"About This" is a long poem by Mayakovsky. It appears in Herbert
Marshall's 1965 book /Mayakovsky. /Marshall was a committed Communist
but like so many others he couldn't stomach Stalinism. In his "Notes on
About This" Marshall writes "The introduction to the poem states the
theme . . . This theme -- love -- was considered 'personal and petty'
both in the early days of the Revolution and indeed right up to this
death. It was considered a 'petty-bourgeois hangover' and not a theme
for poetry of social significance. But despite Mayakovsky's own sincere
attempts to 'crush under foot the throat of his very own lyrics, this
theme kept hammering at his brow, however much he tried to repress it
out of Party discipline.
One year later, in [his poem] "Lenin," he said:
About this, and that I'll write in its hour,
But now's no time for a lover and his lass
All my ringing poetic power
I give to you, attacking class
A major portion of "About This" is subtitled "The Ballad of Reading
Gaol." Mayakovsky was only self-imprisoned -- nothing at all like Oscar
Wilde's two-years in Reading Gaol, but Marshall writes, "The editors of
the 1940 edition of the Collected Works give this note to the section
headed 'Ballad of Reading Gaol': 'This work of Oscar Wilde, written in
prison, was taken for its association with the external conditions in
which Maykovsky found himself at the time.'"
I'm not so sure about that. Mayakovsky had his party-hack critics but
he was not physically persecuted. And no one told him he couldn't write
whatever he liked. Lenin disapproved of one of Mayakovsky's writings
and said the person who published it ought to be whipped, but he never
said Mayakovsky should be.
I stopped and reread Oscar Wilde's ballad. Wilde's emphasis isn't upon
his own incarceration -- well to some extent it is when he writes about
the conditions and rules, but he is caught up with and catches us up in
the situation of an inmate who is to be hanged. The events leading up to
as well as the actual hanging and subsequent burial have a great effect
on the rest of the prisoners, but especially on Wilde, and apparently on
Mayakovsky who couldn't read English but had access to, according to
Marshall, an excellent translation.
Marshall quotes the two lines ending section three of Wilde's poem,
For he who lives more lives than one,
more deaths than one must die
Perhaps I didn't read Wilde's poem carefully enough because I didn't
understand what multiple lives the condemned man lived or Wilde either
for that matter. He had a somewhat hidden life as a homosexual, but he
wasn't executed for it. The condemned man killed his wife but how was
that a double life? In regard to Mayakovsky, however, Marshall said he
lived a double life in the sense of being a lover in the extreme sense
-- think of Somerset Maugham's /By Love Possessed -- /while at the same
time being a committed Communist wanting to do his best for the
revolution. Suicide is mentioned more than once in "About This," which
makes no sense to me. If Mayakovsky was feeling guilty about his
excessive attraction to Lily Brik, suicide was even more objectionable
in Communist terms. That is, if a prominent Communist committed suicide
it was taken as a criticism of the Revolution. Writing poems about Love
were merely hangovers of bourgeois thinking and something to be
disapproved of but not condemned to the same extent that suicide was.
After all, one must doubt that Mayakovsky was the only Communist to fall
in love; so there was probably an underlying sympathy for him in the party.
I couldn't help but notice that Wilde's Ballad can be read as a
condemnation of prison as an acceptable alternative to execution. The
condemned man accepts his fate with equanimity. He deserves to be
executed for murdering his wife and accepts it. The rest of the
prisoner of Reading Gaol are another matter. They are overwhelmed and
tormented by what is happening. Their suffering, according to the poem,
is much worse.
Lawrence