Life Is Elsewhere (25 page)

He denied her as Peter denied Christ; he claimed she was a casual acquaintance; he spoke of her with disdain. But just as Peter remained faithful to Christ, Jaromil deep down remained faithful to his girlfriend. He did restrict their walks together through the streets, and he was glad when no one he knew saw her with him, but at the same time he actually disagreed with the student and detested him. And he was at once moved by the thought that his girlfriend wore cheap, unattractive dresses, seeing in this not only her charm (the charm of simplicity and poverty) but also and above all the charm of his own love: he reflected that it was not difficult to love someone dazzling, perfect, elegant: such love was a meaningless reflex automatically aroused in us by the accident of beauty; but a great love wishes to create a beloved being precisely out of an imperfect creature, a creature all the more human for her imperfection.

One day as he was once again declaring his love for her (probably after an exhausting quarrel), she said:

"Anyway, I don't know what you see in me. There are so many girls more beautiful than me."

He explained indignantly that beauty had nothing to do with love. He asserted that he loved in her what everyone else found ugly; in a kind of delirium he even began to enumerate: he told her she had meager, sad little breasts with big, wrinkled nipples that aroused pity rather than enthusiasm; he said that she had freckles and red hair and that her body was skinny, and all of that was precisely why he loved her.

The redhead burst into tears because she understood the reality (the meager breasts, the red hair) all too well and the idea not at all.

Jaromil, on the other hand, was carried away by his idea; the tears of the girl, who suffered from not being beautiful, warmed him in his loneliness and inspired him; he thought that he would devote his entire life to making her forget these tears and to convincing her of his love. In this rush of emotion, the redheads first lover was no more than one of the uglinesses he loved in her. That was a truly remarkable feat of will and of thought; he realized this and began to write a poem:

"Tell me about her I ceaselessly think of, / tell me how she ages [he wanted to possess her completely anew, with all her human eternity], / tell me what she was like as a child [he wanted her not only with her future but also with her past], / give me a drink of the waters she wept [and above all of her sadness, which relieved him of his], / tell me about the lovers who stole her youth; / about all those who pawed her / all those who mocked her / all of that I will love; . . . [and a bit further on]: there is nothing in her soul, in her body / not even the putridity of her old lovers / that I will not drink to intoxication. ... "

Jaromil was enthusiastic about what he had written, for in place of the great sky blue tent of harmony, in place of the artificial space where all contradictions are abolished, where mother and son and daughter-in-law sit at a common peace table, he had found another dwelling house of the absolute, an absolute more harsh and genuine. For if the absolute of purity and peace does not exist, there does exist an absolute of infinite feeling in which, as in a chemical solution, everything impure and foreign is dissolved.

He was enthusiastic about this poem, even though he knew that no newspaper would publish it, for it had nothing to do with the cheerful era of socialism; but he had written it for himself and the redhead. When he read it to her she was moved to tears, but at the same time she was frightened once again by the allusions to her ugliness, to her being groped, to the coming of old age.

The girl's misgivings didn't bother Jaromil. On the contrary, he liked and savored them; he liked to dwell on them and refute them at length. But the worst was that the girl didn't wish to spend much time discussing the poem, and she changed the subject.

He forgave her her pathetic breasts and the hands of the strangers who had touched them, but there was one thing he couldn't forgive: her endless chatter. Look, he had just read her something that was entirely himself, containing his passion, his sensitivity, his blood, and after a few minutes she began to talk gaily about something else!

Yes, he was ready to make all her faults vanish in the all-forgiving solvent of his love, but only under one condition: that she obediently immerse herself in that solvent, that she never be anywhere else but in that bathtub of love, that she never try, not even in a single thought, to leave that tub, that she be entirely submerged below the surface of Jaromils words and thoughts, that she be submerged in his world and that the least particle of her body or mind not spend a moment in another world.

Instead she went on talking, and not only talking but talking about her family! Now, her family was what Jaromil disliked most about her, because he didn't know how to object to it (it was a perfectly innocent family, and moreover a proletarian family, a family of the crowd), but he wanted to object to it because when she thought of her family the redhead was constantly escaping from the bathtub he had prepared for her and filled with the solvent of his love.

Thus he had to listen yet again to stories about her father (an old peasant worn out in harness), about her brothers and sisters (it wasn't a family but a rabbit hutch, Jaromil thought: two sisters and four broth ers!), and especially about one of her brothers (his name was Jan, and he must have been an oddball-before 1948 he had been the chauffeur for an anti-Communist cabinet minister): no, it was not just a family, it was primarily an alien milieu he was hostile to, a milieu whose cocoon still stuck to the redhead's skin, a cocoon that estranged her from him and kept her from being totally and absolutely his; and that brother Jan was not so much the redhead's brother but primarily a man who had seen her up close for all of her eighteen years, a man who knew dozens of intimate little details about her, a man with whom she had shared a bathroom (how many times had she forgotten to bolt the door?), a man who recalled the time when she became a woman, a man who had surely seen her naked many times . . .

"You must be mine to die upon the rack if I want you," the ill and jealous Keats wrote to his Fanny, and Jaromil, back home again in his childhood room, was writing a poem to calm himself. He thought about death, that great embrace that soothes everything; he thought about the death of hard men, great revolutionaries, and he thought that he wanted to write the words for a Communist funeral song.

Death; it too, in that time of compulsory jubilation, was among the nearly forbidden subjects, but Jaromil thought that he would be able (he had already written beautiful poetry about death; in his own way he was an expert on the beauty of death) to find a particular view-point that would strip death of its customary morbidity; he felt that he would be able to write
socialist
poetry of death; he thought of the death of a great revolutionary:

"Like the sun setting behind a mountain, the fighter dies. ..."

and he wrote a poem called "Epitaph": "If I must die, let it be with you, my love, and only by fire turn into heat and light. ..."

5

Poetry is a domain in which all assertions become true. Yesterday the poet said: "Life is as useless as tears," today he says: "Life is as joyous as laughter," and he is right both times. Today he says: "Everything ends and gives way to silence," and tomorrow he will say: "Nothing ends and everything eternally resounds," and both are true. The poet has no need to prove anything; the only proof lies in the intensity of his emotion.

The genius of lyricism is the genius of inexperience. The poet knows little about the world, but the words that burst forth from him form beautiful patterns that are as definitive as crystal; the poet is immature, yet his verse has the finality of a prophecy by which he himself is dumbfounded.

"Ah, my aquatic love!" When Mama read JarormTs first poem, she thought (almost with shame) that her son knew more about love than she did; she didn't suspect anything about Magda being seen through the keyhole, for Mama "aquatic love" represented something more general, a mysterious, rather incomprehensible category of love whose meaning could only be guessed at, like those of sibylline pronouncements.

We can laugh at the poet's immaturity, but we must also marvel at it: in his words there is a droplet that has come from the heart and gives his verse the radiance of beauty. But this droplet has no need for a real experience to draw it out of the poet's heart, and it seems to me rather that the poet himself sometimes squeezes his heart like a cook squeezing a lemon over the salad. To tell the truth, Jaromil didn't much care about the striking workers in Marseilles, but when he wrote a poem about the love he bore them, he was truly moved, and he generously sprayed that emotion over his words, which thus became a flesh-and-blood reality.

With his poems the poet paints his self-portrait; but since no portrait is faithful, I can also say that with his poems he touches up his face.

Touches up? Yes, he makes it more expressive, for the imprecision of his own features torments him; he finds himself blurred, insignificant, nondescript; he is looking for a form for himself; he wants the photographic chemical of his poems to firm up the design of his features.

And he makes it more dramatic, for his life is uneventful. The world of his feelings and dreams, materialized in his poems, often looks turbulent and replaces the actions and adventures that are denied him.

But in order to dress himself in his portrait and enter the world behind this mask, the portrait must be exhibited and the poem published. Several of Jaromirs poems had already appeared in
Rude Pravo
, but he was still dissatisfied. In the letters accompanying the poems he addressed the editor, whom he didn't know, familiarly, hoping to induce an answer and to meet with him. But (it was almost humiliating) even after the poems were published, no literary people were interested in meeting him personally and welcoming him among them; the editor never answered.

Among his fellow university students his poems also didn't arouse the reaction he had counted on. If he had belonged to the elite of contemporary poets who gave public readings and whose photographs shone forth in illustrated magazines, he would perhaps have become a curiosity for the students in his class. But some poems buried in the pages of a newspaper barely held anyone's attention for more than a minute or two, and in the eyes of his fellow students, who were heading toward political or diplomatic careers, Jaromil had become a person uninterestingly odd rather than oddly interesting.

And talk about Jaromil's infinite longing for glory! He longed for it like all poets. "O glory! O mighty deity! Ah, may your great name inspire me and my verse gain you," Victor Hugo implored. "I am a poet, I am a great poet, and one day I shall be loved by the whole world, I must tell myself this, it is how I must pray at the foot of my unfinished mausoleum," Jiri Orten consoled himself with the thought of his future glory.

An obsessive desire for admiration is not only a weakness added on to a lyric poet's talent (as it might be regarded in, for example, a mathematician or an architect) but is also part of the very essence of poetic talent, it is the distinctive mark of a lyric poet: for the poet is the one who offers the world his self-portrait in the hope that his face, projected on the screen of his poems, will be loved and worshipped.

"My soul is an exotic flower with a rare and hypersensitive fragrance. I have great talent, perhaps also genius," Jiri Wolker wrote in his diary, and Jaromil, disgusted by the editor's silence, selected some poems and sent them to the most prominent literary monthly. What happiness! Two weeks later he received an answer: his poems were considered interesting, and he was asked to visit the magazine's office. He prepared for this meeting as carefully as he used to prepare for his dates with girls. He decided that he was going to present himself, in the deepest sense of the term, to the editors, and he tried to define who exactly he was, who he was as a poet, who he was as a man, what his plans were, where he came from, what he had overcome, what he loved, what he hated. Finally he picked up pencil and paper and wrote down the essentials of his positions, opinions, stages of development. He filled several pages, and then one day he knocked on the door and entered.

A thin little bespectacled man sitting at a desk asked him what he wanted. Jaromil gave his name. The editor once again asked him what he wanted. Jaromil once again (more distinctly and loudly) gave his name. The editor said he was glad to meet Jaromil, but that he would like to know what he wanted. Jaromil said that he had sent some poems to the magazine and that he had received a letter inviting him to come for a visit. The editor said that his colleague who dealt with poetry was out at the moment. Jaromil said that he was very sorry to hear that because he wanted to know when his poems would appear.

The editor lost his patience, got up from his chair, took Jaromil by the arm, and led him toward a big cabinet. He opened it and showed him piles of paper stacked on the shelves: "My dear comrade, in an average day we receive poems from a dozen new contributors. How many is that per year?"

"I can't figure it out in my head," said Jaromil with embarrassment when the editor insisted he guess.

"It comes to 4,380 new poets per year. Would you like to go abroad?"

"Why not?" said Jaromil.

"Then keep on writing," said the editor. "I'm certain that sooner or later we're going to be exporting poets. Other countries export technicians, engineers, wheat, or coal, but our main resource is lyrical poets. Czech lyrical poets are going to establish lyrical poetry in developing countries. In exchange for our lyrical poets we'll get coconuts and bananas."

A few days later Mama told Jaromil that the school janitor's son had come asking for him. "He said that you should go see him at the Police Building. And he asked me to congratulate you on your poems."

Jaromil blushed with pleasure: "He really said that?"

"Yes. As he was leaving he said: 'Tell him that I congratulate him on his poems. Don't forget.'"