Yevtushenko: A "Mailboat" Between East and West

In yesterday's Crimson, Richard Dey, poetry editor of the Advocate, brought us up to intermission in an essay-review of Yevtushenko's January poetry reading in Madison Square Garden. What follows is the conclusion to his two-part story.

I

IT HAPPENS I spent three years in the Army, two and a half of them in Washington, D.C. as a writer on the staff of the Army's official magazine. Because I did not want to fight in Vietnam and, in any case, because I wanted to work as a writer, I sought the job and it was created for me. Naively, I thought I could write poems for the Army and the U.S. Government. I agreed to become a journalist of sorts.

With something of a cavalier, soldier-poet of fortune attitude I walked into the job. I wrote poems for the Army. I wrote magazine articles. I wrote poetic captions for an entire double issue that told the "Army Story" in pictures, and I even covered the Pentagon for awhile. I prostituted myself to the government, and my art--though it was in the name of that art--to propaganda. I managed to do so for about six months. Fan letters from four star generals and a host of others rolled in and got me-promoted a couple times. It seemed like I got more pats on the back than I ever got for scoring a winning goal in a hockey game back when I lived for and played the sport. Then, for a multitude of reasons, I caught onto the Army and to myself.

I stopped writing Army poems altogether, and concentrated on magazine pieces. That lasted for maybe a year longer. Then I began going to the office in the morning drunk. Lunch hours lost themselves in Georgetown and Capital Hill saloons. Road trips were spent in NCO clubs and the brawling, fleshy dives that make up the strips outside Army posts. I had realized that reporting and telling it like its not were two very different things. Soon I began deleting my byline from stories. I threw out the fan mail and avoided the Pentagon information types. My last stories, which I wrote so they could not be rewritten, went unpublished. The Army is not all bad. But at a time when I, along with thousands of others, was also marching in moratoriums and in midnight candle processions around the waxy White House, it became impossible to write exclusively about the not bad. Each day in the office was a battle for one hint of truth or another. Exhausted, I rode home on my motorcycle each night to my Alexandria studio cursing Mediocrity till my bike nearly crashed into the front door. Then I quit writing altogether, and worked my last four or five months as a photographer.

THIS IS NOT a confession: given the same circumstances, I would go through it again. I recount it only to tell the experience of one man's sensibility. You can't write a lot of glorious shit for long and maintain an unjaded sense of truth and dignity. You can't know one thing in your heart and operate with your mind in another way. You gotta believe in what you're doing. After awhile, even the several masks become holloweyed. Your conscience--and you acquire one fast if you didn't have one--goes crazy: with guilt, with sorrow, with anger, helplessness, with a gut feeling of desperation.

I attempted to justify myself over and over again by rationalizing that, what the hell, the professional soldiers in the field and the fat cats who run 'this man's Army' believe the propaganda, or want to believe it, so why not write it for them. Let them believe what they want. This is just a job, President Johnson's and General Westmoreland's idea of patriotic duty. But I found, "teamwork" and "the frontiers of freedom" to the contrary, that one's sense of to duty himself is the greatest duty, the most difficult to perform.

Yevtushenko must think he can pull it off, that he can write in a way that will please his government and still squeeze out some truth somewhere, somehow. The craft becomes craftiness. Skipping the mess in your own backyard and writing about what's on the other side of the fence doesn't get it: the act is a cop-out and the man doing it is a sellout.

II

I want to be a mailboat for everyone divided by the ice of estrangement, a craft before the coming of large navigation, moving through the drifting ice with letters and parcels.

--Yevtushenko, from his introduction to Stolen Apples.

SOME YOUNG THING from the East Side flashed by like an apparition wearing an intimate, black backless gown: "Yevtushenko and Friends: Poetry in Concert" was the event of the evening in New York, and the Felt Forum was the place to be seen. A saxophone playing warmed-over Coltrane swelled over the audience, followed by the angelic choir bursting into rock musical fireworks.

Barry Boys oozed back on stage with his phony theatrical accent to read "New York Elegy," a kind of sleepy zookeeper's political poem set in Central Park. After a flute drifted in and out, the choir turned itself into a chorus line that danced and horsed around like teeny boppers. They transformed the poem into a rock song with the refrain, "lost children of the earth." Yevtushenko joined Boys. Both sat on the edge of the stage as Judy Garland used to do, and listened:

At night beneath this snowfall, its whispered secret having made us one, America and I sat down together in the place for lost children.

Nice lines--seeds for a Broadway musical? John Updike translated them but an inspired Rod McKuen could have written them. They are harmless lines. One sees the Soviet bosses sipping coffee and reading about their cosmopoet in the morning paper. And one sees them having a second cup over these lines from an untitled love poem:

I speed back and forth in a sick panic, with a hard-hit mask of a face, with a mind split two ways, both ways false.

YEVTUSHENKO'S mistresses? two women? East and West? his muse and the communist muse? Here, no doubt, is worry. But in another poem dedicated to Shostakovich, Yevtushenko reveals: "He who torments himself is a trouble maker." And we know what happens to literary trouble makers in the Soviet Union. So, we return to the cure-all snow falling in Central Park, and to Yevtushenko. The performance of poetry should not be the substitution for poetry. It is a secondary art of the poet, an additional talent and ambition. Yevtushenko seems to have the order reversed. I have no doubt also that it is a belief about poetry, a belief backed up by a long, if infrequent tradition. Performance, however, is too easily a handyman waiting below the lonely tower to fix up what does not flow by itself.

The consciousness of international brotherhood should not and cannot replace the individual poet's conscience. A poet ascends to the universal, or international: he does not drop down for visits from it. Though great poets have been otherworldly, their otherworldliness is a place they went to and, if they could, returned from. Yevtushenko's "mailboat" conception makes for no better poetry than diplomacy. It does not assuage or rectify the fundamental flaw of selling out. But we must ask, hopefully: is the good that comes out of his sacrifice--if, in his soul, that is what selling out is--worth it? I hope so. What a shame it would be if this man's work were not.

III

RICHARD WILBUR, another American poet unaccustomed to spectacle, came on stage in the same manner as Stanley Kunitz had. Bearded and apparently suffering from stage fright. Wilbur first read a poem of his own about shame (it was the emotion of the evening) told in political metaphor, and then a nonpolitical poem of Yevtushenko's he had translated.

Yevtushenko does seem to have a poem for every topic and for every place he has been. His allegorical poem about the blacks in the United States, "Monologue of a Polar Fox on an Alaskan Fur Farm," was read by someone named Nat Woods, aptly black, whose reading made it worse than the poem actually is. Nonetheless, the audience drank it up, the choral refrain of "children of captivity" included, and gave him more applause than to either Kunitz or Wilbur. At work here, more than any appreciation of poetry or performance, was the fashionable white middle-class guilt hangup. I remember seeing one black in the audience.

The Bijou Singers sang awhile before it was time to hear what is perhaps Yevtushenko's best known poem, "Babi Yar." The choral interlude was effective. It gave the audience a rest, a rest that would have been welcome more often. As it was, I felt bludgeoned by the whole show, advertised as "an extraordinary mixed-media program." The incessant pelting of poetry, round after round, left me as a loser in a ring in which I had not entered to fight, and where no champion triumphed. Had the mixed-media concept been better realized, the performance might have been different. Slides, for example, could have been used with great effect, especially with Yevtushenko's scenic verse. The possibilities of lighting were also entirely unrealized. A more tasteful and less commercial use of the music and chorus would have greatly enhanced the show's ambience. What was supposed to have been a concert was more like a brawl. Joseph Siracuse's sloppy direction catered to the vulgar and completely lacked imagination.

"BABI YAR," an early, powerful poem of Yevtushenko's about the slaughter of Jews in a place in Russia by that name, was lost if not ruined by the tawdry Barry Boys who could ruin anything. It was as Yevtushenko recited this poem that his lack of what we call charisma became clear. His showmanship was entirely overblown. He bleated as though he had been knifed in the side: which is theatrically acceptable when honest, but which is bad when the sincerity is doubtful. The contagiousness of art, Tolstoy wrote, finally depends on the artist's sincerity: if he falls short of this standard, a resistance sets in, and the audience can actually be repelled. The magnitude of "Babi Yar" speaks for itself. It does not need the overacted passion which Yevtushenko brought to it: subtlety is more powerful than bombast. "Babi Yar" is the product of vehement and inspired passion. It has about it a sublime quality and offered Yevtushenko the opportunity to transmit sublimity itself. But he blew it. Nothing really happened. His reading conveyed none of the poem's indigenous holiness. He did not reach the height of any incarnation, nor did he transport me or anyone else around me into imaginative, compassionate realms. The chorus moaned with a low swelling voice. At times, Yevtushenko read in conjunction with the music. A cello came in with the mention of Anne Frank that was effective, if hackneyed. The subtlety, for once, was in the music. Nonetheless, Yevtushenko's performance of "Babi Yar" was passionate, and the audience sent forth applesauce waves of applause.

Yevtushenko's voice was finally too harsh. It had no particular quality or unusual richness. Most often it did not insinuate an ease of understanding into the poems. It gave not a sense of enjoyment but of melodrama to the business of poetry. I cannot describe Yevtushenko's voice as Ralph Maud and Aneirin Talfan Davies have described Dylan Thomas' as "that warm, rich, dark, soothing voice wrapping itself around every word and phrase, bringing them to life and making them stand and dance a slow moving pattern of sense and sound, which brings us as near as possible to the ecstasy of the creative act." A comparison of Yevtushenko with Dylan Thomas may not be fair but it is inevitable and useful. Thomas, the great light who is also the shadow for any public reader of poems, was no journalist of brotherhood: he was brotherhood. The intensity of his readings matched the intensity of his poetry, as Yevtushenko's does not. Thomas's great performances came after the majority of his writing was done, not during the writing. Thomas's voice and not some piano-wired chorus was the music: the naked choir swelled within him. Yevtushenko tried to stage a cool performance whereas Thomas's readings were a sweaty giving.

IV

A MIDDLE-AGED, balding man with long hair came on stage. He wore a flashy red double breasted sport coat that covered an abnormally swollen belly. James Dickey had a cold and spoke in a nasal voice unfamiliar to those who had heard him read elsewhere. Knowing that he is not unacquainted with bourbon, that all those flights into Imagination are not easy flights, it was apparent that he was a little tight. If any of the American poets who appeared with Yevtushenko match him in sheer power of performance, it is normally Dickey.

But he stopped and swayed in the spotlight, and his cold didn't help him. In his southern drawl he introduced himself and said some sloppy words about the poem he was about to read. The audience seemed to sense that the evening might have a casualty. But what happened reminded me of the scene in Sidney Michael's play "Dylan" where Dylan Thomas, appearing an hour late before an audience at the YW. YMHA in Manhattan, is three sheets to the wind until he begins reading "In My Craft or Sullen Art," and gathers momentum. Out of drunken chaos came the poet's only order, and by the end of the poem Thomas was sufficiently sober to soar and thunder. Like Thomas in the play, Dickey garbled the first lines of "The Place," one of his shorter love poems, but then something took command over the words, a command that endured until he had finished reading a second poem, one of Yevtushenko's love poems he had translated. At one point, the spotlight roamed hellishly between Dickey and Yevtushenko who stood behind him at another microphone. The applause was appreciative, if not wholly understanding, as Yevtushenko helped Dickey off the stage. John Berryman's recent suicide flashed through my mind.

TWO more poems, one read by an actress named Susan Stephens and the other by Barry Boys, and the lights went up. The blue jeaned choir ignited itself into another Hair-like rendition of Yevtushenko's Central Park & Brotherhood poem, Groovy. A dozen scrubbed and shining secretaries burst out of nowhere to bring flowers to the poets and chorus. Everyone joined hands. Mr. Kunitz, holding one cluster of flowers and swinging to and fro with the music, looked ridiculous. As I left, Yevtushenko stood swaying in the middle of his chorus line, holding a bunch of flowers and gazing benevolently around him. His performance had been that of a lightweight in a heavyweight's garden.

Yevtushenko tried to do in America what he evidently does well in the Soviet Union--photograph: Yevtushenko alone on stage reading and swimming before 20,000 in the Moscow Sports Arena--and it didn't come off. Why? Because our poetry and politics, comparatively speaking, operate in separate spheres. Americans are too smart for a sell-out, and the New York audience is generally too sophisticated and too demanding for Yevtushenko's style. However, had someone like Rod McKuen performed with him, the audience would have been different and the event might have been a success. A poetry of social usefulness may be what America needs but, if so, it must come from a poet better than Yevtushenko. A fawning sentimentalism must be replaced by an honest, perhaps spiritual beckoning. Seeing Yevtushenko for what he is, however, should not negate an appreciation of the effort he is making to breathe life into the slender, spare, precious prison of books poetry normally all but dies in.

AT 1:30 a.m. I stood with a headache and a case of the blahs in the cold night on Eighth Avenue looking for a cab. I had wanted the reading to be good, even revolutionary. I realized that any renaissance of poetry in the public arena is dependent solely on the personality and genius of an individual poet. As I rode back uptown, my woman in my arms, I saw a hooker snag a sailor in the vicinity of the Port Authority