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

[Vivek Narayanan]

Thank you for responding, Dhatri.  I am curious to know if you had any 
further comment / explication in relation to the particular quote from 
the piece I highlighted:

"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."

With regards,
Vivek

we wi wrote:
> 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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