Selected Essays of John Berger (72 page)

Thus the Russian language at that moment in history. If we call it a language
demanding poetry
it is not an exaggerated figure of speech, but an attempt to synthesize in a few words a precise historical situation. But what of the other term of the relation, Mayakovsky the poet? What kind of poet was he? He remains too original to be easily defined by comparison with other poets, but perhaps, however crudely, we can begin to define him as a poet by examining his own view of poetry, always remembering that such a definition is made without the pressures to which he was subject throughout his life: pressures in which subjective and historical elements were inseparable.

This is how, in his autobiographical notes, he describes becoming a poet:

The tone is laconic. Nevertheless he is saying that he became a poet because he was called upon to become one. Obviously the potential of his genius already existed. And would probably have been released in any case. But his temperament insisted that the release should come
through a demand
.

Later, he continually refers to poetry as something which must meet ‘a social command’. The poem is a direct response to that command. One of the things which his early, marvellously flamboyant Futurist poetry has in common with his later political poetry is its form of address. By which we mean the poet’s stance towards the
you
being addressed. The
you
may be a woman, God, a party official, but the way of presenting the poet’s life to the power being addressed remains similar. The
you
is not to be found in the life of the
I
. Poetry is the making of poetic sense of the poet’s life for the use of another. One might say that this is more or less true of all poetry. But in Mayakovsky’s case the notion that poetry is a kind of exchange
acting between
the poet’s life and the demands of other lives is specially developed. In this idea is implanted the principle that the poetry will be justified or not by its reception. And here we touch upon one of the important conflicts in Mayakovsky’s life as a poet. Its starting point is the existence of language as the primary fact; its finishing point is the judgement of others towards his use of that language in a set of particular circumstances. He took language upon himself as though it were his own body, but he depended upon others to decide whether or not that body had the right to exist.

One of Mayakovsky’s favourite comparisons is between the production of poetry and industrial factory production. To explain this metaphor just in terms of a Futurist admiration for modern technology would be to miss the point. Poetry for Mayakovsky was a question of processing or transforming experience. He speaks of the poet’s experience as the
raw material
for poetry, the finished product being the poem which will answer the social command.

What he means there by preliminary work is the inventing and storing of rhymes, images, lines which will later be useful. The ‘manufacture’ of the poem, as he explains with unique frankness in
How Are Verses Made?
, goes through several stages. First there is the preliminary work: the casting into words of experience and the storing of these relatively short word-units.

Then comes the realization that there is ‘a social command’ for a poem on a particular theme. The need behind the command must be fully understood by the poet. Finally comes the composition of the poem in accordance with the need. Some of what has been cast into words can now be used to its ideal maximum. But this requires trial and retrial. When it is at last right, it acquires explosive power.

When the poem is written, it needs to be read. By readers themselves, but also by the poet out loud. At his public readings Mayakovsky was a man showing what the things he had made could do: he was like a driver or test pilot — except that his performance with the poems took place, not on the ground or in the air, but in the minds of his listeners.

We should not, however, be deceived, by Mayakovsky’s desire to rationalize the making of verses, into believing that there was no mystery in the process for him. His poetic vision was passionate, and continually rocked by his own astonishment.

Yet he saw poetry as an act of exchange, an act of translation whose purpose was to make the poet’s experience usable by others. He believed in an alchemy of language; in the act of writing the miraculous transformation occurred. When he wrote about Yessenin’s suicide in 1925 he was unable to give any convincing reason why Yessenin should have gone on living — although he judged that this was what the social command required. It is early in the poem that he makes his real point: if only there had been ink in the hotel bedroom where Yessenin cut his wrists and hanged himself, if
only he had been able to
write
, he could have gone on living. To write was simultaneously to come into one’s own and to join others.

In the same poem Mayakovsky speaks of the Russian people ‘in whom our language lives and breathes’, and he castigates all timid, academic usage of this language. (Yessenin, he says, would have told the conformist orators at his funeral to stuff their funeral orations up their arse.) He admits that it is a difficult time for writers. But what time hasn’t been? he asks. And then he writes:

To clarify what we are saying, it may be helpful to compare Mayakovsky with another writer. Yannis Ritsos, the contemporary Greek poet, is like Mayakovsky an essentially political poet: he is also a Communist. Yet despite their common political commitment, Ritsos is precisely the opposite kind of poet to Mayakovsky. It is not from the act of writing or processing words that Ritsos’s poetry is born. His poetry appears as the
consequence
of a fundamental decision which in itself has nothing to do with poetry. Far from being the finished product of a complicated production process, Ritsos’s poetry seems like a by-product. One has the impression that his poems exist for him
before
their accumulation of words: they are the precipitate of an attitude, a decision already taken. It is not by his poems that he proves his political solidarity, but the other way round: on account of his political attitude, certain events offer their poetic face.

There can be no question of quoting Ritsos against Mayakovsky, or vice versa. They are different kinds of poets writing in different circumstances. Ritsos’s choice, of which his poetry (given his poetic genius) is the by-product, is a choice of opposition and resistance. Mayakovsky considered that it was his political duty to celebrate and affirm. One form of poetry is public, the other clandestine. Contrary, however, to what one may expect, the former may be the more solitary.

To return now to Mayakovsky. Before the Revolution and during its first years, one can say that the Russian language was
demanding
poetry on a mass scale; it was seeking its own national poets. It is impossible to know whether Mayakovsky’s genius was actually formed by this demand or only developed by it. But the coincidence between his genius and the state of the language at that moment is crucial to his life’s work, and perhaps to his death. It was a coincidence which lasted only for a certain time.

From the period of NEP onwards, the language of the Revolution began to change. At first the change must have been almost imperceptible — except to a poet-performer like Mayakovsky. Gradually words were ceasing to mean exactly what they said. (Lenin’s will-to-truthfulness was exceptional and his death, in this respect as in others, now appears as a turning point.) Words began to hide as much as they signified. They became double-faced: one face referring to theory, the other to practice. For example the word
Soviet
became a designation of citizenship and a source of patriotic pride: only in theory did it still refer to a particular form of proletarian democracy. The ‘virgin’ reading public became, to a large degree, a reading public that was deceived.

Mayakovsky was dead before the devaluation of the Russian language had extended very far, but already in the last years of his life, in works like
Good, The Bedbug, The Bath-house
— all of which were badly received — his vision became increasingly satirical. Words were loaded with a meaning that was no longer just or true. Listen to the Producer in the third act of
The Bath-house:

Meanwhile, what was happening to Mayakovsky himself? A woman he was in love with had abandoned him. His work was being subjected to more and more severe criticism, on the grounds that its spirit was far from the working class. The doctors had told him that he had damaged his vocal cords irrevocably by straining his voice when reading. He had dissolved his own avant-garde group (LEF, renamed REF) and had joined the most official, ‘majority’ association of writers, which had always been highly critical of him (RAPP): as a result, he was snubbed by them and treated as a renegade by his former friends. A retrospective exhibition of his life’s work — poems, plays, posters, films — failed to make the impact he had hoped. He was thirty-six, next year he would be the same age as Pushkin when he met his death. Pushkin had incontestably been the founder of the language of modern Russian poetry. Yet what was happening to the language of revolutionary poetry which Mayakovsky had once believed in?

If a writer sees his life as raw material waiting to enter language, if he is continually involved in processing his own experience, if he sees poetry primarily as a form of exchange, there is a danger that, when he is deprived of an immediate audience, he will conclude that his life
has been used up
. He will see only its fragments strewn across the years — as if, after all, he had been torn to pieces by the jackals. ‘Don’t be afraid, we have good dogs, they won’t let them come near.’ The promise was broken. They came.