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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 ...