Animal Symbolicum
Safe Conduct, and other works. By Boris Pasternak. (Elek, 15s.) `CELEBRITY does not exalt,' says Pasternak in one of his poems, and the wild success of Dr Zhivago is tending to confirm this. Because its fame has so little to do with its merits as a novel there are many'who think that the whole chorus of delight with which it was greeted can be dismissed as hysteria; and the celebrity which makes it desir- able to get every available sentence of Pasternak translated into English may also help to depress rather than to exalt him. Yet Dr Zhivago is a very great book (anybody who had the luck to read it before all the fuss began must remember, that un- mistakable shock of recognition) and this would remain true even if all the minor Pasternak now coming at us were worthless, even if it turns out that the lucid though inexplicable world-view of Zhivago is 'really' only a variety of Marxism too pure for politicians. In fact, however, this new collection is of high literary interest, whatever may be said of its politics. There is a quartet of stories (Mr. Alec Brown, the translator, explains the musical analogy) which contains 'subtle symboli- cal expositions' of Marxist concepts—Mr. Brown vouches for these in a series of terse and brilliant editorial comments. These stories seemed to me ' marred, like 'The Last Summer,' by excessive . rhetorical posturing, especially by catachresis ('the hues of the sunshine stuck so firmly to the walls . with their glue-paint wash that it was only with blood that the evening could tear off the past day, it 'stuck so'). There are a good many poems, hi- clUding '1905'; Mr. Brown gives one a powerful notion of the translator's difficulties here, and he
• seems to succeed wonderfully with 'Themes and
Variations,' which have the air of distinguished poetry. But the item that makes this book important is Safe Conduct, an autobiography of the poet up to the death of Mayakovsky.
This is a poet's work, as all Pasternak's is; the method is Goethe's, for what we get is not primarily a narrative but an imaginative projec- tion of isolated events as symbolic. We jump from one period, one crisis, to another, interested less in -the development of a personality than in a pattern of events thus accorded symbolic force. Time is not so much regained as defeated, extinguished by flares of figurative language, in what Mr. Brown calls the 'crucial stretto passages.' Pasternak's subject is not an ageing individual, but man considered as animal symbolicum. Even the great men who influenced him in his youth —Rilke, Scriabin, Mayakovsky—serve as deter- minants in this pattern. Here; as in Zhivago, the aim is to transpose what is represented from 'cold coordinates' to 'burning' ones. As if to provide a hint of 'cold coordinates' in work that transcends them, Pasternak scrawls railways all over his books; at times one feels that everything of any importance happens in trains. This satisfies our esprit de geomitrie; even these important things have to happen according to the rules.
Obviously there is no sharp difference, when this method is used, between autobiography and fic- tion. However, we do learn something about Pasternak's own life. He might, thought Scriabin, have been a great musician; but he gave up his studies for no good reason immediately after he was told so. A memorable portrait of Hermann Cohen emerges, as if by accident, in the pages on the poet's philosophical studies at Marburg; he gave these studies up just as he was on the point of being, accepted, because he found he was using learning in a poet's and not a philosopher's way. Love moved him both to poetry and wild train journeys; in the end everything did.
In some ways the most remarkable aspect of the autobiography is the short and straightforward statement of Pasternak's aesthetic; it is similar to what may be inferred from Zhivago, but here he thought it fitting to be fairly unequivocal about his position, and one is grateful. It is a symbolist aesthetic; art depends upon the 'brilliance and unimperative quality of its images,' indeed it con- sists of their 'mutual interchangeability.' It is essential that this symbolic form, this way of knowing, should remain absolutely free and un- directed, even though in a modern society the artist is necessarily 'different' and disobedient and might therefore seem to need correction. 'The most lasting images are composed by the iconoclast in those rare cases when he was not born empty-handed.' Thus the suicide of Maya- kovsky, whom Pasternak regakded as the type of the modern romantic genius, was a completely symbolic event. Pasternak traces these ideas from German romanticism through the Symbolists and Blok to Mayakovsky, who intensified them; in the poet's assumptions that he was a criterion of life (compare Dr. Zhivago) and that he would have to pay with his own life for this honour, Pasternak sees a truth 'devastatingly vivid' and 'incontro- vertible.'
Clearly you do not say the last word about Pasternak when you talk'of his moving from neo- Hegelianism to Marxism; he belongs to a different tradition. There is a superb passage in his account of Mayakovsky's death which exactly dis- tinguishes between reality, apprehended by the artist, and the ersatz reality of others. The mass conception of tragedy had swiftly excluded the firearm freshness of the sheer fact. There, as if of saltpetre, the asphalt yard had reeked of worship of inevitability, that is, of that false urban fatalism built on monkey mimicry, representing life to be a chain of obediently recordable sensations. There too people were sobbing, but that was because with animal mediumistic response the shocked gullet had reproduced a spasm of dwelling blocks. fire escapes, revolver holsters and all that turns one queasy with despair or makes one howl murder.
There is some avoidable clumsiness in the trans- lation here, but one can still see what Pasternak's rhetoric is al its best; the concrete 'firearm• fresh- ness' opposed to the abstract 'urban fatalism,' and lying between them all the gulf of the difference between a full intuitive response and mere animal mimicry, between the artist and l'homme machine. The passage rings with the familiar claim of they great modern artist to special and authoritative sensibility; Pasternak is always on the side of life, but it is not a generally accessible life. And -if we are ever foolish enough to think him unlucky to be in Russia, we should remember that he would certainly find our own society profane and vulgar; he would be the enemy here, or anywhere.
FRANK XERMODE
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