Author: Date: Saturday, February 13, 1988
Page: 10
Section: LIVING

"Displacement and misplacement are this century's commonplace," he has written in an essay titled "The Condition We Call Exile." Perhaps there is a certain poetic justice, if not irony, in this spot where he has chosen to settle every spring. The house, too, is an emigre, moved here from its foundation decades ago to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir.

As Brodsky steps outside his back door to greet me, he seems kinder and gentler than the fierce, brooding hawk of a man who gazes out from the book jacket of "Less Than One," his prize-winning book of essays published two years ago. He looks a bit rumpled and distracted, as one might expect from a man who lives, as his friend, the poet Seamus Heaney describes it, "frugally, industriously and in a certain amount of solitude."

He offers coffee and invites me to look around, apologizing for the series of interruptions that signify a man in considerable demand -- the phone calls in English and Russian, the arrival of express mail packages. It has been only three months, after all, since he journeyed to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize.

Although his friends in Russia, he says, have felt more relaxed recently about contacting him, the news of the prize has not been publicized in Russia. In Novy Mir, a Soviet literary almanac that has published some of his poems, the news was mentioned in a footnote. "It was like some kind of Chernobyl," he said of the secrecy surrounding his honor.

Brodsky, I am to discover, possesses a droll, sardonic wit whose sharpest edges he saves for the bureaucratic tyrants of his native country, from which he was exiled 16 years ago after serving 18 months in a Siberian labor camp.

Finally, we settle down at the kitchen table cluttered with papers, a small typewriter, and a pack of the cigarettes his doctors have forbidden since he underwent open heart surgery, his second bypass operation, last year.

Brodsky has rented this house, he says, since 1981, when he first began alternating his teaching appointments between Columbia University and the Five-College program in Pioneer Valley. He still spends much of the year in his West Village apartment in New York, the city he calls "the mother of interference." Last year, he accepted a permanent appointment as Andrew Mellon professor of literature at Mount Holyoke, where he teaches a course in Russian literature and a course in English literature that he calls "The Subject Matter of Modern Lyric Poetry." He stole the title, he says, from the poet Elizabeth Bishop: "I thought it sounded dry, and I didn't want to be swamped with students."

As we gaze out the window into the snowy woods, it seems natural to talk about a sense of place and about Robert Frost, one of his favorite poets. ''There is the sort of landscape and a certain diction and tonality here that harks back to Frost," he says. "Sometimes you are tempted to play the Frost game on paper. You can fall under his spell," he said. "But not too much. Maybe it's a matter of temperament. I'm far less steady than he was."

New England scenes have begun to appear in Brodsky's poetry, etched with as much authority as those of Leningrad, where he grew up, and Norenskaya, where he served time. In an elegy for Robert Lowell, he writes of "church-hooded New England," of planes at Logan that "thunder off from the brown mass of industrial tundra with its bureaucratic moss."

It would be a mistake, however, to look here for important clues to either the man or the poetry. He is no longer, as he once described himself, in the plight of Lot's wife, the exile looking back. And yet one feels that even as he alights here, the momentum of his exile is still pushing him onward. In a recent essay, he compared the exiled writer to a man "hurled into outer space in a capsule . . . and your capsule is language."

Being grounded, he explains, might be necessary for prose but not for poetry. The fiction writer, he says, "ought to have a community settled in its ways in order to comment on it. But poetry is not a comment on the life of society. Poetry, is essentially the moment in the history of language. Unlike a prose writer, the poet is like a bird who starts to chirp no matter what branch he lights on."

Returning to Frost, he observes of Frost's reputation for angling to win prizes, "If I were Frost, I would indeed seek all forms of recognition, not so much to tickle my ego, but create a situation where my work would find a greater readership."

Of his own relationship to such recognition, however, he feels differently. ''I'm not a native son," he says. "In the spotlight, I feel a bit uncomfortable. The accent would be the first reason. I know I may sound unconvincing. But it is pure and simple animal insecurity. And if I can speak about myself with sobriety, I have sought a slightly different posture, a posture of somebody isolated, operating in his own idiosyncratic way, somebody on the outside instead of in the thick of things." He pauses, then delivers the punchline. "Finding myself one day outside Russia," he says, "in some grotesque way, was a very congenial thing."

Brodsky says that there was never a single dramatic moment when he realized in a blaze of clarity that he would become a poet. "It simply happened," he says. "In some ways, I'm distressed to have turned into a professional writer. I used to regard it as a byproduct of life, a gentleman's occupation. A picture I had was to be in the merchant marine, a deckhand, to disembark at a cheap hotel and write a couple of elegies." And yet, during his trial in Leningrad on charges of "parasitism," the Soviet judge questioned where the writing of poetry could be learned, if not in school. "I think that it comes
from God," he had said.

For Brodsky, the value of literature lies in its power to evoke uniqueness and individuality. "This may be a very crass view of the medium," he says, ''but it provides the reader with the sense of his own uniqueness. Poetry offers a higher plane of regard. It is a terrific accelerator of one's mental operations. To use the modern lingo, it expands your consciousness. And in that sense, it saves."

In that spirit, he teaches the work of his favorite poets, requiring his students to memorize up to 2,000 lines of poetry a semester. He tells them, he says, "Let's commit this stuff to our brains, to our bloodstream."

Poetry, he believes, offers an antidote to the illusions created by politics as well as popular culture. "Every society," he says, "has in its articulation a positive slant, a positive tenor all the time. The way the politicians talk, the way commercial people talk. The language gets tilted, and literature tries to restore the balance, to convey the idea that life is a double-edged sword.

"When you've been fed all this positive stuff, and then you encounter trouble that exceeds your expectations, you are prone to get hysterical or to say that someone deceived you. You look around for a culprit. What a poet tries to do is tell you that the wolf is never too far. It may be inside already. It may be that you are the wolf yourself."

It was literature, he says, that turned his own life around. "I was a normal Soviet boy," he says. 'I could have become a man of the system. But something turned me upside down, 'Notes from the Underground.' I realized what I am. That I am bad."

That notion of human nature as fundamentally flawed, he says, has been omitted from the modern world. And paradoxically, he says, it is the belief in humanity's fundamental goodness that has led to the tyranny of the state. "We are victims of the enlightenment," he says. "We are all Rousseau-ists, who believe that man is good, and that the institutions have spoiled him. Hence we have to improve the institutions, which results in the ideal state -- the police state."

Technology, too, he says, enforces a certain uniformity. "In one way or another," he says, "the species is becoming a victim of technology. The nation falls under the spell of the TV screen. Eventually, the diversity of opinion is going to shrink to the number of networks." As for the aesthetics of technology, he observes, "Everything is done in an opaque block of color and texture," he says. "The dashboard of the car looks like the VCR, and the VCR looks like the Uzi machine gun. Perhaps a Japanese firm like Sony could combine into one unit a machine gun, a camera, a VCR, and a car. A fusion."

Although he is reluctant to talk about Gorbachev -- "My imagination fails to get absorbed by political figures," he says -- he feels that Americans reacted naively to the Soviet leader's recent visit here. "You put anybody on the TV screen, and you will get a following," he says. "You wouldn't want to live under that man. But to watch him on TV is all right. You feel that you are in control, that you can switch him on and off."

Brodsky says that what he feared most in coming to the United States was a certain American naivete about human nature. "What I feared most of all in my first years here was that it would turn me into a simpleton. It's a good thing I arrived here not at the age of 18 but at 32. I'm not saying one should concentrate on one's dark nature. But with good intentions, you can do a lot of harm. For instance, by loving someone you can wreck someone's life as substantially as by hating. You love that person, and you are convinced of your noble motives, and you impose yourself on that person. You reduce that person's options and confine that person to yourself. It should cross your mind that maybe there is somebody better than myself for that person. That is why the epithet 'love is blind.' Love should not be blind, it should be very keen."

Later that afternoon, the exile walks across the Mount Holyoke campus from one class to another, crossing continents and centuries, teaching first the majestic fatalism of Thomas Hardy and then the wild resolve of Pushkin. He translates Pushkin line by line, as his friend, the poet Derek Walcott, described in a poem he dedicated to Brodsky: "Under your exile's tongue, crisp under heel, the gutturals crackle like decaying leaves." As Brodsky walks wearily back across the snow, bundled up in his flapped Russian fur hat, I feel startled again by the unlikely scenario of the exile who has landed here, an exotic bird alighting on the tundra, an unexpected gift of grace.

On Monday night, in behalf of the Poets' Theater, Brodsky will join his fellow lyric poets Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney onstage at the American Repertory Theater for a reading of his poetry. Wallace Shawn will read a portion of Brodsky's play, "Marbles."

masts of the shuddered grove steaming up to capsize

in the frozen straits of Epiphany. February has fewer

days than other months. Therefore, it's more cruel

than the rest. Dearest, it's more sound

to wrap up our saling round

the globe with habitual naval grace,

moving your cot to the fireplace

where our dreadnought is going under

in great smoke. Only fire can grasp this winter!

Golden unharnessed stallions in the chimney

dye their manes to more corvine shades as they near the finish,

and the dark room fills with plaintive chirring

of a naked grasshopper one cannot cup in fingers.

(c) Joseph Brodsky. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc.

FLAKE ;02/11 JOBE ;02/13,10:52 BRODSKY