What made me stick with Joseph Brodsky’s On Grief and Reason was the enjoyable description of how he was ingeniously robbed in Rio while on a Seventies culture junket. There was a dog involved. It was trained to distract gringo sunbathers by tugging at their pants.
There is a pattern among Russian oracles – at least those sheltered in the West – in that they seem incapable of imagining how the world looks to the more circumspect, little-guy countries. It isn’t only Russians either but anyway, there was even a time, back in Leningrad, when Brodsky shared Solzhenitsyn’s (and Nabokov’s) deranged enthusiasm for the Vietnam War but, by the time of this book, there was merely the condescension of a crackpot scheme set out in an open letter to Václav Havel. It was envisaged that Havel would enforce by decree (“although I don’t think your parliament would object”) the serialization of the following writers in Czech daily newspapers.
By giving your people Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Platonov, Camus, or Joyce, you may turn at least one nation in the heart of Europe into a civilized people.
It now seems a little easier to answer the question as to what on earth Brodsky was doing with “four hundred bucks” on him at the beach in Rio. It remains a minor mystery why he had taken off his watch. (Did he not want a tan line on his forearm?) He wasn’t going for a swim, as the German consul had warned all these cultural gringos that two Hungarians had been eaten by sharks there the week before. Where did he think he was? At home in (non-Latin) America?
The other really instructive piece in this light is the strange meander around Kim Philby, about whom he openly confesses his ignorance.
A country, especially a large one, gets only two [options]. Either it’s strong or it’s weak… Who cares what country one grows up in…
Of Philby’s life… I know only the bare bones… intuition will suffice.
Why Philby did it is the most interesting question, not least from an Irish perspective. By that I mean asking what it really was that repelled Philby about Britain. That kind of concern however sails over the head of Brodsky who only offers a few trite remarks about English diffidence.
Brodsky’s hero was English. It was Auden, about whom Beckett occasionally voiced his irritation. For example, Beckett reasonably queried a well-known Auden line from the Thirties, about Yeats (“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”).
What in the blazes is that supposed to mean?
The last piece in Brodsky’s book was written in memory of Stephen Spender but his hero and the “truly transatlantic texture” of his speech also feature prominently in it. As it happens, in Spender’s Journals there is a memorable line about Auden’s standing in Oxford in 1955, given the latter hid out in the States during the war.
I think that Auden has a hard time in the Common Room at Christ Church, where several of the dons twit him about being an American.
In other words, they were pulling at the pants of his post-war credibility, like that dog on the Copacabana. In their humour there was also a recognition that Britain no longer knew it all and had come down in the world, as America had risen, to be followed by Germany. It is the same humour evident in Jeffrey Bernard’s later vision of paradise, which sounds like somewhere not too far from Rio.
Sitting beneath the palms… I can hear the fizz of frying prawns, the dying hiss of a lobster and the rattle of a cocktail shaker and, with luck, the scream of a German tourist treading on a sea urchin.
Dr. John Flynn 