46
PARTISAN REVIEW
the sentence like a reaper through a field. Miserable, small plunder.
Someone brought a hare, someone else was happy with a full sack of
juicy pears. The strange impression one has when leaving the city for a
broad space: the horizon grows, there is more air, the enormous lung of
flaxen steppe gives momentary joy. Our people were model at the be–
ginning. Model. Humble, noble, cultured, decent. They understood the
seriousness of the situation. They came at daybreak. There wasn't a trace
of anger in them. They wore leather jackets, and had swarthy, sharp
faces, they were gentle as teachers of the people. They were able to
avoid exaltation, pathos. They came at daybreak, sometimes without
even having the time to eat a decent breakfast. They slept three, four
hours a night. No one remembers this. Many of them paid for this later
with illnesses and ulcers. They gulped down burning, bitter coffee, ran
downstairs
to
their cars three steps at a time and drove through sleepy,
lifeless towns from which rose the singing of blackbirds . Dew fell on
park lawns. Marble statues looked at the black cars indifferently. It is
held against us that these cars came at dawn . If they hadn't come at
dawn, those people would have slept until noon, tossing in their stale
bedding; then they would stand in front of a mirror for a long time,
looking at themselves , yawning, frosting the surface of the glass with
their breath.
It is possible that there were mistakes. One has to allow for the scale
of the enterprise. I personally regret Mandelstam, even though I realize
that some of the later poems would never have been written if not for
the policies we were applying to him . Our people liked cheerful songs,
the sound of the accordion, military marches, parades, and the future.
They were content with modest nourishment; they never complained
that they lacked champagne or trumes. We stood before a white canvas
then, as painters; our every stroke changed the face of the world. We
liquidated horse races. We never allowed certain kinds of boxing or
wrestling. We would not agree to things tolerated by those moral
Americans. One had to simplifY many complicated processes.
What is it that you regret? Hunting with its unspeakable cruelty?
Popes with their cold, lordly lack of interest in suffering;> Tables set out
under old trees so that certain people could feast four days and four
nights? The past tense? The trumpets of the postillion?
Fog in the meadows. In childhood I thought that willows were not
trees. They are entirely different, supple, deprived of form. The wind
gives them form. I tried then to imagine America, the great cities with
their chaos of neighborhoods and races. I imagine modestly dressed im–
migrants, freezing at dawn, waiting for hot soup, which they would not
get until noon, from the hands of an elegant and weary lady. Jews,
Armenians, Poles, Irish, Italians, Greeks. What a waste, what an excess of
