June 21, 1988 Dear Joseph Brodsky, It has now been six months since you delivered your Nobel Lecture on poetry and politics, and six months since I first read it in the pages of The New Republic. My first reaction was one of mild disappointment, a sense of having been let down by someone I thought I understood. As I look back over your lecture, I wonder whether you could have anticipated the reactions you triggered by making the case for poetry, and more generally for art, that you did. I wonder how well considered were your remarks that, “had we been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth,” and then this: I believe . . . that, for someone who has read a lot of Dickens, to shoot his like in the name of some idea is more problematic than for someone who has read no Dickens. And I am speaking precisely about reading Dickens, Sterne, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, Melville, Proust, Musil, and so forth; that is, about literature, not literacy or education. A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading this or that political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list. Do you really believe that a man cultivated by Stendhal, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Musil would be incapable — or at least less willing — to squeeze a trigger in service of an idea? I wonder because we have both, more than once, heard a similar aesthetic political equation expressed in the credulous question: “Can such things be possible in the land of Goethe and Schiller?” And we both know the answer. Yet I cannot imagine that, were we together to draw up lists of those rulers guilty of the worst crimes, you and I could not also agree upon a list of writers — good writers, perhaps great writers — capable of excusing each and every one of them. Neither of us would wish to be ruled by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, or Mao; nor, I suspect, would we place our fates in the hands of Brecht or Genet, Céline or Pound. So the issue, I assume, is not one that can be decided on the basis of reading lists or body counts. The issue is poetry itself. It is the claim poetry makes for the moral import of aesthetic experience and the challenge that all art offers — and has always offered — to the very possibility of politics in any elevated sense. Rarely do we find the matter set out quite so baldly as you managed to do when you painted a picture of demiurgic political man violating aesthetics, which you called “the mother of ethics,” then spiriting us back into what you call our political past of “total mass solutions to the problems of human existence,” while we amuse ourselves with “mass police entertainment.” You invite us to resist temptations from these “champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity,” and to return from our prodigal wanderings to the Muse who can still transform each of us from anonymous zero into “autonomous ‘I.’” The image could not be clearer, and, really, who could resist even facing such a choice, one promising high stakes and thrills while demanding little sustained thought about the nature of the alternatives? Art is like that, aestheticizing not just itself and its objects but, more dangerously, aestheticizing its adversaries, politics first among them. Something in me instinctively recoils at these falsely posed alternatives. Yet I have also come to see why this aestheticized notion of politics could acquire such a strong hold on those who have experienced the worst excesses of modern politics. For these aestheticized political alternatives — the soul or “the state,” individual conscience or “mass conformity,” autonomy or “authority” — were for many in the twentieth century the only real choices available. The starkest, crudest aesthetic image cannot begin to approach the political reality under modern tyrannies. The human spirit naturally longs for escape when decent, humane political relations are replaced by the “post-political” materialist state that demands of every spirit its pound of flesh (because it only believes in the flesh it can touch). To escape the velvet prison that state socialism offered, the captive mind sought and accepted almost any form of transcendence. For some, still hopeful of change, however meager, a dreamy “antipolitics” of engagement was inviting; for others, less hopeful, the turn within was made by means of religion, poetry, scholarship, mathematics, even chess. I have one friend, a computer specialist, who in Communist Poland effused over the spiritual possibilities of Go, the Asian board game. Another, a historian, prided himself over his memorization of the order of battles in the Mexican‑American War, a study of which has allowed him to be a pure historian, he said, without addressing contemporary political concerns. A third, a philosophy professor, spent his time quite pleasurably on abstract “decision theoretic” models of economic and political choice. When I, stupefied, asked why someone living in a country with overwhelming concrete problems would study “models” that few in the West would find relevant to their own condition, he answered quietly, “Because there are solutions.” Art, too, offers a solution — precisely because it rejects the mass political solutions you describe. The life of art, less than its works, poses and resolves a dramatic existential choice. Behind the Iron Curtain this aut aut was frighteningly close to reality. But in the West? Can it really be said that human beings, artists or not, are systematically forced to choose between their souls and their skins in our
The Unlovely City: An Unsent Letter to Joseph Brodsky
