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.6
