Portraits

by Elaine Feinstein

Overview

Elaine Feinstein has always written with most intensity about people. In this book, she remembers friends she has loved, writers she has known and literary figures from the past. She writes of the Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina with tender admiration; the East End poet Emanuel Litvinoff, at work in his Bloomsbury flat; and Masha Enzensberger, who brought Feinstein into the world of Marina Tsvetaeva. As she imagines Raymond Chandler, Isaac Rosenberg or Billie Holiday her words about them say things about herself. In the closing poem, Death and the Lemon Tree', she finds a compelling image for the privilege of continuing to write into old age.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847774965
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	03/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	60
File size:	248 KB

About the Author

Elaine Feinstein is a poet, a novelist, a biographer, and a translator. She has received many writing prizes, including a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, Wingate and Arts Council Awards, and the Daisy Miller Prize for her experimental novel The Circle. She serves on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is a fellow, as a judge and as chair of the judges for the T. S. Eliot Award. She is the translator of Marina Tsvetaeva's Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems and the author of Cities, It Goes with the Territory: Memoir of a Poet, and The Russian Jerusalem.

Read an Excerpt

Portraits

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By Elaine Feinstein

Carcanet Press Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Elaine Feinstein
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-498-9

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CHAPTER 1

    Courting Danger

    for Bella Akhmadulina

    Those red sea urchins, Bella, on a platter of ice
    alarmed me. Their spiky skins had to be
    cracked open like chestnut cases, the creatures
    still alive inside. Did I dare to broach them?
    We were eating in Paris, somewhere near the Bastille.

    You must have known that to dine with editors
    from Kontinent was risky, but you'd spent
    your life flirting with Soviet danger:
    other writers lost pensions, ration cards, freedom
    and some their lives for milder infringements

    but mostly you avoided punishment,
    and lived flamboyantly as Queen of Moscow.
    In the West, émigré admirers bought champagne
    and Sevruga caviar. These I shared greedily,
    though your beauty made me dumb.

    I could not ask if you still shook with a fever
    that broke thermometers and appalled your neighbour,
    or whether the gentle spirit of rain pursued you
    into the houses of rich Party members
    who urged you closer to the fire

    as once a mob would have dragged you
    into the flames as a witch. Perhaps that Yelabuga
    you invented – whose eggs you threatened
    to crush under your heels in payment
    for Marina's death – took her own revenge

    one day when her yellow eyes swivelled
    towards you, hearing the tone of your laughter.
    Or maybe she decided she could wait until,
    many years later, she would find you
    sick and blind, and could move in for the kill.


    April Fools' Day

    i.m. Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918)

    Does anybody know what it was all for?
    Not Private Rosenberg, short as John Keats.
    A nudge from Ezra Pound took him to war,
    to sleep on boards, in France, with rotting feet,
    writing his poetry by candle ends.
    His fellow soldiers always found him odd.
    Outsiders do not easily make friends,
    if they are awkward – with a foreign God.

    He should have stayed in Cape Town with his sister.
    Did he miss Marsh's breakfasts at Gray's Inn,
    or Café Royal? He longed for the centre
    though he was always shy with Oxbridge toffs –
    he lacked the sexy eyes of Mark Gertler –
    and his Litvak underlip could put them off.
    'From Stepney East!' as Pound wrote
    Harriet Monroe, while sending poems to her.

    He died on April Fools' Day on patrol.
    beyond the corpses lying in the mud,
    carrying up the line a barbed wire roll
    – useless against gunfire – with the blood
    and flesh of Death in the spring air.
    His was the life half lived, if even that,
    and the remains of it were never found. We remember:
    the iron honey gold, his cosmopolitan rat.


    Life Class: A Sketch

    In Paris, perhaps. On wet cobbles,
    walking alone at night, fragile
    and wispily dressed, Jean Rhys,
    without a sou, past streets
    of lit cafés to a meeting place.

    Cold to the bone, she has it all planned:
    when they go home, she'll fall
    at his knees, gaze up like a child,
    and make him understand
    he cannot abandon her,

    lost in a strange land.
    His grey eyes are indifferent as
    the North Sea to her need –
    if she tries to plead
    her words will drown.

    So she smiles instead.
    That's how she'll cope with crooks
    and pick-ups, drink and veronal
    in those grim boarding houses
    that now stretch ahead.

    Over and over she will write the story
    of frail girls and the unkindness of men,
    speaking in the voice of her cool notebooks,
    until one day a frightened Creole self
    climbs down from the attic of memory

    in the shape of the first Mrs Rochester,
    betrayed, barefoot, imprisoned
    in an England of snow and roses,
    constrained in Thornfield Hall, a dangerous
    ghost – that apparition brings success.

    Jean entertains in a Knightsbridge hotel,
    elegant in her seventies to meet her fame,
    with eyes like dark blue pools:
    'Too late,' she says, 'Too late', without irony,
    as her looks fade – into a ninth decade.


    Emanuel

    i.m. Emanuel Litvinoff (1915–2011)

    With your sardonic, Sam Spade elegance,
    the pale clothes always clean and pressed,
    and that lean body women knew at once
    would give them pleasure, still, those bitter
    lines from nose to mouth suggest
    you felt a sense of failure,

    a childhood misery always ready to pounce,
    from the doorways you slept in, long ago.
    Writing saved you once,
    and books in the Whitechapel library:
    A poet, like the Messiah, carries no cash.
    You were precociously aware of poetry;

    wrote soldier-lyrics, then, after the war
    found the Cosmo, and Canetti.
    An angry poem at the ICA
    in the voice of a Bleistein relative
    made you notorious, all the more
    since Eliot himself sat in the audience.

    Your theme was waiting. Wandering off from your
    chic wife's catwalk into Moscow's 'Thaw',
    you found disabled creatures from the Gulag
    who told their stories in familiar Yiddish,
    the lingua franca of the twentieth century.
    It became your mission to portray

    their Europe in your novels, while beneath
    the desk, scuffed carpet showed the wriggling
    of feet forever longing to walk free –
    until evening entered the room as street light,
    releasing you from that prose duty
    into the living world of Mecklenburgh Square.


    The Gamble

    i.m. Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)

    The woman in the mirror swimming
    towards you like a terrible fish
    never made landfall. Look upon this fin.
    Observe the lines the scars the teeth the skin.
    I am old as you will never be.

    Your life was shorter than Mozart's or Pushkin's.
    I remember living through the humiliation
    you were too proud to bear, and now to imagine
    the motive for your dying troubles me – was it
    your poems that demanded that last gesture?

    I honour your carbon-paper skies
    typed through with stars, those winter trees
    dissolving in their blotting-paper clouds.
    You threw away the last half century
    as if your death could be a deal you cut

    with genius, in return for fame
    and those ferocious poems, blossoming
    in the unnatural freeze of '63.
    Was it your legend that demanded blood
    to prove the violence packed in every lyric

    was no pretence? Sadly, it was authentic.
    You could have had the man back in your bed
    if you'd been willing to endure suspicion. Was hatred
    cleaner, did you prefer to damage him
    when he saw your healthy body dead?

    What if the doctor's number had been found
    and you had woken up to Ted's embrace –
    seen his remorse – would a new life begin,
    would brushing death have kept him safely bound,
    was that the happy end you fell asleep in?

    Do not rise up now with your red hair
    to mock an audience which has come to stare
    at the fairground Lady in your story;
    explain instead what gamble made you waste
    your energy and grace – and the taste of glory.


    Homesickness

    i.m. Maria Fadeyeva Enzensberger (1943–1991)

    Yesterday I found a postcard with your scrawl:
    'Darling, we are all horses, how is it
    you haven't learned that yet?' And at once
    your high-boned, white face rose
    beside me like a reproach

    as if I had begun to forget the wildness
    in the gutturals of your laugh, and
    the loneliness of tosca po rodine
    in the frozen sea of your eyes. But I have not.
    You were always my Russia:

    the voice of Marina's poetry. We saw you last
    in a Moscow of brown streets, puddles, and
    people queuing for ice cream: an autumn of anomalies,
    women turning back tanks, in St Petersburg
    there were teenage boys playing Deutschland über alles.

    Your mother, the poet Aliger, brought us into
    Sologub's yellow mansion where Ivan found himself
    in his underpants and writers fix their dachas:
    Bulgakov would have enjoyed the chicken livers in
      coriander.
    That day you were shaking with the euphoria

    of street victory, as if you had come home
    after the bleakness that took you into
    Highgate hospital. 'I have been so frightened,'
    you whispered to me there and I had no answer,
    any more than at your table in the Cambridge fens

    rich with forest mushrooms, peppers and white cheese,
    when you struck the glass to command some speech
    of love and closeness, and we all failed you. In London
    you found another silence, and now we're only left with
    a little honey and sun from Mandelstam's dead bees.


    Dickens Considers Fagin

    'Let me break up the lines.
      There's moonlight now.
    Wet London cobbles. Shadows,
      the stink of frying onions.
    Red-haired, in raggy night gear,
      a merry old gentleman
    offers friendship, sausages, hot gin
      to his pack of street children:
    his family workshop's warmer
      than the workhouse.

    "My dear," he croons, "my dear,"
      and soon that voice is in my ears,
    he is given life, he's loose
      in my imagination,
    I let him tap into centuries
      of thieving peddlers.
    Cruikshank gave him a woolly caftan
      cross-hatched for texture,
    stood him by the fire with a toasting fork,
      like the devil, though I remember
    thinking – Bill Sikes is more brutal.

    As I had Fagin cower in his cell, waiting to be
      hanged, I was puzzled, though:
    how did I hit on the name? – Irish, not Ashkenazi,
      and Bob Fagin was kind to me long ago
    in the blacking factory. The choice
      was part of a writer's game,
    which has its own rules of vitality,
      as much as the gestures of caricature;
    no wakeful effort to correct the damage
      by drawing Riah can begin to cure.'


    The Irony of Wislava Szymborska

    In London, I remember the indignation.
      Surely the Nobel prize should have gone
    to Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet we loved
      – dissident, charismatic, much translated –
    not some woman we had barely heard of?

    I thought Polish poems should resemble films of Wajda,
      charged with the electricity of war.
    Szymborska's poetry held no such glamour.
      She had not played a part in the Resistance.
    The poems were almost English in their texture,

    a bit like Larkin – though serene
      where he was glum – never
    expecting to fill a football stadium.
      Her voice was quieter than Cassandra's –
    but equally we did not listen to her.

    Her vision lay in refusing to make patterns
      out of the casual happenstance of fortune
    – who survives a massacre, who marries again.
      Of life's mistakes, she only murmurs sadly
    This particular course is never offered twice.


    Luftmensch

    i.m. Joseph Roth (1894–1939)

    After Radetzky March and world success,
      he had to learn – since Nazis
    blocked his German publication –
      to live on the run
    between cities – Cologne, Antibes,
      Leipzig, Paris – pursued
    by creditors, hustling for advances.

    In photographs his eyes remain amused,
      the cheekbones high.
    Fearless and feckless,
      he still enjoyed Grand Hotels,
    rich dinners and champagne,
      with the novelist Irma Keun
    a lovely companion.

    Disreputable charmer, he found patrons –
      distinguished writer friends,
    like Stefan Zweig in Mexico –
      but gambled away his gains.
    How could that matter once
      the catastrophe he prophesied
    was round him? As he wrote: Hell reigns.

    Luftmensch and wanderer, he hedged
      his last bet: two funerals, one
    Jewish, one Catholic. A witty entry
      into the next world. Genius
    is a changeling, registered in no parish:
      'I'm always at home,' he said
    ['Wherever I feel unhappy.'


    Dizzy in Westminster

    Glossy black ringlets, blistering waistcoats, silver-buckled
      shoes.
    Where did you get the nerve for such flamboyance?
    Not from your father, skull-capped and scholarly,
    whose anger with his Synagogue released you
    into the gentile world, a baptised Jew.

    Always in debt, and eager for renown, only
    literary fame and a witty tongue gave you
    entry to river parties and heady dinners
    where politicians ate swan stuffed with truffles
    and married women readily became your tutors.

    How did you bewitch those stolid gentlemen
    of the shires to choose you for a leader?
    Baptism did not make you less a Jew,
    cartoonists mocked your aquiline profile
    and drooping lip. Parliament was your theatre.

    Gladstone thought your talent opportunist,
    disliked your eloquence, and found you slippery.
    Let us confess your policy Imperialist,
    your shrewdest foreign deals somehow
    congruent with your own extravagance.

    Yet courage trumps all and demands tribute.
    You flattered, entertained, but never cringed.
    And that, dear Earl of Beaconsfield, I salute.


    A Charred Slipper

    i.m. Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948)

    A flash of dazzling hair and the gaiety
      of a wide, unsteady smile:
    she glows in the sunlight of his success,

    his writing suffused with her presence.
      An enviable marriage,
    with Paris always shimmering around them.

    She could have basked in his splendour
      for life, but was it sickness
    to need something of her own? Doctors ruled out ballet.

    Jazz, alcohol, dancing, celebrity
      left her waking into self-hatred;
    her notebooks held the world she could be making.

    Why did Scott write to Scribner's to advise
      she should not be given praise,
    being too unstable for superlatives?

    After publication, the petering out of hope.
      More doctors, misery, hospitals,
    her fragile intelligence fed letters and diaries

    he used tenderly in his own novels.
      Well, he paid the bills,
    while she pined away in nursing homes

    a reluctant Muse, hating to be consumed.
      Her unused talent
    flickered while she lived, until

    her beauty went up in flames in Carolina.
      When she was dead, only
    one charred slipper remained under her bed

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Portraits by Elaine Feinstein. Copyright © 2015 Elaine Feinstein. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 9

Portraits

Courting Danger 13

April Fools' Day 14

Life Class: A Sketch 15

Emanuel 17

The Gamble 18

Homesickness 20

Dickens Considers Fagin 21

The Irony of Wislava Szyniborska 22

Luftmensch 23

Dizzy in Westminster 24

A Charred Slipper 25

Sleepless Nights 26

Dreaming Raymond Chandler 27

Marina's Ghost Visits Akhmatova 28

A Yorksmreman in Provence 29

Siegfried Sassoon and the Wish to Belong 30

The Marriage of Thomas and Jane Carlyle 32

Dr Who in Las Vegas 34

The Generation of Gabriela Mistral 35

Flair 36

Down and Out 37

A Young Wife Listens to Piaf 38

Billie Holiday in Chalcot Gardens 39

The Undercover Rider 40

Burning Bright 41

Old Muse 42

Immortal in Kensal Rise 43

Voice 44

On Not Dying Young 45

Self-Portrait in the Olympic Summer 46

St Lucy's Day 47

An Oxford Beauty 48

A Video of Habima at the Globe (2012) 49

Love 51

My Polish Cleaner's Version 52

Death and the Lemon Tree

Death and the Lemon Tree (1-4) 55

Editorial Reviews

"Like numerous English readers, I owe my discovery of Tsvetaeva to the multitalented poet and writer Elaine Feinstein . . . [whose] translations prove that a poem can be reborn in its adoptive language."  —Carol Rumens, poet and former poetry editor, Quarto and Literary Review, on Bride of Ice 

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