David Matthews

Conversations with Joseph Brodsky
Solomon Volkov
The Free Press, 1998, 306 pp.

I am presently enjoying a collection of conversations between the poet Joseph Brodsky and Solomon Volkov, a Russian musician, cultural critic, and author who emigrated to the U.S. in 1976, four years after Brodsky came here in exile. Brodsky as he is portrayed in the film Room and a Half is a considerably more appealing character than the Brodsky of these tape-recorded interviews that took place between 1978 and 1993. Plenty of interesting people can be pompous, arrogant, and full of themselves. Some I find simpatico. Brodsky, not so much.

Even so these wide-ranging interviews with the Nobel Prize-winning poet who lived almost half of his life in involuntary exile are a joy to read, unconvinced though I am by many of his assertions and ideas. My experience here bears out my conviction that we can respect and appreciate people with whom we differ on substantive matters and find ourselves to some degree unsympathetic.

Brodsky was not inclined to false modesty, I give him that, and the rather silly observations he was prone to spout are at times amusing, as with these remarks about Stalin and Western intellectuals:

…[D]o you know who Stalin made a very strong impression on? Homosexuals! This is terribly interesting. There was something southern, something Mediterranean in that mustache. A real-live mustachioed daddy! I think that a significant percentage of the support for Stalin among the intelligentsia in the West had to do with their latent homosexuality. I would guess that many people in the West turned to the Communist faith precisely for this reason. That is, they simply worshiped Stalin! (pp. 30-31)

Anti-intellectualism is a hallowed American tradition, as is homophobia for that matter. Perhaps Brodsky the emigré is just trying to fit in as he exhibits a variant strain not uncommon in intellectuals of the self-educated variety, which manifests itself in a tendency to hurl slurs at intellectuals, the intelligentsia, in general. This is altogether distinct from the legitimate leveling of concrete criticism against individual intellectuals, debatable points that will stand or fall on their merits.

There is an interesting exchange about European and American attitudes about money in an interview from the second half of the 1980s.

Brodsky: By the way, not just in Russia, but in Europe, too, talking about money is just not done. There are so many political parties, platforms, philosophies, and everything else there, all of which can be discussed with impunity, but no one would ever breathe a word about money. Whereas here, in the States, everyone talks about it. Well, maybe not everyone, but in general, people talk about money quite a lot. The majority of Americans, in comparison with Europeans, are extremely well off. Nonetheless, a rich American can start making faces because a sandwich seems too expensive to him. Or make a terrible scene about it in a restaurant.

Volkov: I’ve run into that more than once. Americans are nonchalant about going to a restaurant only when their company is footing the bill. (pp. 163-164)

A little further on Volkov inquires if Brodsky cooks for himself or goes out to eat.

Brodsky: There’s this illusion that it’s cheaper to cook for yourself, which is true to a certain extent, but in the final analysis, it’s not. There are so many psychological costs involved. First, there’s all that chaos. Then endless dilemmas arise: wash the dishes or not? And if so, then now or later? And so on. Therefore, as a rule, I go out in the evening. (p. 164)

The psychological costs involved in cooking for oneself! Now there’s an intellectual observation! These considerations have been on my mind of late even before I came to this passage. I enjoy dinner out, wine, conversation when with a companion. Dining out is something of an occasion, more than just getting something to eat. For that reason and so that I do not have to concern myself too much about expense when I do eat out, I cook at home most nights. I am no great shakes as a cook, but I do well enough for myself. Brodsky nails it with the psychological cost. That’s the kicker, the time it takes for preparation before and cleaning up after, with the disruption and chaos that entails. When you factor this in with time wasted at the wage-work, granted a necessary evil but nonetheless an evil, a substantial chunk is taken out of the day that would be better spent on other pursuits. There is no solution to this dilemma. We must live with it. Or as I advised my niece, an art major, when she asked if I have any advice about how to survive as an artist: Marry a doctor. It may be too late for me, but she still has a shot.

David :: Mar.13.2010 :: Literary :: 1 Comment »

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