There was one other subject, of a biographical nature, which, to be sure, didn’t resolve anything, didn’t necessitate anything, didn’t determine anything, but for all that couldn’t help working on the imaginations of Czapski and his friends. He had escaped death time after time in some—mysterious? miraculous? in any case inexplicable—fashion. Poles know the story well; in September 1939 Czapski, who’d been mobilized at the rank of captain, became a Soviet prisoner and not a German one. Readers of history books know that the Red Army attacked Poland from the east on September 17, 1939, in accordance with the treaty signed by two diplomats, Molotov and Ribbentrop. All in all some fifteen thousand Polish officers and noncommissioned officers were interned by the Russians in three camps. By the spring of 1940 the vast majority of these prisoners of war had vanished and only around four hundred officers turned up in a different camp, in Griazowiec, without a clue as to what had become of their comrades, although they had, of course, considered various possibilities and conjectures (maybe they’d been transported to the far north? to the south? the east?). Today everyone knows that the vanished officers were shot, at Stalin’s order, by a bullet to the back of the head, and then buried in shallow mass graves in the springtime, as the birds were singing.
Czapski escaped, though, and in accord with the bizarre logic of his biography, found himself along with the other castaways in the camp in Griazowiec, where he gave a series of lectures on Marcel Proust (they were published years later as a separate book). Czapski’s life evolved under the sign of contradiction: this calm, cheerful painter and writer continued to study Proust even in the very heart of the Gulag archipelago. He took part in both world wars although in his heart of hearts he remained a pacifist. After the Second World War he was thrust into the role of a prosecutor of the Soviet system—he was a witness, for example, at Rousset’s famous trial—although by temperament he was better suited to being its champion. Perhaps the most extraordinary moment of his life—at least in its external, epic, dimension—was the mission entrusted to him by General Anders, the mission of seeking out the vanished (murdered, as we now know) officers. Czapski traveled around Russia for several months, talking with generals of the NKVD, as the KGB was then known, and inquiring into the fate of the thousands of officers. The frail, slim, six-and-a-half-foot Czapski, the admirer of Blok and Hofmannsthal, Norwid and Cézanne, peered into the square skulls of various notables of the Stalinist police. They all knew perfectly well what had become of the Polish officers, and this visitor from another world must have amused them. They must have had to restrain themselves forcibly to keep from simply shooting him; he personified an enemy class, he embodied an “old world” doomed to extermination. For all this, this investigatory mission was not completely exotic to Czapski himself; it was not entirely foreign to his own driving intellectual passions. He always sought to reconcile the esoteric with the exoteric, the general. And he never lost the sense that he owed his unfortunate, murdered colleagues, that he must conduct the investigatory mission with which Anders had entrusted him to the end of his days, he must seek out the NKVD’s victims even if this placed him in a position that was rather too “official,” “hierarchical,” “formalized” for his taste. (I suspect that for thousands of Polish readers Czapski is still better known as “the witness of Katyn” than he is as an essayist or painter.)
In the postwar years he returned late—only finally in the fifties—and with great relief to his writing and painting. Specialists speak of his discovery of seeing, of the way that Czapski’s painting liberated itself from the doctrines of colorism and opened itself to vision, to the moment truly seen. But Czapski’s postwar paintings also conceal a purely anarchic element. Seeing may be anarchic, may become anarchic. Czapski’s paintings are the work of an emigrant who views Paris and its inhabitants in a “wild,” oblique, surprising, anarchic fashion. Not Freedom Leading the People to the Barricades, but a black woman sitting on a bench at a subway station. Not Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte, but three patients in an optometrist’s waiting room. Seeing must be governed by one principle alone, the principle of “inner freedom” that so entranced Czapski in Blok’s diaries. Walking through Paris like a Parisian lawyer wearing a toga edged with green ribbon on his left shoulder and walking through Paris like an emigrant are two entirely different things. A Parisian attorney walks through his city and that city is stratified, sated with order; the president and ministers are seated on a cloud, engineers and lawyers bustle below, every building comes complete with a price tag, and everyone always knows whether you’re better off investing in real estate or gold. The emigrant sees a different city, disparate, disjunct, resistant to the force of social hierarchy. Carts on the Place Saint-Lazare, a worker at a café table, a pregnant woman on a bench—these are more interesting subjects for vision than the president’s palace. Vision has no hierarchy. A subway car gleaming in the spring sun—it was raining a moment earlier—on the viaduct of the Boulevard Garibaldi is Notre Dame’s equal. (This is why emigrants from so many countries like Paris; they subject this disagreeable, bourgeois town of offices and bureaucrats and fixed social structures to the innocent sabotage of the free gaze, thus splitting it into disconnected atoms.)
The postwar Czapski is an anarchist of painting and of Paris. As he drifted through Paris, sketchbook in hand, waiting for some sunbeam to open the doors of vision, for some stretch of wall, some figure, some color to speak in the language of ecstasy, he was free and he must have completely forgotten about the NKVD generals and their conversations (if the word “conversation” can be used to describe meetings that aren’t meetings). And of course, he no longer recalled his aristocratic family and Przyluki. He kept faith rather with Goethe, who protested the bigotry of memory and praised the beauty of the present moment. We live in an age that defends memory, since it’s thought—not without cause—to be under seige. But perhaps we’re exaggerating our cult of memory; Goethe would doubtless defend the moment’s worth even today!
To understand Czapski, we should view him simultaneously at an émigré meeting where he’s discussing Katyn, speaking in an unforced, ordinary way, ignoring the promptings of political rhetoric, and as he strolls along the Seine, registering both the buildings’ gray and the river’s green (“I looked at the city reflexively, half consciously noting the arrangement of blacks and grays highlighting the muted greens of the rising Seine’s quick waves”). Here, the public man, the moral authority; there the anonymous figure, no one, an anarchist, an emigrant. Nonetheless, there weren’t two separate Czapskis, disparate, contradictory; his inner purity combined these oppositions into something like harmony. The battles waged for two hundred years between the partisans of “ethical” art and the champions of purely “aesthetic” art (as if such a distinction really exists!), the heated arguments that raged throughout Czapski’s long life, didn’t particularly bother him. Or maybe they did—he didn’t turn a blind eye, after all, to contemporary schisms and polemics, he mentions them in his sketches and journals—but he resolved this particular dilemma in a completely original way.
The purely aesthetic element in art compelled him; in the history of Polish art and aesthetics, it’s easy to place Czapski unequivocally among the opponents of “patriotic,” “engaged” art, that is, art driven by its subject, not by peinture but by painterly écriture. In this he is a pupil of l’école de Paris and the great artists of the past, a pupil of Rembrandt and Zurbarán, Vermeer and Morandi. But this is only part of the story. The late Czapski in particular thinks and paints with the dictum “to express the world’s terror” constantly in mind—and this is more philosophical than aesthetic. The sweetness of the first impressionists was foreign to him; he found expressionism compelling precisely because it rubbed up against the “world’s terror.” Moreover, every reader of Czapski’s journals—which are slowly emerging from his almost unreadable notebooks to become his magnum opus—know the strata from which his painting and writing grow. They come fr
om an abundant inner life, a spirituality suspended between pure seeing and the anticipation of a mystical calm; but they also address the horror of history and nature. In considering a personality so rich, so complex, so indefatigable in its quest for an elusive truth, it’s a bit pedantic, even comical, to draw a line between the “ethical” and the “aesthetic.” Still, the antagonism—more or less acute—between the ecstatic and moralistic elements of art is not simply an academic invention. Czapski’s solution—I use the term reluctantly, since Czapski was always far more engaged by the chase than by its conclusion—depended in the final analysis upon an exceptionally simple juxtaposition (as befits his favorite adverb, “simply”). He combined a mystic’s temperament, anticipating those visionary experiences that require months, even years of lying low, with an absolute, active integrity in the outside world, in his dealings with others, a sense of justice so obvious and omnipotent that it required no outlet in writing. Incorruptible, Czapski? Absolutely—but unlike Robespierre, he never imposed the terror of his virtue upon others.
Restraint combined with goodness. Since he was also—“simply”—a very good person, who kept friends not just for the sake of conversation but, perhaps chiefly, in order to help them when they needed it. By the time I knew him, he no longer had the strength to help actively—but in the letters of Jean Colin, for example, I found the image of Jozef “delivering packages to friends around Paris.” Sometimes afterward he would sigh—in his top secret diaries—that he was too busy for painting, reading, thinking. He treated the other activities, though, as obligations beyond discussion.
Czapski was a genuinely great person, but the very notion of greatness embarrasses and upsets us. The theoretical apparatus provided by contemporary philosophy doesn’t lend itself to the apprehension of greatness. Czapski’s ruthless honesty also gave him grief: he was constantly testing to see if his experiences were real, if those great moments of illumination weren’t simply a diversionary ploy undertaken by his glands and hormones. And he was never triumphantly certain of either his painting or his prose. For all this, though, the prevailing mood of Czapski’s diaries is very different from what we find in the famed quest for authenticity conducted by the caustic existentialists. The tone of his passionate hunt for truth is almost naive—“almost” but never completely. Czapski’s allegiance to the tradition of oil painting was likewise “almost” naive. He rejected those thousands of ultramodern innovations that have in our times very nearly displaced canvas, brush, and oil paint, that extraordinary, protean substance, amorphous, flaking from the surfaces of so many great paintings, oil paint, the world’s backbone. An almost naive allegiance, an almost naive quest—never, though, descending into the tawdry, commonplace naïveté displayed by those traditionalists devoid of inner discipline. For Czapski, this near-naïveté was a path leading him unerringly past both the shifting fashions and fads of avant-garde art and the skepticism and suspicion of modern European thought.
His greatest threat lay elsewhere. He wasn’t hindered by rationalism or Marxism—nothing could have been more alien to him than Marxism—or even by the ideological militance of avant-garde art (although this did cause him the occasional headache and fleeting doubt in his creative path). He was most threatened by Simone Weil, whom he admired, loved, and feared both personally and as a philosopher. To put it differently—the threat came not from the island of utopia, but from the island of mysticism. Passionate discussions with Simone Weil fill his diaries. He knew her books by heart. He knew her biography by heart, her letters and the texts dedicated to her by friends.
Once, in the late eighties, we took Jozef—at Maria Nowak’s suggestion—to a performance in the Théâtre Huchette based on Simone Weil’s life. The actress playing Weil bore a strong physical resemblance to her. And she seemed to have entered her role so deeply that she appeared to be possessed by the same mystico-hysterical agitation that had killed Weil herself. They even had to stop the performance at one point since the actress playing Weil had become so deeply absorbed in the mystic’s own suffering and ecstasy that she couldn’t go on. The production’s mimesis was absolutely extraordinary, since the relationship between the actress and her part mirrored exactly the relationship between Simone Weil’s own spasmodic life and the prospect of a longer, calmer, less dangerous existence. Jozef likewise shook, trembled, and took in every word spoken by either the stage Weil or the actor playing the narrator of the biographical tale. He responded to every word since he knew them all, knew every twist and turn. He reacted almost the way a child does in the theater. He’d whisper the words along with the actors, even jump up from his seat as if he wanted to leap onstage and save Simone Weil from the disasters awaiting her. The Spanish Civil War was among the most dramatic events both in Weil’s life and in the play. Jozef was especially taken by the tale—he clearly knew it, remembered it—of a fifteen-year-old soldier in Franco’s army who’d been captured by Weil’s division. The commanding officer gave him an ultimatum: either to renounce his loyalty to Franco or be shot in short order. The boy chose death. (This was when Weil began to doubt the justness of the Republican cause.) Then came a brief moment of respite; they reenacted the famous episode, taken from Gustave Thibon, when Weil becomes absorbed in contemplating the Rodan Valley. Then Weil’s death in Great Britain began to draw ever closer; the narrator was about to pronounce de Gaulle’s verdict on Weil (Elle est folle, she’s crazy), but Jozef broke in, leaped from his seat, to the actors’ and spectators’ astonishment, and cried with deep feeling: Elle est folle.
Elle est folle, Czapski yelled in the little auditorium of the Théâtre Huchette in the Latin Quarter, and his impassioned cry contained the emotions of many years, the passions of his endless struggle with Simone Weil. For a brief moment, I think Czapski wanted to agree with de Gaulle, who may have been a lunatic himself as far as the British were concerned, but who had enough common sense and political cynicism to see that Simone Weil’s plan of forming brigades of nurses on the front line who would risk death alongside the infantry (another of her death fantasies) was impractical. Elle est folle; I never found this outburst in Czapski’s diaries, but it would surely have surfaced if their author had recorded all his moments of anger and rebellion against the imperious Frenchwoman. After all, she wouldn’t let him paint! The painter Czapski wasn’t supposed to paint, since painting was a prime instance of a misguided imagination. Imagination—that combleuse du vide, in Weil’s phrase—fills the void, the void through which God might otherwise speak to us. The imagination is a stopper that keeps us from reaching eternity. Pascal had already denounced painting: Quelle vanité que la peinture qui attire l’admiration par la ressemblance des choses dont on n’admire pas les originaux. Art is a pastime for frivolous individuals with inflated egos who seek the world’s acclaim. The world—for Pascal and his friends from Port Royal—is the domain of vanity, amusement (divertissement), and art becomes a particle of that treacherous terrain from which we should withdraw into prayer, religious meditation. Simone Weil was in many respects Pascal’s faithful student, faithful and severe, ill disposed to the imagination. Both Pascal and Weil—the time that divides their biographies seems almost meaningless—mistrust art. It is mere exercises in vanity, narcissism, great balloons in which our self-esteem parades. Weil makes exceptions for Gregorian chants, in which the “I” really does vanish entirely, bulldozed by the monks’ monotonous voices, and for “English poetry,” by which she means, not English poetry in its entirety, but a few metaphysical poets. In a famous letter to the editors of Cahiers du Sud, Weil attacks French interwar literature, particularly surrealism, both for ignoring the fundamental distinction between good and evil and for indulging the pleasures of the imagination. Instead of searching for true, divine, reality, writers invent an artificial reality, artificial fogs.
Elle est folle, some readers will say, along with de Gaulle and Czapski leaping from his seat. How can we discard art and its instrument, imagination? What would remain after casti
ng off imagination? And in the name of what? Mystical expectations that, some might say, are ridiculous in any case, doomed to defeat from the start, since they’re false, completely ungrounded, or at best, others might add, inexpressible. They may be authentic, even vital, but they can’t be voiced in human speech. Mystical experience can’t be communicated. If it could, not a single atheist or agnostic would remain on the planet, they’d all be swept up in a great flow of religious fervor. But in fact, mystics are mute, or they speak in allusions, they summon metaphors, they circle the burning bonfire without being fire themselves. They speak only to those who’ve undergone like revelations, who’ve been awakened in the night by the dry flame of God’s presence. But art lives differently, more forcefully, immediately. Perhaps it isn’t always so ambitious, it doesn’t always seek eternity, it’s satisfied with human beings, or even at times with a tray full of pears, apples, and grapes. Sometimes, in music, it acts by way of melody, evokes longings, appeals to obscure expectations, hazy memories. Beauty is the promise of happiness, Stendhal claimed. Simone Weil is closer to the Kantian tradition, in which beauty is understood as distance, disinterest, liberation from the senses’ tyranny. Art leads to understanding; someone else dreams up all those intimate dialogues. Thus on a park bench someone smiles reading a book. Someone is stirred by Degas’s Milliner’s Atelier. Someone feels joyfully revived by listening to the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata K310, that incredibly brisk, buoyant music that summons us to life (although Mozart wrote the sonata during his mournful second visit to Paris, when his mother died, and the French critics, preoccupied with native talents, refused to acknowledge the Austrian composer).
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