Today I read two articles that looked at the idea of a poet from an odd angle. One was about Josef Stalin, a teenage scribbler of some renown in his native Georgia. The other was a fresh look at the silver fox - still wowing the resort denizens of the warmer American states - whom we know and love as Rod McKuen.
I'll get the links out of the way up front. The Stalin article, by Simon Sebag Montefiore (who has a biography out, Young Stalin, from Weidenfeld & Nicholson), is from today's Guardian Review. The McKuen article, by Claire Dederer, is on the Poetry Foundation's excellent site (so it should be excellent with all that money sloshing around it) and is a complete treat. I found the link on James Marcus' blog, House of Mirth. (Puff warning! Please also note James' piece, reporting on a movie-star fundraising event.)
I have to confess that I didn't want to read the poem by young Stalin-to-be featured in today's Guardian. Of course the very notion of Stalin (shudder) being a poet (gasp) fills us with a superstitious dread, as if something precious is being defiled - or maybe we think it proves that "being a poet" is after all pretty meaningless, that it changes nothing. We all know about the Nazis listening to Strauss & Beethoven, after all. There's something unnatural in reading a poem by a man who lived along such principles of evil. The purpose of reading the poem - any poem - is at war with the only proper reaction to the idea of a foray into such a man's psyche.
Well, I was glad after all that I did read it. Utter tosh. Banal isn't even the word. Well - banal in fact is the word. Evil and Stalin's poetry: both banal. There you go.
Now, speaking of Stalin's evil, it did have one peculiarly sinister quality, and that is the inconsistency with which he treated poets. Some of them he allowed to survive. He tortured and persecuted them, sure, but he also kept them alive, in the same way a schoolboy of yore might have kept a jar of insects alive. There's a particularly creepy anecdote in the article about Stalin asking Pasternak on the phone if he didn't think Mandelstam was a complete genius. Pasternak - no doubt terrified to voice any opinion at all - said nothing, and as a result Mandelstam was sent to the gulag.
I've never read a biography of Stalin, and in fact have almost made a point of not knowing much about him - but I do read about writers, and the history of the arts under Stalin is both infamous and riddled with these stories, so I've heard a bit. Montefiore makes the assertion that Stalin was acting out his jealousy of these first-rank writers, but that he did value their art enough not to have them killed. (In kind, if not extent, and allowing for historical inaccuracy, it reminds me of the characterisation of Salieri in "Amadeus" - who is, of course, a pathetic and reallyl quite tragic figure. It is the invitation to sympathy that feels riskiest in that play and also in the idea, here, of Stalin as an artist.) It is terrifying to think of being Boris Pasternak, with Stalin on the other end of a telephone wire.
Here is a telling story about Stalin's younger years, which usefully intersects the terrorist aspect and the 'poetry' aspect. Montefiore writes:
"When, 10 years after these works were published, he was a top Bolshevik, a political god-father running a gang of hitmen and bank robbers to fund Lenin's faction, he was still proud of his poetry. An unpublished memoir from the 1905 revolution recalls a pistol-toting Bolshevik boss leading packhorses bearing guns and stolen banknotes over the mountains, cheerfully declaiming his own poems to his companions.
"By 1907, he was looking to pull off a spectacular bank robbery, but he needed an "inside man". In the streets of Tiflis, he bumped into an old schoolfriend, now working as an accountant in the state bank, who declared himself a passionate fan of Soselo's poems, particularly the one dedicated to Eristavi. Stalin charmed and cultivated this admirer until he agreed to reveal the arrival by stagecoach of a million roubles. Using this information, Stalin set up the Tiflis bank robbery in which 40 people were killed and a huge sum stolen for Lenin. This secured Stalin's reputation with Lenin, who declared he was "exactly the type I need". Only in Georgia, where poetry was read passionately, would a banker risk his life and career to arrange a bloody bank robbery because he loved a man's poetry."
I would argue that all this, together with the derivative, romantic nature of Stalin's verse - a perfect precursor to Social Realism - illustrates a central fact: that there is nothing to fear in Stalin's poetry itself. In fact, because his entire view of poetry was so reductionist, and so much about other things, we can practically say that there's no poetry there at all. It's all flowers and nationalism. Banal!
Strange how this leads us straight into the article about Rod McKuen, a figure I remember all too vividly from the early to mid-seventies, when my sister, the Baroness of Baroque, really got into him. There were soft-focus yellowy-green paperbacks with swirly script on the covers all over the house! I won't bother to quote, because - well, I can't quite bear to go to the trouble. There are some excellent examples in the article, though.
Here is part of Dederer's description of the man himself, in performance im Palm Springs:
"His face is rueful, his eyes are shut. His hair and beard are white; his suit is black; his tie is a shiny red. He looks like the most elegant sea captain ever. “Baby, take it slow,” he sings, and then he mutters with perfect eccentric-old-man timing, “Don’t break anything we might need later.” He gives a big-eyed mug to the audience.
Over the next two hours, McKuen expertly unspools his personae before us. There’s the Beat Poet Lite: He reads his poems quietly, accompanied by soft, plinking jazz from his very fine band.
Then there’s the Frenchman: Over the years, McKuen has composed music with Jacques Brel and many other Europeans. He sings his own songs and a handful of standards with the emotional vibrato of a chansonnier, coloring the music with quaking heartache and near-tears grief. (He is a man who is unafraid to stretch his hands into the air in a gesture of helplessness.)"
This gesture, whilst demonstrating an extraordinary amount of emotion and seisitivity on the paret of its author, is also - almost literally - handing the requisite emotion to the listeners. This is not poetry that allows you, the reader or audience member, to try to work out what you think or feel about it.
In other words, as far as the poetry itself is concerned, this persona may not be so far removed from the Georgian folk-hero troubadour who knew how to string words together at the same time as he was masterminding a gangster bank robbery. As long as people saw him as a sensitive soul, he could be doing anything. And McKuen, too, is a sensitive soul.
Of course, I am not beginning to imply that McKuen is a bank robber (or, indeed, the worst dictator of the twentieth century). I am purely saying that I think these two hugely disparate figures have operated on much the same level of poetic impulse. (Sorry, sis. Please still come over!)
On second thoughts, I will leave you with two quotes: one from "Soselo" and one from McKuen. You get to guess which is which.
1. I cannot bear the thought of you / in someone else’s arms / yet imagining you alone is sad...
2. Gently smile at the earth / stretched out beneath you; / sing a lullaby to the glacier...
