The Day I Met Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I had to pinch myself, but there I was, sitting opposite one of the most famous public poets in the world, debating what drink we were going to order from the bar. It was decided for us when Marion Boyars, publisher, and her second husband Arthur, poet and translator, appeared with four whiskies. I felt decidedly starstruck. Here was a poet who used to have everyone queueing down the street to hear him speak. Here was a poet who'd stared Nikita Krushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Boris Pasternak, Robert Frost and John Steinbeck in the face. And now here he was, giggling right in front of me, inquiring how his books were selling in Coventry and Kidderminster. It was unreal.

We were in the Warwick Arts Centre at the University of Warwick, where the Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, was giving a reading before a crowd of adoring, mostly female admirers. I'd brought along a stack of his poetry books for him to sign. Hopefully there'd be plenty of eager fans wanting to buy them during the interval and after the performance. And this really was a performance rather than the usual staid, polite poetry event. On stage was the quiet and restrained Arthur Boyars, Yevtushenko's friend and translator, and beside him Yevtushenko himself, fizzing and exploding like a human firework. What a piece of theatre! He was a whirlwind of energy. He danced around the stage like a gazelle, addressing many poems directly to girls he'd singled out in the audience, going down on one knee before them, even (I'm sure my memory's not playing tricks) sitting on their laps. The old charmer. His charisma, humour, boyish innocence and unashamed romantic ardour went down a treat (Simon Armitage and Carl Ann Duffy please take note!)

Yevtushenko's led a controversial life. Never out of the public gaze, he's been criticized for trying to placate various Soviet regimes, for not coming out as a fully fledged dissident like Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov. But I suspect Yevtushenko would argue that it can be more beneficial to fight the system from within rather than from without. Certainly his record on speaking out against the crimes of Stalin and the persecution of the Jews (by both the Nazis and the Russians) is unimpeachable. His famous poem Babi Yar, which appeared in samizdat form in 1961, strongly denounced Soviet distortions of Jewish history. It was not officially published in Russia until 1984.

Yevtushenko has travelled widely, and now spends half the year in the US, where he gives readings, and teaches poetry and European cinema. Known for his many romantic liaisons, he's been married four times. At the end of the evening Yevtushenko signed my own copy of his book The Face Behind The Face with the words 'To Robert ... with my gratitude for your help.'

Marion Boyars: Last Of The Mavericks

Pulling down from the shelf Yevtushenko's poetry collection, The Face Behind The Face, the other day, I was reminded of its publisher, Marion Boyars, who died just over 11 years ago, in February 1999, at the age of 71. In the early 1990s Marion commissioned me to sell her books in the Midlands and North of England. It was a tough assignment. These were books published out of love, radical commitment and a passion for ideas. She published the books she believed in, books which lived up to her high literary and aesthetic standards. Consequently they proved a difficult sell into the UK's general bookshops which, as ever, were looking for middlebrow potboilers, TV celebrity bestsellers and a quick turnover.

Marion was one of the great, maverick, independent publishers of her day, and the last of her kind. She was the first American and, I believe, the first woman to enrol at Keele University, the first of the new English redbrick universities to be built after WWII. At Keele she was also the first student who was already married and the first to own a car - a sports car which she used to drive at breakneck speed. In 1964 she bought into the small independent publisher, John Calder. Calder and Boyars went their separate ways in 1980, and Boyars struck out on her own. Over her career she published Henry Miller's Tropic Of Cancer, William Burroughs' The Naked Lunch, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Hubert Selby's notorious Last Exit To Brooklyn, the subject of a famous obscenity trial in 1968, which Marion won after a second appeal with help from barrister and writer, John Mortimer.

Her reading was wide and global - she loved Russian, French, German and Eastern European writers, Tolstoy, Rilke and Thomas Mann, as well as Plato, Joyce, Shakespeare, Updike and Hemingway. She published several writers (Elias Canetti and Kenzaburo Oe for example) who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a host of radical intellectuals such as Georges Bataille, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ivan Illich, John Cage, Michael Ondaatje, Julian Green, the celebrated film critic, Pauline Kael, and the feminist philosopher and sociologist, Julia Kristeva. With John Calder she also published Samuel Beckett.

A tiny figure in full make-up, chainsmoking, stern but smiling, I met her only a couple of times, though every few months she would ring to berate me about my sales figures, phone calls I came to dread...

To be continued...