Extract: Table Talk: Opinions, stories, and a play, by C.K. Stead

Poet, fiction writer, critic, essayist, teacher and academic C.K. Stead has made his mark on all these disciplines. While he has already written or edited over fifty books, there is no sitting on his laurels for this nonagenarian. Instead, he wore them as New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2015–2017 and has continued to celebrate poetry and poets through blogs, reviews and essays. He has also returned to his exploration of the life and work of Katherine Mansfield, and to writing and revisiting short fiction as well as an ‘approximation’ of a play first written in French by Racine.

Combining this eclectic material into one fascinating collection, this prize-winning wordsmith continues to provoke, delight and stimulate. Extracted from Table Talk: Opinions, stories, and a play by C.K. Stead. RRP $36.99. Published by Quentin Wilson Publishing. Published Nov 2024. 'Vladimir'

It was 2007. I knew that it was although nobody said so. They came for me in my hotel room and took me down to the car. Putin was in the back. It was like a room. He half stood and reached out to shake hands. ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich.’ ‘Christian Karlson.’ ‘Sorry not much English,’ he said. ‘Sorry no Russian at all,’ I replied.

For the five minutes it took to drive to the Marriot Aurora, he continued to hold my hand. When it came in sight he gave an order to the driver, and we veered off into the streets behind the hotel. We stopped and it was as if we were in a city ruined by bombing. Outside the temperature must have been 20 below and the puddles were ice. I was shown a narrow and very steep stone stairway.

‘You can climb?’ Putin asked, pointing ahead.

‘I can,’ I said, as I could back then, effortlessly.

So we made our way up in a single line, Vladimir Vladimirovich, Christian Karlson and two bodyguards. A sort of landing took us indoors and up a dark stairwell with green walls and marble steps. At the top huge double doors opened on what in a moment of carelessness I might have called ‘a glittering scene’, all the men in formal attire, the women in ball-gowns with jewels. I checked myself – bow tie, cummerbund, gold cufflinks, shiny shoes – yes, it was all in order.

‘So where are we?’ I asked.

Putin didn’t answer that. ‘You know one another,’ he said, pointing to Tom Stoppard in the crowd. Stoppard was tall and dashing, with that great head of curls I had always envied. He must have been well past sixty but looked much younger. He was smoking of course, a habit that was frowned on and going out of fashion in the West but not in Moscow, and never with Tom.

I began to reply that I knew him, in the sense that everyone did, but I had no reason to suppose that he would remember me. But Putin, not listening, had pushed us together and was gone.

‘You came with Vlad the Impaler,’ Stoppard said.

I said, ‘It was weird. He shook my hand in the car and then held it.’

‘You’d better wash it at the earliest opportunity.’ Tom was laughing, but I noticed that he hadn’t shaken mine.

A tray of drinks was offered. We each took a glass. ‘Is this safe?’ I asked.

‘Champers is fine,’ he said. ‘It’s when they sit you down for a cup of tea you have to hunt for the nearest aspidistra.’

‘I’m looking forward to your play,’ I said. ‘I don’t know any Russian, but I saw it in London so I’ll know pretty much what’s going on.’

‘The Russian version’s a bit different,’ he said. ‘Briefer, sharper, swifter, I think. Cuts you know.’

‘Yours or theirs?’

‘All mine. Economies. I made the cuts for the New York production. When I go back to a play after a few years, I always find everyone talks too much – as I do myself.’

I said I was sure it was wonderful in either language. ‘Your plays–’ I began.

‘Glad you like them,’ he said, seeing what was coming and cutting me off.

‘You don’t like Putin,’ I said.

Putin was new, or new to me in those days. I don’t suppose I had followed much of what was happening currently in Russia. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Cold War was over, and public attention had shifted to the Bush-Blair misadventure in Iraq and the looming financial crisis.

‘He’s an arsehole,’ Stoppard said. ‘He’s taking Russia right back to the time of … you know …’

‘Stalin?’

‘Stalin, yes, but the Tsars, the secret police, nationalism, the church – the whole fucking lot. Control of the media, closing down on free speech …’

‘So he won’t be in sympathy with these plays will he?’ I said. Tom was bringing the whole trilogy – The Coast of Utopia – about Herzen, Bakunin and the 19th century idealists in revolt against the power of the Tsar.

Tom said, ‘I’m interested in the Russian Soul with a capital S. Putin wants to celebrate the Russia that put the first Sputnik into space and invented the Kalashnikov. He murders his enemies and wants his share of the Oligarchs’ plunder.’

I thought of the sinister little Vladimir Vladimirovich who had held my hand after shaking it. ‘Doesn’t he scare you? Aren’t you afraid you might get that invitation for a cup of tea?’

‘By the time he’s had someone tell him what the plays mean, I’ll be back home in England – where of course most of those Russian revolutionaries fetched up and died, free men but disappointed.’ *

Tom was famous for his Anglophilia. Having been born a Jew in Czechoslovakia, he had escaped as an infant with his parents and brother. It was only in adult life he had learned that many of his nearest family had been murdered in Auschwitz. He celebrated England and the freedom he’d found there, and was loved for it. Liberty was his theme, which had made him (deplorably I thought) an admirer of Maggie Thatcher. But he could make the celebration lyrical, like Chekhov or Turgenev, and intellectual, like a mathematical puzzle – and all that together with really good jokes: with energy, sprightliness, fun. That was what I’d wanted to say to him when, typically modest, he’d cut me off. But now he had reminded me of something else, something quite other.

I said, ‘Do you remember that first Sputnik?’

He was surprised. ‘Yes I do.’

‘They put a dog up in space and then had to “put it down” by remote because there was no way of returning it to earth.’

‘Yes, I remember. The dog was called Laika.’

‘Which means Barker in Russian.’

‘Alas, poor Barker, I didn’t know him well.’

‘That was 1957,’ I said. ‘You were in Bristol.’

‘I was. How do you know that?’

‘I was there too. I remember seeing you in the audience at the Bristol Old Vic. Peter O’Toole was playing Hamlet. And then in the same season he was Vladimir or Estragon in Waiting for Godot.’

‘That’s right. He was …’ Tom thought a moment and then laughed, shaking his curls. ‘How odd. He was Vladimir, wasn’t he?’

‘I think he was.’

‘O’Toole and I were friends at that time – before he went up to London and became famous.’

Tom looked hard at me. ‘Your face is familiar. Did we meet?’ Table Talk is available in bookshops now. About the author: C.K. Stead is a distinguished, award- winning novelist, literary critic, poet, essayist and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland. He was the New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2015–2017, has won the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction and is a Member of the Order of New Zealand, the highest honour possible in New Zealand.