ABRUPT, confident, apparently perpetually exasperated by the stupidity of the rest of the world, Russian poet and 1987 Nobel Literature laureate Joseph Brodsky, who died a year ago at the age of 55, possessed a singular, confrontational critical intelligence - and he knew it. Few writers have personified the idea of artist as self appointed belligerent quite as brilliantly as Brodsky, a feat made all the more fascinating by the fact that in spite of being angry, despairing and disgusted with his country's dark history, he considered his work to be apolitical. He was a campaigner only as regards the truth and in his forcefully sincere love of literature and its righteousness.
Added to that achievement, his mesmeric prose was written in English, his second language, which he didn't speak until he was in his thirties. His first volume of prose essays, Less Than One, published in 1986, quickly became a classic. On Grief and Reason is a worthy successor, in ways a sequel.
Like the earlier volume, this marvellous book offers an exciting and thoughtful combination of literary criticism, memoir, lively discussions on subjects as diverse as Kim Philby and Marcus Aurelius as well as inspired - and inspiring - master classes on the poetry of Frost, Hardy and Rilke. Few can thrill and provoke as ably as Brodsky. Whatever the topic, his intelligence punches its way through to the truth. Frost's famous line from "A Servant to Servants", "The best way out is always through", is a favourite Brodsky reference and certainly one he abided by as a reader, a thinker and a teacher. And it is in these roles that I believe his literary immortality is assured.
Death, however, is the theme of many of these essays. Joseph Brodsky walked hand in hand with mortality for most of his life. The final piece in the book, "In Memory of Stephen Spender", is a powerful elegy, as tough and beautiful as the best of Brodsky's prose. It acquires a slight eeriness when one realises that within five months of writing it, Brodsky himself was dead.
He was a man of contradictions and ironies: the Russian at home in great cities who could act like an American and swaggered between two cultures; the dissident who didn't over dramatise his internal exile, "as a young pup, kicked out of my home to the polar circle", yet took himself very seriously indeed; the Russian Jew who admitted to being too upset by the wartime deaths of 20 million Russians to mourn exclusively the Jewish dead; the disciple of Auden (indeed, his famous lecture on Auden's "September 1939", published in Less Than One, may be Brodsky's finest critical performance, although the Frost and Hardy pieces here challenge it) who understood irony but as a poet lacked his master's light touch; the poet whose prose surpasses his translated verse; an unpredictable, explosive modern artist thinking at speed, yet often writing with the ease, deliberation and confidence of an 18th century essayist.
Brodsky was a thinker who loved performing, a performer who lived in his mind, or, more precisely, in the world of literature. He was never a sentimentalist; when an acquaintance refers to Spender's death as "the end of an era", the dogmatically truthful Brodksy yearns to correct him: "not the end of an era. Of a life." The autobiographical writings exude an almost sexual physicality and warmth, the critical readings a sophisticated detachment and a scholarly richness of cross references while somehow never losing touch with the speaking voice. Yet Brodsky's reading of his own poetry in English was disappointing, his voice, always nasal, becoming harshly urgent, even monotonous. In Russian it was different: the register dropped into a more comfortable zone, and his breath defying blank verse, often flat and certainly testifying to the hazards of translation, assumed the chanting, incantatory rhythms of church ritual.
Brodsky's mastery of English prose was awesome and his critical essays, amongst the finest of this century, are superior to even those of another Russian exiled genius, Nabokov. His approach, in the lectures printed here, was dramatic, aggressive, challenging and always unashamedly definite: "poetry is the supreme form of human locution in any culture", he announces in "An Immodest Proposal", and cautions that "by failing to read or listen to poets, a society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation". Brodsky's range is intimidating. In these pages classical literature comes vividly alive. He addresses Horace with the same throwaway ease that he brings to a recollection of the tins of canned corned beef from America which made their way to his home town - then Leningrad, now Petersburg - near the end of the war.
While the poetry master classes are wonderful, what bring us closest to this testy, cantankerous individual are the random memories, such as the evocation of the shimmering light of Leningrad, or the loving eulogy to his parents in "In a Room and a Hale (both from Less Than One), or, in "Spoils of War", the opening essay in this book, his recalling being struck by "the roar produced by the then newly opened, imported from Lord knows where, American made laundromat in Leningrad when I threw my first blue jeans into a machine".
Nadezhada Mandelstam, widow of the man Brodsky considered, along with Anna Akhmatova, Russia's finest 20th century poet, was immortalised by him in an early piece written in 1977 (in Less Than One) when he likened her determined efforts to preserve Osip Mandelstam's poetry to an odyssey in which she "dodged across one sixth of the Earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorising them by night in the event they were found by the Furies with a search warrant". In "Wooing the Inanimate", his remarkable essay originating in a 1994 lecture on Thomas Hardy and one of the most compelling pieces here, Brodsky correctly argues that Hardy was a poet first and novelist second, and complains about the general ignorance of Hardy's poetry. Even at his most arrogant, Brodsky was always a deeply concerned reader - and it is his belief in literature, particularly poetry, which is both his gift and his gift to his readers.
A person's life is, according to him, "in the end a patchwork of someone else's recollections". Joseph Brodsky will never have to rely on anyone else's memories .. His prose is so dazzling and vivid that it will always provide the surest testament to a rare intellect.
