New York: Home
AS HE AGED -
and in his last years he aged very fast, as if trying to catch up with
or even
overtake his own end - a kind of world- weariness (mellowness?) seemed
to be
replacing the earlier acerbity. Even so, the world was still a
wonderful place.
Joseph's creativity did not desert him.
Talking of
wonderful places, what of Joseph and New York City? This was his home
for most
of his time in the West, even though from 1981 he taught in the spring
at Mount
Holyoke College and rented a home in South Hadley, Massachusetts. He
was also
in the habit of spending Christmas in Venice. The Joseph I knew,
however, was
the New York Joseph, even though I met him first in London and, at
least in the
seventies, often saw him there, and even though my first visit to him
in
America was to Ann Arbor, Michigan when he was poet-in-residence at the
University of Michigan. I visited him only once in Emily Dickinson
country.
New York became his home
and he was at home in New York. Or
that's how it seemed. The City lets (or encourages?) you to be whatever
you
are, meaning that, wherever you hail from, it is not really possible to
continue being a stranger or foreigner there. Everyone is both outsider
and
insider. To live in New York is to become a native New Yorker. If
Joseph was
going to fit anywhere, it was in New York.
But there is something
else. The scale of the city, even if
it is now matched by other urban conglomerations, still frees one from
the need
to measure up to one's environment. It is impossible to measure up to
New York.
Actually, its scale is still unique.
Perhaps it is the only
truly twentieth-century city, which would
also means that, among cities, it is the one and only true child of the
nineteenth-century. What will it be in the twenty-first century? Joseph
did not
expect to live into the next century anyway, and perhaps in a way
didn't want
to. The world is, or appears to be changing radically, while he had
sweated
blood surviving in it as was. After all, even so brave and virtuoso an
improvisers
as Joseph has his limits. The price of further change might simply have
been
too great.
For instance, Russia.
There was no longer any impediment to his
returning. On the contrary, he would have received a hero's welcome.
But he was
a world citizen, or rather he was a New Yorker. A hero's welcome might
have
disturbed the equilibrium he had achieved, at who knows what cost. And
besides,
as he was fond of saying, being outside was the best situation for the
artist. Being
a New Yorker allowed him to be outside and at the same time to enjoy
the horny
comforts it offered.
Perhaps he could have
slipped into Russia unannounced, as the
fiction writer Tatyana Tolstaya suggests, in a novelistically
transcribed
interview:
"Do you know, Joseph, if
you
don't want to come back with a lot of fanfare, no white horses and
excited
crowds, why don't you just go to Petersburg incognito?" [. . .] Here I
was
talking, joking, and suddenly I noticed that he wasn't laughing [. .. ]
He sat
quietly, and I felt awkward, as if I were barging in where I wasn't
invited. To
dispel the feeling, I said in a pathetically hearty voice: "It's a
wonderful
idea, isn't it?" He looked through me and murmured: "Wonderful. . .
Wonderful ... "
Wonderful, but too late.
After all, one of Joseph's great achievements,
as George Kline has pointed out, had been to throw himself into the
language
and literature of his adopted country. He rejected the path of
nostalgia,
regret, self-pity,lamentation, the fatal choice (if one can call it
that) of so
many émigré writers, especially poets. And what now, when he was no
longer
technically an involuntary exile? He had refused to complain about it,
just as
he refused to complain about his treatment in Russia, or his lack of a
formal
education. On the contrary, he had valued exile to the arctic region as
liberating. And the education in question was a Soviet one, though when
he said
that the "earlier you get off track the better", he may not have been
referring exclusively to the Soviet system.
Furthermore, his own
generation, as he acknowledged, was what
mattered to him. He kept up, to a remarkable extent, with what was
being
written by his younger contemporaries, but his real sympathies were
with those
of his own generation. Although, with the unanticipated collapse or
abdication
of the Soviet imperial power, he came to see many of his friends again,
he had
both intellectually and emotionally bade them" farewell" (proshchaite),
not "good-bye" (do svidanie, "see you again
"). In a sense, the reunions must have been posthumous affairs. So,
when
he was shown photos, taken shortly before his departure from the Soviet
Union,
he suddenly became serious, solemn, grim: "One's affinity is for the
generation to which one belongs ... Theirs is the tragedy ... " Not of
those who emigrated or, like himself, were given little choice other
than to
leave. And as for himself, well, he had exchanged oppression for
freedom and
all kinds of material advantage. He had no patience with talk of exile.
Perhaps
the dissolution of the Soviet State, its transformation, rather than
opening
the way for his return, simply confirmed his Americanness ...
Or rather, his New-
Yorkerness. New York, as he put it, "reduces
you to a size". It is a gigantic impediment to gigantism. And yet, at
the
same time, it is human. The scale of its monumentality is human. It was
also a
"Mondrian city". Who, familiar or besotted with New York, does not
know what he meant by that? The perpendicularity and horizontality;
windows,
facades, facets ...
Anyway, it was his city;
that is, he made it his. And he was right
about it. In this place, you were not greater than yourself; you were
"reduced to a size" (curious that use of the indefinite article), the
right size, your own human size. It's not true that you were dwarfed by
those
canyons; they are clearly the product of human labour, an index to
human
industry. And strangely heartening, too, even now, nearly a century on
...
But now I am waxing
sentimental. Thinking about the city now,
at age sixty-one, it seems to me not a bad place to die in. I remember
being
told by Ted Hughes, ten or twenty years ago already, that we had
reached the
age when the Indian princes abandoned their worldly concerns and
retired to the
forests. Perhaps New York is the equivalent for urban man? As if one’s
death
there would be less unbearably personal, with that crush of people
which
somehow leaves you uncrushed, so you feel, even in your isolation, part
of a
far greater organism, an organism in that it doesn't (quite)
self-destruct.
There's one positive effect being "reduced to a size". Joseph, having
been deprived of what, as a Jew, he possibly never quite possessed,
Russia,
having "quit the country that bore and nursed him" and having been
forgot - ten by so many - first you have to be known
by so many -, having suffered catastrophic loss, however much
he insisted that he had left the worse for the better, was now
threatened with
the early loss of his life. Under these circumstances, New York,
perhaps, fitted
the bill.
I am waiting
for Joseph in Washington Square. It looked like rain before, but it
hasn't
rained yet. I am watching the skateboarders, the jugglers, the
children, the
clochards, the mothers, the gangs of youths. Nobody pays any attention
to me,
and I suddenly feel blissfully unselfconscious. Joseph arrives late. He
shuffles over, grinning wryly. He seems in no hurry and doesn't
apologize. There
is a stillness about him. Suddenly I feel, by contrast, tense, anxious.
We stroll into the
Village, towards one of his favourite
restaurants. And now it is raining or drizzling. He has to call Maria.
He uses
a street phone. At the same time, he conveys to me that nothing has
changed ...