60
PARTISAN REVIEW
sensibility .
It
was together with Seymour Glass that I learned
through haiku poetry the art of choosing the right words, the art of
being silent , and the art of living.
I was speaking about you, books of Heinrich Boll. I understand
that
Billards at Half-Past Nine
and
The Clown
are not only original
books, but are also stylistically brilliant. But I will always rate the
earlier works of Boll higher. Perhaps the air in his books
And Never
Said a Word
and
The Bread of Those Early Years
is somehow closer to
me . Perhaps in the accursed, solitary, young, half-starving, tattered
heroes of Boll, who think a great deal, who experience life greedily ,
who wander about such orphaned and decrepit cities of postwar Ger–
many - cities that bear a likeness to the leanness and ugliness of
someone who has gone through a lengthy and severe illness - I
recognize my older spiritual brothers, or perhaps even myself. Now
it seems to me that these heroes of B6lllived on the wind, on the out–
skirts of cities , under concrete bridges , protected by filthy gray walls
that crumble under stains of a stinking dampness which never dries
up . I cannot forget the idiot from
And Never Said a Word,
who, unable
to articulate clearly, was always mumbling, bubbling, and chirping
away. Only now can I understand why this idiot moved and
troubled me. By his inability to express himself, he resembled me!
I found out about the ingenious Faulknerian idiot , Benjy, much
later.
The Sound and the Fury,
written by William Faulkner in the late
twenties , was published in Russian in 1973 or 1974. Somewhere in
the libraries the folios from the Stalin-Zhdanov era are still gathering
dust . Somewhere among these folios lies
The Sound and the Fury,
slan–
dered as evidence of the marasmus and degeneracy of modern bour–
geois literature . How many beautiful books and how many beautiful
films, which influenced the formation of tastes and viewpoints of
entire generations in the West, were forbidden to be read and seen
by my parents, by my older brother, and by myself as well. There
was something immoral in the fact that our literary and film critics
and scholars for years wrote about Kafka, Musil, D .H . Lawrence,
Nathalie Sarraute, Borges, Beckett, Ionesco, Bunuel , Alain Renais,
Bergman , Fellini, Peter Brook, books and films that were physically
inaccessible to almost all Soviet people. There was something
sadistic in releasing only two early films of Fellini,
La Strada
and
Nights
of
Caberia,
or finally in the mid sixties sprinkling a mere ten
thousand copies of a collection of works of Kafka, which contained
The Trial
and about ten other stories, in such an enormous country
