The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  Tell me, Salomon, you’re such a good man—will I get rid of this hair, and will my skin be white again, when we are liberated?

  I got angry. She looked half dead and she was worried about things like that. I left her the bread and a kind word. Before I’d closed the hospital barracks door the woman lying next to her had stolen the bread.

  When one of the sick died they threw the body in a container between the barracks and the latrine. That’s where they threw Róa. Every couple of days the bodies were loaded on a car. That was an extra job. Whoever wanted to could do it and you got a crust of bread for it. Mendelewicz made extra money that way.

  After Róa died we thought he wouldn’t do that work anymore. But he did. Maybe he wanted to see her for the last time, or put her on the car himself. I don’t know. I only know he didn’t have to share with anyone the bread crust he got for it and for the first time he ate it all.

  1956

  VAN GOGH’S SAD POPULARITY

  A FEW YEARS AGO, visiting Provence, I stopped off in St. Rémy. I went to the ancient monastery of St. Paul-de-Mausole to see the place where Van Gogh lived in the year before his death. An elderly nun whom I asked to show me the painter’s cell became indignant: “There’s nothing to look at. You’d do better to pray for Van Gogh, that unfortunate man, who weeps eternally.”

  Later I saw his big retrospective in the Jacquemart-André Museum. You had to stand an hour in a long line of pious followers who had made pilgrimages from the four corners of the earth to touch the martyr’s relics.

  The recent exhibition in the National Museum in Warsaw broke all national records for popularity. School groups wend their way across the crowded rooms, listening to a commentary thickly strewn with remarks on the painter’s unhappy life. I do not think, however, that this belated honor by the public is quite sincere. There is too much sensationalism and snobbery in it, too little authentic acceptance. For the majority the art of Van Gogh is an unacceptable art just as it was 70 years ago. And it doesn’t look as if even the wildest avantgarde of the future will be able to assimilate it.

  I don’t want to pretend that I belong to a select group of initiates. I have seen many of Van Gogh’s paintings, but every encounter with this painter plunges me further into helplessness. I suspect there are no initiates to this master’s work. They are surely not the novelists who track his unhappy loves, nor the gentlemen in white suits who speak of psychomotoric epilepsy, nor the art historians who explain that his beloved sower motif signifies an “almost smiling” death walking “in the bright light of day, in a sun illuminating everything with a radiance as pure as gold.”

  It seems to me that a comparison of Van Gogh and Cézanne is fruitful, not on the basis of similarity of course, but of contrast. Cézanne, realizing his program with an iron consistency, is a classic, a great analyst of form, a painter whose anatomical vision should be taught in art academies to this day. The other is a Romantic, a Dionysian artist, a visionary running across the fields like Saint Francis shouting: Love, love. You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne’s lesson. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn’t care about masterpieces, or even good paintings (an example from the last exhibition: Willows at Sunset) but about what is beyond all painting, beyond all art.

  The exhibition in the National Museum, based mainly on the collections in the Kröller-Muller Museum, is the first Polish presentation of Van Gogh worthy of the name. For this we owe the organizers a debt of gratitude. For the first time we can trace all the phases in the artist’s development, from his first childish drawings to his last canvas. The exhibition very suggestively shows the Dutch roots of Van Gogh’s painting, which is a counterbalance to the prevailing views on the decisive influence on this artist of Japanese art and Impressionism.

  Van Gogh remained faithful to Rembrandt’s country even in his best French period, even under the burning sun of Provence. It’s true that Three Bird’s-nests of 1885 is black as pitch in comparison with the Field of Wheat of four years later, with its sower melting in the sun. But the battle of darkness and light, the searing drama of red and yellow is fought in the painter’s consciousness up to the very last moments of his life.

  In June 1890, a month before his death, he writes to his brother: “…I’m now working in a field of lucerne full of poppies.” It is worthwhile to compare this Field of Poppies with the well-known painting by Monet—the French painter’s frothy and terribly superficial joy in colors with the Great Dutchman’s severe, subdued study, no longer of nature but of reality.

  1962

  WHY THE CLASSICS1

  I CHOSE THIS POEM* after some hesitation. I do not consider it the best poem I’ve written, nor is it one that can represent my poetic program. I think it does have two virtues: it is simple, dry, and it speaks of matters that are truly close to my heart, without superfluous ornament or stylization.

  The poem has a three-part structure. In the first part, it speaks of an event taken from the work of a classical author. It is, as it were, a note on my reading. In the second part I transfer the event to contemporary times to elicit a tension, a clash, to reveal an essential difference in attitude and behavior. Finally, the third part contains a conclusion or moral, and also transposes the problem from the sphere of history to the sphere of art.

  You don’t have to be a great expert on contemporary literature to notice its characteristic feature—the eruption of despair and unbelief. All the fundamental values of European culture have been drawn into question. Thousands of novels, plays, and epic poems speak of an inevitable annihilation, of life’s meaninglessness, the absurdity of human existence.

  I don’t mean to subject pessimism to easy ridicule if it is a response to evil in the world. However, I think that the black tone of contemporary literature has its source in the attitude its writers take to reality. And that is what I tried to attack in my poem.

  The Romantic view of the poet who bares his wounds, relates his own misfortunes, still has many supporters today, despite changes in style and literary taste. It is universally held that the artist has a sacred right to ostentatious subjectivism, to a display of the tender “I.”

  If a school of literature existed, one of its basic exercises should be the description not of dreams but of objects. Beyond the artist’s reach, a world unfolds—difficult, dark, but real. One should not lose the faith that it can be captured in words, that justice can be rendered it.

  Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a stylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn’t sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.

  Philosophy gave me the courage to ask primary questions, fundamental, basic questions: does the world exist, what is its essence, and can it be known? If this discipline can be made useful to poetry it is not by translating systems but by recreating the drama of thought.

  I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.

  It is an old dream of poets that their work may become a concrete object like a stone or a tree, that what they make from the material of language—itself subject to constant change—may acquire a lasting existence. One of the ways to achieve this, it seems to me, is to cast it far away from oneself, to erase the ties that connect it to its creator. This is how I understand Flaubert’s recommendation: “The artist must be in his work as God is in nature.”

  1966?

  TO DESCRIBE REALITY1

  I FEEL AN INWARD panic coming on when I imagine I’m walking down the street in Periclean Athens (we all have our favorite histo
rical period) and bump into—guess who—Socrates, who grabs me by the arm and begins, cunningly, as follows:

  “Hello! It’s good I ran into you. Yesterday some friends and I were talking about poetry: what its nature is and whether it speaks the truth or lies. But none of us, neither Sophro, nor Crito, nor even Plato, writes poetry. But you do, and you’re even praised for it, so you must have knowledge of what poetry is.”

  I now know the game’s up for me. We are surrounded by a thick crowd of onlookers. I share the fate of general Laches, who could not give a definition of courage, and Polos the sophist, who knows nothing about rhetoric, and the priest Euthyphro, who has nothing very intelligent to say about piety.

  It will probably end like this: I will slink off in shame, pursued by laughter, the dialectician’s voice ringing in my ears:

  “How is it that you go off, leaving us in dark ignorance, you, you the one who could enlighten us? You carry your secret away with you and you’ll just go on pulling the wool over our ears with your sorcerer’s words. But we don’t know whether to yield to your charms or defend ourselves from them.”

  With all my admiration for the great Athenian, it always seemed to me that in his dialogues, in the manner he conducted them, there is a certain amount of intellectual blackmail; for surely one can be courageous while not being able to give a definition of courage, and one can write pretty good poems while being a frankly miserable theoretician.

  The language of poetry—a non-discursive process, a method of using images, metaphors, parables, an oscillation between what is clear and what is only sensed intuitively—itself offers arguments for its defense.

  I am convinced that poetry in all its ambitious attempts strives to touch reality. It does so by other paths than science and it should not yield too much to the pressures of our all-too-rational age.

  Technocrats prophesy the end of poetry. Cyberneticists say that its content is “noise,” that is, devoid of information. What will the poet be in the coming age? A shaman festooned with amulets? One who summons the old myths of humanity? Or perhaps a jester at the court of science?

  I read the reports of the Rand Corporation. This is an organization of American scientists, a little like a brain collective, concerned among other things with predicting scientific progress. From these documents we learn that in the course of the coming sixty years we will be using animals like monkeys, whose intelligence will develop to the extent that they will be able to occupy the place of unskilled workers; human life will become longer as a result of control of the chemical processes of aging; apart from space travel, we will be able to make journeys through time by freezing bodies and bringing organisms into a state of prolonged death throes.

  A characteristic mark of the report is that it identifies human progress with scientific progress (the myth of the twentieth century) and places history outside the brackets of its consideration. As if the dull march of barbarians had never yet erased or exploded the radiant visions of reason.

  My gymnasium instructors drummed it into us that “historia magistra vitae.” But when history appeared in all its barbarous magnificence—as a real incandescence over my city—I understood that it makes a peculiar teacher. Those who lived through it consciously, with all that followed it, have more food for thought than readers of ancient chronicles. It is clotted and murky material. It requires the work of many consciences to illuminate it.

  The medieval French astrologist Nicolas Flamel2 once saw an angel in a dream holding an open book containing knowledge of the universe, man, and the future. Nicolas Flamel’s pilgrimage to the book he dreamed would take twenty-four years, only then could he open it.

  Humanity will never abandon the dream of a sign, an incantation, a formula that will illuminate the meaning of life. The need for a canon, for criteria allowing us to distinguish evil from good, for a clear set of values—is presently as strong as ever.

  When our fathers and grandfathers were asked about eternal values, their thoughts invariably turned to antiquity. Human dignity, gravity, objectivism radiated from the writings of the classics.

  But for the ancient authors and lovers of antiquity, Greece and Rome were a little like happy isles where virtue, harmony, and balance flowered under the sun of reason. Winckelmann’s3 formula “edle Einfalt und stille Grösse” long held sway over our minds. Greek statues came to us cleansed by rains, stripped of the colors of life, pure as Platonic ideas. A deepening historical perspective has opened our eyes to the dark periods.

  My philosophy professor, who taught the wisdom of the Greeks, infused us with enthusiasm for the Stoics. At the time that was going on, amor fati saved us from madness. We read Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and trained ourselves in the difficult art of ataraxia (), driving all agitation and passion from our souls. Living in accordance with nature, that is, with reason, in a world gone mad, amid shrieks of hatred, was a difficult experience.

  Some critics with an overly optimistic attitude to the world accuse me of pessimism. This has always seemed to me a misunderstanding. Even if a dark tone prevails in a poet’s work, it doesn’t mean that the author means to scoff at the world’s imperfection and add his lament to the sum of real misfortune, increasing the despair.

  Similarly, irony is not cynicism but a bashfulness of feeling. What on the surface seems pessimistic is in fact a stifled call for the good, for the increase of the good, for the opening of the conscience.

  And it is certainly not a coincidence that authors of joyful odes have always hung around the courts of tyrants.

  A dialogue with the past, harkening to the voices of the departed, touching stones that bear the half-erased inscriptions of ancient destinies, summoning shades to nourish themselves on our compassion…

  A taste for the past can, but need not, signify a flight from the now, from disillusionment. For if we set out on our travels through time carrying the full burden of our experience, if we penetrate myths, symbols, and legends in order to extract from them what is alive, then surely we cannot deny that these doings require an active stance.

  Paracelsus said that God’s creation was unfinished, and that man was summoned to finish the work of creation. That is a very beautiful declaration of humanism.

  A sense of the fragility and transience of human life may be less oppressive if placed in a historical chain of events that are a transmission of faith in the purposefulness of efforts and strivings. Then even anxiety will be nothing but a call for hope.

  1966

  MONSIEUR MONTAIGNE’S VOYAGE TO ITALY

  Il est bon de voyager quelquefois; cela étend les idées, et rabat l’amour-propre.1

  SAINT-BEUVE

  WHEN ONE HAS just enough strength left to shift the pillow under one’s head, it will be time to write a work, a book, not a collection of essays, with the title Introduction to the Theory of Travel. To limit the vast topic one should abjure the description of many sorts of voyage and concentrate on the noblest genre, which the Germans call Bildungsreise, a pilgrimage to holy sites of culture.

  It occurred to me that by analyzing travelers’ accounts from the Renaissance, say to the nineteenth century (even taking into account only descriptions of Italy), we would gain interesting material on the artistic sensitivities of representatives of various ages, on changes in taste, aesthetic canons, the dawn and dusk of masterpieces.

  From the rich literature on the subject I chose to start with Montaigne’s Voyage en Italie, in the hope that this book by that marvelous writer and typical representative of his time would bring together everything that Italy and its art meant to a man of the Renaissance.

  The manuscript was discovered late (in 1774) and by accident, by a canon looking for material for a history of the Périgueux in an old trunk in the castle of Montaigne. It is not among the works of his that are well-known and read. The manuscript, written in the hand of the author of the Essays and his secretary, is consigned to the margins of Montaigne’s work. It is not styled in literary fashion (and was p
robably never intended for publication), but is on the other hand a sincere travel journal. This curious book made an immediate impression on me, as I didn’t find in it what I expected—and drew me in the further I read in it.

  It will be no indiscretion to say that Montaigne’s reason for traveling was not exclusively curiosity about the world, his humeur avide des choses nouvelles2, but a physical ailment—kidney stones. The Tuscan town of Villa near Lucca was famous for its curative waters. Montaigne, who had no patience with doctors and like the Romans loved waters (and therefore Nature), set off on July 22, 1580, to regain his health. He naturally took advantage of the occasion—as we would say now, although then it meant an additional journey—to visit Rome, the destination and dream of every humanist. For Montaigne this was particularly important. After all, he had written of himself that his mother tongue was Latin and that he had come to know about the affairs of Rome before he knew those of his own house. On the way back from the Eternal City he headed for the village Loretto, famous for its miracles. Villa and Loretto—a touching symbol of double indemnity.

  Montaigne’s book is not a guidebook to monuments. Instead, descriptions of inns and gastronomical problems occupy a prominent place in it. It is a remarkable thing that, at the height of the Renaissance, one of that age’s great writers shows so little interest in matters of art. We find only one painter’s name in the pages of his diary. During a visit to Pisa, Montaigne mentions the frescoes “d’un Gondi de Florence” (this is probably the scrambled name of Taddeo Gaddi).

  It is difficult to determine whether it is an accident or the consequence of the author’s personal aesthetic inclinations, but the fact is that Montaigne lavished much more attention on sculpture. In the church of San Lorenzo he notes Michelangelo’s sculptures and finds them excellent. He visits the Villa d’Este in Tivoli and gives a list of a dozen or so sculptures that especially interest him, without attempting a detailed description. Recognized masterpieces of antiquity figure on this list: the Laocoön, Antinous, the Belvedere Apollo, the Wolverine, the Boy Extracting a Thorn from his Foot. Among contemporary sculptures, Montaigne’s preference again goes to Michelangelo.