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0 P LE, YEA RSAN 0 LI F E
505
against himself as well. He wrote: "I want to be understood by my
country, but
if
I am not-what then? I'll pass through my native
land like a shower of slanting rain," and then crossed out these lines,
thinking them too sentimental. But his native country did under–
stand him, and also understood the beautiful verses he discarded.
I remember
him
in the autumn of 1928. At that time he stayed
more than a month in Paris. We often met. I see him in a somber
mood in a little bar called
La Coupole.
He ordered White Horse
whiskey, drinking little of it but writing a ditty which went "White
Horse whiskey is a good old mare, with a white mane, and white
tail." Once he said to me: "Do you think I have an easy time of
it? ... I could write better verse than anybody." To the very end
he was devoted to his concept of himself.
There has been much conjecture about why he committed sui–
cide-some say it was difficulties over the exhibition,26 others that
it was the attacks of RAPP, and others that it was a love affair. I
don't like this sort of guessing game: I can't view the life of a man
I knew as I would the plot of a novel ... I will say only one thing:
people often forget that a poet is an unusually sensitive person,
otherwise he wouldn't be a poet. Mayakovsky called himself an "ox"
and spoke of his poems as "hippopotamuses," and at one gathering
said he had had the hide of an elephant and that it was bulletproof.
In actual fact he did not even have ordinary human skin.
According to Christian legend, the heathen Saul, once he had
become the Apostle Paul, began to cast down the graven images of
gods and goddesses. The images were perfection itself, but Paul suc–
ceeded in overcoming his sense of the beautiful. Mayakovsky cast
down not only the beauty of the past, but himself as well; that is
the greatness of his "feat of self-denial" and also the key to his
tragedy.
In St. Petersburg there was a writer called Andrei Levinson,
who was considered a connoisseur of choreography. In 1918 he pub–
lished a lampoon of Mayakovsky in the magazine
Life of Art .
He
was answered by many artists and also by Lunacharsky. Levinson
emigrated to Paris. When he got the tragic news of Mayakovsky's
26. ''Twenty
Yean
of Work," an exhibition of Mayakovsky's writings and
posters which took place a few months before his suicide.
