Posts Tagged ‘Truman Capote’

A letter from Alexander Deriev, husband of the late poet Regina Derieva. The Russian couple have a helluva back story. I wrote about her in “Writ on Water,” an 2014 essay for the Times Literary Supplement here. And I’ve written about her on the Book Haven here and here and here.

She and her husband have a helluva back story. from the age of six, she lived obscurely in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, “perhaps the most dismal corner of the former Soviet Union – once the centre of a vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy industrial city,” according to the distinguished Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova. For him, Derieva’s precise, epigrammatic poems limn “the concentration camp zone, where space is turned into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance”.

The couple met at the Karaganda black market, while buying books. She was a pianist and the daughter of a KGB higher-up, he is an artist The two shared a love of Andrei Platonov and Truman Capote. They were Russian Jews, then fled to Latvia to convert (bypassing the corrupt Russia Orthodox Church, which has notorious state ties). Then they settled in Israel, before finally relocating to Stockholm, where she is buried after her death in 2013.

Now she has a new book out, Selected Clouds with Bondarenko M. O. , notwithstanding her death a decade ago. Deriev writes:

“Dear Cynthia, on Friday, September 20, Russian troops attacked Odessa again with ballistic missiles. Despite the bombing, the launch of Regina’s Selected Clouds in Odessa’s Literary Museum went well. About 40 or 50 people attended). However, several more presentations of this book will be arranged in other localities soon.” Photographers Stepan Alekyan and Vladimir Bogatyrov documented the event, which included translator Oleksandr Hint, and Kateryna Chernenko, the librarian of Odessa Regional Scientific Library.

The reading continued smoothly as the missiles fired. Grace under pressure.

Postscript: The poet Regina Derieva was also a great collector of seashells – many of them now housed at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Alexander recently found one gastropod that bears the name Cynthia. See the attached photos of this shell. Canefriula cynthia (H. C. Fulton, 1902) – 36 mm, Humboldt Bay, New Guinea. He notes: “It is unlikely that the British malacologist, Hugh Coomber Fulton (1861-1942), when naming the newly discovered mollusk, had in mind the verses of Propertius addressed to Cynthia. Most likely, he used the epithet of the Greek goddess Artemis.” I’m flattered.

Hermann Hesse finds true love

I have a lot of writing to finish between now and Sunday night – I’ll be going at it 24/7.  Meanwhile, you might want to check out Buzzfeed’s “30 Renowned Authors Inspired by Cats.”  There’s also more at Writers and Kitties.

Mark Twain was an obvious choice.  But I combed through to see if they were going to remember some of the world’s most famous cat-lovers.  Colette, for example, who famously said, “Plus je connais les hommes, plus j’aime mes chats.”

Mississippi and J.B. (Photo: Bengt Jangfeldt)

She’s there, along with Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Philip K. Dick, Hermann Hesse, Edward Gorey, George Plimpton, Jacques Derrida, W.H. Auden, and Jean-Paul Sartre make the cut.  But where’s T.S. Eliot, for goodness sake?

A few other notables were missed.  Where is Joseph Brodsky and his famous cat Mississippi?

I’m not entirely sure Vikram Seth is a cat-lover, but I think he must be.  The gnarly old tomcat Charlemagne, in The Golden Gate, is one of the great literary cats. I could find no photo of him with cats – only this from Delhi Walla, which is as close as I’m going to get tonight.  And since my own copy of Golden Gate is loaned out to a good cause, I found this sole sonnet (the novel is composed of Pushkin tetrameter sonnets), in which the lawyer John is warned of his romantic competition for the heart of fellow attorney Liz.  I like the way these fleet, four-footed sonnets fit onto wordpress better, next to a photograph, without awful line breaks:

Vikram Seth and fan

Ah, John, don’t take it all for granted.
Perhaps you think Liz loves you best.
The snooker table has been slanted.
A cuckoo’s bomb lies in the nest.
Be warned. Be warned. Just as in poker
The wildness of that card, the joker
Disturbs the best-laid plans of men,
So too it happens, now and then,
That a furred beast with feral features
(Little imagined in the days
When, cute and twee, the kitten plays),
Of that familiar brood of creatures
The world denominates a cat,
Enters the game, and knocks it flat.

Charles Bukowski and friend

Speaking of Vikram Seth, let’s take a moment to give equal time to dogs.  I have in mind one that played prominently in Seth’s novel, An Equal Music. It’s St. Augustine’s small white Maltese dog in Vittore Carpaccio‘s Saint Augustine in His Study, in Venice’s Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. It’s from Carpaccio’s mature period – he began it in 1502 and completed it in 1507. It’s one of seven panels he made, still in the Schola, depicting the guild’s patron saints.

On Vikram Seth’s authority, I shlepped to the Schola a decade or so ago. It’s tucked away on one of Venice’s sidestreets and not easy to find.  It was worth it. The schola is dark and mysterious and pure magic. The painting everything he said it would be.

Highly recommended.

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A saint's best friend...Carpaccio's Augustine in his study

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