Exiled from his homeland of Russia in 1972, Joseph Brodsky emigrated and eventually obtained citizenship to the United States. He is best remembered as the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1987, and Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991. Czeslaw Milosz, another Nobel Prize winning Poet, said of him, "Already since his beginnings and his trial in Russia the aura of greatness surrounded him."

'In a Room and a Half', Less Than One: Selected Essays, 1986

A Room and a Half is the last essay in Joseph Brodsky's Less Than One: Selected Essays, dedicated to the 'memory of my mother and father', and it is small extracts of this that will punctuate the rest of this article. It wasn't a monumental work - not in the sense of the 'philosophical quest' with which critics might be concerned. But it was characteristic of the way he wrote; in the words of Yevgeny Rein, it gave one the sense of how 'time flows past and away from you; and time knows neither heat or cold'.

And it is this distinctive style of his that gives an added poignancy to A Room and A Half, because it isn't just any essay. It is a biography by the poet himself on his life and those he left behind in the long wake of his Russian exile. There is something romanticized about the whole idea of exile, and the spell before that which he spent in hard labor sentenced by the Soviet Government, in the artic Norenskaya, in the 1960s. Rein sees it as the point where Brodsky reaches his "high spiritual, high metaphysical plateau'. But with A Room and A Half, the aura of greatness half falls away, and it feels as though a window were opened to his soul - if only momentarily - and there is nothing deep about him, another man, another life story with its share of sorrows.

"I write this in English because I want to grant [my mother and father] a margin of freedom: the margin whose width depends on the number of people who may be willing to read this. To write about them in Russian would be only to further their captivity, their reduction to insignificance, resulting in mechanical annihilation. I know that one shouldn't equate the state with language but it was in Russian that two old people, shuffling through numerous state chancelleries and ministries in the hope of obtaining a permit to go abroad for a visit to see their only son before they died, were told repeatedly, for twelve years in a row, that the state considers such a visit "unpurposeful"."

Brodsky wrote in both Russian and English, the former, of course, being his native language. Always, though, there is that neutrality of tone which he maintains (this is not at all to say that it doesn't create emotion in the reader - only he does not impose his own). Aesthetically, It gives a sense of the surreal to the reading. Technically, it confers balance to the themes he deals with, whether it be death, love, or the 'after-the-end' idea.

That last can be seen in his poem The End of a Beautiful Era (A Part of Speech, 1980) and his play Marble. Another of his contemporaries, Mikhail Meilakh, calls the recurring theme "an answer to life in Russia: all of us there live 'after the end' ".

Brodsky himself praised America on its spirit of individualism, its language, its literature. In instances like this one is constantly reminded, despite his eventual citizenship, and the things he undertook after that - including helping to found the American Poetry & Literacy Project, a not-for-profit organization to make poetry a greater part of American culture - that he did not emerge from this culture.

What makes a poet write as he does? Maybe that first question needs modification, because Brodsky wasn't just a poet. He had a lengthy resume: a poet, playwright, essayist and critic. So what was it that made his great? I like to think that it is the acuteness with which he sees both worlds - the outer one in his surroundings - and the inner one, within us all. For a poet who is so intellectual, he has that keen intuition and he threads the line between both well without ever falling into extremes. It is something that comes across in his interviews as well, and in one such by a Boston Globe reporter in 1988, he speaks revealingly on his notions on love:

"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." -- Joseph Brodsky, interview, 1988.

Love was also a theme he dealt often with. There was New Stanzas to Augusta, a collection of poems written from 1962-82, and then Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots' which explored an intensity of passion that was almost brutal: 

"the fire in the blood, the bones' crunching collapse, / melting the lead in fillings with desire/ to touch - 'your hips', I must delete - your lips."

For someone celebrated for achieving what a critic called the 'liberation from emotionality', instances like these might seem like deviation, although they did illustrate the width of his repertoire. Still, I confess I preferred the suggested, the implied, that which doesn't stab one through the brain:

"I remember [mother and father] sleeping in [the bed] on their sides, backs turned to each other, a gulf of crumpled blankets in between. I remember them reading there, talking, taking their pills, fighting this or that illness. The bed framed them for me at their most secure and most helpless. It was their very private lair, their ultimate island, their own inviolable, by no one except me, place in the universe. Wherever it stands now, it stands as a vacuum within the world order."

Joseph Brodsky passed away on January 28, 1996, of a heart attack. He was 55. It calls to mind again a line from one of his own poems:

Everything in these parts is geared for winter: long dreams
Prison walls, overcoats, bridal dresses of whiteness that seems
Snow like. Drinks. Kinds of dirt in proportion to soaps in dark corners.

The last book of his I read was Watermark, an account of his experiences in Venice related in his unmistakable style. The little black book in the middle of the poetry shelf in Borders caught my eye, and when I lifted it up to look at it, the plainness of the cover design struck me. It was the fourth printing (incidentally, on the year of his death) of the Noonday Press edition and I have no idea how the others had appeared, but this had a plain black cover, with a white label across the top of it and in large type, the words 'Watermark'. When you held it closer you could see, behind the words in what seemed like woodblock printing, a sea with intermittent waves gliding its surface. It recalled life and its brevity, somehow all of it flowing and blending into some great sea, and finally quiet, finally peace.

"Because the city is static while we are moving. The tear is proof of that. Because we go and beauty stays. Because we are headed for the future, while beauty is the eternal present. The tear is an attempt to remain, to stay behind, to merge with the city. But that's against the rules. The tear is a throwback, a tribute of the future to the past. Or else it is the result of subtracting the greater from the lesser: beauty from man. The same goes for love, because one's love, too, is greater than oneself." - from Watermark, (dated November 1989) 

 About the Author: 
Ruth Fung is currently studying at the National University of Singapore. She reads some, writes a little, lives with a cat, two mice and a hamster.