[Reader-list] I can't write a memoir of Czeslaw Milosz

[we wi]

Narayanan  this is beautiful!

--- On Mon, 11/3/08, Vivek Narayanan <vivek at sarai.net> wrote:

From: Vivek Narayanan <vivek at sarai.net>
Subject: [Reader-list] I can't write a memoir of Czeslaw Milosz
To: "sarai list" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Date: Monday, November 3, 2008, 7:34 PM

I know well that poetry is outlawed in quite a few republics, maybe for 
good reason; I know that it renders some people speechless, others 
angry, and still others contemptuous;

but still I wanted to throw this beautiful "non-memoir" (of Czeslaw 
Milosz, one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century) down and see 
if anyone had anything to say.

"He had always attacked the pettiness of his compatriots; he defended 
the visionary homeland of his dreams, pluralistic and tolerant, but at 
the same time he castigated the vices of the existing society: he hated 
anti-Semitism, narrow-mindedness, nationalism, stupidity. He had a 
religious mind but he also believed in liberal, democratic principles 
and tried to teach his contemporaries the implications of this complex 
creed."

Is it indeed possible to love your land deeply but despise the stupidity 
of nationalism, to conduct an intense lifelong search for the invisible 
while avoiding doctrinarian religion? Milosz, like many others, believed 
it was not only possible, but necessary.

Vivek

(from The Threepenny Review: 
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/zagajewski_f08.html )

*I Can't Write a Memoir of Czeslaw Milosz*

Adam Zagajewski


I can't write a memoir of Czeslaw Milosz. For some reason it seems 
impossible to me though I had almost no trouble when I wrote about the 
late Zbigniew Herbert, for example (but, on the other hand, I wouldn't 
envisage writing this kind of essay about Joseph Brodsky either, someone 
I knew well). Why is it so? Was Herbert more of a "unified person"?
Not 
really. All three of them, Milosz, Herbert, Brodsky—so different as 
poets and human beings—enjoyed, or suffered, the complexity of a life 
divided between the utmost seriousness of their work and the relative 
jocularity of what the other people perceived as their socially visible 
personalities. All three enjoyed joking, being with other people, 
dominating the conversation, laughing (Milosz's laugh was the loudest, 
the most majestic), as if needing a respite from the gravity of their 
vocation.

And yet, again, some time ago I was able to write a few pages about 
Herbert's life. Was it because I met him briefly when I was almost a 
child, when he visited my high school in Silesia? Because his personal 
predicament, his illness, stamped him with a drama which was so gripping 
in its ferocity and made him differ even more from the music of his 
noble poetry than was the case with other poets and artists (who, none 
of them, are ever identical with their work)? Because I had the feeling 
that, as we were born in the same city of Lvov, some twenty years apart 
and only two hundred yards away from each other, I had a special claim 
on his fate, the way veterans from two different wars but from the same 
regiment may feel close, almost like members of the same tribe, the same 
family?

I had read Milosz for many years before I met him in person. In the late 
Sixties and in the Seventies I didn't believe I'd ever meet him. He was

then for me a legend, a unicorn, somebody living on a different planet; 
California was but a beautiful name to me. He belonged to a chapter of 
the history of Polish literature that seemed to be, seen from the 
landscape of my youth, as remote as the Middle Ages. He was a part of 
the last generation that had been born into the world of the 
impoverished gentry (impoverished but still very much defining 
themselves as gentry): he grew up in a small manor house in the 
Lithuanian countryside where woods, streams, and water snakes were as 
evident as streetcars and apartment houses in the modest, industrial 
city of my childhood. His Poland was so totally different from mine—it 
had its wings spread to the East. When he was born in 1911 he was a 
subject of the Russian Tsar; everything Russian, including the language 
which he knew so well, was familiar to him (though, as his readers well 
know, he was also very critical of many things Russian). I was born into 
a Poland that had changed its shape; like a sleeper who turns from one 
side to another, my country spread its arms toward the West—of course 
only physically, because politically it was incorporated into the 
Eastern bloc.

I grew up in a post-German city; almost everything in the world of my 
childhood looked and smelled German. Cabbage seemed to be German, trees 
and walls recalled Bismarck, blackbirds sang with a Teutonic accent. My 
primary school could have belonged in any of Berlin's middle-class 
suburbs—its Prussian bricks were dark red like the lips of Wagnerian 
singers. The first radio in our apartment (a radio I worshipped—it 
received signals from an invisible realm, it had music, it brought 
strange sounds from different continents) was German and probably still 
nostalgic about Adolph Hitler's endless speeches. The first foreign 
language I had begun to learn (unwillingly), because of my grandfather, 
himself a Germanist, was German, too. For Milosz, who was a polyglot, 
learning German never existed as a possibility, especially after World 
War II, and German poetry never played a major role in the vast universe 
of his reading.

There were no manor houses and water snakes in my childhood. Coal mines 
and chimneys played the part of woods and meadows. Aristocratic families 
were squatting in the smallest apartments, surviving on minimal wages. 
(My family, I hasten to make it clear, was not aristocratic at all.) I 
was supposed to be a lucky inhabitant of a classless society in which 
falcons and sparrows were condemned to mandatory friendship. Classless 
society: practically, it meant that everybody was very poor, with the 
exception of Party dignitaries and a few cunning merchants who were able 
to outwit the Party but whose sleep was rather nervous; the wealth they 
accumulated could have been taken away from them in one day, no solid 
law protected them. The language we spoke was a plebeian Polish, hard, 
ugly, filled with typical Communist acronyms, abbrevations, and clichés, 
punctuated with giggles, swear-words, and ironies—a language of slaves, 
good only for basic communication in a kind of a Boolean algebra of 
resentment. In the mid-Seventies I venerated a performance of Adam 
Mickiewicz's Dziady (Forefathers) staged at the Teatr Stary in Krakow; 
it was directed by Konrad Swinarski, who before long died tragically in 
an airplane accident in Syria. Soon afterwards I was told that Milosz, 
who had been offered the recording of the piece, commented sourly: "I 
can't stand the way these actors speak the Polish language." He found 
their pronunciation barbaric. These barbarians were my peers, my 
contemporaries: I knew many of them from rather benign military training 
sessions at the university. When they played the rebels from the 
Mickiewicz generation they sounded to me like my friends; I was 
transported back to turn-of-the-century Vilna, I was one of them. They 
spoke my language, a language that didn't have the sweet music of 
Russian nor the elegance of French.

Also in the Seventies, one of my friends, a painter, Leszek Sobocki, 
traveled regularly to the United States (his mother was living in Los 
Angeles then). He was a part of a vague constellation of young artists 
and poets who were critical of the Communist system, though they hadn't 
known any other from personal experience, and who tried, being faithful 
to a more or less realistic aesthetic, to create art that would matter 
socially and politically. I belonged to the same archipelago. Sobocki, 
on one of his trips to L.A., mailed to Berkeley a package which 
contained excerpts from poetry and fiction produced by us, as well as 
reproductions of the paintings and prints made by him and his friends. 
After a while, a long letter written in response by Milosz arrived; it 
couldn't have been more devastating. Milosz basically dismissed the 
whole business of socially critical art, reducing our efforts to the 
well-meaning but aesthetically uninteresting and totally predictable 
reactions of inexperienced youngsters. He extolled "metaphysical 
distance," quoting Aleksander Wat's sentence on the necessity of 
fighting against Communism on metaphysical grounds. Which meant going to 
the very foundations of somebody's convictions. The letter was a cold 
shower for us, for me. Was Milosz right? I was of two minds even then... 
He gave me pause. Now I think he was mostly right, though there must 
have been also a bit of jealousy in his judgment, jealousy of the 
directness of our action; an intellectual in exile is often 
"metaphysical" by necessity— for him it's not a matter of free
choice 
since he has lost access to the unmediated spectacle of life in his own 
country. A much younger Milosz, the Milosz of the great poems written 
under the Nazi occupation or right after it, was after all somebody who 
didn't disdain directness at all.

And yet against all odds I fell in love with Milosz's poetry; its 
melodies seemed at times ancient, but its intellectual content couldn't 
have been more modern, more attractive, more complex, more intoxicating. 
I say I fell in love with it, which is true—still, first I had to find 
Milosz's poems, which was very difficult indeed. My parents had a 
significant library (where, it's true, fiction dwarfed poetry) but there 
was nothing by Milosz on the shelves. His name was erased from all the 
textbooks. My high school literature teacher never mentioned the name of 
Czeslaw Milosz. In an encyclopedia there was an entry under Milosz, but 
it was devoted to "Milosz Obrenovic," a brave Serbian prince, not to
the 
author of Native Realm. Since 1951, the year of his defection, Milosz 
had been an outcast, a non-person. If his name did appear somewhere in 
print, it was frequently accompanied by the official Byzantine formula 
"an enemy of the People's Republic of Poland." Poor republic,
having 
such a potent enemy!

In order to be able to read his poems and his prose, I needed a special 
permit from the dean of my college, and even once I got it—which wasn't 
easy—I was not allowed to check these books out; I could only study them 
in one of the reading rooms in the Jagellonian Library, my Krakow alma 
mater's crown jewel. Each day I had to say good-night to a pile of 
books: they had to stay on the shelf while I walked home. I was assigned 
to the Professors' Reading Room, which in my eyes, the eyes of a young 
graduate student, added to the importance of the occasion. And there I 
sat for hours, discovering the writings of the enemy of our republic. 
Sweet hours! And they were made even sweeter by the conspiratorial 
conditions under which I approached Milosz's poetry.

The richness of this work was overwhelming; I wasn't able right away to 
grasp the whole extent of the poet's achievement. I was swallowing lines 
of his poems like somebody given only a short moment in a magical 
orchard, a trespasser avidly reaching out for cherries, pears, peaches. 
I didn't have enough time and leisure—nor maturity, I'm afraid—to 
discern the different layers within his work, to understand the 
meandering of his thought, to define the stages of Milosz's complicated 
poetic evolution. I read for enchantment, not for any critical insights. 
I remember walking home after these sessions in the library and 
repeating lines from his poems—I was inebriated with them. Had I been a 
driver then, the police could have arrested me for driving in a state of 
drunkenness. But as I was only a chaotic walker, nobody could stop me; 
even a totalitarian state was not able to control my daydreams, my 
poetic fascinations, the pattern of my walking.

What was it that attracted me to Milosz's poetry? Precisely everything 
that was different from my own experience, my own situation, from my 
"people's republic" language. I fell in love with the freedom
with which 
Milosz both respected and defied the rules of poetic modernism. He was 
saying more than the poets I had known before—I mean he didn't keep a 
strict diet of purist metaphors: he was willing to tell the reader more 
than was accepted among contemporary poets. The reader knew that Milosz 
believed in something and hated something else, knew what Milosz's 
Weltanschauung was, and yet many of his poems were violent quarrels of 
the poet with himself, not at all easy to decipher—he was never 
doctrinaire, he never quite agreed with himself. I was also struck by a 
constant, energetic quest for the invisible in his poetry, a quest that 
arose amidst the most concrete, sensual images, not in an ascetic 
monastery chapel. In his oeuvre, ecstatic tones mixed with sober 
reflection; there was no easy way to classify this poetry—it burst 
taxonomies. It was not "nature poetry," it was not a "poetic
meditation 
on History," neither was it "autobiographical lyric"—it was
all of 
those. The ambition of this poet knew no limits; he tried to drink in 
the cosmos.

After so much intimacy gained from the contact with his work, the shock 
of meeting him in person was still considerable. And the contrast 
between the immense, complicated territory of his powerful work and the 
gentleman I finally met (a seventy-year-old "smiling public man") was

sizeable, too. How can a single person embody all the nuances and 
contradictions of a vast opus? I don't want to say that I was 
disappointed with Milosz's human incarnation. Not at all; I admired him, 
I loved him, every moment spent with him was fascinating. He was a kind 
friend; he wrote a most generous preface to Tremor, my first collection 
of poems in the United States; he showed interest in my life and work; 
and much later, in Krakow, we became almost neighbors, and I saw him 
often. And yet I know that for him I always remained a younger friend, 
not somebody he would confide in the way, I imagine, some from his 
generation might have enjoyed—or endured.

I met him for the first time in June 1983, in Paris, in the spacious 
apartment of Leonor Fini and Konstanty Jelenski near Place des 
Victoires. I was then somebody who had recently left Poland and who had 
no idea how long his Parisian emigration would last. Konstanty Jelenski 
was an exile like Milosz, a brilliant critic and a great admirer of 
Milosz's poetry. The Milosz I met then was an elder statesman—old and 
yet strangely young and handsome, serene, witty, radiating an energy 
which made him the center of every social event; wild and tame at the 
same time, rescued by the renown of the Stockholm accolade from the 
trials of his Berkeley solitude.

In January 1986 I read with him and some other famous poets during the 
PEN conference in New York, in the Cooper Union Hall, where a huge and 
enthusiastic audience that consisted mostly, it seemed, of very young 
poets greeted the readers—what a wonderful audience it was! After that I 
saw him now and then in Paris, in California, in New York, in 
Indianapolis... In Houston, where I taught creative writing, I 
introduced his reading.

Later, in Krakow, I'd visit him many times in his apartment in 
Boguslawski Street, where he eventually settled down with Carol. I saw 
him walking—more and more slowly—in the Krakow Old Town, where almost 
everybody recognized him and looked at him with awe. Given the slow pace 
of his walks, the awe had enough time to be richly deployed. He was like 
Goethe in Weimar, though his apartment was so much more modest than the 
house in Frauenplan—but the centrality of his position in the small 
world of Krakow and Poland was never questioned. This in itself was an 
enormous achievement for an exile who had returned to his country after 
so many decades of absence. His intellectual authority was overwhelming. 
In the restaurants he spoke very loudly because he was hard of hearing, 
so loudly that it was a bit embarrassing for his friends—not much 
privacy in these conversations. And yet he was never diminished by his 
great old age. His memory was invincible, his laughter irresistible, his 
mind alert.

In 2002 and 2003 he was enthusiastically received by American poets, 
very young ones and also the well-known ones, during summer conferences 
I organized with Edward Hirsch in Krakow; Milosz refused to participate 
in panels because he couldn't hear what the others said, but agreed to 
meet students from Houston. He gave several Q & A's, answering endless 
questions, embarking on long, unforgettable soliloquies (someone would 
always help him by repeating the question near his better ear). And he 
read with the other poets: I'll always remember him at a reading in the 
beautifully restored Krakow reform synagogue, a yarmulka on his regal 
head—old David speaking to his nation, feeble and yet so strong, solemn 
but also visibly savoring with a courteous, contented smile the din of 
the ovation that went on and on.

There was something absolutely splendid in the way he stood up to the 
challenges of his last years. He never withdrew into the comfort of a 
well-deserved retirement. With those he loved or liked, he was tender, 
magnanimous, charming; he received many friends and many strangers, 
young or old admirers of his work, poets and critics, but when he spoke 
in public he retained the tone of an angry prophet. He had always 
attacked the pettiness of his compatriots; he defended the visionary 
homeland of his dreams, pluralistic and tolerant, but at the same time 
he castigated the vices of the existing society: he hated anti-Semitism, 
narrow-mindedness, nationalism, stupidity. He had a religious mind but 
he also believed in liberal, democratic principles and tried to teach 
his contemporaries the implications of this complex creed.

I witnessed his deep sadness after Carol died; by then he knew he would 
face the end of his life in an empty apartment whose every corner bore 
traces of Carol's tender hand and imagination. Even then, after he 
returned from his last trip to California, where he bade her goodbye, he 
was able to write the beautiful elegy for Carol, "Orpheus and
Eurydice." 
His gift for transforming life's sorrows into poetry was intact, but he 
was tired and, it seems to me, maybe even a bit ashamed of always 
succeeding in being a magician against all odds, all catastrophes, all 
deaths. "What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?" he 
asked in the mid-Forties. What's the use of magic that doesn't assuage 
despair? There was always his religious hope, his faith, sometimes 
dreams brought him signals of divine presence, but—we know it from the 
poems—despair was also one of his frequent visitors. His laughter still 
triumphed over the baseness of biology, but the last years made him frail.

This great life had its secrets: how many times had Milosz told us in 
his poems that he was an "evil person"? His friends never believed
it, 
though I think he wanted us maybe not to accept it as true it but at 
least to consider it more seriously. Friends are usually too 
well-meaning, too polite, too well-bred. They always tell you "you'll
be 
fine," "you exaggerate"; they want to cheer you up—that's
their 
business. Which is probably the last thing someone coping with the grave 
images at life's end wants to hear. The poet who decided early on that 
poetry was about communicating with other people, not about lofty 
hermeticism and language games, was dying in the silence of his solitary 
days and nights. One of the last humans who spoke to him in his hours of 
agony was an uneducated woman who took care of his small household, a 
wonderful person with a great heart. I like to think of it: in the vast 
polyphony of the almost hundred years of his dramatic existence, the 
ultimate sound he heard was an unschooled voice of goodness. Perhaps in 
this soothing voice he found something like an arch between his early 
idyllic childhood in the Lithuanian countryside and his closing moments; 
and in between there remained, bracketed out for once, the rage of 
modern history, the loneliness of his long exile, the violence of his 
struggles, of his thought, his imagination, his rebellions.

I can't write a memoir of Milosz: so much was hidden in his life. 
Besides, he was an ecstatic poet and an ecstatic person. We'll never 
really know people like that. They hide their great moments of elation; 
they never share with others the short joys of their sudden discoveries, 
and the sadness when the vision fades. They thrive in solitude. With 
their friends they are usually correct, measured, just like everybody 
else. They are like a ship we sometimes see in a peaceful port: a huge 
immobile mass of metal covered by spots of rust, a few sailors lazily 
sunbathing on the deck, a blue shirt drying on a rope. One wouldn't 
guess that this ship was once struggling with the hurricane, barely 
surviving the onslaught of big waves, singing an iron song... No, I 
didn't know him enough. I have to return to his poems, to his essays.



Adam Zagajewski, who divides his year between Krakow and Chicago, is the 
author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Without End 
and A Defense of Ardor.
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