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| Portraits by Elaine Feinstein is out now from Carcanet |
Writing about people has always been the most intense of my preoccupations. I understand myself more clearly as I call up those I have loved: their presence, their words and gestures. The poems in Talking to the Dead drew on memories of a long marriage, and my recent memoir, It Goes with the Territory, describes other extraordinary figures who have shaped my life. Portraits is a continuation of that process.
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| Bella Akhmadulina |
Bella was Queen of Moscow in dangerous times: a beauty, who had read her poems to packed-out stadiums of fans and fearlessly written open letters in support of writers and scientists in trouble with the regime. The day I met her first, she resembled a mischievous child. She welcomed me warmly because she revered the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, and had prepared a dish of chicken and walnuts for the occasion - she had never cooked for Yevtushenko, he reported glumly. At their long wooden table where we ate, she told amusing stories about Anna Akhmatova, acting out both Akhmatova’s grand manner and her own wish to be helpful. Bella and Boris stayed with me in Cambridge when she came to read at the Poetry Festival there and I met her again in Paris when I came to meet Konstantin Rodzevitch, the ‘hero’ of Tsvetaeva’s ‘Poem of the End’, in his middle age for my biography.
Tsvetaeva herself only appears in Portraits as a ghost in a dream of Anna Akhmatova, but Masha Enzensberger is there as the beautiful, separated wife of Hans Magnus the German poet. Masha’s generosity, and that of her mother, the poet Margarita Aliger, brought me into the world of Tsvetaeva’s past, and I met among others Pavel Antokolsky, an actor Tsvetaeva had loved at the time of the Moscow famine. It was Masha who helped me work on the poem ‘An Attempt at Jealousy’.
A very different figure, Jean Rhys, was important to me when I was beginning to write novels. No
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| Jean Rhys |
When we met, her face still had the bones of beauty, but was heavily lined; she was a little drunk, and querulous too - probably impossible to protect, though when she asked me whether the sliver of moon through the window was the new moon (and therefore unlucky) I found myself instinctively lying to reassure her. For all her skinny frame and feckless life she outlived many more prudent women. Some of her elegance as a writer can be found in a seemingly much tougher American Elizabeth Hardwick, whom I sketch in the poem ‘Sleepless Nights’, imagining her relationship with Robert Lowell.
Although I knew Ted later in my life, I never met Sylvia Plath, whose story echoed so powerfully through the last half of the twentieth century. In Russia, I was often asked why Plath had taken her own life and I outlined all I knew - the adultery, the two children, the freezing cold, her depression - and was met with incredulity. Against their history, her misery seemed almost a luxury, and they had no belief in Freudian theory.
Plath’s pain was something I could share easily. I can remember experiencing it, though I was never tempted by the thought of death. And I responded to the ferocious elation of her language, acknowledge her genius, even as I mourn the waste of it.
Not all my close friends have been women. Tony Ward, the novelist, who helped me run Prospect in the early sixties, lived with us for many years, and we continued a warm friendship even after his marriage to the French writer and academic, NicoleWard Jouve, and his departure to a Lectureship at York. Our children stayed in each other’s houses, and our whole family stayed in a barn attached to the Jouve family home in Provence one holiday. Tony’s burly presence was so much a part of my life that even now it seems hardly possible to think of him as dead.
Emanuel LitvinoffI came to know much later through Judith Burnley, my then fiction editor at Penguin. I had already read his Journey Through a Small Planet, an account of his impoverished childhood in London’s East End. Emanuel escaped through Whitechapel Library and service in the second world war (he rose to the rank of Major) and entered the literary world through café life in the Swiss Cottage Cosmo which was frequented by Elias Canetti and Dannie Abse.
Angered by T.S. Eliot’s decision to include two anti-Semitic poems in a post-war reprint of his Selected Poems - even though by then what had happened to European Jews was widely known - Litvinoff wrote a memorable poem as ‘one of Bleistein’s relatives’, and read it to an audience which included Eliot himself. Dannie Abse, who was there, remembers hearing Eliot muttering, ‘it's a good poem, a good poem’ even as several members of the audience (including Stephen Spender) rose in indignation to defend him. Litvinoff remained a witty man into his nineties, though he never lost a bitter melancholy.
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| Joseph Roth |
There are people in Portraits I know only as voices from a record player - like Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Edith Piaf - or in books I first began to read in my teens, like those of Raymond Chandler, or whose stories seem relevant to the way my life might have gone if I had not had the accidental good fortune of living in the United Kingdom rather than continental Europe. Joseph Roth, for instance - that extravagant chancer - who, even after the success of The Radetzky March, had to learn to live on his wits when the Nazis took over Germany.
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| Elaine Feinstein at Delphi |
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