Solzhenitsyn’s return
Sir, – In his thorough survey of contemporary studies of Alexander
Solzhenitsyn’s life and works (November 28), Michael Nicholson quotes from
an essay by Alexander Genis in which the Russian writer refers to
Solzhenitsyn as “the last prophet of Apollo in the abandoned temple of
absolute truth”. This quotation is taken out of context and Genis’s words
are, in fact, ironical. They refer to the title of a pompous essay by
Solzhenitsyn, published in an émigré journal, in which (quoting Pushkin’s
verse in the title) he attempted to debunk the enemies of the Russian sense
of morality and beauty, comparing them to those who tried to shake the
temple of Apollo. A sense of righteousness never left Solzhenitsyn
throughout his tumultuous career.
In a BBC documentary which recorded Solzhenitsyn’s pilgrimage from Vladivostok
to Moscow, after twenty years of exile in Vermont, there was a brief
exchange (in Russian) between the writer and his wife as he prepared to
alight from the train to meet the crowd of admirers on Russian soil. “Smile,
smile!” prompts his wife. “No smiles”, retorts the grand man. “An expression
of restrained benevolence is what we need now.” This bit of dialogue was not
translated for the British audience.
Solzhenitsyn always knew which facial expression was appropriate for Russia at
any given moment. Not everyone, though, accepted this. He was regarded as a
mendacious political manipulator by Varlam Shalamov who, like Primo Levi,
created out of his own experience of the prison camps a picture of an
unmitigated and unredeemable hell that shows us everything and teaches us
nothing. Solzhenitsyn, instead, created a pedagogical fable of suffering
that leads to a Dostoevskian kind of redemption.
Since Russia’s politics are now heavily influenced by a ruling group made up
of former KGB employees, this conception of Russian history suits the
authorities very well. Solzhenitsyn was nominated for the Order of Lenin by
Khrushchev, but went too far in his exposure of Stalinist atrocities, and
fell out with the Soviet leadership. Many decades later, however, he was
granted a similar state award by Vladimir Putin. It was presented to him by
President Putin himself, in Solzhenitsyn’s new home in Moscow.
This visit was filmed by Russian state television. Solzhenitsyn, the former
political prisoner, showed every corner of his house – even his study – to
Putin, the former KGB officer who had publicly defended Stalinism as a
historical necessity. Putin praised Solzhenitsyn for demonstrating to the
younger generation how difficult this patriotic road to great statehood had
been. The scene was a heartbreaking betrayal of everything that Solzhenitsyn
had declared he stood for; unless in reality he stood for something else
altogether.
ZINOVY ZINIK
67 Haverstock Hill, London NW3.
Auden and prizes
Sir, – Jascha Kessler’s letter (November 28) about W. H. Auden and the Yale
Younger Poets Series is seriously delusional. Kessler describes a mid-1950s
New York dinner party that I do not recall, where supposedly Auden and I
first met, and where he was so entranced by my effeminate, Waspy charms that
he invited me to send him a manuscript for the Yale competition, of which he
was the judge, thereby robbing Kessler – or another of the twelve
“finalists” – of the prize.
Kessler has a careless way with facts. He says I was “new to New York from
Buffalo”, where I’ve never lived, and “recently acquainted with [the host]
Arnold \[Weinstein\]”, whom I had known since 1949 when I moved to New York
City. Also, I had first met Auden as an undergraduate around 1947 after a
reading he gave at Harvard, and often seen him in New York as a result of
knowing his lover Chester Kallman. If he was going to be swept away by my
“mewling”, “mincing”, “goy gay persona” he had already had almost a decade
to be so (and wasn’t). To suggest that the notably ethical Auden would
propose circumventing the Yale contest rules to someone he had just met is
ridiculous. In any case he would have had no need to give me his address, as
Kessler says he did, since I had been to his apartment on a number of
occasions (including for one of his famous birthday parties).
The “history” to which Mr Kessler refers at the end of his letter is hardly
supported by the easily verified record. George Bradley has written the
history of the Yale series in the introduction to his Yale Younger Poets
Anthology (1998). This is from the part about me (p lxviii):
As usual, Auden was on Ischia that spring [1955], where he had been sent
twelve manuscripts. After he went through them, he sent [Eugene] Davidson
[at Yale University Press] an unhappy letter. Not only had he not found
anything he liked, he had not found what he was looking for:
“I am very worried because, for the second year in succession, I do not find
among the mss. submitted to me one that I feel merits publication. It so
happens that there is another poet staying here, and I have asked him to
read them also as a check on my own judgment. He came, however, to the same
conclusion.
“What bothers me particularly is that a young poet (John Ashbery) whom I know
personally told me he was submitting a manuscript this year. I have
reservations about such of his poems as I have seen, but they are certainly
better than any of the manuscripts which have reached me. I don’t know how
or by whom the preliminary sieving is done at the press, but I cannot help
wondering whether I am receiving the best.”
The other poet reading manuscripts with Auden was Anthony Hecht, who had been
travelling in Italy and had met Auden by chance. As for John Ashbery, his
manuscript had indeed been weeded out, along with that of another New York
poet, Frank O’Hara. Auden contacted them both and asked that they re-submit
their work directly to him. He received the manuscripts in little more than
a week and made up his mind within days. The winner was Ashbery, salvaged
from the slush pile to become in time one of the best-known poets the Yale
series has ever published.
JOHN ASHBERY
c/o Georges Borchardt Inc, 136 East 57th Street, New York 10022.
The ‘Protocols’
Sir, – I presume that Nikolai Tolstoy cannot be serious in his bizarre
suggestion (Letters, November 28) that the idea of tsarist secret police
sponsorship of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion originates with my review
in your pages. Should he care to consult only Chapters Four and Five of
Warrant for Genocide by the late Professor Norman Cohn, an exhaustive study
of the question which was first published in 1966, he will at least be
obliged to remove the look of affected astonishment from his features.
Perhaps the recent and rather belated counter-attack by Charles Ruud and
Sergei Stepanov will justify Tolstoy’s confidence, but I must say that
anyone who can go on to describe the work of John Mearsheimer and Stephen
Walt as “enthusiastically” pro-Israeli has risked the forfeit of his
credibility on any subject.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
2022 Columbia Road NW, Washington, DC 20009.
MOG
Sir, – Trevor Mostyn, in his review of Kingmakers by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen
Blair Brysac (November 21), refers to Lord Cromer as “The Grand Old Man”,
but surely the title was applied to Gladstone – and the initials reversed
after General Gordon’s death to stand for “Murderer of Gordon”?
MICHAEL GOLDMAN
1 Lyndale Close, London SE3.
‘La Périchole’
Sir, – In his review of Peter Dickinson’s Lord Berners (November 28), Patrick
O’Connor says that Berners’s opera, Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement, “was
based on the same Prosper Mérimée story that had furnished the libretto for
Offenbach’s La Périchole”. The scandalous affair between the Viceroy of Lima
and the singer Micaela Villegas, known as “La Perichole” (without an accent
in Mérimée) allegedly because the insult he reserved for her, perra chola,
was deformed by his Catalan accent and lack of teeth, is, as Mérimée points
out in a footnote to his one-act play, based on historical fact. In
Offenbach’s operetta the loves of the impoverished street singer and
Piquillo are conventionally frustrated by the amorous Viceroy of Peru in a
plot involving a drunken marriage, imprisonment and escape, and their final
reunion and the Viceroy’s pardon. There is no coach. The only debt of the
librettists, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, to Mérimée is the name of the
Viceroy (Andres de Ribera in Mérimée, Andrès de Ribeira in Offenbach) and of
that of the Governor of Lima; if anything there is a greater debt to Manon
Lescaut, which provides a joke in the most famous aria, and The Count of
Monte-Cristo. Berners’s sprightly opera, however, does follow closely,
albeit with inevitable omissions, Mérimée’s play, with its single set, in
which the irascible, jealous and gout-ridden Viceroy is manipulated by la
Perichole, successful, unfaithful, impudent and witty, into gaining his new
coach for a ride to the cathedral, then donating it, overcome by piety, to
the Archbishop of Lima. The play was the basis for a freer adaptation by
Jean Renoir in his 1953 film Le Carrosse d’or.
PETER COGMAN
141 Bellemoor Road, Shirley, Southampton.
Alasdair Gray
Sir, – For some reason, Rodge Glass’s biography of my father, Alasdair Gray,
is rather inaccurate about the last year of my mother’s life. Karl Miller,
in his review of the book (October 24), adds to these inaccuracies.
In 2000, having been diagnosed with cancer in Denmark where she was living, my
mother, Inge Sørensen, came to Britain, visited a friend in England and then
went to Glasgow, where she stayed for three weeks with my father and his
wife in the latter’s home and was looked after by me and close friends. From
there she went to two Glasgow hospitals for treatment and then rented a flat
in which she lived for some months, looked after by an old friend, before
dying in it on October 2, 2000.
I only burden your readers with this account because Karl Miller attaches such
importance to her dying in the “marital bed”.
ANDREW GRAY
93 Grennan Road, West Hartford, Connecticut 06107.
Dirk and Noël
Sir, – Whether Noël Coward met Dirk Bogarde in 1939 or 1947 (see John
Coldstream’s letter, November 21), and did, or didn’t make a pass at him,
and whatever the truth about Bogarde’s sex life (or possible lack thereof),
in 1954, or so tradition has it, the Master, contemplating a poster
advertising both Bogarde and Michael Redgrave in a now mercifully forgotten
film entitled The Sea Shall Not Have Them, was heard to observe: “I don’t
see why not; everybody else has”.
PETER GREEN
1268 Chamberlain Drive, Iowa City, Iowa 52240.
