Faith, Hope and Poetry

Osip Mandelstam1

‘Art for art’s sake’ has become a gibe because of an inadequate notion of what art can encompass, and is usually bandied by people who are philistines anyhow. Art has a religious, a binding force, for the artist. Language is the poet’s faith and the faith of his fathers and in order to go his own way and do his proper work in an agnostic time, he has to bring that faith to the point of arrogance and triumphalism. Poetry may indeed be a lost cause—like Jacobitism, as a young Scottish poet observed recently—but each poet must raise his voice like a pretender’s flag. Whether the world falls into the hands of the security forces or the fat-necked speculators, he must get in under his phalanx of words and start resisting.

All this is made sure by the example of Osip Mandelstam, the Lazarus of modern Russian poetry. Mandelstam’s last published book came out in 1928 and in 1938 he died in transit to one of Stalin’s prison camps, aged forty-seven. In the meantime and for two decades after his disappearance, his name was almost totally erased from Soviet literary records. His books were confiscated, he became a ‘non-person’, and the poems of his last ten years were buried in three school exercise books which his widow carried through war and persecution like the ashes of an ancestor. Yet nowadays if an edition of his work were to be published in Russia it would sell out in minutes. Mandelstam’s faith, it would seem, has been justified:

The people need poetry that will be their own secret

to keep them awake forever,

and bathe them in the bright-haired wave

of its breathing.

Mandelstam served the people by serving their language. His early poems were written in association with the Acmeist poets, a group whose ideas parallel those of the Imagists and who came together at almost the same time. These first poems are fastidious and formal, breathing the air of the whole European literary tradition, exhaling themselves back into that air as a tang of Russian; yet one can see the organic link between the Parnassian cool of these lines, written in 1915:

This day yawn like a caesura: a lull

beginning in the morning, difficult, going on and on:

the grazing oxen, the golden languor powerless

to call out of the reed the riches of one whole note,

and the bare authority of this, written in exile twenty years later:

When my string’s tuned tight as Igor’s Song,

when I get my breath back, you can hear

in my voice the earth, my last weapon,

the dry dampness of acres of black earth.

And in another poem to that black Russian soil he asks it to be ‘the dark speech of silence labouring’. As Clarence Brown puts it, Mandelstam was an aural poet: ‘He heard his lines and took them down, having wrested them from silence, from what he could not, at first, hear.’ Everything—the Russian earth, the European literary tradition, the Stalin terror—had to cohere in an act of the poetic voice; ‘So Ovid with his waning love/wove Rome with snow in his lines’—this voice of poetry was absolute for him.

Mandelstam obliterates the Yeatsian ‘choice’ between perfection of the life or of the work. In 1971 he entered the martyrology of Russian literature when his widow’s memoir, Hope against Hope, was published in the West. That story began with Mandelstam’s arrest because of a poem he had written against Stalin. It had not been published, but an informer’s whisper was enough to lead to his three-year exile in Voronezh (1934–37) and his second arrest and death, from heart-failure, almost immediately afterwards.

Still, if Nadezhda Mandelstam is one of the great sustaining muses of our time, inspiring and literally carrying the poems from silence into the world, Clarence Brown is one of the best advocates that any poet has ever found. His book covers Mandelstam’s early life and work, up until the end of the twenties, and is the result of almost twenty years’ immersion in the poetry and research into the life. As a biographer and critic, Clarence Brown works with a double sensitivity: he gets inside his subject to comprehend, to feel with him and affect the reader; but he also stands outside to see the poet in a context and to test the poems against his extremely literate ear and cultivated common sense. The pace of his book is slow but not leisurely; the tone one of concern, of intimate involvement. He is Horatio to Mandelstam’s Hamlet in the strict arrest of death, and the best compliment I can pay the book is to say that it measures up its dedication, which is to Nadezhda Mandelstam.

Clarence Brown also writes about the poems with beautiful insight into their techniques and linguistic texture, and with obvious gratitude and joy in their very existence. I cursed my ignorance of Russian as I followed his commentaries and as I read the versions of the poetry which he and W. S. Merwin have collaborated upon. Selected Poems contains work from all periods of Mandelstam’s career, from the Acmeist verse of Stone to the last poems in exile, tears of fire and ice. The versions have the drift of contemporary American verse about them, and I have a notion that Merwin’s rhythms soften the sculptured sounds of the Russian—inevitable, anyhow, when metrical, rhymed stanzas become free verse—but they nevertheless preserve the richness and uniqueness of Mandelstam’s imagination, his premonition and almost celebration of doom and resurrection:

Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance.

I dwindle among them. Nobody sees me. But in books

much lived, and in children’s games I shall rise

from the dead to say the sun is shining.

We live here in critical times ourselves, when the idea of poetry as an art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry as a diagram of political attitudes. Some commentators have all the fussy literalism of an official from the ministry of truth. Mandelstam’s life and work are salutary and exemplary: if a poet must turn his resistance into an offensive, he should go for a kill and be prepared, in his life and with his work, for the consequences.

Hibernia, 1974