of her to speak through the narrow opening of the window. Frances slipped her arm inside his open coat.
“Jacob, hello,” the passenger boomed. “We missed you. Can we drive you anywhere? Are you hurt?”
“I had a fall as I walked. It’s okay now. I’m almost home.”
The Russian opened his door and came around the front of the car. He stood breathing clouds of steam next to Jacob in the center of the street. The visitor looked at the torn pants, the mouth. He came closer. His hands gripped the other man’s arms.
“Jacob Black,” he said, “you are a fine and decent man. Jews and Russians, so much in common, yet such terrible things have been done. Joyce was right, no?--history is a nightmare. You are a...what is it you Jews say? I can’t remember.” The Russian leaned forward to hug him and kiss his cheeks. “All I know is you don’t kill the souls of those around you.” Then he dodged back into the car which billowed down the street.
Jacob stood alone now in the snow. Tu n’a rien vu a Hiroshima. He tasted the blood in his mouth. You saw nothing at Hiroshima. Nothing.
My torn tongue
Is corroded by
Its own radiant code.
Is this the gap
Made in the mouth
By mute immolation
And toungueless pain?
He trudged home through the bare ice-bound streets, skidding on glazed patches, bruising his knees and hands as he fell. When cars passed, he sought the shadows. Veering back and forth between the center and the curb, Jacob heard the voices of his days and nights, their images, and the words he fathered into being.
After a time--
Depuis longtemps--
Like sex so richly
Slowly so darkly
The taste of words
Dissolves slowly
In the riddled mouth.
Ton nom est Hiroshima. That would be the title. Your name is Hiroshima. Flawed by alcohol and the taste of blood, yes, it would do for now, before another birth, wailing, bloody, flesh of his flesh. His toes were freezing. His face was swollen and open to the night.
My tongue aches
With your name Hiroshima.
My mouth mouths
Radiant Hiroshima.
Depuis longtemps,
Riddled with love,
We become Hiroshima.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Part iv: Schnittke, Shostakovich, Mahler - the Art of Travesty
[These thoughts on Schnittke can be read either individually or in order parts i to iv - see i through iii below - or altogether on the "Art of Travesty" page. Also, for my discussion of Joseph Conrad - specifically "Speech and Silence in Conrad's vision of Russia" - see the Conrad page here.]
The disintegration courted in each Schnittke score both distorts and salvages the contents of his society's music—its classical inheritance, its popular kitsch, its military marches, its buried religious forms, its peasant modes. He recycles these forms of music in such a way as both to salvage them, harmed and fractured as they are, to expose their fracture points, and to reveal the extremity which shadows survival in any totalizing order and which harms the members so “ordered.” As Adorno observes about Mahler, in Quasi Una Fantasia, “the individual’s fractures are the script of truth….In them any social movement appears negatively, as in its victims: the marches in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony are heard and reflected by [and from the standpoint of] those whom they drag away.” Similarly, in Schnittke’s travestied marches, tangos, or baroque obbligato, the distorted resurrection of haunted form itself becomes a mechanism of confrontation. The effect achieved here is similar to that of “the marginal, undomesticated element” in Mahler’s music, as Adorno describes it: “[That element]—archaic, outdated, [and] inimical to compromise—bound itself to traditional material, [which] was thereby reminded of the victims of progress, even musical victims: those elements of language ejected [but also calcified by tradition were] endowed with power in order to resist power. The shabby residue left by triumph accuses the triumphant.” Schnittke’s own accusatory and uncompromising travesties are akin to Adorno’s idea in Negative Dialectics of thought which scrutinizes itself and confronts its own complacency; music today must equally measure itself and be “measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, [or] it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.”
Taruskin, in his discussion of the composer, makes use of the idea of ‘negative dialectics’ in order to characterize Schnittke’s use of resolution as a sign of degeneracy, as an ironic consonance, so that the noise of great affirmative gestures is exposed as noise. As we have seen, Adorno’s conception can lead to a still deeper understanding of the ways in which this composer’s art aspires to reach through and redeem the haunting and negated discards of history. Such music attempts not only to voice what Adorno calls, in Mahler, “the shriek of horror at something worse than death: pogrom music,” but to restore the life-after-death of history’s broken, extinguished, discarded elements. The notion of restoring the potential of what falls between the cracks of history is developed by both Adorno and his colleague in critical theory Walter Benjamin. Their shared aim is to formulate a critical witnessing of what is suppressed by societies based in rationalized domination and the manipulation of reason. The stance of such witnessing shapes and underlies the late- or post-humanist identity of Schnittke’s postmodern art.
Benjamin and Adorno help us to clarify, in particular, the relationship of Schnittke’s art to grieving. In a discussion of the modern fate of storytelling—analogous in key ways to musical form for a composer like Schnittke—Benjamin suggests that the vanishing remains of life and of an entire tradition can be reclaimed as images, in the “transmissible form” of aesthetic figments. As such music gazes backward like Benjamin’s Angel of History on its vanishing tradition, on the history of musical form, its simultaneous complicity and defiance become apparent in the face of the power of the encompassing society. Music like Schnittke’s witnesses there all the discarded forms, the dashed hopes for transformation and the struggles against silence, which are lodged like “chips” of Messianic hope and expectation in musical history, as in human history. This looking backward exerts a profound pressure to hear what has been silenced, to redeem what has been cancelled, to restore the suppressed to expressivity and an existence in the world of sound. The fertility and wit of Schnittke’s retrievals of past musical gestures—for example, his travestied Classical and Baroque effects—are examples of such resurrection and reconnection, not in a complacent ‘neoclassicism’ but as a means of showing us how grotesquely haunted and pregnant with suppressed possibility is our present in the light of the transformative expectation of us implicit in past art.
Travesty is Schnittke’s mechanism for affirming the expectation that the capacity to generate meaning can endure in the face of unmeaning, of the death of meaning in a commodified and media-dominated world. Travesty becomes productive as a form of mourning. The elegiac generosity and wit of his retrievals of a whole range of music—from hymn and fugue to tango and punk—coexist with the effect of grievous shock which his voracious imitations achieve, sometimes in the very brutality of their sound. In this way, his art creates a double perspective which joins a stark veracity of critical witness with the voracity of travesty, and this double strategy energetically exposes the brutal power of domination in contemporary society, as it simultaneously testifies to what is left out, what has been discarded in the garbage bin as invalidated and invalided. Experiencing the brilliant wit and grief in his musical travesties, a tentative community of listeners is developed. Each of us becomes a witness to the dwarfing excess of power and the haunting distortion of our own complicity, yet each of us also participates at least as auditors in an act of startling and even healing generation, giving voice to what survives, however banal or eccentric or deformed by the scarring dialectic with society’s force.
The disintegration courted in each Schnittke score both distorts and salvages the contents of his society's music—its classical inheritance, its popular kitsch, its military marches, its buried religious forms, its peasant modes. He recycles these forms of music in such a way as both to salvage them, harmed and fractured as they are, to expose their fracture points, and to reveal the extremity which shadows survival in any totalizing order and which harms the members so “ordered.” As Adorno observes about Mahler, in Quasi Una Fantasia, “the individual’s fractures are the script of truth….In them any social movement appears negatively, as in its victims: the marches in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony are heard and reflected by [and from the standpoint of] those whom they drag away.” Similarly, in Schnittke’s travestied marches, tangos, or baroque obbligato, the distorted resurrection of haunted form itself becomes a mechanism of confrontation. The effect achieved here is similar to that of “the marginal, undomesticated element” in Mahler’s music, as Adorno describes it: “[That element]—archaic, outdated, [and] inimical to compromise—bound itself to traditional material, [which] was thereby reminded of the victims of progress, even musical victims: those elements of language ejected [but also calcified by tradition were] endowed with power in order to resist power. The shabby residue left by triumph accuses the triumphant.” Schnittke’s own accusatory and uncompromising travesties are akin to Adorno’s idea in Negative Dialectics of thought which scrutinizes itself and confronts its own complacency; music today must equally measure itself and be “measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, [or] it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.”
Taruskin, in his discussion of the composer, makes use of the idea of ‘negative dialectics’ in order to characterize Schnittke’s use of resolution as a sign of degeneracy, as an ironic consonance, so that the noise of great affirmative gestures is exposed as noise. As we have seen, Adorno’s conception can lead to a still deeper understanding of the ways in which this composer’s art aspires to reach through and redeem the haunting and negated discards of history. Such music attempts not only to voice what Adorno calls, in Mahler, “the shriek of horror at something worse than death: pogrom music,” but to restore the life-after-death of history’s broken, extinguished, discarded elements. The notion of restoring the potential of what falls between the cracks of history is developed by both Adorno and his colleague in critical theory Walter Benjamin. Their shared aim is to formulate a critical witnessing of what is suppressed by societies based in rationalized domination and the manipulation of reason. The stance of such witnessing shapes and underlies the late- or post-humanist identity of Schnittke’s postmodern art.
Benjamin and Adorno help us to clarify, in particular, the relationship of Schnittke’s art to grieving. In a discussion of the modern fate of storytelling—analogous in key ways to musical form for a composer like Schnittke—Benjamin suggests that the vanishing remains of life and of an entire tradition can be reclaimed as images, in the “transmissible form” of aesthetic figments. As such music gazes backward like Benjamin’s Angel of History on its vanishing tradition, on the history of musical form, its simultaneous complicity and defiance become apparent in the face of the power of the encompassing society. Music like Schnittke’s witnesses there all the discarded forms, the dashed hopes for transformation and the struggles against silence, which are lodged like “chips” of Messianic hope and expectation in musical history, as in human history. This looking backward exerts a profound pressure to hear what has been silenced, to redeem what has been cancelled, to restore the suppressed to expressivity and an existence in the world of sound. The fertility and wit of Schnittke’s retrievals of past musical gestures—for example, his travestied Classical and Baroque effects—are examples of such resurrection and reconnection, not in a complacent ‘neoclassicism’ but as a means of showing us how grotesquely haunted and pregnant with suppressed possibility is our present in the light of the transformative expectation of us implicit in past art.
Travesty is Schnittke’s mechanism for affirming the expectation that the capacity to generate meaning can endure in the face of unmeaning, of the death of meaning in a commodified and media-dominated world. Travesty becomes productive as a form of mourning. The elegiac generosity and wit of his retrievals of a whole range of music—from hymn and fugue to tango and punk—coexist with the effect of grievous shock which his voracious imitations achieve, sometimes in the very brutality of their sound. In this way, his art creates a double perspective which joins a stark veracity of critical witness with the voracity of travesty, and this double strategy energetically exposes the brutal power of domination in contemporary society, as it simultaneously testifies to what is left out, what has been discarded in the garbage bin as invalidated and invalided. Experiencing the brilliant wit and grief in his musical travesties, a tentative community of listeners is developed. Each of us becomes a witness to the dwarfing excess of power and the haunting distortion of our own complicity, yet each of us also participates at least as auditors in an act of startling and even healing generation, giving voice to what survives, however banal or eccentric or deformed by the scarring dialectic with society’s force.
Friday, November 27, 2009
Part iii: Schnittke, Shostakovich, Mahler, and the Art of Travesty
Schnittke's music involves a further exploratory voicing of this situation of witness, of art’s characteristic problem throughout the last century: the struggle of aesthetic form in a brutal era to articulate and stimulate consciousness, with its implicit ethical potential. His “post-everythingist” art exposes and travesties the deformations of power. Even the sound itself absorbs and protests power’s defeating brutality. There is the violin’s violent attack in the Fifth Concerto Grosso, or the massing of brutal cultural discards in the Fourth Symphony’s electric guitar distortion, or the First Concerto Grosso’s use of the intentionally deadened prepared piano melody—a sound which is said to resemble the old Soviet radio identification chimes, rather like NBC. (And that last coincidence reminds us of how complicit is the hyper-mediated sphere of consumer culture in the brutality and banality of modernity.) Where Shostakovich uses banal melodies and effects as the basis for tragic expressivity, Schnittke’s music reveals that our post-modern consciousness of extremity is identical with and emerges from the detritus, the absurd ordinariness and kitsch of the present. (There is a link here to the films of Schnittke’s friend Andrei Tarkovsky, which present lyrical forms infused with chaos and a defeating brutality. Think of the continuous envisioning of decay, detritus, and incineration in Nostalgia.) The pervasive brutalization of culture is rendered, assimilated, but transformed in Schnittke’s music, and this strategy has a double impact. It can seem to reproduce the affront of the uninteresting, and yet this nervous and energized evocation of crude banalities also enacts the springing vitality of travesty, its ironic and energized transformation.
This paradoxical confrontation of the brutalization of culture is dramatized particularly in Schnittke’s concertos, and the outlines of his characteristic musical and ethical strategies clearly emerge here. For example, in the second movement Allegro of the Viola Concerto, the viola's empowered individual personality, with its subjective extravagance of gesture, is pitted against the collective power of the orchestra's brutal march theme. The ironically excessive stylization of both orchestral grossness and the violist’s virtuoso intensity project a wild competition of nostalgias, a grotesque and ironic double valorization of both individual and collective. In this movement, we hear the withering excess of blasting factory sounds confronting the violist’s virtuosic yet fractured folk melody. At the movement’s catastrophic climax, the orchestral violence explodes and the brutality becomes explicit of the orchestral collective all sounding together; here, the viola is reduced from energized playfulness to fragmentary squeaks of sound, and its ghost of melody is now a trivial travesty of carnival tunes. The brutal, manic force of the Viola Concerto’s climax plays with power and the simulation of destruction; it ironically reproduces and explodes the ethos of domination in the blasted space of postmodern society, whether in autocracy’s propaganda theater or in media’s theaters of manipulation. Schnittke's listener must endure a version of that brutal blasting, but one also hears the coexistence—travestied and playfully ironic—of alternate voices, counter styles, other melodies.
Schnittke's music frequently strikes the ear as an overhearing of distressed, endangered conversation among a musical gathering of survivors who share jokes, stifle screams, search for solace, and vent a fragmenting rage. This effect is especially apparent in Schnittke’s chamber music, for example the Third String Quartet. In it, we hear a repeated collage of three thematic fragments: an antique and solacing modulation from Orlando de Lassus' Stabat Mater; then the dissonant kernel of theme at the core of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, the most radical destabilizing gesture in his late works; and finally, a sequence of tones based on the letters of Shostakovich's name. Haunting these fragments is the ghostly echo of a heavy-footed pesante folk theme. These themes represent fragmentary residues of musical traditions, of alternative pasts or inheritances, which have been retrieved in broken form, fragmented and—as such—transformed into what we have for meaning in a "post" or latter-day culture. This post-humanist transformation in Schnittke’s music is not parody but travesty. The musical fragments are clung to and valued for whatever grotesque and broken expressivity is possible in a usurped, harmed, and invalid culture. The musical gestures are reached for, mangled though they are, as all that is left for art to use now. (One is reminded of Schnittke’s Mann-like version of Doctor Faustus, desperately ransacking and travestying the past.)
A typical subject of travesty in Schnittke is the clichéd material of the Classical and Baroque eras, the musical conventions of Mozart and Haydn, Bach and Vivaldi. Classical form here is skewed into a means of assault. Take the form of the toccata, developing from Bach and the Baroque through Schumann to Prokofiev; Schnittke absorbs and deranges the form’s agitated and incessant repetitions into a sort of freakish intensity, disorienting and transformative. In his powerful Concerto Grosso #1, for example, the fifth movement drives a related repetitive Vivaldiesque violin figure into exaggeration and excess, loud and climactic, and then it is abruptly juxtaposed to tango. High and low styles are made to interpenetrate; in the tango, the Baroque harpsichord joins with virtuoso violin to express a sort of death: death of classical rhetoric, death by drowning in kitsch, which is confirmed by the climactic reentry of the deadened radio identification chimes on the prepared piano. Bathos is the risk and the cost of this strategy, and yet the music's violent voracity—absorbing all it touches, whether high Baroque or tango—becomes an expression of grief. Death of form becomes the energized occasion of witness, and desperation of gesture becomes a powerful incitement to attend to the haunted, blasted space of the postmodern. The sensations of Schnittke’s listerners are, at least in part, of enduring together as witnesses to a cataclysm, so that even the most innocently playful theme bears the marks of a sort of irradiation, of the grotesque, the harmed, as if the music were voiced and inflected by and within its own breakdown.
This paradoxical confrontation of the brutalization of culture is dramatized particularly in Schnittke’s concertos, and the outlines of his characteristic musical and ethical strategies clearly emerge here. For example, in the second movement Allegro of the Viola Concerto, the viola's empowered individual personality, with its subjective extravagance of gesture, is pitted against the collective power of the orchestra's brutal march theme. The ironically excessive stylization of both orchestral grossness and the violist’s virtuoso intensity project a wild competition of nostalgias, a grotesque and ironic double valorization of both individual and collective. In this movement, we hear the withering excess of blasting factory sounds confronting the violist’s virtuosic yet fractured folk melody. At the movement’s catastrophic climax, the orchestral violence explodes and the brutality becomes explicit of the orchestral collective all sounding together; here, the viola is reduced from energized playfulness to fragmentary squeaks of sound, and its ghost of melody is now a trivial travesty of carnival tunes. The brutal, manic force of the Viola Concerto’s climax plays with power and the simulation of destruction; it ironically reproduces and explodes the ethos of domination in the blasted space of postmodern society, whether in autocracy’s propaganda theater or in media’s theaters of manipulation. Schnittke's listener must endure a version of that brutal blasting, but one also hears the coexistence—travestied and playfully ironic—of alternate voices, counter styles, other melodies.
Schnittke's music frequently strikes the ear as an overhearing of distressed, endangered conversation among a musical gathering of survivors who share jokes, stifle screams, search for solace, and vent a fragmenting rage. This effect is especially apparent in Schnittke’s chamber music, for example the Third String Quartet. In it, we hear a repeated collage of three thematic fragments: an antique and solacing modulation from Orlando de Lassus' Stabat Mater; then the dissonant kernel of theme at the core of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, the most radical destabilizing gesture in his late works; and finally, a sequence of tones based on the letters of Shostakovich's name. Haunting these fragments is the ghostly echo of a heavy-footed pesante folk theme. These themes represent fragmentary residues of musical traditions, of alternative pasts or inheritances, which have been retrieved in broken form, fragmented and—as such—transformed into what we have for meaning in a "post" or latter-day culture. This post-humanist transformation in Schnittke’s music is not parody but travesty. The musical fragments are clung to and valued for whatever grotesque and broken expressivity is possible in a usurped, harmed, and invalid culture. The musical gestures are reached for, mangled though they are, as all that is left for art to use now. (One is reminded of Schnittke’s Mann-like version of Doctor Faustus, desperately ransacking and travestying the past.)
A typical subject of travesty in Schnittke is the clichéd material of the Classical and Baroque eras, the musical conventions of Mozart and Haydn, Bach and Vivaldi. Classical form here is skewed into a means of assault. Take the form of the toccata, developing from Bach and the Baroque through Schumann to Prokofiev; Schnittke absorbs and deranges the form’s agitated and incessant repetitions into a sort of freakish intensity, disorienting and transformative. In his powerful Concerto Grosso #1, for example, the fifth movement drives a related repetitive Vivaldiesque violin figure into exaggeration and excess, loud and climactic, and then it is abruptly juxtaposed to tango. High and low styles are made to interpenetrate; in the tango, the Baroque harpsichord joins with virtuoso violin to express a sort of death: death of classical rhetoric, death by drowning in kitsch, which is confirmed by the climactic reentry of the deadened radio identification chimes on the prepared piano. Bathos is the risk and the cost of this strategy, and yet the music's violent voracity—absorbing all it touches, whether high Baroque or tango—becomes an expression of grief. Death of form becomes the energized occasion of witness, and desperation of gesture becomes a powerful incitement to attend to the haunted, blasted space of the postmodern. The sensations of Schnittke’s listerners are, at least in part, of enduring together as witnesses to a cataclysm, so that even the most innocently playful theme bears the marks of a sort of irradiation, of the grotesque, the harmed, as if the music were voiced and inflected by and within its own breakdown.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Part ii: Schnittke, Shostakovich, Mahler, and the Art of Travesty
To listen to Schnittke’s music is akin to hearing the teetering songs at a wake, songs of rabid and consuming drunkenness. It is as if wild voracity becomes a sign of grief. One searches for the appropriate critical language in order to evaluate the unstable “situation” of expression and reception into which such music draws the listener. Partly this difficulty of critique results from the extremity of that “situation,” that of apocalyptic and at times tortured witness to the endangered process of making meaning itself. To analyze the paradoxical effect of moral and emotional witness in Schnittke and the model he offers music at the start of the twenty-first century, a useful guide is provided by Theodor Adorno’s idea of negative dialectics, of thinking against itself, against the grain of its own founding assumptions. Particularly relevant is Adorno’s use of such critique in his analyses of Mahler’s beautiful, desperate, massive symphonies in Quasi Una Fantasia and Mahler. Adorno’s conception of Mahler’s symphonies can be linked also to Shostakovich’s concerto and symphonic works, and we will see that the musical ideas both composers develop find their inheritor in Schnittke, in his exposure and explosion of symphonic and concerto forms.
Like Mahler’s Ninth Symphony or Shostakovich’s concertos for string soloists, Schnittke’s Fourth Symphony and his First Concerto Grosso and his Viola Concerto expose and travesty a fundamental assumption in certain uses of symphonic and concerto forms. That is their capacity to project the potentially totalitarian communal power of massed orchestral forces, all concertedly sounding together, whether in early modernist Vienna, in mid-century Soviet Russia, or in our own brave new century. These orchestral forces move toward obliterating the struggling individual voice of viola or violin, and the agon between individual and collective is marked in such music by a markedly exposed and disintegrating extremity. The music of Schnittke, like that of Mahler or Shostakovich, witnesses and estranges society’s gestures of power and expressivity, and—in Adorno's phrase from Minima Moralia—reveals those gestures to be, with their rifts and fissures, as indigent and distorted as they would appear in a transfigured, messianic perspective. This conception of aesthetic and ethical witness helps us to clarify why—as Ivashkin and Taruskin assert—Schnittke is the postmodern inheritor particularly of Shostakovich’s mantle.
To see Shostakovich in relation to the idea of witness is to recognize both auspicious expectations of his work and their ironic defeat. One aspect of Shostakovich's paradoxical struggle—in the Eighth String Quartet or his Fifth Symphony, for example—was to absorb into public, Soviet musical conventions certain otherwise abhorred features of early modernism: the Mahlerian symphony; the Neo-Classical transmutation of Bach's contrapuntal example; and the development of chamber music further into the region discovered in Beethoven’s late quartets, in what Schoenberg termed the "progressive" chamber works of Brahms, and in Bartok’s quartets. Subversively assimilating these modernist prerogatives, Shostakovich's major quartets and symphonies express a self-challenging awareness of the ways in which ethics and aesthetics can articulate or collide.
Shostakovich's complex sensitivity to the tension between aesthetic and ethical elements in modern art has often been interpreted in reductive terms, which ascribe either dissident or Stalinist motives to the composer, as he struggled to advance the Western musical tradition within the oppressive and totalitarian context of Soviet Russia. Given the range of his putative motives, to assert that his music is ambiguous does not merely celebrate its modernist autonomy—its brilliance as self-sustaining form; it is to point also to the music’s capacity to evince and even to liberate a range of interpretive responses in the face of a society dominated by assumed and preformed interpretation. Taruskin argues this same point in Defining Russia Musically. He shows how the motifs of the march or of grief in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony can become infused with ironic transformation to the point of interchangeability. In the familiar material of that symphony, the first movement's sensitive, inward, grieving second theme becomes transformed into the development section's violent, manic march theme, the same theme ironically yielding now a terrifying display of power. There is the inversion of this ironic transformation when the Scherzo's manic travesty of carnival music makes way in a sudden, breathtaking caesura for the Largo's dire requiem—or when the Allegro finale with its catastrophic and brutal march yields suddenly the grievous stagnation in the final few minutes before the rousing and punishing coda.
These transformations render, from within the totalized society, the ironic extremity and the interchangeability of inner complicity and of witness, the sensations almost simultaneously of assimilation into and victimization by the power at work in such a society. At the first performance in Moscow of the Fifth Symphony, the audience of party bureaucrats and musical aficionados was enveloped in a mutual catharsis, drawing from them open weeping and a sense of uplift rousing the audience literally to its feet. This symphony had given subjective voice to the simultaneous sensations of inner complicity and of agonized witness, but not only in the Soviet Union circa 1950. Shostakovich's rendering here of the interpenetration of power and grief is—in Taruskin's words—“an act of witness that gives voice to the silenced cost” from the perspective of the subject within a totalized society.
Like Mahler’s Ninth Symphony or Shostakovich’s concertos for string soloists, Schnittke’s Fourth Symphony and his First Concerto Grosso and his Viola Concerto expose and travesty a fundamental assumption in certain uses of symphonic and concerto forms. That is their capacity to project the potentially totalitarian communal power of massed orchestral forces, all concertedly sounding together, whether in early modernist Vienna, in mid-century Soviet Russia, or in our own brave new century. These orchestral forces move toward obliterating the struggling individual voice of viola or violin, and the agon between individual and collective is marked in such music by a markedly exposed and disintegrating extremity. The music of Schnittke, like that of Mahler or Shostakovich, witnesses and estranges society’s gestures of power and expressivity, and—in Adorno's phrase from Minima Moralia—reveals those gestures to be, with their rifts and fissures, as indigent and distorted as they would appear in a transfigured, messianic perspective. This conception of aesthetic and ethical witness helps us to clarify why—as Ivashkin and Taruskin assert—Schnittke is the postmodern inheritor particularly of Shostakovich’s mantle.
To see Shostakovich in relation to the idea of witness is to recognize both auspicious expectations of his work and their ironic defeat. One aspect of Shostakovich's paradoxical struggle—in the Eighth String Quartet or his Fifth Symphony, for example—was to absorb into public, Soviet musical conventions certain otherwise abhorred features of early modernism: the Mahlerian symphony; the Neo-Classical transmutation of Bach's contrapuntal example; and the development of chamber music further into the region discovered in Beethoven’s late quartets, in what Schoenberg termed the "progressive" chamber works of Brahms, and in Bartok’s quartets. Subversively assimilating these modernist prerogatives, Shostakovich's major quartets and symphonies express a self-challenging awareness of the ways in which ethics and aesthetics can articulate or collide.
Shostakovich's complex sensitivity to the tension between aesthetic and ethical elements in modern art has often been interpreted in reductive terms, which ascribe either dissident or Stalinist motives to the composer, as he struggled to advance the Western musical tradition within the oppressive and totalitarian context of Soviet Russia. Given the range of his putative motives, to assert that his music is ambiguous does not merely celebrate its modernist autonomy—its brilliance as self-sustaining form; it is to point also to the music’s capacity to evince and even to liberate a range of interpretive responses in the face of a society dominated by assumed and preformed interpretation. Taruskin argues this same point in Defining Russia Musically. He shows how the motifs of the march or of grief in Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony can become infused with ironic transformation to the point of interchangeability. In the familiar material of that symphony, the first movement's sensitive, inward, grieving second theme becomes transformed into the development section's violent, manic march theme, the same theme ironically yielding now a terrifying display of power. There is the inversion of this ironic transformation when the Scherzo's manic travesty of carnival music makes way in a sudden, breathtaking caesura for the Largo's dire requiem—or when the Allegro finale with its catastrophic and brutal march yields suddenly the grievous stagnation in the final few minutes before the rousing and punishing coda.
These transformations render, from within the totalized society, the ironic extremity and the interchangeability of inner complicity and of witness, the sensations almost simultaneously of assimilation into and victimization by the power at work in such a society. At the first performance in Moscow of the Fifth Symphony, the audience of party bureaucrats and musical aficionados was enveloped in a mutual catharsis, drawing from them open weeping and a sense of uplift rousing the audience literally to its feet. This symphony had given subjective voice to the simultaneous sensations of inner complicity and of agonized witness, but not only in the Soviet Union circa 1950. Shostakovich's rendering here of the interpenetration of power and grief is—in Taruskin's words—“an act of witness that gives voice to the silenced cost” from the perspective of the subject within a totalized society.
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