Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky: a poetic friendship

Seamus Heaney first met Joseph Brodsky at the Poetry International Festival in London in June 1972. Heaney recalled, “My first impression of him… was of a slight, somewhat nervous fellow about my own age, shooting the half-tentative, half-suspicious glances that any young poet shoots at a big-deal poetry reading.” Heaney, who had published three highly-praised books of poetry, was fascinated by the unprepossessing Brodsky — short, red-haired, balding and with Russian clothes and a strong accent: “There was something mysterious and enlivening about this fair-faced, trimly built man in a red shirt, born [in 1940] a year later than I but already marked for and propelled into history.”

Brodsky had been denounced and imprisoned for declaring himself a poet, and could say with Walt Whitman, “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” Heaney wrote that Brodsky’s “arrest and trial by the Soviet authorities in the 1960s and his subsequent banishment to a work camp near Archangel had specifically to do with his embrace of poetic vocation — a socially parasitical vocation according to the prosecution. This had turned his case into something of an international cause célèbre and insured him immediate fame when he arrived in the West.” He saw Brodsky as a legendary poeta non grata, as a courageous warrior and martyr who’d sacrificed his freedom for his art: “Joseph was a kind of poetry samurai, totally alert, totally trained in his art, a bit of a dazzler and a bit of a danger. We’d heard of his defiance of the Soviets, and regarded these things as the boy-deeds of a poetry hero.”

While writing my biography of Robert Frost I asked Brodsky if he’d met the older poet on his visit to Russia in August-September 1962, when Frost had the famously contentious tête-à-tête with Nikita Khrushchev. In a letter of February 11, 1995 Brodsky wrote, with irony and wit, “Alas, I have to inform you that I did not meet Frost on his visit to Russia. At the time of his sojourn in my home town [Leningrad] I was behind bars.” Brodsky’s hero Osip Mandelstam, who died in 1938 from cold and hunger in the Gulag, remarked that “poetry is respected only in Russia — where people are killed for it.”

Like a prince who’d inherited a prestigious dynasty, Brodsky had received the laying on of hands from Anna Akhmatova and Mandelstam’s widow Nadezhda in Russia, and from Auden in America, and became the filial successor to two great poetic traditions. Heaney noted that “we were all conscious of Brodsky as the man of the moment, ever since he’d landed in Austria as the guest of Auden.” Casually describing the violence in Northern Ireland as if it were a party, he speculated “that my Belfast address may have been of [political] interest to him, since the bombing and shooting were by then in full swing.”

In his influential Foreword to Brodsky’s Selected Poems (1973), Auden vaguely but enthusiastically called him a traditionalist, interested “in personal encounters with nature, human artifacts, persons loved or revered, and in reflections upon the human condition, death, and the meaning of existence… I have no hesitation in declaring that, in Russian, Joseph Brodsky must be a poet of the first order.”

Though Brodsky was egotistical and pugnacious, Heaney admired his faults and always gave him generous respect and precedence. The two poets had important traits in common. The Irish Catholic and Russian Jew, born a year apart and far from the centers of Anglophone poetry, were both caught up in violent politics. They bonded through their keen interest in Dante and Donne, and both published (with Derek Walcott) their tripartite Homage to Robert Frost (1996).

Heaney praised Brodsky in interviews and wrote a tribute when he won the Nobel Prize. He patiently tolerated Brodsky’s dogmatic and sometimes ignorant assertions as well as his lame English verse, defended his attack on Yevgeny Yevtushenko and expressed sympathy when Brodsky’s mother died. He wrote Brodsky’s obituary, spoke at his memorial service, visited his old flat in Petersburg and composed two poems about him. Though Heaney translated Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Beowulf, Irish poets, the Scottish Robert Henryson, Polish and Czech writers, he never translated Brodsky — who would have insisted on correcting his work. The self-absorbed and self-promoting Brodsky did not write about Heaney. Without an edition of Brodsky’s letters and a thorough biography, we see their friendship only from Heaney’s worshipful point of view.

Brodsky, the perennial outsider in Russia, was enthusiastically adopted in America. He was translated by distinguished poets like Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, and gave sixty poetry readings during the first eighteen months in his new country. He published his work in the New York Review of Books, was elected poet laureate of the US, and won distinguished professorships, a Guggenheim fellowship, membership in the American Academy, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, honorary doctorates from Oxford and Yale, a MacArthur award and the Nobel Prize — which Auden, whom Brodsky rightly considered infinitely superior to himself, never received. In short, after his change of empires, he reaped every reward and honour the American artistic and intellectual world could give a poet.

Except for physical beauty and a successful suicide (though he did once cut his wrists), Brodsky had every non-literary quality that enhanced his reputation. He dropped out of school at fifteen, which allowed his originality to flourish, and gained unusual experience as a geologist in Siberia. His poems were condemned, suppressed and confined to the underground in Russia. He showed courage and a stoical lack of complaint as a Jewish victim of Soviet persecution, became a legend when the transcript of his trial was published in the West, spent time in psychiatric hospitals and prisons, and was sent into harsh exile in the Arctic Circle. He derived tragic authority from several heart attacks, heart operations and the threat of an early death. He lived modestly, generously helped Russian exiles, was an overwhelming personality, charismatic in speech and in the strongly accented, bardic chanting of his poems. He quickly learned English and published extensively in his new language. Though his involuntary exile was a fortunate escape and his life in America infinitely better than in Russia, he’d lost his country, his language, his parents, his lovers and his children.

Like most people, Heaney was deeply impressed by Brodsky’s electrifying character and conversation, by his fiery performance and teaching. He was a brilliant speaker who made everyone race to keep up with his verbal pyrotechncs. Heaney said Brodsky was “like a star, an exhilaration, a transformer. The pace quickened when he entered a company, the bar was raised, the daring increased, the feats became more spectacular… It was as if some underground cable had started to carry the full voltage and the whole grid was sizzling… His intellectual readiness was almost feral. Conversation attained immediate vertical takeoff and no deceleration was possible… Words were a kind of high octane for him, and he loved to be propelled by them wherever they took him.”

But there was also a penalty clause to Brodsky’s unrepentant diktats. He claimed to know more about English poetry than the best poets writing in English. He’d been oppressed and felt the urge to dominate. “Joseph liked to lay down the law; certainly,” Heaney allowed. “Even among friends, he would act the boss poet; but if you had his respect, he would take what you had to give. He couldn’t help speaking ex cathedra [or ex synagoga], trampolining off his own brilliance.” Brodsky also had the stubborn and exasperating blind spot about Heaney’s favorite poet: “He told me once that Yeats’ rhymes left something to be desired and at that stage I felt he was too far gone in certitude to be educable.”

Heaney took the title of Albert Lord’s influential book The Singer of Tales (1960), about the Balkan bards who chant their poetry, for his tribute after Brodsky won the Nobel Prize. He compared his performance to the music of a Russian balalaika: “He brought a new vitality and seriousness to the business of poetry readings… It was as if a hard-grained, thick-stringed and deeply tuned instrument were given release. There was lament and tension, turbulence and coherence. I have never been in the presence of a reader who was so manifestly all poet at the moment of reading.”

Brodsky was an inspiring teacher at the University of Michigan and Mount Holyoke College, and Heaney gave a positive spin to his dogmatic declarations: “Nobody enjoyed laying down the law more than he, with the result that his fame as a teacher began to spread and certain aspects of his practice came to be imitated. In particular, his insistence that students learn and recite several poems by heart had considerable influence in creative writing schools all over the United States, and his advocacy of traditional form, his concentration on matters of meter and rhyme, and his high rating of nonmodernist poets like Robert Frost and Thomas Hardy also had the general effect of reawakening an older poetic memory.” Unfortunately, Brodsky’s salutary advice did not take hold, and the endlessly proliferating creative writing courses encouraged self-indulgent free verse, without technical skill, that was little more than “sensitive” prose in broken lines. Heaney could have added that Brodsky, who adored Czeslaw Milosz, aroused Anglophone interest in East European writers, who were enthusiastically promoted by Ted Hughes and Philip Roth.

In June 1987, a few months before Brodsky won the Nobel Prize, he got into a fierce public controversy with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the older Soviet poet and cultural ambassador. Loyally defending Brodsky, Heaney — who would never have attacked a fellow poet — declared: “He was scornful, but didn’t go on about it. His actions spoke louder than his words. He resigned from the American Academy of Arts and Letters when Yevtushenko was elected a member. When he talked about them, it was like Virgil talking to Dante about the damned in their circles: he instructed you to observe and pass on quickly.” In fact, in the New York Times of June 20, Brodsky did go on about it and made a loud, rather brutal assault:

“I cannot in good conscience sustain membership in an organisation which has thus so fully compromised its integrity… Yevtushenko is a high member of his country’s establishment, and he lies terribly about the United States to his Russian readers… He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved. To have him as an honorary member of the American academy, as though he represents all Russian poets, seems to me unseemly and scandalous.”

Though Yevtushenko was well known in Western literary circles for his poems exploring Soviet anti-Semitism and Stalinist terror, Brodsky claimed that “he adopted both positions only when it was safe to do so.”

As usual, Brodsky provided no evidence for his attack and for challenging the Academy’s right to elect its own members. Since Brodsky reigned in America, Yevtushenko did not “represent all Russian poets,” and his poems condemning anti-Semitism and Stalinist terror were certainly not “officially sanctioned and approved.” Though Brodsky, according to Heaney, assumed a lofty Virgilian stance, his motives as well as his arguments were dubious.

Though pro-Soviet, rather than anti-Soviet like Brodsky, Yevtushenko was a formidable rival. The tall, handsome Siberian was a flamboyant, theatrical and popular performer. The author of “Babi Yar” (1961), about the massacre of Jews in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine, had an international reputation. The two temperamental Russians had had bitter personal, poetical and political quarrels, and Brodsky had called him a self-promoter, a lackey and a sh*t. Brodsky had been expelled from Russia; Yevtushenko was admired in both Russia and America. Jealous as well as disdainful, Brodsky wanted to be the only honorable and superior Russian poet, and leading candidate for the Nobel that year. As Alexander Pope said of Joseph Addison, Brodsky bore “like the Turk, no rival near the throne.”

By contrast to this vitriol, Heaney described congenial, stimulating evenings in Boston with Brodsky and Derek Walcott, when the three poets were teaching in Massachusetts and had not yet won what Hemingway called “the Swedish thing”: “It was like being back in your first clique as a young poet with all your original greed for the goods and gossip of poetry instantly refreshed. Poems being quoted and poets being praised or faulted, extravagantly; anecdotes exchanged; jokes told; but underneath all the banter and hilarity there was a prospector’s appetite in each of us for the next poem we ourselves might write. We were high on each other’s company and that kept the critical standard-setter alive and well in each of us.”

Heaney and Brodsky met again in Ireland early in 1988, soon after Brodsky had secured the glittering prize in Stockholm. He was then less combative and more confidential about his permanently distant family. Heaney remarked that “the mouth of the River Liffey reminded Joseph a lot of the quays of St. Petersburg, and he spoke more intimately than he’d done before about his family and his first life in Russia. I don’t mean he shared secrets, just that his tenderness and loss were more evident, readier to reveal themselves.”

A few years earlier, in June 1983, Heaney had sent Brodsky a condolence letter on the death of his mother, whom he’d not been allowed to see when she was moribund: “A pang of unexpected shock occurred. I had never taken into account that your parents were still behind you all that time. Stupidly I had assumed that your spiritual state… of solitude and beyond-ness was some sort of absolute condition.”

Heaney had seen Robert Lowell only six days before his death in September 1977, and met Brodsky for the last time in New York in January 1996, three weeks before he died. (Was he getting superstitious?) Though well aware of his poetic genius, Brodsky refused to take proper care of himself. Heaney recalled that “dear, undaunted and endangered Joseph” was in terrible shape and destined for an early grave: “He looked awful, stooped, pale, out of breath, still smoking, and we knew, of course, that his heart condition was very bad: he couldn’t settle at the [dinner] table, just kept coming in and out between cigarettes… Even though I knew he was living under a threat, even though I knew he’d had several bypass operations and had seen with my own eyes the state he was in, something in me just refused to consider his death an imminent possibility.” He just didn’t want to lose his precious friend.

Heaney’s obituary of Brodsky appeared in the New York Times on March 3, 1996. He recalled Brodsky’s “igneous and impetuous sensibility,” his rare mixture of brilliance and sweetness. Remembering his “shared secrets” in Ireland, Heaney said their friendship was like meeting a Conradian “secret sharer.” He also observed that since Brodsky, despite his weak heart, always seemed indestructible, “it was difficult for friends to admit that he was in danger. The intensity and boldness of his genius plus the sheer exhilaration of being in his company kept you from thinking about the threat to his health… Having to speak of him in the past tense feels like an affront to grammar itself.” Echoing “your gift survived it all” in Auden’s elegy on Yeats, Heaney observed with a striking simile, “print is what we have of him now, and he will survive behind its black lines, in the pace of its poetic meter or its prose arguments, like Rilke’s panther pacing behind black bars.”

The following week Heaney read Brodsky’s late poem “Reveille” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. At first Brodsky wakes hopefully in a gentle dawn to winged creatures, clouds, sun, sky and oceanic ejaculation:

Birds acquaint themselves with leaves.
Hired hands roll up their sleeves.
In a brick malodorous dorm
boys awake awash in sperm.

The intensely compressed and convoluted poem then turns dark as the poet stoically faces, with scant consolation, the harsh reality of human existence. It ends with four strong monosyllables that echo Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Brodsky concludes:

putting up with nothing whose
company we cannot lose
hardens rocks and — rather fast —
hearts as well. But rocks will last.

It’s unclear why Heaney chose this gnomic poem or whether the audience understood it.

As Dennis O’Driscoll observed, Brodsky’s English poems “could be linguistically clotted, syntactically confused, totally misjudged, not to mention rhythmically unconvincing.” In June 2003, while reading and lecturing in Saint Petersburg, Heaney visited Akhmatova’s House on the Fotanka and Brodsky’s family apartment — an utterly “solemn, sweet, sorrowful, unforgettable moment.”

Heaney wrote two poems about Brodsky. The first, “Lauds and Gauds for a Laureate” on prayers and celebrations, introduced Brodsky’s reading at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1988. Instead of the usual formal and familiar presentation, the poem was like a witty prologue to a play, written with many off-rhymes (hotshots / glasnost) in the balladic style of Robert Burns. The poem mentions Stalin and Orwell’s Big Brother, Shakespeare and Walcott, and includes Heaney’s favorite image of “The digger working against time.”

Heaney said that the poem originated in Brodsky’s talk, “about how he had once defied the labour-camp authorities in Siberia by refusing to stop when they deemed one of his punishments had gone on long enough. He’d been given a task of splitting logs, but when they indicated that he’d done his bit, Joseph refused to lay down the axe, and went on and on, splitting and splitting, furious at the absurdity, exposing it by his excessiveness. In my mind, that axe got mixed up with Kafka’s remark that ‘a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.’” Heaney later explained that Brodsky’s “muse was essentially a lie-detector.”

Yet Joseph’s tool is not the spade.
The axe with ice upon its blade
Is more his thing.
It splits the frozen sea inside
And then, You lied! You lied! You lied!
The echoes ring.

Heaney also recalls their memorable meeting in Dublin:

In Ireland, on a harbour wall,
Among the shipping lanes and all
Those gulls and gannets,
Joseph, I won’t forget the day
We spent last year in Dublin Bay
Discussing sonnets.

The last stanza directly addresses the eager audience as Brodsky magically appears on stage to release the genie from the bottle of his Slavíc art:

So let your expectations tremble
Now these real presences assemble
And lights are lowered,
As they unearth the jars and click
The locks wide open on the Slavíc
Poet’s word-hoard.

Heaney’s elegy on Brodsky, “Audenesque” (2001), is a brilliant and witty tour de force that uses the seven-syllable rhymed couplets of the third part of Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”:

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Yeats and Brodsky both died on January 28: Yeats in 1939, Brodsky at the age of fifty-five in 1996. Adapting some of Auden’s memorable phrases, Heaney captures Brodsky’s lively and lovable personality. He repeats the ice-axe-frozen images from “Lauds and Gauds” and mentions Archangel, where Brodsky did forced labor. As in Auden’s poem, the icy weather matches the condition of the dead poet:

Dublin airport locked in frost,
Rigor mortis in your breast…
Ice of Archangelic strength,
Ice of this hard two-faced month,
Ice like Dante’s in deep hell
Makes your heart a frozen well.

Heaney then revives Brodsky through memories of their friendship when they gave readings in Amherst. Brodsky would have liked the rough rhyme of the first couplet:

Pepper vodka you produced
Once in western Massachusetts
With the reading due to start
Warmed my spirits and my heart.

Liberated from the oppression of Russia, where he’d been a political prisoner, Brodsky rejoiced in

Politically incorrect
Jokes involving sex and sect,
Everything against the grain,
Drinking, smoking like a train.

Repeating “train” in the next line, Heaney also recalls that they reversed the direction of Lenin’s return to the Finland Station in Petrograd:

In a train in Finland we
Talked last summer happily,
Swapping manuscripts and quips,
Both of us like cracking whips.

In a gentle rebuke, Heaney noted that in the self-indulgent peculiarities of Brodsky’s English verse “the English ear comes up against a phonetic element that is both animated and skewed… a certain metrical oddity, especially in the matter of enjambment”:

Jammed enjambments piling up
As you went above the top,
Nose in air, foot to the floor,
Revving English like a car.

Heaney saw that the artful and idealistic Brodsky commanded a formidable intelligence, erudition and intuition. He displayed an absolute belief in the supreme value of great art and showed precisely “what makes the whole enterprise of poetry so valuable for our species.”