Less than one.

Less Than One

ON THE evidence of Less Than One, a collection of essays by the poet Joseph Brodsky, there exists such a thing as poet's prose. Despite a slight overlapping, this is not the same as poetic prose, a somewhat dubious proposition, often no more than bejewelded verbiage and clangorous rhythms. Poet's prose, however, is rather like Rimbaud's definition of poetry: a prolonged, immense, systematic derangement of all the senses. Or something like the pushing aside of molecules to enter into the heart of matter, into the mind of the universe. It is a deliberate skewing of perception, so as to see around appearances into truth.

Brodsky is remarkable in many ways. He is one of that small band of foreign-born writers who have mastered English as well as, even if perhaps slightly differently from, native artists. But he came to English relatively late, and is the only such writer of major significance in verse, even if he first writes it in Russian and then translates it into an English that in no way feels like a translation. First jailed, then expelled by the Soviets--at age 32 in 1972--he has been teaching literature at several distinguished American institutions, as well as teaching himself how to write English prose as good as his already renowned Russian poetry. Thus he has achieved a small personal bridge across the world's widest, most ominous abyss.

Not that Brodsky is a mediator in any political sense: His hatred of Communist Russia--Which, among its other crimes, disallowed his aging and dying parents any reunion with their only child--is matched only by his fanatical love of poetry. This love of poetry is what rattles around imperiously in the condescended-to cage of prose of this collection. It should be noted that the quality of the essays varies according to their type. Those dealing with biography and autobiography--notably the first, about Brodsky's early years, and the last, about his parents--are incomparably moving in their blend of rough-hewn truthfulness and boundless love. A similar intensity and inteligence inform the pieces about poets Brodsky has known personally, but here friendship can cloud judgmenet, and the ones about writers known from their work only tend to be better. But even there tendentiousness crops up: Brodsky must defend his admiration against potentially less favorable judgments. He regains his control in essays about ideas (e.g., "On Tyranny," where the Soviet system is skewered with a kind of sardonic lyricism) and places (e.g., Leningrad/St. Petersburg, which he loves, and Istanbul/Byzantium, which he hates, and where the geographical, historical, cultural ruminations stimulate even as they ramble on).

The first quality of this poet's prose is brilliance, which freely commits grand assertions and paradoxical idiosyncrasies in the hope of breaking up the solidified commonplaces of established wisdom and making a new world from reshuffled shards. Take this, from the essay on Mandelstam: "A poet gets into trouble because of his linguistic, and, by implication, his psychological superiority, rather than because of his politics. A song is a form of linguistic disobedience, and its sound casts a doubt on a lot more than a concrete political system: It questions the entire existential order. And the number of its adversaries grows proportionally." Such apercus are too grandiose; they border on a Rimbaldian, or more ordinary, derangement. But they also contain a smidgen of genius, a silver of cutting truth.

This poetic mode of perception depends on--its second salient quality--the arrogant yet awesome faith in the absolute superiority of poetry to prose and, by implication, anything else this world can come up with. A recurrent thought, it is most baldly stated in the essay on the prose of Marina Tsvetaeva: "The poet, in principle, is higher than the prose writer." As elaborated in the essay on Auden, it reads: "Unlike fiction writers, poets tell us the whole story: not only in terms of their actual experiences and sentiments but . . . of language itself, in terms of the words they finally choose." What takes some of the curse--though none of the edge--off such brutal statements is Brodsky's downright mystical belief in the superiority of poetry to any poet, and in the sacred primary od language above, or at least prior to, poetry itself. Again and again he restates and refines his notion that the structures of the language fashion the writer, that the word that chooses him (rather than vice versa) determines the flow of his thought, the shape of his verse or prose. Call it the verbal equivalent of Michelangelo's assertion that the statue is in the stone, and the sculptor merely disengages it from the marble.

Wheter or not we agree with this, as it were, religion, it is inspiring to observe it guiding and fulfilling Brodsky's thinking, disengaging from the poet-essayist his most sculptured utterances. "A poem," he says in the fine essay on Montale, "is a form of the closest possible interplay between ethics and aesthetics.c Still, as we gather from the essay on Tsvetaeva's prose, "a reader can be taken by the hand by prose and delivered to where he would otherwise be shoved by a poem."

This leads us to another characteristic: Brodsky's fierce partisanship and concomitant purblindness. Whichever favorte poet he is writing about in a given essay becomes--at least implicitly, but more often explicitly--the greatest of all. Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Cavafy, and others rotate to the top, previous champions sometimes remembered, sometimes not. To brodsky, Auden was "the greatest mind of the twentieth century"; the novelist Andrei Platonov (in one of Brodsky's favorite phrases), to say the least, the equal of Joyce, Musil, and Kafka (Proust is always conspicuously absent from these lineups); and as for Derek Walcott, he has given us "an archipelago of pems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper." And so on and on.

It is not surprising, then, that Brodsky is at his worst when explicating one of his beloveds' poems. The 72 pages on Tsvetaeva's "New Year's Greetings" and the 52 on Auden's "September 1, 1939," are the least agreeable parts of this collection, not only because of the hail of superlatives, but also because Brodsky over-interprets wildly, free-associating to the point of making every image, line, word, and sound take on impossible multifariousness. A Strasbourg goose's liver, morbidly hypertrophic as it is, is at least palpably there; the marvels stuffed into a line of Auden's or Tsvetaeva's could not be fitted even into Shakespeare or Dante, and as often as not do not exist. But even when off the mark, Brodsky's enthusiasm is something to marvel at; the ingenuity of his very errors is astonishing.

Finally, this prose has a way of soaring into metaphysical realms where I cannot follow: "Love is essentially an attitude maintained by the infinite toward the finite. The reversal constitutes either faith or poetry." I must not forget, either, the wit that enlivens and endears page after page, or the sure aphoristic touch, as in, "By itself, reality isn't worth a damn. It's perception that promotes reality to meaning." Well, Brodsky is a superb promoter of meaning, and the essays on himself when young, on his parents, and on what used to be called St. Petersburg (ironically titled "A Guide to a Renamed City") belong in the anthology any reader carries around in his memory. Let me quote the ending of the last, about those fabled white nights: "On such nights, it's hard to fall asleep, because it's too light and because any dream will be inferior to this reality. Where a man doesn't cast a shadow, like water." I may be infected with Brodsky's disease, but I say only a poet could have written that prose.