Kipling Good

By KINGSLEY AMTS

LI ORD DAVID CECIL once remarked that when we say a man looks like a poet we don't mean he looks like Chaucer and we don't mean

he looks like Dryden and we don't mean he looks like Shakespeare. I forget exactly who he said we did mean he looked like: Shelley, perhaps, or Dylan Thomas. Anyhow, Lord David might well agree that when we—that is, persons living in the middle of the twentieth century— say a man looks like a poet we could do a sight worse than mean he looks like Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

On my experience the other week in Cam- bridge, Yevtushenko's looks were the most striking thing about him. His clothes reflected perfectly his elegant and casual demeanour: light grey silk suit with variations in tone that did not quite constitute a pattern, navy-blue brass-button shirt with a vertical checker-board strip running up and over the right shoulder. His hands looked strong and deft, like a precision mechanic's. But his face held the attention. With its clear blue eyes, thin upper lip above delicate teeth, and generally flattish planes, it was both grim and gay, seeming to hold both these quali- ties at once when in repose and lending itself to swift alternation between the one mood and the other. I have found that kind of emotional agility to be uncommon among non-English- speaking intellectuals, and rarer still among those of any nation who present themselves as poets.

No photograph of Yevtushenko could do justice to any of this, to the directness of his gaze or to his personal magnetism, a quality I had hardly cared to believe in before I met him. The prospect of several hours' conversation through interpreters with a literary Russian had not thrilled me much, but when I arrived at the lunch and was introduced to him all but one of my reservations vanished. The remnant was slight disquiet at the notion of being cross-examined about Russian and other foreign literature. This foreboding was justified: I ended the day feeling ignorant, which I imagine does one no harm occasionally.

We began well. Through one or other of the interpreters, who were both British, Yevtushenko complimented me on my novel Lucky Jim, which he said had been well received in Moscow. I said truthfully that I was pleased to hear this.

'Since the appearance of Lucky Jim, some people have found they've had to take up a new position,' one of the interpreters said.

`People in Russia? Good God. Tell him —'

'Er, not quite,' the other interpreter said. 'What Mr. Yevtushenko wanted to know was whether, since the appearance of Lucky Jim, you've found you've had to take up a new position.'

`Oh. Well . . . not really.'

'But you've come to Cambridge. Won't that make you change your line? Do you like it here?' 'Oh yes. It's not too bad.'

'It's bourgeois, though, isn't it?'

'Yes, I suppose it is. But the people are quite pleasant.' When this reached him Yevtushenko looked disappointed: 1 had become corrupted, perhaps, or else had just clammed up on him. He switched the talk to politics.

'In many countries,' he evidently said, 'there is a conflict between the bureaucrats, the philistines [that's as near as I can get, it's got a broader meaning in Russia* and the people who want to live ordinary private lives.'

`Between the power men and the sensualists?'

'Possibly. There are really two international nations in existence, each with its own interests in common, and these override national interests.'

He developed this neo-Marxist thesis for a time, but always in general terms. In an attempt to give things some sort of concrete turn, I men- tioned the power man's supposed indifference or hostility to bodily enjoyment, and instanced the tale that Hitler abominated smoking, feeling myself on safe ground here with one so clearly committed to the cigarette.

'Hitler's cigarettes were the chimneys of the extermination camps,' was the reply. There were more such ,sententim later, all as hard to answer as this one.

'What do you think of Dr. Zhivago?' I was asked.

'I haven't read it. I don't know Russian.' `It has been translated.'

`I know.' I thought of doing my piece about an interest in the paraphrasable content of literature being an anti-literary interest, but re- frained. It felt too boring in anticipation.

After lunch we went across to King's chapel. Yevtushenko's height and youth and foreign look gave him an authority which had nothing to do with arrogance. In the way he looked about him 1 thought I detected the courteous interest, the concern to see but not to make comparisons, of a man looking at something impressive that the Other Side had done.

`You atheist?' he asked me in English.

'Well yes, but it's more that I hate him.'

I felt he understood me very fully. He gave his delightful grin. There was in it a superiority im- possible to resent. (It might be real.) `Me,' he said, pointing to himself, then gesturing more vaguely towards the roof, the other people there, the Rubens, but also seeming to include the being I had just mentioned; `me . . . means nothing.'

Outside again, we walked towards the river. 'You like Kipling?' he asked. 'Kipling . . good.'

`Isn't he an imperialist?'

He gave a brief shout of laughter. 'Oh yes. But . . . good. Russian translator Shakespeare . . . good. Translator Shakespeare translator Kipling. Good.' Then he declaimed something I can only represent as:

Boots. boots, boots, boots, koussevitsky borodin,

Boots, boots, boots, boots, dostoievsky gospodin . . .

and so on for another two or three couplets.

'It sounds good,' I said.

On the way up in the car we noticed some uniformly clad figures flitting about beyond the trees. Yevtushenko turned round animatedly. 'Football,' he said.

`Cricket, I think.'

`Football.'

We stopped the car to prove it to him. He turned round again. 'You like football?'

'Well, not soccer so much. I prefer rugby.' Roogbi,' the interpreter said. 'What else can I say?'

Yevtushenko did his disappointed look.

When we stopped finally he leaned over and grasped my wrist in the way he had-1 forget

what led up to this—and spoke with great earnestness. 'I am only a writer by coincidence.

My readers would write exactly as I do if they wanted to write. They created me, I didn't create them.'

We got out. 1 indicated my house. 'Bourgeois?' He gave another shout of laughter. It had no edge to it.

The press boys were waiting. Yevtushenko refused brandy, said unavailingly 'No photo,' and

went and sat down on the lawn. A sort of inter-

view developed. I found it natural to look at the interpreter when I was talking and also when he

was talking. Yevtushenko, however, looked at me more or less throughout, so that he could put his points with maximum conviction and then, while

these were being translated, be on the alert for each fresh access of bafflement or horror as it dawned on my face. He always did this, I was told later. It disconcerted me a little at the time.

He was rather severe, for him, when I ex- pressed indifference to the work of Henry Moore and said lamely that I preferred something I could make a bit of head or tail of. 'There is an old Russian proverb'—I gazed unbelievingly at the interpreter—'which says that some kinds of simplicity are worse than theft.'

'Yes. Would you ask him who are the readers he writes for?'

'Russian writers have always written for the people. Some of my poems are for workers and soldiers, others for the intelligentsia.'

'Doesn't he find it hard to be two men at the same time?'

'There's no difficulty. The bonfire is the same even though the flames fly out in different directions.'

'Does he feel his primary responsibility is to literature or to the Russian reading public?'

'To both.'

Hereabouts the interpreter explained to me that time was getting short: Yevtushenko was booked for his reading at the Union in about an hour, after an undergraduate tea and a game of ping-pong—he had to have that before he read.

When he had said: 'Some poems are like some children: the ugliest are the best,' we wrapped things up. A little of the damp from the lawn had transferred itself to the seat of the poet's trousers. He cured this himself, politely taking an electric iron off my eight-year-old daughter and vanishing into the play-room. It was all over before the photographers could do anything. 'That's the shot of the year gone,' they said morosely.

Rather as earlier, the thought of a poetry recital in an unfamiliar language had not greatly excited me. The reality was for long periods ab- sorbing and at no time dull. Yevtushenko's voice, leaning hard on vowels not at the beginning of a syllable but an instant later, ranged from sad quietude to sonorous declamation in a way that perhaps suggested a good Russian actor reciting Shakespeare. The renderings were evidently word-perfect and under complete control. Every- body listened hard.

Each poem was preceded by an admirably un- 'poetical' prose translation. The evidence of these would have convinced me, had I needed to be, that the man before us was not a charlatan. But I wondered, trying to allow for my ignorance, whether I was right in detecting a lack of the power of statement. The 'They' whose presence, expressed or unexpressed, can be felt in Soviet verse seem hostile to the very quality of that verse by pushing it into dealing with pluralities and abstractions. Is it a bourgeois or other pre- judice to feel that poetry had better deal with the particular, with the concrete, with the present indicative and the preterite rather than the dura- tive present and the imperfect? And similarly, that if poetry is pushed too far away from state- ment in one of two opposite directions—towards fiction or towards symbol—it may be weakened? Anyway, if there really is a lack of statement in Soviet verse, I would back Yevtushenko as the man to put it there. 'One day,' as he said, 'it will be normal, not courageous, to write the truth.'

The reading was a great and genuine success. Afterwards we took our leave in what seemed to be the Russian rather than the English manner. That was all right with me. Yevtu- shenko went off waving his joined fists in the boxer's gesture. He is the first completely good reason I have met with for liking the USSR.