That Smell and Notes From Prison (9 page)

Yevtushenko, “Confessions of a Young Soviet,”
L’Express
: “The autobiography of a poet is his poetry,
everything else is merely a footnote. The poet must offer the reader his
feelings, his thoughts, his writings. To deserve the right to speak for others,
he must pay the price and submit himself mercilessly to the truth.”

— After the Revolution, Soviet poets established the
Association of Proletarian Culture and made the decision never to write except
in the plural form, to always say “we.” At the same time, our literary critics
very cleverly devised a theory of “the lyric hero.” According to them, the poet
was required to extol the loftiest virtues so that he would not appear as
himself in his poems, but rather as a model of the perfect man.

— Many old Bolsheviks who were arrested and tortured
persisted in believing that they had been abused without Stalin’s knowledge.
They never accepted that he had personally ordered their treatment. Some of
them, after being tortured, traced the words ‘Long Live Stalin’ in their own
blood on the walls of their prison.
****

Stravinsky’s thoughts on reaching eighty: “Were Eliot
and myself merely trying to refit old ships while the other side (Webern,
Schoenberg, Joyce, Klee) sought new forms of travel? I believe this
interpretation or distinction, much discussed a generation ago, is no longer
viable. Our era is but a great unity in which we all share a part. It may indeed
seem that Eliot and I made things that lacked living continuity, that we made
art out of disjecta membra: quotations from other poets and artists, references
to earlier styles (‘hints of earlier and other creation’). But we used these
things along with anything else that came to hand, treating everything
ironically in order to rebuild. We did not pretend to have invented new
conveyors or new means of travel, for the true job of the artist is to refit old
ships. He can say again, in his way, only what others have already said before
him.”

In a book he published in ’48, entitled
Organon for a Small Theater
, “Brecht rejects his early
artistic works as political and didactic. The theater must be a place for
aesthetic pleasure and nothing else — though it is also necessary to keep up
with the fashions of the age and work scientifically. . . . We need a theater
that does not merely make possible the emotions, insights, and impulses allowed
by the relevant field of human relationships in which the actions occur.
Instead, we need a theater that will exploit and generate ideas, so that they
might play a role in changing the world.”
Brecht
,
Ronald Gray.

Must write about Cairo after studying her neighborhood
by neighborhood, her classes, her evolution.

“You could say that in my last phrase I’ve joined the
new realism. Its characteristic features are not at all the same as those of
traditional realism, which is supposed to provide a faithful representation of
life. The new realism goes beyond details and rounded characters. This isn’t an
advance in style, but a change of content. The basis of traditional realism is
life — you paint its picture, show how it works, extract its tendencies and what
lessons it might offer. That’s where the story begins and ends: it depends on
life and on the living, the way they dress, the details. For the new realism,
the motive for writing lies in ideas, in specific passions that make reality
into a means for expressing them.” Naguib Mahfouz.

June

John Dos Passos (born 1896), the total,
panoramic view. Journalistic spirit. The city itself rather than a particular
individual in the
USA Trilogy
.

Hemingway: A tight frame with three dimensions: Simple
character. Simple style. Simple setting. In
The Green Hills
of Africa
, he talks about four-dimensional prose: the kind that
hasn’t yet been written, but which is possible. There is a fourth and a fifth
dimension (the symbolic?).

Hemingway, The Writer as
Artist
, Carlos Baker, translated by Dr. Ihsan Abbas.

— On Africa: “
You ought to always
write it. Write it down, state what you see and hear, without worrying what
you might get out of it
.
”

— “Where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as
we have been.” The practical standard is participation. There are other
practical standards: the truthfulness of the writing, its vital verisimilitude
(in other words, nothing that is in life, whether language, thought, or action,
can be wholly excluded without some loss to the vital principle).

— Hemingway’s experience in Africa in the translation of
reality. He says in the introduction to
Green Hills
:
“Given a country as interesting as Africa, a month’s hunting there, the
determination to tell only the truth, and to make all that into a book — can
such a book compete with a work of the imagination?” The answer is that it
certainly can, provided the writer is skilled, as well as being committed to
both truth and beauty — in other words, the way it was + formal construction.
Yet the experiment also proved that the writer who takes no liberties with the
events of his experience, who tells things exactly as they were and invents
nothing, will place himself at a disadvantage in this competition [the intensity
of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Life of Francis Macomber”]. This book and
the two stories established one aesthetic principle firmly in Hemingway’s mind:
The highest art must take liberties, not with the truth but with the modes by
which truth is translated.

— Hemingway and politics: “A writer can make himself a
nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it
from the inside, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will
be very well placed . . . But none of this will help him as a writer unless he
finds something new to add to human knowledge through his writing.”

— “
All bad writers are in love with
the epic
.
”

Eliot to the American poet Donald Hall, in an interview
from ’59, published in
The Paris Review
: “I think
that for me it’s been very useful to exercise other activities, such as working
in a bank, or publishing even. And I think also that the difficulty of not
having as much time as I would like has given me a greater pressure of
concentration. I mean it has prevented me from writing too much. The danger, as
a rule, of having nothing else to do is that one might write too much rather
than concentrating and perfecting smaller amounts.”

July

On the night of July 13, ’63, I came across the
text of a letter I intended to send to my sister. I think constantly of writing
to her about my real feelings toward her and of describing many things. But my
letters to her travel in more than one direction before they arrive. My sense
that someone might read them and smile at their naïveté paralyzes me, as does
the thought of meeting someone who had read these letters and could be looking
at me and laughing to himself without my knowing. Although actually other people
don’t care about your sentimentality. The thought that this might be the story
of my life.

Is the real problem in art the problem of form? Can we
say that the basis of art is form? This doesn’t mean we’re against content. Form
without content is meaningless. (The content of abstract painting is found in
the sensations experienced by the self when stimulated by a certain arrangement
of colors.) The artist at work is not motivated, in the first place, by a strict
idea, but rather by forms and styles. It is by virtue of his working through
these forms and styles that the content emerges (the opposite might also occur).
In backward societies, or one in which art enjoys a mass audience while it is
still culturally backward (Russia at the time of the Revolution), a direct style
is necessary and valid. . . . When the cultural level is higher, when life has
become more complex and intellectual development has progressed, the need for
more depth — for new forms and styles, for an increasing variety and profundity
of each art’s creative elements — becomes urgent. (In narrative: memory,
experience, symbol, style, scientific awareness.)

If I wanted to describe a picture of my sister when she
was young and innocent and wide-eyed and full of possibility — a picture of her
wearing a pink skirt with a white spot marking the slight swell of her chest, a
trace of sweat above her shoulders — can words succeed in describing her, in
translating the feeling that digs into my chest? Film can do it better. So
another way must be sought, beyond the snapshot, to capture this feeling in
words.

August

The mood in the prison has become unbearable.
Terrible noise. I can’t sleep at night or in the afternoon. I wish the prisoners
were gone. I don’t know how to work; I’m constantly depressed and nothing
changes my mood except reading a good story or something about the writer’s
craft. I’m confident I know how to write, but what nearly destroys me is not
knowing the level of writer I’ll become. Many thoughts run through my head,
which I want to express but can’t. I don’t know how to express my thoughts
clearly in speech. If I try to write them down, the thoughts run away.

When we express ourselves, we also express the
collective. A fence gleaning.
*****
What is shared by these
collectives: boredom, disgust, disillusionment. The romanticism of struggle is
over. What remains are the utterly naked facts. The cult of personality and its
collapse. Rethinking of everything. The masks are off (the mask of religion, the
mask of heroism . . . ).

Eye of the child: “Human nature seeks constantly to know
the world around it, but the desire decreases over time. As we grow older the
world loses its beauty and brilliance, but we can reclaim our acuity of vision,
the sunrise of the world, by way of the child who observes the world around him
with wide and curious eyes.”

September

September 2, afternoon: I dreamed of my father.
He was walking and he put his arm around my shoulder and embraced me. He seemed
strong, solid. He complained to me about the troubles and pains of last year. I
told him that as for myself, I’d been in pain since turning eighteen. It made me
happy to complain to him and expect some kind of relief. But he pointed to the
crowded tram and said, smiling kindly, “They’re going to pick each other’s
pockets,” and I realized he wanted to change the subject. Then he disappeared
and Adel H. took his place.
******
We walked next to each other
with his arm on my shoulder and I began to complain to him, too. He sympathized,
then left me when we reached a playing field. I was angry, because he had
listened to me only so that I’d accompany him to the playing field, not because
he was especially interested in what I was saying. I went away, after taking his
towel in revenge. I woke up and felt happy about seeing my father. I recalled my
feelings of delight, gladness, comfort at being able to complain to him and have
his help. I thought, if only there were no science of dreams. How wonderful it
would have been if this were a visit from my father’s spirit — a consolation, a
prophecy!

Read an article, “The Dialectic of Nature.” Planets in
motion, the earth cooling, establishing the conditions of life, the first cell,
the vertebrates, mankind, mankind in its most advanced stage, the extinction of
the earth (its cooling, its collapse into the sun), the persistence of matter in
alternate forms in an infinite universe. Subject for a great novel.

Virginia Woolf’s
To The Lighthouse
has opened up a new world for me. . . . Her idea of art seems to be the
same as that given in her novel by the painter: “One wanted, she thought,
dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to
feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a
miracle, it’s an ecstasy.” This is what Woolf does in the novel, handling
everything that is simple, ordinary, quotidian. She writes by magic, elegantly
and simply, without artifice: “But he did not ask them anything. He sat and
looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he
might be thinking, I have reached it. I have found it; but he said nothing.”

Anything that takes us beyond the limits of the
conventional novel, now exhausted, is worth doing. I believe writing, the
practice itself, will reveal the ingredients of experimentation, will be the
incarnation of its content.

How shall I write? I don’t think I have to write about
any given topic — that is, sit down to write it and find a suitable form. Not at
all. My feelings are set in motion by an idea, an experience, a memory, a style,
a form, and they demand release. In releasing them, they interact with my
rational mind, which determines their form and content.

Depths of the sea: a book by William Beebe,
A Half Mile Down
— “At a depth of eighteen meters, red
light vanishes. Yellow vanishes at one hundred. Two hundred and forty meters
down, green and blue also vanish from the spectrum, giving way to a deep
blackish blue. Between 520 and 580 meters, we were enclosed in utter blackness.”
A battle in the deep dark waters between a whale . . . and a nine-meter squid.
With its snaky, suckered tentacles it measures 15 meters. A strange world, where
darkness reigns, unsafe, unchanging, ice-cold, almost without oxygen. But there
is life. About the Japanese shrimp, Dr. Noginama says that the act of
insemination occurs between midnight and eight in the morning on mild and calm
summer nights, in fresh water: “The male pursues the female . . . gripping her
as she tries to flee him . . . and tears off her outer shell. He then embraces
the naked female and she takes his organ of reproduction, brutally and coarsely,
inside her, then rips it off . . . so that he remains in a state of impotency
until a new organ takes the place of the old.”