A glance at the fate of two poets.*6 The talented Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote obligingly gruff-voiced hymns to bayonets and pig-iron statistics; and he put a bullet in his brain in 1930, aged thirty-six. The talented Sergei Yesenin wrote obligingly soft-voiced hymns to rural toilers and reapers; and hanged himself in 1925, aged thirty. What these two men had done was betray their gift and their avocation; and therefore they fell afoul of the sources of their being.
Me, I wrote a bit of hack reportage about escort girls in a nude magazine. But to compare little things with large is a salutary habit; the little thing tells you a little about the large thing. In miniature, little things, like exceptions, prove the rule – using prove in the older sense of ‘test’.
Yesenin and Mayakovsky told what they knew to be lies in their poems. Me, I wrote lies about escort girls in a nude magazine. Consequently I didn’t kill myself. I just had the third cousin of what Solzhenitsyn had when pressured (unsuccessfully) to denounce, to delate, to ‘write’, as they said (‘Does he/she write?’ was a common, and anxious, enquiry). He said to himself: ‘I feel sick.’ Yesenin and Mayakovsky were self-denouncers, in their verse.
All the writers whose last decision was suicide were killed by the State. Their situation affected them like a slow-acting poison, delivered (perhaps on the point of a phantom umbrella) by ‘the Organs’, as the secret police were popularly known; or like a course of mind-altering drugs, administered over months or years, in national psychiatric wards specialising in the ideologically insane.
But the poet-suicides had to have something within them to make the spell firm and good. Demyan Bedny, the obese ‘proletarian poet laureate’, lived complacently (until the later 1930s); he had a town named after him, his face appeared on postage stamps, and he was the only writer in the USSR to be honoured with an apartment in the Kremlin. None of this seemed to bother Bedny, and why would it? He was manqué, and could say of any of his poems, I didn’t really mean it. The writers who really did mean it ended differently; in their own souls they were playing with fire.
8. Ever at the lips
My thing with Phoebe Phelps went on until Christmas 1980. The night of shame was merely the halfway point; and for a while, for a year, for two years, there was love, there was unquestionably love. But after that she attenuated, gradually receding from me. Today, when I think long enough about her as she was then, as she faded, I end up with a version of Keats’s line about ‘Joy’ (capitalised, like Pleasure and Delight, in ‘Ode to Melancholy’): those hands of hers (moving languidly now) seemed to be ever at her lips, bidding adieu. And she lost her quiddity and solidity, no longer novelistic, merely lifelike…
Phoebe will not tend to dominate these pages, as she would in a work of unalloyed fiction; but she will periodically resurface. There was her bold move in the summer of 1981, and her even bolder move on September 12, 2001. And, much later, there was the meeting in London in 2017, when she was seventy-five.
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Before we sign off on the nice idea about the genres and the seasons, I will suggest that the progress of a human life can also be evoked in genres and seasons. In this minor thought experiment, chronology is reversed (do you think that’s significant?): the three-score-and-ten begins around August 31, moves backwards through summer and spring and then winter and autumn, and comes to an abrupt halt around September 1. I’ll be brief.
Life begins, then, with summer and romance. Childhood and youth constitute the phase of the fairy tale – with domineering fathers, wicked stepmothers, vicious half-siblings, etc., to be included ad hoc. The time of quests, dragons, and hidden treasure. The Brothers Grimm, and Alice in Wonderland.
Then comes spring and comedy. The problem comedy of one’s twenties and thirties, the phase of the love story, the picaresque, and the bodice-ripper, the sentimental education and the Bildungsroman, leading one way or another to marriage and probably children, Love in the Haystacks leading to All’s Well That Ends Well.
Then comes winter and satire. Maturity and middle age, the phase of the brackish roman-fleuve and the increasingly sinister Aga saga, with sour whispers gathering in the kitchen dusk. For some, the great losses and injustices of life can be tamed and borne; for others, the debit ledger breaks free and burgeons. It is the time of Can You Forgive Her? (yes, you can) and He Knew He Was Right (no, he was wrong).
Then comes autumn and tragedy: decline and fall, the roman noir, the Gothic ghost story, the book of the dead.
9. Identity crisis
Until September 2001, when I was fifty-two, I’d never given my ‘identity’ (my what?) a moment’s thought. Why would I? I was white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual, non-believing, able in mind and body…Identity crises were for the rest of the world to worry about, the present world (the extant, the actual), fluid and churning and chameleonic, with its array of syndromes, conditions, disorders, and its burgeoning suite of erotic destinies (I’m bi, I’m trans, I’m chaste). In short, your identity sleeps inside you, unless or until it is roused.
Yet it occurred, my crisis, it took place – it elapsed. Not that I would dare to claim any kind of parity with the outliers, the anomalies, those singled out for questioning in the planet-wide identity parade. My case was peculiar. There were no models or patterns, no support groups or integration programmes, no experts or counsellors, no newsletters, no ‘literature’. I was all on my own.
…As Larkin wrote (in a letter of 1958, complaining to a woman friend about the banal irritations of the Christmas season, and briefly comparing her trials to his): ‘Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine
