Поэт вспоминает легендарную ночь на пляже Виареджо, где шестидесятилетие назад он спал в пластиковых мешках под звездами

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Sixty years ago, on my first trip to Europe with my friend Dave Mann, between our sophomore and junior years of college — I was 19 and had already been infected with the poetry virus — we were driving up the Mediterranean coast from Rome in the VW Beetle Dave had picked up in Hamburg, it was the middle of summer and there were no vacancies anywhere we stopped. We pulled into Viareggio around sundown. Viareggio, to an English major, resounds with myth. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the early 19th century Romantic poet of sublime lyricism, radical politics and scandalous behavior, a polyamorous wife deserter and a bad role model, drowned off the coast of Viareggio at 29 and was cremated on the beach. According to legend, his heart was unusually large and would not burn. Like James Dean or Jim Morrison, he was an emblem of tragic genius gone in a flash, and for a young romantic of the mid-1960s he exerted a dreamy magnetism. Dave was the golden boy of our high school class — tall, blond, straight A’s, varsity basketball, student body president, now studying at Stanford. We had gone to grammar school and played Little League baseball together (and we’re still friends). I was an above-average B student belatedly blooming as an undergraduate, and we were out in the world for the first time. With no place to stay, we drove the Bug onto the beach, got stuck in the sand and decided this was where we would spend the night. We had no sleeping bags, but we did have a couple of large pink thick plastic laundry bags from a laundromat in Rome. We would sleep on those. There was nobody else on the beach and no one bothered us, so we figured we could get away with camping. Our car wasn’t going anywhere and there was no room anywhere else, so what could we do? I tried to imagine the fateful day in 1822 when Shelley, who couldn’t swim, went sailing with a friend and the boat was caught in a sudden storm, capsized in rough seas and the poet drowned and washed up and was burned on this very beach. How much more mythic can you get, except maybe to crash on Route 46 where Dean died in his silver Spyder in 1955. Being on that beach felt to me like an initiation — one of many in the years that followed — into some kind of poetic destiny. And in this tragic romantic setting, as I bedded down under the stars fully dressed on my plastic bag with nothing between me and the Italian sky, I could feel insects biting me all over and my back erupting painfully with pimples. I believe, with Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, that our lives are suffused with myths and archetypes, and that those of us prone to mythmaking can’t resist constructing narratives in the effort to make sense of our experience. As Joan Didion put it, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I seldom saw it that way when I was in the middle of it, but now that I have the luxury of retrospect, my life is sort of beginning to make sense. That long, cold, uncomfortable, sand-flea-bitten, acne-afflicted night on the beach at Viareggio feels to me now like my introduction to what it meant to be a poet: unease, exposure, uncontrollable eruptions, a vehicle spinning its wheels, insomnia, ridiculous dreams of identification with greatness, with a skylark pouring out “profuse strains of unpremeditated art” that transcend whatever hurt we suffer on earth. I’ve since come to think that, for all his lyrical genius, Shelley is probably better on paper in the afterlife than he was in person at the time. I often feel that way myself — better in writing than in real life. I would still love for anything I’ve written to have the staying power of “Ozymandias” or “Ode to the West Wind” or “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” without the collateral damage in my personal life. The exalted squalor of my night on the beach at Viareggio was a preview of the romance, contradictions, impurities, paradoxes and ironies I was to find farther along the way.