A Letter to Uncle Lenin

...Such is the genius of Beethoven, too...

...Oh yes...

...Today is Handel's 292nd birthday and my radio station, WMHT-FM of Schenectady, a proletarian city if ever there was one, has been celebrating by playing his music all day long...

...Hell, Unc, we all know that if one has a soft heart, one can't liquidate the objective enemies of the masses, let alone those poor subjective slobs who don't want to play on our side for no other reason than they just don't want to...

...He and those Menshevik comrades of his constantly went to movies when they should have instead been hard at work denouncing the enemies of the proletariat and plotting the seizure of power...

...Yours...

...Believe me, life has been nothing like what you and our comrades had expected at the time of the Revolution, that exhilarating world struggle that would elevate mankind to a healthy, rational stage of history, scientific socialism, and all that jazz...

...It's too irrational, too stupid, plain nuts...

...They went to the flicks, you made a revolution...

...The sacred anecdote has you walking out of a Beethoven concert because his music had gotten to you, excited you emotionally, and you were ready to cry, and crying was a weakness you did not permit yourself...

...to me you will always be Little Uncle, with the bald head, huge forehead, and piercing metallic eyes...

...ON HANDEL'S 292nd BIRTHDAY A Letter to Uncle Lenin by WILLIAM HERRICK February 23, 1977 Tovarich V. I. Lenin The Sarcophagus Red Square Moscow, USSR Dear Little Uncle, Please forgive the familiarity (you know what they say about familiarity, so I won't repeat), but I was born under that small metal bas-relief of your three-quarter profile that could be seen hanging on the walls of your enthusiastic admirers here as well as in your native land...

...This was the story about you in Switzerland with Martov, the Menshevik leader, a man so decent, it is said, that even you admired him...

...I was reflecting, too, on how down I've been lately, having given up on the human race —politically immature, that's what I am—when suddenly I heard Beverly Sills, "Bubbles" we call her (we're an irreverent people), maybe not the world's greatest voice yet great enough, singing a Handel aria from the second act of Julius Caesar, another great leader who won an empire that rested on a foundation of human skulls (nothing as solid as human skulls, eh Unc...

...just given up on the human race...

...You name it, we got it, as they say at the supermarket...

...Because I'm aware you never had time for cards, I inform you that klobiasch is a bastard form of pinochle enjoyed by Rumanians...

...Period...

...I find forbidding...

...Well, Little Uncle, you were proven right again...

...I remember well what you thought of the Balkans, Uncle—they simply didn't count...

...I was listening to Handel, thinking of you and the Red apocrypha, pondering your colossal success and the blood red fruits of the seed you planted, harvested by Big Uncle Joe, or Osip the 'Orri'ble, as some of my Cockney comrades call him...

...what with atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, industrial pollution, senseless kidnappings, terror, Irish killing Irish, Arabs Jews, Moslems Christians, and sometimes Christians Moslems, not to mention a great Socialist leader, Idi Amin, a black man, slaughtering blacks faster than any white man ever dared (after all, slaves cost a lot of money, and we know the meaning of economic determinism, don't we, Unc...

...For years now I've been down in the dumps, as we say here in capitalistic America, because of the way things have been going in the world...

...In any event, listening to the radio I remembered you exiled in Switzerland, refusing to go to the cinema, at the time a new marvel of science, and poking fun at your admired Martov because he was in your word a cinemaist, what we call a movie nut...

...Strangely, though, after you took power you immediately grasped that the cinema could be a powerful instrument for teaching the masses whafs what as well as what's to be done, and said so, didn't you...

...Then, wham!—as we put it—insult upon insult until he was completely degraded, a fate, I hasten to add, he deserved because you were the only one who was right...

...you reserved your admiration for those already dead, such as Marx and Engels...

...Dead, of course, they could not oppose you, argue with you—like, say, Plekhanov, your old Marxist teacher, whom you also admired before he disagreed with you...

...Such is the genius of Handel...

...As I grew up, your face moved with us, on one wall or another, and I became as familiar with it as with my mother's and father's...

...William Herrick...

...Yes, redeemed...

...that's what comes of listening to Handel all day: It forces you to forget the one and only way...

...There weren't many men in this world you admired, we know that...

...Listening to Handel's music all day, that glorious music which can lift one out of one's skin, can cleanse one's soul and transform it (if one believes in souls), I thought of yet another bit of Red apocrypha...

...The human race would continue...

...According to Red apocrypha, Little Uncle, there's a story about you and Beethoven, another famous composer...

...I'm digressing...

...well, it's come to the point where I've William Herrick, author of Golcz, is now working on a novel about the poet Frederico Garcia Lorca...

...And hearing those glorious notes rise up and up, pure, so very pure, you disappeared, the stories about you were gone, the foul mess we've been in these years forgotten, and I was lifted from my filthy human skin, my aching bones left dangling, my old heart abruptly on fire, and I began to cry...

...And I've been thinking of you...

...it would perhaps soften your heart when what you needed most was a harder heart than even you were born with because of the difficulties that faced the Revolution...

...In case you forget who the Rumanians are, they are the descendants of an ancient Gallic tribe that got caught behind the lines of history, so to speak, in the Balkans...

...Later, naturally, you imprisoned them, and many were killed...

...You were the greatest agitator-propagandist the world has ever known...

...What with infantile communism, war communism, bourgeois anarcho-communism—your terms, Unc, not mine—and all the rest covering the globe...

...But before you get a bigger head than you already have, my dear Uncle, I want to tell you what happened to me today...

...Little Uncle?and gone to the movies with Martov...

...Somehow the world would trudge on...

...You should have listened...

...Before you start smiling (which I understand was difficult for you even on your good days), I had better inform you why...

...You know how it is: I don't want to play pinochle, I want to play klobiasch...

...Despite you, Little Uncle, and what you left behind...

...No one that I'm aware of calls you Nicolai anymore, and V.I...

...Thus over the years I came to call you my Little Uncle...

...Might even again flourish...

...what with American capitalism growing so fat that a goodly number of its citizens suffer from boredom and must resort to every kind of decadent bourgeois behavior to while away the hours...

...At any rate, today is Handel's birthday and I've been listening to his music...

...I've been thinking about you all day...

...Damn it, it was so miraculously beautiful, so purifying, that at least for a moment I felt redeemed...