Buber

"WHEN YOU SPEAK, cherish the thought of the secret of the voice and the word, and speak in fear and love, and remember that the world of the word finds utterance through your mouth. Then you will lift the word." This is from Martin Buber's Ten Rungs, Collected Hasidic Sayings (I947), a section entitled, "Of The Power Of The Word". Later, in "How To Say Torah", the compiler warns: "You must cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear that hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you. The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, you must stop." And further: "[The proud] are reborn as bees ... that hum and buzz: 'I am, I am, I am.'"
    If Joseph did not allude directly to "the word of God", did not set his devotion to language in a specifically Judaeo-Christian context, it was perhaps because he felt that "the twentieth century has exhausted the possibilities for salvation and come into conflict with the New Testament." "Christ is not enough, Freud is not enough, Marx is not enough, nor is existentialism or Buddha." He concludes, in a kind of last ditch appeal to the power of the Word: "All of these are only means of justifying the holocaust, not of averting it. To avert it, mankind has nothing except the Ten Commandments, like it or not." Such statements seem to contain little or nothing of Christian charity or belief in redemption, but a great deal of misanthropy and Old Testament fatalism. Only the Word, specifically the words of the Ten Commandment, stand between us and the triumph of Evil. At the time, I thought this rather simplistic. But there was also something quite empowering about it. It is not so much that the Word saves, as that language is identified as the arena of contention or engagement. Joseph acknowledged this when he gave up the various consolations on offer. However different the timbre of his voice, he was after all- I came to this only lately – of that company I had so admired in my early days with MPT. It reminded me of what Ted Hughes, in his Introduction to Vask Popa's Collected Poems (1978), had written of this generation "They have got back to the simple animal courage of accepting the odds." If you accept the odds, you do not obliterate them, but paradoxically you do take control. Joseph was never one to surrender control.

Let me try something! He was not meek in his fatalism, his resignation. Rather, he was fierce, even angry. Like a moralist. But this anger, which sometimes showed itself in his encounters with the press or others, was not manifest in his writing, in that which was destined to remain. Language, as written down, demanded more of him. A certain ceremony or decorousness was required. But he did not, as I sometimes supposed, hide behind it. He just paid his dues to language and earned the right to import more and more of the whole man. This apprenticeship
was an intensely moral affair, a training in morality, in ethics as well, morality being engagement but with the ego under control, providing the charge of energy but not dominating the proceedings. Come to think of it, wasn't Joseph a Protestant rather than a Catholic? A Calvinist actually.

I am not being captious, merely speculating about Joseph's approach to the business of writing. His vision of the self was a useful one. Perhaps, after all, I was misled when, in the early seventies, I conjectured that "His refusal to play any part other than himself should protect him against blandishments in the West, as he was, in a sense, protected against pressures of conformism in the Soviet Union by the refusal of the orthodox literary establishment to acknowledge his artistic existence." The second part of that statement is, in any case, tautologous. And the trouble with the rest of it is that I was probably fearing
the worst, that he would end up wholly owned by the media, typecast as America's tragic resident exile. But at the same time, knowing him, having sensed, even experienced the strength of his resolve, I also hoped that he would be able to preserve his integrity, even if I presumptuously couched this hope in paradoxical, skeptical, or political terms, when I talked of his not playing a part. It would have been wiser to have stated the obvious: that it was being himself, answerable to none except his great predecessors and finally God or Language, that got him into trouble in the first place. But at least that, if he were successful from a worldly point of view, as seemed likely, it would be largely on his own terms.
    Obviously his insistence on the primacy of language and his own subordinate rôle, helped him to combat pride. He kept reiterating, almost like a mantra, that the biography of a poet has to do not with the life he has lived but with his words.
    On the one hand, this smacks of a certain counter-elitist elitism, a romantic "not myself but the force within me"; on the other, it is simply foolish to claim for oneself what properly belongs to language, since one is the latter's servant or, more precisely, its artisan. If Joseph was a pedagogue as well- and he certainly was - it was not out of some exaggerated notion of his own importance. But, as I have said, there was no false modesty either. He could be the most natural of men. For instance, in response to the question posed by Bella Yezerskaya, mentioned earlier: "Do you consider yourself an innovator?" he replied: "No, I don't think so. Innovation is, in any case a silly concept. My rhymes sometimes turn out to be quite good, but to consider them 'new' is senseless; they're taken from the language in which they have always existed". Which is, of course, literally true. Nevertheless, more than a little satisfaction is expressed also by the modest "quite good"!