The Poet Remembers

A word that speaks of older, indeed, mythic times hovers suggestively over the poet Czeslaw Milosz. That word is hero. Milosz is an authentic hero of humanity, a speaker for its better self, a defender of civilization against the darkest forces of human nature.

But Milosz not only writes, he acts: he tore himself and his family up by the roots from their Poland for a long, lonely exile in the West, a heroic repudiation of Communism. Nearly everyone now rejects its promise; it was not at all so in the early 1950s, when Communism promised a new day to millions in Europe.

“My own decision proceeded,” he wrote in “The Captive Mind” of his 1951 defection, “not from the functioning of the reasoning mind, but from a revolt of the stomach. A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt. In the same way, the growing influence of the doctrine on my way of thinking came up against the resistance of my whole nature.”

It was a lonely decision, taken in Paris, where Czeslaw Milosz (CHESH-lav MEE-losh) had been dispatched as a cultural attache of Poland’s Communist regime. “When I broke with the Polish government, all the intellectual milieu in France--not all, there were some exceptions, among them Albert Camus--was rather hostile,” the Nobel laureate tells me in his Berkeley home, where he has lived now for more than three decades. “They considered that I was insane, because I had escaped from the future of mankind.”

Milosz, then, is a voice not only for humanity, but also, and especially, for Eastern Europe. No person of his talents was better placed to witness what evils happened there, to understand them, and to tell the rest of us.

A witness to the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazis in 1943, he wrote about that year in a poem that the historian Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg calls the best ever written about the Holocaust, for its portrait of ordinary human beings going about the business of their lives while unspeakable acts were being committed around them. It is entitled “Campo dei Fiori,” the name of the flower and produce market in Rome where the humanist philosopher Giordano Bruno was gagged and burned at the stake by order of the Inquisition on grounds of heresy.

. . . Before the flames had died the taverns were full again, baskets of olives and lemons again on the vendors’ shoulders. I thought of the Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the sky-carousel one clear spring evening to the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall, and couples were flying high in the cloudless sky ...

Speaking, Milosz chooses his English words carefully, in gentle sentences with more rise and fall in pitch than a native-born American’s. He courteously answers my questions about his work and his remarkable life. He writes some essays in English, but nearly all his poetry in Polish. When I ask him about his compatriot Joseph Conrad, who became a master of English prose, he replies simply and gently that “a poet must write in the language of his childhood.”

The history he inherited is of smaller nations squeezed, pulled and pushed by the larger nations to the East and the West, Russia and Germany, the region’s national borders expanding, contracting, shifting over the centuries and into our own time. That is the reason Milosz believes that the “inviolability of borders (those set after World War II) is absolutely essential ... any desire for revision leads to what you see in Yugoslavia.”

He devotes no little effort to trying to prevent ethnic and religious division. Lithuanians fear, he says, that Poland would like to take back Vilnius, the city of his birth, which Poland once held. Last year he went back to Lithuania for the first time since World War II. He had not gone back when Lithuania was still part of the Soviet Union “because I did not want to go on a Soviet (visa).”

On that trip “my political mission,” he says, “was to reassure Lithuanians and of course to take a position that Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania. . . . When I went to Poland, I tried to influence the government--(President) Lech Walesa--in this direction, and he made a very friendly declaration, trying to assuage (the feelings of) the Lithuanians.”

Vilnius is close to the poet’s heart. It was two cities, Catholic and Jewish, between the wars. He was raised in the first and knew the other before the horrors of World War II. With the touch of deep sadness that seems to come over him whenever he mentions the Holocaust, he adds that he encountered no Jews on his return to this former center of Eastern European Jewish culture. “I spoke about the Jewish Vilnius of my youth,” he says of an address he gave on that trip.

He returned to Europe this summer, collecting honors presented to an octogenarian man of letters--Italy’s Premio Cavour, the Czech Academy’s Medal of Honor--and visiting his grandparents’ estate in Lithuania. “I was very moved to stand there alone,” he says.

Of his region of Europe as a whole, Milosz calls himself “optimistic,” yet there are serious problems. Lithuania, back in the hands of the old nomenklatura, the former Communist bureaucrats, “is in a very bad state economically,” he says, and decollectivizing agriculture there has produced chaos. Poland is more advanced economically than the Czech Republic, but the gap between rich and poor is widening. It does not, however, have “the savage and wild capitalism of Russia,” the poet observes. “My hope is that relations between Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine will be correct. I believe there is a change of mentality on all sides, even if there are some frictions.”

As for Poland, it “has such an historical opportunity it has never had for a long time.” To its east it has not Russia but Belarus and Ukraine, with Russia behind them preoccupied with its own vast troubles. To the west it has Germany, “now in the throes of reconstruction and change.” “No outside dangers face Poland, which was not the case after the First World War. Poland has a tremendous opportunity. So let us hope.”

THERE HE IS, ASLEEP AFTER LUNCH, LYING ON A chaise longue in his flowery garden near the top of the Berkeley Hills. As he once wrote: “Below, the bay, the playful sun,/And the towers of San Francisco seen through rusty fog.”

Presently he awakens and walks, a vigorous 82, into his sun-filled living room, a short man, not much over five feet, with powerful, forward-sloping shoulders and thick arms and hands. His countenance, with its almost devilishly expressive eyebrows, is alternately merry and grave.

Milosz is one of the five or so best-selling poets in America; his books of poems translated into English sell 10,000 to 15,000 copies, a lot for a poet. His 1953 book, “The Captive Mind,” was one of the first published in the West to dissect from within the fatal lure of Communism for intellectuals. His poetry, essays and novels have been well-translated into English. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

“I have no hesitation whatsoever in stating that Czeslaw Milosz is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest,” wrote Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-born Nobelist and former poet laureate at the Library of Congress. Yet for so eminent a Californian, Milosz’s fame is rather limited.

If you studied literature at UC Berkeley, you no doubt knew him. His lectures on Dostoevsky were popular with undergraduates when he began teaching there in 1962. He is now a professor emeritus, and he taught a graduate seminar this spring.

In recent years he has been translating and retranslating his poems into English with the help of some American poets, notably and most recently the poet and UC Berkeley English professor Robert Hass. A book of reflections, “Hunter’s Almanac,” is being translated into English and will be published in the spring. He has been working on an international anthology of poetry about tangible things, but is reluctant to talk about it. He has written about poets he admires, among them the Americans Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, and is the author of two novels, essays and literary criticism.

Through the 19th-Century, poets were read and honored in America. Americans knew great chunks of Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by heart, and they knew Alfred Lord Tennyson and Shakespeare and the Bible, too. Poets still have great followings in Poland and in Russia, but in America and the West poets as the bardic voice of nations have all but disappeared. Maybe it’s one result of Modernism, the encompassing movement in literature and the arts that reflects the unruly, fractionated reality of the contemporary world. Milosz stands in this tradition, that of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak, Federico Garcia Lorca and Octavio Paz and Milosz’s cousin Oscar Milosz. Some of them are read by millions, but not, usually, by the scores of millions.

WHEN MILOSZ WAS BORN IN 1911 TO POLISH GENTRY IN LITHUANIA, THE land was ruled by the Russian Czars. He got a Roman Catholic and scientific education in Vilnius. As a writer between the wars, he experienced in quick succession the rise of fascism, the Soviet encroachment into Poland in 1939, Warsaw under the Nazis, the destruction of the Jewish ghetto there and the desperate Warsaw uprising, the advance of the Red Army and after the war, Poland’s corrupting slide into airless Stalinism.

Milosz is, like his countryman Pope John Paul II, revered in Poland. Yet he has lived outside of Poland for the last 42 years, since the day he defected from the Polish Embassy in Paris, unable to reconcile his role as diplomat for a Communist-dominated government with that of free man and honest artist. He went his own way then, and he has ever since, through long years of loneliness, doggedly eschewing political and artistic fashion in search of his own perceptions, obedient to his own vision.

Look at--and listen to, for his poems ask to be read aloud--some of the aspects of that vision. “You Who Wronged” is a poem he wrote while still on Polish government service as a cultural attache in 1950 in Washington:

You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, And kept a pack of fools around you To mix good and evil, to blur the line, Though everyone bowed down before you, Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way, Striking gold medals in your honor, Glad to have survived another day, Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date. And you’d have done better with a winter dawn, A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.

So unmistakable is the political and moral meaning of this poem that its hammer-like penultimate stanza is inscribed on the monument erected at Gdansk in 1980 when the Solidarity union was founded to honor the workers killed there by police in anti-government riots 10 years earlier.

The world of the childhood has appeared often in his poems, juxtaposed with the world of the present. Here, for instance, is a signature poem, called “Blacksmith Shop,” from his most recent collection, “Provinces: Poems 1987-1991.” In it, a memory of Lithuania, Milosz writes, like Whitman, about the beautiful tangibility, of the world and the people in it.

I liked the bellows operated by rope. A hand or foot pedal--I don’t remember which. But that blowing, and the blazing of the fire! And a piece of iron in the fire, held there by tongs, Red, softened for the anvil, Beaten with a hammer, bent into a horseshoe, Thrown in a bucket of water, sizzle, steam. And horses hitched to be shod, Tossing their manes; and in the grass by the river Plowshares, sledge runners, harrows waiting for repair. At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.

It was a childhood in a world now gone forever, the family manor house torn down, though the church in which he was baptized remains, as does the grave of the woman who was a vampire and the priest’s mistress. When he went back for the first time, in the spring of 1992, the sights shocked him. “Over by the river it’s more or less the same, but on the plain there is enormous change. Where there were villages, there are only fields of the collective farms. It’s very sad.”

School in Vilnius was rigorous, both in religion and in science. It was then that the contradictions in his life and thought began. In his high school, the role of the priests was very big--”like political commissars later.”

“There was a concordat between the Polish state and the Vatican,” he remembers. “There were compulsory lessons in religion, and so we had several years of very tough religion lessons, the Holy Writ and then moved to apologetics, dogmatics, the history of the church. Yet parallel to that we had lessons in biology, physics and so on. At 15, I was giving lessons in biology at school, lessons in Darwin.”

Milosz says that in his youth he came to take a “scientific, atheistic position mostly.” Now he calls himself a Catholic who does not want to be thought of as a Catholic writer “because if you are branded as a Catholic you are supposed to testify with every work of yours to follow the line of the Church, which is not necessarily my case.” He worries that there is a tendency in the Polish Catholic Church toward imposing an ideal of a theocratic state. He wrote an article warning against it, citing Thomas Jefferson and praising the separation of church and state.

He published his first book of poems when he was 21. He studied law, went to Paris, to visit his writer relative Oscar Milosz. He worked in Warsaw for Polish radio. Then in 1939, when the Germans attacked Poland and the Soviet Union swallowed up the eastern part of the country, Milosz went from Lithuania through German territory to Warsaw, where for five years of Nazi occupation he wrote and published in the underground and scrounged for a living. Warsaw was then, he wrote later, “the most agonizing spot in the whole of terrorized Europe. Had I then chosen emigration, my life would certainly have followed a very different course. But my knowledge of the crimes which Europe has witnessed in the 20th Century would be less direct, less concrete than it is.”

His wartime experiences convinced him that “only men true to a socialist program would be capable of abolishing the injustices of the past, and rebuilding the economies of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe,” he later wrote. “People who haven’t lived through the first decade after World War II,” he wrote more recently, “have difficulty visualizing the triumphal elan of the Marxist creed then attracting the best minds in both parts of divided Europe.”

So Milosz went to work for the new Communist government of Poland. Prizing intellectuals to show off in the West, it sent him to Washington and Paris as cultural attache. Gradually he resisted his own complaisant yielding to the growing power of Communist thought.

After his hard and lonely decision to leave the East for the West, Milosz worked on a Polish review in exile, Kultura, and continued to write in Polish, but when Berkeley offered him a professorship, he accepted and moved there with his first wife and two sons. He says he was desperately lonely at first, but he has been there ever since, in a hillside house he bought soon after he arrived.

Milosz presents the world of things and of his personal experience against the backdrop of ideas that drive mankind and the awful history he has lived through. In his book “Provinces” are two poems, “Conversation with Jeanne,” written in Guadeloupe, and “A Poem for the End of the Century,” written in Berkeley.

Of them he writes, in self-explanation: “The two poems placed here together contradict each other. The first renounces any dealing with problems which for centuries have been tormenting the minds of theologians and philosophers. . . . “The second, just the opposite, voices anger because people do not want to remember, and live as if nothing happened, as if horror were not hiding just beneath the surface of their social arrangements. . . . The two poems taken together testify to my contradictions, since the opinions voiced in one and the other are equally mine.”

Here is a stanza from the first poem:

You are right, Jeanne, I don’t know how to care about the salvation of my soul. Some are called, others manage as well as they can. I accept it, what has befallen me is just. I don’t pretend to the dignity of a wise old age. Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now, In things of this world, which exist and, for that reason, delight us: Nakedness of women on the beach, coppery cones of their breasts, Hibiscus, alamanda, a red lily, devouring With my eyes, lips, tongue, the guava juice, the juice of la prune de Cythere Rum with ice and syrup, lianas-orchids In a rain forest, where trees stand on the stilts of their roots.

And two stanzas from the second:

Don’t think, don’t remember The death on the cross, Though everyday He dies, The only one, all-loving, Who without any need consented and allowed To exist all that is, Including nails of torture. Totally enigmatic. Impossibly intricate. Better to stop speech here. This language is not for people. Blessed be jubilation. Vintages and harvests. Even if not everyone is granted serenity.

To live with contradictions, Milosz says, he learned from the French philosopher Simone Weil. “She liberated me from my scruples, because I would like to have had a coherent Weltanschauung (philosophy of the universe and of human life). She taught me that contradiction is (he laughs loudly) clairvoyant, Yes! So she taught me how to live with my contradictions. . . . You cannot strive for coherence where coherence is not possible. Today in our time somebody who doesn’t learn to live with contradictions is lost.”

THROUGH THE WINDOW above the desk in his small, chilly, studio, he can see the apple tree in his neighbor’s yard. He writes in pen in blue-covered notebooks with black bindings, poetry and snatches of poetry on the left-hand page, commentary and notes on the right. He has acquired a simple personal computer for writing letters. There are books in bookcases, books on tables, books piled one upon another in an order he more or less understands.

When I ask him questions he jumps and goes for one of his books that contains the answer. There are dictionaries in English, Polish, Greek and Hebrew; he has translated several books of the Bible from the original languages into Polish. He did the translations because the Bible had never been translated into Polish from the original Hebrew and Greek, only from the Latin Vulgate Bible.

He became an American citizen in 1970. His first wife died in 1986. Last October he was married to his companion of four years, Carol Thigpen. In the afternoons they read or see people or go about. They love to eat at Chez Panisse and the other Berkeley food palaces. It is a fine sight to watch him work his way through a hearty bowl of rabbit stew.

Is Berkeley an agreeable place for a poet? He laughs. “Well, I must say it’s the best poets’ place in America, because of the bookstores. Browsing there is a permanent pleasure of life.” He also likes the sun in Northern California. Paris was once home, but his friends there are dead now. “The only place I am interested to go is Krakow, the university city in Poland.” He visits a couple of times a year.

For all his American citizenship and American wife and American friends and readers, Milosz clearly is an Eastern European, Central-Eastern European. “It’s a peculiar heritage. What I can bring is my heritage . . . and not pretend to be somebody else.”