FOR AS LONG AS we are, we’re always somewhere. Feet are always somewhere, whether planted or running. Minds, notoriously, can be elsewhere. Minds, whether from lack of vitality or from the deepest strengths, can be in the past and the present, or the present and the future. Or simply here and there. For reasons not hard to understand, the making of art at the highest plane of accomplishment during the last century or so has required, more often than not, an exceptional development of the talent for being, mentally, in two places at once. Elated by the landscapes he has been painting and drawing in the south of France, van Gogh writes his brother Theo that he is “really” in Japan. The young, as yet unpublished poet from Leningrad fulfilling a sentence of compulsory labor on a collective farm in a village in the Far North, near the White Sea, receives the news—it is January 1965—that T. S. Eliot has died in London, sits at a table in his icy shack, and within the next twenty-four hours composes a long elegy to Eliot, which is also an homage to the very alive W. H. Auden (the tone and swing of whose elegy on the death of Yeats he adopts).
He was elegant enough always to claim that he had not really suffered during that year and a half of internal exile; that he rather liked farmwork, especially shoveling manure, which he regarded as one of the more honest and rewarding jobs he’d had so far, everyone in Russia being mired in shit, and had got quite a few poems written there.
Then, back in his native Leningrad, a few years later Joseph Brodsky, as he put it succinctly, “switched empires.” This happened suddenly, from one day to the next, and entirely against his will: among other losses, it separated this beloved only son from his elderly parents, who, in further punishment of the renegade poet, were thereafter repeatedly denied exit permits by the Soviet government to meet for a brief reunion in, say, nearby Helsinki, and died without his ever embracing them again. Intractable grief, borne with great indignation, great sobriety.
He even managed to make of his KGB-enjoined departure something self-propelled—
And as for where in space and time one’s toe end touches, well, earth is hard all over; try the States
—landing among us like a missile hurled from the other empire, a benign missile whose payload was not only his genius but his native literature’s exalted, exacting sense of the poet’s authority. (To be found as well among its prose writers: think of how Gogol and Dostoyevsky conceived of the novelist’s moral and spiritual task.) Many aptitudes eased his rapid insertion in America: immense industriousness and self-confidence, ready irony, insouciance, cunning. But for all the dash and ingenuity of his connections with his adopted country, one had only to watch Joseph Brodsky among other Russian exiles and émigrés to realize how viscerally, expressively Russian he had stayed. And how generous his adaptation to us, along with the eagerness to impose himself on us, actually was.
Such adaptability, such gallantry, may go by the name of cosmopolitanism. But true cosmopolitanism is less a matter of one’s relation to place than to time, specifically to the past (which is simply so much bigger than the present). This has nothing in common with that sentimental relation to the past called nostalgia. It is a relation, unsparing to oneself, which acknowledges the past as the source of standards, higher standards than the present affords. One should write to please not one’s contemporaries but one’s predecessors, Brodsky often declared. Surely he did please them—his compatriots agree that he was
his era’s unique successor to Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova. Raising the “plane of regard” (as he called it) was relentlessly identified with the effortfulness and ambitions and appropriate fidelities of poets.
I think of Joseph Brodsky as a world poet—partly because I cannot read him in Russian; mainly because that’s the range he commanded in his poems, with their extraordinary velocity and density of material notation, of cultural reference, of attitude. He insisted that poetry’s “job” (a much-used word) was to explore the capacity of language to travel farther, faster. Poetry, he said, is accelerated thinking. It was his best argument, and he made many, on behalf of the superiority of poetry to prose, for he considered rhyme essential to this process. An ideal of mental acceleration is the key to his great achievement (and its limits), in prose as well as in poetry, and to his indelible presence. Conversation with him, as felicitously recalled by his friend Seamus Heaney, “attained immediate vertical takeoff and no deceleration was possible.”
Much of his work could be subsumed under the early title of one of his poems, “Advice to a Traveller.” Real travel nourished the mental journeying, with its characteristic premium on speedy assimilation of what there was to know and feel, determination never to be duped, mordant avowals of vulnerability. Of course, there were favorite elsewheres, four countries (and the poetry produced within their borders) in particular: Russia, England, the United States, and Italy. Which is to say, empires never ceased to incite his powers of fast-forward association and generalization; hence, his passion for the Latin poets and the sites of ancient Rome, inscribed in several essays and the play Marbles as well as in poems. The first, in the end perhaps the only, tenable form of cosmopolitanism is to be a citizen of an empire. Brodsky’s temperament was imperial in many senses.
Home was Russian. No longer Russia. Perhaps no decision he made in the later part of his life was as startling (to many), as emblematic of who he was, as his refusal, after the dismantling of the Soviet empire and in the face of countless worshipful solicitations, to go back even for the briefest visit.
And so he lived most of his adult life elsewhere: here. And Russia, the source of everything that was most subtle and audacious and fertile and doctrinaire about his mind and gifts, became the great elsewhere
to which he could not, would not, out of pride, out of anger, out of anxiety, ever return.
Now he has rushed away from us, for so it feels, to reside in the largest, most powerful empire of all, the final elsewhere: a transfer whose anticipation (while enduring a serious cardiac ailment for many years) he explored in so many defiant, poignant poems.
The work, the example, the standards—and our grief—remain.
[1998]