The hard, very hard life and the radiant clarity of the poetry; the contrast was striking. But Herbert never would have written—as William Styron did, for example—a confessional book on his depression. This choice was both personal and part of the cultural tradition he endorsed. He took classicism to mean: Don’t complain. This is precisely the point of his brief poem “Why the Classics.” In the depths of despair he wrote another lovely poem, “Old Masters,” in which he marvels at the anonymous restraint of the Italian Gothic painters. No, he couldn’t write “American-style,” he couldn’t acknowledge his “problems,” share his personal cares with his readers. For all that, though, he writes understandingly about the Dutch artist Torrentius, and declares emphatically that anyone who demands an absolute unity of life and art is in error. This is one of the few moments in Herbert’s work where he reveals the painful connection between biography and artistry.
To know him well, be his friend, also meant being initiated into the battle he waged with his diseases. Viewed from afar, especially from the Polish People’s Republic, Herbert’s life might have seemed glamorous. His colleagues from Warsaw or Koszalin, who rarely traveled, even to Bulgaria or Slovakia, who spent long hours in Writers’ Union cafeterias, may have thought that he’d won the lottery jackpot. California, Paris, Greece, Italy, West Berlin … The reality was less impressive, though. Illness constantly paralyzed his projects. Illness and want, since he scarcely ever had enough money. Living in the wealthy, costly cities of the West, he was constantly beset by financial problems. His wife Katarzyna, the priceless companion of his long pilgrimage, would have even more to say about the two monsters that plagued the poet and his wife.
But—let’s return for a moment to that film shot in the late sixties—there were of course happier times. Berlin, I think, offered Herbert good working conditions (as long as his illness lay low). West Berlin was a paradoxical city back then, a hybrid combining a metropolis with a provincial, green small town, almost a health resort (Gombrowicz saw it that way too). Berlin was a town without suburbs, fenced in by the wall, and the wall, as seen from within, seemed less frightening than it did from the other side—at times it reminded you of the Great Wall, designed to keep barbarians at bay. It looked almost like the campus of an American university, with its hospitable, nearly empty museum in Dahlem. People started appreciating Herbert’s poetry—in Dedecius’s translations—early on in Berlin, and it was for a long while Herbert’s favorite address. As I already mentioned, the film has a sequence in which Herbert visits a museum, sketchbook in hand; the sketchbook also undoubtedly helped him to achieve maximum concentration. Concentration was a mainstay of his poetry. To look, to note, to sketch—as a painter, as a poet.
To phrase it differently, empathy, an unpopular aesthetic category nowadays—Einfühlung, as certain neglected nineteenth-century German philosophers would say—becomes the underpinning of his art: tenderness toward the world, sympathy for both the major and minor players in the cosmos. (“Don’t be surprised that we can’t describe the world/we just speak to things tenderly by name”—this is from his poem “Never About You,” where the “you” is the lost realm of Lvov.)
Herbert’s empathy, on which, as on a foundation, he built his dissent against the twentieth century’s monstrous history, calls to mind yet another kind of doubleness in his poetry. Herbert’s poems are like a suitcase upholstered in soft satin; but the suitcase holds instruments of torture. His early poems and prose poems have something boyish about them, they’re delicate to the point of helplessness. But it turned out very early on that this delicacy had nothing in common with weakness, capitulation, and a cover for suffering: it is poetry, or the prelude to poetry.
I came to know him well in Berlin ten years after the making of that documentary, and over time he honored me with his friendship. He had already come to feel at home in Berlin, but he’d also, I thought, grown tired of it. His poetry was still popular there, but we should remember that in the late seventies and early eighties West Berlin was a city of amnesia. Berlin’s artists and writers by and large embraced the frivolous posturing of the radical avant-garde, as if trying to forget the wall’s disgrace, the disgrace of recent history. They preferred to think of West Berlin as an outpost of New York, a sort of Greenwich Village cast upon the map of a divided Europe. Words—and gestures!—borrowed from the English (American) language seemed to carry more weight than the words of their native speech. Herbert’s poetic art, built upon memory, upon tireless observation of the world, at once ironic and tender toward those whom history had crushed, could not be too popular here, there were limits to its popularity.
I remember one dinner at the Herberts’; the poet-critic P, who was a few years younger than I, had also been invited, and Herbert didn’t acknowledge me even once. He talked with P the whole time, turned to him, asked him questions, smiled at him, fondly said good-bye. This neglect wasn’t accidental. I understood that I was being punished. For what? For my early book-manifesto The World Unrepresented? I don’t know if Herbert was thinking of the entire book, which he may have seen as barbaric, a return to socialist realism. Or perhaps he had in mind only the two chapters on his work. If the second chapter was the problem, then I was punished unjustly. It was my co-author, Julian Kornhauser, who attacked his work there, while I defended it elsewhere.
But perhaps I was being punished for something else. He may have objected to the undue weight I gave to the notion of the “literary generation” in the seventies, to the generational manifestos that I’d authored, to my belief in groups and generations, to the murky hypostases I employed instead of discussing concrete, palpable things like individual books, poems, talents, and ideas. Worst of all, I thought, with a vulgarity typical of our times, that my generation must be better than those that preceded it. If so, I was punished justly—and very gently.
That penitential dinner was followed by a reconciliation; a friendship was slowly born between us, a friendship always marked, on my part, by admiration. Later, in Paris, our friendship grew closer. I understood that my early offenses had been forgiven when Zbigniew gave me a beautiful tie, and then a second and a third. I wear one whenever I find the occasion. The ties’ silky elegance (Zbigniew recognized only silk ties, which weren’t to be found in the stores of communist Europe) is a good metaphor for the classicist’s friendship. Herbert protested the decline of form, the anomie of our world, even in his gifts.
For two years we met frequently in Berlin, often in—as memoirists put it—the “hospitable home” of the Szackis’, where the Polish intellectual colony usually gathered. Witold Wirpsza used to stop by as well, along with the Polish recipients of the Berlin writers’ grant: Kazimierz Brandys, Wiktor Woroszylski, Jacek Bochenski.
Herbert’s stay in Paris forms a separate, far from happy chapter. The Herberts arrived in Paris in the winter of 1986. This visit was inevitable in some sense. If you look at the poet’s biography, you’ll see that he’d always—or rather not always, just starting from 1956, the thaw—spend a few years in the West, then go back to Warsaw, then leave again, accepting one invitation or another. He couldn’t, he didn’t want to stay for good on this or that side of the Iron Curtain. He was disgusted by the baseness—and ugliness—of Warsaw’s small-scale totalitarianism. I also suspect that he resisted the ever-increasing pressure of independent public opinion, which wanted to force the mask of national poet upon him. In Berlin, in Siena, in Padua he was a lonely, free artist, he could return to his favorite occupations, his favorite paintings, his sketchbook, long hours spent in the museum, the local cathedral. In the end, though, he’d begin to miss Poland. The West’s leftist intellectuals, who would not or could not understand the tragedy of Central Europe, got on his nerves. His loneliness pained him, his illnesses plagued him.
He spent several years in Paris. (He celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday there, I remember bringing Czeslaw Milosz to the apartment in the passage Hebrard in the Belleville district, he gave Herbert a warm
hug.) The Herberts’ stay was not a success. It failed for a number of reasons, chiefly because the illnesses tormenting the poet grew increasingly troublesome. But also because Herbert’s poetry was almost unknown in France; only during this last stay in Paris did Fayard publish a volume of translations. It received only one review; the French poets, who subscribed to completely different aesthetic ideals, could not wax rapturous over these poems. His material situation was difficult. The aging poet, famous in his own land, admired in the United States, in Germany, Sweden, Italy, lived modestly, almost anonymously, in Paris. When every so often—quite rarely—he’d agree to give a reading for the Polish audience in Paris, for the Parisian Poles, crowds of patriots would appear, but things were different in everyday life. In a sense, Herbert’s loneliness in Paris in the late eighties was emblematic of poetry’s situation in the modern world. Almost any assistant professor who made his living analyzing poetry was better off than the poet; any bureaucrat had a cushier spot; any policeman knew what kind of raise, what kind of pension to expect. Herbert once said to me jokingly, “You know, I’ve noticed that they always pay me one thousand no matter what currency I get paid in.”
At one point during that protracted Parisian retreat, driven by both despair and illness, Herbert decided to bring a lawsuit against almost all his publishers. He even had a lawyer with an office, as I recall, on the Champs-Elysées. He wanted to charge them with fraud, with embezzlement. But his real complaint was that he lived in poverty, he, a poet, a hardworking, conscientious, exceptionally gifted, aging man who longed only for stability. He’d been translated into a dozen languages, the best presses scrambled for his books. Each successive volume was by and large greeted with high praise (the French situation—here he received, as I mentioned, just one review—was exceptional). He’d indisputably been called a master, he was respected, considered one of Europe’s greatest poets. He really was a master and he did in fact live on next to nothing.
I don’t need to add that the case never made it to court; how could it? Luckily enough, since it would have ruined him and given him a reputation he was better off avoiding. All his friends tried as tactfully as possible to dissuade him from this desperate step (their advice didn’t count for much). I also timidly protested against these measures; but on another, symbolic level I took Herbert’s part. He was in the right, and if his case had actually gone to some impossible court, it would have been that long-awaited, long-desired trial: Poetry versus the World. The trial would have concerned not money, but the weight of spiritual life as opposed to practical life in its most banal, mercantile form. I thought Herbert was right, symbolically speaking; there was something scandalous about his Parisian isolation. There was something monstrous about this great poet vegetating in Parisian Belleville while mediocrities basked in affluence. Of course the publishers weren’t to blame. If Herbert had churned out books called Fourteen Steps to Happiness, if he had written semipornographic novels or slick detective fiction, he would have been living in a large suburban villa with a garden just like the self-satisfied, tanned authors of best sellers whose canny faces turn up every so often on our TVs.
The readers would have to be put on trial; royalties take their cues from democratic elections, except in this case the polling booths are placed in bookstores. So this would be a trial against lazy readers, and it would be hard to win. How often, on airplanes or express trains, in the Paris metro, do we see readers with intelligent faces reading silly books with shiny covers? Should we sue them? Arrest them?
Like several other great poets in this historical moment, Herbert stood before Evil and Beauty—the demon and the divinity, two riddles linked by nothing, that create no order when taken together, but likewise provide no illumination when considered separately. Some force, though, commands us to set them together—not for comparison, not for our own amusement, not even for purposes of classification. We put them together in order to discover once more how different they are, and how paradoxically they place the magnetic poles of our age. And yet, standing face to face with this malicious sphinx, Herbert spoke in a pure, clear voice, clear as the glance of the stone in one of his most famous poems.
Do you remember—my little memory prompts me—that stroll through the park Butte Chaumont in Paris? Do you remember the poetry festival in Polanica years ago? Do you remember the readings in Krakow, on Krupnicza Street, in the seventies? I remember, and I’ll try to remember well and carefully, since I know that beginning to remember coincides over time with beginning to forget.
6 Reason and Roses
An Olympic sprinter, cheered on by a vast, admiring stadium full of fans, is tackling the hundred meters. Right off the starting line he leans forward, bent almost to the track itself, staring off into the distant horizon; mid-race he straightens up, erect as Mont Blanc; then as he’s approaching the finish line he curves back, not just from exhaustion but also in tribute to the universe’s hidden symmetry. So it is with the energetic pace of Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry. In the early years he lovingly murmurs spells about the mysteries of worlds and fires, about picturesque disasters; in maturity he observes, praises, and criticizes the real world, the world of history and nature; as he enters the late stages of life he grows more and more obedient to the demands of memory, both personal and suprapersonal.
No, of course he’s not a sprinter; he’s a poet finishing the ninety-year mark, a splendid marathon runner rather, and not at all tired. His volume This is one of his greatest achievements. And the stadium was often painfully empty, or filled with hostile or mocking spectators; this athlete had his share of loneliness. But of the athletic metaphor those three postures remain, three angles of our necessary proximity to the earth, which truly answer to the evolution of the poet.
Stendhal supposedly said that literature is the art of selection, since it’s charged with laisser de côté, sifting out the superfluous. Wedekind said something similar—and undoubtably many other authors have as well, especially the modernists. Czeslaw Milosz’s work would seem to be founded upon the opposite principle: Leave out nothing! But not in the sense of craftsmanship (obviously poetry can’t survive without selection, abbreviation) so much as in the sense of his “poetic politics,” broadly conceived. You only have to reach for the autobiographical Native Realm, The Captive Mind, or virtually any volume of his poetry. In Native Realm, we find sections that are historical, even economic in nature, as if Milosz were saying, I’ll show you that poetry can be made from nonpoetry, that the power of the poetic mind is fueled by ingesting as much world as possible, not by retreating into the perilous regions of inner intimacy. Not a flight from the world, not the infamous “escapism” that was the favorite charge of party critics, but a vast osmosis: this is Milosz’s program. It is not a clinically sterile osmosis, though, nor is it objective or even mimetic. It is personal and in a certain sense ethical, and even therapeutic to some degree, since this poetry’s goal is finally to comprehend the incomprehensible, an operation I’d call humanistic if that word hadn’t been damaged by frivolous overuse in university lecture halls.
Milosz’s aim more specifically is not to omit antagonisms. Lesser talents develop a snail-like tendency to take refuge in a hut, a shell, to escape contrary winds, contrary ideas, to create miniatures. As both a poet and a thinker, though, Milosz couragously takes the field to test himself against his foes, as if he’d told himself, I’ll survive this age only by absorbing it. Often, though, these enemies moved against him uninvited. If that student at Wilno University could only have imagined how many obstacles he’d be forced to reckon with, overcome, comprehend, how many times he’d find himself just a step away from death, silence, despair …
He is a poet of great intelligence and great ecstasy; his poetry wouldn’t have survived without both. Without intelligence it would have perished in a duel with one or another of its opponents (since the twentieth century’s monsters didn’t lack for dialectical abilities, they even took pride in them). Without ecstasy, it would
n’t have have reached its distinctive heights, it would simply have remained splendid journalism. He calls himself an ecstatic pessimist, but we also stumble upon those numerous isles of bliss that Bergson said signal the touch of an inner truth.
In the age of Beckett, a great, witty, and very sorrowful writer, Milosz defended the religious dimension of our experience, defended our right to infinity. The telegram Nietzsche sent to inform Europeans of God’s death reached him, of course, but he refused to sign the receipt and sent the messenger packing.
I’m not convinced that Milosz is—as he himself has often claimed—a Manichaean. For all that, though, I see in his poetry an exceptional, inspiring closeness between thought and image, polemics and rapture, California nature and twentieth-century ideology, observation and professions of faith.
Milosz is also a great political poet: what he has written on the annihilation of the Jews will endure, and not just in student anthologies. During the worst years of Stalinism, students read his Treatise on Morals like a latter-day Boethius. He didn’t remain silent during the anti-Semitic campaigns of 1968, a disgrace for the Polish press and some of the Polish intelligentsia. The presence of Milosz’s pure words was and remains a boon for the Polish reader, exhausted by Stalinistic crudeness, worn by the long ordeal of communism and the boorishness of the People’s democracy. But perhaps the deepest sense of Milosz’s political impact lies elsewhere; following in the great Simone Weil’s footsteps, he set forth a model of thought linking metaphysical passion with responsiveness to the plight of the simple man. And this in a century that scrupulously and mean-spiritedly insisted that religious thinkers and writers be perceived as right-wingers (Eliot for example) while social activitists must be atheists. Milosz’s model has enormous significance and will continue to serve us well in the future.
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